Wholesome feeling

It’s been just over a week since sending my “coming out” email to the majority of my friends and I am thankful for the supportive, encouraging, accepting, even enthusiastic and celebrating replies I have been receiving. I have also received some “silent replies”: some friends who are either too busy or not really tuned in, or aligned with, gender identity & non-binary nuances haven’t answered my email — as I expected them not to. But this doesn’t upset me (and I hope my “coming out” didn’t upset them): they are dear friends to me anyway and that is the reason I decided to include them in such a delicate communication even if it might fall dead on them. 

Last week, I wrote and sent that “coming out” email because I felt ready to do so at a gut level: I felt almost an instinctive, instinctual imperative to do so, that the moment had come for me to tell those people how I really felt, about my whole person as non-binary “androgynous/gender-fluid”. 

A week after that important step, though, my feelings have evolved, in a positive way. What I feel now is a wholesomeness, like I’m whole at last, I’ve fully come into myself (or my selves) at last. And it’s a wonderful feeling, especially contrasting it to the emotions I felt during the spring and until the end of June, before my summer trip, as I began to realize and grapple with my non-binary gender (and other aspects of my identity). Throughout the spring and beginning of summer, the realization of there also being a boy in me —  an unacknowledged and often stifled boy in me who had cohabited with the openly accepted and sometimes forced-upon-me girl — this realization brought me mainly a huge sense of loss, and therefore sadness. I felt keenly what I, or the boy in me, had missed or had had to fight against for so many years: it felt like a hole, and was painful and sad. And then, there was also fear: fear of the boy in me not being accepted by the outside world, as it hadn’t for so many years (especially fear that cisgender male persons would not accept the masculine part in me, not consider me “male enough” — which I recognize might be my own bias/prejudice).

Fortunately the emotions I feel around my non-binary gender are very different now: I feel healed and whole, like that loss has been healed, at last. There might still come moments when my androgyny is not accepted or understood, when I might have to fight over my gender or drop the topic altogether, and I am still being cautious about communicating it (I choose other options than “male” or “female” in forms but I’m not ready to put “they/them/their” at the bottom of my email signature nor is it something I communicate immediately to people I’m meeting for the first time at just any social event). But I feel that I’m in a different place now: I am so happy and grounded, tuned in and whole with my identity that I am not only ready to let it come out more and more to the world, but also want it to come out to the world. Step by step, at the right moments, I want to show who I am, I want to express how I feel in a whole, complete way.

And this sense of wholeness for me is truly new: I don’t think I’ve ever felt this type of wholesomeness before in my life…