#egg memory

my partner had left for a week for a trip and i had the house to myself. and i was just in a slump. i didn't feel like doing anything. i didn't feel like eating or drinking. i couldn't play games and escape like i normally would. i couldn't watch anything. all i could do was listen to music and scroll and hope i could numb whatever it was i was feeling.

i wanted to stop being. i knew it wasn't right to feel that way. that something was wrong and i couldn't figure out what it was. i wanted to die. not the first time in my life, but this time felt different. i was watching a lot of trans content creators and "am i trans or not?" videos and many of them said similar things, that if you clicked on this video and are watching all the way till the end, then you might be, and it's worth considering.

it was like the last piece of a puzzle i had been failing to solve my whole life, finally clicking into place. except the truth was so powerful that it was hard to accept, and i tried so hard to block it out. i resisted it for so long. i didn't know much about non-binary identities and had the wrong idea and assumed it meant something closer to genderless / agender. i think if i had known more about non-binary as an identity, i would have maybe hatched sooner, but i'm not sure.

i knew something was wrong with me that a local therapist couldn't fix. there wasn't a doctor i could go to. no one was going to tell me what was wrong with me. they had tried everything when i was a teenager. i had been on so many different medications for every ailment under the sun and none of them really helped, except anti-anxiety medication made panic attacks more bearable. i felt like a dry well and like my brain was missing a chemical i couldn't make or didn't have enough of. i thought for so long it was dopamine and chased it, and then serotonin, but i knew that antidepressants didn't help me. i felt like a dry plant missing water, estrogen in my case.

hatching was so hard. it was just me lying in bed and crying for three days and listening to Sophie - It's Ok To Cry and BIPP on repeat. i cried until there was nothing left, then cried some more. it was like all the toxic and wrong parts of my brain were leaving my body through my tears. it hurt, but i was healing. i felt all the pain and hurting in the world. i felt all the pain from my childhood.

i saw myself as a scared and nerdy little girl back in the 90s and sitting in the video game section of electronics in walmart and looking at the cover of EverQuest, and wanting to be the girl on the cover. i saw myself being raised as a girl and everything that could have been. i felt my dad raising me differently, and not being as hard on me or as physically violent and abusive, and why it hurt me so bad emotionally when he'd yell at me. i saw a different world, where i was raised differently and he got the daughter he wanted. i had an explanation for why i felt so distant from my mom, in a way that she didn't understand.

i saw myself being normal, and playing with the other girls, and turning out like them. i saw all my early friendships with girls and they all made so much sense now. and why i had so many and got along with them so well. i remember one of my friends telling my parents i was so fun to play with when we went to the waterpark, and not like the other boys that she didn't like playing with. sure i liked hanging out with guys, but girls were just so much easier to be around for me. i could just be myself around them.

but my past wasn't an absence of boyhood, it was an absence of girlhood that was also a part of me. i felt femininity on a spiritual level and connected with it. i had previously explained myself by using taoist symbolism of yin and yang to say "i'm kind of like both in the same body" if people ever asked. or "i'm trying to balance masculine and feminine energies" or something like that before understanding i was genderfluid / bigender. i was sad for the girl i never got to be. for the one that had to go away and be put in the closet and could never come out. i wasn't sad that i had been raised as a boy, i was sad for the other part of my soul that never got to exist.

hatching was so painful and so hard, but so necessary for me to grow and heal. it's so strange being on the other side of it. like i'd lived my whole life inside my shell, and it's odd not struggling so much mentally. there's less noise. i get better sleep. i'm less tired all the time. i'm not as depressed and anxious. being on estrogen is literally the only thing that's worked so well for me. it's helped with so much, and my dysphoria is basically almost completely gone. i have days were i question if i'm non-binary or not, but that's about as much as i really struggle with my identity like that these days. and it's a healthy amount of questioning that i feel is expected. sounds cliche, but things really do get better sometimes.