What Age Dysphoria Can Feel Like: Cognition Dysphoria
(This post applies more to younger age identities.
I plan to make more posts like this but for other dysphoria kinds.)
Adult Cognition.
It never turns off. Its sirens are ever blazing.
I'm outside, playing with my stuffee Mittons the Cat. She's jumping from tree to tree, and I'm with her. Almost. But part of me isn't. Maybe it's 3 or 8%, but part of me is noticing that I am playing, that I want to return back to watching YouTube, and that I am a person existing. This meta-cognition has me forever a step outside the water; my brain is physically incapable of submerging completely to kidlike thought.
I crave so badly to Think like a kid, to be fully immersed in that magic. There was a day when I was 11 or so that I realized I could think in my head. My internal monologue never ceased from that day onwards. I'm always thinking, always analyzing. It serves me well in pure mathematics, a special interest of mine that requires deep insights to form proofs. I love deep thinking then. But I'm a system, and I'm a headmate whose age dysphoria is so strong. I want to think childlike because that feels like me. And I can't because our brain isn't structured that way.
It may seem weird that I want my brain to be "less functional". The abstract thinking of chronological adult brains has many benefits. One headmate of ours wishes she could switch from adult to childlike cognition on the fly so she could play freedly and still write introspectively like right now!ยน But I just want to be a kid. I'm the most me when I'm giggling with my Sharky. That spark, that childlike joy that's deep within me? That's not dysfunctional! It's special, and precious that it survived over all these years. I still can feel the magic, even if only for small moments. I want to just hold it for longer and not have to fight our brain to be me.
The closest I've gotten to feeling the magic fully was last Christmas Eve when I watched The Polar Express for the first time. After being disowned years ago, this was also my first Christmas spent with a family, my partner's. The message in the movie, that we can choose to believe in Santa...I loved it. Later that night, I took my Rambley the Racoon stuffie to the spare bed, and we looked out the window to the stars. Santa is real, and he was coming!! It felt so right. And he did come, for we got presents in the morning. ๐ ๐
It usually doesn't go this way. Usually, I can't fully submerge. Here's an example: I'm doing imaginative play with my stuffed animals. I've been turned into a Pikachu! Rambley leads me to a prison cell. I apparently broke stuffed-animal law. I trick him into letting me out, and I escape!... And that's it. That's end of the play. My brain finds the easiest way out of being a child. Sometimes it forgets how to sustain this simpler mindset for long. It sucks.
Many age dysphoric people like myself might try weed/edibles, hoping the high feels similar enough to thinking like a child. Honestly, they did relieve dysphoria for a while. But I started getting headaches, and I started over thinking. Every time I got high, I would rest for a bit, and I loved it. And then I thought of something, something I needed to write down, a whole realization about reality that NEEDED to be memorialized. I would pull out my laptop, start a text document, and that would be the rest of my night. No littleness, just brainstorming followed by anxiety. It's just not the same as being a kid, for me at least.
Still, I've had better luck playing when I have a plot in mind. When my Cupcake the Unicorn plushie said, "My son is missing. Can you rescue him from the dragon?" There was a goal, and I played for much longer. The rescue crew and I traveled across the river. We tamed a sea serpent, and we reached Dragon City! We climbed the spire on our own to meet the dragon. And of course, the dragon just wanted more friends. ๐ When you have a goal and a plot outline in mind, you can embark on powerful imaginative adventures.
Perhaps chronological adult brains need more structure to find the magic. For the theater kids among you, do you remember improv games? Shouting "Wahhh!" was silly at first, but it was fun. And then you would start doing scenes with each other. Here's another popular imaginative play activity older people engage in: Dungeons and Dragons is literally structured imaginative play! Imaginative play is a muscle we forget to stretch as we age, but you can retrain it. It's uncomfortable first to be silly, but it's also a lot of fun. Maybe we need a society that encourages more structured imaginative play opportunities.
But I don't want it to be this hard to think like me. I don't want all these coping mechanisms to "get back in the element" and act how I know my brain should act. I want to have a toddler's body and think like a kid! Regardless of how much I try to let me play, there's always one toe out of the water. The monologue that's always self-aware. I want to be a kid. Maybe the constant awareness is trauma I could move past. But I just want to be a kid.
I will always dream of medical technology progressing where I can be a child physically and mentally again. I dream of switching between childlike and adult modes so all my headmates are happy. Regardless, I will still play today. I am a kid, no matter the adult-developed sections exist. I know who I am. My stuffies are waiting for me.
Keep picking those berries~ ๐ซ๐๐
Addendum
This post is talking about how my thinking is bound to meta-processing, always experiencing a monologue. But in some ways, my brain is actually stuck as a child. It occur in my executive functioning and my emotional processing, and it's a huge reason why I quit my job. Tons of age dysphoric people feel their brain is permanently childlike. That's the reason r/nevergrewup on Reddit is named as it is! So my post today is more on how some age dysphoric people experience dysphoria from adult intellectualism. But many won't feel this dysphoria because:
They're brains are permanently regressed in this area as well. This is less common, as in surveys we've conducted, most of us do not have intellectual disabilities.
They have a tween or teenage identity, and so cognition dysphoria is less relevant to them.
In future posts, I'll talk about where I do feel my brain is a child's. In this post written a week and a half later, I start to get into my executive functioning struggles.