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 female to male in the months that followed. The fog in my head never returned, and though I’ve also been told by friends and family that I’m visibly present and joyful and, as my partner put it, ‘excited about everything’ now, it was really just that near-magical, chemical sludge removal that made me want to scream and laugh and cry my restored, relieved, alive-again little heart out for myself and all the world to hear.
For whatever reason — maybe my own boyish and bent-up little genes, maybe a wash of prenatal androgens from my mother’s preeclampsia, maybe some combination of that and/or a labyrinth of epigenetics that will never be deciphered in your lifetime or mine — I am suited to the male form and the hormone that comes with it, exactly as the deepest instinct of the otherwise-conforming and unassuming little girl who played pretend as a ‘he’ had always known. I don’t know why I’m left-handed, either, but apparently that particular human experience is acceptable, while, to many, my transness is not.
That’s why I, an introvert to the bone who would really rather just not, scream out loud for this callous and churning and, oftentimes, downright cruel world to hear. The joy of feeling human again, as I have in my male form for the past four years, is more than I could ever ask for in the quiet, wonderful privacy of my mind.
But the despair of this being up for debate — the sheer, infuriating, baffling, gut-wrenching ignorance of it all — that is why I write.
I write, first and foremost, to implore the world to leave me and my medication in peace.
I’ve certainly been around the block in other ways, inside and outside that god-awful fog, and I write about those, too. It means a lot that others have identified with my life experiences and told me as much, on Medium and elsewhere.
At the end of the day, though, I’ll be frank. I started all this because I do not want to be dead on the inside again (and, by extension, on the outside soon after), and I will not stop until enough of the world agrees.
So why do you write?
