“YOU'RE JUST TOO LIBERAL FOR ME.”

I'm sorry I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to become the person in this body. It was Easter Sunday, of all days. Two days earlier, I had been unconscious in a hospital bed, after the culmination of everything I had slowly led my life towards. I woke up surrounded by pieces of a life I couldn't remember living. Shreds of memory. Questions. Fear. And eventually, the consequences. Someone had to tell me what happened. And as I listened, I kept thinking: I couldn't have done that. No. Not me. I am not that person. Except I was. That is one of the hardest truths I've ever had to swallow. Because there is a strange thing that happens when the person you've always believed yourself to be suddenly collides with the person the world now sees. You want to separate the two. You want to say: That's not who I am. But eventually you have to ask something harder. Who am I, then? Was I a person when I was running from everything? Was I a person when addiction was making decisions for me? Was I a person when pain had become louder than reason? Am I a different person now because I've changed? Or am I the same human being who finally stopped running from himself? I don't have an easy answer. And that's precisely why I struggle when we reduce other human beings to labels. “You're too liberal.” Maybe. But if believing that another human being deserves dignity, safety, compassion, and the freedom to tell the truth about their own experience makes me too liberal for you— I'll live with that. Because I've spent enough time being the person everyone else had already decided I was. I've experienced what it feels like to have your identity reduced to your worst moment. To have people look at you and see a label before they see a human being. To have your entire existence compressed into a decision you made, a mistake you made, a reputation you earned, or an expectation you failed to meet. And no— my experience is not the same as being transgender. It isn't the same as being non-binary. It isn't the same as being gender-fluid. I would never pretend that it is. But I recognize something in the struggle. The human need to be seen as more than the role somebody else assigned you. Family expectations. Social expectations. Religious expectations. Cultural expectations. The invisible rules we've inherited about who we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to act, what we're supposed to look like, who we're supposed to love, and what kind of life we're supposed to live. Sometimes those expectations become so loud that a person can no longer hear themselves underneath them. And when someone finally says, “This isn't who I am.” our first instinct shouldn't be: “You're wrong.” It should be: “Tell me.” Tell me what you've been carrying. Tell me what I don't understand. Tell me what it feels like to wake up every day inside a life that doesn't feel like yours. Because I've learned something about human beings: we don't become healthier by forcing people to disappear inside themselves. We become healthier when people are given enough safety to be honest about what is happening inside them. That's not political to me. That's human. And I know what it is to need grace from people who could have chosen condemnation. I've been given mercy I didn't deserve. I've had to learn that accountability and compassion aren't opposites. That you can tell someone, “What happened matters.” without telling them, “You don't matter.” You can disagree with someone without stripping them of dignity. You can not understand someone's experience without denying that experience exists. You can hold convictions without treating another human being like an enemy for having a different reality. I've spent too much of my life watching pain get blamed on the person carrying it. And I've learned that sometimes the easiest thing in the world is to blame the person who is hurting. It saves us from having to ask why they're hurting in the first place. So if supporting human dignity makes me too liberal— then I suppose I'm too liberal. Because I've seen what happens when we stop seeing people as people. I've seen what happens when we let labels become more important than lives. And I don't want to contribute to that world anymore. I want to live in one where we can look at another human being and say: I don't fully understand you. But I see you. You matter. And I'm willing to listen. Maybe that's the kind of rebirth Easter actually taught me. Not becoming someone else. Finally becoming willing to see the human being underneath the labels— including my own. I'm Nicholas. I've made terrible mistakes. I've been broken. I've been changed. And I'm still becoming. Aren't we all?