Accepting myself and dealing.

Today is June 1, 2020. It is officially pride month. I had the privilege of coming out to my super religious mom when I was 13/14. It went basically like this: I went into her room at 3:00am and was like "Hey mom, I think I like boys and girls" and she went "Oh honey, I already knew that." I was lucky to have a mom who loved and accepted her four children for who they are (by the way, 3/4 are LGBTQ in some way.) When I was sixteen, I had a big fat crush on my best friend. He told me that he was transitioning, and what he'd like to be called, and I still had a big fat crush on him. Around this time I started to realize I was attracted to people regardless of gender. So bisexual turned out to be pansexual, and my mom was cool with that too. I lost her two years later.

Growing up, I didn't fit into to the normal "girl things." I liked football, and only wore jeans and flannels, mostly because they were comfortable. I had only guy friends. It really wasn't a big deal. I recently came out to my family and friends as non-binary and introduced myself to the world as my new preferred name, Vix, they were generally accepting. One person said I was a dishonoring my mom because she hated the name Victoria and she wouldn't approve. Except, my mom would have. She would have been like "you do you". I even had an old friend who I hadn't talked to in years message me on facebook to ask me my pronouns because she didn't want to mispronoun me.

I saw a tweet recently that said "if you had messy long hair, insisted that u were a tomboy, or said you were only good friends w/ boys growing up you arw either transmasc, nonbinary, or a lesbian now" and like, I didn't ask to be called out like that. All jokes, I promise.

June 1st is also the one year anniversary of my adoptive dads death. My childhood home burnt on March 3, 2019 and we found out he had a tumor in his brain on March 4th. It was small cell lung cancer that metastasized to his brain, we just found out the one on his brain first. He was given 1-3 weeks, but we got almost 3 months. He was 79 years old. He was my confidant. Its hard. I miss him so much. I keep waking up at 6 am waiting to smell the coffee brewing, or hear his walker coming down the hallway, or him to yell at the dog to go back to bed. But I will power through today just like I always do.