My Name is Faith MacGregor...I used to be a Spy.
Who am I? Where did I come from? Ok, so I wasn’t a full spy, just your friendly neighborhood human intelligence collector, but maybe I am a secret Targaryen or Stark? Well no. I’m just a semi normal lady who has been through the shit ringer. One thing after another and I am still here standing tall in my sensible three inch heels. So lets go on a journey together. It was many years ago that I realized that I was different, I saw the world in my own way and adding being gender and sexually diverse I had to learn to navigate a world that did not match the one in my head.
I was raised in a non-religious home. My parents had some bad experiences with some Christian friends that turned them off to religion. So if god did not make me this way then what was wrong with me? I cried myself to sleep on more than one occasion.
Many years later, the internet had been invented, but it would not be a part of my life for several more years. The feelings I had that I was different were growing, yet I still had no idea what to do with them. I was in high school and made a new group of friends at a local church. All but two were women. I became very close to them and it was becoming more and more clear that it was more than simple hormones and being attracted to women I was unique, and I needed to figure out what to do with myself and my life, you know, just small stuff. Later I would realize that I already was me and that no other person got to tell me who I was. I will always be grateful to those ladies from junior high and high school, some of whom are still my friends.
Soon after I was in college. I ended up in a religious college, but found myself surrounded by the Outlanders. I did attempt to share some of my feelings of gender and sexual diversity with trusted friends. There was still very limited internet and no resources for someone like me to educate myself on what I was going through. My journey had ups and downs. I had now adopted religion myself and was doing my best to suppress any conflicts about who I was.
It wasn’t until my first marriage that I finally understood what I had been going through my whole life. A few years in I joined the Army, party in an attempt to prove I could run with the “bad asses” but also to satisfy a void of purpose in my life. My gender struggles had left me feeling empty inside. Serving my country had helped me fill it.
In the end I realized that I always was a bad ass and no man could take that away from me. I found my heroes to give me strength, many of them in fiction. Ripley, Sarah, Clark, Selene, Lagertha, Draper, Avasarala and some in nonfiction like Tolkien, my father, COL Intress, and Daenerys, I mean Emilia :)
What is great about fiction is it gives us ideals, while even Steve Rogers may be close to perfect most of us in the real world are not. We stumble and fall and chase after fallible heroes when what matters is the story. Why can’t a reals person strive to be as accepting and kind as Steven Rogers, or as brave as Ellen Ripley, or fight for your life’s desires like Lagertha? The answer is, we absolutely can.
The only limits out there are the ones we put on ourselves. - Faith original :)
