For me, coming out was dropping a match my family dared me never to light.
Unspoken rules, gender neutrality in the vacuum of my bedroom.
Like a pine tree that's safe base in a game of tag.
Expected only to perform masculinity when crucial to save face.
An act I always feigned incompetence of as if my knees were too weak to lift their burden.
It was their problem. Never mine.
and the fire was lit underneath me.
Six months of scrutiny. Six months of me feigning apology while stoking the fire until it was a control burn.
Six months of hell on a church pew.
I lit a torch. I swallowed too many of the pills that were left in my reach, and finally after quietly burning I fucking screamed.
An ambulance. A hospital bed. A psychiatric ward in a state left in a state of designed obsolescence to prevent unwanted people from finding their footholds.
The wrong overpaid doctor. The right underpaid social worker, with a list of the underground that provided essential care to a girl mistaken as a boy who became too soon a woman.
A list of people doing their job in an GULF of people looking the other way, swimming against the current if they have to.
I laid down the torch at a lighthouse that guided me to potential.
Not perfection, but hope.
The current state of the States of Mississippi and Alabama that never once looked our way until we became a useful villain to scare the people we call family, friends and neighbors...
Would now charge the physicians, psychologists, counselors and even the people "related to me" that had nothing to do with me...
...with felony charges that would end in years in a prison. Strip them of the licenses that grant their knowledge and their wisdom work.
For being the only ones holding onto my hand while I was on fire before I drowned in a man made flood.
They put the choice in my hand.
Spironolactone. Twice daily. To pause the unwanted heights I was afraid of reaching, confused for something I never was or would ever be.
Comparatively to a belly full of all the pills that weren't gate kept.
Now, I have my cake and I eat it too.
I was far too young to make the choices to had to make for medical health. For mental healthcare. For my basic necessities.
However, there were still options that nobody could take away and I took them.
You can't turn a butterfly into a beatle by thumping the chrysalis and demanding the wings turn black and harden.
You can only squeeze the cocoon until what could have been starts dripping through your fingers.
Blood staining your hand.
There's waiting until they're ready,
There's waiting until it's too late,
There's denying all the time they had left to live.
However with the oxymoronic nature of life, inaction is still a choice.
Just take my example, if you choose to stand still...
2087
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
izzy806
