take me to the moooon 🐄👽🛸
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I had a conversation with a cis friend of mine where the topic of body image came up; we've been friends for about a decade now. Obviously I've started going through changes, but he had too; he's changed his hairstyle, got fitter, started wearing less loose clothing, and I realized that he was cis, yes, but he was still going through the process of discovering himself and his gender presentation.
I was talking with my cis brother about how trans people talk about gender beyond the binary; how certain specific aesthetics or characters can be part of our self image, and he said "Oh! Aragorn is my gender." (And for the record he was very correct)
Maybe I'm an idealist here but I think that the trans experience of self discovery and self creation is not inherently exclusive to the trans experience. We all live in a world with behavioral and physical expectations forced on us, and we all could do to examine how we relate to those expectations and who we really want to be. Most people will fall closer to expectations than outliers, but I think these kinds of things are a universal experience that our society denies.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this right here is why I feel earnest anger and pity on behalf of cis people, cishet people especially. Most of them have either never explored what this huge aspect of who they are means to them, or done so only unintentionally. Even when they do explore or experiment, they must do so without allowing themselves to look at possibilities beyond preset bounds. It means they almost never get to a place they'll be really happy with, and that, no matter what the result, they feel obligated to dig in and never consider they might want to revisit the question again some day.
In exploring your gender, you may find something is wrong for you. You may also decide that everything is working as intended. Either way, that's your business, and so is anything you do or do not decide to do about it. The process is what matters most here. The journey is how you learn about and create yourself, to emerge feeling more comfortable and confident in your own identity.
i have a story. so for the past week i've not been sleeping very well because i got a new job that has me on call to do odd tasks for wealthy people. i won't get into it, but i will say that it kept me up until 4am a couple nights in a row, and once i'm up until 4am i have no chance of going back to sleep. this is relevant only because that job ended yesterday, and in celebration i decided i was going to get a full night's sleep. like a FULL night's sleep. so 7pm rolls around, i got my dinner made, it's an acorn squash stuffed with sage and mushrooms, i eat the WHOLE THING. don't even put away the dishes. leave those dishes out. take a nice long shower, get all cleaned up, immaculate. and then i get in bed and i think--and this was my first mistake as you're going to see--some dumb shit always wakes me up, but not tonight. oh no, not tonight. i have a plan. i set my phone on do not disturb mode with the blissful certainty of someone about to make the worst mistake of their recent life, and then i get in bed. it's a full on snork mimimi situation. i crashed, and when i say crashed, i mean that even when my alarm on my phone (that i forgot to turn off) went of at 12:33am (hell, hellish alarm setting), it didn't wake me up. i was out. i was out cold.
i was out so cold that when something opened my back door at 5am, i didn't hear my security alarm going off.
honestly will never forget this older client we had who told me how her life had gotten so much better with time and age and asked how old I was and when I told her I was 28, she said I was just a baby and reassured me I had so much time ahead of me and how much better it'll get as I grow into my life. There was such an indescribable amount of love and hope in that single interaction I think I'll hold it with me forever.