It's not easy being trans.

When I first came to the conclusion I would be better off being a dude I didn't realize what it all meant. The statement in itself is simple: I identify as male. But it has huge consequences. It impacts your life on every level. One of the things it affects, that most people don't realize, is the past. Suddenly everything you have done in the past has a different light on it. A friend of mine once told me, ages ago, that her boyfriend thought I had anorexia because I wanted to be a boy. It freaked me out because I felt caught. Back then wanting to be a boy was my deepest darkest secret. But it also pissed me off because he was wrong. Wrong in the way that I didn't have anorexia because I wanted to be a boy, but because I was trying to be like a girl. And clearly I failed at it. I started dawning on me a few days ago how much of my past has been determined by the fact that I am a transgender. I hated my body and tried very hard to destroy it. But I didn't want to die. I never wanted to die. I just wanted to pain to stop and this horrible thing that seemed to decide my life for me that I was stuck with, would go away. Looking back I'm amazed how little damage is left from that period, call it a life time. My teeth are bad but some people have that without throwing up all the time. The nerve damage is pretty much gone these days. Healthy diet helped a lot with that. And I have a bunch of scars on my arms, legs and torso that most people don't even notice anymore. Not bad for over 20 years of self-destructive coping devices. But that's just my body.


The mind is a totally different thing. So is time. I can't turn back time and undo those bad things and replace them with events I wish had happened instead. I can't erase that pain, the feeling of loss. Looking back it seems like it was a different person all together who did those things, who lived that life. It wasn't me. It was some sort of alter ego that I created to survive in this world that would judge me for what I seemed to be but was not. When I look back I see this scared little girl, hurting and lonely, and there is nothing I can do to help her, because she isn't real. She never had a chance. And now she is gone and I am here. But I am left with her pain, her trauma, her memories of blood filled nights and the cold hard floor underneath her knees in front of the toilet bowl. I can not make that go away. I thought I had put it behind me, that I had moved on and in a way I have. I just hadn't looked at it from a trans perspective yet and that makes a lot of difference. It all makes a lot more sense now. It also feels more useless. If only... But no such thing. I missed out on most of my childhood because of this, my puberty and adolescence. My early adulthood is overshadowed by my transition process. And what will happen after that? Right now I'm afraid I'll never be a real man, even though I know I already am, boobs and all. But I will never have been a boy growing up, I will not have a past as a man. I will have to start from scratch from here on, as if I was a foreigner moving to a different country. The Land of Man. And I can try to fit in as much as I want but I will always be different. I will always be castrated, no matter what.


So right now I am trying to deal with this. I am mourning. Mourning for my past self who never had a chance at all, and for my future self, for I will never be truly whole.



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