we'll carry on.

A Guide to Feeling Like A Disappointment

Step One: You are not special. You’re one of seven siblings, all born on the same exact day and raised by a man who is not your biological father. It’s the only life you’ve ever known but it’s still a little unfair. There are no birthday kids, just birthday children, and the party is shared. You’re all powered but it is not equal power. You are ranked and the higher than ranking, the more use you are to your father. That doesn’t sit well with you as Number 6.

Step Two: From a young age, you’ve felt like the outcast. You’re given a name that doesn’t fit right and a uniform, including a skirt, that makes you self conscious. You ask one of your brothers if you can have a pair of their pants but your father finds out and you get in trouble for not following his rules. Your sisters wear their skirts without issues, why can’t you? You spend the night crying and staring at yourself in the mirror but the next morning, pretend that nothing happened. It’s oddly comforting that your dad never calls you by the name you were given. You’ve only ever been Number 6. 

Step Three: Your powers aren’t the most useful. Certainly not during a fight. You can’t help protect people and, if it wasn’t for the rigorous training, you’d hardly be able to protect yourself. You were never the most athletic, the most gifted physically, but you weren’t above using your powers to make your siblings, and occasionally your father, forget that. You warp memories freely, making your siblings believe you bested them in competition, making your father think you’d done something to be proud of. They catch on quickly and, though your siblings complain that you’re cheating, your father says that you adapted. Later that night, he reminds you, none too gently, to never use your powers on him again. 

Step Four: There is a disconnect between you and your family. You’re not one of the boys and don’t feel accepted by them but you’re not one of the girls either. None of your clothes feel right. You can’t look at yourself in the mirror because you hate what you see. It leads to many breakdowns in the privacy of your room and you end up crying yourself to sleep more often than not. It’s not until you turn thirteen and begin to sneak out, meeting up with people your father would disapprove of that you have a word for it. Transgender.

Step Five: Knowing why you’re different is a ton of bricks off your shoulders but it wasn’t the only ton there in the first place. You agonize over whether or not to come out, to tell your family but you don’t. A part of you feels like an impostor and another part feels like even if you’re not, you’ll never belong to either your family or the trans community. After training on a child, where your ponytail was used against you and you were thrown to the floor after one of your siblings got a hold of it, you grab the kitchen shears, cutting your ponytail off and leaving it short. It’s the first step towards feeling more like yourself, but when your father demands to know what you’ve done to yourself, you assure him that it’ll grow back. And then you remember that it’ll grow back. 

Step Six: At age sixteen, you begin to stay out later, sneaking out more and more to meet up with the people that taught you about yourself. They call you every name you try, never faltering, never getting your pronouns wrong. They listen when you say you’re Jack now and four months later, when you say that you’re Dalton, they call you that. When you broach the topic to your father about maybe wanting to change your name, you’re met with scorn. And once you make him forget that you ever asked, you determine that you’ll never be allowed to do it. You use an ace bandage to bind for a while, using weed to ease the pain that comes from the bandage cutting into your skin. The pain and the cuts are a small price to pay.

Step Seven: You try to run away multiple times throughout your youth, each time making it a little further than the last. At seven, after being compared to one of your siblings, you make it as far as the next block over before your nanny catches you. At ten, you plan ahead of time and do it in the middle of the night but the door creaks when you open it and the noise wakes your father. At twelve, you think preemptively and go out the window and down the fire escape. You get held up at the bus station trying to buy a ticket. At fifteen, you buy a ticket ahead of time and make your escape out the window but you miss your bus. It’d almost be humorous if you weren’t so desperate to leave. Each time you end up in trouble, not being brave enough to use your powers on your father to make him forget after what happened when you were a child. He tells you that he’s disappointed that you’d prefer to run away instead of reaching your full potential. You snap that night and ask if he’s ever been anything but disappointed in you. Again, it’s reassuring that he only refers to you as Number 6 and not by the all too feminine name you’d been given. You are sent to bed and grounded for your attitude, but you’re never given a straight answer about how if he’s proud of you. It doesn’t matter. You know he isn’t. 

Step Eight: You get caught making a variety of mistakes during your teenage years. With your power set being what it is, you find yourself being careless when it comes down to it. Getting busted with a few ounces of weed on you would surely get you in at least a little trouble, especially considering your friends have attitude with the cops but you toy with their heads, pulling out the memories of you and your friends and replacing them with false memories of the officer finding out his partner had purchased weed. You make his partner remember buying it. You lose your stash in the process but its worth it. After erasing the dash cam, you and your friends are on your way with the cops none the wiser. You were not made for combat but that’s fine. Your powers worked in your favor anyway.

Step Nine: One of your siblings notices you having breathing issues during training when you are sixteen and word gets back to your father. You are cornered and forced to explain that you’ve been binding. It does your father no good to have you unable to breathe, unable to fight. When he offers you top surgery, you feel like it’s a trap but within a matter of months, you’re flat. Waking up in the hospital room and being under the anesthesia, you cry. You begin taking testosterone and keep your hair short again. Your old name is left in the dust, though you sample a few more throughout the years. When you turn eighteen, you settle on Oliver, get a license that has a M instead of an F on it. You look and feel and present the way you want. But it’s not enough.

Step Ten: Your final step in feeling secure is to erase all memories of the girl you used to be. You toy around in your siblings’ heads, make them remember you only as Oliver. It’s not an easy task and some of the memories start to get a little fuzzy by the time you get to your childhoods. The memories are more synthetic than necessary, almost like they’re sugarcoated and hazy but you couldn’t resist. They flowed seamlessly enough and you may have felt like the outsider all your life but now they wouldn’t remember you as one. 

You didn’t erase your father’s memories of who you used to be though. You want him to remember where you started, in the hopes of making him proud someday. You doubt you ever will though.

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