STILL ME AND OTHER PRIVATE THOUGHTS: Finding Motivation, Living Authentically, and Letting Go of Regrets

I can vividly recall the moment when I first started to grapple with my gender identity, a realization that exposed the stark contrast between how I saw myself and how others perceived me. From a young age, I instinctively understood the need to mould myself into the version others desired, striving to keep the peace and “calm the waters,” often at the expense of my happiness. Long before I forged friendships or even learned to spell my name, something deep within me recognized that the person I was projecting to the world didn’t resonate with my true spiritual essence. Reflecting on those challenging formative years, I realize that my frustratingly inconvenient eidetic memory tragically and with specificity allows me to access these memories, even as early as four.

The prompt for this essay touches on two significant themes: the upcoming Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31st, 2025, and my recent experience watching the heartfelt Netflix documentary “Will & Harper.” This film beautifully captures the journey of a road trip that deepens the bond between Will Ferrell and his lifelong friend, Harper Steele, highlighting friendship and personal transition. Inspired by this poignant portrayal, I feel compelled to share my own reflections on my early years grappling with gender dysphoria. I was inspired to convey the challenges I faced during my youth before and as I began my transition, but more importantly, the profound sense of relief and joy I discovered in living authentically as my true self. Throughout this journey, I have also experienced incredible friendships that have enriched my life in ways I could have never imagined. I hope that sharing these thoughts will resonate with others navigating similar paths.

IN THE BEGINNING

As cliches go, earmarking your life in a series of chapters is as cliched as they come. In a lazy effort to dice up my life into digestible morsels for easy accessibility, I will categorize my life into two poorly constructed chapters: pre-transition, “The Before Times,” and post-transition, let’s call that chapter, “Everything’s Peachy-Nothing to See Here.”

In those “before times,” expressing myself as a girl directly contravened polite society; though lacking evidence, it was probably in the Criminal Code of Canada at one point. Still, even scarier than growling, moustachioed Toronto beat cops barging into my home was catching the ire of my young, unprepared parents. Invariably, the desire to express oneself as another gender came with the calculable and universal trans trifecta of fear, anxiety, and guilt. And despite all of that swirling around a young me like punishing gusts of wind battering an infirm house, there were glimmers of happiness, contentment, and a feeling that this was “right” and natural—not the hiding and covert missions, but the instinctively righteous expression of me and existing as such.

I had told almost no one of the precise day or moment when I knew I was “different” from so many others my age and in my neighbourhood or what remedy I took to explore my femininity. However, the memory is as faithful as any other (unreliable) narrator (at age four) could be. That late agreeable spring day, I remember standing alone in my living room, the feel of the off-white high pile carpet between my tiny, stubby, albeit cute toes, the enduring, aromatic smell of my mother’s cherished rice casserole carried along the trade winds of our draughty Mississauga townhouse, and the sudden recognition of some unspeakable anguish. As my toes dug into that downy carpet, I leaned into the notion that I wasn’t a boy but something else. What happened next is only known by this (unreliable) narrator and my parents, but it was a day of profound despair for me, confusion for a young mother, and disappointment for a father. There was talk of therapy (an early notions of conversion therapy), shock therapy, threats to out me to friends, and of being disowned.

From that summery spring day, I learned two things and cultivated two guiding principles; 1. never again will I express who I was and that, 2. I was right; I wasn’t the boy everyone in my life believed me to be. While I was caught wearing women’s clothes again and again by my mother over the next thirteen years, I never once attempted to open myself up to my parents and, by extension, my friends. I would do everything in my power to fly below the radar and never again be terrorized with shock therapy or tormented by the possibility of ridicule or homelessness. I would pantomime some masculine character that my parents would be proud of. Through elementary and high school, that’s who I was. While only marginally gifted in a few scholastic subjects and not especially accomplished academically, I was happy (or manifested a close approximation of happiness), entertaining, courteous, and compliant. 

TAKING OWNERSHIP

Growing up in my family meant moving often. Pursuing the optimal economic and work-life balance for my father meant moving to areas in, or close to, his sales territory. Friends were disposable and came and went with each new school year and each new city. By the start of grade nine, I had already attended six schools across southern Ontario. 

In grade six, I moved back to St. Catharines. My parents had timed the move over the winter break to give me time to settle in at home before I needed to attend my first day at a new school. After moving in, but before the first day of school, my parents shipped me off to a week-long school trip in some wintery Northern Ontario village. In these rustic bunk shacks smelling of damp wood and lacquer, I first met what would soon be some of my new classmates. This is where I met (thee) Bill Heculuck. 

Bill’s reputation across the entire separate school board was already well established. Before I met him, I knew all about this character. Stories of Bill carried along the air like whispers of mythical creatures and fanciful legends. What I would come to quickly learn was that Bill was a sweet, funny, and rare soul. While sometimes the target of ridicule, he and I became fast friends in that 5-day winter excursion. This winter camp stay was for all of the separate school board students from across the city to revel in remote, rustic winter activities. At the end of the long prologue to my new St. Catharines adventure, all the kids returned home and to their respective schools. Bill went to a Catholic school in Port Dalhousie, and I started school at Michael J. Brennan (MJB) in the city’s north end, a school that has been ultimately swallowed up by a public school in the years since. I wouldn’t again see Bill until middle school a year later. 

When I next met Bill again, I had established a new circle of friends. Still, at the time, my charismatic self always sought companionship, and I was always eager to add another to my collection of friends even if I knew there was chance for me to move once again. Despite some MJB friends-including some of the more garrulous educators-telling me that Bill was “weird” or “a troublemaker,” I saw something in Bill, whether that was also sorrow, loneliness, or being an underdog; Bill and I spent two years at St. James, our middle school years, underachieving and having a blast. Our bond only grew with time through our later high school years.

As high school graduation approached, I knew Bill and I were on different paths in life; despite that, Bill fought hard to be my friend. He was the only one who saw my underlying fragility and melancholy. And in the same way I ignored what people continued to say about him, he pushed past my misery and made me laugh. As I prepared for life in university, a journey Bill would not be able to join me on, I got a call from his mother one morning. I still remember that call and her splintering voice as she told me that Bill had been checked into the hospital for testing. It wouldn’t be another week or so until Bill and his family received confirmation of what the preliminary X-rays showed. He had bone cancer, and it had already consumed most of his hip and lower back. It was particularly sinister in its aggressiveness; it was terminal. Bill would ultimately lose his fight with cancer only a few months later.

The death of my best friend, Bill Heculuck, hit me hard. Bill, only 21, and I, barely 20. This was the first death of anyone in my life that I knew and was close to (and essentially my age). Cancer and death wasn’t something people our age should have to worry about. In the wake of Bill’s early death, I began to appreciate taking ownership of the present. Not long after losing Bill, I began to earnestly think about coming out and transitioning.

THIS WAS ALWAYS ME

When I finally came out to a few close friends in those early years, in conversations after the tectonic shift in reality, many of my friends expressed concerns that they “never knew who I was” or that I had “fundamentally changed” and that “[they] were actually meeting me for the first time.” At first, I abided by these assessments, but later, I believed none were accurate. I was always the same. Even as I grew up, existing beneath a devastating veil of some societal or self-imposed gender or social norms, I was still me. My sense of humour was always authentic. What caused me grief did not change. My likes and dislikes were unadulterated and remained consistent between now and “the before times.” I had always been me. Maybe the outside, superficially, was unsettled or itinerant, but the person in the mirror looking back at me was going to persist. 

Despite my insistence that I was the same unwavering nerdy Trekkie or goofball laughing at the same ridiculous, over-the-top Chris Farley skits or Norm’s dry one-liners on Weekend Update on SNL, many of my schoolmates saw it differently. Could it have been possible that the mirror I saw myself through may have deceived me in the static nature of how I saw myself? What was certain was those staring at me through their ‘uncorrupted notion (of who I was to them)’ glimpsed a liar, an outlander. No amount of temperate persuasion would convince them that they weren’t losing someone; they only saw a refugee from the scorched earth that lies somewhere in between the rooted gender hostelry. I was no longer “one of the guys,” and my girlfriends, who grossly outnumbered my guy friends, felt I betrayed them in my choice to remain aphonic. As they saw it, I was a perjurer throughout my friendship; I deceived them and lost their “faith.” This is how, or why, and when many of my friends left me.

REGRETS

I have never, nor can I ever apologize for transitioning or living my authentic self, despite some family and former friends insisting I should. The only regret, if that’s the right word, that I have over the whole process is just the initial shock of the process of coming out. This is not something I could have avoided, nor is it unique to me, but I recognize the emotional and physical realities of experiencing something like this. 

Sadly, in our gender-obsessed culture where women and men still live squarely in divided camps and have specific functions and defined roles, the treasonous act of going “AWOL” and parading over to the other side is still a jolt for many. When a society defines and differentiates between gender roles and keeps those camps too distant and walled off, the cortege to live authentically seems so much more consequential. In the West, we’ve placed high walls around the notions of masculinity and femininity–albeit through a patronizing lens of male chauvinism and harmful, unnecessary patriarchy. When I made the decision-not to “transition”-but rather to “tell others who I was,” (a transition in their eyes), they couldn’t help but see it as an arduous march, whereas for me, I saw it as a quick jaunt over to (finally) “hang with the girls.” 

What was the recognition of a simple truth, to live authentically, for others, felt like the leading edge of a shock wave, a sonic boom from a jet flying low and fast. For me, this was necessary; it was time, and there were just a few unequivocal moves to embrace my earned and deserved happiness; for everyone else, they now had to brace for an enormous thunderclap that shook the ground as we walked together. Some of my friends from “the before times” have expressed sorrow, disorientation, and grief, sometimes over the perceived loss of a friend or the change to the dynamic of our friendship, whereas others have expressed sorrow and sadness for me and the necessity to hide who I was from the world for all these years.

NEVER AN ENDING, ONLY A BEGINNING

Those who have known me from “the before times” and the few friends I have stayed close to since, many of them would agree that I still have the same adolescent sense of humour and like the same things, more or less. All of us grow up, and our likes change and evolve, but at our core, we remain ourselves, and that’s no different for me or any other trans individual. 

With the rise in anti-trans and queer rhetoric and the propensity for violence by some, residing in my own skin and in my own community has me feeling less confident and feeling much less safe, even in my own home. With the attacks on trans individuals going from a few anonymous cowards tortuously clacking their way through barely-literate hate tweets to actual criminal threats and attacks on individuals offline at their homes and workplaces, my euphoria over my transitions and the promise of prosperity has been transposed with angst and existential dread. For those few who bit the bullet of that sudden shock wave decades ago and still count me as a friend, and for all of those who have become my friends since; who have stood up with me, or beside me; as an advocate, an ally, and protector, thank you. You’ll never know how much that means to me.

Though I transitioned some time ago, just like the questions posed by Harper at the beginning of her transition, all these years later, I echo some of her self-doubt; I will always have lingering questions, questions that I don’t think my annoyingly analytical and self-deprecating brain will ever be able to satisfyingly answer; “do others actually see me as Sabrina?” and I often find myself asking “am I still worthy of love?”

Dedicated to Bill H. I miss you, my friend. Rest well.

• I DIDN’T PLAN TO BECOME A TEACHER: The Students Who Made Me Stay
• JUSTICE ENDS WHERE POLICING BEGINS: The Shameful History of Policing The Gay and Trans Community in Canada
• RAISED BY PLACES UNSEEN: The Quiet Way Borneo Found Me
• ALONE AGAINST THE SYSTEM: Fighting Police Misconduct in Ontario Means Surviving It
• PART 3 – NO PERMISSION NEEDED: What Was Once Shame Has Become Pride