My name is Maya. I'm 21, currently a junior working on a creative writing degree with emphasis in fiction. Just like writing stories, I think stories are an important part of what makes people people. I think that there's a lot we can learn about an individual person by just anything that they want to tell someone else, regardless of whether or not it's actually real. I would honestly love to write for games and movies on TV, I think that would be amazing. Being an only child living in a neighborhood with pretty much no other kids, I had a lot of time with myself. So I actually learn to read by playing Pokemon on my Game Boy. I was that same kid to want to have a hook hand because I love pirate so much. Then decided against that simply because I couldn't play my game well with it. So that idea was scrapped. But it's still a little bit of a dream. Well, it's something that I pretty much put all of my attention towards since ninth grade. Ninth grade was when I first figured out there was something weird going on. I can think back to preschool being a three-year-old room, I was the only kid who could walk in heels that well. So I do take a little pride in that even if they're like four's, five size is too big, I made it work. But it wasn't until probably ninth grade that everybody figured out what I was feeling. For about 4-6 months, I was suicidally depressed in a lot of dark spaces. I just couldn't really figure out what the heck was going on, nothing felt right. I couldn't figure out what really was going on until all of a sudden it just happened. I just immediately knew exactly what I was feeling. It wasn't really a buildup, it wasn't a slow reveal, flipped a switch, I just knew. I talked to my parents after dwelling on it a lot really trying to suppress it because after doing a little bit of research myself as I do, I give myself more worked up there I need to be. I see all the negative aspects, I see all the difficult things about it, and I think it's going to be absolutely horrible. I'm absolutely convinced that my entire family and all my friends are going to disown me. I'm entirely convinced that I am going to have horrible results with any medical procedure I ever want to undergo, and then my life is going to be a living hell. So for about a year, I tried to convince myself that what I knew was not true. That was really difficult because I'm really good at bottling things up, and at the same time, I'm pretty good at hiding it. A little too good for my own good. So an absence from really dark spaces, but eventually tried to talk with my parents, namely my dad at the time. He was convinced that it was something else, had been something else. I don't think it was so much that he wasn't supportive, I think he was more so just wanting it not be that. Like saying it's not a problem if you're trans, but knowing how much difficulty you would go through if you were, he was just wind to make sure that I wouldn't go through any extra that I didn't need to. So I'm thankful for that, but at the same time, I didn't say it's 20-20. I always wished we'd started something sooner. I went through periods throughout high school and namely in ninth and tenth grade where I would go see a doctor. I saw a family therapist who was told beforehand why I was coming in, but was waiting for me to bring it up, to talk about it. I felt that was fine, but I had such difficulty bringing it up even to my own parents that I couldn't bring it up to anyone outside of that. There were four people in the world that knew. It was my main doctor, that therapist, my parents. It was something that I knew was defining about me, not because that was all I was as a person, but because that was so much of what I was dealing with. Pretty much everything I've thought, a lot of my interests, my free time was spent somehow related to ideas of gender. Nothing could really save that. Just always this, "I really should work for it." But always feeling like there was something wrong and something about me that would be impossible to fix. So I went through probably two or three periods where I completely denied that was what I was. I tried to get rid of everything that I would think about it, tried to completely get rid of articles that I had compiled. Everything I could possibly find, I would save and then throw out. This happened probably two or three times before I finally said, "No, this is a problem. This isn't working." I think eventually I got to this idea that since ninth grade I've wanted nothing more than to live as one person, it wasn't until my freshman year of college that I actually was able to see someone who really knew what the heck was going on with me. That was great. That was nice, but at the same time nothing ever moves fast enough for what I want now that I can expect it to.
