It’s Okay Not To Be Okay

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what being okay feels like. It doesn’t take reading many of my latest posts to see that things are not going well for me. It’s been an incredibly challenging and difficult six months.

In the last six months:

I came out, changed my name, the whole thing. went from pretty much full time in the closet to fully out of the closet. So fast I think I gave myself whiplash. It’s been incredible, but it’s made a lot of the other challenges seem much more difficult.

Bought and opened a business with my wife and her business partner. This was another incredible moment. Incredibly rewarding, incredibly fulfilling, incredibly stressful, and incredibly difficult. Things are looking like they’ll be incredibly positive n the end but it’s been a crazy ride.

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, nearly died in treatment, and since recovering. Has largely walked away from our relationship. It’s been difficult to watch her rewrite our shared history and painful to see her refuse to acknowledge me. Family is a difficult topic for me but my grandmother was often my rock that kept me engaged. It’s hard for her to now be the one pushing me away.

On the other side of the equation is other family members who wanted nothing to do with me have tokenized me to fuel their petty ‘progressiveness.’ It’s difficult when you want a connection to family, and when things are hard and you need support. You don’t get it, you find a way forward without it, and when you’re interesting or whatever it is they come back for some reason I don’t understand. I don’t want to push people away, but where were you when I needed the love and acceptance to come out? Now that I’ve found myself on my own terms independently, your chance is gone. I’m having a hard time sorting out my feelings on this one.

The whole probation/creative dismissal/discrimination/incompetency thing professionally. I’ve talked enough about this one in other posts, needless to say this is the most unnecessary source of stress in my life and yet generates the most.

There are other little and big moments but those are the big themes. As the saying goes when it rains it pours.

So I’m adjusting to a new world of generally not being okay. Work eats up most of my time and energy, I feel like I’m professionally holding on by the skin of my teeth most days. Which takes away the time I need to handle my emotional well being. Which feeds into more stress. I’m exhausted and stressed all of the time. I regularly stress vomit now. I worry I’ve made a mistake. Not in coming out, but in my understanding of my capacity. In the closet I had such a stranglehold of my emotions. I was always so in control. It was difficult for me to feel anything, so I generally didn’t feel bad.

So the whole emotional instability thing is something I didn’t really know how to handle. It’s not something I had experience with. Coming out was like exposing my soul to briny air. Sure it’s fresh and clean but the salt burns like a seeping wound.

The last six months have been incredible, I truly mean it, I’m capable of using a thesaurus, but incredible is the word I want. It’s been so many different things, and it’s changed me. I think for the better. I’ve never felt so alive.

Unfortunately being alive is incredibly painful. It might be awhile before I’m alright again. Which is okay, because in the mean time it’s also fine to not be okay.

I read an article by a transwoman years ago, she wrote it in the early 2000s, and the basic premise was, if you’re going to lose your entire life, your livelihood, all of your relationships, everything of value and meaning in your life by transitioning, should you transition? Her answer was that you should be very careful about how you answer that, because that’s not a cat you can put back in the bag.

I’ve always taken this to mean that you need to put your whole life up against the consequences of coming out. Coming out is difficult, being authentic is more painful then it should be. There aren’t many relationships I’ve had to walk away from, my wife knew very early in our relationship what my identity was. I came out to friends slowly over time, and only lost the ones that time was already taking. I had a life before coming out that I was reasonably sure was going to be intact after coming out. Yet I’m still buried in a miasma of problems and misunderstandings and other unnecessary stresses.

I don’t regret coming out, and I don’t think I will. But I think I can safely say that you can never know the consequences of transitioning until you’ve walked into them. Which means even if you do transition. I think it’s prudent to be okay with not being okay. I know I’m learning to be.