It’s not just sorrow from a returning wave of grief that I have been feeling in the past week or so. There’s something deeper, older. Something that had started resurfacing this past spring, around March. I only have inklings of what it is but I know it’s really important: I know I’m getting to the “core of it”. 

Part of it is unwanted attention. Something I’ve been experiencing my whole life and, especially having being socialized as a woman and being an attractive female, I was conditioned to accept as “okay” or even “good”, as an indicator of my “value” or “worth” (although I always instinctively & viscerally rebelled against this idea). 

In the past months since moving away from California, especially last spring and this past week or so, the insight into unwanted attention and the traumatic effect it has had on me for most of my life has been growing in clarity. 

I’m not ready to go into it at the moment. There’s still too much wrapped up in shadows and fog and pain for me now. 

For now, all I want to say is that in last night’s online gender-support meeting the topic of unwanted attention came up repeatedly even for other non-binary/trans members in the group and I felt really heard and understood in a way that had rarely happened to me before. Which was nice. 

Two other nice and somewhat healing, or at least soothing, things came up in the group meeting last night, after my share. 

I mentioned my recent feelings of loss and sorrow and heartbreak, and the decision of seeking professional help to do some counseling to get unstuck and/or to heal from these feelings/situations/patterns. In response, one person at the meeting said two lovely things: on the one hand, although it is sad that I might never see or hear from one or two of those persons in California again and that I will never have with them the relationships I would have liked or hoped for, although there is definitely loss in that, it’s also good to remember that I was a different person then, not as wholly or authentically myself as I am now, and that I am much happier and healthier now; on the other, that there are things from which we may never heal, that we will always carry as “baggage”, as part of our experience and even of our own selves, things (persons, relationships, feelings) that make us who we are, and that’s okay. 

Even this pain is mine, and it makes me who I am today. 

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“… Yes, I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain” 

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“… Love is destruction

But this war is mine

This war is mine”