Passing Privilege and Perpetual Fear

[calculus_of_destructions]

So...I've passed pretty consistently for around four months now. It was this past December when I first noticed a phase-shift in how people treated me, realized that noone blinked when I walked into the women's restroom, and had people who had never met me before use proper pronouns or address me in a female-coded way, e.g. in parts of the country where groups of women are usually addressed as "ladies" K and I were pretty much always addressed that way.

So this is great, right? I've only gotten closer to the unremarkable white cis woman range since then, as I'm now a b-cup, the shape of my face has changed a bit more, and I have basically no facial hair anymore. Yet I'm still fucking terrified when I go out and am around people. I'm so scared pretty much all the time. Why am I so terrified of being read wrongly? I don't really know! I suppose, though, that if I were to take a guess it's because of a bad intersection of my paranoia in groups that comes from the ptsd with some of the bad experiences I had before I passed consistently.

I just apologize to everyone who has to deal with the splash damage from when I freak out over my appearance and whether or not I'm passing.