The Death of Adam

For the purposes of this blog, my name is currently Adam.

That's not my real name, but it works well enough. Adam was the first man, according to the religions I was taught to follow; the ones that told me a man becoming a woman was vile. I don't believe in those faiths anymore, but their weight still presses down on me and the way I see myself. Even after I'd stepped out from under their umbrella, I kept torturing myself for not being the way they said I should be.

Adam is going to die. I've been trying to kill him for a long time and it took me until I was thirty to understand why. From time to time he would leave for a while and I would take on a new identity, often with a new name or handle. In recent years this went into overdrive and I found myself bounding from identity to identity, trying to cope with what was inside without expressing it.

In order to explain this, I have to explain Adam. This is a long story, so please don't feel pressured to read it. In a way I wrote it for me, so I could see how all the pieces fit together and how my path has brought me to this point. It's a painful path, and it hurts to look back on it. I find myself frequently zoning in on a particular part, and dissociating from the bigger picture. This is the bigger picture, and now that I've written it I feel better about where I am.

I'm on the left.

I was born on a cold day in 1987. My parents had been expecting a girl, so they'd bought baby clothes for a girl. There's actually a picture of me in girl's clothing because that's all they had at the time, and my aunt and mother thought it would be funny to dress me up and take a picture. When it turned out that I presented as a male I was named, baptised and set upon the path that all Catholic males are put on, regardless of who they are.

It was obvious from the beginning that there was something different about me, but perhaps not in the way that it is for some transgender people. My mother describes me as often waking up screaming, unable to move or be consoled as if I'd seen something horrible. I did other things, though, like climbing on top of my father's car and emptying turps over it. There was also a leash because I was prone to running away in the middle of a crowd. One day I escaped from my father -- as I so frequently did -- in the middle of a wildlife park. I wound up neck deep in a broad pond, with people lining the edges to stare at the kid in the water. Somebody called out to me that there were "big fishies" in there, but I had to concept of embarrassment or self consciousness. I was a pure spirit, and all I wanted to do was wade through the water. In my father's own words, nobody moved a muscle to help me. They just stared.

I don't remember getting out of that pond, but I do remember the drive home. My mother cried all the way, and I remember that clearly. They dragged me to a score of paediatricians with varying success, until one day I sat in the office of a doctor at Westmead Hospital who diagnosed me with ADHD. I hated that place; the hospital had concrete walls, a dark interior, and a smell that made me think of death and needles. The fear has never left me, and I'll never feel right in a hospital ever again.

As with any child diagnosed with ADHD in the 90's, they put me on medication. Unlike others, the amphetamines made me hallucinate. I saw creatures in my room at night, sometimes right in front of me, sometimes in a corner or looking away. I still have nightmares about those creatures, but I was a child with an imagination, and who often told stories. Nobody believed me, and although I begged to be taken off of the medication throughout my childhood I stayed on it. It wasn't until adulthood that I was able to convince them that these things had really happened to me, and I still don't think my parents understand the connection between the medication and hallucinations.

I remember the day I started Ritalin quite clearly. My father is an avid lover of garage sales; all it takes is a cardboard sign stapled to a telegraph pole for him to exclaim "Garage sale!" and veer the car down a side street to look at somebody else's crap. I had a stomach ache from the drugs and I was lethargic, so they left me in the car to browse the tables. I'm sure they bought me something but I don't remember it. I do, however, remember the box of barbie dolls and clothes. They were meant for my sister, but I had just as much fun dressing them up, if not more. My parents seem to think that this was wrong and so, it's become a family joke.

The term male suited me well enough before puberty, even though the other males I knew tormented me because I didn't live up to it. I was not into sports or rough housing; I was a boy who liked to draw, and I happily sat out my days off of the playground, scraping a pencil against paper to create fantasies because it gave me peace. It was what I wanted to do at the time, but it ended up making me me feel like a failure.

I don't draw anymore, at least not with lines. I draw with the written word; I create characters and fantasies that can be transferred from my mind to yours. They're never the same, though. Once they enter your mind they take on a life of their own and create something that exists only to you. My characters are not your characters; they might say the same words but they speak with different voices and different faces. They are yours, and you own them.

It was 2001 when my parents connected our computer to the internet for the first time. The cyber-world was new and exciting to me; a place full of people and information, displayed in low-res characters on websites designed with primary colours. It didn't take me long to learn to hide behind handles, and I enjoyed the ambiguous identity they gave me. My first experience of the internet had been using a chat room with an alias I pulled out of a video game. I managed to convince everybody that I was in fact eighteen, although in hindsight perhaps this was because they were thirteen as well. I enjoyed being a different version of myself on the internet. At school I was forced to hide the more eccentric qualities of my persona for fear of the bullying I was already enduring, but it would not be long before they leaked out of their own accord.

I'd switched doctors many times over the years, even taking part in a clinic in the Sydney CBD that would trial me on up to four medications a day. By 1997 my paediatricians had switched me from Ritalin to Dexamphetamine, and it wound up being my kryptonite. In 2003 I was in the tenth grade, readying myself for the school certificate exams that would come at the end of the year. By the end of the first semester, however, it was becoming clear that something was wrong with me. I was losing touch with reality, falling deeper and deeper into delusion, and it had a disastrous effect on my studies. My parents dragged me before my latest doctor around October, and when I blurted out that I could read people's minds he told me the medication they'd been giving me for ADHD had made me psychotic.

In one day I received the dream of my entire childhood; I was taken off of the amphetamines. Unfortunately it came at a cost; I was put on antipsychotics that made me obese, and the withdrawal of ADHD medication came only a few weeks before my final exams. I'd been on medication for my entire schooling, and I never finished a single exam. They even put me in a class of students who received additional time.

But that was the least of my problems. I believed erratic things, experienced hallucinations, and saw creatures in my room and house at night. It's hard to feel bad about exams when there are monsters in your life. It was like living a nightmare for two years, and I'm surprised that I made it through that without ever successfully attempting suicide. I managed to finish the 10th grade, but my chances of succeeding beyond that were slim to nil, so I left.

Meet DemonicWolf.

I knew that there was something different about me, but I couldn't imagine what it was. At school, I'd developed a fascination with paganism, shifting away from the Catholic dogma that was taught in my religion classes. It was new and exciting, and vastly different from the worldview I'd been brought up with. I found I quite liked the feminine aspects of Wicca, and I adapted many of them into myself. In the absence of classes after year ten, I joined a Wicca-focused IRC channel and took on the identity of DemonicWolf. The people in there didn't know the real me; they only knew the internal me, the person that I felt like inside, and so I learned to introspect through the internet. I spent hours each day hammering away at the keyboard, but at the same time I had started to write, crafting high fantasies like the ones in my books. I've been writing on and off ever since, and constantly for at least ten years.

Sadly, this also makes me feel like a failure. I am one of three men in my family; my father and my brother are both tradesmen, and it was expected that I would also become a tradesman. I tried to get an apprenticeship straight after high school, partly because I was hounded by my parents to do something with my life. I liked plants; I had a herb garden that my father built to help me recover from my psychosis. I found it calming to water my magickal herbs each day, and I thought that meant I wanted to work in a wholesale nursery. It did not.

I remember sitting on the side of a quiet road in Kellyville, wishing to whatever spirits that were listening for my life to end. School had been hard, but I had at least felt like I'd had enough of a grip on it to succeed. This was different; the real world was a cold place for a subpar male.

There were nurseries all along this road, locked behind gates of cyclone fencing and barbed wire, and I had already worked in two of them. One of them was owned by a man who just gave me work because I was there and he wanted assistance. He shared a nursery with several other people, their plants arranged into long and colourful lines, waiting for the day when they would finally sell. We spent the day taking plants out of seedling tubes and pushing them down into larger pots. He paid me but he never explained the details of our arrangement. The next day I came to work but he never showed up. I still wanted to be useful, so I got to work doing what I had been doing the day before. When I came to work on the third day he was not happy with me. I did the job wrong and killed a lot of plants, or so he said. That was my last day on the job.

The second was an actual apprenticeship. Well, it was a trial for one. My boss was a mumbling drug addict who wanted me to arrange shoots of mondo grass in straight lines across long planters. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it right enough for him and he berated me for it. I spent all day trying to arrange one planter of grass, with a brief respite cloning clippings from bushes when the person training me thought we could take a break. He was wrong, and in half an hour I was back at the grass, scolded for walking away from the job.

I had decided within an hour that this was not for me but I wanted the money anyway, so I worked until the day's end and told him I didn't plan to hang around. He seemed understanding, though I suspect that was only because he'd intended to lay me off anyway. The next day my mother drove me out so I could pick up my pay, in cash. When I knocked on the door he berated me for knocking wrong, then shoved a handful of fifty dollar notes at me and slammed the door in my face.

That man scared me. Not because of what he did or even because of the way he antagonised me, but because of what he was. Here was an old man with worn hands and a lost mind, his body worn out by decades of hard work in the sun. Maybe his mind had never been there to begin with, or maybe the toll of his life had caused him to addle it with drugs. I didn't know, and frankly I didn't want to live like that for long enough to find out.

I felt like I was fated to this. This was the life I was assigned because of what was between my legs, and the attitude carried much further than to apprenticeships alone. I tried for years to get work in administration, because I wanted to work with paper and computers like I had in school. Nobody wants to hire a 6'4", 120kg young man to work in an office. Men like me are supposed to work in factories and warehouses, and it didn't matter how creative or intellectual I was. That was just what I was supposed to do, at least in the eyes of my employers.

Meet Janos.

I bummed out of life, to the chagrin of my parents. They hounded me to find work but I'd lost interest. I wanted none of the world they had chosen for me, so I fell into a life of just hanging around. It wasn't all bad; I read a lot of books, I wrote a lot of stories, and I had friends who, at least at the time, stimulated me. That was the first time I took a new name.

I became Janos; Janos Audron. It was another name I'd pulled out of a video game. I felt like using an alias gave me more control over my identity than just plain old Adam. I'd never gone by a different name before -- not in real life -- and I found it thrilling when my friends called me something other than my birth name. Nobody would be able to find me in my real life if they didn't know my name, and I wound up with an entirely different branch of relationships who only knew me as Janos.

There was a very good reason that I wanted to keep people out of my "real world". My psychosis had given me erratic and ofttimes threatening behaviour. I sealed myself in the old loungeroom of our extended house, burning incense, chanting and meditating. Any conversation with my father brought us to blows, my emotions carrying me away before I knew what was happening. I never meant to be threatening, but sometimes when a person won't hear what I need to say I end up raising my voice. I have a very loud voice; it goes to eleven and I eventually vowed never to raise it all the way unless I had to.

“If there was conflict, it was due to me. If there was sadness, surely I had caused it. I hope you don't know what that does to a young person struggling with their identity, because I do. I might have seemed defiant, but I was busy I stuffing myself deep down into a box and locking it.”

That was how we came to family counselling. We'd seen counsellors while I'd been in school, but they had come to us and sat in our living room. This was a different experience; the room was an office, with a one way mirror and three other counsellors behind it. They said it was to help but I couldn't help but feel like I was being interrogated. We sat in a circle, each of us shifting in our seats and trying hard not to look the others in the eye. To the outsider it might have seemed that we were against each other, but in reality they were against me. My illness had turned every member of my family against me, and to this day I'm an outsider because of it. That was how I learned that who I was should be concealed; all of the problems in the family came down to me. The counsellor would give us turns speaking, and invariably the four of them would spend time talking about how my problems affected them. If there was conflict, it was due to me. If there was sadness, surely I had caused it. I hope you don't know what that does to a young person struggling with their identity, because I do. I might have seemed defiant, but I was busy I stuffing myself deep down into a box and locking it.

I might be cynical now, but back then I genuinely wanted my family to think well of me, so I returned to being a man. It took me a year of failed applications and trials, but in the end I found a job. I cheered as I hung up the phone, and then picked it up again to ring all my friends and tell them the good news. I started out working at a restaurant, in the kitchen because I wasn't the "right sort" for front of house, but the work was hard and the hours late. I spent my days tossing food in and out of a deep fryer, and then spraying food scraps from dishes and ramekins with a hot hose. I liked the people I worked with and I had many friends, but nobody wants to live their life in a kitchen, so from there I moved to sales, and I thought I might have finally found my career.

I thought something was strange about the interview. Every other interview I'd been to had made me feel inadequate, but for some reason this one seemed designed to lift me up. They told me they'd hire me almost immediately, and I was far too naive to think that a bad sign. I thought I'd found my calling, and the company lauded me and filled me with self esteem. I had no idea I'd walked into a pyramid scheme. Now I know that any job that guarantees you a place at the interview is bad juju, but I missed all the signs back then. Nobody ever explained it to me.

When I came home from work one night, my parents gathered the children around the dining room and put lollies on the table. This was the universal sign that a family meeting was about to take place, and I think I remember feeling uneasy at the look on my parents' faces. My father told me that he'd been offered a redundancy at a job he'd worked for nearly twenty years, and the money was enough to pay off their mortgage. Golden handshake is the exact term he used. Western Sydney was not the place they'd originally moved to, so they'd chosen to move away. I remember being told as a child that the road we lived on had once been a Cul-de-sac, with a field of cows just up the road. I'd never known that world; in my eyes the street had always gone straight through, the cows long since replaced by houses and bitumen. The world I grew up in was urban, with crime, broken glass, and a housing commission neighbourhood in the next block over that I was told not to wander into.

It got worse as time went on. I remember hearing about a story in the paper where a young boy was murdered or beaten or something for his Nike shoes, and for that reason I was never allowed to own a pair. By the time I was eighteen there were gangs, muggings, rapes, and murders. My parents didn't want to live in that world anymore, but instead of moving to another suburb they decided to pull up their anchors and travel almost two thousand kilometres away, to a town called Mackay in North Queensland.

They asked me if I wanted to come, but I had no desire to leave the city of my birth. Sydney was my home; every friend I had ever known had lived in this one city. Sure we had travelled -- we'd even been to Mackay -- but that was a nothing place to me. It was a land of industry and agriculture, two of the things I'd worked so hard to escape. I know now that it was a mistake to stay behind, if only because of how unstable things would become, but it didn't matter to them that I had only a short time ago been a raving psychotic. I was a man now. A woman can live with her parents until she marries, but a man must make his own way in the world from eighteen.

So they left, and I moved into a guesthouse in Parramatta where my earnings barely covered the cost of rent and a packet of cigarettes. If there weren't free jars of cereal and cans of tuna I would have starved, and I often found myself leaving for work at 8am only to arrive home at 3am the next morning. The job was a seven day effort, and although Sunday was said to be optional, it was highly discouraged, even penalised, to take the day off. Despite the effort I put in, there were no sales to be made. The cleaning kit I was peddling cost over three-thousand dollars and we were selling it in Western Sydney. Nobody had that kind of money for a vacuum cleaner, even if it did revolutionise housework.

After three months of that I realised that the $100k a year career they'd been taunting me with was a fantasy. This was no career; this was a place to lure people who wanted work, and then to drown them in a sea of pep talks and corporate jargon. I'd learned some time ago that what few sales I had made, my team leaders had claimed credit and commission for. I even lured other people in because I was guaranteed to make money off of sales that they would never make.

One day I came in wearing plain clothes to show that I'd had enough. I meant to resign, but the Factory Distributor -- my boss -- took one look at me and dismissed me. I wasn't even allowed to go past reception to say goodbye to my friends, so there were people that day who never saw me again. I had nowhere to go. The guesthouse had been arranged for me by the job, and without it I had no way to pay the rent. I called my parents, who were now happily settled in Mackay, and begged them to bring me to live with them. They told me that they only had three bedrooms because they'd planned for me to live in Sydney. It didn't matter that I was only eighteen and still finding my way in the world; there was no room for me, but I had nowhere so they relented.

I realised for the first time that this was the doom of being a male who was not man-enough, so the next day I caught a plane to Mackay. I remember staring out the window as we landed, at the many palms and the colourbond roofs that seemed so strange to somebody raised in Sydney. It felt like a new beginning, but I spent the next year or so sleeping on a mattress on the floor, with no privacy because the arrangement was only ever meant to be temporary. It lasted a year, and I slept on the floor the whole time.

My parents will tell you that this was all appropriate. They had, after all, endured me when I was psychotic (never mind that I had also endured myself) and so they were justified in trying to cold-shoulder me out of the house. This is an attitude I have often experienced in life, and it comes with a double edge; tough love and the cold shoulder only work when a person is able to escape that situation. If they can't, then you're just being cruel.

Of course, I worked during that time. They wanted me to be a man and a man had to be able to support a family. I worked behind a bar and for once I was a little happy. I spent the night carting drinks out to thirsty diners, but I was never fast enough to keep up with the Friday night rush. The job ended with me being told that the employers had reconsidered my suitability for that role. They offered me a position in the kitchen but I had bad memories about that kind of work, and I couldn't bear to do it again. When I came to the restaurant a few months later there was a young woman behind the bar, and I felt inadequate again.

After that, I applied for an admin role at a warehouse, but when they saw me they immediately denied me that job and offered me another; work in the warehouse, as a storeman and forklift driver. I needed money, so I took it, and I worked there until I injured myself in an accident that caved in my steel cap boot. I tried to tell the doctor that I had done something to my foot but there was nothing on the x-ray. Years later, after an x-ray for an unrelated injury, my doctor told me that I'd broken my foot at some point and it had healed by itself. Tell that to Mackay Radiology, I said.

How could I do this for a lifetime? I was already exhausted. If I didn't burn out, I'd be killed in an accident. My brother has frequently worked in the mining industry, and he has many scars from work-related accidents. Despite knowing this, it was dishonourable for me, as a man, to turn down this kind of life. I couldn't explain why, but I just didn't want it. It wasn't for me.

But I was tired of living with my parents. I figured that if I completed my education I might have a better chance of getting employment somewhere that didn't expect me to be a labourer, but the only place that offered anything like that was a town four hours south of Mackay, called Rockhampton. I begged my parents to drive me down to find a place, and they were sick enough of me living in the house to agree. When we got down, I bought a paper and looked for shared accommodation. There were two places that rented out rooms; one on the south side and one on the north side, so we went to inspect them both.

The first house was on a quiet street in a suburb called Berseker. I knocked on the glass sliding door but nobody answered, and for a while, we thought that nobody was home. Suddenly a face appeared at the door, with red eyes and smudged mascara from a night of partying. She opened it up and stared at me as if I were a figment of her imagination, and for some reason from the moment I met her I lied her. Let's call her Christine.

Christine was ecstatic when she learned I was looking for a room. She told me that the person who had lived there before was not right, but that I did feel right. I thought she was cool, and although the house looked like a cyclone of alcohol cans had blown through I felt like I would be happy there. The place we inspected after didn't give me the same feeling; it was full of medical students and nurses (one of whom I'd become friends with later), and I really just wanted to party.

So I paid my bond, and a week later I moved into the house at Berseker. She lived there with another girl, whom we'll call Abigail, and whom I immediately liked as well. Christine worked in radio, and Abigail was a reporter on the local news; they knew all kinds of people from around town, and pretty soon I found myself brushing shoulders with TV presenters and radio DJ's. I felt like I'd wandered into a clutch of celebrities. Small towns are small worlds.

But there was more to this place; for the first time in my life I was living in a female world. The gaggle came over at night to talk, eat, drink wine, and watch TV together, and being a member of the house I was of course entitled to be there. I had a few party tricks up my sleeve and I soon found myself reading their tarot and runes. They liked that, and somehow I managed to become one of them. It might seem like an odd thing, but to me it was entirely natural, and I felt good at the thought of spending a long time there.

I was happy. By god, I was happy for the first time in my adult life. I had friends, but not just friends; I had friends who were fulfilling, kind to me, and who didn't judge me for being different from the rest of my gender. I loved them, and although I never told them so, they became like family to me. When I started my course I made friends with a group of gays and their "fag hags" (ergo the nurse from before), and I found myself at home with yet another group of people who didn't judge me, and around whom I felt comfortable and well-liked. I drank a lot of alcohol and smoked a lot of pot, but the things that stand out most to me now are the fulfilling relationships.

“They admonished me not to take it personally, but there are few things that I have ever taken more personally. How could words shatter somebody so completely? And how could I not take personally something that was about my most personal aspect; my gender?”

But it was not to last. I spent maybe six months in that house, dropping out of a TAFE course to work a full-time job in marketing and journalism that ended up being another scam, albeit better paying than before. One night I came home from work to see Christine and Abigail in the living room with the television off, which was odd. They asked me to chat, and that night they told me something that broke my heart.

"I don't want to live with a man," Christine said to me.

They were moving out. My happiness was over and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't feel like I was any different from them, but evidently they did, and it cut me. They admonished me not to take it personally, but there are few things that I have ever taken more personally. How could words shatter somebody so completely? And how could I not take personally something that was about my most personal aspect; my gender?

When they left I fell into a depression. My other group of friends came to know me as the alcoholic because I was always drunk, although they still loved me and we still hung around. Then in July, something traumatic happened to me that I do not wish to recount, either in person or in written form. I'm sorry; as a reader, you deserve all the facts, but I cannot give you this one. I cannot.

I fled my house that night, taking only what I could stuff into the back of a taxi, and leaving my keys on the counter. I had, as my friends put it, trashed the house, and I won't attempt to hide this. I was depressed, drunk, and alone, and housework was not something I was able to do, for reasons I would later discover. I stayed in my office until I could find a room above a pub, and in my own words I was "homeless" for six months, living among the sad, lost souls of displaced men. About three months later I needed surgery in Mackay, and I wound up moving back to my parents' house where I slept on the floor again. After a while I moved into a camper trailer, and then I eventually forced my way into the spare room after my brother had moved out, because I was sick of enduring the weather. They weren't happy, but they couldn't stop me.

I started to question myself around this time. I'd lost my virginity in Rockhampton but it hadn't felt right for some reason. I knew I was attracted to women, and I didn't think I was gay but... maybe I was wrong? Could a person be gay and not know it? Was that why I had never been able to climax with a woman? I apologise if this is hard to read but that fact confounded me! For the first time I felt like I didn't know myself, and I desperately wanted to discover who I was so I could be happy.

Meet Faustus.

So I retreated into IRC, finding a new identity behind a new handle. I was Faustus now, the new persona replacing Adam almost the same way that Janos had, and it allowed me to explore my sexuality in a way that wasn't tied to the real world.

I started wearing mascara, and I thought I looked stunning. I took photos and showed them to my friends, developing a small following for being attractive. I'd like to show you those photos, but my family began to shame me. My father caught me bolting between the bathroom and the bedroom with makeup on, and it became a family controversy. They made fun of me for being a man who wore makeup, and to this day it's something brought up at dinner parties when the topic turns to things Adam has done over the years. At some point over the last decade I went back and deleted the pictures. I'm angry at myself for doing that, and I wish I could show them to you.

I had an internet boyfriend around this time, but it was nothing serious. We texted and spoke over the phone, but he was on the other side of the country and I found I was only attracted to exceedingly feminine men, which now leads me to question the assumption I made about being anything approaching gay. Gay and straight were the only two labels available to me, though; I knew about transgendered people (although I knew no PC term for them), but because of my religious upbringing and the friends I had kept, I thought they were supposed to be horrible people. I didn't want to associate that with myself with that, so I locked it away.

As can be expected, things didn't work out with my family. I actually came out as being gay and they reacted as you might expect a strong, hetero-normative family to react. It became a big deal. My mother told me (as she frequently has) that she knew who I was because she gave birth to me, and that this wasn't me. Although I had discussed it with my friends and cousins I quickly retreated back into my shell and tried to forget it had happened. I didn't want to be taunted by my parents and siblings anymore, so I moved far away to a tiny town called Glen Innes, across the Queensland border and back in New South Wales. Nothing much happens in this story for a while, except that I smoked a lot of pot, had dodgy friends, and learned that my incident in Rockhampton had given me PTSD. I was having panic attacks and meltdowns that I couldn't explain, and although I had a diagnosis I wouldn't get treatment for years.

Let's skip ahead a bit. After about nine months in Glen Innes, I wound up moving back to Sydney to

Meet Adam.

live with friends from my days as a salesman. I became Adam again; even though I resented my family for shaming me, I could not stop the effect of it. I took all the things about myself that I'd started to unpack and I stuffed them deep down within, locking the box again.

In my shame, I started to cultivate a hypermasculine version of myself that allowed me to distance myself from the femininity I had enjoyed. I cut my hair, I went to the gym, I lifted weights, and I even got engaged. I was called a stud at my cousin's wedding, and I felt like I was finally becoming the man that everybody expected me to be.

My engagement ended in disaster, though. About three years into it I had a breakdown with my PTSD and I had to be hospitalised. In hospital I gained a collection of new labels that had been following me for years but I'd never known about; Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Type II, and Aspergers are a few that still stick around, but it's hard to keep a list between doctors because of the nature of psychiatry. My fiance realised I'd never be able to provide for her, so she broke up with me over the phone and told me I'd never be fit for anybody because I couldn't work like a real man. I used to look at the other patients and their visitors, but I never had a single visit in that second three week stint. What she did to me destroyed me, and I believed her cruel words for the longest time.

Things get fuzzy after that. I moved back to Mackay in 2012, and wound up living with my parents again. The rental prices in Mackay have always been too much for me, and I was tired of living in shared accommodation with strangers. Maybe it's me, but I never had a single experience with shared accommodation that didn't end up with me fighting with the other tenants, except for that one time in Rockhampton. Coincidentally, all the other tenants I lived with were men. I put my name on the Public Housing list but because I was living in what they considered to be stable accommodation, it took forever for me to get a place.

After my ex, I turned to religion to fill the sinkhole that was forming inside me. I couldn't go back to the Catholic Church so I turned to the Uniting Church, but I found Protestant Christianity to be riddled with ethnocentricity and even unnoticed racism. Having studied the Bible in depth, I also began to notice literary and theological problems with the source material. It scared me that my last grasp on meaning was slipping away, so I did something drastic. I became Mustafa.

Around January 2015 I got a lift to a Mosque to say what's called my Shahada; "Ash hadu an laa ilaaha ilallahu, wa ash hadu anna Muhammedur abduhu wa rasulu". I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is his slave and his messenger. I would spend three years not only as a Muslim, but an orthodox Muslim. I was in with the group they call Tabligh; people who travel from Mosque to Mosque seeking to draw people closer to Islam. If you've ever seen people dressed in traditional Islamic clothing as they travel the country, chances are you've seen a Tablighi Jamat. I learned to read Arabic and I learned to memorise the Qur'an. For a while I felt like I'd found my meaning in life, but it was a lie.

Meet Mustafa.

That's me in the photo, fattened on medication and apathy. I might look happy, but make no mistake; this man is dying. He might be able to find temporary happiness from time to time but when he's on his own he feels the rot within him. He's imploding and he knows it, so he tries to throw Qur'an, Ahadith, and Tafsir into the void, and hopes that God will favour him enough to cure him of his misery.

I spent a lot of time looking up to a God that wasn't looking down on me. When I had my fits of mental illness they would tell me that if I only spent more time in the Mosque, Allah would cure me. What they didn't know was that I had one of the biggest episodes of my life during what's called Sunnah Itikaf; a period of ten days at the end of Ramadan where a person confines themselves to the prayer area in a Mosque. You can only leave to go to the toilet and perform ablution, and you spend the rest of your time in the Mosque. It almost killed me. I had confined myself in there, but Allah was nowhere in that Mosque when that happened.

I remember sitting on the floor, grasping prayer beads in my right hand while everything around me felt like a horrible dream. If I'd thought it an option, I would have walked out of there and gone home, but the burden of the community is always on the person doing Itikaf. If nobody in the congregation does it, then the whole congregation suffers. It was my first Ramadan and there was nobody else willing to do it. I jumped at the opportunity because I'd been enjoying myself thus far, and although they were hesitant they let me. I should have known better, but religion has a way of making people think they're bulletproof. It took me eight months to recover.

After that, my Islam came in short and powerful bursts that were followed by long and noted absences. The absences got longer until in 2017 I finally decided that Islam was not for me. Abrahamic religion has a very poor paradigm for understanding mental illness, often relying on the ideas of Demons and Jinn to explain it, and I realised that no religion that claims to have all the answers can be so if they can't explain something as simple as my own illness. My old friends from the Mosque might read this one day and tell themselves that it was my fault I wasn't cured; that I didn't believe enough, or didn't do enough. They're wrong. I believed wholly and I did everything, and it didn't help one little bit.

Meet Me.

This is me now. In 2016 I moved out of my parents' house and into Public Housing during Ramadan. It was meant to be my final salvation; I would have a place of my own where I could be myself, away from my family and closer to the Mosque. It didn't turn out that way, and when I left Islam I wound up sitting alone for six months, staring at a word processor and making the people in my head do things on paper. When I'd look in the mirror I wouldn't recognise the person that I am, so I just sat still, trying to churn out a book that I could finally publish. I've been writing for ten years, but I've never written anything that satisfied me.

That changed when I began my current novel. I've written many books over the years but this one was different. It had a strong female lead, written in the first person so that I could directly experience what my character was going through. I could feel my character living within me; her world made sense to me, her actions felt natural, and her relationships struck me with envy. I found myself lying awake at night wishing I could be her. That left me feeling empty and devoid of happiness. Something wasn't right, and I had no idea what it was. How could a man wish to be a woman? Why did I feel so empty in the knowledge that it wasn't possible? And what kind of person was I to desire such a thing?

The truth was it wasn't the first time I'd wanted that. I have, over the years, wished many times that I was born a woman, but each time I grasped the thought and shoved it into the locked box before I could dwell on it. None of this would have been so hard if I'd been born female, not because women have it easy but because my character is almost the reverse of what I should have been to be accepted as my born gender. I would have been able to socialise and express myself as I had always wanted to; instead, I had bottled everything up because it was expected, and it had turned foul in my soul.

Then the curtain fell. In June 2017 I turned 30, and I looked back on ten years of shame and forward to another seventy or more. I got on the drink, and at some point I took a Stanley knife and carved myself up, carving some drunken protection spell into my torso where nobody could see it. I thought it was a freak accident but a few days later it happened again, and then a third time. Something was wrong with me and I didn't know what it was. I wanted to die, I just didn't have the courage to go through with it, nor the knowledge of why I felt that way. I have lived a life with no identity, constantly trying to switch out the one I was born with for something that felt better and more natural to me, and I felt condemned by it. I didn't want to live like this forever, with this nothing inside of me that kept trying to find a mask to wear.

Somehow my grace came from an unexpected place. Depression is a very practical emotion; if we're brave enough, it forces us to dig around inside ourselves and try to figure out what's wrong. I don't recommend this, but the drink helped me; it gave me sessions where what was confined within came out and danced in front of me, forcing me to look at and acknowledge it before I woke up sober the next day and hid it again.

The revelation of my gender was not immediate. In order to reach that point I had to first accept that it was a possibility. Imagine yourself in a corridor, staring at a broken image; each time the next door opens you move forwards, and a more complete version of a picture is revealed. At first you don't know what the picture is, but you want to understand so you guess. Is it me? Is it my sexuality? Is it my future or my past? You move forwards, but the process never happen as quickly as you want, so you spend time at each interval trying to decipher what is happening to you.

When I looked back on my life I realised fairly quickly that I was living some kind of lie, but I had no idea what the truth is. I had many pieces but I couldn't fathom that they were all connected until the doors in the corridor opened and I moved ahead. Slowly, I noticed that the pieces I already had were getting closer together, and for the first time in years, I felt like I was close to understanding myself.

At first, I thought I might be queer again, though at least I had access to more terms and labels that gave me the idea that this was a spectrum and not a binary. I'd resolved myself to not dating after what happened with my ex, but over time the thought of never loving or being loved again began to rip me apart. I knew I wanted to love a woman, but there was still something missing from the puzzle that made the thought of that reprehensible. I think I knew that it was to do with me, but it was always easier to place the blame on something else.

I almost blurted out that I wanted to be a woman in a drunken fit on IRC but I silenced myself, thinking you'll regret that in the morning! The old saying is true, though; drunk words come from sober hearts. From there it was merely a process of coming to terms with the fact that I could want that; that it was allowed! Nobody had ever told me this, but I'd seen the sentiment often enough online. I considered the fact that I was transgendered, but the process of coming out felt far too difficult for me. I was dying, though. Maybe not medically, but if I existed in this place much longer I would kill myself. That's not hyperbole; I was suicidal, I just wasn't cutting deep enough yet. I didn't want to die, though, and when I weighed transition against death I found transition to be far more palatable. Once I'd realised that I could do it... I found that I wanted to do it.

A strange thing happened when I reached that place. The floodgates opened, and all the things that I had thought and experienced over the last decade came pouring through. I knew now why I was happy in Rockhampton, why I kept trying to assign myself a new identity, and why I had spent so much time feeling so empty. It was cathartic and terrifying at the same time, but when the waters had passed I found that image before me, the one that I had seen in my mental corridors, was finally complete! The only times I'd ever been happy were the times I'd allowed myself to embrace femininity.

That was not long ago. I'm still reeling from it, but I feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I realise now that I'm going to have to go through yet another metamorphosis, but I think I can finally emerge as a butterfly. To boot, it's as though the sinkhole inside me is finally being filled. I could not fill it with religion; I could only fill it by digging deep down into it and pulling out everything I'd buried.

Adam was never meant for this world. He was already dying, and he risked taking the whole of me with him. The only way to escape death was to kill him myself; I need to murder Adam. I need to kill him, but through his death, somebody new will be born like Midgard from the corpse of the giant Ymir. Someone female. A real version of me. 

I haven't named her yet, although I have a few names in mind. I suppose it'll be like childbirth where I won't know what to call her until I meet her, but I can't do it in Mackay. This is a mining town, and furthermore George Christensen's territory. If I try to transition here I might end up in a ditch somewhere, so I'm returning to Sydney. It won't be easy, and I think I'll have to lose everything again to achieve it, but I think I'll be happy when I succeed.

I think that this will be the hardest thing that I've ever done, so I've made this blog to catalogue it. You're going to see me change, and the transition will not always be pretty. I'm covered in cuts from self harm, and the wounds are still healing so I have no idea what my body is going to look like when it's done. I know I need to do this though, because if I don't I'll either die or I'll spend my life in agony. I've seen this happen to a family member before, and the thought of what he's endured to keep a secret scares the hell out of me.

I leave you with this image. It's an ugly image, and it comes with a trigger warning for self-harm. I apologise, but I feel that it needs to be shown. This is the gravity of keeping a terrible secret, from everyone and from yourself. This is what happens when you allow the needs of the many to silence the needs of the you.

This is what the Death of Adam looks like.