I never imagined that I had a monopoly on being at odds with life. It is simply a state of being with which I am much too familiar. I have spent most of my life struggling with things that most people take for granted, stumbling and falling in places where most people stride with confidence and conviction.

Strangely, I can dance through other places where most people crawl along blindly in fear and confusion or turn and run from in terror. I am not like everyone else, and I can not just be like everyone else and do what everyone else does. In order to live like other people, I have to learn the role and act the part—but the performance I put on never ends and by going through the motions I end up not having a life of my own.

There are people who are paid millions of dollars to use the skills I use simply to survive. My life has been a job that no one hired me for and no one pays me to do. I do this simply because I was born in a body that disguises my true nature. I do this because it is the only way I can do anything, be anything, have anything at all.

There is one interesting benefit; I am in constant turmoil because of a conflict between who I am and what I appear to be. I know I have a soul, because my mind is not strong enough to exist at such complete odds with my body. In spite of every effort and encouragement to conform to my physical reality, I continue to exist as a girl in my own mind.

My mind has fallen apart and reset to this female identity too many times for me to question who I really am. Trying to be a man destroys me. There is a limit to how long I can play the part before it kills me. It is like holding my breath under water. I have to surface one in a while to breathe or risk drowning.

Unfortunately, I have to keep taking that risk because the people around me can only acknowledge the person I appear to be; only the physical part of me is accepted as being real or legitimate. Oh, I can talk myself blue about who I really am, but most people will continue to perceive me as a mentally defective man—or worse, a sexually defective man.

I could get a sex change—pardon me, I mean, I could elect to undergo gender reassignment surgery—in which case I would no longer be considered a man. I might even, with lots of work, pass for a woman. But I would not be female. I can not even begin to explain the problems I’ve had with the very idea of surgical intervention, but it was being forced to confront it as the only real option available for correcting things that drove me to the brink of suicide.

That is a very odd place to end up as the result of wanting a real life. For now, the fact that I literally can not afford it, and for health reasons should not risk it, is all that keeps me from pursuing in desperation to get out of living as a man.

I am actually afraid of what would happen if I could afford to go through with it. Not because I would regret doing it. I’ve spent so much of my life hiding who I really am, I am not sure if I would know how to just be myself. The other concerns, real and terrifying as they are, just don’t compare to the fact that I would end up alone and uncertain of myself.

The hardest part of what I have survived is the one part that will be emphasized most if I were to do the right thing for myself. I know that I would get past that point, and survive if the process itself doesn’t kill me—a risk I was always willing to take.

In the end, the final curse is that no matter what I do, I have no idea how I am supposed to fit in anywhere. If I have no place in this world, either way, why do I put myself through all of this misery?