i needed to transition to progress as a person
personal development has always been important to me. ive always wanted to be better today than i was yesterday. that doesnt mean im better than anyone, it was just the only thing i felt i had any control over in my life for many years. at the time, i thought that it would be enough to work on little things and that eventually the big things would solve themselves. unfortunately, it wasnt quite like that.
i definitely changed for the better over time, but i didnt make significant progress on any of those big things until 2021. that was when i confronted the fear at the core of my being: if anyone ever truly knew me, then they would hate me. that core belief shaped so many of my bad decisions. by overcoming that challenge, i learned that i was worthy of love and that it was okay to exist. so that was the first real step. being honest with myself and with my loved ones about the deepest fear i had inside me and making amends for the ways i had wronged them.
the next step was medication. so i finally saw a psychiatrist. it wasnt perfect by any means, but it helped. i have a very straightforward chemical imbalance depression wise and i have something to help with sleep too. separately the two medications i take arent great, but together they helped. i still wasnt where i needed to be though. i still struggled with employment and basic life tasks. i couldnt take care of myself, let alone my spouse who needed me. it was deeply frustrating to realize that medication alone wouldnt help. something was still wrong.
i still had behavioral issues that plagued my everyday life. i still didnt see myself as a real person either. i spoke with a friend about these issues and they brought up how they had been tested for autism and it changed their life for the better. it had honestly never occurred to me that i could be neurodivergent, but when i looked more into it, so much of my life made sense. i started to see myself in a new light, but that self discovery wasnt complete without an assessment and diagnosis. receiving the results made it real in a way that i couldnt convince myself of without them. it was extremely validating to have a medical professional affirm that i wasnt making up my struggles.
so i confronted the worst parts of myself, i had the medication i needed, and i incorporated my neurodivergence into my life, but something was still missing. i clearly remember sitting on the futon in my last apartment thinking about that missing thing. it hit me all at once that it was time to transition. i couldnt find a reason not to at that point. for some context, ive known i was trans since i was a pre-teen, but didnt actually experiment with my gender expression until i was a teenager. this was in the early 2010s, so the environment wasnt exactly friendly. for a variety of reasons, i decided i had to put my sense of self away to survive. so then im sitting there on that futon almost 15 years later and feeling terrified because i knew i had to transition if i was going to progress as a person.
its been two years since i made that decision. my life is the best its ever been. i finally feel like a whole, healed person. now i can actually live my life instead of being stuck in a state of what i can only describe as undeath. a living corpse. a brain piloting a mech. a husk with no soul. take your pick. getting to this point and being able to self actualize (a process that is never truly complete in my opinion) in this way is one of the greatest gifts ive ever had the fortune of receiving. i intend to become the best version of myself, for myself and those around me.