Two summers ago, I went to a beach in Northern California that’s famous for sea glass. I lay in the sun until the tide touched my shoes, then crawled around on my knees, combing for the luminous green pieces. I didn’t look up until I bumped into an older woman who was filling a leather pouch with shards.

“I like the green ones, too,” she said. “They’re real neon.” She told me they were from nineteenth-century Vaseline bottles that glowed if you put them under black light. She explained where all the colors came from. Amber from aromatherapy bottles. White from milk bottles. Red was very rare, and so were black and turquoise. Her favorite color—the hardest to find—was amethyst. She told me that her name was Venus, and I told her that my name was Grace.

“That’s my son’s name,” she said. “I know, it’s a little weird.” Venus disappeared down the beach, and I walked to a cliff with the goal of sitting still for an hour. I wanted to keep my eyes closed, to home in on sensations—which I rarely did. That afternoon, it was even harder than usual to focus, and I wondered if my encounter with Venus was a sign, if she was a messenger shooting arrows of meaning into my life, signalling something about the future. I knew it was a stupid thought, more of a wish than anything else.

My mom had me when she was forty-two. She tried hard to have me. On a green piece of paper, my parents made a list of all the names they might give me. My mom liked Esther, my dad liked Kay. They agreed on Grace, which was an idea, not something you could touch.

As a child learning to write my own name, I copied my father’s signature, which starts with the letter “C.” I liked to draw “G”s walking across the page, their tongues getting smaller and smaller until they became “C”s, just like his.

When I was five, I figured out how to spell the words I held in my mouth. I wrote them down until they filled up an entire page: I’m gross I’m gross I’m gross I’m gross. I’m sick I’m sick I’m sick I’m sick. I’m a boy I’m a boy I’m a boy I’m a boy. Then I ripped up the paper and threw it in the toilet.

Back then, I knew how to stay in character as a girl. Polite, curious, the right mix of self-assured and humble. When puberty hit, I became obsessed with mirrors. I checked my reflection—four times, eight times, twelve times—to make sure that I hadn’t lost control of my performance.

Twenty years later, my girlhood was dissolving, with no clear alternative in place. I felt less embodied than ever, less able to gather myself into one person. And yet the idea of “transitioning”—changing my name, starting hormones, getting surgery—sucked me into a thought circuit with no end and no exit.

What did I really want? I wanted thicker skin and better boundaries. I wanted bigger hands. I wanted a flat chest and a new car. I wanted to pull my shirt over my head by the collar, the way men in movies did. I wanted to feel like myself. I wanted to be concrete—a thing you could touch.

I hesitated to call this collection of desires “dysphoria,” that catchall term for the pain of having a body that doesn’t align with one’s self-image, however aspirational that image may be. My unease was far-reaching and difficult to explain—even to myself. I felt like vapor trapped in a container. A windowless room with no doors, a single dangling light that never turned off. I tried out one metaphor after another, then wondered if the pain was just an excuse, an explanation that could pull all my disparate memories into a coherent narrative—a coherent gender. And, anyway, if I admitted I was dysphoric, I’d have to decide whether to do something about it, to decide if my pain was real or imagined, if the problem was gender or me.

A few months after I met Venus on the beach, I deleted all my social-media accounts. I didn’t want to exist outside my body. My limbs, my breasts, my genitals—these were unwieldy enough. I couldn’t manage a digital projection, too. And I didn’t want to see my name anywhere. It unmoored me and made me dizzy. I wanted to be nameless, nothing. The opposite of known.

The less I wanted a name, the more compulsively I named everything I saw. Caterpillar. Bird. Knife. Shit. Cunt. Tree. I lay in my bed and imagined myself as every other thing in the universe, so diffuse and infinite as to be indiscernible—unnameable. Every morning, I walked up the hill from my house to a scrubby field slated for development, where a rope swing hung from a black-walnut tree. Leaning against the tree trunk, I practiced filling up my body with air. Air into my toes, into the arches of my feet, into my shins. Into my bladder, into my anus, into my ribs, even into my breasts.

The more of my body I felt, the less like Grace I felt. She drifted away, an idea or a dream, dislodged from somewhere within me. Had she ever existed at all? I imagined her far out at sea, on the other side of a swell, a white spot bobbing in the water. I told myself there was no bringing her back.

Each day, I imagined myself with the name of a different man. Samuel, my mother’s father, an orthodontist who used to let me play with the tools in his office. He had three last names in the course of his life, each less Jewish-sounding than the last. Simon, the first two syllables of Samuel’s original last name. Edward, my father’s brother, a lawyer who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Civil War history. Michael, the archangel, and also the teacher who’d taught me about white holes, the opposite of black holes, where disappeared matter emerges into another dimension.

In November, I told my partner at the time that I didn’t want to be called Grace anymore.

The name came to me one morning, sitting in front of my house before my roommates had woken up. I remembered the piece of green paper, framed and hung on the wall of my childhood bedroom. A column for the girls’ names: Betty, Myrna, Georgia, Esther, Jane, and a dozen more. Grace, with a circle around it. In the boy column, just one name: Cyrus. I said it slowly. I pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth to whistle the first syllable, pushed my lips out for the soft “r,” let my mouth curl around the “us.” Then I wrote it down on a sheet of paper from one of my yellow legal pads. In cursive, then in all caps. Then in block letters. Over breakfast, I slid the yellow paper across the table to my partner, face down.

“Don’t say it out loud,” I told them.

They didn’t look up, just scribbled, then slid the paper back to me. They’d written an acrostic with “Grace” and “Cyrus” intersecting at the “r,” an uneven cross. I folded up the drawing and put it in my jacket pocket. I didn’t tell anyone else.