I was a cantankerous teen; I was fickle and hard to predict. Mentally, my enemy was my parents, and while it was partially me being rebellious, the state of affairs at home was them wanting me to fall in line. Well, a sane person would say they are the adults and I am the child. Falling in line is necessary, and then my mother’s crying is heard. “I would rather have my son be dead or smoke crack.”

After some repetition of these words, I learned them to be true. While I resided in my grandparents’ hovel, my mother would turn the lights off in the bathroom and bring vodka and orange juice in the bathroom with an assortment of pills from anything she found or bought.

The blow-back of things I did were met with simple hard force: being locked out of the house, intimidation, and trying to take my keys when I got older. These schmucks were of the lowest caliber in terms of people. When I was twelve or thirteen, I started drinking; by then, my older brother was taking pills. I realized my mother considered me a man and wanted money or something out of me, and that was what the drinking symbolized.

My double dealings came quickly. These people were easy to anger, yet easier to deceive. Their simplicity was no match for soft power or any amount of coercion. I started to walk around with a sense of invulnerability and amnesty towards my family. While I came home, I would be called by my middle name, a western name by nature. When I went to school, I was unaccompanied by any family. There, I was called by my peers by my first name.

This was the first line I drew in the sand, and I slowly compartmentalized things to buy distance. By the time I got my second phone and my first car, I rarely saw my family. I bought a lot of distance, and I slowly cultivated a rapacious mind directed even at my family. One of my acquaintances I knew was a fellow classmate who only knew a single alias of me. He and his brother were very religious, and I enjoyed that they didn’t drink or do drugs. I have a very high opinion of these people. I would play board games with them and sleep over at their house when my romantic life wasn’t going well. Around this time, I started to transition, and only a handful of people knew. I had to give up the stability of my religious acquaintances. The stark, sheering sense of isolation, accompanied by the thrill of getting ahead of other people’s thoughts, was fun.

Slowly, I became an adult, and the reason for the duplicity ceased, and I had to burst these balloons I had created. John Wayne or James Bond wasn’t real, just a demure woman, and I mulled it over. Then I realized I had to give up a sense of pride by giving up these facades. Then I thought about doubling down on years of work, and I saw something that scared me in this. I slowly started to walk around, scared of my own shadow and afraid that if I looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t see anything. As if I were a Romanian and my name was Nosferatu.

What was an innocent game of cat and mouse spiraled out of control into something unrecognizable. Then one day I landed back in the nest that my family threw me out of; the occasion was my grandfather’s death. My whole family was there, and I didn’t recognize them, but the feeling was mutual for them. I looked into the mirror while I excused myself to go to the restroom and finally saw my own reflection. What I saw was not recognizable to me. It was not my first alias, but someone who was behind the mask the whole time, and I felt naked for the first time. Yet, naked only to myself, no one shared the sight of who I was.

When you go off the deep end, you have a precipitous knee-jerk reaction to do what you have been doing to get out of the situation. Inherently, this is troublesome for wicked people; you must be sympathetic to my plight here. You are reading my blog after all.

So I did the rational thing. I learned a small amount of self-control and cleaned up my act. By then, though, I was estranged from my whole family. I lost every relationship I ever had; however, in the face of this loss, I believe I found something precious.

With skills that are guileful or cunning, the immediate reaction is to fly too high and to be scorched by the sun. if you can survive initial freedom for long enough to learn self-control. Then you have obtained a rare skill. From time to time, I mourn a broken family I once had and an identity I once adored like a piece of fabric. Yet I am reminded of the bar of entry and the debt I had to pay to learn what I know today.

I spent years walking around not knowing who I was; every time I looked in the mirror, I was something else. After losing my face and being disregarded by my family, my voice became shrill, and it was really difficult to speak until my mid-twenties. The tension in my throat was often so overbearing that my shrillness gave way to muteness. Subsequently, I lost a few jobs because of the unreliability of my own voice.

I was so afraid of my own intentions; this is something that shatters all sense of self. The self-doubt doesn’t bring tears but a vacantness and separation from the regular human condition. The struggle of talking to people is compounded because you are unsure of what you will do. It took years for me to speak, and my voice did not give out unexpectedly.

It took longer to have faith in my own intentions.