A month later, my optimism was gone.

My attempt to avoid honorifics worked at first, but saying “Mr.” or “Ms.” was so ingrained in my students that within a couple weeks I was back to being “Mr.” most of the time. On its own, this would have been manageable, but it was just one of the many ways that I felt boxed in by the Mr. Mitchell role.

As a teacher, I always focused on building and maintaining positive relationships with my students. The goal was not to force kids to do the things I asked them to, but to make them want to do what I asked.

In this mode, Mr. Mitchell was always something of a chameleon — looking for the things that would engage his students, having conversations about shared interests, and strategically adopting various interests in order to connect with students who were having a hard time engaging and being productive. He was good at it. Kids that had difficulties in other classrooms did well in his.

For him, it was always about what the kids needed in order to connect. Mr. Mitchell aspired to be whatever a kid needed at a given moment. If he couldn’t figure it out, he spent hours stressing out about it, and talking to other teachers about what worked for them until he figured it out.

Mr. Mitchell was able to do all of this because he was played by me — and by the time I created the Mr. Mitchell persona over the course of my first year as a teacher, I had a ton of experience trying to be what others wanted. I was good at it.

But that changed. After experiencing the freedom of being who I wanted to be over the summer, I chafed at being anything but my own authentic self. I was sick of trying to be something else. I wanted so badly to be me and to not have to worry about whether that worked for everyone else. This made it hard to put as much energy into teaching as I had previously. Playing Mr. Mitchell felt like a distillation of the various problems I was trying to solve through transition.

Every time I deviated from the Mr. Mitchell role to express a bit of myself, I worried I was alienating students, or giving away the fact I was trans. So in every bit of personal authenticity, there was an element of guilt and fear.

This feeling was amplified by the fact that even when I wasn’t teaching, I was often beholden to Mr. Mitchell.

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

I was always worried my students or coworkers would see me outside of school, and that I’d be outed. So, if my wife and I wanted to go out to eat, I either stayed dressed up as Mr. Mitchell, or we drove twenty minutes away to make sure we didn’t run into anyone who knew me as Mr. Mitchell.

If I was running errands on the weekend, I was always watching out for current and former students. At one point, I narrowly missed running into a couple former students at Target — students with younger siblings who still attended the school I taught at — and only avoided them by making a quick turn down another aisle.

If we invited people over for dinner or drinks, I had to avoid inviting coworkers — many of whom were good friends — because I didn’t want to have to pretend to be someone else in my own house, and I didn’t want them to have to keep my secret.

As a result, I felt like every bit of my own personal authenticity was limited or constrained in some way by the existence of Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was a like a chronic disease.

Despite this, I still loved the kids I worked with. I still had wonderful, positive experiences working with them. I still wanted to do everything I could to help them succeed. But, I was starting to feel that in order to do that, I had to engage in yet another form of self-denial, which wasn’t sustainable.