Diary of one (1) trans person

Every time I smell it, I am taken back to standing in your closet, laying in your bed, putting our socks on to grip the shingles of the roof so we wouldn't fall to our deaths while trying to stargaze in the AMs

I wonder if you think about me. I think about you every day.

I tell all these new people that I'm meeting that I grew up an only child, but it never feels completely true.

It is strange to think, at one time you would have known all these new people too. And now you do not know a single person I know.

I do not know your friends anymore either. I do not know what your current job is. If you are in a relationship. The last time you got sick. Your current favorite band. If you have pets. If you are happy. If you are sad. If you are still angry.

You are a complete stranger to me now. In my head you are a child, a teenager, a 21 year old, my cool big sister, my favorite person, my biggest influence. You are naive and kind, but also stubborn and selfish. You are open to new experiences, and set in your ways. You never cry, but you're crying in front of me again. You are getting everything together, you are falling apart.

But you are nearly 30 now. It has been a long time since we have talked. I like who I am better than I did when I last spoke to you, but I don't think you would like me very much anymore. I've become too brash, too earnest, too stubborn. I'm not very easy. I think you liked that our relationship was easy. I think you resent me for making it difficult.

But I knew there was no way I could stay the way I was. I was a bird outgrowing my cage, and my wing bones were beginning to fracture from the pressure of pressing into the bars. I could not stay there.

I do not regret going. But sometimes I regret how I left you. Sometimes I wish I could go back to you. But there is no me to go back to you anymore. I cannot fit through the doorway I came out of anymore.

There is no going back.

But regardless.

I miss you

I love you

I was 18 when I finally stopped talking to her, now I'm in my mid-twenties, and even after almost a decade I find myself going back to this thought process. The "What if everything was my fault and I stopped talking to my bestest friend in the world for no reason" thought process.

But I found something interesting the other day.

An old reddit post I made a very, very long time ago. We were in middle school, and someone had asked "What's the stupidest thing someone's been mad at you for"

And I described something I don't remember at all. I was sleeping at her house, as I did much of the time. It had gotten late, she was about to take her nightly shower, but I wanted to brush my teeth before she showered because I thought I might fall asleep before she was done showering, teeth unbrushed. She became very angry with me for brushing my teeth before her shower, to the point she would not speak to me for the rest of the night. Because I delayed her shower for 2 minutes by brushing my teeth.

Then, the next day, she gave me the silent treatment for most of the next day, and when she did finally speak to me, it was laced with obvious annoyance.

This by itself, is a story of two 13 year olds who have spent too much time together recently, and like sisters, just start arguing about dumb things, as 13 year olds who have spent too much time together tend to do.

But in actuality, this is how it always was. I have just conveniently forgotten. She was constantly giving me the silent treatment for crimes I had apparently committed, except she wouldn't tell me what the crimes were. And on the rare occasion that I understood what the crimes were, I didn't understand the punishment.

The boy she liked was vaguely nice to me, and I responded politely? (NOT flirtatiously) I was an evil skank who deserved death glares and silence for hours, days, weeks?

A boy at a theme park flirted with me and I'm telling our friend about it? She walks into the room after overhearing and shouts at me angrily, declaring that she had seen that boy walking around with another girl at another point in the day, and that was probably his girlfriend (something I did not witness or know about)

Our friends were extra nice to me one day, and that made her feel jealous? She's not going to speak to me for 2 weeks.

Her parents complimented something I did in front of her? She's silently angry at me for the rest of the night, and when I ask her what's wrong, she shortly says "Nothing."

She asks me to go get her laundry from downstairs one day when I have been in bed all day with a mixture of severe heat sickness and a newly broken toe, when I explain to her that I'm too sick and in pain to carry her laundry up the stairs she says "UGH, FINE! STOP WHINING!"? She is annoyed with me for the rest of the day.

These are all small petty things, but this was almost every day with her from 13-18. In elementary school we were both sweet children who loved spending time with each other more than anything else, but I guess something changed at some point.

I often wonder why she didn't end our relationship. Through our teen years she acted like she hated me a lot of the time. I would try to pull away, give her distance, because I figured SHE wanted this relationship to end since she hated me so much, but then she would become upset that I was pulling away from her.

Something that was also difficult in this time, is that we shared all the same friends, and I knew if I ever stopped speaking to her, they would choose her over me and never speak to me again. Everyone believed she was the nicest girl alive, they constantly told her how wonderfully kind she was. I wondered if we were spending time with the same person.

Despite everything, I blamed myself for the ills of our relationship. If I just did everything right she wouldn't be angry I thought, it's not her fault she feels insecure sometimes I thought, if I just become the perfect best friend and shrink myself so small I can't upset her anymore everything will be good again!!!

I felt that way until... She dated her first boyfriend. And I witnessed how she treated him. So incredibly controlling and condescending. I never understood why she even dated him. She treated him more like a dog than a boyfriend. Hell, she was nicer to her dogs.

That's when I realized, she harmed anyone that she became close with. Me, our other best friend, her boyfriend, her sister. All close to her had to feel her wrath.

I remember our last day as friends. It was a good day actually. She had just started college a few weeks prior, and she had come back home to visit family and friends. We got coffee and walked around town, we talked about her new college life and the boy she liked, we ate lemon iceys from the dollar store like when we were kids. I told her I thought I might be trans, she told me she thought that made sense. Ironically that was my easiest coming out, I knew she would support me in that way.

She also said some things about our friends, people I really loved and cared about, she talked about how annoying and clingy they were. One of these friends was a girl I had feelings for, who my best friend had aggressively tried to "steal from me" earlier that year (unsuccessfully) putting yet another nail in the coffin containing our relationship.

Something about hearing her bad mouth these friends of ours I cared about, this girl I had feelings for who she had borderline used to hurt me, made me snap. She had done so much worse than this, but for some reason this was the last straw for me.

We had a great day. I hugged her goodbye, told her I loved her. We took some pictures together. She left.

And I walked into my house, and realized I had to end our relationship completely.

This is what I remember. But I know I don't remember almost anything, so I always wonder what I'm forgetting.

After I ended our friendship, I realized I had collected a lot of trauma during our relationship. Which felt pretty dramatic. But I started having severe difficulties starting and maintaining relationships.

I was constantly waiting for the people I met to punish me. To give me the silent treatment, or to randomly cut me down, to become enraged at me but refuse to tell me why.

I became extremely anxious. Trying to anticipate every need of the other person so they would not become angry and lash out at me. I realized after a while, that our relationship had made me a complete shell of a person.

I didn't know how to be a friend anymore. I didn't know how to let people be nice to me anymore.

So many years later, I've gone through therapy and I'm around better people, and I still find myself cringing when someone is kind to me.

When my partner is kind to me, sometimes I tell him I need a minute because the emotions are overwhelming, and that sometimes it's scary when people are really kind to me because it feels like I don't deserve it, and because sometimes it even feels like a threat. He understands, he's always really good about it, and he continues to be kind to me. My kindness threshold had gotten wider over time, so slowly it is easier not to freak out when he's kind to me.

Sometimes I don't know if I could have begun recovering if I hadn't met him. Maybe it would have just been a lot slower. I don't know. But I'm really grateful for him and our friendship and our relationship.

I don't know how to tie up this slightly traumatic ramble.

I guess, I think I need to remind myself that just because I don't remember something, it doesn't mean I was automatically the problem. And just because I don't remember something, doesn't mean my body doesn't remember. The body doesn't experience trauma responses for no reason.

Is that my ex best friend of 18 years has become an ABA therapist

She spent our entire teenhood subtly berating me for the way that I was, constantly trying to control my behavior in one passive aggressive way or another, making me completely miserable in the process (mind you neither of us knew I was autistic, I was just the "odd" one growing up)

And now her job is berating autistic children into "normal behavior" until they're miserable.

If you're insecure about your dick size you can hide it in your pants.

I'm just out here, having friends take my hand into theirs like it's made of glass saying "Aw wow your hand is so smallllllll"

Imagine if someone did that to your dick.

Fine

Kind of nice actually

I try really hard to be kind to people and do good things. Partially because I'm always trying to make up for the fact that some part of me believes I was born wrong and bad, and partially because I just genuinely want good things for everybody.

Perhaps it was the abuse and trauma all along and I was never evil to begin with. Perhaps I never needed to prove I deserve to exist in the first place. Maybe I'm as deserving of love and kindness as everyone else is.

I spent so much of my life feeling ashamed for wanting you and wanting to be you

And I immediately ran into two trans women, they both looked at me and grinned knowingly, and I grinned back.

This week has been extremely horrid. The kind of horrid I'll be thinking about for a very long time. life changing horrid.

But in that moment, I felt such joy. To be seen by two of my own, and we're both thinking "Hey you're like me!! I'm so glad to see you!!"

It makes me feel so happy.

Something I've never seen anyone talk about, is how one of the reasons I knew I was trans aside from dysphoria/euphoria, is the fact the trans community has always been home for me. Growing up I never fit in anywhere, ever. Not with my own family, not with my peers, no one. I felt outside of the world my entire life.

When I discovered the trans community in like 2013, I felt so incredibly drawn to it. I always felt this pull in my chest like I was SUPPOSED to be with these people. But I didn't believe I had any right to feel that way, I didn't believe I could be trans. So I sort of skirted around the edge of the community for years. Enviously, lovingly.

Until I eventually DID realize I was trans. And when I finally let myself be part of the community, it was such a relief. For the first time in my life it felt like people liked me like I liked them, for the first time in my life I felt like I sort of belonged somewhere. For the first time in my life I felt understood.

I love meeting trans people in the wild (which happens every time I go out now since I moved to the city)

We always look at each other like we already know each other. Like we're a little bit family. Like we have each other's back. It makes me feel so safe and happy.

I've been putting off reading this for a while, because I was afraid of how much it might reasonate with me.

But today, because of some events, I decided it was finally time.

Our relationships with our Mothers are so similar. Mine was far more distant and uninvolved, but so many of the sentiments remain. The emotional incest, the lack of boundaries, forcing her eating disorder onto her daughter, the hoarding, the rage, the emotional instability. Jennette and I even share a mental illness as well as her specific type of guilt, resentment, and anger.

Whenever I try to explain my relationship with my Mother to other people, I end up wordless. How do I explain the years of awfulness? *Am* I overreacting? I'm betraying her by speaking ill of her, I need to stop talking. Those are my thoughts.

I write off my Mom's behavior a lot, and I tell people her behavior has gotten a lot better. But I'm not sure this is true. I think I've just become a pro at handling her. Like some sort of zoologist. Walking into the tiger den every day.

We'd have a lovely vegetable garden and lots of native plants and grasses around the house. A greenhouse, a coy pond with a little waterfall.

We'd have chickens, and dogs and no cats because he's allergic but maybe we could befriend some neighbors barn cats to satiate our love for cats.

We'd make dinner together and watch the sunset often on our little porch. The sunsets are the best in my hometown.

I'd reconnect with old beloved friends and meet new people. We'd become part of the small town queers and always volunteer for queer events.

Our home would be a safe haven for queer youth, whoever needed a bed, a roof over their head, hot meals, and gay Dads to give them advice and teach them how to be adults would have all of that and more if they wanted it.

We'd have dinner parties regularly, and always host friendsgiving as well as gay Christmas dinner.

We'd have such community, and enough routine and stability that our mental illneses would only eat us a little bit sometimes.

We'd argue like an old married couple, and play bored games, and never stop laughing because we are both the funniest people on the planet.

We'd live long, and well, and fully. Taking all the bends and changes of life gracefully. Together, in our little cottage.