Alex
Blackthorn

But it's all wrong.

There is wall to wall carpet in the kitchen and the bathroom. The floors are uneven and it makes all the tables and chairs wobble. The dishwasher leaks even when you're not using it. The spoons are too big for your mouth and the dishes are abrasive on your fingertips. The toilet is too low and all the faucets are backwards. The water pressure is too weak and the shower never gets hot enough. There are blinds, but they don't close all the way so that every time you try to watch television there is a blinding glare in part of the screen. The light switches are all in unintuitive places and you have to step on your toes to reach them. All the lights flicker. Not incessantly, but just enough to be constantly bothersome. Your bed makes a horrible squeaking sound every time you shift and when the rest of the house is silent there is a faint high pitched tone coming from an ambiguous place that you can't pinpoint but that you can't tune out.

You're a little kid and you don't know anything else so you just live with it with the hope that someday you'll grow into it or at least get used to it.

But you never do. In fact it only gets worse. The lifetime of inconvenience and discomfort becomes unbearable. Now that you've grown the toilet is so low that you have to line it with cushions just so you can use it, but they get splashed with toilet water and smeared with shit and you're so embarrassed that you have to use them that you hide them away after every use. That becomes a perpetual source of anxiety because every once in a while someone comes over and you're terrified that someone will stumble upon your hiding space, see them, be disgusted, and ask you what the fuck is going on. The squeaking of the bed and the high pitched tone get louder and louder so that the only way you can get any sleep at all is to drown the sounds out by crying yourself to sleep. Every night.

Every day your parents come over to visit you and with beaming eyes ask you how you like the place. You want to tell them, but you know that they won't understand because their house is nearly identical and they love it.

So you put on your best face and you lie and you tell them it's great because they sacrificed their own lives to build that house for you and also because you're terrified that if you told them the truth that they would be devastated and disappointed in you for being ungrateful and everyone you knew would find out and they would be disgusted and distance themselves from you.

So you power through and you keep lying every day until you kind of start to believe it yourself. You even kind of get used to it, but not really. So you start thinking that maybe it's not the house that's the problem. Maybe the house is just right and you are the problem.

So you look into it and you come across some other people that have experienced a similar situation. Not exactly the same, but similar. You see what happened to those people and all of your fears are reinforced because everything that you were afraid would happen if you told the truth happened to them. In more than a few cases their parents were so furious that they completely disowned them, and all of their friends were so disgusted that no one ever came to visit again.

You don't want a similar fate, so that option is not an option at all. At that point the only way out is death.

Six months ago today I started transitioning. I couldn't fucking stand living in that house anymore and I didn't want to die so consequences be damned I decided to remodel that house and start HRT.

For the last six months my house has been covered in sawdust. There are walls missing and chunks of plaster everywhere. There are open pipes and exposed wires. Strange men carrying greasy toolboxes come and go and tear up the floors and rip out sinks cursing and sweating as they do it. Someone else's big dirty truck is blocking my driveway and I have to walk past a smelly dumpster full of debris on my way out the door.

But yesterday the bedroom was finished. It took me by surprise. I got home and I went in and all the light switches were where they should be. The carpet was clean. The bed didn't squeak anymore and the high pitched tone was gone.

I was so tired.

I went to bed and I fell asleep right away and I slept for hours and hours. And when I woke up the sun was pouring through my window instead of smoke. The beeping and whirring of garbage trucks was replaced by the gentle chirping of birds, and the smell of the paper mill down the block was replaced with the smell of fresh flowers.

The rest of my house is a fucking disaster and it'll be years before it's finished, but last night I got the first good night's sleep I've ever had in my life.

Thank you all for being so patient with me.

Wylie Amanda VanWenger June 19, 2019