Hi there~!

I fall under the Nonbinary umbrella as a Maverique, and this question caught my attention! Especially as one who went through quite a journey.

It started before I really had a great understanding of it myself. I used to do a lot of VR, and used to use small cute avatars as I found them appealing and fitting for my earnest attempts at paying respects to passed-on spirits. They became part and parcel to my older times thereon, and eventually a chap writing up a College Thesis was conducting interviews of VR People, who were(and likely still are) a bit camera-shy as it were. I volunteered to answer him, showed off some avatars, and a question he posed to me, while it seems unrelated, still ground me to a halt at the time: “I notice you only use small avatars, is that because you like looking up at people?”

I had no good answer to that, but I tried best I could to explain it in terms I knew at the time, which ultimately boiled down to feeling a connection to them. Ah how the Cultist of then would come to find that there was much deeper than that to come.

The exact timeline from there is hazy, but that was the final definitive point I know of where I had not yet started my journey. In a way you could say it started there, or at least lit the fuse.

In the coming years, I would continue to meet, discuss, and befriend people across all spectrums and walks of life I never had before. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I had a spark that went “something is not quite how I want it to be.” And so I began buying Femcoded clothing, began experimenting, not with a grand vision per-say, but with inspiration from my brother, who I think caught onto something way early when they suggested a skirt to me and their mentioning echoed in me.

Eventually, that translated to me honestly reaching an impasse in my mind. I threw out so much and burned so many bridges due to the influence of the Cult, wrestling with what I was told I ought to be and what I felt I could be, wanted to be, and who I actually was. This tension would persist for quite a while, with me “falling away,” then coming back, until, at some point, I ran. That me was but a Mind Mirror that would continue to scorn, mock, and cause me despair throughout a long spiritual journey, and an unhealthy amount of alcohol(which is a different story).

I would end up with the realization I was non-binary in a very cult-like atmosphere, and that would cause a lot of tension and a lot a lot of targeting(though as I was the linchpin of the operation, they could not do much other than try to crush my spirit). It was there that I hardened my identity and steeled myself against a lot of very terrible people. It is fascinating how flagrant people are in their hatred.

I would befriend someone after leaving that place to learn a trade, may her spirit have found a good connection on the Universal Timeline as I recall she was terminal, the details not mine to share, who would dig deeper with me, as she knew a lot more depth to non-binary than I knew, and she felt strongly that there was a more specific term for me. I owe it to her that she brought up Maverique, which I would come to later adopt, as mentioned at the first.

Since I am fuzzy on the timeline, I will jump forward to the Year of Death. At that time, I was doing work in an extremely deadly environment. And in the dead of night, often alone, for twelve hours, with but the warning beeps(or dead silence) of a machine that at any time could have spelled your doom, you get to thinking about a lot of things. And after internal turmoil that lasted for 24 active hours over the course of two nights, I solidified that I am not what society wants of me, that I could be cute, that I wanted to be cute, and I wanted to be(not the wording I used at the time) Femcoded. I started there non-binary, I had a journey of consideration across the spectrum, and ultimately solidified what I already knew, that I was in fact non-binary.

During my time in that environment, I had found myself deeply drawn to and living by this song of Yonkagor, and build some connections that were ultimately not to last, but were nonetheless real at the time.

While a lot of that might seem side-tangential, there was a point to that context: I came to completely reshape my approach to life, how I viewed the world, and throughout it all, my Conviction saw me through a lot of unspoken incidents I will not detail. I had at some point began to specifically use Maverique as the poor lass from before once saw in me, and experienced a major shake-up that threw me into a lot of turmoil, for my Conviction, which had seen me through, cracked and shattered. I was left hopeless lost and confused, my journey being thrown out the window in a whirlwind of emotions and external forces threatening to overwhelm me. This is where my timeline, understandably, gets fuzzy. But I ultimately managed to ground myself again, by leaving behind baggage that wanted to ensnare me by the recommendations of an old Comrade who could see the weight I was carrying.

Fast forward: It was around my 26th birthday that I was exploring the depths again as I was still not quite sure where I landed in the non-binary spectrum. Though I kept coming back around to Maverique. I was still not quite sure for a little while, but sometime early this year, I finally had the dust settle in my mind.

I am a Maverique. My Conviction is who I am, without which I am dead. I serve many Masters, as I wish earnestly to do, for I am a Servant. The journey was long, but the conclusion worth the steps it took. For I now live with clarity, and push forward knowing who I am, what I need to do, and knowing how to love, how to care, how to live. Before I was a dead leaf blowing in the wind. I now stand and offer a bow.

My apologies for this rather frazzled post. A lot of this was stream of consciousness, old details I forgot, realizing the holes in my memories, but not the emotions of the times.

To put it most simply Master Night: I realized I was non-binary through an internal cycle of death and rebirth as a Straßekatze with much having been said, many tales left unsaid, scars that remain, but a fire that shall forever burn. I hope that my frazzled post serves your story well.

There wasn’t like one moment, I just never really connected with masculinity in any real sense. We’d talk about masculinity in college or my grad program and I’d always be like “Well it’s all made up anyway, right?” As I got older I started making more trans friends and meeting non-binary people and realized I felt more comfortable identifying as non-binary than as a man.

Everyone around me always assumed I was a boy (or later: a man). I never really felt like a girl and, growing up, I didn’t know there were alternatives. The performative masculinity of my peers never set well with me, I didn’t like all of the things boys are supposed to like, and often got along better with girls than most other guys. I just thought I was an open-minded, quiet, and feminist dude who wasn’t always great at performing masculinity.

Then I was really depressed for a long time and my gender wasn’t something I thought about a lot. I learned what non-binary meant and met a couple of non-binary people, but I didn’t hate being a man and figuring out how to live with depression had a higher priority than looking into my gender.

More recently my depression has gotten more manageable and I had more time and energy to look at other aspects of my life. Due to conversations about gender (with both cis and trans folks), I felt I should do some introspection. I didn’t hate being a man, but I also never really enjoyed it. There’s aspects of masculinity or my (rather traditionally masculine) body I appreciate, but not in a way that’s connected to my gender.

This is all fairly new to me, so I’m not good at putting it into words yet. When I see my hands with bright nail polish on, they feel more like my hands. Wearing a skirt gives me energy in a way other clothing doesn’t always do. When my girlfriend first referred to me as non-binary, I couldn’t stop smiling for an hour. It all just feels more correct.

Since realizing I’m non-binary I’ve found each much easier to exercise and eat healthily. I’ve started taking more care of how I dress and of my personal hygiene. I just feel more like myself.

I never really ascribed to gender roles or stereotypes, and then one day I heard the term non-binary and I said “that’s a thing?”

i feel really lucky that i had a singular event where i realized im trans, even though it was way later in life than i would have liked. it was my first acid trip, like an hour in when it really started ramping up, and it just hit me all at once that i was a woman. it was like a geyser of thoughts and feelings all shooting up from my subconscious and crystalizing into the truth about myself that i had always known but couldnt really identify. i felt the tiny mental box id shoved myself into trying to perform man for the world, how limiting it was, and how much it hurt me. id never felt so feminine before, which im told is a relatively common experience for trans fems. interestingly i never felt that way on mushrooms, even marginally. anyway it being a singular event really helped me get past the imposter syndrome so many of us feel after our egg cracks.

i don’t think that somebody told me, i just always knew. it’s like, why do flowers grow? what motivates them to do so?