We’ve been “phucked” and we’ve “unphucked” ourselves too. Maybe we’re all still unphucking ourselves.

I realised I was phucked during the first pandemic shutdown, sitting on the floor of my room, looking through photos of myself from the past couple of years. I had just gone through a hard breakup with the longest and only partner I’d had, and it had ended messily. As in, no contact, blocked on everything, asking my aunt for advice messy. The phucked-up I was encountering had less to do with that breakup and more to do with all the buried need for change it dug up. I fear change. It makes my skin crawl and that nervous smile of mine crawl up my face. I always want to be in control, and if I’m not, I obsess. Perfect, perform, grapple for control by manipulating how others see me and my imperfections. So when I realised my gender identity didn’t fit me anymore, it dropped like a stone through my fragile ‘do what looks best, fear change’ mentality. For the second time since ‘coming out’ I was really having an epiphany about who I might and might not be, and of course, imagining how people will react. Was I changing who I was? Was I faking this? I was phucked. I’d spent so much time and energy in my life trying to conform to the womanly ideal, and now I felt that that gender identity was deeply incongruent to what my soul wanted, craved even. I wanted freedom. Limitless. Something expansive and all encompassing without a label. That is, unfortunately, QUITE a stretch from control. I wasn’t the curated beauty standard I showed others, and now that I’d faced that realization I knew I couldn’t go back to pretending the ‘Woman’ label made me feel good. So I unphucked myself…and sometimes it phucking sucked. Only this time, it was the kind of suck that was filled with bravery, truth and more transparency between myself and the world around me. Every time I fell down I knew I fell trying to be me instead of who I felt pressured to be, or what I thought people felt more comfortable with. I was telling the world one small brave change at a time that I was deserving of love and acceptance exactly as I was, and that they didn’t have to get it. That I was pretty phucked, and still amazing because of it.

So yes, being phucked brought me here, and now this barbecue is a chance to give back to the community that helped me put my pieces together when I needed it most. -Indie.