A self portrait collage I did in high school

I was going through some boxes of old stuff of mine and came across this self-portrait collage I did for photography class in high school. I was looked like a cute boy with kind of a Beatles' haircut, as in how they wore their hair just before they grew it long. Anyway the collage had a photo of me among a bunch of magazine cut outs I thought represented who I was. There were actually quite a bit of trans references in it, hidden of course but not really.

This isn't going to be a long entry. I just wanted to write a quick blurb about it.

Sometimes I look back on my life and think of myself almost as two people. There was my guy-self and then there was my true-self. It's easy to think of myself as having been at some point a normal boy. The truth is and it shows in that collage. I was always a very transgender boy. I actually am not so transgender as a girl. It's easy to brush over the fact that every day in high school I was struggling with the question "Why do I feel like I need to be a girl so bad?" That every night I browsed the internet for hours looking for something that would definitively make me transsexual or better that would make me not transsexual.

When I realized that I had to transition I definitely thought back on how my entire life prior to transition was centered around the fact that I was a female trying to live a male life.

I failed utterly at that.

Or rather, I doubt others really see it that way. The truth is I failed utterly to gain some sort of peace with myself and my body as a male: something that actually comes rather easily to me as female.

It's easy to look back on my life from how other's saw me, because for a significant portion of my life I did "pass" as a cisgender male. I say pass because in my memory there really isn't a time when it wasn't an effort on my part to "pass."

Another great thing about transition is that I don't have to think about how to be a girl. That just kind of comes naturally.

I'm actually really glad that my self-portrait collage referenced my transness as much as it did. It's nice to see evidence of how my life is a continuum like every one else's.