When Sophie sits on her sofa on March 6, 2017, she considers ending her life.
It’s not yet spring in New York City—no flowers or leaves on the trees—but it feels as if everything is ready to bloom after long months of winter stillness. Spring is her favorite season, and she doesn’t remember yet that she always feels like a different person when the pink petals start to fly in the sky and land on the sidewalk, a magical wonder that only lasts until the busy New Yorkers walk on them and strollers squash them, petals sticking to their wheels for blocks.
That morning, she woke up exhausted alone in her bed in her dream home in Brooklyn at the border of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy. Her place has two floors, two bedrooms, an office, and a rooftop. She filled the space with West Elm furniture she loves: plush carpets that she likes to step on barefoot, designer white chairs, and a mid-century modern dining table she bought with plans to host dinners. These objects make her feel like she succeeded in life.
Her husband, Guy, had just left to drop off their two-year-old, Capucine, at daycare before heading to his accounting job in Manhattan. Still in her pajamas, Sophie shuffles down the stairs to the living room, grimacing at the feeling of the heavy, wet pad sticking to her crotch. She feels dirty. She walks faster past a mirror, avoiding her reflection, and settles into her usual spot on the beige-gray IKEA sectional sofa.
This is where she is when she realizes she cannot continue with her life.
She has had some glimpses of him in the past. A year before, she looked more closely at her face in the bathroom mirror in their smaller railroad apartment in East Williamsburg, but did not recognize herself. She felt disgust, thinking she looked like the man with a rat-tail haircut in The Walking Dead, which she religiously watched every week.
Before that, while visiting family in Melbourne, Australia, she had walked around the hot, buzzing city, wearing a red summer dress and a huge polka-dot hat, pushing her baby in a blue Yoyo stroller. It was so damn hot, and her thick hair made her even hotter. Trump had just been elected for the first time, and her anger bubbled up like lava. So, she turned into a nearby salon, sat down in the 1950s red-leather hairstylist’s chair, and found the strength to ask for what she had always wanted but had never allowed herself: a short haircut.
Under the big black cape covering her body, her thighs were sweating in the chair. The hairstylist cut her hair shorter and shorter. Sophie sat motionless the whole time.
She stared at the mirror.
In the mirror.
Typically, she avoided mirrors and only glanced at them briefly. Yet, in this moment, she looked into her own eyes. She stared deeply. They were like black holes swallowing stars.
Suddenly, she saw a glimpse of him again. What was this? Who was this? Who was Sophie, really? She didn’t know it yet, but that day, she would sit down in the hairdresser’s chair as Sophie and stand up as Max.
Here she stays, two months later, on her beige-gray sofa for hours. Stuck. Frozen. Staring into the void.
She can’t take it anymore.
Last night she got her period again. It had returned a year before, after she stopped breastfeeding her baby. That’s how it works. Before that, she didn’t have periods for years while taking birth control. But here it is, in her belly, outside her body, dark red on her fingers when she goes to the bathroom. She feels nauseated and sad, as if her body is not a safe place. Each time her period reappears, she disconnects from herself as she waits for it to pass, already anxious about the following month when it would return. She believes she hates her periods because she is weak and lazy.
On March 6, 2017, she can no longer stand it. The only way to end it is to stop living in this body. To stop living.
She knows she will do it if she leaves the sofa, so she calls her husband at work and whispers, “Please come home. I am about to do something stupid.”
She is still within this crystallized moment, while he makes the forty-five minute train trip from the Lower East Side. It must feel like hours to him. While she waits, she is barely breathing, not looking at anything, hanging by a thread, desperate for help.
Guy was supportive the previous fall when Sophie needed to stop working for three months due to severe burnout, which put her in the hospital for a week. He cared for Capucine so that Sophie could rest. Her brain felt foggy every day, and she struggled to focus. Even browsing the internet felt almost impossible. She realized that, after a month, when she returned to work for her design client, she couldn’t understand what was on her screen, a project she had been working on for a year. Terrified, she had to accept that she needed more time, her brain still healing from overexertion: twelve-hour workdays, caring for Capucine at night, managing the home, and attending to Guy’s needs, even making doctors’ appointments for him. She had too much on her plate. Would she ever be able to go back to work? Her entire career was built on multitasking and working hard. She was scared to admit that something had to change. But what?
Sophie grabs her favorite blanket and covers herself, still not leaving the sofa. Since the burnout, the spot became her place to try to relax. On that sofa, she learned how to breathe fully, to take her time even though it felt challenging to do nothing, not to be productive. Her whole identity was rooted in achievements and meeting the high standards of the family member for whom she worked. She had to look inward and learn to listen to her deeper needs, something she had not learned to do in the first three decades of her life. Most days, she binge-watched TV shows, numbing her anxiety and her sense of inadequacy. She feared that she would never find a job again. She was afraid she was broken. Eventually, she decided to watch The L Word, a show about lesbian women and their dating lives. She had avoided watching it until now, succumbing to her discomfort and apprehension, despite her friends constantly talking about it. She now understood why. Through each episode, something in her grew warmer until she felt the urge to look for lesbian porn. This was new for her. She never watched porn before, even straight porn. The shame she felt for seeking such movies dissipated as she discovered her body, giving herself pleasure. This was new for her too. But then the shame would return and she would keep her new pastime a secret, even as she eagerly awaited the next time.
Watching Game of Thrones, she felt aroused at nude scenes, especially when women had sex. She was only looking at the women. She felt herself getting wetter the longer the scene went on. She wanted to have sex after almost every episode. Guy noticed and often joked, hopeful, “Is it a Game of Thrones night?”
Sophie is silent now, waiting for her husband. She is frozen, with no energy to even get up and get a glass of water. How long will it take for Guy to arrive?
A couple of months ago, she finally understood why she was so drawn to roller derby, a predominantly lesbian sport: she was attracted to women. Up until that point, she never questioned her sexuality, but she couldn’t hide it anymore. She had to tell Guy. They had spent eleven years together and were honest with one another.
“I think I am into women. I feel horny around women, and you know how I feel when there are naked women in Game of Thrones…” Sophie said.
Guy looked at her and smiled.
“That’s fine with me if you want to explore with women!” he said, which surprised Sophie, since they were monogamous and had never discussed opening their relationship.
“Are you sure?” She said, anxious about hurting his feelings and about meeting someone new, particularly a woman.
“Yes, go ahead. It’s better if you explore this than repress it.”
Wow, that went surprisingly well. Maybe too well. A heavy weight was lifted off her chest, but a new anxiety surfaced: she had to find a woman to go on a date. It happened via Tinder. It took Sophie a good hour to set up a profile, writing and editing. This was the most vulnerable she had ever felt, even a little embarrassed. “Pansexual, Queer, Questioning, Woman, Open relationship, Non-monogamous, 5′ 5”, “A little extra” build. In a great, long, loving relationship with my man, while open to finally exploring another part of me, who apparently loves women! Everything is clear and honest between us. I am here to have fun on my own, with new queer friends.” She picked two photos that represented her: one with a polka-dot dress and another, more recent, with her short purple hair. Desperate, she liked almost all the women she saw in the app who said they were lesbians. Very few of them replied, but a petite woman with short black hair from Park Slope agreed to go on a date a few days later. Guy happily agreed to care for Capucine while Sophie was on the date.
It took Sophie a long time to find a proper outfit. She landed on a black t-shirt, black jeans, and a pair of suspenders with hot pink skulls. They met at the cozy Russian bar, Masha and the Bear, in East Williamsburg. Sophie asked surface-level questions. The woman politely answered. The date felt more like a job interview and after thirty minutes, they stood up. Sophie was so nervous and too uncomfortable for anything intimate to happen, even a kiss. She wanted to forget about the whole thing, feeling embarrassed and inadequate.
When Guy finally arrives, she can’t hear most of what he says, but he sits beside her, and that is enough—enough to remove the insistent call to end her life. They sit for an hour on the sofa, and when Sophie finally comes out of her freeze, she finds the courage to seek a therapist. Why now? Does she feel something terrible will happen if she doesn’t talk to one? Perhaps the thought of ending her misery is too comforting. Or maybe she doesn’t want to give up. She keeps gasping for air like she did when she almost drowned at six years old. She can still see her mom running to her from the beach.
She needs to talk about her unexplored sexual orientation at thirty-five. After swiping through multiple therapists on ZocDoc, she finds one who works with LGBTQIA+ patients. She makes an appointment for the next morning, wanting him to see her at her worst. She wants him to see how raw and disgusting she is, her wounds in the open like red and pink meat hanging in the window at the butcher shop. She wants him to see how broken and flawed she is. If she waits longer, her facade will quickly rise again as she pretends to be this happy-go-lucky roller derby cool mom. Growing up in a family that did not value therapy, she has no idea that it will save her more than once in the following seven years. Deep scars that seem healed on the surface will be poked at, squeezed, and cut with a surgeon’s knife, releasing old pus contaminating her mind and body.
That night, alone in the bed she bought when she moved for work with her husband from France to New York City five years before, she feels annoyed that Guy is, again, unable to go to sleep until early morning. She wonders what she has done or not done to make him avoid going to bed with her. She can’t pinpoint when it started, but they also stopped kissing goodbye before he left for work, as they had done when they met eleven years ago.
Lying on her back, she is nervous about seeing this new therapist in the morning. She only met one many years ago for a couple of sessions, which made her feel ashamed because her parents did not believe in therapy. She is glad this one is available on such short notice. What time is her appointment again? 10 am. All right. Capucine would be at the daycare by then, so she could go easily. Where is his office?
Rolling to her left side, she grabs her phone from the bedside shelf and pulls up therapist L’s info on ZocDoc. In his profile picture, he looks kind and happy. She swipes and lands on another selfie, except this one shows him looking like a woman. Weird. How is this possible? She remembers watching the show The Fosters, in which trans actor Elliot Fletcher plays a trans boy. Until that point, she had no clue trans men existed, as she only heard disturbing stories about trans women. Her only awareness is from movies like La Cage aux Folles, a “folle” being a derogatory French word for an effeminate gay man, or the homophobic culture in France that men perpetuate, her dad included, referring to “manly” activities like driving a powerful car as not being “for the fags.” It hasn’t clicked for her yet, even though her entire Instagram feed is now filled with trans men’s accounts, where they show their new chests without breasts. Why this obsession? While watching The L Word, she also encountered a trans character named Max. She remembered thinking, “Wow, this is so empowering for the character! I want to feel this too.” Without her realizing it, the glimmers inside her started to vibrate, ready to shed light when the right time came.
Alone in her bed that night, she feels an electric shock. Why did she pick a trans person as a therapist? In these few seconds of realization, she is at the edge of a crevasse, the wind pushing her back while she looks down into the void. Every sign is pointing in the same direction. If she weren’t in shock, she would laugh at the situation. How could she have missed something this obvious?
Alone in her bed that last night, just a few hours after she was ready to end her life, Sophie closes her eyes for the last time, her breath slowing, her blood so cold that she feels her body sinking into the mattress, unable to see the light again.
***
“Fuck, I’m trans,” I say out loud.
My blood warms, my veins revive like tree roots bringing water and sap to the dried branches after winter. I open my eyes and take the first breath of my new life.
