(first posted on Facebook on September 5, 2013 - I add it here as it is a big part of my moments)
"Hello World!"
Anyone who has ever taken a course in a programming language will tell you that one of the first pieces of code you write has, as its sole purpose, to output the sentence “Hello World!” onto the screen. If someone was to think on a philosophical level as opposed to one of logic, they would come to understand as I have that what we did in that moment was nothing short of magical; with those few lines of semantics and instructions we gave a lifeless entity a voice.
"Hello World!"
That is my voice, long buried with the hurt, rumbling from my chest, creeping up my throat only to be obstructed by clenched teeth and tight lips that for so many years have played sentry, instructed to prevent any mutinous word to escape. With time, the defences put in place start to weaken and those lips that have so often hid the truth with their smile, part to let the words of liberation escape and float upon the air:
"Hello world, I am transgender."
My entire life I have been surrounded by a loving family, by the best of friends a person can ask for yet the feeling of the body being disjointed from the mind was a nagging constant. As a child, I didn't have the language to express how I felt but even if I did, I was conscious enough to know that it was unwise to speak these things out loud. With my secret safely locked away in my core, my heart and soul withered but my shell grew a thick layer of crafted confidence; just please, don't ask me how I am feeling, I will sell you a lie. I played my part on the stage of life and I fit in well. There was no bullying, there was no mocking. Not from others. There was also no honesty with myself, my self-deprecation was my bully. My mind was my tormentor. My body was my persecutor.
Every night as I lay in bed, my youthful naivety allowed me to ask god to make me whole, to let me wake up as I should have been born. Come morning, a peek beneath the sheets revealed that nothing had changed leading me to alter my tactics and instead I prayed for my mind to be fixed because something was obviously broken. Come morning I would tell myself "I'm a boy!" but the words painted me in every shade of wrong. With my last bit of remaining faith, and with the youthful innocence long vanished, I asked one last thing of god, to please bring me death.
And yet here I am.
I was angry then. I collected dark thoughts and locked them away with my secret; these new twisted characters that accompanied me on my journey. The laugh practised to perfection, the sarcasm aimed at others as a protective shield. I never imagined a happy ending for myself but each day I survived; grade school, high school, university. University, a study in self-discovery with a few detours in the wrong direction. I found it then, the name for what I was feeling: Transgender. Trans, as in opposite of. Of all the subjects I took in school this was the hardest to grasp. Trans, as in across of. It was mine to live with now and knowledge was not power, it was despair. Trans, as in not normal.
Nowhere is it defined as such but in that instant, it fit. Not normal.
But then university had a surprise for me, it brought me love. My secret felt easier to carry with her around, never forgotten, never spoken, but buried deeper. Those dark characters that travelled with me died the fate they were destined to have; one jumped off a roof, one overdosed, one hung itself. Stripping it down to its very essence, the love I never believed would be directed towards me, that love, saved my life.
I successfully received my University degree, I had a good paying job, I was married to the one I love, we had our own house, two cars and a dog. That, I told myself, would be the end of the miscommunication between mind and body. This had to be the cure. After all, I had done what many other men set out to do and ergo, I am a man. So why was I still feeling this way? Hadn't I done all that was expected of me? What have I done to deserve this? Is being "normal" too much to ask for?
This was my normal. Closets, no matter how large or how small, are designed to keep you lost and guessing. They deprive you of all your senses except your thought processes and the constant ebb and flow of the coming out or staying in tides will drive anyone mad. I have truly known that I was different from the age of 10, possibly younger but those memories are but skin left behind on the pavement after a tumble, long forgotten and scabbed over. I knew I was transgender from the moment I read the definition written in a most ugly shade of green in an LGBT flyer. That being said, admitting it to yourself and accepting it for what it is, is an entirely different concept than telling someone you love and care about.
I had asked god to take my life, I had thoughts of taking my own, and not once before 1996 had I ever thought I would live to see my own version of a near story book ending. But I'm right here, I made it and I'm writing you this letter. It will leave many of you wondering but just know this, despite any changes in appearance, I am the same person that I was before you started reading this letter and now that you have reached the conclusion, you are being introduced to a truer self of me. I am ready to start living the complete truth now, with all of you by my side. I am Serena, transgender woman, and I am pleased to meet you.
"Hello Word!"
