Our modestly sized acting club entered backstage of an actual theatre. It was of course really exciting; most of us couldn’t even afford seeing a live performance, and there we were. Thanks to our teacher’s connections, we were actually able to see inner workings of a real modern day theatre, and more than that, we were even allowed to put up a scene of a play.

The full dive VR technology was all nerds talked about these days, despite still costing way too much to use in any actual entertainment. Full dive augmented reality however, outside of its obvious uses in all kinds of therapy, also found its way to the movie industry, and, in some cases where it was still performed, live theatre. It still cost about as much as an impressive house in a large city center, but theatres that somehow managed to survive without being completely digitized could afford it, and the one we were in was one of them.

Full dive AR was used as a modern alternative to costumes and stage dressing. Basically it let everyone, audience and actors, experience the events of the play as if they were really happening, with all of their senses, and for some reason we were actually allowed to use it! Miss Jones, as a general rule of existence, was really the best, but this time she had outdone herself.

The first thing everybody noticed upon entering backstage was the huge computer responsible for running semi-realistic simulations. It was almost as big as its cooling system; both together took up the entire back wall of the rather high area. Most of the girls walked up closer to the machine, while me and my best friend Amy walked slower, taking in all the backstage had to offer.

Luckily for Miss Jones, all six of us knew how to behave in those kinds of situations, so her friend, who also happened to be a technician at this place and our impromptu tour guide, could set up the things required for us to use the system in relative peace. Out of all of us, however, I was the one who was most shy, silent, and generally well-behaved, which was kinda ironic considering I was the only guy in our little club. The others tried making jokes about it, but for some reason I didn’t like those, and they stopped as soon as they noticed that.

It was quite surprising how well the club worked together, considering that both me and Amy only had mild interest in acting. Of course, mild interest for both of us still meant that we could just sit and listen about all the things to do with it for hours everyday, but we hadn’t joined the club because of that. As a child, I had poor control of my emotions and cried a lot, which of course ended in me getting a lot of… negative feedback, that resulted in me shutting in before I could really develop myself, and as an effect of that, I had a really hard time expressing myself at all. Amy suggested that maybe I should try becoming a member of an acting club to help with my problem, so that’s why I was here. Amy was here because I was here and she was the best and I didn’t deserve a friend like her, but she was there for me either way.

Both of us were honest about our reasons for joining the club when we did so, but to my surprise, all the people involved were completely okay with it, and we got along surprisingly well. Of course, my shyness was still there. The crushing majority of my interactions with others were initiated by someone else, but I could still participate in semi-casual conversation with someone who wasn’t Amy, so it was already significantly better than I’d do in any other environment.

The time I spent in my thoughts was apparently enough for Miss Jones’s friend to select and set up stuff for the scene we were going to. She’d specifically chosen that scene from all the performances currently offered by the theatre we were in, and she knew us well, so I wasn’t really worried about it before.

Now however, that I could see the characters of the scene displayed on the screen, I got a little nervous. There were three stereotypically feminine girls, and three stereotypically masculine guys, all looking to be young adults, and I was honestly afraid for who I was going to play. It made sense for me to play one of the guys, which was rather unfortunate, since all of them looked like people I wouldn’t want to look like, even temporarily. I shuddered at the thought of being perceived as stereotypical conventionally handsome man number two.

To my surprise, though, Miss Jones had different plans. Apparently, each of us were to play the character that was closest in personality to our own personalities, in order to get the best we could out of our one chance. That one chance was really nothing special, since we’d literally just have two spectators, but it was still a big experience, and we wanted to have fun with it, so the reasoning made sense. Just as much as it made sense when I was assigned the role on one of the girls on the screen.

I didn’t really need an explanation for that choice. The character design made it pretty clear; she looked shy, and for that to be so clearly conveyed with just a small still image of character from torso up was rather impressive. I actually envied that clarity; maybe if I looked like that, people would give me much less of a hard time for being as shy and anxious as I was. As my imagination went from that place in logical directions, I found myself rather infatuated by the idea of looking like the girl on the screen, and even thoughts like ‘I wouldn’t stand out in the club if I looked like her’ crossed my mind, even though literally entire thing about our club was that we all stood out, and I actually stood out the least.

Amy shook me out of my unreasonable thoughts to inform me that all the roles were already assigned, and to hand me the interface assigned to the character I was supposed to play. The guy whose name I really should have gotten by now (Miss Jones had introduced him at the beginning, but I might have forgotten it) took to explaining how everything worked. He showed us how to put them on behind our ears, and that it would basically act as a wireless interface between our brain and nerve signals, and the computer system responsible for running the illusion.

He then went on to specify safety concerns. For example, for many safety reasons, we couldn’t just completely immerse ourselves in characters and cut out sensory information from our real bodies, as it would make it rather difficult to do things like walking, or not stumbling into stuff randomly. The solution for that was rather simple; all the sensory inputs from our real bodies were simply kept in place, and the simulation of characters’ inputs was put on top of that. He assured that despite the idea of experiencing having two separate bodies sounding rather overwhelming, it actually took a really short period to adapt thanks to all the advanced neurology research used to design the system.

With all that, we were told that the simulation would trigger for each of our characters as soon as we entered the scene area. Of course, I was the only one to approach the scene with a slow walk rather than an overexcited run. It became very clear at that moment that my friends were having way more difficulties containing their excitement than I did, but the fact that I also seemed to experience my emotions much more weakly than others was something I’d noticed a long time ago.

“Oh, wow, that’s so weird, haha!” laughed Emily, with a much lower voice of her character. I shuddered once again; I very much wouldn’t have enjoyed having that voice come out of my mouth.

It was a little odd considering how all of the others reacted, but I felt a little tense about crossing the literal red line that indicated the border of the stage area. For some reason, it felt important, and not in the ‘big experience with advanced technology exciting’ sense, but the personal sense. I probably shouldn’t have overthought the character I was about to play so much… I took a deep breath, and stepped forward.

I was immediately assaulted by a very intense feeling, something very hard to describe. I could feel the two separate bodies, but telling any detail about any of them was obstructed by how strikingly different they were compared to one another; one of them just felt so wrong on every possible level compared to the other one that I could barely stand. I couldn’t focus due to the sheer strength of emotions overwhelming me, but I knew I had to escape it.

I took a step back, and to my utter terror I realized that between the feeling of two bodies, it wasn’t the wrong one that disappeared. I felt tears start to flow down my cheeks as I began to grasp just how disgusting my body felt. The feeling was so strong that I experienced physical pain in my chest. I had to hide. I had to hide so that no one had to see it ever again. I disregarded all the thoughts about the practicality of such a solution, just like I did all the concerned faces around me.

I quickly ran up to Miss Jones and her friend, apologized to them, gave them back the interface, and apologized once more, then ran out of the room before anybody could interrupt me. I ran for a place to hide, and the first place I reached was the toilets. I stopped in front of the doors and looked at them. Two different doors, to two different, but almost identical bathrooms, labeled with simplified pictures of people. The answer to the question the doors stated was seemingly obvious, yet the only thing I could do about it was to feel more pain in my chest. My eyes ached as they shed yet more tears, and I continued running.

Eventually I reached the room that we’d visited earlier, which was basically a small theatre hall that no one used anymore, and I used that fact as an excuse to hide in it. I sat in a chair that resembled ones seen in cinemas, and I just cried. I cried, I sobbed, and when I sobbed I heard my voice, which made me cry and sob even more. Everything was so painful, each part of me was so disgusting I had troubles stopping just to think about what was happening. I felt huge, way too big, I took up too much space. I tried to take my knees up to my chest to make myself smaller, and I partially succeeded, but I wasn’t slim or flexible enough to keep that pose for long. I cried more as my body didn’t allow me even the tiniest comfort of making myself feel smaller.

After a short bit, the door to the room opened again as Amy entered it. At the sight of the state I was in, she stopped for a moment, and then slowly walked up to me. She put a comforting hand on my shoulder and then sat next to me.

“Do you want me to help?” she asked.

Knowing what she referred to, I nodded a bit too aggressively. She nodded at that, and took my head into a hug next to her chest. She patted my hair and made soothing noises to get me to a state in which I could talk. She knew how to calm me down; we’d done a significant portion of our growing up together, after all.

After a bit of time, she decided to ask, “Can you tell what’s making you cry?”

“My body,” I sobbed, hugging my shoulders, as if to make them smaller, “it feels… wrong…”

“You told me that before. Is it something new, or is it just stronger?” she asked.

She asked, knowing full well about my insecurities. She was my best friend, of course I vented to her sometimes. She vented to me about stuff too. But the question that she’d asked just now made me realize that none of what I was feeling felt alien. The realization that it wasn’t something new that had attacked me just now, that it was a version of what I was already stuck with made me cry more. How was I going to survive this? Would it feel like that all the time now?

“Shh, okay, it’s okay,” she cooed some more for a bit, and then added, “Let’s try something different -- if your body is wrong, then what would feel right?”

Before I could properly think about it, the image of the character that had started it all appeared in my mind. “The… the girl I was going to play…”

After a bit of pause, Amy spoke. “Okay, then why? What is it about her that makes her right?”

I couldn’t help but marvel at the way she said it. There was nothing but care in her voice; despite the oddity of the situation, she was still trying to comfort me. Did I mention that she was the best? Because she was the best.

I thought back to reasons I’d given myself for feeling the way I felt about the character, but quickly realized just how bad they were. The implication that I wouldn’t be bothered if I looked like a shy person was clearly ridiculous, and it even disregarded the fact that people disliked my shyness because I was a guy, which meant I was ‘supposed’ to not be shy, which basically meant that both of my reasons for feeling that way could be shortened to ‘because she was a girl’, and it was not the answer I was capable of understanding. Why did being a girl sound so appealing? My reasons for it were non-existent, and I wasn’t going to go the ‘girls have it easier’ route, because they obviously didn’t. It wasn’t my first time feeling strongly about not wanting to be a guy, but it was so strong now, and I just didn’t understand why.

“I don’t… I don’t know...“ I cried, “I don’t understand!”

Amy was about to start calming me down once again, when she was interrupted by the familiar voice of Miss Jones, “I might be able to help.”

I looked up in the direction of the door, and there she was, approaching us. As I was now capable of forming semi-coherent thoughts, I started to once again apologize for all the mess I must have caused before I was interrupted.

“It’s okay, you were clearly overwhelmed, you still are. I won’t punish you for having emotions, what am I, a teacher?” our teacher said.

I smiled at the joke, which was a small relief from what I was feeling. We sat there a bit longer in silence, presumably waiting for me to calm down a little more, before Miss Jones took to explaining by what she meant by being able to help. She straight up asked me if my lack of understanding was about wanting to be a girl and not knowing why that was, and my shocked reaction made a verbal answer pretty unnecessary. She then took to explaining to me that it was a thing that happened, and that wishing to be a girl like that meant that I was most likely already a girl on the inside.

Needless to say, if I somehow wasn’t already incapable of forming words, that information would have driven me to that state alone. As we got up and started walking back to the main hall, Miss Jones told me to take my time thinking about how I felt about the whole thing. I decided it would be better to not try to participate in the play, as I was still rather fragile emotionally, but I still enjoyed watching my friends having fun and butchering the scene of a play they were unfamiliar with.

I also tried thinking about the whole ‘being a girl on the inside’ thing, but I had no doubts that if it was an actual real thing that happened to people, and if I was allowed to be one of those people, then I just was. It simply explained too many things about my past life, about how I thought about things and what kind of perspectives I usually took on any given subject; it just screamed of a girl that wasn’t allowed to be a girl. Which was technically what I was? It was still kinda hard to intellectually take a hold of that idea, and it obviously overwhelmed me emotionally.

What I was worried about was actually telling people about it, because I decided I had to tell my friends. I knew that Amy and Miss Jones wouldn’t be a problem, since they’d likely question me in some way about it anyways, but the concept of actually saying it out loud, to people no less, sounded extremely terrifying. It turned out that my worries were misplaced, as Miss Jones was willing to explain the situation for me, for which I was really grateful. And of course, my friends reacted positively, if a bit underwhelmingly. Nobody really made a big deal out of it, and when I asked about why that was, Abby said something along the lines of “No offence, but you were never really much of a guy.” I agreed.

That was just the beginning of my struggles, that much was obvious, and I still had a lot of things to figure out. The questions of my family, and of what I would do about the whole thing were still up in the air, and I had to admit it was rather scary. But on the other side, it filled me with optimism, because while I still didn’t know how many things I had to discover about myself, I’d just gotten a big step closer, and the prospect of more steps ahead of me was rather exciting. Overall, I was still rather lost about everything in life, but I had my friends by my side, who accepted me as I really was, and that was more than I could have ever asked for.