Panic Attacks

You look in the mirror every morning and yet it still strikes you as surprising. You feel like it should be easy to love yourself, there’s nothing inherently wrong with you… is there? You inspect up from your waist, across subtly defined abs, reaching developed pectorals and out to either shoulder to track down bicep, forearm and finally you reach your hands. When you finish flourishing your digits you find your neck, chin, and begin the journey across your face. Your cheekbones are sharp and risen, defining the landscape of your face with assistance from the caterpillar brows mostly hidden behind matted brown hair. You take a deep breath, there’s one last step your therapist insisted on, but before you can take that step you remember what …show more content…
That’s not to say they’re the only ones who commonly deal with anxiety, or that all transsexuals will have even a single panic attack. What it demonstrates, however, is one effect of this particular anxiety disorder. Panic, fear, loneliness, self-loathing, anxiety about body-image, social acceptance, being “out-ed,” coming out, the opinion of parents, family, and friends – each of these form a list of the possible negative associations of gender dysphoria. That list, however, is not comprehensive. Another subset exists, parallel and opposite to the above: love, courage, strength, empathy, compassion, and a profound insight into others. One might question the architect of such a strange assembly, are these all effects born of the same disorder? It’s not as queer as you might suspect. Great philosophers have often acknowledged anxiety as the predecessor of empathy, agony as the catalyst to growth, and fear as a requirement of courage. Gender dysphoria will simultaneously act as the deepest seed of fear, and the nourishing root to conscientiousness. A side note about gender dysphoria: Gender dysphoria is the disorder defined by: anxiety caused by the marked difference between one’s mental gender and physical self; it does not affect every transsexual …show more content…
It started as an inkling, a fraction of an idea that, maybe, she didn’t quite fit in with her brothers the way that she should. From that inkling grew the obvious question: why didn’t she fit in with her brothers? As questions are wont to do, this one rapidly became a realization: she was not like her brothers. Now, that realization is fundamentally normal and as such, the meager epiphany that she lacked some common trait with her brothers was put aside until a later date. That was the first beginning and the most influential until the fourth. The two small beginnings in between strengthened the first realization and applied it to social circles outside her family. The fourth came nearly eight years later, in the middle of her junior year of high school, this was when she finally accepted why she was different than her brothers, and note the word accept, because on some level, she had always known. Mary had been born with the wrong default settings; somewhere along the way her body had become decidedly male. This insight was not one that could be ignored; she was forced to explain the anxiety that had followed throughout her life to her parents. Now, Mary’s parents could not comprehend the issue, Mary had always excelled at being a boy, she played sports, and had a good relationship with her brothers – at least since her temper had calmed down – and did well in school. Mary’s parents