Another text I wrote for cis people, again to balance the horrific narrative around transitioning that Swedish state television keeps pumping out. This one I actually translated to English (with some help from the machine).
➡️
Another text I wrote for cis people, again to balance the horrific narrative around transitioning that Swedish state television keeps pumping out. This one I actually translated to English (with some help from the machine).
➡️
Transitioning is an act of radical self-love.
It is a love for yourself because it presupposes that you accept who you are and say to yourself that you must blossom now.
And it is radical because it goes against every rule the world has instilled in you, every instinct that has arisen to keep you out of danger. Your whole being screams at you to not do it.
Transitioning is radical self-love because nothing else has ever been as forbidden as liking yourself, yet you decide to even love yourself—your true self—anyway.
❤️
So I started taking care of myself and repairing all the damage. I started trying to heal what I had lost and build up what I had never had.
Because when I now for the first time saw myself exist in a future, I felt such a deep connection and compassion to the person I saw there. I wanted to give her everything I could.
And I did. I gave away all of me. Because it was only when I let go of myself and gave it away that I felt I was worth something. It became a reclaiming or a vindication. By simply ceasing to be mine bit by bit and giving myself to her instead, I felt how each part I gave away also got a value that it had never had before. I made a promise to my own future that I would create her no matter what it would cost me. I even have that promise written down.
➡️
Speaking of transition and mental health, the most important and most revolutionary change happened so early that I almost forgot it already: When I realised that I had made up my mind and that it would happen, I started to care about myself.
The body stopped being just this uncomfortable and meaningless meat in slow decay, and became instead the raw material that would become me. My psyche or soul stopped being something with which I just shut my eyes as hard as I could in an exhausted attempt to survive—maybe all the way until the day I die.
Before, I had never seen any future. You know when someone asks “where do you see yourself in five years?” I never saw myself at all—not in a week, not in a month, not in a year or five years or twenty. Never.
But now that I had accepted myself, a future was just there, as if it had always been there, as if I had just never recognised it as a kind of future when I looked.
➡️
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.