I keep looking back. It’s really hard not to. I’ve entered 2025 which, outside the year when my dad died (then I got dumped, and then I fucked up my nursing course (not y’know, permanently, but I went from being like top of the class to “oh this screwed my grades and I’m busy falling apart from my dad’s death” and then what has turned out to be ADHD became much more of a factor in my course) it’s been one of the hardest of my life.
I have support from an awesome wife, and I’ve got awesome friends, I’ve even got a shiny new therapist. But: the political climate is utterly horrific; we’ve been trying to adopt for 5 years without a match and we need to think about renewing and that just thinking about that make me want to crawl in a hole and hide; and did I mention the politics? And the climate change stuff? And a bunch of my friends having a staggeringly shitty time from which I’m powerless to protect them and also which sits poorly with my overdeveloped sense of justice?
Yeah. All that.
Anyhow. So on the biting hand, that’s part of the reason I keep looking back – because the world is a trashfire and so I look back and wonder whether I should have done something differently; and the answer is obviously both yes, and very decisively no.
But the other reason I’m finding myself looking back is because the Kate who exists right now, on the 30th October 2025 is so fucking far from the Kate that existed on the 30th of October 2022. Or 2021. Or for any of that twenty-plus years that I was out prior. And I’m confronted by that fairly often. The last few years have been marked by a shit ton of work on myself. A shit ton of saying yes. A shit ton of going outside my comfort zone.
And mostly, a shit ton of trying to explore who I am when you peel back the hot mess of compartmentalizing and trying to repress the results of bullying and abuse.
And it’s weird.
It’s really fucking weird.
I mean maybe this is just a mid-life crisis (in which case, yay, I get to live to 94). But honestly it’s really weird to start to like myself a little. To maybe believe that I’m a likable human. To feel worth and value in myself.
Which, like, not to be a whiny person (which I am, but in this instance it’s just fact), I’d never really considered myself. I mean Kathryn tells me I am. And she tells me all sorts of nice things about myself but I find them hard to believe and she loves me so…it’s always felt like she’s biased or just being nice (which is ridiculous because why would she put up with me and tell me nice things about me if she didn’t like me in the first place)?
But now I’ve been getting it from friends which yes, also, hard to believe.
And then I’ve started to feel it just a little bit.
And it’s funny – because the political climate is so utterly fucking toxic. So utterly toxic. And so damning of the temerity of me daring to exist. And my response to that has been to like myself? And do more things for myself? And to be burning through this period of fucking trash fire kill-the-trans going “no fuck you, I’m a decent person who (tries to) look(s) after my friends and has empathy and does her best”.
But *also* has come out of this period going “actually I like the way I look, and I have fashion and style choices and fuck you if you want me to be different.”
Anyway.
