Simultaneously like yesterday, yet longer ago than it seems, I was about two months into Year of the Nee, my official year of celibacy and no intoxicants.
I’d come to embark upon that decision in large part due to my romantic relationships and the patterns I had seen in them, one of those patterns being a tendency to put my life and direction on hold to ‘be’ with someone who I had immediate visceral doubt about, but who wanted me, which I had historically found to be more important.
In my solitude, I traced that pattern all the way back into my childhood, back to the first instance of being presented with the illusion of a choice I never really had, and did not have the capacity to make in the first place.
I recognized in that moment, that all of my life, since before I can even remember, I had belonged, in one form or another, to a man — beginning in the form of taking ones name as a toddler — and I could see, finally, how that experience and the nature of that relationship had helped to shape the whole of my teenage and adult experiences with other males as well.
As of tomorrow, I have been Courtnee Fallon Rex for one full year. And I am still drug free, alcohol free, and free to love myself in whatever ways I deem fit.
BAM.