Did you ever wonder what the ‘normal’ teens would do in your current situation? Like, the ones that don’t have depression and anxiety problems, the ones that have no problems talking to people and making friends, the ones that are sometimes kinda jerks? This kind of teens. I never really could put myself in their headspace, and at that point in time the contrast between me and them became really apparent.
You see, I just came back from school on friday, and it just so happened to be my eighteenth birthday. It was a real opportunity that I probably wouldn’t do anything with, it’s not like I could throw an impressive party with only two friends, in a two room apartment. I could legally drink alcohol, which I guess some people cared about, but I never really saw the appeal of that. Realistically, I was probably going to spend most of my evening playing games with my mom and we’d order a pizza like she promised.
But that’s when things stopped being realistic. Suddenly, I became aware of something about myself that I never knew was there — I apparently had powers. On some level, I knew it was a possibility, since my mother, who had died soon after I was born, used to have powers too, but at some point I’d just sort of assumed I didn’t, since most people revealed their powers at the start of their puberties; my best friend, Lisa, discovered her powers when she was fifteen, and she was considered a late bloomer.
However, the reason I found out about my powers was also why I knew I wasn’t exactly normal in this regard either — my powers came with some sort of mental manual. It wasn’t like I had new thoughts or memories that I could play back, it was more feelings and instincts, which made it much harder to decode, but it wasn’t impossible.
From what I could understand, those powers got revealed when they did on purpose, and they were passed down to me with intent, which was nice. I apparently could turn into a different form, in which my powers would be much stronger, but I also could use my powers as I was. As for what my powers could do, it seemed to be some sort of generic faster, stronger and more durable thing; it was possible I could also shoot some sort of energy, but it was too confusing to be able to tell for sure.
That brought the question — what to do now?
On one side of the spectrum, there was the impulsive, irresponsible idea to go on some sort of joyride to test how far my powers would go, and on the other was telling my mom and not doing anything stupid. The problem with the reasonable option was that, no matter how much I prefered it, I didn’t really know I had powers — I just had feelings, and, well… Testing my unknown potential powers inside an apartment didn’t seem like the best idea.
Eventually, I decided that the best course of action was probably to walk to a park, find a spot with no people in it and try to do… something. I’d figure it out when I’d get there.
I tried to act as natural as possible when I went out. “I’m going for a walk, do you want something from a store?”
“Nothing. Be careful, okay?” My mom said.
“Okay, bye.”
I didn’t make it even halfway to the park before I got stopped by a literal monster in the way, as if I needed extra bad luck. It was big, muscular and somewhat humanoid, but I could not for the life of me tell what it was — it was surprisingly hard to tell if it was magical, another lab experiment that went out of control, or aliens. For all I knew, somebody accidentally opened a portal to hell again. Regardless of all of that though, I knew one thing for sure — I wasn’t going to try to fight it. There were already some people taking care of it, and I could just take a long way around.
And just as I was about to turn away, for whatever reason the monster looked straight at me. It lasted less than half a second, but it was enough for some instinct in me to trigger. My body started to glow brightly, and then change, which startled me enough to make me fall on my butt. When the glowing stopped and I mostly recovered from the shock of what just happened, I managed to see through my blurry eyes that one of the people who were fighting the monster ran up to me. I blinked to clear my eyes, and…
It was Lisa.
Great. Might as well be.
“Are you okay? Did it hit you?” She asked as she offered her hand to help me get up.
I reached out to find out my hand was now smaller and slimmer. I probably looked completely different from the usual, which meant Lisa probably didn’t recognise me. Or at least, I hoped that was the case.
“Uhm, I…” That was not my voice, unless I just squeaked. “N-no. It’s just… my powers. Sorry, I’m new to this.” Nope, that was a completely different voice, much higher one too.
I tried to focus on my body, and… yup, okay, it… it fit the voice. The girl voice. As if there weren't enough things for me to get anxious about.
Lisa started, “That’s good, I— Wait, new to this? But—”
“I need to go, sorry,” I half-yelled and turned away.
You’d think that I’d be able to run really fast in my new form, but apparently most of my powers went to keeping me from tripping up on my own shoes and pants, since they, of course, didn’t get resized to fit me.
Where was I running? Home, of course. I got what I went out for, and I didn’t particularly like keeping secrets, which, in retrospect, meant I probably shouldn’t have ran away from Lisa, I realized as I was almost home. I’d most likely be useful if I changed back before entering the apartment, but as soon as I thought that, it became clear that I apparently had to be actually calm to do that. Which meant I’d be lucky to be able to change back as soon as late in the evening — and given the track record of that day, that didn’t seem likely.
When I was in front of the door, I realized that using my keys probably wouldn’t be the best idea for potential misunderstanding reasons, so I decided to just ring the doorbell and wait.
After a couple seconds, my mom opened the door with a smile. “Oh,” she said as she saw me, and her smile turned into a surprised look. “Come in and tell me what happened.”
Wait, did she recognize me? Or did she mistake me for someone else? I did what I was told and walked in timidly, still feeling really anxious about the whole situation.
“M-mom…?” I tried to test the waters, in the process surprising myself again with my new voice.
“Oh, right, I should probably explain first.” She let out a big sigh. “I… I knew this was going to happen. I even knew it would most likely happen today. I would have told you sooner, but, well… your mother asked me not to tell you about your powers until you discovered them on your own. She didn’t want to burden you with them while you were still a child, that’s also why it took until now for your powers to manifest. And, well… I knew her for years, I saw her transform and use her powers many times, and when she realized she was dying, she taught me everything about them so that I could help you, so I understandably thought I knew what to expect, but apparently, I was wrong,” she explained.
After a moment of thought, she continued, “She told me it was a possibility for you to look significantly different after transforming, or at least after your first transformation, which made sense to me — let me tell you, your mother looked way too flawless for somebody who never spent more than five minutes getting ready to go out — but… I know her father had those powers before her, and that he definitely did not transform in the way you did. And, well, having me give you all the knowledge and space you needed, I figured you didn’t have any unresolved gender issues that might have caused something like this…”
Of course I didn’t have unresolved gender issues, it just didn’t make sense for me to have any. My mom was trans, as was my other friend, Emmie, and both of them were pretty open about it so I knew practically everything needed to figure this stuff out for years now. It just didn’t seem realistic to have all the knowledge and multiple trans people close to me and still take years before realizing I was some flavor of trans myself. Like, who would do that?
She coughed. “Right, that’s probably a topic for a little later, and only if you want to talk about it so soon. If we have nothing else to go off of, we’ll probably have to address it sooner or later though. Anyways, what happened that got you running home like that?”
There wasn’t much to it, but I’d still somehow managed to take a couple minutes explaining after we sat down on the couch. When I got to the part when I got super anxious and ran away, my mom hugged me. We stayed like that for a bit.
At some point, the doorbell rang again.
My mom got up and stretched. “It’s about time she showed up.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, as she approached the door.
“Lisa, of course,” she said.
What? Did she somehow text Lisa without me noticing? I didn’t even know if she had her number.
She opened the door, and indeed, it was Lisa, who looked like she just ran all the way here as well.
“Hi, I, umm…” Lisa started, before trailing off.
Then, her eyes fell on me, and for some reason, I had an urge to hide, so I turned away to break eye contact.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yup, whatever the hunch you had, it was probably right. Please come in, I’ll explain everything,” my mom sighed, “again.”
While she recounted the story again, she also included what had happened from my perspective, which was really nice for letting me try to calm down a bit — especially since, for some reason, Lisa decided to sit right next to me, and for some reason that made me feel self-conscious about multiple things.
After a moment of silence, I figured it was a right time for me to explain myself. “I-I’m sorry for running away, I got startled, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just sort of panicked…” I trailed off, again caught by surprise by my own voice. In my defence, this voice had much more… range than my regular voice had.
“It’s okay, I know how you can get sometimes, and, well… you looked positively terrified back there,” Lisa said.
I nodded, and looked down for a bit, then it occured to me. “Wait, how did you know to come here?”
“Well, after the monster thing went down, and I had the moment to think about it, it was a very easy guess. Your face doesn’t really look that different,” she explained.
I suddenly felt sick in my stomach. For some reason, the idea of running around with a girl body and my stupid boy face felt much, much worse than the situation I thought I was in, and it hurt.
“I-It doesn’t?” I asked in a very small voice.
“I mean, yeah, it’s just— Wait. You haven't looked in a mirror yet?”
I shook my head.
“You should do that. Like, now. It might help. Maybe.”
I might have gotten up a bit too quickly, but then again, I didn’t know the appropriate speed for getting up and going to the bathroom to look in the mirror was. From my past experience, the optimal speed was usually zero.
I didn’t close the door behind me, leaving it ajar instead, scared someone’d assume I was doing something inappropriate. I then had to stop and take a deep breath before stepping in front of the mirror, given that even on the best of days the experience was at least moderately unpleasant.
Then, I saw my reflection.
And I let out a sigh of relief.
Okay, it wasn’t so bad. Aside from the glowing magenta geometric stripes across my face, it didn’t really look like anything out of the ordinary for a regular girl. I was having trouble identifying what Lisa meant, what part of my face was ug— I mean, still as the usual. I didn’t even have the bad feeling in my stomach.
Though I did feel something. Maybe I was dissociating? After all, it was a big change that I technically should at least dislike. I tried to make sure I was there, in the moment, and that I truly understood that the person in the mirror was very much me, and—
Whatever the feeling from before was, it was much stronger now, and it definitely wasn’t bad. If anything, it felt too good to indulge in without shame, somehow. Also, it might have just been my imagination, but my face might have gotten a bit redder? I tried touching it, and it did seem a bit warm.
Before my thoughts could go too far on that line, I heard my mom’s voice.
“Are you okay in there?” She asked.
“Y-yeah…” I responded shyly.
Right, regardless of if the door was closed, spending too much time in there was still a bit suspicious. I didn’t want either of them to think I was doing… something bad.
I went back to sit on the couch, and I could feel Lisa’s eyes on me all the way. My mom was probably also looking, but she had ways to make it discreet.
After a moment of silence, Lisa spoke, “You’re doing… surprisingly well.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah! I expected you to… Well, I expected something worse.”
“Hmm…” I looked down for a moment, then looked her in the eyes. “Why did you say I look similar?”
“Wha—? Because you do? You didn’t see that?” She looked flabbergasted.
“I… I tried to look for it, but I couldn’t figure it out,” I admitted.
Suddenly, I got startled by my mom sitting down right next to me.
“Let’s try this differently - what is it about your regular face that is so different from this one for you?” She asked.
“I… umm…” I looked down and away — I couldn’t answer this question honestly.
Then my mom held my shoulders, and said, “Hey. You don’t need to say it if you don’t want to — you just should be honest with yourself.”
I considered it. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I thought — I just knew I shouldn’t think about myself that way. The only thing that actually stopped me from talking about it was…
“C-can you promise you won’t get angry at me?”
She looked surprised, but then nodded. “Of course.”
Now came the hard part — figuring out how to say it diplomatically, so I had time to explain myself before the assumptions started.
Eventually, I started, “Well, umm, the biggest thing I guess is that I’m not… I’m not ugly anymore… And, like, I know I shouldn’t think of myself like that, I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t.” I paused for a second to take a breath and prepare for what I was about to say. “I… I really tried. I did all the techniques that you taught me to deal with the bad thoughts, but none of them worked like they did for most other stuff, and it didn’t go away, and a couple years ago when I grew a lot, it got even worse, and then it’s been only getting worse ever since.” I paused again to try to steady my shaky breathing a bit. “I talked about it with my therapist too, and it didn’t work either, and at some point it got so bad it literally hurt but I couldn’t figure out why and… and… I’m sorry…”
It was only after my mom grabbed me into a hug that I realized I started crying. I decided to just let myself cry out onto her shoulder, she’s always told me it was better to not try to stop it and instead let me run its course.
A bit after I stopped sobbing, my mom ended the hug and wiped my tears with a tissue.
“I’m never going to be mad at you for struggling honey, and you absolutely don’t need to have it all figured out right now, it’s okay to take your time. Please consider, though, if you really find your face ugly, or if it’s some other feelings causing you to think that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well… I don’t want to lead you to any conclusions at the risk of introducing my own bias, but it could be that you only mind that it is your face that looks that way that upsets you, and you’d simply like it to look differently. Or at least, you could ask yourself why your face shifting to be more feminine made you stop feeling that way,” she explained.
I frowned.
Either my trans mom had to stop making so much sense, or I had to reexamine some things about how I felt and why I felt that way. I’d already had that thought experiment — I tried to remove myself from thinking of it as my face, and instead to imagine seeing a stranger that looked like I did, and if I found them ugly. And I didn’t. So the idea that I simply didn’t like how I looked because it didn’t fit me not only wasn’t a far reach, it was practically already there, even if I hadn’t come up with it on my own.
Then, there was actually asking the big question — was I actually sure I wasn’t trans? I had to admit, I hadn’t really considered it for a long while now. After all, I’d already thought about it seriously, and came to the conclusion that I was cis. But then again, that was when I was twelve, and the twelve year old me wasn’t really the smartest. I tried to recall my reasoning.
The big one was definitely that I was too scared — it simply seemed like something some people in school would bully me for, the process of transitioning was overwhelming, and there was the risk that it wasn’t the thing that was bothering me after all and I’d need to undo it, which was scary too. My reasoning was that such a revelation in my identity would be so big that it’d make all those problems seem small and insignificant. Of course, over the years I’d learned that such big life changing moments didn’t really happen that often in real life, like when I was diagnosed with ADHD and got some meds for that, it didn’t magically make all the problems to do with that disappear; if anything, it introduced new problems and struggles. And besides that, well… there wasn’t really a way to really know those things for sure, there was always some uncertainty there, so that argument hardly seemed valid.
There was also the concern that I wouldn’t end up looking the way I wanted to, or somehow wasn’t enough, but then again, if I wanted every solution to be perfect, I wouldn’t be able to do anything — good enough is good enough. Even if I didn’t have an option with the outcome I knew like I do now, not doing anything to feel better just because it wouldn’t be the best was just silly.
That left only one thing — the fact that I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t feel like I deserved this thing, the ability for this big self actualization moment that would change everything and potentially restructure my life, and make things better. The worst part was that, unlike my previous two ‘reasons’ (which now sounded more like excuses if I had to be honest), this one didn’t go away over the years, I just got better at dealing with it. Rationally, I knew of course that there wasn’t anything to deserve about being one’s true self, or being happy, it simply wasn’t like that worked; so I decided to just push through and let myself decide for myself.
So that was it. All of my ‘reasons’ for why I thought I was cis; unless I was forgetting something, those were really underwhelming. And of course, there were reasons I might be trans, I just mostly excused them away by thinking that they weren’t frequent or strong enough to actually imply anything, which of course, seemed silly in retrospect. It’s not like I hadn’t imagined (or more accurately, fantasized) myself being in a situation very similar to what had happened that day, or that I didn’t have that nice warm feeling when I thought about the idea of getting to be a…
A girl.
So that was it, wasn’t it? All the people in my life were sure to be supportive, all I had to do was ask.
I looked back up at my mom.
“Umm… Would it… Would it be okay if I tried being… a girl? For a bit, just to see if…” I trailed off.
“Of course honey. I’m so proud of you.” My mom hugged me again.
After a bit, she got up and asked, “Lisa, will you be willing to stay with us for a bit for a pseudo birthday/coming out party?”
“O-of course.”
“Yay, I have an excuse to get an extra large pizza!” My mom stretched and went for her purse to grab her phone.
After a bit, I turned to Lisa, and said, “So, umm… What do you think?”
“I think you make a really cute girl.”
At that, my face heated up and the nice feeling returned. Being called a girl definitely didn’t feel bad.
“Y-you can’t just say that!”
She moved her face a bit closer to mine.
“Yes I can.” She winked.
I covered my face in embarrassment and let out a long noise that was kinda like a squeak.
Most of that evening was spent playing games, eating pizza, and watching some stuff on Netflix. It was fun, but more than that, it felt comfortable in a way I didn’t even know I missed. I might have pretended that I was still thinking it over, but some part of me had already decided that I wanted to stay like this.
Even with that, I still decided at some point, when I felt my anxiety had calmed down, to check what would happen if I tried to change back. It was a bit scary, and I kinda wished the choice would be taken away from me. That I could just embrace being a girl without any responsibility, even if I knew that the responsibility would be insignificant.
I eventually looked in the mirror, and tried to do what felt like changing back in the instructions in my head. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
When I opened my eyes and I saw the exact same girl I saw just before I closed them — the only difference were the glowing stripes that were now missing.
“Oh,” I said, and I could help but smile.
This is wonderful and I needed it so much today exactly
this was nice
Short stories like these can be so refreshing sometimes. Very nice
Awwwww this was really lovely <3
Oh this is looovelyyyyy aaaa
What a fantastically sweet story
