This is gonna be a long post so sorry in advance, but it’s 2am and dysphoria is hitting me hard, so I figure it’s the perfect time for a story. This story will contain BRIEF and non detailed mentions of suicide, but I find it to be a happy story over all.

Alright so, I am currently 20 years old. I came out at 17, but looking back, I’ve always kind of known that I was trans. I remember being really young, I’m talking maybe 5-7 years old, hanging out with boys in my neighbourhood and feeling out of place. The only time I really felt comfortable and truly happy was when I was with my best friend.

She and I grew up together. Literally. We were born a few months apart, but our mothers had been friends since high school. They were both mothers to us, and we saw eachother as siblings. We were friends since the day we were able to create memories.

I remember being around 6 years old. My friend, who will be refered to as A, and I were playing in the dirt in her backyard. I don’t remember exactly what we were doing, but there was a lull in thw action of whatever game we were playing. A was standing beside me pretending to cook or something, and I was just kind of standing there silently thinking, something I did often and still do. I vividly recall looking up at A and thinking “she’s so fun and I’m always happy with her. Why don’t I feel like that with boys?”

(Obviously my thoughts weren’t that clear at that age, but that’s the basic gist of what was going through my head)

Fast forward a year or two. I’m with my male friend in his backyard. He lived across the street from me, ans had a massive fort/treehouse type thing. We were walking from his back door toward the fort, and this feeling came over me. I started to wonder if he ever felt the same way I did about relating more to girls than boys. My young, dumb, anxiety filled brain wanted to ask him, but didn’t know quite how to go about it without sounding stupid. Somehow I settled on “Hey _____? Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be a girl?”

Tgis os the point where, when I look back on these early years, I wonder if what he said paved the way for my internalized fear of my own feelings.

He reaponded with a simple, but powerful, “No. Why would I want to be a girl? Girls are stupid! Why, do you want to be a girl?”

Not wanting to embaress myself, I said something to the tune of “Haha no I was just messing with you.”

In hindsight, that was probably the moment I disconnected from reality, because from that day on, I started to become something that I’m not sure I can ever quite recover from. I started doubting myself constantly, and hating myself for every thought I had that didn’t match up with what the other boys were like.

In elementary school, I had this constant feeling that I was outside myself. Like I was watching a puppet version of me living out my life. I felt like I had zero control over everything and anything that happened. I would get bullied for dumb stuff, like being German or having a higher voice than the other boys. I never really felt hurt by anything, because no matter how brutal the other kids could be, it didn’t feel like they were saying/doing anything to ME. They were attacking this version of me that wasn’t actually me. I started to develop a talent for lying and acting.

I still saw A fairly often, but nowhere near as often as I wanted. When I was around her, I felt like she would grab the real me and pull me back into my body. I wish I’d shown her how much I appreciated and needed her, because come high school, we stopped hanging out all together.

Suddenly, my only anchor to reality was gone, and I was permanently dissociated. My lying got worse, or better in a way. My parents would tell me constantly that I should enroll in the drama classes and become an actor because of my “natural talent”. I wanted too, and I probably could’ve done something great had I listened to them. Instead, I listened to my guy friends, who told me drama and acting was girly and gay. Clearly I wanted to avoid those titles, as the last time I expressed my interest in femininity, it didn’t exactly go too well.

So, my link to reality is gone, I’m in a permanent state of dissociation, I secretly hate myself, and I can make people believe just about anything I tell them. A recipe for disaster if I ever saw one.

I know, I know, not a very happy story. Just sit tight a little longer. This story gets a lot worse before it starts to get better, but it DOES get better.

I’m now around 14 years old. All my friends think I’m on drugs at all times, and I’ve begun to develop a serious case of depression, while my anxiety has grown exponentially worse. My high school bullies love to practice their insults on me, since my only response was laughter, hiding the pain I really felt from everyone. I took up smoking cigarettes, and regularly put my body through any kind of abuse I could. I would run full speed into brick walls, get people to hit me with the biggest sticks they could find, set my clothes on fire during lunch hour. You name it. Why? Partially for the laughter and attention it got me, bust mostly, secretly, to punish myself anytime I had thoughts that I deemed wrong.

Then, a small miracle. One of the bullies I mentioned previously, came out to everyone as bisexual. My school was incredibly intollerent, violent, and hateful. Especially towards lgbt peeps. But all of a sudden, one of the most popular boys in the school, not just our grade, admits that he is bisexual, and everyone is completely fine with it.

Before, I felt like I was drowning in the sea, caught in a raging storm, but suddenly there was a raft. Tge storm was still raging, maybe even growing, but at least I had something to grab onto.

And boy did I grab tight. About a month after the boy came out, I went camping with my (new) best friend. He was a brother to me, and had seen me on the rare occasion that I came back to reality from the dissociation and lies. I came out to him on that trip. Not as trans, I didn’t even know that transgender was a thing yet. No, I came out as bisexual. I will truly never forget that conversation.

We were walking along a river in the forest, looking for lizards and snakes and the like. There was a brief moment of silence between us, something that rarely happened, and without thinking, I heard myself say “I have to tell you something.”

Immediately I started panicking, thinking of anything I could say aside from what I knew was about to fall out of my mouth. Foetunately, I wasn’t quick enough, and as soon as he turned around, I basically vomitted the words “I’m bisexual.”

Now, technically that was true, but I didn’t know that yet. I was freaking out, as we had both made some honestly horrible jokes at the expense of the gay community. He was quiet for a few seconds, which felt like days, but eventually he looked my dead in the eyes and said, “Well, I guess I’m not homophobic anymore.”

His words, combined with the genuine care in his smile made me want to fucking cry. And I did, later that night. I hugged him, and just to put him at ease, made a joke that I will not repeat, because it was disgusting and horrible, but it was exactly what we both needed in the moment.

A few months later, I came out as full out gay to our entire friend group. This clearly was not the case, and I knew it was a lie. By then I had realized that I am in fact bisexual, but remember, I am still in the midst of that raging storm of lies and hate. My basic thinking was:

I feel most comfortable around girls.

Girls like boys.

If I like boys, girls will want to hang out with me.

I do like boys, but also girls.

I can pretend to only like boys very easily.

And so I did. Admittedly I went way overboard in the first few weeks. I had never actually met a gay guy, so all I had to go off of was the stereotype we all made fun of back then. After the first 2 or 3 weeks of trial and error, I had everyone, including family and teachers, fully believing I was gay as fuck. And my plan, kind of worked perfectly. My best friend, the one from the camping trip, got a girlfriend, and she ended up spending more time with me than him. She introduced me to her friends, which opened a world that had previously been unknown to me or any of the boys I knew.

High school boys were immature, rude, competitive, and aggressive. High school girls, however, were so incredibly diverse. Every girl I met was different in nearly every way, but had a sense of familiarity with eachother. My depression vanished in a matter of days. My raging storm calmed to a light breeze. These girls would paint my nails and convinced me to give up the buzz cut in favour of the long hair I had always wanted. They introduced me to makeup and music other than rap. The artists showed me the beauty of drawing, and the drama girls taught me how to truly hone my lying into acting. I felt at home with them.

Unfortunately, but predictably, my plan backfired, and crumbled like a brick house in the path of a tornado. After about a year, the “light breeze” began to pick up speed again. I started hating myself more than ever. I was so damn close to what I’d always wanted, but I realised the closer I got that rather than my path to happiness being clear, there was a glass wall in my way. I was allowed to embrace the femininity that I once had to hide, but I was sti’ll just another boy to those girls. I wasn’t truly one of them as I wanted so desperatly to be. Worst of all, I had started catching feelings for a girl, but couldn’t possibly act on them or express them at all without ruining not only the illusion, but all the friendships I had just finally found.

I’ll save you the details, but in short, all this came to a point and I ended up attempting suicide. I was sent to a psychiatric ward, and my friendships, both male and female, began to erode.

Instead of watching everything I lied so hard to achieve turn to dust, I decide to use my new acting abilities (sharpened in drama classes that the girls talked me into) to fool the doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists into letting me out before a single one of my issues had been addressed.

Don’t ask me how I managed it, because I still don’t have a clue, but I did it. I somehow managed to convince everyone I was perfectly fine, and was released after only a week and a half. This was the first in a line of horrible mistakes made by yours truly.

So, I return to school. I expect I’ll have to tell everyone why i missed a week and a half of school, and showed up with a mostly true story. I never got to use my story, however, because my school counselor had already managed to inform the entire school that I was “suicidal and extremely depressed”. While that was true, that is the furthest from how I wanted everyone to find out.

To save time, I’ll skip over the events that took place in those few weeks, to my second admittance to the ward. This time, I was filled with rage and wanted not only my own death, but the death of anyone who got on my nerves. This is when my anger issues started to take root.

My raging storm had developed into a devastating hurricane, and my raft was torn to splinters. Only this time, I wasn’t at the mercy of the storm, I was the storm. At one point, the ward staff had to call 3 security gaurds in to get me to return to my room without anyone being injured. I was so lost in my rage and hatred that I milked the shit out of it, and got off the idea that 3 buff ass dudes were needed to return my 90 lbs butt to my room out of fear that I was actually going to make an attempt on someones life. Not my proudest moment to be sure. This is when my friendships were nearly all dying, if not already dead. I ended up making some friends in the ward, who helped me get to place mentally where the staff felt I was safe to be released.

A month later, I was in a new ward. An adult ward this time. With no one my age to talk to, and having very recently become anti social (the real definition, not asocial or shy, though I am very introverted), I turned to the bookshelf as my only companion. I found a book about lgbt definitions and information, and decided to read it for no real reason. I was skimming through pages rather quickly, not really reading or retaining anything, just sort of looking at the ink on the paper. Eventually a saw a word I had never heard before; Transgender.

My curiosity got the best of me, and I started to read the paragraphs. Almost immediately, I realized that I connected with what I was reading. I read the entire book that night.

The next day, my mom came in for a visit. It was my 17 birthday. The first thing I said to her when she walked into my “room”, was “mom? I think I’m transgender.”

Without a hint of hesitation, she simply looked at me and said, “okay.”

After 17 years of hating myself, doubting myself, and punishing myself for something I didn’t understand, my mother was able to accept it immediately. I’m not exaggerating. We spend the day discussing it, and she had absolutely no problem with it at all. She supported me not just from day one, but from minute one. It took her a few months to get used to she/her pronouns, and she did get frustrated at my changing my name every few weeks, but she never stopped supporting me. It’s been 3 years since I came out. I have exactly one friend whom I didn’t meet until I dropped out of highshool, and I have my mom. And you know what? I’m happy.

I struggle still, obviously, with anger, depression, anxiety, antisocial personality, and now gender dysphoria, but thanks to the two amazing women in my life, I’m working through it all. I’m getting better. And my transition has finally begun.

As a side note:

This story ended up being WAY longer than I originally intended. I started with the intent to only talk about the time I asked my friend if he ever wondered what it was like to be a girl when I was like 7 or something, but it kinda spiraled into my life story. So I want to give a little detail to my friend A from early in the story. We’ve grown apart and haven’t seen eachother in years, but we do still consider eachother friends, and as crazy as it may sound, she came out as a HE around the same time I came out as a SHE. We literally swapped. Neither of us knew the other was trans until well after we came out, so we had a good laugh about it. Life is crazy hunh?