A Quarter Century of Change

A Quarter Century of Change

Photo by Klemens Köpfle on Unsplash

I threw away a box today that I’ve had for almost 25 years. It wasn’t a dramatic moment. There were no tears, no long goodbyes. Just relief.

It started two days earlier. I was sitting in the cab of my excavator, early afternoon, sun shining through the windows on a perfect spring day. I’d just finished lunch when my wife called. She’d been cleaning out the attic and was telling me about everything she’d found up there. Then, almost as an afterthought, she said, “Oh, by the way, I found a box of your stuff. I put it in our bedroom so you could go through it later. Didn’t want the kids finding it.”

I knew exactly what was in that box.

There was no panic, no racing heart. My wife knows everything about me — that I’ve been trans my whole life, that I recently started HRT, all of it. So I wasn’t worried about her finding it. I just told her I knew what it was and that I’d deal with it when I got home.

I didn’t spend the drive home thinking about it. I’d carried things like this in my head for so long, let them weigh me down and stress me out for years. But I’m in a different place now. Almost at peace. So I just drove home.

Everybody was in the kitchen when I got there. We cooked dinner, sat around the table, went on about our evening like any other night. The box sat upstairs in the corner of our bedroom, waiting. I didn’t go to it until after dinner, when I headed up to take a shower.

I walked over, opened it, and verified what I already knew was inside. Then I closed it back up, pushed it into the corner, and went on with my evening.

I waited two days for trash day. I didn’t want it sitting on top of the pile where it might spill out into the world and my kids might stumble across it. So when trash day came, I put it at the bottom of the can, underneath everything else. And just like that, it was gone.

Relief. That’s the only word for it. Like I was officially moving on.

To understand why that box mattered, you have to go back to when I was eighteen years old.

My friends and I walked into a dark, dingy adult store. DVDs lined every wall, sex toys hung in rows, and the whole place had that particular smell — a mix of must and something you’d rather not think about too hard. We wandered through the aisles, my friends browsing, me mostly just along for the ride. And then, by accident, I stumbled across a section I’d never seen before.

It was labeled she male — terminology the porn industry used back in the early two thousands, even though there were other words out there. But this was what I found, and it was the only visibility I had for people like me.

I walked past it quickly. Too quickly. When my friends were ready to leave, we all walked out together and headed to my friend’s house. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d seen. So I made a decision. I got in my truck, drove all the way back across town by myself, and walked back into that store alone.

Curiosity. That’s all it was. I just needed to understand what I’d found.

I walked back to that section, picked up a box, and flipped it over. And standing there in that dark, dingy store, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Relief.

There were other people like me out there in the world. I wasn’t alone. This was back before Google, before smartphones, before you could search for anything from the privacy of your own bedroom. Information wasn’t easy to find. You had to physically go looking for it, and even then, you might not find it. But here, in this store, holding this box — I found it.

I bought it. A five-pack of DVDs. And I held onto it for almost 25 years.

That box became my research. My proof. Seeing people like me — even if it was in a porn store, even if it wasn’t exactly the most dignified introduction — meant I existed. It meant others like me existed. From that box, I even built a plan. I was going to run away to California, become a porn star, and use the money to pay for my transition and build a life. It sounds wild now, but when you’re eighteen and desperate and you can’t see any other way out, you’ll build a plan out of whatever you’ve got.

But my religious upbringing stopped me cold. Transitioning felt like a sin. Being a porn star felt like a sin. Two one-way tickets to hell I could never come back from. So I stayed. I hid. I carried that box with me through the years like a secret I couldn’t let go of.

Until now.

I’m two months into HRT. I’m writing this book. I’m finally, slowly, learning to live for myself instead of for the character I was told I had to be. I’m not fully there yet — I’m working on it, figuring it out day by day. But I’m moving forward. And that box, that little time capsule of shame and survival and secret hope, doesn’t have a place in the life I’m building.

I don’t need an escape plan anymore. I’m already escaping.