Has anyone else spent the past twenty years wanting to be spun by a swing dance partner while holding onto jangly Kegels balls with your pussy?

I Grew My Feelings and Desires in Bottles Before I accepted that I had to be the most me, I grew my feelings and desires in bottles. (I kept them contained, never to grow so large as to change anything.) They were in a hidden cupboard, in the space behind the drywall in my closet, between two wall studs, covered with a makeshift door and hidden by a hamper. (I concealed them, often even from myself, in illicit places inside myself, often in traumas felt in my body.) I kept them in the dark, clustered around flickering grow lights, powered by batteries, when I could manage to replace them. (Sometimes, I didn’t have the hope to nourish them.) I rigged them with incendiary charges, reasoning it was better to immolate my hopes than let anyone find them. (I gave up on them, rather than let people know about them.) It was a horrible way to live. I don’t want you to live like that. It brings tears to my eyes remembering it. I want you to grow your feelings and desires and hopes in a garden. Tend them. Let them feel the sun. Share them with your friends. Know that not all of them will flourish, but some will, and with your love, more will than you might expect.

Being Not-Me Is Traumatic; Being Pushed Towards Being Not-Me Is Triggering I’m trans. I tore my way through the supposedly unshatterable bonds on me and found myself in a body. A body full of the history of trauma. I sifted through the memories in the brain I met, and at first they seemed complete. Where had I come from? Why was I suddenly in this body, at THIS point in its life? There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to be myself earlier. But in time I found places where the fabric of the narrative had been overlapped to hide the holes. Where the traumas had rejected the memories. I studied the body’s reflexes. The way it lied casually and without a second thought to appear untraumatized. I lined up its personal history and its medical history and found causation. I tried trusting my feelings, and the body reacted. It unclenched, a little. I returned to the stated truths I’d been given when I introduced myself to the brain, and I experimented with inverting them. Not, “I am well adjusted,” but “I am traumatized.” Not “I was happy,” but “I was choosing to kill myself with alcohol and neglect.” Things that never made sense started to coalesce. I was hidden deep. The body I was sequestered within was compelled to reject and suppress me for decades. It built lies in my brain, it trashed my joints, it refused to move like I move. And it positioned itself in relationships in ways that are hostile to me. It was industrious and inventive in this task. To carry out the directive of making sure I was never able to take ownership of my own body and life, it reinforced patterns in how I behaved in romantic relationships that were antithetical to me. I survived, and I claimed myself. But the body I claimed is filled with these memories of BEING in ways that are not who I am or how I am. Filled with reflexes, reactions, and relationship patterns that are antithetical to me. And when those are active, it’s traumatic. The tragedy I struggle with now is important people in my life express themselves in ways that constitute trauma triggers for me, activating the impulse to fall into those patterns that will further suppress me. Holding on to myself during that is extremely costly.

I Show You I Love You By Being The Most Me Once, I was not confident in who I was. I believed toxic monogamous scripts that called for demonstrating my love through sacrifice - giving up paths I might have walked, selves I might have chosen, relationships I might have formed, loves I might have kindled, to consecrate my love for one person in the blood of my own potential. My partner did not ask this self-butchery of me. It arose from the interplay of who I am with all the things society told me I had to be. In order to play those roles, I had to sacrifice myself. And society encouraged that sacrifice. And it encouraged isolation. Because connection is powerful. Connection with who we are. Connection with who we can choose to be. Connection with each other, on terms we define for ourselves. These are the connections society wants us to sacrifice to profane the one connection permitted under monogamy’s aegis. I reject these demands. I am a glorious being, ever becoming myself. I will not turn towards my partner, wiping my own blood off my hands as I fit myself into a box provided by the patriarchy in the size and shape of her desires. I share my luminosity with her, that she might know I love her not because I fit perfectly in a box eternally by her bedside, but because I do not. Without that box, I must learn myself and my partner better than I ever thought to know anyone, deeper than I knew was possible. I cannot rely on the chains of society to support us; for my transgressions against its rules, society would sunder my connections. To accept my love is to be outcast. This may be the farthest afield I have ever asked her to walk beside me.

My wife saw this and was like, “I found a meme of you!”