I used to have this little bucket when I was a kid. I would store my girls’ clothes in it. In my free time, I would put the clothes on, turn on the radio, and dance in front of a glass cabinet, watching my reflection. I would also put a skirt on my head and pretend it was my hair. I loved it. I remember the difference I felt when I wore those clothes in my free time as opposed to my everyday boys’ clothes. It was like my mind switched, I suddenly felt like I was alive. I felt comfortable, confident, and most importantly, like myself.

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The radio I mentioned before was a Christmas gift from my parents. You could play audiotapes and CDs on it. I later found out that I could record my voice onto audio tapes. I became obsessed with it, and I would record myself every day until the wee hours of the morning, reading books and stories I knew by heart. When I ran out of stories, I began creating my own.

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I started writing a lot of scripts with random scenarios, and I would get my friends to act them out with me. I would record these plays I created on audiotape and store them in my shoe box. I also had a collection of audiotapes with stories that I enjoyed acting out and lip-syncing to. When I would ask my cousin to play with me, we would put my girls’ clothes on and be in character as the audio tape was playing. Any time I chose a character to play, it would be a female. I never gave it a second thought. It was my "go to" and I never had to think about it.

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This cousin meant a lot to me at the time. I felt very authentic with her and in my own skin. She was never judgmental, and I would dance how I wanted to. When I was at her house, I would wear her princess dress. I remember she took a picture of me in it, and I loved it. My mom put this picture in our family album.

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Speaking of pictures, I remember going through my mom’s photo album, and there was this picture of her. She was a little older than me at the time. This image triggered feelings in me that I couldn't and still can't fully articulate. The easiest way I can put it is to say I felt like I was looking at myself. I was looking at myself in the near future. However, I knew that my body wasn’t going to look like hers since I was in a boy’s body. I could not understand the feeling, so I just got scared and closed the photo album. My mother has always been someone I admire. I have always wanted to be as beautiful as her when I grow up. I remember her picking me up from school one time, and we were watching a movie when she walked into the class. I turned around. She was wearing a long navy coat with high black boots. I was so stunned by the way she looked, it felt like time stopped and nothing else existed in that moment. I wished I could look like her one day.

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Imagining myself as an adult in the future was never the same as being in the body I was in. I would imagine myself as a woman, a successful woman in show business, working as an actress. It made sense to me. There was never one occupation that I felt would interest me enough to do for the rest of my life. I could clearly imagine myself in different scenarios, doing a variety of things, and playing different characters.

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I always sort of knew that I was different from the people around me. I never felt like I fit in. There was a difference between how I wanted to present myself to my friends, family, and society and how they wanted me to present myself.

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As I started getting older, I would be told I couldn't wear girls’ clothes anymore. It was a shame. I was told boys don’t do such things. I didn’t quite understand it, and I couldn't rationalise this argument. The environment I grew up in emphasised the idea that the only thing that is really real has to be tangible. What we see and touch, whatever was happening in your head or what you felt—is often considered irrelevant or not important. Without having role models around, I believed that. I separated myself and created two parts of me, the physical and the psychological, which were contradictory to each other.

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The psychological part of me always wanted to overcome whatever I was being told and just do what I truly wanted, but I knew that I would not be safe. It was causing too many mental disturbances and a lot of unpleasant social interactions. I started hating this part of myself. This was a mental battle. I would tell myself how much I hate myself and wish the psychological part of me was dead. The self-hatred just kept progressively growing. I lit old pictures of myself in a princess gown on fire and watched them burn. I would imagine fights between the physical and the psychological me. The fights would be quite vivid and dark. I would imagine the physical me choking the psychological me, staring at it, and wishing it was dead. I imagined it so vividly that the psychological part of me became silent and non-existent one day.

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Instead of expressing my authentic self and fighting for myself, I used all the willpower I had to suppress who I truly was and wanted to be.