It's all about love, not hiding. Love for yourself, whoever the fuck you turn out to be. Love for the people around you, no matter how much they hide and flinch and flee. Love for masks and experimentation and play and desire itself. Patient love for a world that stubbornly refuses to comply with your expectations and wishes, no matter how much you want it to change. When you refuse to hide your love – the power in it, the strength, the sheer flexible, gorgeous imaginative grace that springs from it – you coax the world and the people around you into a more loving, compassionate shape just by existing.

So it’s not really about choosing all strength or all vulnerability. It’s not about pretending you don’t cry into your hands over nothing sometimes, or that you don’t have pointy opinions that turn a lot of people off. It’s about trusting what is ‘all good’ inside you enough to let everything inside you show a lot of the time. It’s about making enough space for your true self – bumbling idiot bear and greedy imperious lion and ass-shaking Prince-mask wearing ferret included – that the different dimensions of your whole, organic self stop feeling so completely exotic and unsafe and unfamiliar to each other. It’s about giving yourself time and patience and saying “I am feeling my way forward, welcoming joy wherever I can find it.”