Dear Anita

Thank you for your enthusiasm and encouragement that always makes me laugh louder and feel grateful that I still have opportunities to go far in life. Thank you for helping me see the value in myself. People can be their own worst critics and sometimes my inner critic will tell me how I am not strong enough or knowledgeable enough to survive in this world as a man. I think talking with others, learning more about myself and fighting my dysphoria so it doesn’t overwhelm me are the most important things currently. It’s rough when you discover that you are more like an adult than you feel you are. People will expect you to be able to take on adult responsibilities, but they can be hard when you are still taking care of yourself and feeling a bit lost. I think it’s important to focus on yourself first, to make sure your emotions don’t overwhelm you and find ways to cope with them first and then work on learning the life skills you may need. I don’t think there should be a set time for people to learn how to live on their own since I believe trying to find yourself and understand who you are is more important. You can learn all the skills you want, but if you lose who you are then it won’t be worth it. Also it can be hard to learn things when you are trying to be yourself in a world that tells you otherwise and the sadness may make it hard to focus on learning new things. I know the most important thing for me is to learn how I cope with my emotions so they don’t overwhelm me and cause me to not be able to learn the things I want to learn. I feel I may have delayed my learning of life skills like automobile maintenance and money management because my depression made it difficult to focus on things. It takes time to develop a strong will to fight the inner critic that tries to bring you down. It’s not just about focusing on positive thoughts and things will be okay like my parents think. It’s about reevaluating who you are as a person, understanding your feelings, seeking support, dealing with the relapses as you try to heal, struggling with the fact that there are people who just think you are just being immature and making you feel invalidated, struggling with yourself trying to disentangle yourself from you being your own worst enemy and working on healing. It’s not as easy to just focus on the positive thoughts when you need to figure out who you are and that is hard. People may not find out who they are entirely, but they can live a life that makes them happy by taking time to understand themselves. When it feels like you are working on understanding yourself and fighting to be recognized for you, sometimes other things seem small in comparison. It is difficult to focus on learning life skills when you want to get out of your head at times or when you feel the weight of the world sits on your chest. I realize that the most important thing for me is to research more about how to present myself as me and become wiser so I don’t entrap myself in the stereotypes of the world. There are people who want to see me as who I was and those people tend to limit me when I try to become who I am. But now I know that I can be strong enough to overcome obstacles in my way. For the first time, I feel like and believe that I am not alone and I sense that my words are on the surface and I am about to speak the words of my spirit. I think I have the courage to fight my gender dysphoria and survive. And with that hope, I hope to learn the life skills I need that I sometimes have trouble focusing on learning because I’m fighting my depression. But I think I feel like I will achieve my goals and even though I may slip at times and it may be difficult to fight and work on learning new things I have hope that I can overcome. There are two guys I know who try to bring me down by refusing to acknowledge who I am. One of them has asked me for forgiveness but it turns out he just wanted to get back into my life and have a justification for hurting me again because yesterday I ran into him again and he called me by my birth name and I corrected him. I told him that things have changed and that I identify as a man. He said some rude things like asking me to show my body to prove that I was masculine and asking personal questions like “So have you gotten surgery? Can I see if you have Male anatomy?” It made me feel angry and I told him that I was going to therapy and that I didn’t have to prove that I was transgender to him. My gender identity doesn’t match my birth sex and it isn’t your business to ask these personal questions. Then he went on to say “So maybe we could hang out because in the past I had the feeling that you liked