Beware, emotional content!

Well.. after struggling with blogger to actually recognize that yes.. my email does actually exist..

I figure it would help people that don't live with this sort of thing if I elaborated what was going through my head way back when.

It is probably hard.. or even impossible.. for someone on the other side to understand what it is like to hate your own body. Well, I wouldn't describe it as hate. At least not back then. I barely even understood the differences between boys and girls. I just knew there were, and I wanted nothing more than to be a girl.

Before the age of ten it was just feeling out of place. Physically there isn't much of a difference between a little boy and a little girl, but they get treated vastly different. I disliked being treated like a boy. Being naturally sensitive(read crybaby) was made even harder by the expectation that I should be able to take anything childhood threw at me without batting an eye. I couldn't, and I hated it. I wanted to be in a dress. I wanted to play the girl games. I wanted to do the things little girls did. I knew I wasn't aloud though. It was taboo for a boy to do that. I could play with the boys, but I didn't want to. Even ASKING if I could play with the girls brought much ridicule, and the boys could tell I did't fit in. It was a very lonely feeling. I had no place to belong. That might be a good way of putting it. It's like feeling you have absolutely nowhere to belong.

Speaking of girly toys, I remember when I visited my cousin.. a girl. Well, of course all her stuff is girl stuff(oh boy.. that room could give someone diabetes). If I wanted to play.. it would be with dolls. This ended rather.. disastrously. She invited a friend over. I couldn't help hovering nearby and watching them play with my cousin's Barbie dolls. She had barbie.. a house.. the car. I desperately wanted to play.

I was still.. very young at this point.. and foolish. I knew it was taboo, but I hadn't quite learned my lesson about that. I asked to play. They said no, of course. I kept insisting.. and of course the worst happened. I cried. It drew the adults. I explained that I was being left out. They comforted me.. but did nothing to correct the behavior of my cousin. I spent the rest of the visit sitting distraught in the hall.. wanting nothing more than to just go home.

I can't even count the number of times I was at the store with my mom where I wanted to just walk down the doll aisle. Not get anything. Just walk.. and look. That was my greatest desire.. just to look at all the pretty toys. I can count on one hand the number of times I actually worked up the courage to walk down it.

Give me long beautiful hair!

One more to kick off this blog and I will give it a rest for today. I'm sleepy. Nothing terribly important or revealing. Just a bit of vanity. I'd rather start this thing on a happy note than diving right into the deep and dark of my past.

How others treated me at times certainly didn't help matters. They didn't know they were doing it, but they where. It was almost like a sort of torture.. but also a joy every time it came up.

Still quite young. It never failed. Every time I went to get my hair cut the hair dresser would say, "I'd KILL to have your hair!" or, "Lots of women would kill to have your hair." I was born with a head full of curly hair. It's thick.. it's black.. it's curly. My mom commented on it.. my babysitter would say things about it. It made me happy every time. Tell me about my great hair! Come to think of it, this might be a part of the origin of my mysterious obsession with my hair. I can't even look in the mirror for a moment without brushing it. I hate having a single hair out of place. The other part is probably long hair being a traditionally feminine trait.

Anyway, I hated having my hair cut short. I couldn't even tell anyone how I wanted it cut because I hated all short styles(I resorted to shrugging till my mom told the hair dresser what to do), but I always loved hearing those words, "I'd kill for your hair." I could smile to myself. It was.. fantastic. Kind of like I wasn't quite a boy.

Where to start?

I have lots of random thoughts that come flooding back now that I think about it, but what do I write about first?

On some level, I've always known I wanted to be a girl. I might not have been able to put it into words, but as soon as I could grasp(even on the most basic level) the idea that boys and girls are different, I knew I wasn't comfortable with the hand I was dealt. By this point I wasn't obsessed. I was too young to really understand just what it all meant, but something inside me did.

It's.. a very strange dream I had. I recall it being before I was in kindergarten.. or maybe when I was. I was quite young at any rate. Certainly not past first grade.

The dream is still very vivid in my own mind.. even now. I remember walking into the room with the washer and dryer in it. Everything seemed normal, but when I closed the door the lights went out. No window.. so it was pitch black. I'm stuck in this tiny room in the darkness.. when suddenly the floor opens up and I drop down. I landed on a long table, and I am immediately strapped in. Metal cuffs at the ankles and wrists. I look over and see a mad scientist of some sort at a machine. He remarks that I will make a pretty girl. My hair grows out into lovely bond locks... and I'm suddenly in a pretty little dress. I can feel my breathing speed up and my heart pound in the dream. A strange mixture of fear over what was happening and being thrilled beyond imagination. I wake up immediately after the dress is on. As soon as I realize it was a dream I become a bit disappointed. I had hoped to wake up and find I had turned into a girl.

It was my wakeup call. I realized I desperately wanted to be a girl.. and I couldn't even tie my own shoes yet!

It was cute dress too. Think Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Something like that. I REALLY wanted that damn dress, dammit.