"I said 'There are two types of men in this world, and you're neither of them.'"

As a young primate, I took cues about my development as a human being from my peers and popular culture. I watched My So-Called Life, and developed an affinity for dying my hair red and wearing flannel. I listened to my friends gabble on about boyfriends and school and drugs, an endless cycle that repeated itself via handwritten notes passed between and in classes. (These have been replaced by texts, in which teens now try to reveal their souls to one another in 160 characters or less. Yes, I'm judging.) I heard the rebellious music of my generation on pop radio stations, sandwiched between commercials for jewelry stores and weight loss drugs. Every so often, a story about someone leaving home and adventuring in a far off place would surface, and the person would claim to be "finding themselves". I found the proposition of finding one's self absurd, even offensive. Find yourself? Your actual self? Life is not an Easter egg hunt, with your rightful sense of person concealed in purple plastic, hidden just in that bush around the corner.

I also found the phrase "time heals all wounds" equally maddening, as well as its illegitimate cousin, once removed, "it will feel better with time." The "wounds" and the "it" being something fairly devastating, like the death of a young child in my family. To look at someone who feels as though their heart has been ripped out, and say it will take time to feel better, is essentially the same thing as looking at a person who owns nothing but an oven and saying "bread will happen." You know what time gives you? Nothing. You have to keep going, and find your way through the brambles of the wilderness that is your life. No one else has lived it, you are the first one...you thought the path would be cleared for you? Grab a machete, rookie. Survival situations tell you who you really are, whether you eat the priest or the nurse first when you run out of coconuts on the island.

There are stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, as we travel through our lives and try to learn who we really are. I have spent the past 35 years telling myself a story about this straight lesbian queer woman gender queer trans? person.

I first knew something was amiss in kindergarten. I learned the word "gay" at 10, at some other kid's expense when I was listening to my friends talk about him on the playground at school. I learned it meant me when I asked what "gay" meant. (I was devastated, until I convinced myself a few sleepless nights later that I was being imaginative and lying to myself to make myself more interesting. To myself. Just to myself, because I had ZERO intention of sharing this knowledge.  I realize now that this made no sense.) After six years of denial, shame, and confusion, I settled on "lesbian" as an identity after a lot of time spent in (useful) amateur counseling in an AOL chatroom called "Ask A Lesbian". I read the conversations for a while, and began asking a question after 3-4 days of just watching. I was racked with anxiety and uncertainty, which I thought I was hiding fairly well via black and white text. However, a profound bit of advice came from one of those women, when she whispered to me in a private message "Heterosexual people don't ask themselves that question THIS hard." She said it, because I needed to hear it. I needed someone, who was not assaulting me, to say "You are gay." I needed permission. It took my breath away. I laughed. I cried. I heaved. Twice.

I came out when I was 17, and I felt more free than I had felt since before I had grown breasts and lost the boyish frame of my youth. I didn't tell anyone how the relief of coming out began to mildew as time went by, because it did not feel like the entire truth. I internalized that confusion, telling myself that I was just feeling conflicted to make myself more interesting...to myself, because there was no way I was going to make myself more of a freak by telling other people. (Shut up.) I thought my brain was fucking with me, that I was just kind of broken that way, and this confusing feeling was part of the process of my brain being a pathological liar. Like my mind was telling me, "Hey, you know you're gay, right? Okay, maybe not. Wait, no, definitely gay. Tell everyone you're gay. HAHAHA, just kidding. You're something else and you just made ALL of these people believe you're gay. What are you, really? Um, we don't know, but gay isn't the whole story. Have fun with your lie, you lying liar."

Now if you would, please direct your attention to the first sentence of the previous paragraph. For my lazy folks:


"I came out when I was 17, and I felt more free than I had felt since before I had grown breasts and lost the boyish frame of my youth." When I say that I grieved over these two things on my chest, I more mean I lost myself in a kind of identity crisis. Up until that point, I thought every girl wanted to be a boy in some capacity; I sure did. But as my friends went through the same physical changes, they embraced them. THEY WERE ENJOYING THIS? Now I was really confused, and growing more concerned by the day that I would not be able to play the part of female. (Um, what?) To the more self-aware individual, this recognition would have set off some kind of alarm, but this was my normal. My body had stopped being home when I was about 7 and realized that I dreaded hand me-downs from my two older sisters. I was having to look in the "boys" section for clothes I liked. This wasn't just preference...it felt like a violation every single day that I had to wear that girl's school uniform that included a plaid skirt. I just had no language for it. I still struggle with the language, after years of exposure to the LGBTQ community and months of therapy. If confusion were a flashlight, I keep shining a flickering beam onto the same deeply rooted, pale and sickly question in my gut...am I transgendered? I have asked it for years, in the most silent, private, desperately sad ways possible.

Cisgendered people do not ask that question this hard. But I am filled with hesitation. Even now, I feel like admittng that I am transgendered is just a way for me to make myself more interesting. To myself. I never wanted to tell anyone. I still don't. I never wanted this, and I would change it if I could. But at this point, it is hurting me, and I need to stop hiding from it before I hurt myself in irreparable ways. I have many questions, but only one matters: what will I do with my one wild and precious life?