📢 Please read and share. This one matters.

I want to tell you about someone in our community who needs help getting out.

His name is Rayford. He goes by Ray. In ten years, his parents have never once used either. They call him Rae — a feminized nickname tied to a version of him they refuse to release. When his father died, Rayford had no say in how he appeared in the obituary. They used Rae. They used photos of him as a child in a flower girl dress — not a single image of the adult man he has become. He found out after the fact. He was told, not asked. Even in grief, even in a document that will exist forever, he was not allowed to be himself.

His parents are and were emotionally abusive. His father is, as previously stated, recently deceased from cancer. The threat and sometimes follow-through of physical abuse cowed him and silenced him for years. And right now — because he has no driver's license, no vehicle, and no way to reliably get to and from work in a rural North Carolina town — he has no way out.

Last October, Rayford survived a suicide attempt.

He is still here. And he is still fighting. But he cannot keep fighting from inside that house.

Here's the part that stopped me:

While he was going through all of that — the abuse, the isolation, the October that almost took him — he was building a mental health platform. For us. For people like him. It's called MindFull Nest, and it's real: encrypted journaling, a 34-emotion check-in system, AI mood analytics, crisis routing to 988 and LGBTQ+ hotlines, grief support, and peer communities for marginalized groups of many kinds, including domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. Built by a trans man with lived psychiatric experience who refused to believe our community deserved less than what he could give us.

He didn't build it from a place of stability. He built it from the floor.

He has a plan. He has mining certifications and real job prospects in Nevada. He has a partner there who is his chosen family. He has a dog named Bo — his emotional support animal and, by his own words, his reason to keep going on the worst days.

He just needs to get there.

His goal is $5,000. That covers a one-way flight, first month's rent in a pet-friendly place, and enough of a buffer to get employed before he runs out of ground.

If you've ever felt like the world was trying to erase you and you built something anyway — this is that person.

If you've ever needed someone to guide you through to the other side of something, this is his desperate plea for your guiding hand.

Please donate if you can. Please share if you can't. Please tag anyone who needs to see this.

Every dollar over goal goes directly into MindFull Nest — into launching this platform to marginalized communities across multiple environments, including our own. Find demos of the platform linked below available on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/B2LoU5fVgnw?si=-cVnfxKInyt7ZjGx

https://youtu.be/ys66s7hpTSw?si=jdDKckN2hmpEeMMm

#TransSupport #MutualAid #LGBTQCommunity #MentalHealth #TransRights #MindFullNest #HelpRayford