like, i didn’t always know i liked girls too. i wasn’t having crushes on them or kissing them on the playground when i was five years old like you see on tv or read in books. i didn’t know for sure that i’m bi until literally this year (i’m 17 as of writing this). a former friend of mine is a trans girl. she didn’t always know. she didn’t realize she was trans until she was nearly eighteen years old. some people don’t realize it until they’re twenty, or forty, or sixty.

some people do always know. good for them! but can we please please please make it known that you don’t have to have always known for your identity to be valid? it makes it so difficult for people who are figuring themselves out later in life, because it feeds into this idea of “why didn’t i know it before? is this even real? if i haven’t known i’ve felt this way all along, how do i know i feel it now?” and that’s only making worse what’s already such a difficult time in life

So you’re twenty or twenty-something or twenty-five and you’re applying to a dozen or maybe even thirty jobs on Indeed.com or LinkedIn per week but almost no one is calling back, or when they do your social anxiety decides to make you choke in the middle of an important phone interview. And you don’t have a car, or even a fourth of the amount of money you’d need to buy a used car, and breakfast most days is either frozen mozzarella sticks or nothing at all. You work a little at a few part-time jobs or a few jobs that only give you a few hours per week and you try to go out on the weekends and make jello shots and go to clubs but you end up falling asleep with your cat at 8pm instead.

And you want that nice car, one of those cute little boxy ones in mint green, and either a gorgeous house or a nice apartment with sunflower yellow walls and a terrace you can do Blogilates on every morning before work. And you want couscous and quinoa salad for lunch with a glass of water and only a handful or two of nuts at your prestigious attorney job for a snack, the job where you can do ab and leg exercises under your desk without anyone noticing. With the perfect boyfriend and meals you cook yourself every night, a new recipe to try every night, without trans fat or carbs or gluten or the latest thing all the health blogs you follow warn you not to eat. And a hot tub and a huge master bed with cream sheets and silk pillows.

But you can’t have all those things, or maybe even half those things, and you won’t. And that’s okay. Because one night, in the middle of the winter in your tiny little apartment with your cat who’s in the middle of old age, with your rickety heater, you’ll make clam chowder and stand at the window in a wool blanket watching the snow storm out the window beneath the stars. Or you’ll have a friend over after one of your minimum wage jobs and you’ll make popcorn on the stove and watch a movie on your boxspring mattress together, without the silk pillows and cream sheets, but with everything else in place you could possibly want. Or you’ll only be able to manage two or three workouts a week, and you’ll come home to the leaking shower covered in sweat, with your hair stuck in tendrils like Jack’s beanstalk to your neck, but you’ll realize that the last thing you wanted to do that day was work out and you did it anyway.

Or you’ll have to ride the bus to work instead of the mint green boxy car you always wanted, but you’ll meet one of the best friends you’ll ever know on one of the stained polyester seats in the front instead, after you almost fall onto their bookbag after a particularly sharp turn by the driver. And maybe sometimes you’ll order pizza a little too often or get Chinese takeout a little too much, but on the most part even without that quinoa salad or those bagels with salmon and avocado you’ll still do the best you can. You’ll accidentally overboil a pot of pasta onto the floor, or burn your $3 skillet trying to sautee chicken, but you’ll have tried something new and that’s all that matters.