I was hit by a car (a second time), and the injuries were so bad I had to withdraw from college and had to take disability leave from work, and I spent three months unable to even go for a walk or use a computer. It was the first time in my life I remember not having significant stress and responsibility on my shoulders.

I spent that time reading up on Buddhism and meditation practices, and then started meditating an hour a day. Loving kindness meditation in particular created some rather significant emotional breakthroughs.

I don’t endorse Buddhism, but applying the right secular meditation practice was really helpful for me and I credit it for some of the most significant positive changes in my life, and those positive changes accumulated in ways I could have never imagined.

The moment I thought: “What is the point of everything if I’m not myself? Who else am I living for?”

I had a lot of confidence issues as a teen and young adult and hid a lot of myself. It was still a long way after this realisation and I’m not quite there yet, but I’m so much happier since my baseline is “this is who I am, take it or leave it.”

Social life has also improved. Turns out people like a personality even with flaws better than no personality. Who would have thought? (Not 15 year old me, apparently)

The morning of my 30th birthday. I looked in the mirror and thought to myself that I didn’t want to die in the same state I was in then.

It wasn’t a straight line from there, but here I am at 48 with several reasons to live.

In my second year of high school I was really wishing that I was born a girl. I hated every moment of my life since I felt wrong, felt like I was wrong for being who I was. No one ever spoke to me about feelings of gender dysphoria, trans people, about being gay even, or what being queer meant. Like yeah I had basic sex ed but that was all about scaring people away from sex rather than explaining anything meaningful.

I was slowly working up the courage to even search the internet for answers about what was wrong with me. When I finally did, I was sucked into what I was reading. Finally I found the words I had been missing, found how to describe myself. Went through a phase for about a year during the early days of the Covid lockdown where I kept saying “this can’t be me, I don’t have any experiences where I acted like a girl growing up”. Then the memories came flooding back and it all clicked.

Took me a few more weeks to work up the courage to come out to my mom. After telling her I locked myself in my room and cried for a bit. Not because I was rejected, but because I finally didn’t feel like I was wrong.

Took me a few years fighting with the healthcare system to finally be able to start. I’d like to thank the university I go to for helping me actually get the care I needed. It took less than a week from me talking to them for the first time till I got my first pill. Haven’t felt that happy before that day, I was so excited and was crying while that pill dissolved under my tongue.