🏳️‍⚧️ Indigo's Reblog Hell 🏳️‍⚧️

I am relieved that I'd left my room tidy

fox with a fox

July 6th marks my 4th year on HRT.

I took some time to write about my past, trauma, abuse, finding myself, coming out, and the hope and joy on the other side of all that pain.

TW: emotional, physical, financial, sexual abuse, transphobia

Please read with discretion.

Today marks my fourth year on HRT. I started on July 6, 2022. I had started my social transition about a year before that when my life was falling apart.

I wanted to write something again for it. I did that a few times in the past and that feels like the thing to do. It’s hard to think about, it’s hard to write about. Most of what I have to say, I have already talked about openly and freely.

My life has not been easy. I struggle with post traumatic stress disorder daily. Some days are better than others. If you’ve ever wondered why my streams are sporadic and haphazard, this is part of the reason. I have deep seeded self confidence issues and struggle with imposter syndrome because of things that happened.

So this, once again, is my story for you. It will probably be hard to read. We’re gonna crack open the scars of abuse. There is literally every flavor in here. The fucking Baskin Robins of trauma. This will NOT be fun to read.

Some of this is simplified because otherwise I would be writing a novel.

I do find that sharing my story and the context of healing provides something for people that helps. A hope or a light or a rope to grab onto and haul yourself up and out of the muck. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll help imbue you with hope, maybe it will help you see your own light. It is, I guess, a trauma dump. I think it’s important to be open about these things. If someone had been open when I needed it, it could have saved me.

I can’t spend all day telling you all the in’s-and-out’s of my life, but the crux of it all starts when I dropped out of college. I had social anxiety so bad that I couldn’t leave my dorm room. I stopped going to classes. This was in 2009. I had to drop out. I was failing my classes.

My stepfather called me one day and caught on to my shortcomings and lost his mind. He was not a kind person, but was more of a father than my real biological one. This is, I need to point out, a bar so low that even a fucking cum rag could do better. That is not to say my stepfather was, by any means, a good father.

Back at home and without classes, I was expected to work and help pay the bills at home. We lived in the county and I had no car to get any place with jobs. My stepfather told me to “get a friend to drive me” and would yell at me that it was “[my fault] for not cultivating friendships with my peers” when I told him I had no friends. He would tell me–in more words–that I was a horrid and awful son if I did not have a job to support my parents.

Eventually, my aunt and grandpa got me a cheap car and I began working. I was washing dishes at a buffet. Typical first job shit. I was making minimum wage and my boss was paying me “training wages” at 50% of minimum – which equated to about $3.60 an hour. Yes, this is illegal. Yes, that was wage theft. I was so desperate to get a job that I just put up with it. I was timid then.

Eventually, I found another job at a factory that paid better. I actually was given the job because I was standing in the parking lot when someone’s scorned ex-lover smashed up their car with a cherry red baseball bat. She was tall and lanky and wearing aviators. Legendary. I told someone inside the factory what I had seen and so the Human Resources manager offered me a job on the spot “because [I] was a good samaritan.”

When I was working at this factory, my twin brother also dropped out of college. He was also struggling with anxiety, but more specifically my stepfather had told him that “if [he] didn’t get a job to support himself at school, he wouldn’t have a home to come back to.”

He got a job at a McDonald’s, but was on a rural campus. He had to ride his bike three miles just to get to work. It took a lot of his time. On one occasion he succumbed to heat stroke while riding his bike and crashed. He still got up and rode to his shitty job. He burned himself out eventually.

My stepfather was a force over us that we did not have the words to explain back then. He was emotionally and physically abusive. If we stood up to him, he would tower over us, pick us up one handed by the shirt collar and scream in our faces. It was, however, so normal to us that we didn’t see the forest for the trees. My mother, at the time, was on his side. She would often stand alongside him while he hurt us and yell at us that we had “brought it onto [ourselves]”.

My brother was with me when this factory job fell in our laps. This is where I learned to drive a forklift. You know all those forklift memes I kinda try to dance around? This is part of why I am trying to get away from that. This is why there’s no more redeem for this on my streams. This job was alright as far as factory jobs go. It was not ideal and not the worst thing ever. We worked six days a week. When we got home we would be expected to keep the house spotless. We would be expected to run all the errands. My stepfather was able to access our bank accounts – they were a special “College Account” type offered by Chase Bank. They were intended for the parents to have a backdoor access to give their children emergency money. My stepfather was using it in reverse and taking every paycheck the moment it landed.

He would say pretty flatly that this was to keep the family afloat. He would guilt us and accuse us of hating our family if we protested at all. He told us that this was the only way to keep going. The physical abuse and emotional abuse continued the entire time. If I questioned him, he would scream at me that I “wasn’t the head of household” and “just a kid”. This went on for about five years. I didn’t see a single penny of that money I worked for. It is something in the ballpark of 90 to 100k dollars. People would commend me for being so “selfless”, but I was hurting and in pain. My life was being stolen from me.

I was convinced I was crazy. He constantly gaslit us. He would turn my mom, my brother, and me against one another. He was sowing discord and doubt between us. He made himself the only “sane” one in the house.

I attempted to hang myself with a belt, but the door to my bedroom was warped from flood damage caused by a broken pipe in 2006. The weight of my body against the distorted wood wouldn’t hold and I fell to the floor. I sat there numb and crying silently. Coco, my cat, was there – only a kitten – and she came to me and pawed at me and asked me to pet her. I think I knew then that I had to get out of there or I was going to die.

In 2014 (when I was 23), I met a woman that would become my future wife (henceforth referred to as Exwife - there’s some subtle foreshadowing for you). I had also made a friend at the factory job (henceforth referred to as KO). This woman was kind and gentle to me in a way that I had never seen. She was my first serious relationship. As soon as she caught on to what my stepfather was doing, she began to tell me that it was abnormal. She began to give me words to describe my pain. I began to understand that I was being abused. My friend at work told me the same.

By January 2015, I had a plan to get out. My friend had an extra bedroom and told me that if “the shit hit the fan” I had a place to go. My breaking point came when my stepfather, once again, began screaming at my brother – in his face, threatening to kick him out and break his body and bones.

This time I recorded the audio on my phone. I still have the recording of this. I recorded it because I knew that the gaslighting had poisoned me. I couldn’t trust my reality. I would listen to it to remind myself that it was real.

I asked my brother to go with me, so that we could figure out how to get out together. He refused to admit that my stepfather was abusive. His exact words were “[stepfather] isn’t abusive, he’s just an asshole.” He was convinced that if we left, we should still send money back to our stepfather and financially support him and my mom. I was adamant that we cut him off entirely and forever. I had to make the decision to leave without my brother. This is, perhaps, the biggest regret of my life. It ruined our friendship. I left to save myself, but abandoned him in the process. It’s easy to look back and call myself a scared kid, which is true, but I still regret it the same.

I told my stepfather I was leaving. He lost his mind, as predicted, and I had to bail that night. KO picked me up and I left with only the clothes on my back, my cat, and $8 in my bank account. By the time we arrived at KO’s house, my stepfather had taken another $5 out by the back door in my account. I had $3. I had no car. I had nothing.

I don’t remember the drive. I remember walking out the door with Coco in her car carrier and she was screaming and meowing. KO was there, ready to kill someone if he had to, but my stepfather was slow and we were driving away by the time he got to the doorway. The next thing I remember, I was at Exwife’s apartment sitting in the bathtub.

I started receiving awful texts from my mother. I would later learn, when discussing this with her six years later, that these texts were being sent by my stepfather. Vile shit like “you were always the selfish twin, some son you are”. I never saw my stepfather again until the day he died. We’ll get to that later.

In the meantime, I slowly began to piece myself together. I was able to get a car. I still have this car. She’s on her third engine. She’s like me. She won’t go down easy and keeps limping along. I got my own apartment in six months (late 2015 by then). I was living alone for the first time in my life. I was on the second floor and if I heard knocks in the apartments downstairs (which sounded like my stepfather) I would break down weeping.

Exwife and my therapist suggested I get a therapy dog. Not a licensed assistant dog, but a regular rescue dog. Something to take care of–no offense to Coco–that was able to get me out of bed and force me to go outside. This was Gumball. Gumball was a good dog.

I was still with Exwife, but I lived alone for a year with Coco and Gumball. My timeline gets a little muddled here, but Exwife moved in with me when her 2015/2016 college semester ended.

There was a day that she was at my apartment and we were showering together. She embraced me, and without any prompting and completely out of nowhere, this is when she told me that she “would always love me, even if I was a woman”. This was when my egg cracked. I wish I could point at something like Mass Effect or Life is Strange or something that I liked cracking my egg, but no, it was this horrible person that cracked it in a moment of vulnerability.

I would later learn that this was not true. More on that later.

For now, it sat with me. All my gay and transgender thoughts started to fall into place. All this discordant noise started to make sense. The static was clearing in my head. I had a history consistent with many trans people. I had memories from as far back as when I was three years old wherein I asked if I could have a dress. I was puzzled as to why “only girls” could wear them. I had confusing moments when I internally felt a desire to be sapphic. I simply did not like being masculine.

I tried to tell Exwife that I was questioning my gender and sexuality. Her reaction was to snap. She cornered me in the bathroom and began to scream at me that “[I] needed to decide if [I] were a woman or a man right now” because she could not commit to a woman. I back-peddaled. I was terrified. She was all I had. I had minimal contact with my family. Besides her and a few friends, I was alone. I told her that I was mistaken, foolish, confused.

In hindsight, she was cruel about many things. There is a particular moment I found in my old phone where – this was when we had been dating for about six months – she had pneumonia and refused to go to the doctor. She was saying things like “if I cough up blood, oh well” and other dramatic and horrid things. I asked her to consider going to the emergency room, and her reaction was to tell me that I was “inconsiderate” for suggesting she do that and undergo the “psychological stress” of a hospital bill and to “think before I speak”.

I would tuck my tail and accept these things. Probably because that’s all I knew. It’s probably why I told her I wasn’t transgender. I was scared. A lot of people are scared to come out and it’s a nightmare scenario to be rejected. At the very least, all I needed was someone to talk to me about it.

I choked that down though.

It was 2017, we got married. I know. I know. You already know that this was a mistake. We got a house she picked out. I was working at a new job. Her abrasive and toxic personality traits began to rear their heads more prominently. She began to treat me, simply, like a nuisance in her life.

I was struggling with the trauma of what happened with my stepfather, and she would scream at me to go to a mental hospital when I was having flashbacks. I began to struggle with work and my attendance was awful. She would tell me that she couldn’t handle me being depressed or having anxiety. She told me things like if I didn’t clean the house, I didn’t love her. She told me later if I loved her, I would find a job to support us. She would snarl at me and tell me to just get disability already. I more or less did exactly what she told me at any given moment, no question, but nothing was ever good enough for her.

She dressed me and dictated my wardrobe, she decided what I did with my free time, and she paraded me around with her all the while I was numb. She insisted I keep my hair buzzed down. She insisted that I have a beard. I was in the net of another narcissist. I barely remember the marriage.

We got another dog and we had her cat too. These animals are probably the only thing that kept my head above water. I still had only a few friends and my relationship with my brother was strained from what had happened.

In 2018, my stepfather died. We think it was renal failure. He was comatose in the hospital and my mother was screaming at me to apologize to him (something she denies now) before he died. The doctors had to keep restarting his heart. It was getting progressively more difficult. He woke up once, but had a tube down his throat and couldn’t speak. He had a notepad and pen and wrote “Am I in Hell? I keep reliving the same thing” before passing out again. This was maybe his last lucid moment. Mom decided to pull the plug and he died in the hospital with us standing around him. I cried. I don’t know why, but I did. There was a part of me that still saw him as my real father, despite it all.

My marriage with Exwife continued. It was dead on arrival. I recently combed through old messages between us. I was endlessly devoted to her and constantly trying to do my best to make her happy, but she was always angry and upset with me.

She would ask me to cook dinner. I would do it for her the best I could. She would taste it, tell me it was trash, throw it out, then complain that I “was making her spend money” and “wasting food” and “ruining her diet” as she went and got fast food.

She forbade me to look at pornography because she saw it as the same as cheating. We rarely–basically never had sex after getting married. This is going to sound insane if you know how I am these days, but I didn’t masturbate or otherwise for three years. She once called me a pervert and a pig for suggesting we try sex toys – specifically a strap on – because it was heartless and perverted to suggest a toy from which she would “feel nothing”. Hold this thought.

I forget when this happened, but she went through my phone and found a picture of a woman I had on there. She was convinced it was something I was masturbating to, but it wasn’t. I was thinking about how I wanted to look. How I wanted to be. My ideal female body. It wasn’t even that scandalous, it was like a goth lady in a corset or something. I forget. I told her as much. I was always honest with her to a fault.

She once again lost her mind and told me to decide if I was transgender on the spot. This happened, by the way, while one of my friends was visiting. She came to me when we were hanging out and began screaming at me, calling me a pig. Once I was talking to her one on one and told her why I had the picture, she started screaming that she couldn’t be married to a woman because she was not attracted to women. I back peddaled again. This time, I said maybe I was nonbinary – a thing that was never brought up again.

2019 came and went, but at the end of the year I injured my back at work and lost my job. They told me that my performance reviews “always showed perfect lifting, so I must have injured it outside of work”. Exwife openly resented me for this and began telling me that every day that I didn’t work and she did, I was exactly like my stepfather. She also compared me to her deadbeat alcoholic father that never could hold down a job. Before I hurt my back, I was having flashbacks at work and crying in the bathroom on good days. On bad days, I would sit in my car in the parking lot and sob. I was often numb and nonverbal. I was paralyzed.

I was overmedicated. Exwife was studying to be a psychiatrist and was constantly telling me which meds I needed to ask for. My psychiatrist – who was also her psychiatrist by the way – would give me whatever Exwife wanted me on. Reviewing this list of meds recently, the drug interactions include: increased anxiety, seizures, convulsions, brain hemorrhages, and death. I honestly wonder if she was trying to kill me.

Anyway, remember the “she can’t be attracted to a woman” thing? In 2020, she came out as bisexual and asked to be polyamorous to have a girlfriend. When she came to me and told me she was bisexual, I responded by saying “That’s great, I am pansexual!” to which she glared at me and said “don’t ruin my moment.”

She told me that I could only have another partner if they were a man or transwoman with a penis. I excitedly told her that I could transition if she was bisexual and she replied “No. I am not attracted to women with penises.” So yes, once again, she told me no once again and I listened.

She would brag about her hot girlfriend constantly and show off and talk about all the awesome lesbian sex they were having. She got dumped, bought a bunch of dishes at Goodwill and smashed them in the yard with a cherry red baseball bat. She met another girl and was openly embarrassed by her and ashamed of her. That girl adored her. Exwife dumped her and complained about how hard it was to meet anyone.

Meanwhile, I met a transgirl and we hit it off so well that my Exwife became insecure and jealous. She gave me an ultimatum and told me I had to decide between this new girl or her. I dumped the transgirl. I had only known her for two weeks, it would have been crazy, right? To dump my wife of three years for someone I had just met? I regret that a lot. I would later reach out to her and talk things out. She was straight, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

Being exposed to other queer folks began to stir the repressed thoughts more. I had been consciously choking them down for at least five years by then. It was getting harder and harder to press down.

It was 2021 by then. Our heartless dead marriage continued like a zombie. I started to go to LGBTQ support forums. I started to ask people for advice. The universal advice from all those queer folks was to run. Run the fuck away from this woman. Leave my wife, run for it. She’s going to be the death of you, run for it. I told them they were wrong about her, that she loved me unconditionally.

Around this time, she sexually assaulted me. I am being gentle here. But remember that toy she was appalled by because “she would feel nothing”? She bought one. She used it. I had to beg her to stop. I told her she was hurting me. All I remember is her on top of me, complaining that it was taking too much lube and she didn’t want to buy more. I bled and hid from her by locking myself in the bathroom. She told me she had needed to do it to practice for her girlfriend. This is the haziest part of it all. I don’t remember when this happened exactly.

I still didn’t leave her. I was still trying to make things work. I can’t remember how I talked myself through this. I can’t remember much of anything about it. The only thing in my message history with her about it is from later, during the divorce, when I bring it up and her response is “yeah, that was wrong of me.” Which, yeah, slight understatement.

I was taking a shower one day, months later, when she once again went through my phone. She opened my internet browser and saw one of those support forums. She came screaming at me while I was in the shower. She was screaming from anger and crying. She told me I needed to see a gender therapist to “put this to rest”.

I went to a gender therapist. They said “lol yeah queen, you trans as hell” (okay it was more like “I can’t tell you, you have to decide, but you have some strong indications that you are gender non-conforming.”) I brought this news to Exwife. I told her and I was happy, relieved to do so. I knew I was trans then. I mean I always knew, you know? In the back of my head, but now I truly KNEW.

She began sobbing again and told me “But you can’t be a woman, that would make me a lesbian – and if I am a lesbian, then I will lose my job! What about my career???” She literally dropped to the floor, flailing and crying like a toddler. “No one can know about this!” I was so fucking livid. I was so furious. I finally snapped. I screamed at her. I told her I wanted a divorce. I took out my phone and called everyone I could think of and told them I was a transwoman. I came out to my biological father, my stepmother, my brother, my sister-in-law, my mother, and all my friends. I was shaking with fury and scared and ready to vomit. She just cried louder and louder.

I put all my stuff in our guest bedroom. I was working a job as a Direct Support Professional (that is someone that helps intellectually disabled adults with day to day tasks). I made $10 an hour, but I was starting a new job at the post office. This job was brutal. I had to walk 17 miles a day and the training was dogshit. I can’t get into it (it’s a whole fucking thing) but just know it was miserable.

I was having suicidal ideation one day. I reached out to my brother and told him that morning that I was having intrusive thoughts. I forget if he replied or not. I calmed down over the course of the day and got ready for bed. My brother showed up that night (he had a housekey) and let himself in. He was at my bedroom door, pounding on it and screaming at me.

I told him to calm down and that I was fine. I told him that intrusive suicidal ideation is not the same as attempting of making a plan. He told me he didn’t care and he was going to kick the door in if I didn’t open it for him. I opened it for him.

He started screaming at me. He told me that it was heartless and cruel that I had strung him along by threatening suicide for attention. I got back in bed and began begging him to leave me alone. I just kept repeating it over and over. Leave me alone. He kept screaming that my marriage was falling apart because of me. It was my fault. He told me he was trying to help me, but I wouldn’t accept his help. He screamed at me that my stepfather and my exwife were right about me and they were justified in the way they treated me. He did not know about the rape.

I jumped out of bed, pinned him to the wall, and punched him in the mouth as hard as I could. I wanted to make him swallow all his teeth. I was flashing back. He was everyone that had ever hurt me in that moment. He called me a psychopath and stormed out of the house, pausing only to chuck his housekey at my head. I went to bed.

I woke up to the cops in my room. They told me that I had to come with them. My brother would not press charges of aggravated assault if I went to a psychward. I could choose jail or the hospital. I chose the psychward. I mean, I wasn’t doing great, I don’t think jail was going to do me any favors.

They didn’t cuff me, but put me in a police cruiser and took me to the local hospital. I sat in a room with a cop guarding the door. After a few hours they took me out to an ambulance and put me on a stretcher. They were taking me to a psychward about 70 miles away.

When I got there, I didn’t know where I was. No one had told me what was happening. They put me in a tiny room with boarded up windows. A man came in and questioned me about my mental state. They admitted me and I signed a paper for “voluntary release”. If you don’t know what this is – it means I can request to leave any time, but must stay there for at least 72 hours. They took all my things. I was in a pair of shorts and a shirt two sizes too big. I had to wait another few hours in an empty concrete observation room. It had a one-way mirror where they watched me. They came in and examined me and made me undress. All the other patients could see into this room for some reason.

I was quiet and did what they told me to do. I did the little worksheets. I talked to the doctor. I didn’t know my job’s phone number. I didn’t know anyone’s number except for Exwife. I called her and she called me pathetic. She told me she was getting a restraining order to “protect herself and the dogs”. She told me I wouldn’t be able to come back to the house. When I asked her what to do, she told me “go to the shelter” and hung up.

72 hours came and went. I asked for release. They refused. This was costing about $1100 a day, by the way. My clothes stank, they didn’t have any scrubs that fit me. There were other patients there that were dangerous and combative. They would streamline them to release them. I suspect that because I didn’t have insurance and I was complicit and quiet, they were trying to milk me for all the money I had. They asked me on several occasions to pay them while I was locked in there.

I was able to convince a nurse to get my numbers off my phone – nevermind the fact that if the nurses liked you, they would just let you keep your phone, but not me. I don’t know why they treated me like this. If I asked them questions, they would ignore me or otherwise give me noncommittal answers.

I called a friend and told her that I was being held against my will and the nurses cut the line (they had a kill switch on it). I was there for seven days before I was able to call my Mom when no nurses were at the station. I lied to mom and told her I was being released and to pick me up at 2PM. This was not true. Mom showed up at 2PM and demanded to know where I was. She was livid and went full “I want to speak to the manager” mode on them. They came and got me, gave me my shit, and pushed me into the lobby with mom within 15 minutes of her arrival.

I found out that Exwife had been bluffing about the restraining order. She has shown the judge messages between the two of us where I was lamenting how she had treated me and how she had turned on me. My reaction to being mistreated was her reasoning that I was unstable, to which the judge basically told her to get lost.

She did, however, hire a lawyer. She kept the house. I had put about five thousand dollars towards the mortgage, but her lawyer said that I paid interest (not principal) so therefore I couldn’t get that money back. She kept the dogs. My dog. My dog–Gumball–she told me it would be impossible to take a pitbull to an apartment and had the lawyer put that she was keeping the dogs in the divorce papers. I couldn’t afford a lawyer. I lost my job. I went and lived with Mom on her couch.

I decided then to live out of spite. I would never give up on myself again. My last interaction with my Exwife – I left her a note in the house when I got my things. I put it on our little dry erase board (that used to be used for love notes and things) and taped my house key to it.

I wrote:

Exwife, Even though I literally get sick thinking about you now, I want to wish you good luck. I hope no one ever makes you feel as abandoned, alone, scared, and as betrayed as you made me feel. I hope no one ever takes away your home and dogs. Or tells you that you can’t be yourself. You couldn’t handle it. -Deadname

Six months after I left the house/the psychward thing – she was engaged to a cis woman I had never met. Within a year, they were married. She is in an open and loving lesbian relationship. As far as I know, her career is unscathed.

It’s easy to look at it now and know that she was a misandrist and transmisogynist. It’s easy to know that now. She was a self loathing lesbian. She was using me as a beard. That is to say she was using me to appear straight and stay in the closet. She just picked another closeted person – and a transwoman at that. As soon as I was trying to come out, her plan to lay low broke and she resented me for it, I guess? I can’t blame her for being scared, but I’ll never understand being used.

Immediately after the divorce, I got an appointment to see a doctor for HRT. It would take ONE YEAR to get into the office and get it.

I got a new job at a factory. Six months later I had a really nice apartment. Coco was still with me. She is the only creature to go through it all with me. Five months passed. I bought a new PC. I started streaming. That’s right, I started streaming less than a year after all this shit happened. You can hear the weariness, I think, in my voice in those early VODs.

Then it was July 2022 and I started HRT. I met some important people around then. People that are very dear to me. I made new friends. I began to live uninhibited, though I was still closeted in public life a lot of times. I stopped all those meds the psychiatrist had given me. I dropped fifty pounds in approximately a month.

It could feel again. Life was so beautiful. I had come so close to ending it. I had come so close to giving up. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like everything went from desaturated to vivid. Emotions were so powerful – I had repressed them for so long. I would sob and weep and hurt in my apartment, alone. I mended my relationship with my mother and she has become a strong and powerful ally. My brother remains estranged.

Music became more powerful. Movies moved me at my core. Books sank their teeth into me. I began to be creative once again. During all of the above – I didn’t do anything creative, I told myself it was a waste of time or pointless.

Do you remember the first time you looked up at the blue sky on a sunny day? Do you remember the first time you tasted a fresh strawberry? The first time you ran your fingers through your own hair? The feeling of rain on your skin? Do you remember what it was like to feel for the first time? I do. It happened then. I was truly alive for the first time.

But, my point, my point of all of this – was that through the storm and the waves and the fear and the pain – I was born on the other side. I came alive. I am surrounded by love and gentleness. I have friends that care about me. I have people that love me unconditionally. I live as myself. There is light at the end of even the longest and darkest tunnels. But most importantly, I love myself.

If you are in pain or scared or uncertain, it will not last forever. Don’t give up on yourself. You can make it. You can do it. I was scared and beaten and broken and I crawled my way through it. Maybe you think you can’t or you're scared or unsafe – you can be yourself – you can do it – you can make it – you can fight – you can come alive like I did.

Sometimes you can’t control your circumstances. I know. I know it’s not always so simple. Some of you have people like I did that won’t let you. If you can’t do it now, then hold on. Hang on as tight as you fucking can, I’ll toss you a rope, grab it so tenaciously that your fingers bleed. Don’t give up on yourself. Cut the toxic people out of your life the second you are able. They are tumors, they will cut your life short, they will waste it. Live for yourself. Live unashamed. Love yourself.

Life can be beautiful, despite it all. Life can heal you, despite it all. Life is worth living, despite it all. Despite everything, there is beauty around you and in you. I lost so much time to pain, but there is love on the other side. Never give up hope. The storm will clear and you will make it and life will be so peaceful and lovely and worth every breath.

I’ve been to Hell and come out the other side bruised and beaten and weary, but I wouldn’t be who I am if not for all the trouble and tribulations. One step at a time. So this is not just the four year anniversary of starting HRT, this is the anniversary of deciding to be alive. I went to Pride for the first time this year. My legal name change is THIS week.