All of the pictures above pinpoint different stations in my life, all representing so much of me — most of the earlier pictures were the result of standing in front of my mirror with my whole wardrobe on my bed, panicking because none of my clothes look right. Because I didn’t look right.

I have come into myself in the last year more than ever before. I’m finally looking in the mirror and thinking it looks right. And now it’s National Coming Out Day and I’m thinking about everything that I’ve come out of — not just the closet, but every situation I’ve walked away from and every goodbye I’ve said to get me to where I am now. It begs the question, where have I come from? How did those circumstances shape me? Did the most awful points in my life have a purpose, or was the universe just pushing me to the next chapter of my life? Has my life been shaping and creating me this entire time?

I wrote this as a response to a therapy prompt a while ago, but it seemed relevant to my thoughts today.

If my life has been slowly creating me, I’m built in so many ways.

I’m stitched together with goodbyes. The material, the insides, every patch of me might be a collection of a million different things, but loss, departure, the goodbyes I’ve said and the ones I’ll never get to say have all had their part in shaping the core of me — each one a different color thread, each one keeping something in place, attaching something, or sealing something off — some adding room for more, some creating knots and flaws that make it harder to build on ir into those spaces. I can count each stitch like muscle memory, and I often do — running my dingers over each thread popping out of the fabric and feeling each moment that goodbye sewed into my memory.

I’m sewn together in a shoddy, uneven, handsewn sort of way — each hand had its own pattern, its own needle and thread, its own style. But I am an array of colors — each hue, each strand of thread, has its own signature across my skin.

My skin is made of patches — little things I’ve collected over the years, moments that I’ve picked up and kept with me, places that holes were left in the fabric and replaced, covers over the threadcare parts of me that I’ve covered up (most of them, anyway).

Each patch, each little (or big) swatch of fabric was formed carefully, deeply, dyed with intention. Each little piece has been carried with me — some for so long I’ve almost forgotten them, pieces of me I wanted to keep warm while I debated whether to keep them; some just for a fleeting moment as I turned them over and decided they were mine.

I wouldn’t call them the whole of me, but I know they hold me. I know they allow the world to see me, and I know they shield the me inside from their gaze. I know they create an image ‚ my walk, my language, my talk, my smile, all the names and words I’ve used to define myself for others — each from a moment where it fit me, each from a moment where I picked it up and desperately wanted to make it fit me. They’re not wrong, these pieces holding me together, they’re not lies — they’re just not the whole of me, not the core, not the light of the darkness. They tell a story, they tell me story, but only with words — only with what can be grasped with human understanding.

Perhaps that’s why I can never truly tell what I’m really made of.

Perhaps that’s why I’m made of so many different little patches, why I’m always covering myself with new coats and sheets, trying on all I can to offer some clarity to myself about what’s inside me.

In all reality, there is so much inside me that sometimes I can feel it trying to burst through every patch I’ve thrown on to describe it and all the loss that’s stitched it in place — trying to just be seen and beheld, not tied down by words or definitions, not tied up by trauma and wounds.

Sometimes, I want to call it light. Sometimes fear creepy in and wants to call it darkness. The closest I get to the word that balls it all up and fits in my hand is truth.

I know, I know that I am full of truth.

That truth is beyond the scope of words, of light or dark or comprehension. And I live by words, I write them all over me every day and every night, trying to see what sinks into my truth, what illuminates in agreement, what fades away into its own absence. But that truth, the truth that is me, still eludes me. Perhaps it’ll come — but I have a feeling it’ll be one word at a time. It’ll take some unraveling of all my goodbyes, but the truth will stay, and shine.

Regardless of how many goodbyes I’ve said, how many things I’ve had to walk away from, I know that in life I am pursuing truth, truth in myself and the world around me. And I know it has come, and I know it will come more and more as my life goes on. For now, I am so intensely grateful for the truths I’ve learned about myself and for the clarity they’ve brought me. I’m grateful not to be the person staring in the mirror wondering why every outfit looks wrong. I’m grateful to not have to struggle with my identity (most days). And I’m grateful that today, on National Coming Out Day, I can proudly say that I am a bisexual transmasculine nonbinary person, that my pronouns are they/them, and that I’m more at home in this body than ever before.