Topic: [rant/affirmation] "I'm still here!!!!"

[Asche]

Sometimes, in the night, I start to feel all the places I'm broken and recall how each was broken by their attempts to crush the spirit out of me and eradicate the me in me.  It makes me despair, but it also arouses in me the determination to drag myself to my figurative feet and shout at them:

    You failed!  I'M STILL HERE!

You gaslit me to convince me that I was defective and wrong and deserving of nothing, that it was my moral duty to stop complicating your lives by being who I am, indeed, by even existing at all.  But though I'll never erase the gashes you put in my psyche,

    I'M STILL HERE

You tried to erase the me in me and put a robot with my face in my place.  You drove the essential me into hiding in the deepest recesses of my mind, where it's still trying to find the way out,

     BUT I'M STILL HERE!

You put me through years and years of hell, hell that like some caustic poison gas ate away at my spirit and crippled my soul,

     BUT I'M STILL HERE!

My soul stands up on its twisted legs and defiantly raises its arms to the sky (arms which have bends in odd places where the bone was broken and never allowed to be set or splinted.)  Simply staying alive is a kind of victory, and my soul shouts its victor's cry to the world:

     I'M STILL HERE!

[Northern Star Girl]

@Asche
Dear Asche:
In your posting you described exactly what is needed in the bumpy road of transitioning....

      Persistence and Tenacity .... and Patience

Thank you for sharing from your heart!

HUGS and more HUGS   
Danielle

[Asche]

It's not so much the transitioning as such that is bumpy.  My gender transition as such has gone pretty smoothly.  Well, as smoothly as anything goes in the USAan medical system.

As my rant suggests (or was supposed to, anyway), the real bumps and boulders in the road are the damage they did to me back when I was too young to defend myself, and that road is the road of getting through each day.  I shout "I'M STILL HERE" to prove to them -- well, mostly to myself -- that I'm still keeping my head above water and I still haven't drowned.  And also to summon the strength to make the effort to push my head above the water yet one more time.