Preface:
I wrote most of the below post before deciding to add this preface, but I think it’s significant. Last night I had a conversation about why I’m so open about everything. What some people may not know is that my family found out I was gay by reading my journal. At the time, my reaction to that was, “If I don’t get privacy, then nothing is going to be private, everything is going to be out in the open!” At first that was out of anger, but it evolved into a life philosophy - one of rejecting shame and being “proper” and instead sharing my journey in order to be fully understood and embraced for all that I am. So sometimes I may come across as a bit messy or as an over-sharer, but I have found that is a much better way for me to live than being ashamed all of the time. This post involves me processing some stuff that some people would probably keep to themselves, but I hope that - as always - my sharing this stuff empowers you to feel willing to be a little more open about your life.
A photo of me from behind, looking over the cliffs in Howth
This blog post is going to be a lot less structured than a lot of my posts. I know that I need to do some processing, and I know that blogging often helps me do that processing in a way that writing in my private journal does not. So this post will be one in which I do a bit of sharing, a bit of processing, and a bit of reflecting.
After recent events, I’ve been having a hard time trusting my friendships. I have this sense that my feet are going to get swept out from under me again, and that the people I’ve loved and trusted for years and years are suddenly going to do something that irreparably destroys the relationships I have with them. Because of this, I know I’ve been distancing myself from my friends a fair bit. Some subconscious part of me has decided that removing myself now will prevent the potential betrayals.
But obviously, that’s not great. I know that there are people in my life who love me a lot who are not going to sweep my feet out from under me. In fact, because of what happened, there are at least 2 people with whom I feel I’ve gotten closer due to the way they rushed to support me.
I’m realizing the ways I was being influenced were preventing me from growing into the fullest version of myself. I was allowing myself to be shaped into the person someone else wanted me to be instead of trusting my gut on what felt right to me. I hate how much I can be influenced by strong personalities, but it is a reality that I’ve had to deal with for a long time, and I often feel a sense of liberation and clarity after I get free of the influence of those toxic people.
I went back and forth on whether to treat my absurdly low testosterone. At one point I got on a testosterone therapy, then I got off of it. When we got back from Dublin - after weighing whether or not to extensively in my private journal - I decided to get back on testosterone therapy. My mood swings have been SIGNIFICANTLY less severe than they were when I was on it the first time, which tells me that those mood swings were actually caused by the anxiety I felt about the trip and not actually coming from the testosterone therapy.
I feel clear-headed, calm, energized, strong, confident. I feel like the person I was in college in the best way I can mean that - I know who I am, I’m not afraid to be who I am, and I’m not afraid to say who I am. After years of very little art making, I have been wanting to draw again. After over a decade without wanting to exercise, I’ve been exercising again. I feel connected to myself - integrated in mind, spirit, and body. I feel how I want to feel.
Like in the initial period when I started testosterone therapy, I feel like my sense of my gender has been impacted. I feel like the gender identity and sexual orientation that apply to me now are the same ones I felt applied to me in college: I know myself to be a cisgender gay man. When I was feeling this way about myself - that I am, in fact, a cisgender man - some part of me knew that I would face rejection for coming to understand this about myself. Now I feel the opposite of fear and shame about coming to this understanding - I feel proud of myself. I feel like I did the work of understanding my gender identity for YEARS, I really picked it apart and dissected it and looked at it from every angle and examined it thoroughly. I learned so much about myself and SO MUCH about gender expansive people in the process of questioning and exploring my gender identity. It’s not a failure to have come out on the other side of that process realizing that I am who I believed myself to be at the beginning of the journey - it just affirms that I really understand myself, and allows me to see the unbelievable beauty of the lives of trans and non-binary people in a way that I don’t think people who are not themselves trans or non-binary usually get to see.
But despite getting back on testosterone therapy and feeling internally assured of myself, I don’t think I’ve told any of my friends that I started back on it, which shows me that I’m more gun-shy with friendships than I’d like to be. I am someone who talks to his friends about everything, and telling my friends that I restarted testosterone is something I would absolutely normally do. But I haven’t been doing that kind of sharing since we’ve been back. Even those two friends who I mentioned feeling closer to since the whole debacle, I know I’ve been keeping them at arm’s length. And maybe that’s normal, maybe that’s to be expected after something like this happens, and maybe I don’t NEED to rush myself into anything.
I’m sharing all of this stuff for a few reasons. One is that I think that the 15-20 people who regularly read my blog probably would appreciate being informed of my conclusion on who I am and what language to use (“he/him”). Another is that I want to mark the day that I was able to look at myself and say that I really am confident in who I am, which is not something I’ve been able to say historically. Finally, I want to give myself some compassion for needing to retreat a little bit, and ask that my loved ones help to remind me to give myself some grace.
I’m disabling comments on my blog for a while due to some of the locations I’m seeing show up in my analytics, but feel free to respond to me elsewhere, and thank you as always for reading.