“When the right person comes, you’ll know who you truly are.”

I’m familiar with the rocky slope of the journey toward self-identity. Countless are the times I’ve looked in the mirror and wondered which part of me needs fixing, and every single time, I was left unanswered. Somehow, I knew it wasn't surface-level. Unlike any other unfamiliar feeling, this one curls deep into my soul, tied with an invisible string I can tug on but not fully release. This revelation led me to places I never dared to wander into. Throughout this journey, a version of me was formed. And this version felt true.

Acceptance. Society has never been good at that. They wonder how many ways a person can rip themselves apart to prove nothing is wrong, but they are clueless about what constitutes ‘wrongness.’ Is it when you're dishonest? Or is it when you don't conform to their ideals? The issue with both is that, at the end of the day, you haven't earned anything worthwhile by trying to be accepted.

Are you easier to look at now? Are you simpler? Are you fixed? And if you think you are, then look inside and ask yourself this time: Is it real?

Tell them about how you despise the touch of familiarity and watch their hackles rise. Share the stories about the moments you desired the mark of lips as red as yours and count the wishes to have you burned alive. People will ask you to start from the beginning. If a piece is out of line, then reset. Go back to when the surface hadn’t yet been scratched by the years spent through the conveyor belt. Perhaps your wiring is damaged—and that’s the problem. Maybe the program is outdated and that's why you're malfunctioning.

They fail to recognize that I'm a set of bones inside this skin. I have a skeleton wrapped with flesh and veins, organs pumped with blood and oxygen. I don't have buttons to press and binary codes to dictate how I exist. There is no waterlog, no broken motherboards, no faulty operating system to restore back to a default setting. A factory reset assumes that there was a pure version of me. A "normal" one. A version that warrants no complications. A version I supposedly tainted just by living.

Yet machines can't carry the memories I've made. No system can account for the weight of my mistakes. The beat of my heart is the only language that orchestrates my life.

All this love I carry within me was shaped by lifelong processes and reckonings. Everything I've experienced gave me the space to shed my skin and learn that what I was can never be rebuilt again. The right person may come, but they cannot change the truth of who I already am.

My identity is not a glitch in the system. There's nothing to fix, for I was never broken.

The Frontman