Content note: This article discusses self-harm, substance use, overdose, sexual trauma and suicide.

I might be an openly queer writer, seemingly moving in the right direction, but my greatest daily challenge is overcoming self-hate. Almost every waking moment of my adult life has been sullied by guilt, or a feeling that I’m taking the wrong approach to my life.

These feelings are strongly linked to a persistent, unsettling undercurrent of self-disgust. This has made my day-to-day life a constant tightrope to walk, where I’ve rarely felt present. I’ve just kept my mind focused on the thankless task of continuing to exist.

It’s frustrating, too, given that I’ve overcome various obstacles, and achieved goals that I’ve always wanted. The past couple of years have had me put together years of clues to recognise myself and come out as bi and as a trans woman.

My career is finally, tentatively, leading to more and more of my writing getting out into the world. However, I have also become less satisfied than ever over the past couple of years, and seen the destruction of my self-esteem and purpose in ways I had thought were unrecoverable.

It’s only over the past few months that I’ve begun to make some sense of my life, through therapy, YouTube, reading, and time alone.

Images by: Ceridwen Millington

My queerness has not been the panacea that I hoped it would be: the long-awaited route towards finally feeling a real connection in life.

The problem I’ve found is that queer families are as troubled as any. The world we live in is driven by individuality and a striving for personal success, and it doesn’t leave much room for community and deep connection. The expectation that I would have some sense of belonging, after so many years of needing it, has made the lonelier reality all the more painful.

My whole life I’ve never felt that I belonged. Some of that was obviously for being – partially unbeknown to myself – queer. It wasn’t just fear of judgment for my burgeoning sexuality, however, that was the problem. I just didn’t know the scripts for being part of the world.

I couldn’t do the irony and insincerity that the world demanded. As I reached adulthood there came a terrifying realisation that every day, I’d be performing to adhere to these demands – and it would be a deeply unsatisfying performance.

Around this time, I also began to have sex, and this further complicated my relationship to the world, and to myself.

My encounters with sex told me everything I already intuited about myself: that I would never be able to understand the rules of being a human being.

Most importantly, sex made me feel that emotional intimacy, so tied up within culture to physical intimacy, would never be part of my life.

In my experiences, sex has always been less about connecting with the person I’m with, and instead a humiliating, symbolic, and somewhat traumatic boogeyman. Each encounter has been wrapped in with guilt or embarrassment.

Sexual encounters have begun to sit at the core of my identity, in terms of their impact on my psyche. Since my late teens, there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t spent ruminating about a sexual experience. In fact, I usually ruminate over a single sexual encounter for years before it’s replaced by another, more distressing event.

The effect of these circumstances only compounds. I become less comfortable in my own skin. As time passes, the fact that I can’t hide my discomfort starts to ruin more of my opportunities.

My whole life is quickly defined by guilt and shame.

I’ve rapidly lost jobs and friendships as these difficult feelings have taken root. I find this increasingly harder to navigate as I grow older. It’s one thing to be apathetic and introverted as a university student, but in the working world, it’s been the path to job after menial job.

It’s all the more easy, then, to increasingly turn to alcohol and sex, hoping that I can find a sense of belonging and proof of my part in the adult world. Sex, with all its baggage, becomes one of my coping mechanisms in a cycle of distress, trauma and shame.

Anger has been an increasing issue, too, amid all of this. I remember one almost innocuous moment in a club that sent me into a furious social media rant. I started chatting with someone who shared a mutual friend. I was quite drunk, but suddenly they – not cruelly – discerned that I might be autistic.

There was a sense of exposure like a gut-punch – it seemed that I would never fit in, that in one moment someone could take me apart.

Years upon years of unhappiness came to the surface when I recently left a particularly comforting sharehouse. I had been looked after through the pandemic, a few suicide attempts, transition, family illness and family rupture. I had found people whose company I enjoyed, and I trusted them like family.

My world collapsed when it turned out that we wouldn’t stay together any longer. I saw the people closest to me moving on, and my years of mistakes coming to a head. I saw the future as nothing more than a return to my failed life.

My worst nightmares, and the past I worked tirelessly to hold at bay, overwhelmed me. It felt as if the feelings I’d dealt with for over a decade were right, and that my brokenness was unfixable.

No one close to me had witnessed me in the state that followed. They had seen the results of my overdoses, hooked up to an IV drip. But those events had seemed like aberrations to a warm personality. They soon learned that I’d screamed at rude strangers who made comments to me on the street, smashed two phones in less than six months, and cried rivers.

Several times a week, I was desperately contacting crisis lines.

The pain I felt was unrelenting. My final day in the sharehouse was marked by drinking, and the moments after leaving my home felt like the end of my life.

On the way to the new property, I kicked open a glass phone box, leaving scars that are still vivid on my leg. I told my former housemate I’d throw myself in the path of a bus.

It must have seemed as if I was becoming a different person, even if that self had just been hiding just beneath a thin, awkward mask.

In my next sharehouse, I was holed up in a room, with the other tenants also hidden in their own spaces.

This new environment didn’t bring about a fresh start. Instead, it entailed more drinking, self-harming, overdoses, and even smashing my TV. The tenancy ended after four months when I laid waste to the kitchen and glass porch. In this wanton destruction I hoped, on one level, I’d be rescued, that the friends who had given me both home and purpose would come back for me again.

I didn’t want a life without sharing it with the people who had given me what I felt – and still feel – is the closest I’ll get to an adult family life.

What did my life mean if they didn’t want that connection as deeply as I did? What sort of failure was I if they weren’t torn apart at the prospect of separation?

I saw no meaning in a life led by myself, rattling around like loose change.

The past year and half – but in truth, the last decade, and the whole of my life – have led to a recent diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

There are deep roots of extreme anger and a cataclysmic response to perceived rejection. It seems that my whole life I’ve been trying to find validation in other people, and to belong to different groups who will finally accept me for who I am.

It’s no wonder, then, that my experiences with sex and sharehouses have been destructive. Ultimately, I’ve always been looking to find the message that, at my most intimate and vulnerable, I’m actually repulsive.

The last 18 months have been extraordinarily tough, encompassing this recent bout of self-destruction, my diagnosis, and an attempt to turn my life around.

Reading has been one of the most important parts of trying to learn more about myself. Out of all the possible authors, the male, somewhat autofiction-styled, and strongly idiosyncratic Philip Roth has been a key figure for me.

Roth is a writer who is known for writing about sex. His characters tend to have strong sex drives and little self-doubt about this aspect of themselves. The sex in Roth’s books is sometimes erotic, and the characters’ confidence is deeply appealing to me. They embrace sex, relationships, and the brilliant burden of complex emotion.

Reading his work, it came to me that, if I see nothing wrong with these crass, limited characters embracing themselves and their sexuality, then why shouldn’t I deserve some grace?

I still don’t quite understand myself, and even good days have me doubting myself and my motivation. But what I do know is that I’m neurodivergent, queer, that I feel deeply, and that I have a doubt-driven, unshakeable desire to be loved.

It’s a shame that it’s taken me so long to find out that these aren’t defects. But it’s also a reassurance that I’ve been able to survive such a journey with much of my own strength.

It seems that I’m learning, too, is that my task is not to simply categorise myself. My task is to enjoy and experience my unique, knotted outlook on the world.

If this story has brought up any issues that you want to talk about, please reach out for support:

• QLife is the national LGBTIQ peer-support telephone service for people wanting to talk about issues including sexuality, identity, gender, bodies, feelings or relationships.
• Say It Out Loud has a list of the LGBTIQ community-controlled services for each Australian state/territory. The organisation encourages LGBTIQ+ communities to have healthy relationships, get help for unhealthy relationships, and support their friends.
• If you or someone you know is in crisis, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.