A letter to younger me
This is a letter to my younger self. Things that I wish someone I trusted had said to me. But I never opened myself up enough for anyone to know what to say.
Don't wait. Whatever is holding you back this week, or this month, won't go away. You'll always be dealing with some greater crisis that will let you justify keeping everything to yourself. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to separate yourself from all of the anger you're cultivating. Your family is, and most likely always will be a mess. Using that to justify not dealing with your own problems is just making their situation worse because you're taking your anger out on them.
Trying to be a complete human without recognizing that you're transgender only causes problems. It will make it harder to see through the persona you build for everyone else. It will make it harder when you actually feel safe to come out. It is not a requirement to be stable or complete before you start looking at your gender head on.
Mom didn't mean to make fun of you. She didn't understand what it meant and honestly thought that it was a laundry mix up. She will understand if you explain it to her. It's okay to let go of the anger and betrayal you feel over that. You were right to be upset about it originally, but holding on to that anger is hurting more than just you and it's going to stay with you longer than you realize. Even as you make plans to get away from everything, and get past the expression of the anger, it won't be gone.
You won't be a fool if you let go of it. You'll be more of one if you let that one misunderstanding define the rest of your life.
You can't fix everything. The chaos of life only gets worse as you get older and your perception of the world grows. But that's not a bad thing. You learn to grow with it, and you learn to prioritize what's important to care about. That feeling you get of the world being so big and chaotic, of it being impossible to understand or care about everything at once, is good. It shows that you have the drive to be compassionate. But you have to inspect your reasons for caring about things and apply them to what gets you overwhelmed.
Your comfort and sanity matter. Even with everything going on in the world and in your direct circle, the things that make you upset or uncomfortable are important. You can't make a difference if you're suffering and struggling with your own demons. You can argue all you want that your demons are small compared to other people's, but the fact is that they are affecting you, and you need to fight them just like they do. You can't become you while you're trying to justify hiding from your problems. There will always be another mess, another crisis, that's just how your family is. There will always be someone worse off, that's just how the world is. You can't do anything about it unless you get yourself fixed first.
I still feel like I made all the wrong choices. I feel it in the way that I think about myself, the way I understand my identity, and the way I interact with my family. There have been so many times in my life that I would have given up everything I know to just have been born cis, but that feeling was never enough to get me to do anything about it. It was never enough to get me to make the choice to talk to a single person. All I can do now is hope that I can be the person to show others that internalizing those feelings never ends well.