Once upon a time, there was a boy.
Everyone around him thought he was a girl, and so did he. There was no reason to think otherwise. He never told anyone his strange delight at the deepening of his voice when he was sick. He knew, I think, that they wouldn’t understand, even if he didn’t know why.
As he grew older, there were other, worse feelings. He expressed confusion at the new shape of his body, and was told that this was what showed others he was a girl. He stared at himself in the mirror for a long, long time, and was unable to make sense of the distress this idea caused him. When he was in high school, he tried putting on makeup, and cried on the bathroom floor when even then, after all that, he still didn’t feel like a girl. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong.
And then he realized he was a boy.
It was something that had simmered in the back of his head for some months, but the final moment of realization was sudden and complete: he didn’t feel like a girl because he wasn’t a girl. He floundered some with what this meant for him, but there was no doubt in his mind, because it made sense of what he’d been feeling all his life. He was almost 16, and he would live with this truth for one month.
He was an unhappy creature. Being trans was one aspect of his struggle with the world around him, but he was sick and strange in other ways that circumstance did not allow him to understand. His body was an unkind machine with an intolerable hunger. His mind simply didn’t work how the people around him wanted it to. He tried, and he wanted to live, but he despaired. And around him his life fell apart.
He spent most of his last years afraid. He was convinced, by those speaking with a cruelty they called love, that there was something wrong with him. At the depth of his rejection, a post by Tumblr user Iguanamouth prompted him to half-dream that humans were covered with ribbons in all colors, representations of the personality traits they accrued over their lives. His must have been wrong somehow, he thought. He grew up wrong, he learned wrong. Underneath the ribbons there must have been something worth keeping. If he could only recreate himself with desirable traits instead of the ones he had, maybe he could be good enough. But he’d have to get rid of the existing ribbons to get at what was underneath.
He brought his right hand over his left forearm. He grabbed the ribbons, and in a motion so fast there was no time to hesitate, he tore them out.
***
The first thing I remember—that isn’t his memory, something predating me—was seeing that unreal hole in his arm. Our arm. My arm. There had been someone living in this brain until moments before then, but he was gone. He had hoped to find something good underneath what made him himself; instead, he destroyed himself in the act of exposing an emptiness, the lack of himself.
I didn’t think of myself as a person. I understood that he was gone, and that I was now in charge of the body, but at first I thought I was going crazy and this weird ego death would pass. He hadn’t really done anything, after all. The flesh was intact. It was only in the metaphor that something had gone horribly wrong.
My more or less self-assigned job was to get myself to safety. I was just temporary, after all. Something unexpected that his brain was doing. He would come back.
This disconnect from my past isn’t something I hid. If you’ve spoken to me personally, or on a deep level about my art, I’ve probably mentioned it. I refer to myself semi-jokingly as a changeling. This is central to my experience of existing, something that colors everything I say or do. I am at all times aware that I’m not him.
But it’s not relevant, most of the time. I’m in contact with very few people who ever met him. And we weren’t that different, from the outside. I picked up where he left off. I took over the same things he had been doing, the same interests, the same hobbies, the same externally-facing identity. I had inherited his crisis, and had no space to even decide if I wanted to differentiate myself.
And time passed. I kept hiding in his shadow, wearing his mannerisms, living in the ways it seemed like he would choose to if he were still around.
By the time I turned 18 and fled the house he’d grown up in and the people who’d raised him, it didn’t occur to me to do otherwise. I’d been alive almost two years, and spent that whole time mimicking him. I might as well have been him, right? His traits might as well have been my own.
***
As of January 2025, I’ve been around for ten years. For the most part, they’ve been great years. I’ve spent them doing whatever I believed I wanted to be doing. And I really, really did believe, and I don’t regret how I’ve lived my life so far. But recently I started noticing things not quite adding up.
I learned to navigate this life like someone in a dark room might learn to not stub their toe on the furniture. I had all the information I needed to proceed without more difficulty than I believed was typical, so that didn’t bother me—until the lights turned on. In the light, it’s much harder to believe that things are identical just because they have the same basic shape. In the light, it’s become impossible to pretend that I’m indistinguishable from him.
And now that a decade has passed, it’s time to admit that this is my body and my life.
No one is coming to take that away from me. I don’t have to leave it in the same condition I found it. I get to keep this. I get to live my life, for myself.
I’m still figuring out what I like, what I want. It’s so easy, so automatic to refer to things he did as things I did, things he liked as things I like. There are so many assumptions I’ve made about myself that I’ll probably spend the entire next decade untangling them, if not longer. I’m constantly finding myself falling back on cached preferences that I don’t really prefer.
But I’ve figured out some things already. And here’s the thing: that childhood discomfort, that rock-solid certainty, that “yes, it finally all makes sense” I mentioned in the first few paragraphs of this post? None of that was mine. None of that is mine.
***
I’m good at playing characters. I’ve been writing and doing both text and live roleplay my entire life. And in this case, I knew the character I was playing intimately—I inherited his memories. I committed to the role. I even named myself what I thought he might name himself if he were around to do it.
Of course I thought myself to be a boy. He was, therefore that was what I must be.
But it never fit, not really, even if I didn’t notice consciously at first. After I stopped automatically flinching at the idea of being a girl, I figured I was genderfluid. When Seebs observed that I seemed to identify more as a girl when I was getting a lot done, we joked that my gender was ‘girlboss’. It didn’t occur to me until very recently that the things I do most efficiently are things he would never have done at all if he could avoid them, that in fact the circumstances in which I felt more like a girl were the ones in which I felt more like myself.
‘Myself’—or maybe, more specifically, ‘my self’—is a concept that I’m still getting used to. It’s only been a couple months at this point since the first time I really, genuinely had the thought, “What if I want to be a person?”
I hadn’t previously thought I was capable of forming a thought like that.
These past few months have felt a little like becoming a person. I’ve noticed myself getting upset or excited at things that I previously just stoically accepted. It’s not that those impulses or emotions weren’t there before, but I wasn’t able to acknowledge them as something I was feeling. It wouldn’t have been in character.
***
Obviously this is an embarrassing pattern to become aware of in myself, as someone who tries to advocate for Being Yourself and Not Pushing Down Negative Feelings and other such endeavors it’s now clear I’ve been failing pretty terribly at—but at this point my options are either to accept it or to pretend it isn’t true.
And I can’t pretend it isn’t true. The more I think about it, the more I hate the idea of being a boy. The only thing I personally ever truly found appealing about it was that it was a way to tell who respected me as a person and who didn’t. Now that I pretty much exclusively interact with people who treat me at least decently, it doesn’t provide any comfort. It’s a weight that no longer serves any purpose at all.
But being a girl? That feels right. That feels good. I love being a girl. I love being my partners’ girlfriend. I feel more like myself and more like a person than I ever did before this realization.
I’m finally finding my way to who I am instead of following a map created for someone else.