How it is now: episode 1

Introduction to the series:

The ‘How it is Now’ series is a space where I will be expressing my deepest and darkest thoughts on myself and the world. As a bisexual with a bouquet of mental health issues who is also questioning their gender identity, my thoughts can get pretty diverse and black! But fear not, there will be lightness and marshmallows too.

Episode 1:

I think and struggle and think and struggle against the aches and pains the thoughts cause. I speak to myself and am met with negativity and confusion. I speak to others and am faced with the same, but it is even worse because they lie, they claim to understand in a selfish attempt to drag me back from the precipice on which I sit, legs swinging in the rapidly hastening wind.

It’s terrifyingly lonely to know that no one will ever understand me, not even myself. It’s painful to think that J might have understood me, as my twin. Sometimes I find myself wishing he were with me, to reach inside my mind and tidy it up like a kind and wise librarian in a monumental magical library. Somehow I feel that he would know how to order things in there so that I could exist with ease in my own space, that he would know too which items were clutter and which of crucial importance. I realise now that my Mother tried to warn me throughout my childhood and teen years that no one could ever truly know me, because only I lived inside my own mind. She’d say that it was the same for everyone, and that we all had to learn to live with that small sense of loneliness, or even come to embrace the privacy of it. I know now that she was mistaken. Most people can find others who are likeminded, but there is no one out there like me. Not even others with the same diagnosis. I am, and always will be, truly and utterly alone.