For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.

That might seem like a long time to be ignoring a significant aspect of the way I felt about myself, but playing the role my parents assigned me was a core aspect of my identity for long enough that I’d worked out how to justify never exploring my identity. At some point in my life, I’d come to the conclusion that questions were better than answers, at least when it came to personal philosophy, identity, and pretty much anything that had to do with the self. That answers could lead to stagnation. After all, as the idea goes, we change constantly, usually in small, slow ways, but it is always happening. If we merely accept that we are something, then we stop looking for the change in ourselves and it can come as a difficult shock when we finally wake up one day and realize we’re something so foreign to our sense of self that our only hope to cope with the disparity is to deny its truth. Answers are static things that might be true, but are usually only true in a moment. That moment might come again, but it is still fairly restrictive because there will be many times when it is not true, usually more than when it is. Better to hold onto good questions than to cling to fading answers.

While I still largely agree with the general idea, there’s a caveat I’d add nowadays: questions do you no good if you don’t ask them. I was fine with not knowing how I identified beyond the part I played as determined by my parents. It was just one more question about life and my place in it, sitting up on a shelf next to things like “is it worth being a good person?” or “what makes someone a good person?” and any other number of such queries. I just never noticed, as I routinely worked through those questions, that the ones pertaining to my identity never really got brought down and examined. This dusty collection of unexamined questions slowly grew in my twenties, as the broad question of “how do I identify” brought several more specific questions under its wings. Only when I finally had the language I needed to put words to those feelings, the distance from my parents to explore my identity outside the mold I’d confined myself to, and the realization that the voice telling me that it wasn’t worth exploring those identity-based questions belonged to my mother, did I start asking those questions properly.

Now I am still occupying an unknown space with few definite answers and little more than general vibes or a couple phrases that sound nice when I say them to myself, but it’s a space I’ve started to explore. I doubt I’ll ever had answers that stick, since one’s sense of self is a constantly evolving thing and my opinions on things such as labels I’m willing to accept and how my long-ignored feelings impact aspects of my life that I’d long thought largely settled have changed over the course of the last year. I still don’t have a lot of people to talk to about this stuff, though, this time because most of the people I know dealt with these topics long ago and I’m still so new to exploring them that I hesitate to broach the topic in any kind of casual discussion, but I’m slowly working on growing that collection of people. I mean, it definitely hasn’t helped that my collection of friends has shrunk so much, specifically because of the way that their opinions and desires make me nervous to discuss the nature of my identity with them (after all, if I can’t trust them to support me by not playing a stupid wizard game, how can I expect them to support me in a way that DIRECTLY touches on my personal, mental, and emotional well-being?). Which has also definitely had a chilling effect on my willingness to discuss stuff like this with people I don’t know and trust (which probably seems pretty funny considering I’m writing this on a publicly available web page that has links to places you can find my name and email address).

Sometimes I feel frustrated that I’m just beginning to work through all of this stuff now, in my thirties. I feel like this would have all been easier to do when I was a teenager and that most people had the advantage of working through all this when they were younger. Sure, not everyone did since I’m hardly the only person to have been stuck in survival mode by trauma and abuse, but most people. I have to actively remind myself that this is a false impression. Lots of people are still working through this stuff, or reworking through it as their understanding of themselves has changed and grown over years. One of my friends has only recently, though on a much longer timeline, asked people to use different pronouns. Another subtly changed theirs on social media platforms without fanfare. There’s tons of people who, for whatever reason, didn’t start exploring their identity until they were my age, which is often a source of trauma all on its own. There’s no concrete timeline for when this stuff is supposed to happen and it really shouldn’t surprise me that its taken this long, given how stunted my emotional development was thanks to the constant compartmentalization I did in order to survive my childhood. I’m barely a decade into having complex emotions. I’m less than five years into have mixed emotional reactions (things that feel like multiple emotions at once). Sure, I’ve always been empathetic and caring and all that, but it is still fairly recent that I’ve actually been able to experience and properly sit with something that is both sad and angering or negative with a hint of wistful joy.

I often struggle with the feeling that, despite all of my effort, nothing has changed. I might have some words I use for now and a better understanding of how I feel, but I haven’t really made any material changes (related to my identity, anyway) to my life. I still dress the same. I still express myself the same. I still don’t correct most people who use the wrong pronouns. I haven’t suddenly found myself a community or a new group of friends. I haven’t even had the chance to put any of the ideas I’ve had while exploring my identity into practice in any way at all. It’s all been a largely mental exercise. Most of the changes I have made involve the digital world and how I refer to myself. Still, considering how much of my life exists in the digital realm these days, maybe that’s enough for now. It’s not like I’ve really got any ideas on how I’d want to change my presentation or style of clothing. I like my loose-fitting t-shirts and cargo pants/shorts (though I’ve been considering buying some shorts and pants that aren’t of the cargo variety for casual wear, just so I feel less self-conscious about my conspicuous carrying capacity). I find them comfortable. I am satisfied most days and the days I’m not, it is usually because of my body rather than how I’m dressed. I’ll leave all that for another blog post, though, since I think I’ve rambled on enough. This post is about how I’ve begun my slow, cautious hunt for identity and community, not my difficulties with presentation, my body, and the way that other people see me. I’m still working through all those in therapy and really don’t have any answers worth mentioning.