I am a special snowflake!

(Video is tangentially relevant but mostly here because I think you should watch it.)

Almost my entire life has been an internal war between trying to make myself be normal and trying to figure out why I am so weird. I've slowly been peeling off layers of the person I was raised and socialized to be, to reveal the person I actually am. When I was twelve I realized I couldn't be Baptist and when I was sixteen I realized I couldn't be Christian at all. When I was thirteen I realized I wasn't heterosexual (and then again when I was 15 and again when I was 21 - I kept going in and out of my own internal closet). When I was 17, I realized I was probably not neurotypical, something I had suspected even as a little kid. I always knew I hated school, but I didn't quit until I was 16 and I didn't find the unschooling community until I was 22. And, since this is mainly a blog for close friends, I may as well come out and say that in the past year I have discovered I am not cisgender (meaning: my body says I should be a woman, but my sense of self says I am not.)

The process of figuring out who I am has mainly been a matter of hearing the right words. I've felt weird and funny and square-peggish my whole life but I couldn't know who I was without the words. I knew what my spiritual beliefs were but I didn't have the word "Unitarian"; as soon as I learned it I immediately knew what I was. I knew what sorts of people I found attractive but I didn't have the idea of "queer" (as opposed to lesbian or bisexual); once I did, I knew that was me. Sometimes I had half the idea but it wasn't enough. For example, I had the word "trans", and while I was inexplicably drawn to it I didn't see myself there, but the word "genderqueer" struck my soul like a bell. I had the word "autism" and I knew it was like me, but I didn't have concepts like "Asperger's" or "sensory integration disorder" or "highly sensitive person"; once I knew those, I knew where I fit. And I knew I left school to learn on my own, but I didn't have any word for what I was doing ("dropout" only being a word for what I wasn't doing).

Each of these discoveries has freed me initially, but the problem is that claiming them requires a lot of self-confidence that I don't always have. They're not only outside the mainstream, they're outside the words for being outside the mainstream! I'm not straight, neurotypical, schooled, religious, or a cis woman, but nor am I gay, homeschooled, atheist, or a textbook-approved sort of trans or autistic person. It takes a lot of courage to accept yourself as being outside the mainstream, but it takes even more to embrace living in all these in-between spaces. I don't do well with being in-between, and I've spent a lot of time trying to force myself to be completely gay or completely a boy, telling myself I'm either more disabled than I am or not different at all, and so on. One of the hardest things about collecting so many labels is that you tend to get accused of just wanting to be special and unique, of just wanting attention. No one's ever directly accused me of those things, but I've definitely thrown that accusation at myself. The first time I told someone I was questioning my gender identity I spent the rest of the day telling myself I was "such a fucking girl" and that I had some nerve coming out to a "real" trans person. I've spent the last eight years going back and forth on whether I'm "impaired" enough to call myself autistic, which results in long periods of denying and neglecting my needs until I sort of shut down and become impaired. And of course there's all the times I ignore my spiritual needs (admitting you go to any sort of church or believe in anything is just not cool in a lot of the circles I run in) until I have an existential crisis and become deeply depressed.

So I'm trying to start treating myself better and taking my needs more seriously. And maybe where that starts is by standing up and saying, goddammit, I'm weird. I like wearing nail polish while being called "he", I could spend the rest of my life listening to music in a rocking chair in the dark and be happy, I'm agnostic with regard to the fairies at the bottom of the garden, I'm attracted to quite random sorts of people with little regard to what genitalia they have, I think K12 school ruins kids and higher ed perpetuates the kyriarchy. I don't do any of these things to get attention, I do them because they come naturally to me, because they're what I enjoy doing or what I genuinely believe. But if I need to seek attention and make a fuss in order to have the right to do them, then I will fucking well do that. I believe in a world where everyone is free to be exactly as weird as they are, and if I'm going to help build that world, I need to start by living it myself.