Why I write

Writing isn’t my day job, and it would probably be my third choice after programming, which pays the bills enjoyably enough, and art, which gives me a world of my own.

Though I was always told I had a knack for it, I hated writing in school and went to bed a bundle of nerves every time I had to face a ‘timed writing’ the next morning in English class. I never considered myself a storyteller, either, until I suddenly had stories to tell and, for the first time in a long time, a vested and active interest in staying alive.

I can tell you about that very moment, too — the one that flipped the switch. One afternoon, in mid-January 2021, I was going about my usual afternoon walk here in Northern Colorado when I realized, out of nowhere, that the mud in my head was just…gone. The mud, fog, churning, whatever — it had been there like permanent tinnitus since I was 12 or 13 — had miraculously evaporated, and I was just present, alone, and okay there on the sidewalk. When I made it back to the house, I sank onto our dark red living room couch in absolute awe. Somehow, I was now capable of a stillness that had never once been accessible to the girl or young woman the rest of the world had known for the past 28 years.

So I just sat there, empty and elated, for two more hours.

At the time of this writing, it has been nearly four years since that moment on the sidewalk. That moment was also the fourth day after my first-ever testosterone injection, which I had elected to start in private before my social transition from…