Not sure if this is in the right place,
Hi
So I can't have this conversation in person because I have trouble trusting anyone including you and my sister and you are deaf so my rapidly diminishing courage to talk to you about anything serious is made that much more difficult (also my last conversation with you ended in me feeling ashamed of myself which doesn't help). Tried talking to you the last few days but there is such a huge divide now. That said I probably need to tell you a lot you might not know already.
So need to go back to when I'm a kid. I don't remember much of Junior school just really a sense of it being wrong. Having no female peers I had no way to articulate or understand what was going on. I think my sisters friend was about it. At any rate the message that what I am is wrong and would be shunned started early on since I was constantly being mocked for how I ran, moved, spoke, acted. So basically junior school I was being emotionally and verbally abused by my peers. Not physically as I was a big kid, but still it started back then. I think I was a rather submissive kid and believed that if I followed the rules I was doing the right thing, one of them being never telling anyone that I was different or that it hurt being treated the way I was.
From there High School started, after a lot of mocking about how I danced and sang I stopped dancing and I'm not sure about the timing but I dropped out of the church choir when they asked me to sing solo. I started giving up on things that I enjoyed because of fear. I think you and mom told me to give up piano the year before as well. That is when a teacher decided to call me a moffie in front of my class and ended up crying and saying I'm not a moffie. I was meanwhile sitting in front of the class with a math text book just asking for help. After re asking the question the teacher laughed and mocked me for just wanting the answer to the question. I sat down and never asked a teacher for help again. Not even in university. In fact I'm not sure I ever asked anyone to help me up until two years ago, more on that later. It was around this time that I started feeling shame for identifying as female. I dressed myself alone that night and felt truly horrified at how my body looked in the mirror. I stopped looking at my reflection after that.
I'm not sure what you saw from there while I was in high school, but I stopped talking unless spoken to and withdrew. If I didn't have a personality people would leave me alone I thought. Instead they did more stuff to try get a reaction out of me. One kid even spitting on me repeatedly. I remember getting in trouble in class when I tried to make him stop because I was causing a disturbance. Other stuff that happened at school was pt teachers singling me out, one kicking a ball into me during running and various other hazings. Perfectly normal for a boy I guess but rather traumatic for me. A field trip I was also smeared with shaving cream and eggs and other stuff. When I was getting to the end of school I had no dreams left, the hope that I would somehow live happily ever after as a girl was gone at this point. No drive, no need to do anything a guidance counselor was shocked to hear I wasn't going to uni and so gave me the form to go. I didn't even apply to the university until after I got the bursary, this is how little I cared by this point.
Thankfully once I started university I started opening up again and being more myself. I started growing my hair out which I loved and was able to just be myself. At least until one day I was fixing my hair in the mirror and was told its ok to groom just don't groom like a girl. A simple statement, but 12 years of school abuse came flooding back and I started closing up again. Eventually I dropped out of university. I had no future and no reason to try, I came home to die. I started working at that point and gained 40 odd kgs due to heavy depression. Comfort eating kept me going, that and the hope that it would lessen my lifespan. Three years ago I finally found out that I was transgender when I ran across an article about it online. I watched countless videos after that and faced true despair. People were able to change and I was stuck in a non existence. Two years ago I decided to end my life as the pain was too great. I decided to tell some of my friends what was going on and they accepted me. My beliefs that no one would accept me kind of fell away at that point and I started crying for the first time in a long time. It was quite difficult after that, a friend had to setup my first appointment with a psychologist. It was around this time that I spoke to you for the first time.
You were understandably shocked when I told you. I expected this much. I was happy that you helped me find out if I could go to a psych with my medical aid and I felt it was ok to talk to you. Then you decided that my gender identity was more due to my inability as you saw it to talk to girls and decided that you needed to tell me that. I was quite upset that you didn't understand anything about me, something I realise its not really your fault, how do you respond to your child saying she is your daughter and has just been ashamed to tell you. The real blow came when I told you I wasn't going to see a psychologist. You looked so happy and relieved. I hadn't finished telling you what I had in mind, but the way you looked just made me feel ashamed of what I was and I haven't spoken to you about anything in my life since.
Then in february of this year I spoke to mom finally. She assumed I was gay and was telling me how disgusting gay people are and filled with drugs and diseases and all the other propaganda that people believe. I had to correct her and fight her on so many of those. She also told me that I would never be anything other than male, which is pretty much flat out rejecting me. Its not my fault I was born this way or that my body is deformed. All I know is I do not relate to being male and it mentally affects me seeing my reflection. She later came to me after I started avoiding her because of how she was making me feel about myself and asked me if her little boy was gone. She was more concerned with me being what she wanted than ever seeing that I was alive in front of her. We never spoke again after that until I said goodbye to her in July. As you can imagine that was rather painful. Id rather not go through that with you so I am distancing myself from you.
I would rather not have this distance but constantly bouncing back and forth between multiple identities is taking its toll on me. Being accepted as Zoe then not, then told I'm a guy, then a male version of Zoe then just being accepted as miss. I really enjoyed my trip as I just felt normal for the first time in a long time. From the airport to the company and back again, I was just Zoe and people accepted that. I don't know if its a lot to ask to be called Zoe or her or daughter. I know its too much to ask my sister, she keeps telling me how hard it is. I just keep quiet about how much it means to me and how much it hurts.
I won't really sign this but you know who its from.
