I spoke some half year ago about showing up for myself, and I talked about deserving. Well, I’m embarrassed to report that the question I asked myself, Have we not established that love is never deserved?, is still painfully relevant. I don’t believe it yet. Still. Always.

I hate the conflict between knowing that “deserving” is nothing, that we all deserve everything and, logically, therefore nothing, and the very important, very self-loving thought that I deserve things too. When it comes to fairness, it seems I don’t include myself in the list of people who deserve, a concept I don’t even believe in.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

—Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Can you feel my agony? The vise that has long ago taken hold of my two parts – my thoughts and my feelings – and is squeezing them to a pulp, trying to make them fit together, trying to force them together despite all the resistance and all the pain. No, Ursula, I will not punish anyone else for eating when starved. I am punishing only myself. Don’t ask me why. The vise is tightening and I don’t know the answer.

I said some half year ago that I stood up for myself, as if it was a kind of novelty. The truth is that it was. It still is. Because for as often as I still get misgendered, I actually rarely speak up. I freeze, or I dissociate and walk away. Somewhere in me is a voice that says, “that’s what you get for wanting something you can’t have”. I am so cruel to myself. When I look in the mirror, when I walk through the city, when I see my friends, I know I am a woman. Simply a woman. Maybe a woman with a footnote, but not an important one. But when people speak about me as if I’m a man – a man, one assumes, with a lot of footnotes – I let them say that, let them think that, let them treat me like that. How unfair! And how angry it makes me at myself. As if I wasn’t already hurting enough. What do you do with a train of thought like this? And where can I get off?

I am not hopeless. I think I’m funny and cute. I think I give a lot, and I also show what I want. I try to give love and hope to receive it in return. I say hello to the birds, to the insects, I say hello to the moon. I don’t expect love to be mirrored directly, because none of this has to be a transaction – I’m trying to put into the world what I want to see more of. I do hope to receive more love, but I know that that will not solve the problem. Receiving more love will not automatically make me think I deserve it. I will just believe I get lucky. And I am often lucky. And I still talk about deserving. And how I’m not. And is “luck” meaningfully different? Love is probably like the weather, just out there for anyone to experience. Some days are wonderful, and some are terrible, but that’s just the weather. Nobody deserves rain – rain simply happens. Everybody deserves rain – rain simply happens. But I struggle to shake the feeling that I’ve been getting awfully bad weather for a while now.

And I think, somewhere, despite all I have said, that I deserve the bad weather. That I don’t deserve sunshine. And that I don’t even know how I could become deserving – something that, by all measurements, isn’t even a thing. And here we still are.