Starting to Heal

Tenderness is a radical act in a world that idolizes aggression. It takes more courage to love than to hate. Forgiveness is the ultimate act of bravery, and self-forgiveness often its most difficult manifestation.

Lately I've been starting to remember my own worth, and it hasn't been easy. Processing grief and loss and coming to peace with the way my identities and needs don't always fit the mainstream has been a journey. More difficult still has been coming to terms with the fact trauma has had permanent impacts on me without judging those impacts or resisting them because of their origins.

Healing can be a painfully slow process at times, and it's never linear. Humans are messy creatures, and never more so than when processing trauma. I'm learning to take my time.

So here's to the journey, and to growth. Here's to relearning how to be alive, to be human, to be the imperfect, messy, worthy people we are. Here's to love, and joy, and tenderness. Here's to honoring softness, and separating masculinity from aggression and ego.

I've wanted to be a quiet force of nature. I too often forget I already am.

Queer, Tender, Messy, Human, and Alive

The Weight of a Phone

My phone weighs 143 grams. I keep it in my pocket when I'm not using it, which means it's almost never in my pocket. When I click it on, sometimes I wait to unlock it just so I can gaze into my fiancé's eyes on the screen. They're blue, highlighted by his glasses, which darken when the sun shines against them. In the photo on the lock screen, his face holds a soft smile. As I type in my passcode, I can see that smile widening in my mind's eye.

On the home screen, our cats are curled up on my old heated blanket, the warmth of my phone mimicking the warmth of the throw. I imagine Casper purring me to sleep, his soft belly under my ear, and blink my eyes clear from a tired blur.

Under the images of cats sit five folders, each with a variety of applications. In one, there are 11 chat programs, each holding words from friends and family and people who fall somewhere in between. The messages come in from around the world. On one chat program, I talk mainly to a cousin in Dubai. In another, I reach out each day to a few people to tell them I love them, and a few reasons why. I don't want anyone I love to feel alone.

I know what it's like to feel alone. It spills out in text apps, in journal entries and memoirs and odes to the healing journey. Last year, I submitted one of them to a contest. A story of trauma, survival, and how my mind stitched itself back together from the bleakest of nightmares, "My Brain: A Love Story" won first place.

My phone's case weighs 20 grams. In the past, my phones have ended their lives battered; screens cracked, stories faded. Over time, I learned from those dents and fissures. More than bruises that phone and body grew all too familiar with in younger years, though, I've learned from the books my phone holds. When I was a child, paper and ink pulled me to safety. Now that I'm grown, the LEDs behind my screen spell out words and worlds of healing.

I open the camera app. I may be tired, but I am alive, and glad to be. I snap a photo, looking up at the lens with eyes that have seen both joy and pain in equal measure. As a smile crooks one corner of my mouth, I'm proud of the smile lines faint around my eyes. I had so many reasons to lack them. But there they shine, just like the light from my phone. Just like the light in my grin. I am alive, and I feel alive.