“The first time he went crazy was at a girls' slumber party at Sandy Biondo's house in the third grade. It was his inaugural overnight in a crowded sea of Barbie sleeping bags. Giggling and baking cupcakes, doing each other's makeup in the bathroom upstairs, and staying up until 3:00 A.M. As she lay in his plain, light blue sleeping bag, his heart began to race uncontrollably. She felt the racing pulse in her neck, something she would do a thousand more times in her fifty years of crippling anxiety. She had never felt his heart beat so hard. His stomach began to churn and she ran into the bathroom to vomit. Her first panic attack and his first attempt to escape. Her last slumber party.” Growing UpAnxietyMental IllnessTransgenderTrans ManClosetedTrans Boy Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition Source: Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
“I am sitting next to a middle-aged Midwestern blonde from Shakopee, Minnesota. She is unremarkable; from the outside she looks less unkempt than some, a veneer of solidity that makes me wonder what she's doing here. Then she tells her story. Her thirty-year-old daughter, her best friend as she described her, had planned a big fiftieth birthday party for her. She had set up catering, had had a cake delivered to her mom's house. A few hours before the party, she had been with her mom setting up tables and making a playlist, and then left to go to her apartment to change clothes. She said to her mother what she said every time they parted, "I love loving you," and walked out the door. She never showed up for the party. She had gone home and hanged herself. This mother, that veneer I had misrecognized, was a husk, all that was left of a body destroyed by the unknown becoming known. "What had I missed?" she asked. What was lurking inside the body of her daughter that day? What was underneath the party planning and the love of loving her mother? What could that young woman not bear to know, not bear to feel?” LoveLossGriefFamilySuicideInvisibleMental IllnessInvisible IllnessInvisible Self Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition Source: Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
“As a woman, I would have rather been bipolar, something I could take medication for, than been treated like a woman - something I could not control.” Mental IllnessAuthenticityAgencySexismMisogynyTransgenderBipolar DisorderTrans ManClosetedGender Transition Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition Source: Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition