Every Time They Rejected Me, I Hit the Bottle

I now understand what it feels like to be cast out of a community completely.

Not drift away from one. Cast out..

The way someone is shunned by the Amish. Declared dead while still breathing. Walking past people who used to know you, used to love you, used to think of you as theirs, and getting nothing back.

That was me.

And the strange thing is, it wasn’t the initial rejection that hurt most. That part happened fast.

Within a month of coming out, about 95% of the people in my life were gone. Friends. Colleagues. People I’d known for decades. Most of them just quietly evaporated.

But there was a remaining 5%.

And that was the dangerous part.

Because I clung to it.

I’d send tentative little messages. Try to restart conversations. Keep some bridge alive to my old life. Then I’d wait for the reply, sometimes nervously, sometimes obsessively.

And every time, the same thing came back.

Distance. Coldness. Polite indifference. A subtle sense that they didn’t really want me there anymore.

Sometimes no response at all. Sometimes a cursory reply that felt more like obligation than affection. Sometimes the conversation just died in front of me while I tried to keep it breathing.

Eventually I realised something horrible.

In almost every case, I was the one doing the running.

I was the one making contact. The one trying. The one reopening the door.

And one by one, I watched the rest drift away too. Until there was almost nobody left.

And here’s the part I’m not going to dance around, because dancing around it would be its own kind of lie.

This wasn’t only friends, colleagues, or people from the edges of my life. It reached right into the centre of it. Into family. Into the people I had assumed, perhaps naively, would be the safest place to fall.

I had imagined, before all this happened, that the people closest to me might not understand it immediately, but would at least understand that it must have cost me something enormous to say it out loud.

I thought there might be some version of, “We don’t fully understand this, but we love you, and we’re not going anywhere.”

That is not what happened.

What hurt almost as much as the distance was the strange rewriting of history that followed.

This never happened before. You didn’t feel this way. We’d have known. You never showed any signs.

And I almost want to laugh at that.

We’d have known.

I grew up in a northern town in the 1970s. What exactly was I supposed to have shown anyone? Did they think I was going to walk around with a sign on my head announcing that I went to bed every night praying I’d wake up as a girl?

You survive a childhood like that by making absolutely sure nobody knows.

The hiddenness wasn’t proof it wasn’t real.

The hiddenness was the whole point.

By the end of it, the number of people from my previous life who truly stayed was almost absurdly small. Small enough that I could count them on one hand and still have most of my fingers left.

You would think losing nearly everyone would leave somebody destroyed.

And for a while, it nearly did.

Because I began noticing a pattern, and it was an ugly one.

When I focused on my life, on work, on creativity, on software, on writing, on building Stevie, on rebuilding my future, I was more than fine. I was flying, sometimes.

It was relentless forward motion.

Build the work. Build the body. Build the voice. Build the face. Build the wardrobe. Build the confidence. Build the publication. Build the new life.

Build, build, build.

And then I’d reach back.

One message into the past.

One cold reply.

One silence.

One little reminder that I still wasn’t wanted there.

And by that same evening I’d be drunk.

Not sad-drunk.

Gone.

The whole carefully built thing collapsing in an afternoon because somebody couldn’t be bothered to type a warm sentence back.

This happened dozens of times.

Build the life. Reach into the past. Get hurt. Drink.

Build the life. Reach into the past. Get hurt. Drink.

I look back at it now and it’s almost comical in how reliable it was.

I’ll be honest about something. You’ve probably already gathered from my AI articles that I’m exactly the sort of lunatic who would feed years of journals, essays, messages and emotional history into an AI model to look for patterns.

So I did.

And Henry, my faithful servant Claude AI, came back with something so obvious I almost laughed when I read it.

“Stevie, can you not see the pattern, love? Every single time they reject you, you hit the bottle.”

And the awful thing was, he was right.

Every time I reached into the past and failed, I drank. Every time I stayed away from it and built my future, I didn’t.

There it was, in black and white.

So eventually I made a decision.

I stopped trying.

Not out of bitterness. Not out of hatred. Not because I don’t still love some of these people.

But because I finally understood that I cannot drag people into accepting me. I cannot negotiate somebody into loving me. I cannot make myself smaller and smaller and smaller in the hope that one day I become acceptable enough to tolerate.

And the weight that came off me when I decided that was astonishing.

I can’t fully describe it.

It was as if I’d been carrying something heavy for years and finally just put it down in the road and walked on.

There’s another thing I’ve noticed.

Almost nobody says the quiet part out loud.

People don’t usually say, “I can’t cope with what you are.” They don’t say, “I’m revolted by this.” They don’t say, “I preferred you when you were easier for me to understand.”

What they say is something much safer.

The children.

It’s always the children.

What you did to the children.

As if that settles it. As if those words explain everything. As if once the children are invoked, nobody has to look too closely at what else might be going on.

And I understand it. I do.

But I’ll say this once, plainly, and then I’ll leave it.

I would be in my children’s lives in a heartbeat, in every way I was allowed to be. Loving them, looking after them, there for every part of it.

The door was never locked from my side.

It still isn’t.

I’ll leave it there, because some things don’t need spelling out, and the people who need to understand it already do.

Here’s what’s changed, and it’s the part I’m proudest of.

I’ve stopped numbing it, and I’ve also stopped spiralling in it.

There’s a difference, and it took me a long time to find the gap between the two.

I let myself be sad now.

I drive along and an old ABBA song comes on, and suddenly I’m a little boy in the back of our Ford Cortina MK3, and it’s the 1970s, and I can feel the whole warmth of that family around me.

And then I remember something true.

I was alone even then, with those songs.

Carrying the secret even then.

I’m still alone with them now.

The difference is that today I can sit in that sadness for the length of a song, and then I can keep driving.

I don’t have to drink it away. I don’t have to fix it. I just let it be what it is.

Isn’t that what they tell alcoholics?

Accept the things you can’t change.

I used to think that was a fridge magnet. Turns out it’s just true.

I can’t change other people. I can’t control how they reacted, or what they decided I became, or the version of me that exists in other people’s heads now.

I can only control what I do next.

And the version of me that some people seem to need, the bad person, the selfish person, the one who blew up a family for no reason, that one isn’t true either.

It’s not villainy.

It’s just a tragedy.

A tragedy for everyone in it, me included.

I’ve quietly got my proof that I’m alright now, and none of it is dramatic.

I haven’t wanted a drink in a few weeks and counting.

I’m back doing yoga every day.

I started meditating again this week, properly.

I feel in control of myself for the first time in years.

I’m getting my voice changed. It will sound female.

If I want more surgery in future, I’ll get more surgery. If I need another bloody facelift one day, I’ll get another bloody facelift.

I am done dimming myself to make other people less frightened by me.

I went for my little Botox review recently, the standard two-week follow-up, and she looked at me and said, “God, you seem really happy lately.”

And I realised she was right.

I am.

My work has come roaring back. I’m focused again. Building things. Writing again. Thinking clearly again.

Because I stopped standing outside a locked door begging to be let back in.

The past can live over there now and do whatever it wants.

I live over here.