The main things I remember about that time are feelings of hopelessness. The links between gender dysphoria and depression are well-established. As someone who struggled with depression for most of my life, I worried that the mental illness I’d been treating and fighting for so many years was getting too strong for my daily dose of Cymbalta to fend off. A marijuana prescription helped ease the fact that I was starting to have trouble sleeping due to nighttime anxiety and sadness.

It’s tough to encapsulate all the things I thought and felt at the time, especially now, as I sit in a cafe on a sunny day in a body I love. I can’t give a succinct paragraph that summarizes what it’s like. All I can share at the feelings themselves.

● The feeling of being a “supporting character” was amplified the worse my depression got. I had no story of my own, no purpose. I was not a character of consequence in whatever plots were going on. My role was to show up, give the protagonists what they needed, and get out of the way. I thought I was at peace with this feeling about my life, that it was okay to be a support character with no drive of my own. But as my depression worsened, I increasingly felt like a non-entity.

● Hand in hand with this, I had little to no vision for the future. Sometimes partners and friends and I would discuss plans, goals for our lives, ways we would affect the world. I had very few answers for this. Other than short-term, concrete instances of things I knew would happen (a board game convention I would attend, for instance), I didn’t have any grander plan for my life. At best I figured I would just keep working and providing financial support to the people I cared about, people like my spouse who were going to make a real impact on the world. (The fact that I had slipped into a traditionally masculine mindset of seeing oneself as a financial provider, despite the fact that my spouse was equally gainfully employed, doesn’t escape me now.)

● I had no cohesive sense of self. I had personality traits that I acknowledged (I was kind, a good listener, loyal, feminist) but no core around which I could wrap them. It’s a hard concept to describe. It’s like I was a bunch of disparate scenes from a story with no plot to tie them together. I had no foundation to myself, no fallback of “This is who I am” that I could turn to when I felt lost. This led to circumstances throughout my life (as early as middle school) where I would act like a “tofu person” — I had very little flavour of my own, largely absorbing and internalizing the flavour of those around me. I tried desperately to like the things that my loved ones and friends liked and would end up frustrated and feeling like a failure if I couldn’t keep pace with their interests. I had relationships hit stumbling blocks because I would attempt to become a copy of my partner and then get depressed or lash out when I found being their duplicate unsustainable.

● I felt lonely, even though I had loved ones who cared about me and friends who wanted to see me. It was a deep, cutting loneliness. I often found myself thinking that no one would understand me, but when I tried to probe that feeling — to ask what, exactly, people wouldn’t understand — I would come up empty. I knew I was fundamentally different from everyone around me and had no idea what it was that made me different.

● I felt like I was miserable because I had too many feelings. It felt like my heart was a dam full of cracks, holding back an ocean much too strong for its shoddy construction. At night I would sit and have the sense that feelings were pouring out of my heart into the rest of me without control or context.

● At the same time, I often felt dull and zombie-like. I felt a disinterest in a lot of life, including things that used to make me happy. I isolated myself from others, including my closest partner. Used to my introversion and the feeling of needing to recharge, I pulled further and further inward, thinking that if I only could spend enough time alone I’d find the energy to care about things again.

● I went through many days with a sense of “Well, I guess this is it, I just keep doing this until I die.” Life seemed boring, routine. There felt like no real point to it other than to keep doing it and hoping that by me doing my dull routine, I might enable someone around me, someone more interesting and powerful and self-assured, to make a difference in the world.

Overall, my mental and emotional state worsened continuously and felt out of control. I didn’t feel like life as an abstract concept was pointless, but I struggled to find meaning in my life, in my existence. I was terrified that I was broken; that either I couldn’t be fixed, or that the fix was too hard for me to achieve at my level of dysfunction. Any time the idea that all this had to do with my gender came up, my anxiety would flare to such a level that I had to shove the thought deep inside, lest I succumb to a panic attack and become unable to even carry out my robotic routine.