The first time I was given a hint about who I am was from the mouth of an elementary school child in the form of a taunt

 

She was my best friend and looking back she was not a very good best friend but she lived next door and we shared a birthday and what was a best friend to a child if not that

 

I don't remember how old we were but we were old enough to walk the half a mile home from school without an adult

 

She was making fun of the tomboy in my class and like a secret to be shared just between the two of us my best friend said that when the tomboy was older she would be probably ’get the switch’

 

I was a more sheltered child than she was and I wish to do this day I had kept my mouth shut and just nodded along but I asked her what she meant

 

My former best friend gleefully informed me that she meant the switch down there

 

Out loud I agreed because I would have traveled to the moon for her and I might not remember exactly what words were said but I do remember thinking ’You can do that?’

 

I was disgusted with myself, for this was not the thought of learning something new but the thought of curiosity

 

And my best friend's reaction to it let me know that clearly this was a forbidden thought and this girl would never steer me wrong

 

Right?

 

 

In sixth grade the class was split into two groups, boys in one room and girls in the other as we finally discussed the forbidden topic

 

Puberty

 

🎵Just around the corner🎵 do you recall that jingle, that night my class went home to tell their parents about what they had learned

 

I have a secret, I watched the girl’s video in class and that night I went home and looked up the boy's video

 

For the first time but far from the last I cried about who I was supposed to become, I didn't have the words to express what was wrong but I wanted to run so far away and so fast that I could leave my skin behind and start again

 

I cried into the arms of somebody who was so much wiser than me, who knew the secrets of the world, who could tell me exactly what to do

 

She was in middle school

 

And one year older than me

 

I cried not to my parents but to my mom's best friend's kid, our families had grown up so entangled with each other that she was practically my older sister but with a strange distance between us

 

I needed somebody to complain to, to stop bottling it up inside but it had to be to somebody that it wouldn't hurt when they left

 

Because she would be as disgusted with me as I was with myself, clearly there was something wrong that people couldn't see

 

She changed my life when she just held me tighter and told me it would all work out in the end

 

I didn't know it at the time but she would eventually become my best friend and everything that I currently admire about her started in that moment

 

I then had a positive to balance out the negative and I could back to living in the strange neutral limbo that most of my life exists in

 

When I first saw gay rights on my TV I was happy that people were fighting for who they love and I continued on with my life

 

When I first heard the term transgender on TV I sat down and watched,

 

For the first time, here were people like me

 

I delved deep into any form of reading I could find about this topic and Dionysus became my God

 

He was put in a dress and told to be a pretty pink girl when he knew that he was clearly a boy

 

This was done to hide him from the wrathful gaze of Hera and fantasy became my escape

 

Because surely I was being hidden from something far grander than me so my suffering was for a good cause

 

Surely the solution was as easy as taking off the dress and storming up to Olympus and declaring who I was to the world

 

And then middle school and puberty hit me like two semi-trucks full of cement from either side

 

My voice became higher, my hips wider, my chest larger

 

And my classmates became cruel, spiteful and just downright mean

 

People always gush about how I didn't have that horrible preteen phase but that's because I was too busy trying to hide my body in hoodies and degrading myself

 

By the time I reached high school, I was a mess but I found my own ways to cope and when the baggy hoodie finally came off the doctor didn't wait for the blood tests to come back, he got me on an IV immediately

 

I had lost over forty pounds in that last week alone

 

It has taken seventeen long years to make it here and I'm not even happy a lot of the time

 

I still cry myself to sleep over the parts of myself that don't fit quite right and I still wonder if pushing through each roadblock is even worth it

 

So when you ask when I knew I was trans, it was never a matter of when I knew

 

It was when I was willing to listen