Dear Little Juniper

A Letter to Myself 

My therapist suggested I write a letter to my younger self as part of the process of grieving the parts of myself I had to abandon for the first part of my life. In the process of writing the letter, it hit me how much I had lost. The difficulty I experienced due to gender dysphoria on a day-to-day basis was really astounding. I had no idea what was going on, but it affected me on a deep level. I was not OK for most of my life. I powered through and made it work, but I was definitely not OK. I think part of coping with having to not be myself was denial of both the root problem (gender dysphoria) and denial of how bad my mental health was. Coming to terms with my gender dysphoria was fairly easy. The realization of how much I've lost in the past 40 years because of my depression and other mental health issues has been much more traumatic. Writing this helped me to come to terms with some of it. There really was no way around it, as I point out to my younger self below. I did the best I could.

Dear Little Juniper,

Juniper. It is a good name, and it is your name. You’ve never heard the name before? No one has ever called you that before? You will, and they will. Unfortunately, there is a long stretch of time between then and now. That stretch is going to be hard—brutal at times. You will have to summon up a lot of strength and stubbornness to get through that stretch of time, and you will hurt a lot and often. Worst of all, you won’t know what you’re going though or why. You’ll be alone. Even with all the family and friends around you, you’ll know and feel that you’re alone.

That is why I’m writing. I know it’s not allowed, but I thought I could maybe tell you your name and a little bit about what you’re going to have to face growing up. I wanted to let you know that it turns out alright in the end. You can’t know any of that though, but maybe you’ll feel some reassurance that will stick with you after reading this letter.

That preamble makes it sound like you are completely ignorant of who you are, but you aren’t really. You are more in touch with who you are than I was 7 months back. I forgot a lot of what you know now. You will forget a lot of what you know now.

You have a secret wish that you have not told anyone about, but you spend so much time fantasizing about it. You fantasize about that wish the same way you daydream about the worlds in stories, movies, and cartoons. When you fantasize about Star Wars, He-Man, or My Little Pony, you imagine being a character in those worlds and being strong, magical, and free of constraints. Those fantasies provide you with a sense of liberation and independence.

Your secret wish provides you with that same sense of liberation and power. But your secret wish is a bit different than wanting to be a cartoon hero, don’t you think? Isn’t wishing you were a girl really, really different? If you had magic powers, could perform Jedi mind tricks, or could defend a castles single handedly from hordes of monsters, then you would be really unique—something amazing. But a girl? What kind of fantasy is that? If you got your wish, you’d just be yourself—only slightly different. In fact, you’d be at somewhat of a disadvantage because many people around you don’t think much of women and girls.

It should tell you something that having that wish granted would feel as fulfilling as being granted magic powers or becoming a great hero. Where did that wish for an ordinary life as a girl come from? Why is it so persistent?

That wish lives with you and will continue to do so because it’s not really a wish. I can explain what you are going through. Maybe the best way to explain it is to say that you are experiencing things exactly as a girl would if a wizard had cursed her at a young age and turned her body into that of a boy. She would wish to be turned back every day, and she would never stop being upset that she was transformed. There’s no amount of handsomeness, sculpted muscles, success, friends, love that would stop her from regretting that she had been cursed and changed into something that she is not.

Really. I am not joking. This isn’t going to go away for you. You really are that cursed girl. I wish you could accept the body you have, but you can’t. You’ll try your best to do well as a boy, an adolescent, and a man, but it won’t stop you from feeling that things just aren’t right. And you know what, that’s OK. You have to try something to cope, because it will be a while before you figure out that the answer is simply “I’m a girl.” In the meantime you’ll have to slog through a lot of difficulties, but trying to succeed in the face of hardship is better than the other options. You’re an amazing girl, and you’ll come out the other side of this mess with friends and family that love you despite of and because of who you actually are.

I want you to know that in the end things will turn out OK. You do figure it out. There are doctors that can help undo some of the ravages of puberty. You’ll have a job where they really don’t care what wacky stuff you’ve got going on with your gender. You’ll have an amazing wife and child that are just happy to see you stop being miserable. You’ll be a kind person that takes care of your friends and family the best you can manage, despite all the mental health issues you accumulate during your struggle. There’s a decent chance that you’ll be able to look and sounds like woman. I haven’t completely pinned that one down, but we’re working on it.

Why you are the way you are is still unclear. There are lots of people in your shoes—people who feel like a girl cursed to live in a boy’s body or vice versa. You haven’t heard anything about them, because it is just not safe for them to talk too much about it. It probably is not safe for you to talk about it either. Anyway, despite there being no definite answer, there is some evidence that brains have a gender that is determined at a different time than the sex characteristics of the body. So it is entirely possible that you have a brain-body mismatch, and your brain is doing its best to emulate those of its gender around it while the body is going off the rails developing according to its own biological instructions. The brain must have a pretty strong imperative to adopt the role of its gender, because it definitely rebels when it doesn’t get what it wants. It also may malfunction when it doesn’t get the sex hormones it is designed to use. Whatever the problem is, the consensus (both in cultures around the world and in current medical and psychiatric science) is that the solution is to just go along with what the brain wants. If it is driving you towards being a girl, then the answer is to just be a girl. Medical professionals can help out with the hormone thing, and you can just have your hearts desire—to be who you know yourself to be-- right now.

Except you can’t. At the time you are reading this, medicine has progressed enough, but culture has not. I don’t know what your parents and town would do if you insisted that you’re a girl, but I am sure that it wouldn’t be good for you. It is better for you to just forget about this, continue fantasizing, and try to remember all of this later after you’ve achieved some level of social and financial independence. The situation really, really sucks, but so does being homeless and unemployed for the rest of your life. It is hard to make friends when you’re living in a tent or working multiple minimum wage jobs to make rent. It is hard to stay safe if you’re forced into sex work in order to make ends meet. Shitty things (or should I say shitty people) happen to people like you. So it’s best that you stay not-you for a while longer.

Staying not-you isn’t a good option, but it’s the best you have. You’ll be safe and you’ll achieve some success in life, but being not-yourself will make everything you do feel a little off. How you look, walk, and talk is never going to feel natural. You’re going to worry that people are making fun of and judging you—that they see something distasteful in you. You worry about this because you feel something distasteful in yourself all the time, and you assume that they can also sense that wrongness. You’ll never have the confidence to just be present and trust that things are OK—that you’re OK. You’ll always feel like there’s something else you should be doing. You’ll feel that you’ve done something wrong. What it is you’ve done wrong won’t be clear. You’ll read a lot of self help books trying to figure this one out.

You are going to be angry a lot. The world around you has made you do something that some part of you is fundamentally opposed to. You have to make yourself get up every morning and perpetrate a fraud. Of course you’re angry about it, but there’s no one to take it out on. By the time that anger gets really bad—about the time of puberty—you won’t have any way of figuring out why you’re angry. Your anger and your sadness will seemingly be completely separate from anything having to do with gender. If you had someone explain it to you, I’m sure it would have clicked, but no one around you knows anything about these issues, so they can’t help you. So, get ready to carry some anger around with you.

The sadness is going to be hard too. You never really do well with sadness. You will cover it up the best you can with distraction and anger. But at times when you let yourself feel it, it is going to feel like a vast cavern inside you heart. You’ll have a vast emptiness that feels at the same time both transcendent and desperately lonely.

Sadness and anger. Rereading the above, it sounds like you’re just going to have a few bouts of rage or depression. I didn’t really convey the effect this will have on your life. I don’t think I really explained the cost of not being yourself—I didn’t explain how hard this is going to make everything feel. It is going to be hard to get out of bed. It is going to be hard to do your work. It is going to be hard to muster the energy to be around people. At times it is even going to be hard to make yourself do the things you love to do. Part of yourself will be busy applying the breaks, trying to turn yourself around even while you’re trying to drive forward. That conflict is going to darken everything. It is worse sometimes and better sometimes. At its best, you mostly won’t notice it, and you’ll find lots of happiness. At its worst, you’ll want to kill yourself. Fortunately, I don’t think you ever make definite plans to do so. I’m here, so we know you didn’t succeed. However, there will be stretches of time where you think about it a lot—every day, in fact. You’ll wonder how much difference there is between you and the people that do end up killing themselves. What would it take to tip you over edge and get you to actually try to kill yourself? You won’t have any idea what that might be, and it won’t feel like there is much that stands between you and quitting on life. This is especially true when you’re a teenager. In retrospect, I think Hamlet had it right. It was the fear of something that comes after death that puzzled you and had you clinging to the ills you had than to fly to those you knew not of. That thing you feared most, unlike Hamlet, was oblivion. As bad as you felt, you always had the sense that something is out of reach that you desperately want and you still had a chance of obtaining it. You held on, hoping that one day it would be in reach even though you didn’t know what it was or how to get to it. You had hope that you would figure out what it was you needed. You will figure it out. It’ll be a long time, but you’ll figure it out.

Being yourself is hard for most people. Being yourself as a young transgender person in a time and place that won’t accept you is even harder. Not being yourself is also very, very hard. But you’ll manage. You are amazing. You manage to get through all of it without turning into an insufferable asshole. You will manage to surround yourself with kind people that love you. You’ll succeed professionally and academically. And eventually you’ll figure out this thing that vexes you for most of your life. Things will get better. And it’s not all bad along the way. There’s plenty of good stuff too. You’ve just got a heavy load and a long way to carry it before you realize you can set it down.

Don’t despair. You can make it. You do make it. You really are amazing.

Love,

Big Juniper