I don’t cry. It’s difficult to cry when you’re on testosterone. Even when I feel like I’m close to crying, my tear ducts don’t yield. While walking my dog in the humid, Texas early-summer evening, I cried. Tears leaked out beyond my control as the misinformation, the hatred, the idiocy penetrated every ounce of my body through AirPods connected to the live stream of the House session hearing.

Trans people are not okay.

I feel compelled to write because that’s the only way I know how to communicate how I’m really feeling. And what I’m feeling? It’s bleak. The hurt goes deep. The way politicians, talking heads, real people I thought were good no matter what, talk about people like me. How could you feel okay inflicting this much pain to people? It shouldn’t matter if you know them or not.

I didn’t know I was trans when I was a kid in Garland, Texas. I felt alone every single day. I used to walk the perimeter of the playground in elementary school praying for someone to save me. I remember it as clear as 2017 when I would walk around the perimeter of a park and think about how it was a parallel. Nothing had changed.

You just passed 12 years-old. You like listening to The Cranberries because there’s a song called “Ode To My Family” that you listen to when you go to the grocery store with your mom. You don’t want to be at the Tom Thumb. You feel like an outsider among people who claim to be normal. You want to be like them because if you were like them, you wouldn’t be so lonely.

Every human being hurts.

The origin of the hurt is unique to the individual. The heart splitting, cold that surrounds you is the same, but the outer layer of how it clings to you is the same. And the worst part? We don’t have to do this to ourselves.

I recently started listening to this podcast about dialectical materialism. It postulates that everything in society isn’t innate. It was created by humans and therefore, can be challenged, dismantled, and changed. It’s like society gets a second chance. Imagine, you can be free to be who you really are–someone who isn’t constrained by the mechanisms in which we feel we are a function of.

You can change your fate. We can dismantle the systems that have been put in place by people who think they have the power to dictate our freedoms. But they don’t.

There’s this thought experiment that posits: if our entire society went to sleep and then woke up not knowing anything about social rules except Jeff Bezos, what would Jeff Bezos do? He’d probably attempt to make us work for him. But we wouldn’t. We’d tell him to fuck off.

Why buy into the way society is? Why give up there? Do you remember who you were when politicians used you as a puppet to defend the freedoms of Americans? We’re not free. And you’re being used, my friend. Governments aren’t created to help humanity. They’re created to control us.

I used to trust people very easily. I wanted to believe that every human had this overwhelming capacity to empathize and care about people even when they didn’t know them at all. And then I grew up. I realized that society doesn’t feel as though that model benefits them.

Individualism will end this world as we know it. Community care will save us.