When I was asked to write this piece it was the same day as I’d received a message from a friend asking me to speak about my experience as a transgender adult to her church congregation for Pride month in Canada.

She told me she had decided not to ask the two transgender teenagers in her congregation because they were still figuring out their identity, whereas she saw me as someone whose identity was solid and fully formed.

I was surprised to be seen that way because I feel as though I’ve been trying to tease out my identity for decades and not getting far. Did she really think I had it all figured out?

Perhaps it was the list of labels I’d claimed over the last eight years of trying to work out why I’d burned out.

I’m autistic and ADHD with a significant degree of hearing loss. I’m genderqueer, transmasculine and bisexual.

I am a parent to two young adults, I’m a small business owner and I love creativity in all its forms, particularly writing, singing, pottery and ink sketching.

That makes it sound as though I have a strong sense of identity but years of masking the autistic and ADHD traits to become socially acceptable meant I lost track of who I am at heart.

These eight years of burnout recovery have helped me reveal all the labels I’ve acquired so far but left me feeling like a human doing rather than a human being, to misquote Stephen Fry. It left me with questions about who I am, at heart.

By writing this piece, I’ve found a missing label: peacenik. I am never happier than when witnessing people sharing love in its various forms.

I have always loved musical harmony and it turns out that’s probably a reflection of my need for harmony in my wider world. Unsurprisingly, life isn’t feeling too harmonious in the current global political climate.

All over the world people enact prejudice, bigotry and cruelty in the name of identity.

War would be impossible without a fundamental sense that a specific identity is more valid than others: capitalist versus communist, fundamentalist religion versus the more mainstream kind, cisgender heterosexual versus any LGBTQIA+ identity, the concept of eugenics, where certain kinds of people are deemed less human than others.

All my life I have heard the message that I am less human than the people who don’t want to hear me when I speak my truth.

What would the world look like, if we were to acknowledge the inherent humanity of every person on the planet, no matter their identity?

It feels like an impossible dream at this point in history but I believe it can change if enough of us choose to see humanity first and identity second.

That’s not to say that identity isn’t important; it just shouldn’t be the basis for whether we treat someone as a human being.

Some days I’m a superhuman machine and other days I’m a potato. That kind of uneven performance can cause conflict when people who aren’t ADHD expect me to cope and thrive the way they do.

This part of my identity caused me immense harm until I understood it and refused to accept society’s one-size-fits-all approach to living together.

I am in my eighth year of burnout because I spent seven of those years trying to live in a way that is fundamentally unsuitable for me.

The more I understand about these facets of my identity, the closer I come to feeling fully human and being able to live my life authentically so that I don’t burn out and can once again contribute to society.