Prompt 1: I remember...

Just the first in a series of autobiographical pieces written from prompts with my class/group. These are all pretty raw, they have seen little to no editing, aside from some spelling/typo correction.

I remember...



I remember little of my past, years of physical pain and substance use (both perscribed and self-perscribed) have rendered my memory a bit fuzzy.

My first memory is from when I was just a toddler. three or under. I was walking into the kitchen with the family dog next to me, my mother was there, presumably cooking. That's all there is of it.

My middle school years are an especial blur, I know I was struggling to discover who I was and that the constant bullying made this much more difficult. I suppose that age is tricky for everybody but with my many issues it was rendered nightmarish for me, especially as puberty hit and did not lead the way a part of me knew it should.

I did, however, meet two of my best friends in this time. My foster brother, Brian and my dear friend Heather, the first people I came out as transgender to (Brian's wife excluded.) Highschool did not make matters better for me, I continued in my confusion about who I was and what it meant to be so. I did not know whether I was gay (though I felt no real attraction towards men, I convinced myself that I might just be deeply repressed. ) and the constant pressure from my peers to be "manly" complicated the issue further. A clear point in my mind comes when Brian, shortly after breaking up with a girlfriend and while sitting on a curb next to me, suffering from heartbreak, told me "if you were a girl I think we'd be soulmates." Perhaps one of the most awkward moments of my life, made worse by the fact that at that point I still did not fully realize I was a girl.

It was not until my late teens or early twenties I began to suspect what was wrong with me, that in fact the apparent gender I was born in to was not correct. It occured to me one afternoon in my brother's appartment, sitting in his computer room. We had been discussing the idea of "chicks with dicks" and my contention that a penis defined one as a man was contested by him informing me of various genetic factors that could go wrong with regards to gender (XXY, people with two X chromosones having penises, etc.) The unlocking of the knowledge that this was possible opened me up to the realization that this was in fact what was going on with me.

Author's Note

ignore grammar problems