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There’s so much….internet psychology that frames the first step of Good Mental Health as ‘you are not your feelings’ & I’m tired of it. I’m tired of all psychology at this point, at the things we think make good or bad mental health, at the ways that no one acknowledges that all of this is a specific outlook, a specific framework building a sense of morality & meaning for you, & only you can do that, actually.

I am my everything. During the worst of the scrupulosity, during the worst of all my obsessive anxieties ‘I am not my thoughts’ was the words of wisdom for coping through intrusive thoughts, & they just made it worse. Trying to dissociate away from parts of myself just made me dissociated, not well. (Someone will argue it’s not dissociation, but what else is there, when you’re telling yourself that there are things about you that are not You?)

What I actually needed was someone to tell me, alright, this is how you think. This is how you feel. Now…why? Because I understand better now, some of my intrusive thoughts & why they existed. *Why* was a plan of action, a way through, a tool.

I am my everything. I am my every thought, my every feeling. I am one with myself, I am whole with myself. I don’t need someone to reassure my guilt that I do things or feel things that aren’t Actually Me. I don’t need ways of coping so that I stop having bad feelings. I just need to be whole, and one, and myself, and I am. I am.

When I’m angry, I’m angry. When I’m sad, I’m sad. When I’m happy, I’m happy. When I’m all these things together, I’m all these things together, a running mix of feelings, full & contradictory, & always me.

I spent so much of my life dissociated. I used to play this game, where I’d say the sentence, ‘I am me’ just to marvel at how far away those words even felt. ‘I am me’ was a sentence that made no sense. It was wrong. It felt like a lie, & I didn’t understand why. & I couldn’t explain it to anyone, because no one around me had the constant sense that the words ‘I am me,’ were not real.

& then I worked through a lot of my trauma & ‘I am me’ resolved itself, but I was still dissociated. Not from my sense of self, just my body. Until t. Until t.

I am me. I fill every inch of this mind & body. I am whole & entirely self-referential, I am not pieces, I am not built out of wooden slates with pieces that don’t belong to me. I am a csa survivor, I am gay, I am trans, I am bigender, I am all these things all together, as one, & no one else could possibly have such a unique combination all together like that.

I’ve gotten so harshly, harshly critical of therapy lately, because everyone who sings its praises talks about shit that runs absolutely counter to everything I think about who I am & what I want.

I bought a zine once, Unhealthy, in which the author talked about her desire to *not* heal. & how this was actually respected—when she talked about how it went counter to her Buddhist beliefs. She didn’t want to think the way they wanted her to think, to see herself the way they wanted her to see herself & this was okay, because it was a difference of religion, because psychology isn’t about to go around telling someone that their entire faith is wrong.

But she wasn’t actually a Buddhist. She was an atheist, wondering—why isn’t it okay that she just had a different perspective? Why isn’t she allowed to say no because it’s what she thinks? Why is a religious belief the only allowable way someone can disagree with therapy? Why isn’t she allowed to just think differently?

And that’s me. I think differently. I think absolutely differently that all these popular thoughts of mental health & meaning.

I’ve homegrown my own mental health, never stepped foot inside a therapy office for longer than the first appointment. I’ve been crazy by one person’s standards or another, & as things shift & I think the fact that being gay has gotten more acceptable has made me feel this way all the more. Suddenly an entire chunk of myself that once had people sucking the air through their teeth, nodding knowingly that of course, of course I was gay, I’d been raped, I was traumatized by men *of course I was gay* now finally considers that maybe there’s nothing contradictory about being a survivor & being gay & having these two things be unrelated to each other.

I see people talk about something their therapist said & I think “eh sounds like shit, actually.” I know people in therapy who seem trapped by their own mental health. & I’ve certainly known people for whom therapy will never actually make them someone who *stops* treating other people like shit because that’s not what therapy is & that’s not what it does.

Growing up in conservative Christianity “you are not your thoughts/feelings” was our *faith.* It was a way of telling you you weren’t *really* gay, you just had “homosexual feelings” that you could “not act on.” It’s a mind-body dualism I can’t agree to. I am my everything, because I am whole, because my mind isn’t something different than me.

I remember the most important moment in figure out that hrt was right for me. It was actually because of the gendercrits. See, for so long I had this fear that I could “ruin” my body with hrt. It was a good body—it wasn’t physically broken, & here I was changing its hormonal composition just for my brain, right? That’s always the framing ‘you’re changing your body to fit your mind rather than changing your mind to fit your body.’

& then the gendercrits, in an effort to counter the ‘born in the wrong body’ story (a fucking *metaphor* we use, not something most of us actually *believe) said the most profound thing to me: you are your body.

Now they meant it to mean that the body itself still somehow has a will, a design, a map, a purpose, & you need to look at it to determine what you *are* but that’s still a mind-body dualism. Instead, it made me realize that yes, I am my body, which means dysphoria is also my body. I’m not “changing my body to match my mind” I’m changing all of me because this is all of me. Because my body & I are one.

I don’t need anyone to tell me that my own underlying framework is wrong—that I need to start thinking differently about how I see myself & the world. That I’ll feel better only if I think this way or that way. Not if it runs counter to everything I know about myself, everything I know feels right about myself.

I refuse narratives & scripts. I refuse to fit into anything, to define myself by categorizations that limit me. I’ll be crazy & weird. I’ll be the wrong kind of gay, the wrong kind of trans, the wrong kind of csa survivor, the wrong kind of person, broadly. But I’ll be whole. I’ll always be whole. I refuse anymore to ever see myself as anything else but *myself*, from the top of my head, down to my feet, good or bad I’ve got to live with me so I might as well live with me.

So yeah, my feelings are mine. I don’t need to feel better by thinking they’re not. I like the feeling of all of me existing through my bones, I like my happiness resting on the ownership of myself, this flawed, messy, half-crazed self.