Dear LGBT rights,

You told me it gets better. It did. But I didn’t.

I have been condemned to eternal damnation in this sea of grief

Tears of other seas mingle till I am drenched

In hopelessness. Wretched

Am I. Eternally sad adult-child.

You helped me through my hardest times.

You taught me how to accept reality and fight for a better one.

You made my existence mean something in a larger context.

But you didn’t tell me that every other part of my identity was going to make it harder.

The insecure, socially inept part. The depressed, existential part.

The parts that accepted only emptiness into them and let them become a part of themselves.

You didn’t say it will change me forever.

You didn’t say I might not recover.

You didn’t say that once I open my eyes to this world, this community so colorful

I will see myself too. Weak and colorless. Like stale water.

I don’t know what it is like to be a normal adjusting happy human anymore.

Every discovery about me makes me realize how confused and messed up I am.

You didn’t say some of us maybe don’t even have the guts to reach out beyond the virtual world.

I know I can find a community but I don’t know where I will fit in it

Eternally sad adult child.

I can’t walk into an LGBT space. Heck, I can’t even pluck up the guts to walk to the counselor and break down and tell her how uninspired I am to live.

I used to hold on to hope before, but now I have to slow down every few steps because I walk with what feels like the burden of hopelessness of the world.

I have no reason. Absolutely no reason for this.

I have more support than I can ask for

I have more support than I can ever ask for.

But my mind and body seem to be conspiring against me to not let me live.

I want to be normal again. But it seems like I am screaming it into a vacuum.

I am questioning my gender every time I see myself in the mirror.

I have the craziest psychological dependencies that I can’t figure out yet.

I am constantly trying to tell myself that maybe I am just exaggerating things.

I cannot be mentally ill because accepting that will push me off into a void that I feel I will never be able to get out of.

It has been so long. It has been too long.

I was supposed to get better but every time I get back up, the light above seem dimmer.

I should be running into the arms of help but do I even deserve it?

Is this real or am I making it up in my head?

I don’t know who I am anymore.

-xx-

I remember latching on to every piece of information I would get about the community ever since I have been aware of it. I used to dream of doing something that may help out someday. Or just being a part of it. There is always space for social issues in art and design. I didn’t expect to lose my hold of that ray of hope for the rest of my existence but it is slowly slipping.

Depression has blunted so much of that hope. I feel crippled by my inabilities most of the time. Like some gradual incoming fog, I have been slipping into a state where I don’t know anymore if it is normal and my dreams are changing or if I am slowly giving up on everything on my list of things that mattered to me.

I am using the word depression for the first time and I feel incredibly stupid for thinking that I am using such a word to describe….this. Whatever it is that began more than two years ago, when I started questioning my sexuality seriously. Right now, I feel absolutely fine. But yesterday I wasn’t. On many days I am and yet I am not. But I need to be reckless and put it somewhere where it stares back at my face and tells me to accept the possible truth about what has been happening inside my head.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

And I need to find that out.