An Open Letter on Self-Love in Defiance of Rigid Beauty Norms and Bigotry

Inspired by everyone who’s ever hated me and other poets who have bent my hurt back into hope. This is for my queer, trans comrades and any outcasts that are “othered”.

Translation: "Every moment of living the life that I choose for myself feels like a triumph, a victory, the most complete love letter my heart could ever receive."

@AEBart on Etsy

I learned to hate myself with my first breath, before I ever uttered my first words. I inhaled the fumes of toxic theology and masculinity. Why would I not, considering people like me are doomed to suffer for eternity? When you grow up with the threat of hell hanging over your head like a noose, nothing you do ever seems good enough. You aren’t good enough; can’t escape your fate. To most Christians, the only good gay is one who is ashamed and trying in vain to change. 

I let trusted adults spoon feed me bittersweet, miracle cures while attempting to purge my demonic, queer ailments. I tried soooo hard to conform and force my true self down, hoping I didn’t choke and then croak. (Well, I begged for relief through death for years…when I was supposed to be planning my life, I just wanted to die.) So, when I couldn’t change who I was, I internalized the hatred projected onto me and self-destructed. 

I tried to purge the literal demons and “poison” until I became ill, vomited up every lie I ever lived, every life I ever lied my way through to survive. Now, the more my new hormones flow through my veins, the more I transform, the quicker they spit me out in disgust and turn sick at the sight of me. Turns out the “demon” I was fighting all along was me! I was only wreaking havoc on my own mind.

I learned to hate myself when, as a 5 year old girl, a boy told me I look like a monkey, jumping around and screeching with glee while I tried to conceal the dark hair already creeping like vines across my limbs. I was 9 when my parents gave me my first razor. I sat on the bathroom floor to prune my bushes, filling baskets with wilted, brown flowers and decaying leaves, flooding the bathtub with a sea of my dirty insecurities. 

I was 11 when I switched to sharper blades and raked this ground barren, smoothed loose soil over, looked at this tamed wilderness, and saw that it was good. I was 13 when a boy said, “You have a better mustache than me." I went home, painted myself with hot wax, and uprooted those stubborn weeds.

I spent most of my life attempting to shed and peel back my skin. I tore apart my joined brows, stripped tree trunks bare, plucked one head clean off…three more emerging. I think I stopped this self-desecration when I became immune to the whispers and stares if I missed my daily 5 o’clock ritual. I couldn’t bare it anymore.

After I came out as trans, I decided to partner with my body, rather than shrink back from this shell of a stranger. At first, terrifying to subject myself to such scrutiny. Then, liberating. I dared to wait for my legs to bud and blossom, for my armpits to erupt with glorious audacity, my lips to darken unapologetically once again.

Come into my garden. It’s begging to know you. Catch the scent of wildflowers, look at this flourishing, abundant harvest. Eat me as I am. I’ve got so much to show you: intricate lace patterns adorning my skin. Hair creeping like vines across my limbs. Cursive written across my body, a love letter to you and me. 

Some may laugh laying eyes on “a man in a dress”, blinded to my beauty by their fear of vulnerability. They may put me on display…Monkey, dance! But their beauty is a razor. It disappears. My beauty, it blooms!

Turns out I’ve just been playing dress up this whole time, starring in a gender role that’s never been mine to obscure the truth. Attempting to hide my shame with sticks and leaves like Adam and Eve. What really has damaged my body image and self-esteem has been the way my mom has looked at me and talked about my body…and hers. Parents pass down self-hatred like any other disease…dis-ease in one’s own skin. It’s my mom’s voice that echoes in my head at night, that whispers, “Disgusting” in my ear when I walk around the grocery store that causes me to reflexively shrink as small as possible. 

When a random man utters those words, or a woman in passing gives me a mean look, or anyone calls me a faggot, I envision my mom’s lip curling when she looked at my hairy legs and armpits every time I entered a room; then, hairier than “other” cisgender girls for sure. But now, I am an absolutely untamed jungle to explore. Oh, her private horror at my public, wild joy! I remember my dad’s angry insistence, too, that I change out of my spaghetti strap tank tops to conceal my shoulders when his (Christian male) friends came over. And how dare I not wear a bra under my shirt when my brother could walk around shirtless?!

The Church and my family dynamics groomed me to settle for being treated like shit. Moreover, to cower in the face of cruelty, and then to stand up and apologize. How to take hits and then turn my stinging cheek for a kiss. My first ever abusive relationships. When I was 20, I got with a 30 year old man. I thought he was my savior swooping in to save me from my childhood, more responsive and present than Jesus ever was. Why did I need to wait for the prophesied Second Coming when fate seemed to be fulfilled?

I ignored people’s warnings and my own alarm bells. I mistook his love bombing as genuine affection and his passion for true love. When your whole world is on fire, even when you take off your rose-colored glasses, red flags blend into your surroundings. And fuck, he was an all-consuming inferno. He was always hellbent on teaching me the error of my ways and the corruption of my character. He made me believe that I was not enough while attempting to build himself up from my blind devotion out of the remains of his self-sabotage. He rummaged through my value and usefulness ruthlessly, picking and discarding bits of me as he saw fit. 

I escaped his grasp only to fall into the clutches of another abusive man immediately after, when I was extremely vulnerable. He pushed me far past my limits again and again until he broke me. He justified his torture of me because of his tortured soul. I eventually escaped that living situation that almost killed me. 3 years ago now, which feels like a lifetime, yet I’m still deeply wounded. I haven’t been able to love anyone or anything the same since. 

Deciding to leave was one of the hardest but most necessary acts of self-love that I’ve committed to. I finally decided that enough was enough. I didn’t and DON’T deserve to be anyone’s emotional punching bag, especially not a man’s. I deserve more than wasted years mopping up someone else’s tears and tip toeing around their fragile egos. I deserve more than half-hearted, double-edged I love yous and pain disguised as passion. I spit out the poison and never swallow again.

I now know that I can never allow myself to be similarly burned and betrayed again. I can and will be by the side of my loved ones as they traverse the mountains and valleys and hellfire of life, but I will never again cast myself into the lake of fire to earn their love and affection again. I refuse to abandon myself any longer, no matter how tempting temporary infatuation is.

The hardest battle for acceptance I’ve ever fought has been with myself…especially accepting that it’s okay that I am not comfortable in my skin, because I can actually change that! On my terms and no one else’s. Turns out that once I stopped fighting and surrendered to my natural instincts that the rest comes much more naturally. 

My life’s work will be slowly shedding the layers of religious-enforced shame I’m still cloaked in; particularly shame that I am queer and trans. Pretty hard to do in a world that tries to tell me in a multitude of ways every day that I am invalid. Harder to do when random people actually despise me at first glance for existing. Hardest when the people who are my blood raised me to believe that trans people are perverted and confused, when I still remember the looks on their faces and hear the revulsion in their voices when they saw and talked about them…about us. 

I won’t pretend that I’m not hurt and haunted by the outright disrespect (and slurs) I know they heap onto my name…but I know they would probably greet me with a forced smile, lying through their teeth, if we crossed paths. But I can’t live under the weight of their condemnation anymore lest the last of my spirit be crushed.

I’m traversing the rapid waters of grief (mostly) by my lonesome. I try to catch my breath as wave after wave washes over me. I try to remind myself that I once loved to swim…only metaphorically. Every day that passes is another without my family, another day where they just fade into memory…but I have to deal with the all-consuming disappointment of not living up to their beliefs and standards, the plans they drew out for my life before I was even born. I chose myself over them. Now I have to live with the consequences, fallout that I inherited from a family feud stretching back generations.

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

- Jamie Anderson 

I release myself from the obligation to fit any rigid beauty standards, from the expectation to behave a certain way. I release the self-hatred I’ve collected in steady streams down my cheeks and with heavy, loud breaths that fill my whole chest to remind myself I’m alive. I reclaim the body autonomy that has always been mine and never in anyone else’s possession. I drape grief loosely over my shoulders and carry it about my day.

I love that I’m queer in every sense of the word, even if that makes me one of the most hated and hunted populations in the world. Embracing my queerness has been so healing in my journey of self-acceptance…especially loving women. I love the fact that I’m not a man or woman and never will be, even if that puts me in conservative crosshairs. I was born outside the binary. Especially as an autistic person, I wasn’t really socialized as a girl or boy because I never understood either, all the implicit social cues I didn’t pick up and boxes I tried and failed to fit in. I don’t have to be anything or anyone I’m not. 

I only know how to be me! And the thing I love most about myself is that nothing can ever change that. Not even violence. Paint me black and blue all you like, but my heart running down my sleeve bleeds as queer as the rest of me, soil greedily soaking up my sacrifice. I will live and die by this sword. I have an unshakable sense of self. I’ve moved mountains to mould the person I am today, and I can’t allow any external earthquake, any crisis of faith, disrupt my peace.

As Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to office, said before he was assassinated:

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door!” 

I have to shadow box myself in the mirror every morning to choose self-love in a world that seeks out my destruction. I have to deliberately walk around with grace in place of shame, to see myself with compassion and love instead of through my mom’s eyes. My dad’s eyes. The Church’s eyes.

But all that being said…some days I’m not brave enough to present as myself. I don’t always feel mentally strong enough to wear dresses or even skirts in public. Or go many places at all. Forget makeup unless I want to be stared at like a clown. I have to put on a whole other set of emotional armor to do that. I’ve been dressing more masculine partly because I want to, but also just because it’s easier to blend in more sometimes. 

I act strong, and I AM, but I also cry a lot from all the blatant hatred. It is actively (re)traumatizing. I steel myself in public to endure judgmental glares and slurs. I also try to only go to queer spots and hang exclusively with affirming people for the sake of my safety and mental health. Queers of a feather flock together!

I send a hearty Fuck You! to those who pray for my demise. But ultimately, I wish peace and healing for all those who feel the need to cut happy, confident people down to their knees to soothe the insatiable self-hatred that plagues their hearts. How miserable and insecure you must be to so actively resist collective joy and liberation. 

You say that you want true freedom and individuality, the epitome of the American Dream? Liberate yourself from the shackles of shame first and wake up your sedated, authentic self. You were also lied to, taught that you are only loveable when you conform. America the Brave still fears what she doesn’t know!

Critics call queer and trans people narcissists for our loud and proud self-acceptance. Maybe I’m allowed to be a little selfish when I suffered in silence and existed only for other people my entire life?? Trans joy is sacred. Trans joy is radical in a burning world that is screaming that we shouldn’t exist, that tries to erase us with the stroke of a pen on a burning pile of legislation.

I hope that you—whoever you are reading this, wherever you are on your healing journey, whether you love or hate me, whether you even know me—can find the courage to live as outrageously authentic as possible. Our time here is fleeting and precious. Don’t waste another day living a lie, and stop justifying the oppression of people you don’t understand or like!

You don’t have to love or accept me. I love me…and that is enough. I am the sacrificial savior that little Christian girl prayed for. I’ve always been a fortress, fortified to keep the world and myself out. I’m arriving, and I feel like I’m finally home. You are the one you have been waiting for all along. Show yourself…it’s your turn. You don’t have to hide, and I’m dying to meet the real you! Embrace and explore your vast, uncharted galaxy first before embarking on a mission to eradicate those “illegal aliens”.

The cycle of violence stops here. With you. With me. I don’t want to keep punishing others with my pain like my abusers who do the same. I don’t want to continue their legacies. I know it’s been said so many times before, but make love, not war! And I don’t mean in a peace sign/hippie way, but collectively committing to put down our weapons—bombs, words, prejudice—to heal from the fissure cracks of antipathy…and capitalism.

To the people I needed, thank you for leaving. To those that showed up to my surprise, that I never imagined I could love when I was grown: thank you for staying. To my long lost inner girl, queer as can be: soothe your restless soul. You’ve paid for your sins, been fetishized and scorned, but you are innocent. To all the girls I’ve loved before, thank you for showing me I could love you and love myself still.

I wrote in 2021 that I want to be able to write just as eloquently from a place of self-love and peace as I am from the pits of despair and self-loathing. Beginning to transition has been crucial in unlocking the deep well of joy that I’m finally tapping into. It’s bubbling up and just waiting to pour out…and now I welcome the rush of relief.

I am sacred because I exist. 

I already approve of me, 

And no bigots will have me. 

I will have my joy now.

As Alok Vaid-Menon, my non-binary muse, said:

“‘Is' is where I’m from, is where I’ve been searching all along. I have nothing to prove. I have no boxes to check. ‘I am’…The most beautiful love poem there ever was.”

All my love,

Zoë

P.S. Here are some things I love and hate about myself that I wrote in 2022 that still hold true:

Love:

1. Big brown eyes that glint in the moonlight, capturing stars and leaking comet trails.

2. Dimples that ripple with each blissful beam that travels my face.

3. Intuition, without rhyme or reason. Pick my mind, eat it clean off the bone, still unknown.

4. Passion, a deep well of compassion that knows no bounds, eternal spring blossoming.

5. I embody melt-on-your-tongue tenderness, sink-into-your-stretch-marked-skin comfort, eat-your-fill ease.

Hate:

1. Romanesque nose that cuts a shadow across my pimpled cheeks.

2. Brain that threatens to self-destruct, time bomb ticking away, clock chiming "The End is near!”

3. Infernal fires of self-hatred…stoke them and watch hellfire rise. Some words can't be silenced.

4. My spine, sprouting angry thorns that puncture my bones.

5. The desire to be seen and known but just an endless void; aching loneliness enveloping me in an unforgiving, ever-tightening embrace. Now you see me (now you don't).

Duality in all things, but no restriction to a binary.

May you give and receive more love than hate

and boomerang the energy you create.

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