I still wasn’t sure who I wanted to become, but something in me felt wrong. In a general way, it seemed that I had surrendered my identity to my fears. I knew that my relationship with my cousin was built on a lifetime of insecurities. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who took refuge in his brute power. I didn’t want to be someone who trashed a campus just to feel more powerful himself. Anyone could see these compensatory gestures for what they were. I was modeling myself on the noxious behavior that I found most threatening and reassuring in others. I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus with an open pass and no destination. I remember staring through the window on my way across the Great Plains, wondering if I had grown up somewhere quiet, whether I might feel more quiet inside.

The desiccated landscape of New Mexico appeared as an empty canvas. In the garish weirdness of the desert, where beaming hippies dotted the horizon, banging on drums and piling up ramshackle homes from straw bales and tires, it seemed possible to find another sense of myself. I picked up a job in Albuquerque, sweeping floors at a pizza place, and rented an apartment with a co-worker near the city center. One of our neighbors ran a Tibetan store, and I stopped in one day to see him. He was on the phone but raised a finger to signal that he wouldn’t be long. I spent a few minutes looking around. The shelves were lined with oils and candles, incense and folded fabrics. I pulled a batik sarong from a stack and shook it open. It was muted orange with intricate swirls and floral designs. When my friend hung up, I asked him how to tie it around my waist. I left the store with it on. For the next two years, I wore it constantly. I wore it to parties, hiking in the mountains and ambling down city streets. I knew it was only a piece of clothing, but it felt like a step away from my past and toward something unfamiliar. I grew my hair long, tied it in braids, adorned it with beads and feathers. I looked as cartoonish as you’re probably imagining, but that was the point. It came as a revelation that you could walk through town, barefoot and shirtless in a wraparound skirt, with silver crosses dangling from pierced nipples, with Byzantine tattoos, with your beads and feathers swaying like a headdress, and no one even shrugged. I knew that my cousin would have laughed if he’d seen me. A year earlier, I would have laughed at myself.

After a hiking trip in northern Mexico, I returned with food-borne hepatitis that spiraled into debilitating fatigue. I spent a week in the hospital, then slumped back to my parents’ house in Baltimore for a long recovery. My mother insisted that my father and I begin therapy to heal the wounds of childhood. Once a week, we sank into the cushions of a social worker’s office downtown, dredging up and sifting through memories of a broken dynamic. To kill the rest of my time, I volunteered at a local magazine, where one of the editors was a minor celebrity. She was nearly a decade older, perpetually draped in scarves and jewelry, with a wondrous frizz of auburn hair. We became friends, then more. She took me to movie premieres, balls and galas at snooty museums. Some of her friends didn’t approve. Jail bait, they said. Cradle robber. She snapped that no one would notice if she were a man. At parties, we sometimes bumped into a tall, lean artist with dreadlocks and deep bronze skin. I would notice myself watching him across the room. I had never been interested in a man before, but it was easy to believe that someone could reach the age of 22 without discovering his inclinations.

When my relationship with the older woman fizzled out, I ran into the artist one night at a club. I found myself in the center of the dance floor with my head tipped back as he kissed me. I was intrigued by his interest and gave him my number. When he invited me to dinner, I accepted. I don’t know if we saw enough of each other in the next few weeks to call it dating. We met up a handful of times, but we never really clicked. I moved to New York and began writing freelance articles for magazines. When an assignment took me back to New Mexico, I decided to stay. Over the next two years, I fell into a close relationship with an older man. Each time I returned from a reporting trip, he would scoop me up from the airport, dropping my bags at the house I was renting and driving us to dinner. We traveled together, visiting friends in the mountains and taking vacations overseas. We stayed up late, cooking elaborate meals and watching Iranian films. We joked that our relationship was a septuagenarian marriage, but we knew that for each of us it was a placeholder for someone yet to come.

By the time I reconnected with the woman from high school, I had come to a maddeningly simple conclusion. I believed that the conventions of male identity were toxic but ultimately toothless. The crusty archetypes of my father’s cowboy movies and a thousand cultural narratives, the expectations for how a man should live and feel, whom he could love and in what ways — they could all be thrown aside. A man was free to be as he was. He defined the terms of masculinity for himself. He could love other men and welcome intimate relationships in whatever form they came. Finding a more fluid gender identity was as simple as choosing to. This is what I believed.

The rage in my cousin disappeared for an instant. I don’t know how much time had passed by then. I was flitting in and out of consciousness, and everything was warped. What I remember is a sudden shift in his expression from fury to confusion. His eyes grew wide. His right hand loosened at my neck, but his left hand kept its grip. He seemed to be trapped between two instincts and struggling to choose one. He pressed his right forearm into my neck for a moment, then let go again and took a step back. Without his grip to hold me up, I could barely stay on my feet. He watched me teetering in silence. I wondered if he would let me go. Then the real beating began.

How can I describe the way he brutalized me then? I have spent the past three years trying not to let it haunt me. It seemed as if he wanted to punish me for his own moment of uncertainty. He lunged forward, grabbing my shirt with both hands, and flung me to the side like a rag doll. My body smacked against the wall, and I began sliding toward the floor, but he rushed over to lift me up and hurled me against the door frame. I bounced off, and he threw me again. He tossed me from one side of the room to the other. Each time I made contact with the wall, his tools dug into my body. Each time I slumped forward, he pummeled his fists into my gut.