All the TikTok videos and self-help books and podcasts make healing sound so uplifting and energizing and empowering—which, in many ways, it is.
What most of them don’t seem to mention is how it feels like death before it feels like new life.
I roughly mark the beginning of my personal growth journey around May 2020, when it felt like everything that I had tried to build in Atlanta after graduating fell apart. It was time to rethink and rebuild.
I started writing “Curtain Call” at the beginning of March 2021 and published it on June 24th, thirteen months after it all started.
Those months in the thick of it was the storm that I anticipated. I knew that working through all of those things would be a lot of work, most of it not fun or exciting or comfortable. It was isolating and lonely, overwhelming and painful to tear everything down and rebuild from the rubble.
At least there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, right? You persevere through all of these things and then you get to “bask in the cool breeze and warm sunshine.” Get through this, and it’ll be easy from now on.
Not exactly.
Since publishing “Curtain Call,” things didn’t just all immediately align like I thought they would. I had done all of this work, isolated and alone in my apartment, to become my authentic self and get to a point where I felt comfortable enough to share it with the world.
That was only the first part of the journey, though, not the end. I had emerged as a new person—even if your identifiers don’t necessarily change like they did for me, just going through that process fundamentally changes you.
Now, after being introduced and building a relationship again with my authentic self, I had to reintroduce myself to the world.
So many people throughout my life had never seen that authentic self before, mostly because I hid it, mostly, from everyone and even myself. I worried that coming out and revealing that authentic self—with the long hair and the tattoos and the piercings and the new wardrobe and the renewed sense of power and confidence—would be a shock to those people, that they wouldn’t recognize me, that they wouldn’t accept me.
I felt vulnerable, not in that the rejection I might face from those in my life might undermine this new sense of authenticity and make me hide it back deep underneath masks and costumes like before, but that the rejection might leave me even more isolated, even more alone.
Because, before I published “Curtain Call,” I had to come to terms with the new boundaries I’d set: no one who didn’t fully accept me as my authentic self is allowed in my life. Period.
But what if someone makes a comment about my hair? Or my clothes? Or my jewelry?
But what if someone says that gender is set hard-and-fast at birth and that I just have a mental illness that needs to be cured?
But what if someone calls me a slur… or worse?
But what if someone says that they feel like everything in our relationship was a fraud, that they felt lied to, that they didn’t even know who I was and felt betrayed?
To tell you the truth, I still have these worries.
I’ve had to steel myself, though, to the logic of that straightforward equation: if someone does feel or act like that in response to me being my authentic self, then they never accepted me and shouldn’t be in my life.
That makes it easier to go through every day with those worries, knowing that, if they do happen, I’ll know how to handle it.
But I have already had to cut some people out. That certainly wasn’t easy. And feeling confident and steadfast in the logical foundations of that rule doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t hurt like hell to have to do that. Or to have to carry those worries with me every day.
There’s no moment at the “end” of a personal growth journey where you come out of the dark tunnel and are blinded by the light that was always waiting for you on the other side, and stay in that light for the rest of your days. “Congratulations,” it says, “you made it! Now rest and be well, your troubles are behind you.”
No. The light comes from within, from knowing that the darkness and pain and loneliness are worth it, that I’m retaking my life, my one precious life, as my own again.
It radiates and warms my body and calms my senses every day that I get out of bed and don’t have to hide who I am.
It’s my power source, which feeds off the perseverance and allows me to grow stronger and stronger every time my feet hit the floor in the morning.
And I’ll be riding high in a fandangled sky/
It’s going to be easy/
It’s going to be easy from now on/