Dysphoria has a feel to it, a physicality, a reality beyond the discomfort of the mirror. That's there too of course, the rising slopes and curves, the way the fabric hangs instead of clinging, the shape that should be shapeless, flat, blended to the rest of the body. The wrongness seeps in every time you see it, but you don't need a mirror and you don't need eyes. You don't need anything beyond the pressure of your own skin to tell you something's wrong.
There is a discomfort to dysphoria, and ache and a pressure that has nothing to do with physical pain, a hyper awareness that you can drown in. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. The itch can be constant some days, a discordant note in the back of every thought and the foreground of every movement. Sometimes it can be enough to cause panic, hyperventilation, chaos of the mind. Some days you spend half an hour trying to find the right shirt, because you're in the mood for something fitted not loose, but every time you try something the physicality just becomes that much worse, the shape, the feel, the hyper awareness of the part of you that is not you.
You love v-necks and open necklines, you hate clothes that are too tight, leggings and turtlenecks and undershirts, it's been a sensory thing ever since you were a child. But now you need constriction. It costs you your loose, low cut, V-neck necklines, the ones you like the most, the ones that you always feel best in, but it costs you them because you don't feel best in them now, not with this other pressure in your mind, not with the way it makes your skin crawl and your breath catch. You need tightness, constriction, compression, you can't wear compression socks even though you should because sensorially they make you want to crawl out of your skin but you need compression now.
Sometimes you hug yourself, pressing your arms as tightly over your chest as you can, crushing it flat, and you feel a breath of relief, a moment of relaxation, but it doesn't last of course, you can't keep your arms there forever, and so you turn to binding. It costs you your loan necklines but the pressure helps, the way the knot in your chest uncoils, the way you can recognize yourself in the mirror again, it's worth it, it's all worth it, and yet…
And yet lightheadedness has always been your enemy and your weakness and your struggle and sometimes binding isn't an option, sometimes you have to choose between the spinning in your head and the crawling awareness of your skin, sometimes you don't have a choice. Yet even when you can bind, sometimes it's not enough, sometimes, often. The binding pushes the feeling back, but it's still there, lingering, lurking, suppressed but not gone, still a quiet discord of a note. You wish you could bind tighter, press and press and press until you can drive the roundness from your skin entirely, but you know better. Binding with a binder is one thing, a safe, designed, measured, studied, thing, but bandages and tightness are the road to lung strain and broken ribs. And that's if it wouldn't set you spinning which you know it would.
So you make do with the binder, and the loose shirts that hide the curves, and the lightheaded bouts, and the days you can’t wear one, and the need to part with the styles you like best, and the ache, and the crawling of your skin, and the desperate need for pressure, and the wrongness of you own body, and the way the breath catches and the panic rises and the sensation drowns the world, because if you sought the actual solution it might make other people uncomfortable.
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