TRANSlation: Introversion and the Excommunication

Southern Magnolia in Montevallo, Alabama. © Emery Azure

It’s been so quiet and yet so loud lately. That’s the best way to describe the state of my life in this moment. I have been a stranger to writings such as these lately. Words tend to come to me in a lonely state with an influx of thoughts that won’t stop repeating in my brain like the ugliest of catchy tunes on the radio. But lately there haven’t been many melodies of words repeating in my brain, even in the most solitary of moments. My head and my heart have been mostly quiet.

Realizing in the midst of this, the reason is that I am simply living my life and getting on with the damned thing. Also realizing that the only way I am even able to do this is because I am finally able to slip through in an identity and a skin that matches who I am. Every “sir” uttered from the mouth of a stranger tends to slice through the ignorant words of well-meaning but wrong co-workers who still mutter out “ma’am” in reference to me. The fact that new people happily gender me correctly simply because they have no other reference or history of me is refreshing. And I know that the people that matter most to me, they carry my identity close to their chest and they hold it dearly in protection of me and it means the world.

At the wedding of a couple that I regard as dear friends of mine a few weeks ago, another close friend made sure to correct anyone referring to me in the wrong regard, mostly before I was even able to interact with them. I think most people believe that that is overstepping bounds but, in all honesty, these moments make my life easier for the most part.

The wedding, where my pores perspired through the pristine white shirt of my suit while serving as a groomsman and I felt as if my stark crimson cheeks would burst into flames any minute in the southern heat, felt like the beginning of this summer. This summer that I haven’t even realized is shaping up as an odd coming-of-age story for me here in my twenty-seventh year. This summer is moving at a smooth and fluid pace, not too fast and not too slow. Just the right tempo but one that keeps me sweating constantly in following along its uptick.

I’ve been more social in the last two weeks than I feel I’ve been in much of my time on earth. Where I used to always decline invitations to events that involved new people or new experiences simply with the excuse of “introversion” that was truthfully masking the deep depression and dysphoria that I often experience. Now I find myself shrugging and saying, “Sure, why the hell not?” Most the time I can’t find good enough excuses for myself to opt out. For once I am going with the flow of life and not fighting against the tide.

It’s odd how I’ve only grown into this space of comfortability in less than four months and how everything before then almost feels alien to me now. How I used to make it through life, I recently regaled my therapist, I really have no idea. The honest answer was that I was just faking it, roiling around much angrier in that identity on the edge than the testosterone has made me in the entire four months of injecting it. I was more angry in the identity I wore on my sleeve before testosterone than I was when a vendor recently made a joke of who I am by laughing as he regarded me, “Sir, or ma’am, I can’t really tell.”

There’s a renewed energy in my bones to just stand taller and not to back down, before I would cower away. I still mostly choose flight instead of fight simply for my own safety. But I certainly don’t take shit anymore and I certainly will walk away long before I try to argue until I’m blue in the face about your ignorance. I will simply leave you in your miserable life and move on in my much happier one.

This doesn’t mean that my depression has suddenly been cured as I legitimately have a diagnosed and scientifically proven short wiring in my brain that makes me susceptible and causes the mental illness within me. Most the time nowadays I can just ignore what my mental illness has to say in the face of me living my life authentically. These days my will for life mostly wins in the battle of mental wits and I am grateful.

The thoughts and feelings bring me back to my childhood and the bravery that set in my bones before puberty had a chance to stamp out the fire. I was undoubtedly an extroverted child, unashamed as I rolled around in my front yard like I was in battle against evil Nazis or swinging my bat and imaging a big stadium of people as I hit a home run and rounded imaginary bases. I think about how I was born with a marker on me that codified me to play with dolls but I defiantly preferred and often played with toy cars, ramming them together as if at ridiculous high speeds on a track.

Unabashedly I was extroverted in who I was as a child and stubborn in the fact too. No one was ever gonna tell me who I was because I already knew. That changed as the pressures of life and society started to fall on me as I grew up. I learned to be comfortable only inside my own shell and just chose not to deal with the world outside of it for much too long. Many people that I encounter nowadays can’t imagine me being essentially mute, a void in a group of people and completely fading into the background but it’s who I became in the shadow of an idea that the world had about who I was. Under those lights, I was choosing not to play the game at all.

Slowly and surely that extroverted idea of who I am has started coming back to me and showing itself more. The fire has been reignited and seems to be growing with more fuel. But now more than ever I feel the control that I never had before over myself. As I’ve stated in the past, my life felt like a train barreling at speeds with absolutely no control over its course. Now I can choose, I now feel I have the confidence to use my voice and not just shut up and shut down in the face of it all. This really has nothing to do with the “male” traits I have acquired, the slight deepening of my voice or stronger muscles. This more reflects the sense of self that I had never found before, now I just feel that I have the right chemicals and all the right cylinders firing for me take the handles and direct where I want and need to go.

This also means parting with certain aspects of my life that I had become complacent in. This means excommunicating from negative forces that more lent me down a destructive pattern than it did help me propel forward in my life. Excommunicating is one of the most liberating things you can do, ridding yourself of distractions that lead you down narrow roads to nowhere just for the sake of it is a freeing experience. There’s also a heartache that comes with that, there’s a grieving process of losing something - even something negative - simply for the comfort of its familiarity.

Often I only had negative comforts that made me feel at home, my whole life was a steady hike on the verge of an endless abyss where if you fell, you just kept falling and never landed. But I made my way through and away from the razor-thin edge, rustled through some thick woods and found myself a clearing where I could face my fears, leap over the ledge and land safely. I did this all with the help of positive forces, a new familiar that became my chosen family. They helped me make and mold this new life, this inherently right skin feels loved and safe and became a new comfort - a new home.

I excommunicated myself from the village near the edge where I had made a home, staring into the abyss of nothingness. I abandoned this notion that my life means nothing, instead my life means everything. My very existence is a rebellion against negative forces that have wanted to keep me trapped and stuck in a society of Stockholm syndrome where no one truly dares to live.

So now I keep to myself mostly, stay away from the drama that we tend to create for ourselves - a positive side effect of my introversion. Holding that inverted home close, somewhere tucked away inside of me, carrying it along as I more boldly step forward. I find happiness in the smallest of new discoveries in my life and in my identity, no longer feeling alien among the human race but instead finally a part of it. I sometimes can still feel excluded, can still feel that outer rim experience prevalently but then I just step inside, bump the person next to me and tell them to make room.