"not only can live outside those systems, I can thrive as who I am."

[cosmolinguist]

I see so much of myself in this person's life! I knew they were my age before they said, just from their description of junior high.

And of course so much is different too. I wish I could write anything as good as this.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

It's really great to read your thoughts on this; thank you.

I had such a similar experience of mixed messages about my gender, complicated to some extent by disability and my parents' attitudes (my dad liked long hair on little girls and dresses, but also was clearly much more comfortable telling me to help him lift heavy things around the farm than in telling me that I shouldn't sit how I normally do when I was wearing a dress; my mom had some kind of paradigm shift from a terribly tomboyish childhood to being the fusspot about clothes, hair and makeup that I've always known her to be so I wonder if she expected I'd do similar and was disappointed when I never really outgrew my boyish habits).