Dark shadows

[Trigger warning: trauma (re)surfacing]

I’m feeling very lonely and scared. Terrified, actually. Terrified by what might be surfacing to my conscious mind, terrified of what I actually feel pushing, pressing onto my conscious brain. I can feel it pushing almost physically. It’s there, something terrible and dark, something pushing to come up from some unfathomable, terrifying depths. I’m getting inklings of it at night, inklings from my dreams, but also clues from daytime triggers, like the instinctive and partly new responses I’m having to (unwanted) attention, to behaviors that indicate that some person is seeing me as an attractive woman. 

One the one hand, I crave human connection, in-person interactions, and even intimacy — and the increased risks related to COVID and other seasonal illnesses are terribly frustrating to me, an extremely irritating obstacle for me. On the other hand, though, on top of the reasonable fear of getting sick (again), which holds me back from many social interactions, there’s also a deeper, maybe darker fear I feel towards closeness and/or intimacy — which maybe explains why despite apparently (i.e. according to so many people) being and having always been attractive and “hot” and fun and funny and interesting and smart, I have so often failed at healthy and/or long-term committed intimate relationships. 

As the bodywork practitioner Licia Sky said, “Just as you can thirst for water, you can thirst for touch” , I often feel, and often have felt, a “hunger” for human touch, i.e. a super intense and sometimes almost unbearable craving for human touch and closeness and intimacy. And yet, I often also feel a strong, instinctive, gut-level rejection for attention and/or closeness when it comes from certain persons or certain types of people or certain patterns of interactions. I particularly feel this strong rejection or repulsion when the attention I’m getting is “attention towards an attractive woman”, i.e. when the person(s) giving me that attention see me as an attractive woman/girl/female: this feels painful, irritating, frustrating, and even threatening to me. 

Is this “only” due to my gender-dysphoria and/or being a non-binary/trans-masculine person, or is there, instead, something deeper/darker going on?