18 years ago a girl was born to a happy and normal family. The family with a mom and dad, two daughters and a son received yet another daughter. The daughter grew up to be a lot like her older brother and she was the closest to him out of all the siblings.
As she grew up she started to feel some kind of feeling pressing her that there was something wrong with the way she was. Something did not feel right. She envied her brother who could go shirtless during the summer and when she was very young she did as well. But then she grew up and received the knowledge that she couldn’t do that anymore because she was a girl and she would soon grow things that would make the differences between her and her brother even greater.
When she was twelve years old she was bullied for the first time. She was so afraid and there was no one who could come and rescue her. That was the first time she wondered if things would have been different if she had been different. Would she still have been teased by the boys if she hadn’t been a weak little girl? Would she still have been closed out of the female part of the class if she had been a boy? Could her life maybe have taken a better turn if she had been born as a boy instead of a girl?
Later that term she changed schools to another school where her old friend was studying. At first things went great. She started to be able to act as a girl, wear makeup and she finally had some female friends. But then again in the eighth and ninth grade she started to get bullied once more. Once more she was unable to shake of the feeling that she wasn’t supposed to have been born this way. Once more she felt more connection to the male part of the class then to the female. She even felt a distinct disgust with the female sex after all of the bullying and harassment she had to endure. To fit in with the girls she found herself having become like them, and that was far from a good thing. She felt herself becoming more and more of a bad person and she grew further and further away from her true self.
In the first term of the 9th grade she changed schools again. She did everything on her own this time. She contacted the school she wanted to change to and checked out her options and what she would have to do in order to transfer. She stood up to the bullies and accused the lead bully for bullying. Sadly that girl faked tears and the entire thing got downplayed. The bullied girl was called a liar and with sadness and loneliness in her heart she went on to her new school, hoping silently things would be different this time.
The new school was nice, and she did make some friends. But the most of the girls in her class suffered from either depression or eating disorders and suicidal behavior. She found herself embracing her sadness even more and that aching feeling grew stronger by the day. In order to cope with the pain she stopped eating. She had done it once before, in the last school. That’s where her behavior started. It was easy to hide it from her parents too. She knew exactly what white lies she would tell in order to keep her stomach empty or as close as possible. She started going to a psychologist eventually and she got a prescription for anti depressives. Her parents didn’t cope well with their daughter’s unhappiness and like the teacher had downplayed her bullying in her previous school, her parents downplayed the sorrow in her heart as well. Once again she had to suffer through the feeling of knowing the people close to her didn’t believe she was suffering as much as she was, nor consider her pain to be great enough to have to do anything about.
Once the medication was put in, the parents figured it was a case closed. And when the girl asked her mom and dad to please help her get into a home where she could learn to eat normally again, where she could get healthy, they said that school was more important. If there was still a “need” for that, it would have to be after she graduated from middle school. From that day on the girl never asked her mom and dad for help again. She stopped telling them how she felt and she shut up like a clam.
She started getting a little bit happier and she started eating again, just enough to convince her parents that she was fine. But the truth, that the girl knew all too well, was that she was not fine. She wasn’t fine at all. By the time she started high school she had become an entirely different person. She had cut her hair and dyed it black. She dressed in more masculine clothes and didn’t like hanging around other people. For the first time ever she received the question “are you gay?” at school. Automatically the girl answered, “No”, but in her heart the answer was not as clear. From that day the girl could not stop thinking about it. She started to wonder If she could actually get attracted from looking at girls. One day, during pe, she had to help a girl in her class with her bra clasp. The girl found herself overwhelmed with a desire she had never experienced before. She was tempted to kiss the girls body, her small waist and her perfect light brown skin. Shocked with the discovery the girl got more and more anti-social and unsure of herself.
Around that time the girl had an old friend who kept saying “I love you, I love you the most” in every text that she sent her and suddenly the girl wondered if their feelings for each other really were just those out of friendship. When she thought of that she found out that her old friend had been sending those kind of texts to almost all of her other friends as well. The girl lost even more of her faith with humanity after that. However, the friend kept giving signs that there was still something between them. One night the girl got invited over for a sleep over which she thought was just going to be between the two of them. She was wrong. The friend had invited over another one of their friends plus a guy she had met on the internet. The day after the friend told her that during the night, she had given that guy a b*** j**. The girl got all cold inside and felt as if her emotions had been ripped apart and run over. She called out “sl*t” to the friend and couldn’t look at her face anymore. After that the two of them never met again.
The girl got sick. She started having these episodes where she passed out and had her body shaking as she fell into unconsciousness. The first time she fell in the stairs and was completely out of it afterwards. The doctors assumed it was epilepsy after a series of checkups. The girl quit high school and decided to take a year off to get well and think about what she really wanted to do. During that year she didn’t do much. But she did find out something about herself. She loved drawing. She really loved it. Before in school she hadn’t allowed herself to love it since there were certain people in the class who were “chosen” to be good at drawing and she wasn’t one of them, aka not allowed.
Listening to her sisters urging her to stop dressing in masculine clothes because it was embarrassing to them, she started to wear feminine clothes once more.
The next fall she started school again, but this time in an art high school. It was a great choice, the girl thought at first. She had some friends although it was a bit of a struggle for her to be so social all at once. Things went well for a while until the next spring. She got sick again. These times she her body shook so much when she lost consciousness the doctor said it was like a really bad earthquake in Tokyo. She was submitted to the hospital for a week. The doctors found out it weren’t epilepsy at all. But in fact they had no idea why her body acted this way, and so they blamed it on emotional stress. Once again she got fine for some time and was able to finish her first year of high school well.
During the summer she grew more and more warped. Or rather she grew accustomed to setbacks, sadness and letdowns, she got so accustomed to it all that she almost expected life to screw up again, and sadly life never seemed to fail doing that. When it was fall again she started overeating till the day she realized she had gained weight. She started to lose it instead, the right way. It went fine at first. But after a while she started to remember the ecstatic feeling she had previously gotten when she saw the low numbers on the weigh. She ate less and less and started purging up all that she ate. She even binged some at first. All of this didn’t add up to much success on the weigh so she got more and more depressed. In the midst of her unhappiness she found a guy online and went and had her first time. She felt more and more pathetic and so very lonely.
After Christmas and school had started again she got glandular fever, and on top of that she got gastritis. She ended up in the hospital again. She was in pain, could barely stand, she couldn’t eat nor drink, and she was still thankful that she wouldn’t have to go to school for some time and act like she is happy and act like she is someone she actually isn’t at all. She had come to hate school, and the mere thought of it. She got texts and emails saying how much her “friends” missed her but she couldn’t believe them at all. Because she knew that the minute she got back to school they would start bothering her again. Teasing her because she is easily annoyed and trying to make her do their assignments for them because she had such good grades. School was h*ll to her. And despite the pain, she preferred sickness to it.
When she was healthy again and came back to school she was so down in the dumps just getting up in the morning was a struggle. She started skipping school, going to the library instead of school just to be able sit alone in silence. Her parents didn’t know and she wanted to keep it that way. She didn’t want them to know what kind of person she had become. She was so deeply unhappy. Her case of gastritis was really just a sign of her eating disorder that had gotten worse and because of that she had evolved that as well. But even after she was “feeling better” she kept puking, and she was only able to eat very little, and less and less every day. Her mother started to suspect something and said one day out loud to her husband “she is puking again, and I think she is doing it to herself”. The girl denied it but she realized at that moment that she had to change. However the change in her mind was not to get well. It was to get better at hiding her misery and illnesses.
When she finally had a short one week break she was so very relieved. Because it was troublesome to have to lie about how school was every day to her parents. When she couldn’t puke anymore to feel better she fell into her old patterns. Cutting.
One day she had eaten chocolate with her mom even though it was against the “rules” that she had made up for herself. So late at night she sat down under her desk and forced two 55g chocolate bars down her stomach as punishment, even though that was far more than her stomach could take. She felt so bad that she cried. That was the lesson she gave herself. And to mark what consequences breaking the rules would have, she cut her legs. She took out a new razor from her desk and she cut almost every inch of her ankles and calves and then she proceeded to cut some on her wrists as well. When her mission was carried out she sat there and pushed her ankles and calves together and then also her wrists together so that the blood from each cut mixed. That was the punishment for breaking the rules. That and “No puking!”
She started to think more and more every day about killing herself. Whoever herself was? She had no idea anymore. She started to suspect that the aching thought that had been bothering her for so many years was because she wasn’t meant to be a woman. Because she really desired to be a man, and the more she thought that the stronger the feeling got. And that feeling told her that she was dangerously close to the truth, too close.
The break was almost over and she had no idea how to get through the next upcoming months and then her last and third year of high school. She didn’t even know if she would be able to make it that long. Her friends had abandoned her one by one. She was all alone and she didn’t even have a lover. Even if she would start looking for one the problems would come up again. A man or a woman, and was she a man or a woman?
One day when she was searching on the internet she found something interesting. There was a term called pansexual that seemed to fit her perfectly. If straight is one way, and gay is another, then bi is a crossroad and pansexual is standing in the middle where four roads meet. That means you like men, women, transgender women, and transgender men. The girl finally started to get a least a little bit clarity upon her life after reading this.
She thought “Okay, so I am pansexual, but that doesn’t change that feeling. It doesn’t change the fact that I might want to be a male and no matter what I do or how many surgeries I have I will never ever become a full-fledged male. Even if I did a sexchange, I would be a fake male. And I wouldn’t be more loved or more popular than I am now. Isn’t it better to just disappear, the way I am now?” That is what the poor unhappy girl thought. And there was no one she could talk to about it. No one in the entire world did she have to discuss her hearts worries to.
The school week got closer and she grew so very unsure if she would be able to survive. Would she even be able to live long enough to see her sister’s wedding that would happen a few months later? And if she decided that it was important for her to survive long enough to be there, how the h*ll would she be able to achieve that? She wasn’t interested in trying harder, or fighting on. She wanted out, that was all she wanted. She dreamed of death, while most people her age dream of life. She dreamt of the afterworld while most girls her age dreamt of travelling around this world. She wasn’t like any other, that much she knew.
But what she was, or where she was going or what was going to happen to her, she had no idea. After all, this is just the story of a girl of 18.