The Life I Thought I'd Have

Would my life be better if I hadn't dropped out of high school? If I hadn't been put on SSRIs and Zyprexa as a teenager? If I had worked steadily to develop a craft--any craft--instead of drifting through infatuations, anger, distractions, and half-formed ambitions?

These questions don't really have answers. What I do know is this: I am thirty-seven years old, living in a one-bedroom apartment with my mother. I have chronic pelvic pain syndrome--pelvic floor dysfunction, they call it--and I feel it every day. I am heavier than I have ever been, except for that period in 2007 when Zyprexa changed my body faster than I could understand. I feel unhealthy. I know I need to exercise more. These are simple facts, and yet they carry a weight that is not simple at all.

I was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia. My mother brought me to Canada when I was about seven months old. I grew up mostly in Edmonton, though we moved often--Red Deer, Wetaskiwin, then back again. It was in those smaller places, especially Red Deer and Wetaskiwin, that something began to take shape in me, though I didn't yet have the words for it.

Puberty came early, around eleven. I remember a drawing in a magazine--a nearly nude man with a towel--and how I looked at it. I'm not sure what it felt like exactly? Curiosity? Titillation? Maybe it also felt like something I wasn't supposed to feel, although no one had told me that yet?* There was also a book with images of ancient Greece--men running naked--and I stared at those pictures in the passenger seat of a car until my mother's boyfriend said they were gay. I didn't fully understand what that meant, but I sensed that it was something I should be careful with.

In Wetaskiwin, I tried to imagine a different future for myself, one that seemed more acceptable. I pictured myself married to a woman. But at school, my attention went elsewhere--to a boy in my music class. At night, thinking about it, I sometimes fell asleep with tears in my eyes, though I couldn't have explained exactly why.

There were moments that, in retrospect, seem almost like signals. A boy once told me my face looked like a girl's, that girls wouldn't like that. I don't remember being especially hurt, just aware. A year earlier, a girl had asked me if I would ever get a sex change. I said no, automatically. These things registered, but they didn't fully land. Not yet.

I remember waiting--often waiting. Sitting in bookstores or in parked cars while my mother and her boyfriend were at casinos. I would draw sometimes. Once I tried to draw a naked woman, though I suspect I was more interested in drawing a man. Even then, there was a quiet division between what I thought I should want and what I actually did.

My best friendships, as I remember them, were earlier--Grade 4, in Edmonton, before another move disrupted everything. When we returned during Grade 6, something had shifted. That was when the teasing began, more openly. It wasn't constant, but it was enough. One or two boys would mock me, imply things. A girl in my class--also born outside Canada--used the word "taunting," and I remember not knowing what it meant. She judged me for that. I learned the word quickly enough.

Near the end of that school year, there was a rumor that one of the boys who had mocked me had been seen kissing another boy. The teacher made a joke about it, something about showing him magazines with naked women. I remember that moment less for the joke itself than for what it revealed: that everything was being watched, interpreted, corrected.

Around that time, I watched shows like Passions and Days of Our Lives. I once talked about them with a girl, and an adult told us we shouldn't be watching "chick flicks." Even that--what you watched, what you liked--seemed to fall under quiet scrutiny.

Looking back, nothing stands out as a single defining event. It was more like a slow accumulation: small moments, comments, glances, questions, none of them decisive on their own, but together forming a pattern. A life takes shape that way--not all at once, but gradually, through things barely noticed at the time.

And now, years later, I find myself tracing those lines backward, wondering where they might have led if something had been different--if I had been different. But the truth is, this is the path that unfolded. Whether it could have been otherwise is something I can't prove, only imagine.

What remains is not an answer, but a recognition: that a life is made not only of choices, but of circumstances, hesitations, misunderstandings, and things we didn't yet have the language to name.

And somehow, despite all of it, I am still here.

*Although, truth be told, I had heard some anti-gay messages pre-puberty, including my parents saying things along the lines that it's not natural and that it's only for sexual pleasure (and nothing else) because one can't procreate that way. (Not to mention all the times "gay" was used as an insult.)