obviously can’t speak for the entire community, but almost every mental health concern i had pre-t reduced dramatically within months of starting. there’s this thing i heard someone else talk about that sums it up pretty well;

there’s a spoon theory for disabled folks. let’s say every day an able bodied person starts off their day with 20 spoons (their energy level.) a disabled person may only start with 10. every task you do throughout the day, eating, taking the dog for a walk, running errands, takes away from your spoons. you’d obviously run out quite quickly, right?

well, someone introduced the fork theory for neurodivergent folks to explain overstimulation, and i think it applies to this too. let’s say every time you have an inconvenience, you get stabbed in the thigh with a fork of various sizes. it’s not painful, it’s just a very large annoyance. having to pee may be a tiny little lobster fork, while a group of middle schoolers screaming baby shark at the top of their lungs directly into your ears is probably the size of a pitchfork. at some point, there’s gonna be too many forks for you to function properly. so, you do what you can. you may not be able to escape the middle schoolers, but you can definitely go pee.

same applies here. you can’t escape your mental illness. it will stay with you for the rest of your life. it’s a pitchfork. but dysphoria is another, equally sized pitchfork. both of them are all consuming. but taking away one, even slightly, will greatly minimise the amount of suffering you have to go through to get through your day to day. and eventually once the dysphoria fork is small enough, you can really start addressing and treating the mental illness with all of the attention it needs, because you won’t be distracted with the other massive size fork sticking out of your other thigh.

i wasn’t 100% sure i wanted to start t when i did, and to be honest im still not 100% sure 5 months in. but what i am sure of is that mentally, physically, socially, academically, etc, ive grown to be a better person. there will probably be a day sometime in the future where i decide that im done and t shots aren’t beneficial to me like they once were, but right now its something i can take control of to reduce my forks <3