I am AMAB. As a kid I wanted to be a girl. I don't know if it was gender dysphoria or just me being affected by bullying and lack of affection. I didn't want to play football and I always found the boys to be mean and while some of the girls were also mean, most weren't and I envied them for how they treated each other and wanted to be a part of them. I don't remember if there was something more to it. I would picture an imaginary friend in my head who was a girl and while we didn't talk we understood each other as if we were the same person.

Then puberty came and it all went away, but I began feeling a numbness. As a prepubescent kid, I was always known to be very emotional. I remember when our class was watching a movie there was a scene where a dog sacrificed itself to rescue a girl from drowning. I along with one other girl were the only people in the class who cried to that. And I would often cry when I discovered how terrible the world is for other people. But now I struggled to feel. I rarely was sad or happy and I never showed affection to people and had very few, if any, friends. And whenever someone suffered I would try to suppress my empathy because there was no way for me to deal with those emotions. Once in a while however I would when alone have outbursts of extreme sadness, crying at the intense loneliness I suddenly became aware of and the emptiness I felt. It never lasted long however and I would soon suppress it again in order to live my life, because there was nothing I could do about those emotions. This entire period I did not think about gender.

The one thing I can say for sure is that I never was attached to my maleness, the only good things I appreciated about being born male was not having to deal with periods, and the immense strength I had without exercising.

Some months ago I started wondering «What if I am a woman?». In the days that followed I then had a dream while sleeping where I saw a version of my self but a lot more feminine looking. I did not feel repelled, it felt natural. I also added she/her to my pronouns in social media to experiment, but nothing ever came of that because people don't talk about me.

Some days ago I decided to shave all my facial hair and pluck my eyebrows and shave my arms and hands. Combined with my already long hair, it made my face androgynous looking and I could glimpse a woman looking back at me from the mirror and it filled me with joy. That day I went out in public looking like that with my sister (who didn't question me about my change in appearance). I remember it made me feel good, I was smiling the whole day through and while I got some weird looks I felt protected with my sister by my side (though to be honest I passed in front of a church where a funeral was going on, with the biggest grin ever on my face, so kind of expected to get weird looks XD).

When I came home, I realized «I think I am a woman.». That realization filled me with so much joy I couldn't focus. And I was filled with a drive to live and to act. I was the happiest I had ever been in the past years. I was in bliss. I actually wrote the date down, because I felt like on that day I was born again the way I was meant to be. I could feel again. Although I couldn't cry it was because, despite wanting to cry every few minutes, within a second I would be euphoric again, before any tears could even be formed. I also began feeling a lot more affection for people. My most used emojis began to be hearts and 🫂. And I also began attributing a lot of what I had felt in the past to gender dysphoria.

Now however days have passed since then, and I feel this numbness again. My facial hair is growing back and I no longer see a woman in the mirror. I no longer can identify gender dysphoria in the past the way I did some days ago. I don't feel gender anymore, the same way I couldn't feel gender before the realization. Was it all just a "phase"? Maybe this is just my way to cope with not being able to live the way I am meant to live, and it will all come back when I make steps again to affirm my gender, the way I did just before the realization... I guess that's what I have to work towards.