#im tense becuase I have to be to stay afloat lmao

[b3st-part-of-b3li3v3]

lol being trans is so complicated

I feel alone most of the time

I can tell people don't understand me. It's not their fault, and on a good day it's fine, it's whatever.

But when it's bad, I can fell it, I make them uneasy, they feel uncomfortable around me. On a bad day it's suffocating.

Even the people who love me, my parents, my friends, my little sibling who is my closest confidant. I can feel the tension grow whenever I do anything from mention it in passing or crack a joke. I can feel them avert their gaze, like they're afraid I'll sense their thoughts through their eyes. Even in writing this, it's like, what are they feeling? Shame? Disbelief? Confusion? Embarrassment? Do they just not believe me but don't want to hurt my feelings? People are visually uncomfortable around me and it hurts me in the very depths of my soul. It feels like each step I take forward others are backing away from me, so the distance between where I was and where I am feels that much farther. It's debilitating sometimes. Not always, but sometimes, yeah.

It cuts so deep because I love people, I love gender, and I love the human experience. I'm an open book if you care to ask, but now... there are huge, foundational, exciting, and frustrating aspects of my life and identity that are taboo. Maybe it needs to start with me, but god I'm so tired.

I am only now starting to truly grasp the idea of marginal stress, and the way people's intersectional experiences can lead to these big societal gaps. Being trans is exhausting. I've always been a pretty stereotypically successful person. Good grades, loved school, great with people, could get a job. I love learning and school and friends and everything, but it was hard. Depression amplified by undiagnosed neurodivergency and an unnerving sense of disconnect I would later identify as dysphoria made everything a struggle. Completing high school, despite me loving school, was like pulling teeth out. I shed so many tears over college applications. But I did it, and I'm here, and I'm alive, and I'm good at it. I had to suffer a lot to do it, but I did. I kept up.

It's hard not to feel alone. All of my struggle was internal. I wanted good grades, I wanted college, I wanted to keep going. But more than that, it was me who got me out. It was me who fought back against my eating disorder even when everyone thought I was crazy. It was me who didn't kill myself in high school, who got out of that god-forsaken church. I was the one who researched ADHD when no one would listen. I tried to make it easy on people when I came out. I started slow, over years. It was me that got my whole family to go back to therapy, to reach out to a gender affirming therapist, to buy a binder, to reach out about hormones. I was alone driving to the doctor, I sat alone in the waiting room, alone at the CVS, alone at the kitchen table, my hands shaking, for my first intramuscular injection. Everyone in my life had told me it made them uncomfortable to talk about it.

It's like, I can't even be poetic or cute, because it hurts. It hurts because I know every one of these people accepts others like me, but it's my proximity that's alarming. They don't understand the stress. One of my friends was ranting about how at almost 20 years old she doesn't have a bank account that she doesn't share with her father. I took everything in me to listen. My parents don't want me on hormones, and even though they mean well, it still makes me sad. I am still legally entitled to their insurance, not that they would even not let me use it if I wasn't, but I pay for it with my money I make working my jobs. My financial independence is a huge part of how I can even transition. I hate that I feel resentment towards this friend but I do. The idea that she would want to get a credit card just so her dad can't make snide comments about her buying clothes from Shein or a signed copy of a book is comical to me. I hate comparing people's situations (we had even just finished a conversation about Shein which finished on that topic), but I'm financially independent so I can buy the gender-affirming, life-altering, world-changing medical care that I wouldn't have been able to start without it. Her having her own bank account or not, it doesn't make any significant difference in her life, she doesn't have to make a choice but she can still choose. I'm not mad at her, I'm grieving for myself. Not that it's even that big of a deal, but god, it just makes me think.

I'm not mad at anybody, I've just so recently realized why life is hard for trans people. In biology class we were doing a blood typing lab, and part of that involved pricking yourself with a safety needle. One of those little orange boxes where if you press down a little needle pops out. You don't see it go in, it bleeds for less than a minute, and you go on with your day. The class was losing their minds at this. Grown ass adults, the whole class losing composure about having to "stab" themselves with these needles. Funny thing is, they didn't even have to? If they didn't want the needle they could use some blood the lab had on hand. I'm watching these people freak out and all I can think about is my injection I'll be doing tomorrow morning at 6am. I'll have to pull back on the needle at it sits an inch and a half in my leg to make sure I'm not injecting into a vein and going to kill myself, and these adults are freaking out over a needle. That idea sat like stone in the bottom of my stomach. I have no problem with people disliking needles, or having to hurt themselves, or having a weak stomach, or not being manly enough or anything. It's because it felt isolating. I realized I was the only one who had to be so comfortable around needles, who had to put on a brave face tomorrow morning and draw up the oil. No one around me could have lived a day in my life. It's kind of exciting, but on a bad day like that day, it was like a curtain went up around me. And how do I explain this to someone? That seeing people wince over a needle leaves a pit in my stomach that drags me down for the rest of the day. I never thought stress would be so personal, so seemingly random, and affect me so much.

I always joke about being a self-made man, which is a lie, since I'm afraid it wouldn't land. But god, I take pride in that! The idea that I'm working for this. I experience this is a much more purposeful way than any of you bitches. You got here by chance? I got here by choice, every scar and stitch proof of my devotion to myself and to my cause. I'm more of a man than you'll ever be, I bled for this. It sounds violent and aggressive, but god I'm working so hard to get up out of bed every morning. Just to convince myself that we're getting one day closer. Finding the little moments of euphoria and savoring those forever. One of my few queer friends at school took me to Salem and did an amazing job of gendering me correctly. It was effortless for her, and I couldn't stop beaming. I felt like me, I felt so good I can't even describe. And it feels even better because I know she fully sees me as I see myself. Their is no miscommunication, no doubt, no tension which swallows me whole. She is one of the few areas of my life where I am understood. I'm so grateful to her I can't describe. She cured me, if that makes sense. Not even her, she just prescribed it. Being my correct gender cured me, even for that one night.

I've known I've been some flavor of gay man since middle school, but what do you do once you know? And you're so little and you're so confused. I grew up in a conservative church, I didn't know trans people existed, let alone ones who were also gay. I always say that you were your truest self in middle school. Not necessarily down to the minute details, but more of the idea that in middle school you were so generally awkward, odd, or out-of-place that you could explore facets or interest of desire that you who works a 9-to-5 cannot. I new I was a man, but didn't know it was possible to do that in any meaningful way. That night in Salem everything clicked. Not only did I want to be a guy, more than anything, but I could. No questions asked, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I can be a guy. It's never felt like that before. Most people treat me not as I am, but as I appear to be, and that shakes my confidence, not of what I am, but if I will ever not make people uncomfortable. Like, yes transitioning is amazing, the happiest and most satisfied I've ever been in my life, but that night proved that there is a transitioned. It's real hope, and clarity like I haven't experienced in a while. True euphoria.

Anyways, I lost the plot. I've been listening to My Way by Frank Sinatra recently, and it feels very much applicable to my experience. I'm doing it, alone, and very well. I'm doing it my way. And when I'm there, when I'm not -ing, but -ed, when cis people finally respect me because I appear as I am, when I have grown to be palatable, I'll have done it my way. Fighting tooth and nail, alone, for truth so inherent I thought it was a non-issue. And no one else gets the credit. I will have graduated, top of my class, doing straight cis-normative sexist homophobic society better than any of you all ever have. And it sounds bitter, it sounds harsh, it sounds unforgiving, but god so has this. I'm the little red cock and I'm gonna eat my fucking bread man. I am trans joy and trans wrath and trans justice and trans perseverance. AHHHHHHHHHH. I love it, again so happy, but god people sure as hell won't let it be effortless.