I didn’t have the language to identify most aspects of who I am until a few years ago. I was raised as a girl in an Orthodox home, one of 6 children. We all went to ultra-Orthodox segregated religious schools. At the age of 7, my American parents moved us all to Israel/Palestine, where I lived for ten years. This is where I experienced my first traumas. I was struggling, but I didn’t know how to convey what I was going through. At a young age, my parents brought me to an art therapist. I was far angrier than any of my siblings were. My parents were scared of the ways I “acted out.” I would run away in shopping centers and zoos. Years later, my mother told me that she had been afraid of me since a young age.
Growing Out of Loss
At thirteen, I lost my grandfather to cancer. For the first time in my life, I watched my father cry. He cried for twelve hours straight, on the flight from Israel to his mother’s home in Maryland. I watched as my grandfather was lowered into the ground, his body wrapped in burial shrouds. I tossed a handful of dirt into the grave as I bid him farewell, and my faith along with him.
In the subsequent years, I survived multiple rapes, became addicted to nicotine, found solace in alcohol and sex, and dropped out of multiple high schools, ultimately landing in an intensive program. The tagline was “a therapeutic program for teenage girls at risk.” Every time I saw it I would scream. I would scream because I wasn’t a girl, I would scream because I was a baby queer engaging in compulsary heterosexuality in a way that was tearing at the fabric of my being, I would scream because it was the only way I knew to say everything I didn’t have words for.
I spent three years in that program with individual therapy twice a week. After the first few months, I completely checked out. My therapist and my psychiatrist diagnosed me with Bipolar II and an anxiety disorder. They prescribed trazodone and lamictal, and I continued medicating for a “mood disorder” until 2017– nearly nine years.
In hindsight, I don’t think it was a mood disorder. The world I inhabited was the real disorder. I was seen as “out of control”– of course, this was a reflection of my internal state. I was a teenager who had experienced multiple significant traumas, and had no language to talk about it. I was a queer teenager angry at having to conform, with no idea of what nonconformity could look like.
Opening My Eyes to Queer Visibility
I grew up with zero verbiage around queerness. I don’t remember when I first understood that gayness even existed. That having sex with my girlfriends was something I did because I wanted to and I would have done sober, but could only give myself permission to act when there was alcohol to blame.
I was 15 the first time I met someone who I identified as gay. I felt a whole new world open up to me. Being trans did not seem like an option for me personally, but I remember the first time I encountered the story of a trans man. It hit me in the gut.
I tried to express gender nonconformity in the ways that I could, but was shot down multiple times. The first time I chopped my hair off, my then-boyfriend nearly dumped me. The same boyfriend ridiculed me for “being too tomboyish” and pushed me into presenting more feminine because he “couldn’t help his sexual attraction.” I couldn’t verbalize how uncomfortable that made me, and didn’t have the capacity to fight for my right to wear whatever I wanted.
Without the language, my gaze turned inward and led to punishing myself for my inability to articulate my suffering. I already felt so alone with my trauma, heavy from blaming myself for the violence enacted against me. I didn’t know how to talk about what I was experiencing, or who I felt I was, so I pushed it down deeper and relied on substances and other escapist behaviors to keep it buried.
Self Realization as a First Step Towards Change
I had a vision of who I was, but the fear of changing my life to get there seemed insurmountable. Breaking out took years and it brought along with it the cross addictions of a lifetime. I am blessed with the understanding that I will only live once, and that if I don’t determine the path that my life takes I will find myself on my deathbed wishing I did it all differently. I know the only way I can avoid those regrets is by living with unabashed authenticity.
The funny thing about addiction is that it doesn’t allow for unabashed authenticity. It does, however, allow for the addict to shroud themselves in a cloak, and that’s what I was doing. Shrouding myself and all that I felt, all that I had gathered over the years under a weighted blanket that I couldn’t peel myself out from under. The bad feelings turned worse, the anger turned inward, the upset bubbled in my esophagus threatening to spew at any given moment.
Have you ever had an idea that you couldn’t quite form words to describe? You know how it sticks to the ridges of your brain and no amount of tongue scraping will formulate language to express it. For so long, I had no words, and so I had to lie to myself and everyone around me. I was covering myself up because it was easier than facing what that revelation would look like. Honesty was my only way out.
Acceptance, Change, and Pride
I started going to therapy again, after two years of stewing in depression and drug abuse. I told my therapist that I wanted to figure my shit out, and despite going into every session during that first year high and silent, it was true. Outside of therapy, I met more queer people, I made more trans friends, and I did research into what it means to be trans. What I came to understand was that there was no barrier to entry to being trans aside from my ability to state it— no written exam or medical assistance required— all I had to be was myself.
A year into seeing my therapist, I came out to myself and her as genderqueer. On that day, things took a turn for the better. I started talking. I stopped getting high before sessions. I quit alcohol, nicotine, and pharmaceuticals. I started working through traumas, processing them a little bit at a time. I was feeling them, really feeling them for maybe the first time in my life. My angry outbursts became a thing of the past, and my mood fluctuations dissipated along with substance use and abuse.
I am an addict, I am mentally ill, I am a white, queer, genderqueer, transgender person, I am a psychology student, I am a survivor of sexual assault and trauma, I am an ex-religious Jew, and an aspiring mental health practitioner.
I don’t know if I could be diagnosed with a mood disorder anymore, but I know that sobriety, honesty, and learning vocabulary to identify myself have been tools that have set me free. I know that I am committing my life to authentic living, I know that I am committing my life to helping others, I know that I am committing my life to attaining the language to continuously do so.
