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.