I started out reading. Not casual fucking browsing—real, desperate, searching-for-answers reading. My therapist at the time, with her knowing eyes and that goddamn sympathetic tilt of her head, kept telling me something that rattled around my skull like a loose bullet: for all my confusion and searching, she felt there was a strong likelihood that I was probably trans. That somewhere in the tangled mess of my psyche, a woman was clawing her way out, fingernails bloody from the effort.
"You've always known," Wendy whispers from the darkest corners of my mind, her voice like silk brushing against raw nerve endings. "Every time you flinch at your reflection, every time your name feels like ash on your tongue—that's me."
I press my palms against my temples, the pressure building behind my eyes like a storm. The radiator in the corner hisses and clanks, filling the room with dry heat that scrapes my throat raw.
"Shut the fuck up," I growl back, but Wendy's presence swells, a tide of certainty rising against the crumbling seawall of my denial.
"Remember how you used to steal glances at women's clothes?" Wendy's voice has the metallic taste of truth. "How your chest aches when someone calls you 'sir'? That's not confusion—that's me screaming to breathe."
The weight of her words settles in my gut like swallowed stones. My fingers tremble as I turn another page in the book about gender dysphoria, the paper cutting my fingertip. A tiny drop of blood smears across a sentence that feels like it was ripped straight from my own fractured thoughts. The copper scent mingles with the crisp smell of of pages and older conflicts in my head.
"I can't be you," I whisper, but even as the words leave my mouth, they feel hollow, echoing in the cavity where certainty should live. "What the hell would be left of me?"
Wendy's laughter is gentle, like distant wind chimes. "Everything that matters. Everything that's real."
I lunged for those fucking books like a drowning idiot gasping for air, praying someone else's words could untangle the goddamn storm raging between my ears. First one I snatched was Marsh's "How to be You." I devoured that shit in two brutal nights, perched like a gargoyle on my bed, the spine breaking with a satisfying crack as I wrenched it open wider, desperate as hell to consume every last syllable.
Marsh would go on to say in the book, "Sorry! Perfection doesn't exist. Who ever taught you what it means to be "perfect" was making it up." The words struck me with shock. My fingers—slick with sweat—trembled across each page, leaving damp fingerprints smudged in the corners like evidence at a crime scene. Words swam and blurred when the tears came hot and sudden—because recognition is a cruel bitch that way, sucker-punching you in the gut when your guard is down.
"See?" Wendy's voice curled around my consciousness like smoke, both suffocating and intoxicating. "Every fucking highlighted passage is screaming what you've been too scared to admit."
I pressed my thumb against a particular sentence until the page dimpled, the ink bleeding slightly at the edges. The lamp beside me cast yellow shadows across the words that felt like they were written in my own blood.
“This doesn't prove shit," I hissed back, but my throat constricted around the lie, making it come out choked and pathetic. The cotton of my t-shirt suddenly felt like sandpaper against my skin, every seam a reminder of all the ways my body felt wrong. Yet some stubborn part of me kept fighting, kept insisting Wendy couldn't possibly be me—that voice in my head snarling "not me, never me" even as my fingers clutched the pages like a fucking lifeline.
Wendy's laughter rippled through me, warm and knowing. "Then why are your hands shaking? Why does every word that resonates taste like truth—sharp and metallic on your tongue?"
I slammed the book shut, the sound cracking through my silent apartment like a gunshot. The smell of paper and midnight sweat hung in the air, mingling with the faint scent of the lavender candle that Mary had given me years before. It always brought me peace, it made me feel... right somehow.
"What if I let you out?" I whispered, fingernails digging half-moons into my palms. "What if there's nothing left of me when you're done?"
"Idiot," Wendy's voice softened, wrapping around me like the blanket I'd pulled up to my chin. "I am you. The real you. The you that's been drowning in that ocean of testosterone and expectations. And I'm so fucking tired of holding my breath."
The truth of it burned like whiskey down my throat, settling hot and undeniable in my gut as I reached trembling for the book again. My eyes locked on Marsh's words: "When you don't meet the standards, when you aren't the world's idea of perfect, how do you treat yourself? List the ways you punish yourself for not being perfect." The question gutted me—thirty-plus years of self-hatred suddenly laid bare on the page.
I wasn't just desperate for confirmation that I wasn't losing my mind—I needed proof that Wendy wasn't just a creation of my loneliness but the answer I'd been running from since I was a child. Late into the night, I started binging Marsh's old Vine videos on my phone, the blue light harsh against my tear-streaked face. Each six-second clip felt like a goddamn lifeline thrown into the stormy sea of my identity crisis. And strangest of all, I could feel Wendy watching through my eyes, responding to Marsh's words before I could even process them.
"A big part of trusting yourself and your own superpowers is learning not to take the opinions of others at face value," Marsh said in one video, and something in my chest cracked open, raw and bleeding. Wendy's warmth flooded through me, a silent agreement that felt more real than anything I'd experienced in my performed masculinity. The videos kept me warm in ways I couldn't explain—like each one was striking a match against the darkness I'd been living in, illuminating corners of myself I'd been too terrified to acknowledge.
Then I read Boylan's "She's Not There," gulping it down in massive, hungry chunks. After re-reading Marsh's book time and time again, committing every inch of it to memory, I couldn’t read Boylan's book fast enough. I really couldnt. I remember reading sections of that book on the MARTA train, the fluorescent lights making the pages glow an artificial white, the rocking motion of the car sometimes matching the turbulence in my gut. A woman sitting across from me once caught my eye, noticed the cover, and gave me the smallest nod. My face burned hot enough to singe my eyebrows, but something inside me—Wendy, though I didn't fully know her then—sat up straighter.
"Don't you dare look away," Wendy hissed inside my skull as I fought the urge to hide the cover. "That woman sees you—the real you—even through all this bullshit camouflage."
The train screeched around a curve, the metal-on-metal sound drilling into my ears as I white-knuckled the book. The stale, recycled air tasted like pennies and anxiety.
"It's just a fucking book," I argued back silently, but my heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to punch its way out and call me a liar to my face.
"Is it?" Wendy's voice was honey laced with broken glass. "Then why does every sentence feel like it's been ripped from your own goddamn diary? Why does your chest ache when Jennifer describes finally becoming herself?"
The pages trembled between my sweaty fingers as I tried to focus on the words swimming before my eyes. Each paragraph was like stepping on a landmine of recognition—explosive and devastating. I'd hide in bathroom stalls during lunch breaks, devouring chapters with the desperate hunger of someone starving for decades. The cold porcelain of the toilet seat against my thighs, the distant flush of other stalls, the smell of industrial cleaner barely masking the scent of my own fear-sweat as Boylan's words crawled under my skin and nestled there, refusing to leave.
My reflection in the train window caught me off guard—a ghostly, fractured version of myself superimposed over the dark tunnels and flashing lights. For a split second, I could almost see her—Wendy—staring back at me with eyes that knew too fucking much.
"You can keep running," she whispered as we pulled into Five Points Station, the crowd surging around me like a human tide, "but every page you turn is another step toward me. And I've been waiting long enough."
I shoved the book deep into my bag, fingers lingering on its spine like touching a forbidden lover, the weight of it both terrifying and necessary—a truth bomb waiting to detonate the carefully constructed fiction of my life.
"What if we're nothing alike?" I challenged, the inside of my cheek raw from chewing.
Wendy's laugh echoed through the chambers of my heart. "Then why does your throat close up every time she describes looking in the mirror before transition? Why do you taste salt right now? Those aren't my tears, darling. They're ours."
Both of these books were more than just reading material—they were fucking lifelines thrown to a drowning person. Each page was like someone grabbing my face and forcing me to look in a mirror I'd been avoiding for decades. They weren't just formative; they were seismic, shifting the tectonic plates of my identity until cracks appeared in the surface I'd presented to the world. The fissures spread with each turned page, with every revelation that made Wendy pound against the walls I'd built around her, the sound of her fists echoing in my dreams, turning them to nightmares where I was forever running from my own reflection.
"You're exhausting yourself fighting what you already know," Wendy whispered during those endless late nights with my staring contests with the ceiling, my body drenched in cold sweat despite the summer heat. "How many more fucking books do you need before you'll listen? I am not going to leave you. It does not matter how hard you try."
"Just one more," I'd plead back in the darkness. "Just one more perspective that proves this isn't me."
Wendy's laughter would ripple through my consciousness like stones skipping across a midnight lake. 'That's what you said three books ago. And six months ago. And when you first clicked on that trans forum "just out of curiosity."'
It turns out, I went down the line. All the nonfiction my therapist was talking about. Gender Outlaw, by Bornstein. Redefining Realness, by Mock. Becoming Nicole, by Nutt. Nevada, by Binnie. Trans Like Me, by Lester. They were all the same as Boylan's and Marsh's work. I read them, reread them, read them again. I looked at every angle, every nuance, every pattern. Just trying to find a way out.
And all the while, Wendy was there in my head, telling me to stop fighting it. That no matter how much I turned, twisted, or bent the pages, the result was always the same. She was always there. She had always been there. And she, Wendy, was not going to leave. Wendy laughed the harder and harder I tried to deny it.
My iPad was full with reading material, highlighted passages, notes scribbled in margins so frantically and nervously, my apple pencil stopped working for a while even. The spine of my copy of Marsh's book had cracked completely, pages falling out like autumn leaves, but I'd taped them back in, desperate not to lose a single word that might explain this war inside me.
"Just what the fuck do you think you're going to find if you keep looking?" Wendy asked one night as I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, surrounded by a circle of open books like some fucked-up summoning ritual. "The magical paragraph that says this isn't real? The sentence that erases me? You know that can't happen. You know I am not leaving. No one is going to protect him anymore if I do. You know...that boy in the back of your head, the one you won't talk about.....Who will protect him if I leave?"
My fingers trembled as I flipped another page, the paper cutting my thumb. A tiny bead of blood smeared across the words about one of the authors and living authentically. The crimson stain seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat.
"I'm trying to understand," I mumbled, but the lie tasted bitter.
"No," Wendy's voice cut sharp as a scalpel. "You're trying to disprove. There's a fucking difference. You're treating these books like they're evidence in a trial where you're desperately trying to prove your own innocence. But the only crime you are guilty of is how long you've kept me locked away."
The weight of her truth crushed the air from my lungs. Outside, rain lashed against the windows, the rhythm matching the pounding in my temples as I gathered the books to my chest like armor, like children, like the pieces of myself I was finally, terrifyingly, beginning to recognize.
I'd say in whole, the books, all of them, really pushed me over the fucking edge. Not a gentle nudge—a hard shove that sent me tumbling into a free fall of self-discovery.
So I started to have conversations with my inner self, Wendy. At first, these talks happened in whispers while driving alone, in silent dialogues while showering, in journal entries written and then immediately deleted. Wendy's voice—my voice—growing clearer each time, like a radio signal finally coming into tune after years of static.
"Remember Helen?" Wendy whispered one night as I lay sprawled across my bed, the ceiling fan spinning shadows above me. "Your grandmother who raised you when that narcissistic bitch who birthed you couldn't be bothered? What would she say if she were here now? What would she say about what you've done?"
"SHUT UP!!!! You didn't know her like I did. You don't know." I yelled at her, though my chest already ached with knowing.
My internal voice just laughed at me. "I know everything. I am you. You saying that doesn't make it true. Helen treated you like the daughter she never had," Wendy said, her voice both gentle and merciless. "The way she taught you to make her special bread, kneading the dough with your small hands under hers. How she brushed your hair when you were little, before they made you cut it all off. The way she'd call you like she did when no one else was around. All for her to make up for her own sins in her own daughter, and she made you. She made me. Why can't you just accept that?"
The memory flooded back—Helen's weathered hands guiding mine, the smell of yeast and flour, the safety I felt in her kitchen. The secret way she'd look at me sometimes, like she knew. Like she saw me—the real me—beneath all the layers I'd been forced to wear.
"That was just her being affectionate. It is not the same. You don’t know what you are talking about.," I argued, but my voice sounded hollow even to my own ears.
"That's a fucking lie, and you know it. You can't lie to me.," Wendy spat back. "She was our mother, the only mother that actually cared about us. And mothers know their daughters. She knew me before you would admit I existed."
My throat tightened, memories slicing through me like paper cuts—a thousand tiny wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding.
"And what about Mel?" Wendy continued to argue with me, deep in my own heads, relentless now. "Your sister. The way you held her, different from how anyone else did. The instinct that kicked in. That was all a lie too? "
"I was just being a good brother." I protested, but my voice cracked. I knew that was a lie.
"You mothered that child," she hissed. "Not brothered—mothered. The way you'd sing to her with your voice pitched higher than you'd ever let anyone else hear. How you knew which cry meant what before even your mom did. That maternal instinct didn't come from nowhere. It came from me."
I curled into myself, pressing my face into the pillow as if I could suffocate the truth.
"And let's not forget your magnificent track record with women," Wendy continued, her voice dripping with bitter honey. "Karen who never trusted you enough to tell you she was being SA'd by her own father. Lendy whose mother was the same as Zoe, in her control. MixedUp who probably saw you as the woman you are just as much has her gay bestie had. And Mary, let's not even talk about all the damage you did there, just to keep me suppressed and hidden away. Why the fuck are you doing this to us?"
"Those relationships failed because I wasn't man enough," I snarled back, my fists clenching.
Wendy's laughter was shards of glass in my skull. "No, shithead. They failed because you were trying to be a boyfriend or a husband when every fiber of your being wanted to be a girlfriend or a wife. You weren't failing at being a man—you were failing at pretending not to be a woman."
I sat up in bed, sweat-soaked and shaking, the truth of it washing over me in waves that threatened to drown me. Every awkward sexual encounter where I'd disassociated so hard I might as well have been watching from the ceiling. Every relationship where I'd felt like I was reading from a script written for someone else.
"Helen knew you. She knew us," Wendy whispered, softer now. "That's why she showed you how to bake, how to do all the things she taught you. She wasn't preparing you to be some woman's husband. She was preparing you to be the woman you already were inside. The woman I am. The woman we are."
The memory of Helen's funeral crashed through me—how wrong the suit had felt, how I'd longed to wear the black dresses that the other mourners were wearing. How I'd stood at her grave long after everyone else had left, whispering apologies for a sin that I didn’t even understand.
"I can't do this," I choked out, tears burning trails down my face.
"You already are," Wendy replied. "Every book you read, every memory you revisit—you're not discovering something new. You're finally acknowledging what's always been there. What Helen saw. What Mel sensed. What every woman you've ever tried to love has bumped up against. The truth that's been screaming inside us since before we had words to name it."
I began to cry. And then I went back to an even older memory.
When I was young, I crossdressed (secretly), the forbidden fabric of Helen's and Zoe's clothes against my skin like electricity, like coming home. Despite getting caught by Zoe a handful of times—her face a mask of confusion that haunted me for days afterward—I still did it. And holy shit, I felt good.
“You see?” Wendy whispered in those moments, her voice clearer than it had ever been. “This is why nothing else ever feels right. This is who we are.”
The fabric against my skin, the way certain clothes hugged my body in a way that felt right, the reflection in the mirror finally making some kind of sense. Those moments were glimpses of oxygen in a lifetime of holding my breath.
I remember one afternoon, rain hammering against the windows like tiny fists, when I slipped into one of Zoe's sundresses—the lavender colored one, with a nice flare wide. My hands trembled so badly I could barely do up the buttons, but when I finally turned to face the mirror, something inside me went perfectly, devastatingly still.
“Look at us,” Wendy breathed, her voice thick with emotion. “This is what we're supposed to look like. This is what freedom feels like.”
For those few stolen minutes, the constant screaming noise in my head—the one I'd lived with for so long I thought it was normal—just fucking stopped. The silence was so beautiful it made my eyes water. I stood there, barely breathing, terrified that any movement would shatter this moment of peace, this brief alignment between my outer shell and the truth buried beneath my skin.
“Don't forget this feeling,” Wendy pleaded as I reluctantly began to undress. “Even when you push me away again, remember how this felt. Remember the peace.”
Later, I'd hang the dress back up in her closet, making sure to be keen that it looked as though it had never been disturbed or moved. But Wendy's words lingered long after the fabric was gone from my skin, an echo I couldn't silence no matter how hard I tried.
When I got older, I would viscerally joke about other gay persons (a strong defensive mechanism over my own internal feelings), my voice loud and harsh to cover the trembling underneath.
Wendy would, in my head, drive my guilt over having those thoughts and feelings, and admonish me. Her voice a whisper at first, then growing louder with each passing year. Secretly, I was jealous, even then, of those who were living their true lives—their courage both inspiring and damning me as I watched from behind my carefully constructed persona.
"You're a fucking hypocrite," Wendy would seethe when I'd laugh too loudly at some homophobic joke, her voice cutting through the false bravado. "You think if you're the first to throw stones, no one will notice the glass house you're living in."
Those words would echo in my skull on nights when I'd lie awake, replaying moments from earlier that day—how I'd joined in mocking someone whose only crime was living authentically. The shame would crash over me in waves so intense I'd sometimes have to run to the bathroom to vomit, my knuckles white against the porcelain as I purged the self-hatred that threatened to drown me.
Back then I had a habit of trichotillomania, hair pulling, on my facial hair. My fingers would find their way to my face dozens of times a day, searching out coarse hairs to pluck. The tiny sting of each extraction was satisfying in a way I couldn't explain—a small pain I could control amidst the larger one I couldn't name. Now I understand it was because subconsciously, I wanted that beard to disappear, wanted to erase the masculine markers from my face one hair at a time.
The bathroom sink would be littered with dark hairs by evening, a constellation of tiny sacrifices. Sometimes I'd bleed from pulling too hard or deep, tiny crimson beads welling up along my jaw. The pain was almost sweet—a momentary distraction from the deeper ache that lived permanently in my chest. I'd watch that blood swirl down the drain, mesmerized, while Wendy whispered that I was trying to tear away more than just hair—I was trying to claw my way out of the skin that felt like a prison.
I'd catch myself staring at women on the street, in cafés, on buses—not with desire, but with a desperate kind of hunger to understand how they moved through the world so effortlessly in their bodies. The way they gestured, laughed, occupied space. I told myself I was studying them to better understand what women wanted from men, but Wendy knew the truth. I wasn't taking notes on how to attract them; I was taking notes on how to become them.