Truth

There are a few things I want to talk about in this post, and apologising for how awful I am at travel-blogging is not one of them.

First and foremost in my mind is that I no longer believe in the LDS church. Over the past year I've become disillusioned with organised religion in general, but specifically LDS culture's treatment of  women, people who are not straight or cisgendered, and those suffering from mental illness. However, the culture was never my biggest problem with the church. History was one. Another big thing for me is the lack of discourse on female deity.

Clearly I have many feelings concerning this subject. I'll write about my current beliefs at a later date. Honestly, though, I have very little interest in continuing to let my former faith run my life, and I hope you understand if it's difficult for me to talk about things objectively. It's been a long and hard journey for me, and I'm still processing through anger and grief and a tidal wave of other emotions.

The second thing I want to talk about is intensely personal: my sexuality. I have called myself bisexual before, but I prefer to identify as pansexual, because I don't believe that there are only two genders. What it comes down to is that I like people for who they are, not what parts they have. This did not just happen, nor do I choose to whom I am attracted. I've been afraid to come out for several reasons. One, that I was terrified of how my parents would react; my loving, wonderful parents who say things like "gay people are confused because they were sexually abused as children" or "don't you think that gay people have a higher chance of molesting kids?" Two, I didn't want to change how my friends interact with me. I'm a touchy person when I feel close to people, but I don't ever want someone to think that I'm being inappropriate or hitting on them when I'm just expressing friend-love. And three, there are a lot of stereotypes surrounding bi/pansexual people that I did not want to be associated with. My sexual orientation does not make me "greedy," and it most certainly does not mean I will be unfaithful to my boyfriend.

Lastly I wanted to give a brief rundown of the health issues I've been having. I have a chest wall deformity called pectus excavatum, meaning sunken chest. If you haven't noticed, my sternum is depressed about 2.5 inches into my chest. It is also pushing on my heart, leading to decreased capacity and an arrhythmia (atrial tachycardia, if you really wanted to know). I've been on medication since the summer to manage the arrhythmia, and it did pretty well, until I was in China doing things like running all over the city and climbing mountains and things of that nature. After a particularly scary episode on Yellow Mountain, compounding hypoglycemia and heart issues, my mom talked to the cardiologist who prescribed the medication and my dose was doubled. To ensure that I wouldn't run out, since I had brought only enough to last till I got home, my mom sent me another bottle. Long story short, it never arrived, and my problems got pretty bad. There were several days when I thought I was going to die. I was scared to leave my apartment because I didn't know if I would be able to climb the stairs to get back. I also ran out of my antidepressants a few weeks before coming home, which made everything about a thousand times worse.

Now that I'm home, I'm back on the meds and things are okay. I mean, I don't really do anything more strenuous than playing Zelda, but I no longer feel like I'm going to die. In a couple weeks I'm going to see a cardiothoracic surgeon and hopefully get on the way to fixing this. I want to be able to live my life again, and if it takes a metal bar in my chest for a couple years to do that, so be it.

Anyway. So here goes, being honest on my blog again.

--Miranda