I’m trapped. I’m trapped in several ways. One of them is why I’m writing this, and that’s because I can’t talk about it anywhere else. My family doesn’t know, and whenever I try to talk to my friends they either get quiet, afraid to offend me, or they’re too aggressively optimistic about something that they couldn’t possibly understand. If they knew what it felt like, they wouldn’t be telling me to cheer up.

I’m trapped in my own mind. I’m trapped in my own house. And I’m trapped in my own goddamned body. I’m transsexual. And I have to explain to everyone I tell that to what the fuck it means, because everybody thinks it means I’m a hermaphrodite or a cross-dresser. I was born with a body that doesn’t suit my brain, and now my brain knows it and it’s making me pay for it. I deal with constant, seemingly incurable depression. My chest houses a constant pain, a dull aching, like my heart is breaking, over and over again. I can feel parts of me that aren’t there. I can’t even handle hearing my name anymore.

I don’t know why this is happening to me, or how to feel okay about it, but I doubt that’s possible at this point. I’m not a normal person. I figured that out long before I realized this, but I’m even less normal now. Normal people don’t have brains that reject their entire bodies. Normal people don’t hide inside because they’re afraid of someone calling them “sir”. Normal people don’t stare at pictures of beautiful women, crying and holding serrated knives to their Adam’s apples. I don’t know what normal people do. But I want this to be over so I can figure it out.