Hello, I am me. Nice to meet you. I have never fit neatly in a box. Any box. I have gotten extremely good at avoiding notice for not fitting the boxes. It is instinctual. I avoid thinking about the pretenses I maintain and the lies of omission. I am tired of being that way. I am trying to join the human race with honesty and integrity. I grew up in a closed fundamentalist community. Leaving in my early twenties and learning the life skills to live outside that group was extremely difficult for me. I have a freedom now that I never thought would be possible and I never take it for granted. I still struggle with a lot of stuff but it is getting better all the time. Now in my early thirties I am dealing with a lot of things that happened in the past and am deeply involved in some recovery groups. This has been really life changing for me and I am finding new and different parts of myself all the time. I have always struggled a lot with mental illness and I am finally strong enough to deal with a lot of things directly. I cut off my long hair six days ago. It was part of my disguise. I didn't really like it outside of the safety/shielding factor. Each time I got it cut I wished the hairstylist had taken more off. I bitterly envied men's short hairstyles. I have a very physical and outside job and it seemed so unfair that the guys I worked with could head back to the office looking fairly neat and tidy while my head was a hot mess. I have never felt like I looked like "myself." I never thought much about it, figured it was some facet of mental illness that would not change and didn't matter very much. I cut off my hair and suddenly I looked like myself and it felt amazing. I was euphoric for two days over it. Since then I have gone through a lot of self re-examination and I am still very much in the dark but also understand a few things about myself better. Lots of lightbulbs going on right now. I really hated the gender role I was raised in and have done a lot of work to have a better relationship to the idea of womanhood. It has helped a lot but it never covered everything. Not all of me. I don't fit the boxes. So I looked up some new boxes and holy cow is it complicated. To fill out the application for this site I identified as genderqueer. The words in the definition seem to fit, but I feel like an imposter checking that box. I feel like I am posing as something, but I was raised in a place where anything other than the party line was a Lie, regardless of whether it was factual or not. A part of me is so happy that I am exploring this. Another part is like "Is this really necessary?" I went against nearly every person I knew to leave that religion and it seems like the last thing I would want to do is repeat that experience all over again over gender which until recently I thought wasn't that important to me. A part of me wants to look the other way and go back to pretending I don't know about this. Let sleeping dogs lie. I am already quite isolated and I fear that getting even more honest about myself will make me more so. I know it could go the other way, that connection with others can't happen without some degree of transparency, but old fears die hard. So here's to this particular Me kicking the hornets nest yet again. It's not that I don't learn, but that I never learn enough. There is always more to find. For all my worries and emotional fireworks the draw of curiosity and discovery will out weigh safety and comfort every time.
Welcome to EC! Unfortunately, there are also many labels which have no scientific support, and don't make sense at all. To some extent, labels are important because they can help us to identify ourselves in the LGBT+ community, which helps us in organizing groups, activist movements and other important activities in the fight against prejudice. It also helps us to communicate, allowing our listener to have a general idea of how we feel and to whom we are attracted to. However, some people create labels which are way too specific, even for tiny variations in one's sexuality, and spread new words and labels like they were scientifically consolidated, when they are not. Thing is, labels need to be more general than specific. We are all different and unique, and our feelings aren't an exact calculation, like a mathematical expression. If we needed a different label for every small variation on our feelings, we would have a different label for every human on the planet. Thus, I recommend you don't worry too much about labels. You don't need to choose one if you don't want to. But, if you want to, then pick the one you feel it describes you better. It doesn't need to be a perfect fit and, if in the future you decide that there is a better label, you are free to change.
