I hate New Year’s resolutions. 

I hate them because there is an underlying assumption that goes hand-in-hand with the determination to change things: There must be something wrong with me. From the time I was a little kid, I felt different, like I didn’t quite fit in. 

So by the time I was 8 years old, I was trying to be like my friends. I wanted to dress like them, talk like them, be short like them. There’s not much I could do about that when I shot up to 5’4” in the 4th grade. But I slouched all the same.

Now I understand what was different from my friends. It wasn’t my hair or my height. It was my queerness. But of course I didn’t know that at the time. So I started down a long path of self-improvement.

I’ve spent the majority of my 53 trips around the sun trying to fix myself. Be a better student, better musician, better writer, better teacher, better wife, better mom, better Christian…

I wanted to be...