My parents divorced when I was four and my mother won the majority of custody, so I spent a lot of time with her at a young age. She would hit us and yell at us. She used to tell me she wished I was blonde with blue eyes, and she would dress my brother Michael up in dresses instead of me or my sister. This would confuse Michael as he got older.
Throughout the 19 years I was raised in California I don’t think my mother ever gave me a genuine compliment. As a young girl she thought I was strange and instead of embracing my individuality, she would tear me down. She often joked that my father wasn’t my father, and that I was “the milkman’s” daughter. Later the milk man would be replaced by John, my step father.
Once I hit puberty the insults really started flying. My breasts were small, practically flat, and that was a huge target for the women in my life. I distinctly remember my mother, my two step sisters, my step mother and my sister calling them ‘mosquito bites’. And the dead horse of ‘pre-pubescent boy’ was beaten to a pulp.
I remember once I wore jeans. I was 5’5 and 95lbs and if you know anything about women’s jeans in the 90’s you’d know that the smaller your waist was, the longer they assumed your legs were. So all my pants dragged at the ankles. Anyway, I wore these jeans and I rolled the cuffs up because I was tired of them dragging. My god, you would have thought I bombed a country. Heidi and my sister dog piled onto me, “Why would you roll up your cuffs? You look ridiculous. No one does that.”
Um….. I fucking do!?
Those kinds of things happened all the time. Every day.
A little side-anectode. Anecdote-ception if you will. My mom attempted to let my hair grow out when I was younger. But she didn’t understand that little girls – especially little tom boys – rough house and play, and their hair gets messy! Without fail, every day, my mom would angrily brush my hair, admonishing me for getting it tangled. It hurt SO badly and I would be crying and begging her to stop or be more gentle. She didn’t care. At one point she thought tying them into the tightest braids on earth would keep them neat.
What a fucking idiot.
Anyway, at 14 I had had long hair for quite awhile. I had grown it out and attempted to keep it groomed (I was never very good at personal hygiene back then) but I got tired of it. I asked my step grandmother to cut it for me. The whole time she was cutting she was telling me I should have long hair. Still, she cut it. My mom was very disappointed.
From then on, the verbal humiliation and abuse escalated. I looked, dressed and acted like a boy. My eyebrows were too bushy. My chest was too flat. My hair was too short. I played video games and ran track.
I was tired.
At 15 my sister introduced me to Luke. He was 3 years older than me and one of her boyfriend’s brothers (or something?). I don’t really remember anything about him fondly. I would go to his house and watch him play video games. After a few visits, he forced himself on me. I won’t go into detail, but it wasn’t violent. I said ‘No’ and he kept going. This would plant a seed in my head that if a man wants something from me, he’s going to take it.
Luke wasn’t good for my self esteem. He would get drunk and text me sweet things, then get sober and tell me he didn’t mean it. He told me once he cared more for his dog than he did for me. I broke up with him after he got drunk and texted that he loved me.
Around this time, my best friend’s cousin came to live with her. Her name was Samiy and I immediately had a crush on her. She had long brown hair and a beautifully full smile. She was funny and into weird things. I didn’t know what to do with these feelings because she was the first girl I was seriously enamored with. I had been aroused by women plenty in the past, but I had never had butterflies or feelings of love.
I didn’t tell Samiy about my feelings until one night she and I were alone in her cousin’s jacuzzi. I was probably super cringe, but I worked up the nerve to kiss her and she reciprocated. Things went down hill from there.
I had forgotten that my mother is a bigot. She had allegedly kicked my sister out for being a lesbian. Samiy wanted me to openly date her, to tell my mother I was…. What? Bisexual? A lesbian? I didn’t even know at the time, I just knew I liked a girl.
I remember one day after school Samiy followed me to my car. I had my head phones in and I knew she was going to ask me to tell my mom again. I was a coward and ignored her. I don’t think we ever spoke again. I think of her often.
So. I was sexually charged and confused. Everyone thought I looked like a boy. I felt like a boy. Was I a boy?!
I graduated high school and left California. I spent the next two years in hotel rooms around the US playing WoW and binge watching shows. The man I was living with was a cuck and encouraged me to sleep with other men.
The rest of my 20’s were a blur. I was working retail making minimum wage. I was at the peak of my bipolarity and psychosis. At 25 I started heavily smoking weed. I was having panic attacks every day and disassociating during most of them. I was emotionally abusing my boyfriend/husband by picking fights and being too dependent. Weed helped calm my head down when I was making connections that weren’t there.
I think at 28 I started seeing a psychiatrist seriously. Her name was Barbara and she was the most understanding psyche I had ever had. She put me on Olanzapine and Sertraline. It was a hard shift, but once I got through the initial months it was like night and day.
I wasn’t looking to fight. I wasn’t getting overstimulated. I stopped shaking when I had a disagreement with someone and that enabled me to actually think during arguments instead of just spitting vitriol or storming off.
I was about 2 years into my twitch gaming era when I started seriously thinking about my gender identity. I looked back and realized I had always been confused. My body didn’t feel like a woman’s. I felt like more like a man. I never felt sexy or beautiful. But the community I had begun building helped me realize that I could label myself non-binary. I was cautious at first, because I felt silly. Gender identity was still a “new” thing and wasn’t socially accepted by all of society (and it still isn’t) and so I felt dumb calling myself non-binary.
But then people began asking me my pronouns. I had be She/Her all my life that He/Him didn’t feel quite right. So I give them the option between She/Her and They/Them.
As I began embracing the non-binary label, I realized how comfortable I finally felt. I didn’t have to worry that I was feminine enough or sexy enough. I didn’t have to explain why I dress and act the way I do.
Sometimes I would call myself trans. When I was in my teens I considered a sex change often. However I don’t know if the trans community would feel the label is appropriate, haha.
I don’t know where to put this so I’ll just add it here at the end:
As social media began to flourish in the 2000’s/2010’s I always noticed how photos of myself were received as opposed to those of my female friends. I never got compliments in my comments like “you’re so pretty!” or “so hot!”. No one complimented my appearance.
I still don’t get many compliments in public on my posts. I get them from the people I care for most when I send them, though, and that’s what really matters.
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