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.
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