Mirror, Mirror

I've been in Denver for almost a year now. I go to school full time, I work two jobs, and I'm currently in the middle of moving to a new place. I've done well for the last year. I've gotten good grades, I've done well at my jobs, but as the classes have gotten harder, my stress level has gone up and now with moving adding to an already difficult quarter, the cracks are starting to show. For the first time, I'm not doing well in a few of my classes. I'm struggling with finding enough time to study. I'm struggling with feeling exhausted all the time. I go seven days a week. The snow day we had last Wednesday was the first full day I'd had off in a few months. The cracks are showing and I don't know how to fix them. I live in a stupidly expensive city. I can't afford to quit one of my jobs. I'm trying to graduate by next summer so I don't incur a ridiculous amount of debt and so I can actually start working. I mean, I'm 28. Most of my friends and fellow students around the same age have at least one associates degree and most have a bachelors. Me? I'm at my fourth college trying to get the associates degree I failed to get two years ago.

The Gender Conundrum

We live in a world where gender is an ever-changing concept. It's no longer a simple black and white matter of you're male or you're female. Now we have transgender, non-binary gender, gender fluid, agender, bigender, and the list goes on. It can be a bit of a challenge to keep it all straight.

I was raised Christian, so anything deviating from the normalcy of heterosexuality was bad. Homosexuality? Bad. Bisexual? Bad. Transgender? Bad. And so on and so on. I learned to look down on those people, I was taught to look down on them. I had teachers and leaders who vehemently spoke out against them who painted a picture of horrible people making conscious decisions to live in sin, teachers and leaders who framed my perception of those people. I often wonder, if I hadn't left home and gone to college in another city, if I hadn't been removed from my familiar little closed off world, would I still be as close minded as I was then? But while my eyes were certainly opened and I became slightly less judgmental, I was still extremely close minded. It wasn't until I actually began to really meet and get to know these people that I realized that they were humans just like you and me, not these entities of evil I'd been taught about. And not a single one of them was claiming to be gay or lesbian or bisexual or trans or whatever in order to snub God, it was simply who they were.