One Year Later
It has been one year since I wrote my post about self-expression and creativity problems on this blog. A lot has changed since then; my long-time girlfriend @toushindai (once @lady-of-gorgon) and I are now married, I’ve become established in my current full-time job, and I have earnestly started on the long path of understanding what it means to be a man born in a female body. It’s a lot to take in sometimes—how different life has become and yet how many things that I must admit have remained the same.
I don’t write much anymore, which has been a fact of life since the middle of college, and I haven’t been involved in any major fan activities since I left the Soul Eater fandom over a year ago. I’ve felt like I’ve been waiting for an epiphany to happen, but no matter how many new series I’ve watched, no matter how much content I’ve attempted to absorb, none have been quite as monumental as Soul Eater once was. I still haven’t found a character with quite the same effect on me as Franken Stein.
In a way, this has been a healing time for me; a time to step back and reevaluate who I am and what I want to be. Healing is not always pleasant-- I have had to discover the meanings of gender dysphoria, autism, and ADD. I have had to learn what it’s like to put on weight. But I have also experienced what it’s like to be loved, truly loved, not despite my flaws, but because of who I am—a person, a human being capable of great things but also flawed in many fundamental ways.
The truth is that the older I get, the less sense my former self-consciousness and self-possession seem to make, and yet paradoxically through the act of letting go, the closer a solid sense of self seems to be. Perhaps that’s part of the wisdom in the phrase “Life is a process of learning to let go.” Perhaps it is only through letting go of the fact that we are afraid of rejection, ridicule and hate that we can finally be our true selves.
I may not come back to roleplaying, but I do want to keep sharing my thoughts. I want to enjoy things unapologetically. I want to invest myself despite fear. I want to reach out again in the hopes that somewhere out there, my voice is heard. That the people who matter will care. That I, who also matter, care.
And that, even a whole year later, is enough reason to start over and over again.