Yeah, it took me deep into my twenties to unlearn all those subconscious patterns. It took a lot of digging, which at times felt like wandering blindly through a labyrinth. It wasn't a comfortable process, and there were many dead ends. At times I even wound up basically torturing myself in a misguided attempt to rewire my brain. No doubt informed by the underlying assumption that I'm somehow inherently evil and deserved the self-torture, as if the most virtuous thing I could do for the rest of my life was punish myself for being born.

I'm a lot healthier now, and I'm not sure how much of that was necessary, but ultimately it wasn't an easy process to deprogram myself, especially when I found very little social support when what I really needed was healthy mentorship, social acceptance and integration, and basically any good influences to drown out all the echos in my mind of voices from my past...

Like, this whole assumption we see so commonly, where guys have everything so easy and aren't harmed by the patriarchy too, it really needs to change, because it is harmful. Real feminists like bell hooks and carol gilligan acknowledge that.

I'm not claiming women don't have it bad, but whenever I even mention that men also face societal problems, I get flamed by pseudo-feminists who seem to believe "smash the patriarchy" means "bully any man who shows vulnerability or weakness." It's really sad.