The pain marks you long before you know what to call it. It nestles in your bones like a parasite—feeding, growing, whispering this is all you're worth. The sensation crawls through your marrow, cold and relentless, a constant companion in the darkness that feels like ice water injected directly into your spine, numbing and burning simultaneously. My first memories taste of ash and fear, bitter on my tongue like sucking on pennies, small shoulders bracing against storms too fucking big for a child's frame, muscles trembling with the effort to stay upright when everything around me threatened to shatter into a million cutting pieces that would slice through whatever remained of my innocence.
I remember those yellow pants with the elastic waistband, always a size too small, fabric worn thin at the knees from crawling away from Zoe's anger. The cotton threads frayed and stained with dirt and tears, a pathetic armor against her rage that might as well have been tissue paper for all the protection it offered. My mother—that hurricane disguised as a woman. Beautiful, unpredictable, devastating. Her love came with teeth that tore chunks from my heart; her absence with abandonment so complete it felt like being erased from existence. When she smiled, the world glowed golden for precious seconds before the thunder in her eyes returned, bringing the familiar storm that left emotional shrapnel embedded deep in my psyche, fragments that would work their way to the surface years later, unexpected and agonizing.
Helen was my salvation, my lifeline in an ocean that wanted to drown me. Her hands gentle where Zoe's were cruel, her eyes soft where Zoe's cut like broken glass dragged across exposed flesh. In movie theaters with popcorn-sticky fingers, I'd find fragments of childhood stolen back from whatever beast lived inside my mother. The buttery smell coating my palms, mixing with the salt of tears I'd learned to cry silently, the flickering light dancing across Helen's kind face as she laughed beside me, oblivious to the war raging inside my small body. But even in those quiet moments, something stirred beneath my skin—an uncomfortable electric hum, a voice too faint to hear but too persistent to ignore, like a splinter driven deep beneath the surface, throbbing with every heartbeat, infected with truth I couldn't yet name.
A wrongness I couldn't name, couldn't face, couldn't acknowledge without my entire fucking world collapsing around me like a house of cards in a windstorm, scattering the pieces of my carefully constructed reality into oblivion.
The voice had a name. Had always had a name. Wendy. My true self emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis of bone and blood and bullshit, wings wet and crumpled, struggling to unfold in air too thick with lies. She whispered through the cracks in my masculine facade, her words razor-sharp against the lies I told myself in the mirror every goddamn morning, each syllable a tiny cut that accumulated into gaping wounds.
I became the stereotype of manhood—loud, aggressive, bloody-knuckled and hollow-eyed, a caricature so overdrawn it should have been fucking obvious. The pain of becoming yourself when you've spent decades being someone else cuts deeper than any blade, carves valleys into your soul that no one else can see or touch, leaves you bleeding internally while you smile and nod and pretend everything's fine. My record in the cage wasn't just bad, it was fucking pathetic, a testament to failure disguised as masculinity. But each loss, each new bruise blooming purple across my ribs like poison flowers, was proof I was trying. Proof I could take the punishment. Proof I was a man. The metallic taste of blood on my tongue became familiar, almost comforting, as I spat it onto the canvas floor, watching it pool and congeal like all the words I couldn't say.
But I wasn't. I never fucking was, and the knowledge of that truth was acid eating through every layer of pretense I'd carefully constructed, dissolving the person I pretended to be until only raw nerve endings remained.
The animal thrashing in its cage, seeking any escape from the choking reality of being caught between who you pretend to be and who you are, claws scrabbling against bars that only get stronger with each attempt to break free. That's what led to the self-destruction. The bottle. The fighting ring. The betrayal—not just of flesh but of trust, of vows that should have meant something. Nights spent drowning in whiskey that burned my throat but couldn't burn away the truth, my hands shaking as I poured another glass, another escape from the woman screaming to be acknowledged inside me, her voice growing hoarser with each ignored plea.
The beatings came often after that—his fists like sledgehammers against my ribs, breaking bone and spirit with equal brutality, each impact a percussion that echoed through my entire body. The physical anguish was preferable to Wendy's voice, to the truth she carried like a torch in darkness. Each punch was penance, pushing Wendy deeper into silence, if only for a moment, the pain exploding across my consciousness like fireworks, momentarily drowning out her persistent whisper that refused to be extinguished no matter how hard I tried.
My affair was another way to drown her out—desperate, white-knuckled attempt to maintain a grip on an identity crumbling like wet clay between my fingers, slipping away no matter how tightly I held on. But let's call it what it actually fucking was: cowardice dressed up as crisis. Self-destruction masquerading as self-discovery. I chose to blow up someone else's life because I didn't have the guts to face my own truth. The sweat-slick bodies, the grunting, the performative dominance that felt as hollow as my laughter, as empty as the space where my authentic self should have lived—every thrust was a lie, every touch a betrayal, every moment of pleasure stolen from the woman who'd given me everything.
I convinced myself that by dominating someone, by playing the role society assigned me, I could feed the starving part that needed to feel masculine while maintaining the façade I presented everywhere else. What absolute fucking bullshit. What pathetic, self-serving garbage I fed myself to justify the unjustifiable. I wasn't trying to be masculine—I was running from who I was, and I trampled Mary's heart into the dirt to do it. I used another person's body like a shield against my own reflection, and Mary paid the price for my cowardice. But afterward, in the dark, shame would slither through my veins like poison, cold and nauseating, making me hate myself more than any external punishment could. And I deserved that hatred. I deserved every fucking drop of it, and more besides.
The truth clawed its way out, ripping through tissue and sinew, leaving me bleeding and raw in its wake, exposed beneath harsh fluorescent lights that hid nothing, illuminating every failure and fracture in brutal detail. But I was the one wielding the knife. I was the one who chose deception over honesty, who chose to protect myself at Mary's expense, who looked at the woman who loved me and decided my comfort was worth more than her dignity.
Mary deserved better. Mary deserved the fucking world. Mary deserved a partner who would face their demons head-on instead of setting fire to everything good to avoid them. My betrayal left her standing in ruins, her trust shattered like glass beneath my feet, cutting us both as we tried to navigate the aftermath, each step adding fresh wounds—except her wounds were deeper, rawer, because she'd done nothing to earn them. She'd loved me faithfully, built a life with me brick by careful brick, and I took a sledgehammer to it all because I was too much of a goddamn coward to say the words that needed saying: I'm not who you think I am. I'm not who I've been pretending to be.
Every time I'd buttoned that shirt, strapped on that watch, walked with that deliberately widened stance, I'd been building a prison brick by brick, reinforcing walls that were never going to hold against the hurricane brewing inside, the storm that had been gathering strength for decades. My body was a battleground, and I was losing the war against myself, every cell rebelling against the lie I forced it to perform day after excruciating day, my very DNA screaming in protest.
The first time I walked into trans group therapy felt like stepping into a goddamn electrical storm, the air charged with potential and danger. The room reeked of coffee and anxiety, the air thick with unspoken pain and cautious hope, heavy enough to suffocate on if you breathed too deeply. Different personalities, different stories, all wearing our damage like ill-fitting clothes, bodies hunched beneath the weight of secrets finally spoken aloud, shoulders curved inward as if anticipating the next blow. The plastic chairs creaked under shifting weight as everyone avoided eye contact, fingers nervously tapping knees in rhythms of barely contained panic.
Then came Violet, a socially awkward girl with hands that never stopped moving, fluttering like wounded birds at her sides, trying to find somewhere safe to land. I recognized that movement—the instinctive duck of the head, shoulders hunching inward—a body trained to expect the worst, programmed for survival over comfort. I'd done it myself under Zoe's tyranny, muscle memory programmed by pain, a physical flinch that persisted decades after the threat had passed, my body remembering what my mind tried to forget.
The brunches were born from loneliness that had been eating me alive from the inside out, hollowing my chest until I could hear the echo of my heartbeat in the emptiness, a reminder that I was still somehow alive despite feeling dead inside. My kitchen on Saturday mornings became a war zone of pots and pans, air thick with bacon grease and coffee, the sizzle and pop of fat in hot iron creating a symphony of normalcy I'd never experienced. We'd stuff our faces and spill our guts—trading stories about assholes who stared too long, celebrating the first time someone used the right pronouns without being asked, each small victory a battle won in a war that never really ends. The maple syrup sticky on our fingers, linking us together like a sweet, fragile web of understanding, binding us in ways that family never had.
The house in Brookhaven was the first testing ground for my emerging self, walls witnessing my clumsy attempts at authenticity, my stumbling steps toward truth. John—that manipulative, calculating parasite—watched with cold eyes as I tried to mother Violet, as Aubrey and I built something fragile and real between the cracks of our broken pasts, something that might actually survive if we were careful enough. "We wouldn't make it without him," he insisted as we packed to leave, his voice dripping with venom disguised as concern, his fingers gripping the doorframe until his knuckles went white, trying to hold us in place through sheer fucking will.
But we did. We fucking did, despite every obstacle he threw in our path, despite every voice that said we'd fail.
East Atlanta became our sanctuary, sunlight streaming through windows that held no ghosts, floors creaking beneath steps that grew more confident each day, watching my body slowly transform into something I could finally recognize. The first changes were subtle—skin softening like I'd shed armor I didn't know I was wearing, emotional landscape shifting like tectonic plates, tears flowing more freely after decades of drought, each one a release of pressure that had built to breaking point. Then came the more visible markers: face softening, body redistributing its weight, curves emerging where angles had been, each new contour a vindication, each change a revelation that yes, this was always meant to be.
The day I said it aloud for the first time: "My name is Wendy." Not Wim. Not some half-measure designed to appease everyone while satisfying no one. Wendy. The name felt right in my mouth, solid and real, like a key turning in a lock that had been jammed for fifty years, the click of finally coming home to myself reverberating through my entire body, echoing in bones that had carried someone else's name for too fucking long.
Now, at fifty-three, I stand in the wreckage of the life I built and the one I destroyed, scars visible and invisible mapping the journey across my skin and soul like a roadmap of pain. The guilt doesn't wash away. It lives in me like a physical presence, another organ pulsing with each heartbeat, reminding me of what was sacrificed in my pursuit of truth, the price paid in other people's pain. But so does truth. So does authenticity. So does the woman who waited decades to finally breathe free air, her lungs expanding fully for the first time, taking in oxygen untainted by pretense, clean and sharp and real.
Every morning I wake as Wendy is both victory and reminder—I am finally myself, but the path here is stained with trust betrayed, hearts broken, lives dismantled with my bare hands, debris scattered in my wake. The mirror reflects someone I recognize now, gray hair framing a face that finally feels like mine, lines etched by both joy and sorrow, by both guilt and liberation, each wrinkle a story written in flesh.
This isn't a story of redemption. Those clean arcs are for people whose sins can be forgiven in a single lifetime, whose transgressions can be washed away with pretty words and performative penance. This is a story of survival—of the child who endured when death seemed easier, the man who protected her until she could protect herself, the woman who finally emerged from darkness into whatever light she could find, eyes squinting against the brightness after so long in the shadows, pupils contracting painfully against the glare of truth.
My house of pain wasn't built in a day. It rose brick by agonizing brick—each one laid by hands both guilty and innocent, both victim and perpetrator, callused and bleeding from the effort, skin torn away to expose bone. Every childhood beating, every broken promise, every bone-crushing moment of gender dysphoria—they're all rooms in this house where I still live, where I finally came home to myself, where I learned to stop running from my own reflection in windows and mirrors and other people's eyes, to stop flinching from the truth staring back.
The transition was rebirth and funeral all at once. Shedding skin that never fit right, growing into a form that finally feels like home, grieving the years lost to fear and conformity, mourning the life that could have been. The pain doesn't stop—it just changes form, transforms from sharp and stabbing to dull and throbbing, from acute to chronic, a constant companion that I've learned to carry. But for the first time in my life, I'm not fighting against my own reflection. I'm not drowning Wendy's voice with alcohol and violence, not suffocating her beneath layers of performative masculinity that felt like concrete on my chest, crushing the breath from my lungs.
I am Wendy. This is my house of pain. And I finally live here willingly, each room a testament to survival, each window letting in whatever light I can find, dust motes dancing in sunbeams that finally reach places long kept in darkness, illuminating corners that had never known anything but shadow.
Sometimes, in dreams that feel more like memories, I see him—that terrified boy with scraped knees and a soul too heavy for his small frame, bearing weight that would crush an adult. He's on the floor of that piss-yellow bathroom with the cracked tiles, knuckles white against clasped hands, lips moving in desperate prayer to a God who never fucking answered, who never seemed to hear. Tears cutting tracks through the dirt on his face, body trembling with the aftershocks of Zoe's latest storm, muscles spasming with the memory of impact. Blood from his split lip dripping onto the linoleum like sacrificial offerings, pooling in the grout lines like some twisted communion. "Please," he begs, voice raw and broken, scraped bare of everything but desperate need, "make it stop hurting. Make me right." The weight of wrongness crushing his chest until each breath feels stolen, borrowed from someone who deserves it more.
But now, when these memories claw their way to the surface, something else follows—a vision that heals as much as the memory wounds, a balm spread over burns that never quite stopped stinging. I see her, the girl who should have been, who was always waiting beneath the surface. Playing with dandelion crowns in sunlight that catches her hair like spun gold, weaving flowers with small fingers that move without fear. Her laughter, so fucking pure it makes my chest ache with longing for what was stolen, echoes across decades of suffering like a bell that refuses to be silenced. Small hands working with focused joy, not flinching at sudden movements, shoulders relaxed and unburdened by the weight of being wrong. She wears a blue dress that spins in perfect circles when she twirls, face tilted toward the sky, unafraid of what might come crashing down, open to possibility instead of braced for pain. This is who she was meant to be all along—joyful, authentic, whole. Not broken and bent into shapes that never fit, not drowning in whiskey to silence her voice, not hiding behind bruises and bloodied knuckles.
In those moments, I reach across time to touch her face, to tell her we make it. We survive the storms. We find our way home. And though the path cuts us to ribbons, leaves scars that will never fully heal, reopens wounds we thought were closed, she will eventually breathe free air, speak her true name, and find people who love her not despite her truth but because of it, who see her and recognize something real. The boy's prayers were answered after all—not by an absent God, but by her own stubborn refusal to die before she could live, with determination to survive long enough to become who she was always meant to be.