Even with an open mind, what thing's popularity do you genuinely not understand?

Okay I'm not sure if this will work since this is pure imagination and not a lived experience but just try to understand what I'm going to say as if it's something you see and feel every day to one degree or another like an itch you cannot scratch.

Maybe try to remember your mum treating you as a baby when you're a teenager and want to show you're independent, that kind of infantilisation and belittling is a part of the frustration.

Now imagine that your body is small, slender and feminine, and everyone treats you as a girl. You aren't accepted in whatever dude things you do and you don't feel you fit in with the other girls.

You feel that your dick is missing even though you know it should be there. You have a weight on your chest that shouldn't be there and you're just not manly at all. You can feel that something is wrong. You just feel that whenever you look in the mirror you just hate how soft you look.

You don't like the women's fashion and dances you have to do to fit society's expectations of what you have to do as a woman. Because the exclusion that comes from not following is terrible.

You were born this way and have been like this your whole life, but you feel as time goes on that your body is just more and more wrong. Like you're becoming a woman when you know you are a man and just want to fit in with the other men. But men don't accept you as a man because they're too busy thinking of you as a woman. Men see you as a goal and not a fellow man to do men stuff with like drink bear, hang out and watch sports or whatever. Sure you can be there, but it's not the same as being the boys, you always know that you are different

It's constant and daily that you can feel it pulling away at you, you know something is wrong and wish you could've been born different. Sure there are things that suck about being a man but it's worth it because being a man is who you are.

It's not just the body but you know deep down that you don't belong in the social groups that you're in, you always feel alienated, like everyone else is part of a club that you don't understand like an obscure meme you've seen snippets of but don't understand even though you're supposed to understand.

You then find out that people feel just how you do and can actually change their bodies to be something their take pride in and love, they can become big strong men, they can become athletes, soldiers, just absolute lads and they are accepted as themselves. The years of distress are cleared because you finally feel a connection to people who understand your pain and your situation. Then you change your body to be more how you want it. You finally get testosterone and people treat you as if you're the lads lad. An absolute legend, you can live your life with people seeing you how you see yourself and free from a body that feels like a prison and wakes you up at night.

Hopefully that can kind of elucidate your understanding. This is basically my story but reversed, and more generalised. I wrote so much I'm probs gonna clean this up and write it as a proper short story. So more people can understand why. But really we just want to chill and be ourselves in a body we don't hate.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent