I’m not ashamed.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m not okay and that I haven’t been okay in a year. What I have been doing is just going through the motions of losing myself and trying to find myself over and over again. Last year, I made some significant changes in my life. I had top surgery, something that I’ve wanted literally all my life but the happiness I thought that would come hasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong though. I love the decision I made. I love being free from the heaviness of breasts and everything attached to it. I love not holding on to something others wanted for me. What I’ve struggled with is trying to figure how who I am in my own body. I removed my breasts, gained weight, and cut off my locs. I began to see how so much of identities are attached to things that can change. I realized that my image was attached to how people viewed me. What they “loved” about me. What I was in a sense comfortable with seeing within myself.

I am now on the brink of my ideal image yet it all feels so foreign. I’ve had to learn to grieve my old Self and celebrate my evolved Self and it’s hard. To add to it, I started testosterone this year and the changes I’ve seen and felt are exhilarating and scary. To evolve into a new body with new changes, new sensations, and new territory is overwhelming. It’s confusing. It’s challenging.

It’s a daily battle to seek out what feels normal, like home. What feels natural and easy. But I don’t want to just cope. I want to live and thrive and feel. Feel all the excitement and sadness that comes along with growing and learning and discovering.

I am not ashamed.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I navigate through the waters of the functionally depressed. There have been plenty of days where I have struggled to fall asleep and struggled to get out of bed. I have baskets of clean clothes that needed to be folded weeks ago. It makes cleaning my apartment a drawn-out event, resulting in me forcing myself to write tasks list increments to feel like I achieved something that day. I feel like I uprooted myself from safety, belonging, and home to go home and I didn’t receive the love I expected.

I feel an enormous void of community. I have an unquenched thirst for belonging. I spent the majority of my life immersed in a life of privacy and seclusion, tight-knitness. I’ve always lavished on the fact that I am a weirdling, an oddball, the black sheep of life. It’s truly something I adore about myself, but I am yearning for a community of like-minded folk. I have friends and know a ton of people but there’s still something lacking. I crave intimacy with those who I am around. There’s nothing that brings me more joy than being surrounded by people with good energy, good intention, and love. It feels my heart with so much joy with love overflowing. I don’t have the consistency of that in my life. I need that.

I’m not ashamed.

I need, desire, and crave love. That’s it. I love being in love and loving others. I’m not a hopeless romantic but I am a lover. This is often frustrating to me because I’m demiromantic. I need a connection with someone to love and find interest in. It isn’t easy. Grabbing my attention isn’t easy but I’m not hard to love. I’m not hard to understand or see or hear. And when I love you, it’s the most genuine and unconditional love you could ever experience.

I love my friends and family with such an intensity that it is often to not receive it back how I want. I’ve had to learn that I have to accept what people have the capacity to give and it will not always look how I give it out. I am deserving of receiving the love I want but I also must be open and vulnerable in receiving it in ways that are foreign and uncomfortable. I realized that I needed to hear how people love and appreciate me. People have shown up for me but the service accompanied by the words means so much more.

I’m super sensitive to the words people say. Not just to me but in general. I’ve grown hypersensitive to sarcasm, belittlement, disregard, violence, etc. I can feel the pain behind someone’s words. As hard as I try to block the transfer of those feelings, I fail. I often feel like John Coffey in The Green Mile, taking on the bad energy of others. It’s not by choice and it leaves me feeling disconnected from Self and exhausted, resulting in the need to immerse myself in water to cleanse my Soul from all that isn’t mine to carry.

I’m not ashamed of being human, making mistakes, living and growing in my Truth, being vulnerable, open, and accepting of who I am now, who I was before, and who I am becoming. I’m not ashamed of being the imperfect, misunderstood enigma that I am.

I’m living in the moment and seeing the love and light in my thunderstorms. Give grace. Send love.

-Dreux