LGBTQ Awareness/Help Threade

As an addendum: There's something fundamental in the way you feel when you stop pretending to be someone you're not. It's like... every time someone misgendered you, or treated you in a way that was 'wrong', somehow, or gave you the wrong clothes and the wrong presents, you got a rock added to this big pilgrim's progress-esque burden on your shoulders. And you carried around this burden every day of your life, it getting heavier and heavier, until you forgot what it was like to live without it. You told yourself 'this is fine'. You pretended that you liked having a slowly-crushing weight on your back. No one else complained, right?

Stopping this lie to yourself is admitting that you don't want to be unhappy for the rest of your life. It's remembering what it was like not to have that pain, and striving to have those rocks removed from your burden, one at at time. Every friendly acceptance. Every correct pronoun. Every moment things felt 'right' and not 'wrong'.

And one day you'll find bird jesus realize the burden is gone, and it's been replaced with balloons or some shit. This metaphor got away from me