Age
CW: Trans thoughts about age, brief HRT mention
I've been thinking about this for a bit now.
I've always felt a bit younger than the people around me – probably because of autism, slowing certain areas of brain development or whatever. I've always been a little more socially inept and immature than others around me. But until recently, it has been mostly unnoticeable and inconsequential.
But now, I am getting physically older, while going through a second puberty thanks to HRT, which makes me feel even more like a stupid teen (as puberty does). More and more, I am confronted with this mismatch between my physical age (20 and growing) and my desire to just be a cute teen girl, doing teen girl stuff.
I feel as if the years were rushing by, as if I was losing time, as if I was getting too old for the things I want to do, want to enjoy, because people around me grow up, while I am ostensibly growing down in a certain way.
Would it be accurate for me to label these feelings as “age dysphoria”? I think it doesn't feel too different from my experience of gender dysphoria now – a strong (and strengthening) mismatch between my physical age and my felt experience of age and maturity.
At 20, I am not the youngest of first-semester students at my uni, but even the people significantly younger than me are a lot more mature and “grown up” than me. It makes me increasingly uncomfortable knowing that I will get older. I feel as if I missed something very important during my first puberty – because I was so busy being depressed and (in hindsight) dysphoric, I wasn't ready to enjoy the things other people around my age, other teenagers, did. I feel ready for that now, but everyone else has moved on to early adulthood.
The idea of growing up scares me, and I deeply wish there was some way to stop it from happening and instead letting me experience what I've missed, with the people I like. But knowing that this will never happen makes me sad. Unlike gender dysphoria where I at least know what steps to take to alleviate it, I am at a loss here. My age dysphoria is growing and I doubt it will ever really go away, with no real way to fix it. My body is too old.
I guess that's all I have for now. Please do let me know your thoughts.
Meow