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I felt endlessly lucky, like I had actually made it in life. I got a jumpstart on hormones, got my hands on a stable job, and had a small support system. I was able to start transitioning, able to finally be who I am. It carried over to college, where for the first time in my life, I felt truly, genuinely free. In the middle of this despair, though, kept that want for freedom, for escape. Each attempt at escape resulted in me getting caught and set back to square one, pushing me into an intense despair. In her world, I was a confused young man, someone who was a broken machine in need of fixing.Īs a minor, I ran away several times, once even across state boundaries. Continuous attempts were in place to convince me I was delusional, that I wasn’t trans but just vying for attention, or making a scheme to sabotage her social position. I never directly told her that I’m trans, but she did find out and try to force me through a home-brew conversion therapy. My first step on this journey had to be coming out to my mother. Maybe, just maybe, I could even start to transition. I’m transgender! These words began to fit together into a cohesive sentence, and I began to feel a new spring of joy when my new friends would refer to me as she and her, as they let me try out name after name, and as I began to find out, for the first time, who I was. I began to put together who I was and what that meant for me. Nonetheless, I found my way to the trans corner of the internet, and slowly did the pieces come together. She’d often reprimand me for the smallest mistake, threaten me with physical violence, and humiliate me in front of family and friends, so when she would often rant about how trans people are “mentally ill,” I never dared to even consider that I might be a part of that group, because I couldn’t bare what that would mean for me. I never could understand why-my mother would often scream at me that I was just a lazy failure, and so I figured that must be the reasoning. I simply existed as a passive vessel watching my own body move, my own life unfurl in front of me. Ever since puberty, I had felt progressively more numb, more disconnected from my body and my surroundings than I already was.
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Time goes slow when you’re left alone in a room.
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I was cyberschooled throughout much of my youth, and so would often stare at the same four walls. When I was 14, I sat alone in my Scranton bedroom, looking at the brick building directly outside my bedroom window, spending day after day losing track of time. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All Time.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.