The Real Me

A poem about accepting yourself as you are, despite disapproval from others.

Dreams of living a life where I truly feel like myself fly throughout my head.
I scream at the God in the Heavens that people made up, and I ask him:

“Do you really love us? Or are we just pawns for your own personal chess game?”

Along the way, I feel my sense of self fading into the noise of my mother’s preaching;
She tells me I’m being lied to; that there’s some demon in my body making me feel like this.

But I turned the volume down on her, and turned up the volume of my soul.
My soul reminds me of a very poignant fact.

“I am not a pawn in a game,” I tell myself, “I am the result of thousands of years of coincidences, all of which lead to my birth;”
The circumstances I was born into are not my fault. I will not waste any more time trying to please everyone but myself.”

So I’m heading off. I turn my head one last time; my mother stands at the grave of her daughter.
Unbeknownst to her, she never had a daughter. The girl my mom thought I was was simply a product of her imagination - one she still clings onto to this day.

The road is long; the road is tedious. But I’ll get there, and it will have been worth the trip.

Am I Emma? Am I a woman? No.
Am I Andrew? Am I a man? Also no.

Then, who is the “real me”?

Their name is Avery.
They use they/them pronouns.

And they finally know that the extent of their worth is without boundaries.