I woke up like this. Really, I did.

My body hasn’t always been perceived the way it currently is. You have to understand, I’m a transsexual woman. I have always been a woman in my heart, mind, soul, and — yes — body. It’s just that certain features of my body never quite matched up with that internal identity. When I was born, people thought I was a boy based purely on what was between my legs without actually knowing who I am.

I wasn’t particularly boyish. I wanted to play with the girls and play the games they played and build relationships the way they did. I thought like them. I felt like them. After a while, the social pressures of gendered expectations started to get in the way. I was left entirely isolated from everyone because no one would accept me as I was. Everyone was told I was a boy, but I knew I wasn’t. The way they related to me after they started learning to judge how a girl or boy should act was hurtful. The more I tried to fit in, the more pain and mental anguish I experienced.

I tried my hardest to fit in with the boys, but I never did fit in with them. Eventually, I just gave up for a while and sat on the sidelines — literally. I would sit out nearly every recess thinking to myself and doing whatever I could to distract myself from the reality of my life. I gained weight. I was miserable. The other kids would occasionally find me and ask if I wanted to play with them, but I’d turn them down. I didn’t want to be forced to act a certain way.

I slid into depression. My face almost always betrayed my emotions. I would smile, but I wasn’t happy. When I smiled people were less concerned about me. It was a wonderfully effective, isolating shield.

This was possibly an actual smile — there was birthday cake involved.

My life was a living hell until I was 24 years of age. There was much I needed to untangle from having grown up in a dysfunctional household upon which distorted religion and my mother’s obsessive-compulsive personality disorder held a strangulating grip. Until then, I derived my persona from what others expected of me. I buried myself so deeply I didn’t know who I was at times.

I had married. I thought it was the right thing to do. It was what God wanted, right? My wife and I had a boy. After eleven months, she took him and left for her brother’s place in San Diego to extricate herself from my brooding and foreboding countenance. She had figured out she was in a lesbian relationship and she wasn’t lesbian or bisexual. Divorce papers followed. I ended up homeless and I pined for my now always absent family. I was fortunate to have a friend whom let me live with him.

I had nothing to hang onto afterwards except for myself — which would need to be exhumed from its vivisepulture. I would either be the person I knew since five years of age, when I first wondered Why the hell do I even exist? Or I would claim relief from this tortuous world and let someone else clean up the mess of my death and inter my body. You know what I chose — I’m not writing to you from beyond the veil.

As I, the phoenix, rose from the ashes of what I had tried to be for others, life became a joy — again, like it was when I was three. Sure, there was heartbreak. This body of mine continued to break down and cry and mourn over my son being taken from me by someone whom I loved, with whom I had exchanged vows. Despite the background of pain, I was finally able to relate to people. People could actually relate to me. I never imagined that I was actually making it that much harder for me to make it through life by not being authentic to who I really was all along.

When I rose from the ashes and began my transition, my body didn’t change all that much. Breasts grew. Some fat moved around to my hips, but not much. There was never any cosmetic surgery involved. I never had many masculine features. After three months of hormone therapy, my body was unmistakably female in appearance. This is an unusually short timeline — and in that regard, I am quite lucky to have a body like this one. Over time, the main change was having less muscle mass and just looking ever so slightly more my age as time marches onward.