We don’t choose how we start. Or where, or when. Or why or how. But what is a choice. What is my choice?

I came up the stairs one day, grade four. A little girl. Skinny, not knowing myself, and quiet enough to blend in. The only time I’ll talk is after raising my hand. I don’t have anybody to converse with, anyways. And in that moment, when a piece of hair swung over my eye, I felt like something was wrong. Where was me? Who am I? I’m too tall for my age, hitting my head on cabinets enough to remind me of such matters. I grew before the other children. I had not a friend. And the second that hair grazed over the left side of my face, I felt as if I was hiding. That I was hiding, and too shy. Too little, yet somehow also too big. And I’m not sue how, but by grade five, I accumulated enough courage to ask my mom to bring me for a haircut. She looked sad when I told her how I wanted it. Not normal sad though. A different type of sad. The one where you think to yourself:
“What did I do wrong?”
I wanted it short. Boy short, as they call it. I felt as if I was hiding behind my hair that day and ever since then. No more.

You may be thinking the choice was to cut my hair. It was a choice, but not the choice. That would come unbeknownst to me, right afterwards.

I got it cut. My mom looked miserable the whole time. Strands of hair fell alongside her happiness. Strands of hair fell with my sadness. I could jump to the moon, as of now.

And in the car on the way home, my mom asked me.
“Do you feel like a girl or a boy?”
I thought with youthful happiness for a few seconds.
“A boy,” I responded.
The rest of the car ride,
Was silent.

That was my choice. And that choice lead to a series of things. My mother crying in the nights after that day. My dad told my ten-year-old self that. My sister cried because mom cried. And when my mom sobs at the dinner table, something. Is terribly. Wrong.

She also cried to me, about me.
“Where’s my happy little princess,” she said, desperate and broken down. And maybe she was right, because as of now, I was none of those things. And sometimes it didn’t even feel like I was hers.She’s not proud, why would I be hers? She my mother, but maybe, just maybe I failed to be he kid.

She never told me she was proud, at least.

My parents would eventually tell me that I came out looking like a chimney sweep.

But quite frankly, I’d rather look like a chimney sweep than a girl.