I Thought I Had to Choose Between Being Loved and Being Myself

But next month, I’m marrying the love of my life.

I grew up in a small rural town believing I had to choose: I could either be loved, or I could be myself. Not both.

That belief wasn’t taught outright. It was something I learned slowly, in glances and silences and sermons and jokes. It was built into the way adults talked about people like me—if they talked about us at all. Being transgender didn’t just mean being different. It meant being alone. Or so I thought.

So I waited. I hid. I convinced myself that someday I might earn the right conditions to come out: the right friends, the right job, the right person who might love me anyway. But the truth was, I was waiting for permission to believe that someone like me—someone real—could still be wanted.

Eventually, I stopped waiting. I got out. I moved across the country. And in the distance between who I was back home and who I was becoming, I started to find something I never knew how to look for: a community.

It didn’t happen all at once. First, I had to rebuild my relationship with myself. I had to learn to stop apologizing for the parts of me that didn’t fit neatly into other people’s expectations. I had to unlearn the idea that love had to be traded for silence. I had to stop chasing conditional approval and start practicing unconditional presence. That’s what community gave me. People who had walked through the same fire and survived. People who told the truth. People who didn’t ask me to be anything other than what I was.

And in that space—where I was no longer hiding—something else became possible, too.

Love.

Not the kind I had spent years pretending to feel. Not the kind built on compromise and self-erasure. Real love. The kind that begins when the masks come off. The kind that says: I see you. All of you. And I want more.

If you do not love the parts of yourself you’ve kept in shadow, how could someone else? And if you do not offer them freely, how could anyone ever learn how to love you well?

I came out not because I was certain someone would love me. I came out because I had made peace with the possibility that no one ever would—and realized I’d still rather live in truth than spend one more year pretending. And then, of course, someone did.

One month from now, I’ll marry the love of my life.

Not because I finally became good enough or easy enough or "normal" enough to deserve love, but because I stopped trying to earn it altogether. I stopped performing. I let myself be seen. And I found someone who saw all of me and never flinched.

There’s a kind of intimacy that only becomes possible when you stop pretending. A sweetness that rushes in when you leave the door unlocked. And the most astonishing thing of all is not that someone might love you anyway—but that someone might love you because.

If you're still in that small town. Still holding your breath. Still telling yourself you're too late or too complicated or too much: I promise you, you’re not. You are not too far gone. You are not unlovable. And it really does get better.

There is nothing more beautiful than the truth of who you are. And there is nothing more worthy of love.