So... my mom thinks I'm off my rocker

Trigger Warnings: Talk of gender dysphoria, OCD, mental illness, and suicidal thoughts (toward the end there).

A little backstory, I've struggled with gender dysphoria since I was a kid. My mind always told me I was a boy but everyone else in the world said I was a girl. And even as young as six years old, I realized that this wasn't "normal". If I called myself a boy people tended to have this knee-jerk reaction that was both negative and super judgmental. I grew up in the south so there wasn't a lot of talk about alternative lifestyles or LGBT+ stuff (not positive talk anyway). So I had no idea what was "wrong" with me and I feared that if I told people they would think I was crazy. So I always tried to hide my gender dysphoria and just deal all these years...

Well ya know the saying about how "you meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it"? In my early teens I developed sever social anxiety, followed by panic attacks in college, and a few years ago (due to an scary event that triggered it) I developed moderate OCD. My mom (who has mild Germaphobia) claims to understand yet often gets upset with me over my OCD and argues with me about it. And today she basically told me she thought I was crazy. She said it's all in my head, that she wastes so much time trying to appease stupid thoughts in my head that I can't control, and that it's ridiculous.

So yeah... my mom thinks I'm crazy now. And I don't know what to do with myself. I mean I spent my whole childhood and part of my adult life hiding my gender dysphoria because I didn't want people (especially my parents) to think I was crazy. But in the end they think I'm crazy anyway And I just don't know how to react or what to do... part of me is super frustrated for wasting all this time being unhappy only to be called crazy anyway, part of me is super sad and defeated like what's the point of going on with life if I just keep failing, and part of me wants to find some way to prove I'm not crazy... but I don't know if that's possible at this point... So any advice or if you can relate is super appreciated. Let me know what you think or if you have any resrouces for OCD suffers. Always open to that

It is all in your head, of course. OCD is irrational, just like social anxiety. This is a mental illness forum, "crazy" is just a word for us that has derogatory and extreme associations that we therefore prefer to avoid.

Perhaps instead of telling her you're not crazy, it'd be more productive to tell her that you know your behavior is irrational but her getting angry and arguing about it is the opposite of helping and can only make it worse.

I beg to differ. By official definition the word crazy means "mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way." And while you might think of everyone on here as such, I personally do not. Call me persnickety if you want, but I would never call someone crazy or think of them as deranged just for having depression or social anxiety. A person that sees people that aren't there and/or is a danger to themselves/those around them; those people would qualify as "crazy". Someone who's scared to talk in public is not.

As for explaining to her that arguing with me isn't helpful. I've tried that before... and it helps for a while, until she gets tired or angry about something (and then projects that anger toward me when I ask her to wash her hands). It's a toxic relationship, and I wasn't really asking suggestions on how to deal with my mom. I was more looking for ways to deal with feeling like a failure/weirdo now that I know some people think I'm nuts.

Honestly it's not that big of a deal though. I've had a few days to think about it and it's actually kinda freeing. If people already think of me in a negative way, I don't have to try so hard to be perfect anymore. I can relax a bit and be like "screw them, everyone thinks I'm nuts anyway so what's stopping me from doing what I want now? Not much..."

Well remind your mom she might have overcooked that rocker : /

haha I had the opposite problem, I had to convince my parents that I was crazy so that they would give me some support.

My parents have tended to, until more recently, ignore my problems or downplay them. Growing up I always thought I was crazier than they did.

Well I'm not sure about crazy as such - but I've certainly had periods of psychosis where you're literally doing things that are highly irrational - and you only realise that at a later date looking back on the experience.

My family is fantastic - as in my wife, my son and my sister. They're very supportive. My wife calls me often a few times a day to check on me.

I think that's part of my problem with my parents... both before they understood my problems and now that they sorta-kinda do, they've never been the supportive types. They're the "lets figure out how to fix you" types. And that doesn't click well with my personality. I already feel inferior and like a failure, so to then say I'm broken or crazy and need fixing... that's just not helpful at all. It just makes me feel even more worthless

Well I mean yeah, I've experineced similar. Doing things due to OCD that at the time seemed right but looking back were irrational and pointlessly took up a lot of time I could have been doing other things...

I'm glad to hear you have such an understanding/supportive family. I wish mine was actually understanding like that :/

I have both gender dysphoria and OCD. I also grew up in a small redneck town in the 80s, where the only thing you ever heard about people like me was that "If I ever met anyone like that, I'd kill them." So I definitely understand the fear. And no doubt it was growing up in that environment (and all the bullying I got for being weird) that gave me my OCD.

As far as family goes ... well, I come from a family of crazy people. And I mean that literally, since several of them have schizophrenia and talk to squirrels and think they're related to the Queen of England and stuff. That's both good and bad. On the one hand, it's not a big deal if you have a mental illness in my family (I have 8 siblings, and all of them have been diagnosed with something; I'm still waiting on my diagnosis) but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that my parents think my gender identity is just some kind of obsession that will go away if they ignore it long enough. I came out to them about a year and a half ago and they haven't breathed a word about it since. (No one else in my family is queer -- surprisingly -- so they're completely clueless about the whole thing. My brother shares transphobic memes on FB and if there's one thing my sister loves it's jokes about gay people. But I digress.)

I use Jeffrey Schwartz's Four Steps to manage my OCD. (It's easy to Google.) I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone (what does?) but it's been a lifesaver for me. I probably would have killed myself a few years ago if I hadn't started using it (my OCD is about some pretty horrible things). It took me several months of dedicated application to get it to work, though. It takes time to rewire your brain. I still have OCD, but I find it a lot easier to cope with now.

And it's true, in a way, that if everyone already thinks that you're crazy, you might as well just do what you want. It's not like people's opinion of me could be any lower than it already is. But at the same time, you still have to worry about your physical safety. And nothing attracts violence like gender-nonconforming behavior.

I love that expression, btw -- "you meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it". I've never heard it before.