When Did I Know

A friend asked me when I knew I was different.... here is my response:


When I was between 5 and 6 my sister and aunt would dress me up and call me Brycianna.  It felt right and I always loved doing it.  In kindergarten all my friends were girls and I rathered play with them than any of the boys.  I loved playing house and with dolls than with boy's toys and sports... so I guess those were the earliest signs.

Up to middleschool, all my close friends were girls and I found I related to them better.  Middleschool was just hell... everyone is lost and confused there.  But at thirteen is when I started to wish I was a girl instead of a boy.  By fifteen, when no one was home I would sneak into my sister's room and put on some of her clothes.  They felt more comfortable.  By Highschool my circle of friends were girls again and I felt more comfortable with them. Junior year it I started to feel depressingly out of place in my male body.  Contemplated suicide several times.  Still every night wishing I was a girl.  Senior year, I forced myself to try to be more male.. that lasted until my Sophomore year of college.  The summer after my sophomore year is when I did the fifth letter and started to come out to my self.  I started wearing girls jeans and shaving my legs, chest, and pits.  The desire to be a woman was becoming more and more.  When I was alone in Virginia after my first wife and I split, I would dress when I was home and sometimes go driving as a woman.  But when I moved back home I tried to push those thoughts away.  


When I met my wife I hoped being with a woman I dearly love that I would no longer want to be a woman.  I threw away all the clothes I had accumulated over the years.  But the desire to be a woman became more and more.  Feeling ashamed of those desires, I just kept them to my self .  But instead it was eating me up inside.  Then a friend got me to write, which opened the flood gates to me accepting myself.  


So I did know at an early age, but due to societal pressures and the way my family was, I hid it.