in the past i would have probably come out a bit more flippantly or used some form of humor to shield me from how real and how big a moment in my life this is, but that's behind me now. i want to give this moment the gravity it deserves, and that means i'm going to speak frankly about this. but first things first, it feels like a weight off my chest.

before i get any further, i want to preface the rest of this by acknowledging that i am not "all the way" out. i'm out to my father and some close friends, but i'm not out at work yet. i work in a public high school and there's not much precedent for a teacher transitioning while teaching. it'll be a while before any of the physical effects of HRT start to show, but i already know that i'm going to be upfront about my transition before signing a new contract. i like the school i'm at and love my students but also i gotta be realistic and, shit, i'm in the HB2 state. the last thing i want to do is create a distraction that makes my classroom a place where it becomes difficult for students to learn, so i'm inching my way forward in the workplace.

so why now? why at age 26? the best way i can describe it is using shoes. you know how when you have a pair of shoes that juuuuuuuuuuuuuust doesn't fit, but you gotta make do anyway? so the pain that comes with wearing them never really goes away, but you become numb to it? that's what masculinity is to me. a shoe that doesn't fit, but i was able to get used to the pain. last year, i took a good hard look at myself in the mirror (literally), and i saw it was time to start trying on other shoes, so to speak.

now, for most of my adolescence and all of my adult life, i've surrounded myself with people who are all over the gender and sexuality spectrums, and you would think that would make it more likely that i would explore these feelings earlier. but when i did, i felt like i wasn't feeling enough pain for anything i felt to be "real." in short, i'm part of a chorus of trans voices who, before coming out, felt like they "weren't trans enough." i didn't have crippling dysphoria, no. i never explored my identity as an adolescent, no. i was a guy with a beard, because by a certain point in my adult life, i felt like that's what people expected out of me.

i've been seeing a therapist since last march, and the reason i started going in the first place was because i felt i wasn't coping with my Nana's death in the right way, and because i felt i still had a lot to unlock about my mother's death when i was 13. we worked through those things, and over the summer i had more things to work through. i kept having these pits of deep, paralyzing depression that i didn't know how to handle, and it was draining me and everyone around me. since august i've been living by myself, and that's given me a lot of time to think about who i was and who i wanted to be.

throughout my life i've gotten my affirmation not necessarily from being who i wanted myself to be, but from fulfilling the expectations other people had of me. that goes all the way back to my childhood, but take the beard for instance. it was part of my identity for a good three years of my adult life. i relished being the beard guy. but i started thinking about why i grew the dang thing in the first place, and it wasn't because i wanted to, it was because i wanted to look older, i thought it would make my face look better, and even because i thought it would make me, y'know, more of a traditional guy.

some of you may remember me shaving it off in, like, september. that was one of the first steps in this long journey, and when i looked in the mirror and saw my clean-shaven face, i felt pain. with the ridiculous beard gone, for the first time in a long while, i was able to look in the mirror and not just see who i was, but i was able to see who i had the potential of becoming. and i was like, "oh, this is dysphoria."

even looking back at my childhood, it seems like the writing has been on the wall since i was born. i joke a lot about how my first favorite song was "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia, and when i watched the music video for the first time in years, i realized that i was so fixated on it as a nascent six-year-old because i wanted to BE that girl in the video. i realized that my favorite part of watching sailor moon as a kid was the transformation sequences for a reason. i remembered holding my hand flat in a notebook and tracing around it so i could be like they were. i remember my second-ever favorite song, Dancing Queen (as performed by the A*Teens). i remember the very specific feeling of being jealous of girls because the stigma of them playing with "boy toys" wasn't as heavy as it would be if i played with "girl" toys. i remember playing barbies at the house of a girl who rode my bus on a saturday morning in third grade. i can even date it as february 3, 2001, since i recall watching the pokemon episode where ash leaves charizard behind that same morning.

it seems hilariously obvious when i lay it all out like that in retrospect, and it's also probably not an accident that all of these things have stuck out in my memory for so long. over the past several months, i've worked to embrace this new part of my identity rather than tamp it down as unimportant or not trans enough. i chose the name marina for three reasons. i felt weirdly drawn to an M-name for some reason, i've always had an affinity for the ocean, and finally, specifically, after the main character in the N64 classic Mischief Makers, which i was also fixated on as a kid.

i started taking better care of my skin, i started buying feminine-coded clothes and dressing better (in places i was able to do so), and i started staying clean-shaven and letting my hair grow a little bit. for the first time that i can remember, i felt really motivated to take care of myself, because i finally felt like i was someone worth taking care of. the times i felt that for roger were few and far between, but for marina i want to be the best marina i can be. i want to be me because, finally, i have some idea of what that is.

the journey is a long way from over and in fact, in a lot of ways, it's only starting today. i want to climb to the top of a mountain and yell about how proud i am to finally be a girl, but i also don't think that would be a smart thing for high school history teacher mr. burton to do. at the very least, i can do it here, with people who i know will support me and who i feel deserve to know where i'm at in life right now. you might notice i haven't posted any selfies in a long time. expect that to change as i record every step of this long trek to the ideal me.

don't expect me to change much--if anything, i'm going to be able to be even more genuine now. i don't have any regrets about the 26 and a half years roger was around. but he's passed the torch to me now, and i'm going to do right by him and do right by me.

to quote the many times i practiced saying this while driving my car with the radio off, "hello, my name is marina! it's nice to meet you."