I was 5 when I knew I wasn’t ‘normal’ – whatever the fuck that means. My mom was driving me to school and I was sitting in the back of the car when I innocently asked her, “Hey mom, why aren’t I a boy?” She didn’t have an answer for me, but several years later she admitted to me that after she dropped me off at school that day, she burst into tears. She knew in her soul, at that moment, I wasn’t going to have a normal life.
I never wanted to be the person I looked like, but I always wanted to be the person inside of me. It was a voice that was always in my head. As I grew older, the voice became louder and who I was became less and less clear. I remember being 8 years old walking around with my headphones on, playing the audio of a YouTube video of two guys talking to each other and having a casual conversation. I found comfort in listening to the sound of a male voice because it matched the one in my head and who I thought I really was.
It wasn’t until I was 9 that I realized I liked girls. I was on the bus coming home from a school field trip when my friend, Jackie, fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I remember initially thinking “Oh my God, I’m fucking in! She must like me.” But, as quickly as that thought entered my mind, a feeling of overwhelming dread came over me: I wasn’t in. I was the furthest fucking thing from it. All I was, was a girl who secretly liked other girls and I became obsessively aware of it despite it not making any sense to me.
This realization changed me. It made me feel like I had to hide. It prompted a spiral of trying as hard as I could to dress, act and look like a guy. I would wear baggy basketball shorts, sports jerseys, skate shoes, I had long knotty hair, the whole deal. I figured, this way, if I looked more like a guy, I would get the attention of girls.
I definitely got a lot of attention, but it wasn’t from girls. There was a large group of boys that bullied me relentlessly because I acted and looked like a boy. They would beat me up, yell at me, make fun of me, spit on me and offer people money so that they wouldn’t be friends with me. It got so bad that I couldn’t walk home alone after school without the risk of getting the shit beat out of me by this group of incessant jackasses.
The way I was treated was unbearable, so I transferred schools where things were much better. I found a good group of friends and my social life became much better, but I still felt viscerally that something was ‘wrong’ with me. I didn’t know what specifically, but there was a proding feeling that I was not who I was supposed to be that came to punctuate my everyday life.
Day in and day out, from noon to night I felt this deep confused uneasiness within myself. I felt intimately that I couldn’t be the man that I felt like I truly was, so, I beat the perception of who I was in my head, into submission. It was a constant total war that I engaged within myself every single day, 24 hours a day.
By the age of 13, the conflict I constantly waged within myself morphed me. I pushed the voice in my head so far down that it completely transformed my appearance. I went from looking like a tomboy with shorts and ratty t-shirts to wearing heels, dressing in skirts, wearing makeup, and dyed my hair bleach blonde.
During this girly phase, I went so far to deny myself of who I was that I started dating a guy named Daniel. He was my first kiss. I remember kissing each other on the lips and immediately pulling back and saying “Absolutely not. This is gross. I’m never doing that again” and Daniel responding with “I knew it!”. He was the first person to find out, at least at that time, that I was a lesbian. Daniel ended up becoming one of my best friends.
By the time I started high school, I knew if I wanted to have a chance at living even a partially happy life, I had to stop repressing who I was, so, I transformed myself again. I stopped dressing in skirts, cut my hair, took off the makeup, and just dressed how I felt – in sweats and hoodies.
I began to embrace more of who I was and ignored the feminine side of myself that everyone expected to see. I ended up getting my first girlfriend, feeling a little bit more comfortable with myself and entirely stopped giving a fuck about what everyone else thought of me. This combined with the fact that I made a concerted effort never to be mean-spirited about my issues and my history of being bullied made me very popular in school.
Despite coming out, having a great social life, plenty of girlfriends, and loving my school, things started to turn really dark when I was 16. By embracing the idea that I was a lesbian, it made me think that I had finally found myself. However, when I was alone with my thoughts the feeling of not knowing who I was, wasn’t going away. If anything, the voice inside of me clamoring for a true self-identity started to become louder and louder. This unshakeable feeling scared the shit out of me and plunged me into a deep depression that started me down a bad path.