[cw: depression, anxierty, suicidal ideation (no immediate threat), dieting]
Hey,
The thing is, when you hate yourself, everyone around you can tell.
I didn’t really learn that until I was much older. I knew I hated myself, and also didn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to hang out with me on the regular. But obviously they didn’t want to be around me, so I’m clearly justified in hating myself.
You can spend a lot of time thinking about something without ever quite understanding the thing. You stare at the dots long enough and you forget that they’re meant to be connected.
Anyway. For a long time, I hated myself, and I really didn’t want to be alive anymore.
And then a few years ago I almost got my wish.
My gallbladder was finally on the verge of crapping out and I had to spend a week and a half in the hospital, first to have it taken out and then recover from it being taken out.
This all happened at the tail end of a really dark time in my life. I had failed out of grad school because my mental illness had become so debilitating that I couldn’t get out of bed. Soon after, I was told to leave the intentional community I was a part of. I spent the next year and change being functionally homeless, then a couple months being literally homeless, before finally calling my parents (who I had been No Contact with for several years because… let’s just say I had valid reasons). I had shelter, but it came at a great personal cost.
All the while, something that had been gnawing at the back of my mind since at least 2009 was getting louder and more difficult to ignore.
So I was still functionally homeless, staying with emotionally abusive parents, scraping together content mill jobs for any bit of money I could get, and weighed down with the inscrutable feeling that I should be living a different life.
And then my gallbladder exploded.
For years, I had been pretty sure that I would’ve been okay with being dead. I didn’t want to kill myself, per se, but if I happened to die by sickness or misadventure, I would’ve went without a fight. And when my bluff was called, I balked.
After I came home, I had to have a conversation with myself that I had been dreading for years. I had to ask myself, directly, if I wanted to be alive. In that moment, I felt like I had to answer honestly. And if the answer was Yes, I knew I would have to reorder my entire life around making that answer true and meaningful.
Once I felt well enough to be social again, I went and hung out with a friend for their birthday. I ran into another friend who I hadn’t seen in years. In that interim, she had started transitioning.
Reconnecting with her did two things.
First, I found a word for the thing that had been gnawing at me for years.
And second, it showed me that someone could do that thing and be happy.
I started telling people a few weeks later. I went out with friends for New Years Eve later that year wearing makeup and asking people to use they/them pronouns. The following spring, the day after my 33rd birthday, I came out publicly as genderqueer. A few years later I started HRT. Soon after that, I changed my name to Bridget.
Transition is a gift. Not every trans person necessarily feels that way, but it absolutely is for me. It wasn’t just about being able to live as my actual gender. Transition had a series of knock-on affects driven by this newfound sense of… for lack of a better phrase, giving a shit. All of a sudden, I actually cared about my body and what happened to it. I started eating better and walking more. I connected with a therapist to confront some of my emotional hurt. I started caring about how I looked, how I smelled, in a way I never did before. And I stopped walling myself off from the people who cared about me.
Now, for maybe the first time ever, I have a life worth living.
The other thing is, when you start to love yourself, people around you can also tell.
Last week my girlfriend and I went out to dinner. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I threw myself together quick as I could— black polka dot skirt, geeky t-shirt, denim jacket, a quick dab of eyeshadow— and hopped in the car. It was a warm night, one of the last ones before fall began in earnest, and we had the windows down. I connected my phone to her car radio and pulled up Spotify.
The first song came up. The wind was whistling around us, carrying the scent of four-hour-old rain and a promise of something after. She grabbed my hand as the song hit the first verse.
All I could think was, “This is it. This is why I stayed alive.”
Take care,
Bridget