Struggling to comfortably embrace masculinity because of my childhood
Hey everyone. So I (18, AFAB) recently decided to stop trying to fool myself and embrace the fact that I am in fact gender fluid. I'm talking really recently- like, within the past month is when I stopped trying to desperately ignore the urges I often found myself having when it came to being a boy. So, I have a bit of a dilemma here.
In online spaces, embracing my masc/male side and letting him shine is easy. I feel comfy going by he/him online just as much as I do with she/her, and I feel way comfier channeling my energy as a guy online. But as soon as it comes to translating that to real life, I choke. I love makeup and femininity too much to fully let my masc side have the floor. And it confuses me because I so badly want to come off as more androgynous, so badly want to look like a full on boy sometimes, or a mix of both other times. But I feel such a weird discomfort when I try to present fully masc. No makeup, hair out (I've got curly hair), baggy/shapeless clothes.. I've tried it all at once, and I just feel. So. Weird. But I seriously do want to embrace masculinity more.
I think there are a lot of layers that play into this feeling. As a black woman, I was masculinized against my will a whole lot. I became hyper feminine to compensate for what people said about me, my hair, my skin, and my face. So I guess I am not really fully ready to associate physical masculinity with safety yet- It has been painful most of my life and I tried to run from it. So now embracing it feels weird.
At this point, I'm kind of just yapping lol. Well, to try and sum it up/to give a TLDR;
I so badly want to present more masc. But every time I try, it really just does not feel quite right.