My House of Pain: A Community Comes Together

That first night walking into trans group therapy felt like stepping into a goddamn electrical storm. My heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to escape, sweat beading cold and slick down my spine. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everyone in that sickly pallor that makes even the healthiest person look half-dead. The metal folding chair bit into the backs of my thighs as I sat, rigid and awkward, a fucking stranger in a room full of strangers.

I didn't know what the hell to expect. Not a clue. Just showed up because Finny—this online friend I'd been messaging on Reddit—had practically dragged me there. She was early in her transition too, thrown out by her family like yesterday's garbage. There's something about shared pain that bonds people faster than super glue.

The room reeked of coffee and anxiety. You could taste the trauma hanging in the air—metallic and sharp at the back of your throat. Different personalities, different stories, all of us wearing our damage like ill-fitting clothes. Some seemed like posers to me, but hell, I felt like the biggest fraud of all. What was I even doing there? My brain screamed that I didn't belong, that I was taking up space meant for "real" trans people.

"Stop looking like you're about to bolt," Finny whispered, her fingers digging into my arm like talons. Her eyes were rimmed with smudged eyeliner that made her look both fierce and exhausted. "You promised, remember? One full session. If you hate it after, I'll buy you a greasy-ass burger and never mention this place again."

I shot her a glare that could've melted steel. "Easy for you to say. You've been coming for months."

"And I still feel like throwing up every damn time," she admitted, her voice cracking slightly at the edges. "But it helps. Swear to god it does."

The facilitator—an earthy mother type—started the introductions. One by one, people shared their names, pronouns, and some bullshit "fun fact" about themselves. My palms turned slick with sweat as my turn approached. What the fuck was I supposed to say? That I still sometimes answered to my deadname because correcting people felt like lighting myself on fire?

When my turn came, I somehow managed to croak out my name. Finny squeezed my knee under the chair, her touch saying what words couldn't: You're doing it. You're here. That's enough.

"So," Violet said after group, cornering me by the sad spread of stale cookies and lukewarm water that passed for refreshments. "First-timer, huh?"

"That obvious?" I grabbed a cookie just to have something to do with my hands.

"Yeah a bit," she laughed, but there was no mockery in it.

Finny appeared beside us, three paper cups of that godawful coffee balanced precariously in her hands. "I see you've met the Video game girl," she said, nodding toward Violet.

"Hardly," Violet snorted, accepting the coffee like it was liquid gold. "I just play a lot."

"Violet is good peoples. She just doesn't talk much.," Finny explained, her eyes darting between us like she was putting together puzzle pieces.

We stood there, three strangers connected by nothing but shared struggle, sipping bitter coffee that burned our tongues and somehow tasted like hope. The conversation wasn't profound—just fragments about shitty jobs, worse landlords, the nightmare of changing names on documents. But beneath it ran a current of understanding so powerful it made my chest ache.

Later, stumbling into the night air that smelled of rain and city grime, Finny bumped her shoulder against mine. "So? Verdict?"

I inhaled deeply, letting the cold air fill my lungs until they burned. "It was... something."

"Something good or something that makes you want to hurl yourself into traffic?"

My laugh surprised me, scraping out of my throat like it had forgotten how to exist. "Still deciding."

"Didn't feel like I was being welcomed. Felt like being seen. Different thing entirely." I said with an off hand tone.

Finny stopped under a streetlight, her face suddenly serious in the amber glow. "That's why we keep coming back. Not for the shitty coffee or the breakthrough moments they promise in those pamphlets. It's for those seconds when someone looks at you—really fucking looks—and you don't have to explain a damn thing."

The night wrapped around us like a blanket, neither comforting nor threatening, just there. Existing, like us. I didn't know then that Violet would become family, that chosen bonds would prove stronger than blood. I just knew that for the first time in forever, the screaming in my head had quieted to a whisper, and maybe—just fucking maybe—that was worth coming back for.

But then, I looked around and saw reflections of myself. Fragmented pieces of my own experience mirrored back at me in these strangers' eyes. It hit me like a punch to the gut—I wasn't alone in this clusterfuck of gender discovery.

Violet was the first person I really connected with beyond Finny. This socially awkward girl with hands that never stopped moving, fidgeting with the frayed edges of her sleeves. Young, with eyes that were forced to look at shit, Christian shit, way too much. The guilt on her soul was just too real to see. Too real to experience. And her social anxiety, driven by her puritanical upbringing was all too obvious. All I wanted to do was show her what a Mother is supposed to do. We started talking, her voice soft like she was afraid someone might tell her to shut up at any moment. I could see in her, the same damage that Zoe had put me through.

All the while, Wendy was prodding me from inside my skull. “Keep going. Keep showing up. You could help that girl, Violet. You could be a mother again for someone else, not just Ylse.” For once, I listened to her instead of burying her deeper.

The first time she flinched when I moved too quickly, something broke inside me. Fucking shattered like glass on concrete. I recognized that movement—the instinctive duck of the head, shoulders hunching inward—a body trained to expect the worst. I'd done it myself so many goddamn times under Zoe's tyranny.

"You're safe here," I told her, the words tasting metallic and strange on my tongue. How long had it been since anyone had said that to me? How long since I'd believed it myself?

Violet's eyes darted up, wide and uncertain, like a fawn trying to decide whether to bolt. The afternoon light through the coffee shop window caught the faded bruise on her wrist, poorly hidden beneath that frayed sleeve. My stomach clenched into a tight, angry knot.

Tell her about your own scars Wendy urged from within. “Show her she's not alone.”

For once, I didn't fight against my true self. The barriers I'd built—the ones that kept me silent and small—began to crack and crumble.

"My mother used her wrath on me like a weapon," I said, throat dry as sandpaper. "Bet yours does too."

The shock on her face—it was like watching someone see their reflection for the first time. Her fingers stopped their endless dance with the sleeve threads. Tears welled up, hanging on her lashes but not falling.

"How did you know?" Her voice barely a whisper, the scent of her fear mixing with the burnt coffee smell around us.

The raw need in her voice hit me like a punch to the gut. I remembered that desperate hunger—to be seen, to be understood. To not be so fucking alone with the pain.

“This is why you're here,” Wendy reminded me. “This is why we survived.”

My hands trembled as I pushed my mug aside, leaning closer. "Because I've been where you are. Because I know what it's like when the people who should protect you are the ones who break you."

The shop buzzed around us—the hiss of the espresso machine, the clatter of dishes, meaningless chatter—but in our little bubble of shared pain, there was a strange, terrifying intimacy. Her eyes, still wide and wary, held a flicker of something I hadn't seen in years.

Hope. Dangerous, beautiful fucking hope.

“She needs you,” Wendy whispered inside me. “Like you needed someone. Like you still need someone.”

The walls I'd built to keep Wendy silent were crumbling now. My true self surging forward, demanding to be heard, to be felt. To mother this broken girl when no one had mothered me.

"You don't have to tell me anything," I said, feeling the rough wood of the table under my palm, grounding me. "But if you want to talk, I'll listen. And I won't tell you it's part of God's plan or some bullshit like that."

A tear finally broke free, sliding down her cheek. The sound she made—half laugh, half sob—cut through me like a blade. This girl, with her guarded clothes and her haunted eyes, was so much like looking in a mirror, it made my chest ache.

“This is how we heal,” Wendy insisted. “This is how we become whole again—by being what we needed for others.”

For once, I didn't try to silence her. For once, I let Wendy—my true self—guide me toward something that felt real. Something that felt like redemption.

Then came the dinners. Started small—just Finny and me huddled in the corner of some random spot in town, picking at food, our voices hushed like we were sharing government secrets instead of tales about our first days on hormones. The cheap vinyl seats stuck to the backs of our thighs, air thick with grease and possibility. Our fingers trembled around chipped mugs of coffee so bitter it made your fucking teeth hurt, but we drank it anyway, washing down words we'd held captive for too goddamn long.

But our little gathering grew like some beautiful, chaotic organism. Qahira joined us with her eyes that cut through bullshit like a hot blade, always there with words that were kind. Then Shay—who I latched onto because she was just cool as shit. And she liked Charlie Parker, which made me laugh until my ribs felt bruised. Fucking Charlie Parker. No match for John Coltrane's soul-ripping saxophone that could make the universe cry. Something about her energy pulled me in—raw and electric, like touching a live wire but somehow surviving the shock.

Then came Steph with her perpetual fucking insecurity and fear over transitioning. We never understood why it clung to her like a second skin, this bizarre rule that she couldn't do a goddamn thing with her transition until she actually started HRT. I mean, she wouldn't even go dress shopping or anything until the hormones were swimming through her bloodstream. It was something that made my brain itch, like trying to scratch a wound that's just out of reach.

I offered— I offered more than once to take her dress shopping. My voice gentle but insistent, "Come on, let's just go look." And she said no. And then twice again, no. Each refusal sharper than the last, cutting through the air between us like a blade. Her jaw would tighten, tendons standing out on her neck, eyes cast down to the floor where they traced invisible patterns in the carpet. The silence after each rejection hung in the room like smoke, acrid and suffocating.

She would sit in the group sessions, her fingers twitching against her thighs, palms slick with sweat, talking about these things in a voice that cracked and wavered. How she had bought herself a purse—this soft leather thing that probably still smelled like the store it came from—but she wouldn't carry it around with her until she was on hormone treatment. The purse just sat in her closet, gathering dust in the darkness, waiting for permission to exist in the world.