My Transgender Community Has Warm Beating Hearts
Stop and listen for a moment and you’ll hear them
The world we are currently living in is filled with so much anger, hate and pain that we lose perspective. We think that is all we have in our lives and that is not true. We just don’t go out of our way to see the positive because the media does a great job blinding us. Negative sells more advertising.
We need to open our own eyes and not wait for others.
Everybody doesn’t hate. Everybody isn’t attacking you. Everything isn’t miserable.
Five years ago I felt my world falling apart. I was in a very dark place. I felt the culmination of a lifetime of shame, guilt, self-hate as well as a fear of discovery and rejection drowning me in waves of absolute despair.
Out of desperation I sought help and found it in two places, an excellent therapist and a group of online strangers. They both saved my life.
My therapist has become my best cheerleader. She knows my soul, my heart, my fears and my needs in a way unlike anyone else. She has never abused that trust.
My queer world in made up of an online community of transgender and other friends who understand and accept us for who we are. It is absolutely remarkable. I write often about them but not often enough. So many of them have lit candles in my darkest world. They are unrestricted in their caring, understanding and love. They don’t set rules. They don’t set conditions. They accept without restrain. I try to reflect their love back as best I can.
This world exists and we are part of it.
No cheap TV coverage. No “Kardashian” make believe world of lies and backstabbing, just people who care and share a real world of adversity.
We need to celebrate it more.
Not with media parades and corporate balloons. We need to celebrate first in our hearts, then with each other and then with those in our lives that need to see and understand that they are lucky to know us.
They truly are because our love is boundless.
Emma Holiday
Thank you for reading my work.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, My Queer World Looks Like THIS.
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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.
My writing has three specific goals:
1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.
2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.
3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.