17/04/25

Sick Day

Content warning: Dysphoria, religion mention and self-harm.

I woke up this morning and started bawling my eyes out. I haven’t cried in a long time, to the point I started laughing at the bizarre sudden state of it all. I was so stressed by the very idea of working and dealing with rude customers for eight hours with two fifteen minute breaks that I called in sick. I have been, for the past two years, taking on a completely different character to separate my work and personal life. I’m going to tell it like it is to get it out of my system. The character is used as a buffer to keep my life and identity separate from work. When I go about my actual life, nobody knows it’s me. I can live separately and not have my voice recognised. This character I portray has qualities similar to me but is removed enough so that I can do my job efficiently. Voice pitched up, friendly, patient, and asks all the right questions. Of course, asking questions is part of the job, but I hate the fake sympathy, “oh, I’m so sorry to hear about the damage” whilst my face doesn't twitch a muscle. Just a robot, and one day, I will be replaced by one. Using a “feminine voice” so men don’t yell at me. The amount of pet names I’ve been called over the past two years is crazy. Darling, baby, bab, love, sweetheart, kind young lady, madam, miss, lovely, honey. I feel like the biggest fraud, I chose specifically to live my life as a man but due to my actual voice sounding monotone, done and uninterested, I adopted this persona as a customer facing mask and all of it is fake. None of it is real. I am a man behind the screen, and when I log off, I find it very difficult to slip off those shoes and wear my own. I am not saying I want to be a woman, quite the opposite, to the point where I realise how this fake me is actually the person I am being for a vast majority of my day and I wish I could take the mask off. I feel incredibly dysphoric, so much so that I can’t look at myself in the mirror when I talk on the phone at this job. It sounds like someone dubbing over my voice. When calls don’t come through for a while, I see myself hovering above my desk, looking down at the physical form saying, rather concernedly, “why are you doing this to yourself? They can’t see you.” I have dropped my voice during a call and a few customers, who were flirting with me in an attempt to get an earlier appointment, have hung up the phone. The fact that I have spent years of my life trapped in a woman's body and have medically transitioned, only to roleplay as a woman in my job is driving me insane. I think it may be because I’ve been doing customer service for a decade now, I still use my old voice as that was my “customer service voice”.

I love my body hair, my normal voice, and the fact that I am a man. A lotus, blooming out of the mud that helped me flourish in ways that I’m eternally grateful for. At night, I visually meditate and meet my younger self on a swing set. They’ve got muddy knees, corrective footwear, and their hair in knots. They keep snails in their chest pocket, and look at me with wide eyes, words emitting from a cave of gapped teeth, “Well, I think you’re cool!” I see those boots, like two anchors, steel and blocky. Keeping those small feet encased so that they can step, curving and flicking at an angle, like a duckling. Their knees knocked. A thin framed ghost with a laugh that sounds like Christmas bells rolling downhill. I don’t want them to take anger, guilt and pain and inflict it upon themselves. School packed lunches with post-it notes reading, in handwriting identical to Comic Sans:

"To my Happy ___, I hope you have a great day at school, Love Mom xxx"

"I love you, don’t let the bullies get you down. You’re the best, love you to the moon and back! Mom xxx"

They bin them, and a pang of guilt pierces their heart. Something written with love scrunched on a bed of banana peels and yogurt pots. Going home to their mother who, despite work exhaustion, is warm, soft and comforting. Their mother knows they’re being bullied at school and is relieved to hear her child say, “thank you for lunch, it was really good!” Countless times my mothers clothing fabric has formed polka-dots due to my tears.

My heart bursts out of my chest, a swarm of butterflies explodes forth. I’m sure they know the species. They’re so smart. I feel guilty looking myself in the eyes. They’re swinging on the swingset, using those powerful boots to kick and project the swing upwards. Laughing, just a mop of dirty blonde hair swaying viciously. I lack the words to describe how thankful I am that they kept going, so that we can live. As a teen googling difficult questions, thinking the government would come knocking if the search results weren’t cleared.

Male names starting with “H”
Baby names starting with “H”
Justin Bieber - Baby
Thinspo
How to pick a nickname
What is gender fluidity?
How do I know if I’m a girl or a boy?
Why do I like being called a boy?
Tomboy
How to walk like a boy.
Short haircuts 2014
Hatsune Miku - The World is Mine
Androgyny meaning
Can I be a boy and a girl at the same time?
Tumblr
Male contour
Nonbinary
Nonbinary fashion
Nonbinary names
Hansen name meaning
How to draw on a beard
Cheap eyeliner
SAVANT
Will I upset god if I am LGBT?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lady Gaga - Born This Way Lyrics
How to come out
How to come out wikihow with pictures
Samaritans
How to cover self harm scars
I don’t want to be here anymore
Am I still lovable if I am not a girl?

I woke up. I’m holding my pillow. Holding them, myself, us. Sometimes I see dinosaur pictures and they tell me their names, in English and Latin, a skill I no longer possess. “Did you know? Well it’s okay if you don’t, because I do!”

I don’t want to work customer service ever again. I want to be a guy who at least partially likes his job. In an ideal world I would paint, see my friends, travel the world, eat good food, and have a place of my own. But the reality is, despite working full time (40hrs a week) I still live with my parents at age twenty-five. I cannot drive. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t go to parties. After finishing work, I am so burnt out from this persona that I don’t do any personal activities. I don’t make art like I used to. No journaling, having a relaxing bath, just eating food, throwing the objects off my bed, and pretending to sleep. Waking up, putting the objects back on my bed, doing chores, going to the bathroom, making a drink, then work. Call after call flooding in. Break one, work, break two, work, logging out, eating food, throwing the objects off my bed, and pretending to sleep. I had a shower today for the first time in almost a week. I cannot remember the last time I took my medication. It takes 30 minutes to dry, and I conveniently forget to take it. This is it, every day forever. “But that’s just how life is! You work like this to take a holiday once or twice a year! Everyone does the same, they just deal with it! The weekends are when you can actually do the stuff you want, like everyone else!” I’m not asking for special treatment. I do not think I am God's favorite blip in the petri dish of life, nor do I claim to be, it would be absurd to state an omnibenevolent god picks a favourite. I used to pray my queerness away, and why would something, if there is a higher power out there, lead me to believe that an entity he stitched with the fabric of space and time, and loved so much, could be a horrid, retched, unlovable person?

On those nights spent on the swingset. I hardly swing. I just watch. The cold night air has a scent, if my youngerself doesn’t overpower it with Juicy Fruit chewing gum. I want to ask them what I should do with my life, but it feels cruel. The answer would most likely be palaeontology. We’re going to discover the dinosaurs, obviously. We will one day be a pilot and have a picnic in a Lancaster bomber, and fly off to see the pyramids. Oh, oh, and wear one of those cork hats to keep the bugs away and casually discuss blasting off into space just to say that we did it, duh! Our art is in a gallery. We meet Alexsander Vinter and eat ice cream. This is clearly your first rodeo in my mind. We can draw anything, write anything, be anything! My younger self flicks their tongue out to catch snowflakes midair. They pile up, forming small mountains on my jacket.

They’re friends with all the boys at school. The boys included them as part of “The Boys Club”. At one boys house, pizza and wedges for tea, and Wii Sports Resort on the television. At another, spaghetti and garlic bread, with WWE and Sonic on the CRT. Both boys had a trampoline in the garden, but would never, due to my disability, make me do any of the high jumps or flips. Gardens filled with the shrieks of laughter and the scrambling footsteps of hide-and-seek. The first boys room was in the attic, complete with a telescope, en-suite and guitars on the wall. My younger self couldn’t relate to his younger sister, whose room was a pink glitter bomb, filled with Barbie, pink rocking and hobby horses and a grand dollhouse. It almost felt perverse going into a girls room when I was “one of the boys”.

The best thing about the swingset is that I can go there every night. Worst part about it is waking up and staring at the same ceiling, glow in the dark stars mocking the falsehood of it all. No matter what, there’s no going back. Now I’m one of the boys for real this time, and this boy is putting on a headset, pretending he isn’t in The Boys Club. They would have hated that, just as I do. I’m writing this because I don’t know what to do with my life. After so long of finally feeling at home within myself, younger me celebrating us with hugs and high-fives, I’m betraying the very thing that we strive for. Authenticity. As the saying goes, a man of many hats. To appease people I do not know, who are in my life for the span of a five minute phone call.

There’s this idea that transgender people hate their younger selves, though I don’t like looking at old photos of myself, I cannot bring myself to hate the person, that for better or worse is the reason I exist. Hate is not a word in my lexicon. Next month I’ll be twenty-six. Officially marking a decade since I came out. I keep letters and cards from my mom, now with the my new name, sweet uplifting messages signed with kisses. My friends exclaim my name brightly and proudly when they see me. My younger self is cheering and beaming bright enough that the sun forms a pool of light and warmth within me.