7. Michael Becomes a Boy…

I guess I started noticing things the summer I was 13. Before that time, I kept wishing and hoping and praying that I would wake up in the morning to find the last 12 years had been a dream…that I had only been dreaming I was a boy all that time. I prayed every night and I hoped that when I woke that I would be the girl I knew I should have been for as long as I could remember. It never happened and that summer my body would show me just how far from that dream I would be taken.

It began in the middle of the night. I woke up and thought I was dying. My heart was racing, I was breathing really fast and I thought I had wet the bed. When I calmed down, I knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure how or why. I tiptoed to the bathroom to clean myself up.  When I started to undress to clean myself up I realized that I hadn’t peed the bed. This was something else. I was so confused and embarrassed that I threw my underwear in the trash. I thought that I had gotten some terrible disease from a public rest room. No one ever talked about anything in my family. No one ever told me what I would go through as part of becoming a “man”.

So I never told anyone…but as time went on that summer more and more things started happening. Things that I had no control over. Things that I couldn’t stop. My body was betraying me in the worst possible way. I went to the library and found a book on human anatomy and development. That’s where I learned about the terrible stage of life I was going through.

I had begun puberty….

My body was at war with my mind. My body was bound and determined to turn me into a boy while my heart , mind and soul were screaming STOP! DON’T DO THIS! I’M A GIRL! CAN’T YOU SEE? I DON’T WANT ANY OF THIS! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T DO THIS!

The changes were a series of relentless, never ending reminders that God had forsaken me, That there was no hope of ever being a girl now. Every time I looked in the mirror and saw the changes taking place I just wanted to die. I wanted to just crawl in a hole somewhere and pull the earth over me and be done with all of it. I hated my hairy armpits, those hanging things that seemed to appear like magic, not to mention the gross hairy thing between my legs that had a mind of it’s own in the middle of the night. Can’t I just die now, please? I’m so embarrassed and ashamed of myself and everything that has happened to me, without my consent I might add, that I would really prefer to just go off somewhere and die. Things kept happening after that. I grew 13″ inches in 8 weeks and got scoliosis as bonus. I grew hair everywhere…everywhere, my armpits got smelly, my face and body got pimples and I started growing hair on my face! FOR FUCKS SAKE, CAN’T WE STOP NOW, PLEASE?

Oh My God, who is this person I see in the mirror? I have always hated you but now I can’t stand to look at you at all. I hate everything about you, How you look, how you sound, the way you walk, the way you smell, the way you act. Every thing that makes you MICHAEL. I look at you and I am completely depressed by all this. All these changes, everything I have had to endure. I want no part of this, of you and what you represent. I’m even more confused about where I belong. I’m pretty sure that I am the only person in the world that feels this way. Why did my life have to get so confusing and complicated? God must really hate me if this is the way he answered my prayers. Why else would he do this to me? I was graduating from grade school and my mother felt the need to buy me a suit to show me off to her friends. So that she could say “see, he turned out normal after all”