I Was Able To Do It! I Told My Friends And It Was Taken Very Well. I Was Still Very Nervous And Wasn't

I was able to do it! I told my friends and it was taken very well. I was still very nervous and wasn't able to look at them when I spoke, but it was taken with grace and immediately applied. I've been able to tell others as well, and am feeling quite good hearing it from others in my life.

What has surprised me is that it seems to be becoming the name I prefer to hear. It wasn't my intention, and I do still use the name I'd previously gone by, but I'm beginning to like this secondary name a bit more and have been preferring to use it instead. I applied for a job within the past 2 weeks and I used this name in my application; I would love nothing more than to have it on a nametag for regular use, to be recognized under this name.

It's surprising to me how this became such a large part of my life, and how my interactions tangle me a bit more each time I look. I'd even joked about him being cold blooded and unable to regulate body temperature, as well as needing to supplement salt due to his butterfly characteristics, and now I'm currently staring down what is definitely a POTS diagnosis, having both of those traits myself. My acceptance does make me wish to look to see how it interacts with myself, especially in terms of identity and confirmation of such. I don't see it as a bad thing at all, quite the opposite really. I think this is shaping up as something truly quite wonderful through which I may get to fully understand myself a bit better. I never really had a chance to do so before this point in time.

It almost feels as though the two of us became more similar as time went on, though I do swear to myself that I never consciously adopted his behaviors or mannerisms. It was the discovery that his arc mimicked the trauma I went through to an almost absurd degree, it's in the ways he thinks and acts and interacts with the world and others that made me very easily believe that he was neurodivergent because it hit so close to my own personal experiences, it was how I found myself having had the same sort of hobbies - I myself have a violin (though I haven't played recently, and will have to wait out an elbow injury before I can try again) and have always been an avid reader. I explored my own perception of gender through him, seeing him as a very feminine man whose femininity is never made the subject of jokes and is taken seriously, showing me a very rare glimpse of a man who looked just like myself. I felt comfortable in slightly more formal clothing, it felt like it helped to reinforce my feelings regarding my gender, though I can't say for sure whether that was before or after I developed such a strong attachment to him.

I recently got my first tattoo, near my left shoulder, and it's his wings. The artist told me she had actually been watching the series and had just gotten to his debut the night prior, leaving me to wonder whether or not she would think of me at least once as she watched, remembering that I wanted to carry him with me. It's almost completely healed and I'm very pleased with how it's come out, in spite of how dark and blotted it looked when I'd first gotten it. I'd like to get a few more, a few insects and a few awareness ribbons for my various health conditions, but he is present as my first and currently my one and only.

He represents my foray into identity, into coping, into understanding what it is that I want and am, what I want from life and what I desire most to give back. In times when the dissociative feelings kick in strongly, it feels as though there is another person with me, and that the grief I carry belongs to him rather than myself. It distances me from everything I've been carrying, and the feeling of another being present with me when I need it most is a feeling I'm afraid to conceptually lose in recovery, but I feel that I'll still carry him in less fully visible ways. In dress, in name. His, and mine.