How to be your authentic self in a world that isn’t made for you?

Life has always been difficult for me in various ways. I hate how I’m expected to do certain things and be a certain thing because society deemed that as “normal”. I try not to care but deep down I can’t help but care because I hate feeling like I’m doing something “wrong”.

I need to say that I’m not diagnosed with autism but it’s something that I heavily suspect that is a possibility for me which could explain how and why I do certain things. My therapist feels like it could be a possibility too. The biggest problem of mine involves socialization. I genuinely don’t care to be social. I have no desire to, and people get offended over that even when I didn’t do anything personally to them. I just don’t have anything to say even in situations that require me to. I realized that being forced to do things is a big anxiety trigger for me. I don’t like doing things just to please other people or to make other people happy and satisfied. I want to do things because I want to do things and it’ll make ME happy and satisfied. Before someone comments “just having socialization issues isn’t autism”, I know that. I actually have a list of the actual symptoms I experience. If I was to go through all of them then this post would be longer than it already will be.

I HATE how I’m put in a box when it comes to gender too. The whole “xx chromosome equal woman” thing that people like to spew pisses me off because that’s not how I see myself. When I look in a mirror, I don’t see a woman. I just see a person. I’m nonbinary. I’ll always be nonbinary, and it sucks that it’s not safe for me to say that. I was asked about my gender when I was trying to start therapy, and I couldn’t be truthful about that. I was asked about my sexuality too. Couldn’t be truthful about that either. People are so disrespectful, and it’s pathetic honestly. If I had no worries about the reaction I would get after sharing that part of myself with family and others then I feel like I would be happier.

After typing this, I feel like my depression and anxiety stems from not being able to be myself. It’s easy for people to say “don’t care about what people think” but be for real for a moment. That’s not something a lot of people can do. People can be extremely aggressive whether it’s verbally or physically whenever they feel like you’re doing something to them. A lot of don’t know what the best way to go about things.