This was a piece inspired by  #prompt 5 in Club Quarenteen by WriterOnTheIsland! Please take the time to check it out. It's very hard to write personally without being prompted, so I appreciate the wonderful book and Ms. Shaw's initiative. 

CW: Mental health, neeeeedles, domestic messiness

When I was five years old, I'd watch the doctor give me shots. I'd hold my breath and look at the sharp, jabbing thing as it pressed into my small arm. I was a big kid. I wouldn't cry. Because at night, I didn't pray to be big or strong. I prayed to be "tough."

On a rust-red floor in the back room of the public gym, I rammed myself into other kids, raised my hockey stick, and flung angry pucks into goal nets. I'd get carpet burn all over my shoulders from the walls, big bruises from falls and hits, skinned knees and jammed fingers and bitten, bleeding lips. But I wouldn't cry, wouldn't even stop.

I'd press the cut against my scratchy jeans and I'd keep playing. I wanted to be tough like my dad had told me to be. I wanted to endure. My dream was to play hockey, but my school would only let me play field hockey, which I hated. I said it was "for girls*." So I played at the gym until I both got too old for it, and ironically, too small, as all the boys shot up in height around me and I stayed very close to the ground**.

There isn't much I can say I'm proud of. I carried my life in boxes and trash bags on top of the family car, and when I got older, in a Spiderman backpack that hung heavy on my back as I walked from her apartment to his house whenever either parent decided they wanted me. Besides books, hockey games, and writing on forums aimed at horse-girls, that's most of what I remember. Holes in the walls, screaming, police sirens deep in the night. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I..." like a chorus from the world's scariest pop song. 

At sixteen, I had to claw the ghosts off me. Had nightmares and panic attacks and scary mental things that I had to fight. Adrenaline and fear choked the appetite out of me, paranoia kept me wide awake.

And I pulled myself out of it. I stayed up wrestling demons, fought off their teeth as they tried to take bites out of my brain. And I'm not what the world calls successful. I'm not wealthy, I'm not in love, I'm no genius, and I don't own a company. But I'm tough.

I remember sitting there, months ago, in a cold leather chair, ready to lose everything, grit-teeth and stony eyed: "I'm transgender. I need to know, now, if you'll fire me because of it or not so I can put in other applications." I remember the feeling, their 'maybes' and 'we'll have to ask the board' and 'maybe this job won't be a good fit for you anymore.' It was the calm feeling a captain of a ship would have when his vessel was about to be dashed on the rocks. I was both absolutely terrified and absolutely unafraid, because I knew that after the wreck, after losing everything, I would haul my sea-soaked self to the shore.

I'm proud of that. I'm proud when I hold my breath and press the sharp, jabbing thing into my thigh, proud as the chemical leaves the syringe and becomes a part of me. 

"I always feel like I'm fighting," I told a friend a couple of months ago, "I have to fight for my name and just to be, not to sink into depression. To keep my job in a field that hates people like me. But that's okay, because for the first time, it feels like I'm winning."

***

* Field hockey is lovely and things being for boys or for girls is ridiculous. Nine-year-old me didn't care about either of that.

** I'm aware I've mentioned that I'm short in every entry of this book. And I'll keep mentioning it because I'm mad about it.