I did not make it out of the closet to spend my life in fear

A reflection on fear, joy, and the culture we build with each other.

Yesterday, I sent a post about how leftists might enjoy broader electoral success if they could accept that many people find getting yelled at on the internet to be a negative experience. The post was borne out of frustration with people coming into my replies or my DMs and throwing out a lot of nasty language and then making me feel like it was my fault that I didn’t like being spoken to like that, a pattern with which I am unfortunately quite familiar from my childhood. What followed, predictably, was a sort of ritual stomping on my attempt to set a boundary. Hundreds and hundreds of messages swearing at me, comparing me to excrement, or worse. “Friends” taking the opportunity to make public jokes at my expense for the approval of half a dozen strangers. People texting me to demand that I change my worldview or risk finding myself alone in this world.

I grew up believing that fear would keep me safe. That if I stayed quiet, if I stayed small, if I anticipated every possible reaction and moderated myself accordingly, I might escape the worst of what the world does to people like me. It didn’t work. All it did was teach me to hate myself more efficiently. I lost years to that fear. Years spent half-alive—my real self only surfacing in quiet isolation or with strangers online who never saw my face, never saw me smile, never heard me laugh.

I will never get those years back. All I can do is choose what to do with the time ahead of me. I choose not to spend another day steeped in fear or anger for the sake of people who chose cynicism over care. I’ve done that already. I’ve mourned that time. I’m here now. I’m alive. And I won’t squander that miracle.

If it were possible to scold me into adopting any worldview other than that I am ridiculously happy and grateful to be here, in this moment, living my life, I never would have made it out of the closet.

This world is awful to so many people. That is not new. Only our awareness of it is. There has never been a golden age. There has only ever been the struggle to live—and for people like us, to live visibly, joyfully, without apology. That struggle is sacred. That joy is sacred, too.

The opportunity to live on my terms, openly and unapologetically, *is* new. And I will not waste it. I won’t give it back to make someone else more comfortable. I won’t perform despair just to prove that I understand the stakes. I understand them better than most. That’s exactly why I choose joy.

Joy is not naïve. Softness is not weakness. Kindness is not a character flaw. These are the quiet rebellions that make a life livable. They are how we tend to the light within us. They are how we keep going.

In a moment when trans people have been so isolated, demonized, and cast out of the mainstream, the culture we create with each other matters more than ever. We cannot demand that others speak to us on our terms if we refuse to respect theirs. We cannot ask others to assume the best of us while we assume the worst of each other. We cannot expect the world to love us if we do not love ourselves.

When we use the cruelty of the world to justify cruelty toward each other, we lose the very quality that we had to fight so long to protect. We let the hatred in, and it corrodes every moment. And while we are so often powerless over our circumstances, we are not powerless over how we respond. Our character isn’t shaped in silence or solitude—it’s revealed in how we respond to change, how we care for one another in the face of fear, how we choose to stay soft when it would be easier to harden.

We will not survive this moment without love, grace, and self-reflection. I didn’t fight to become myself just to live in bitterness. I survived to bloom.