If you deny yourself the life you are meant for, you simply end up without a life.

A little over a year ago, if I had to tell someone what I thought the future held for me, I think I would have had two answers. I would have the public answer where I'd voice 'confident', 'well-adjusted', and 'optimistic' predictions. I would also have the private answer that only lived in my mind. I couldn't dare reveal an answer that would be so pessistic and negative. In fact, it wouldn't be a vision of a future at all. It would just be more and more of the same dreary unhappy soul-killing present, which in itself was just a repetition of my past few years anyway. It would be a prediction of existence but not living. A prediction where if my inner health changed at all it would be for the worse. A prediction that, according to more than a few of my worst thoughts, made me believe that whatever future I had would be a short one. I suppose it was this feeling of hopelessness that made me finally seek help. It turned out I needed barely anything more than to tell some people, and to have them believe in me and support me. Once I had found support, suddenly my vision of the future didn't involve anything negative, instead it let me explore that other private future. The one I have had for my entire life. You know the one I mean.It was a future that over the years I had let slip and slide away from me due to the masculinization effects of age, the pressures of society, and a reluctance to embrace change. Suddenly though, when compared to the dismal future I had imagined, this new scary and exciting future had become the only obvious path my life should take. Not long after the new future began to take shape in my mind I found that I was doing whatever I could to make it happen in my life. With plans made and goals identified I carried on living, but now that I had events to look forward to I really began to enjoy the passing of days. Each milestone just seemed so small and easy to reach compared to how I had originally imagined it playing out.

A year has gone by already, and I decided to look back on my life. It seems that for years I was holding position along a great slope. All my energy went into holding myself there and I was afraid that any minute I would slip and fall. When I was at the limit of my endurance something had to give, and it did. I used to be worried I wouldn't survive such an event, but as it turned out the difference is that I was no longer stuck at the same place I had been in for years. I was no longer fighting to maintain a position in life I wasn't suited for. I wasn't falling like I had feared, I wasn't struggling to maintain a foothold, instead I just found myself following the course my life had set for itself. My entire life I had been fighting an uphill battle and all it did was rob me of any purpose in my life other than the fight to stay where I was. As soon as I gave up that pointless struggle I found myself travelling easily on my true path. I learned you can't fight who you are, and that if you deny yourself the life you are meant for, you simply end up without a life.