Self

It's a wild ride, growing up and having every part of yourself be destroyed. Your voice is no longer yours. Your body is no longer yours. Hell, even most of your mind is no longer really you. The actual you exists in a tiny part in the back of your mind, pushed away and suppressed because you've been told it was wrong. You go years and years as someone else, the real you stuck in this skin suit that is entirely another person. And you just think this is how everyone is. Every boy wants to be a girl, right? Of course that isn't the case, but you don't know that. You spend years and years trying to be a whole different person to who you actually are. Of course, there are cracks in this facade. Maybe in private, you call yourself by a girl's name. When you're alone, you imagine what it would be like. Everything would be right and you would actually be you again. But then real life comes back, and you're supposed to be a boy, right? But you can't stop it. You create a character and then imagine you are her. But you can't be her, so you instead pretend she's based on a friend and not yourself. You even make a character based on yourself, who is a boy. But then you have the plot replace him with a different character, also based on you, although you'll never admit it. She is everything you wish you were, even though you never even think that part. And still, you don't properly know what is going on. Until one day, you read or listen to someone else's words. And they feel eerily similar to your own life. You take in there story, all the intimate details about their own self discovery, and reach the inevitable conclusion that you had suppressed years ago: you aren't yourself anymore.

So you try to find the pieces of yourself, and rebuild them, become the real you. Become someone who should have existed long ago. You find your name. You find your voice. You find your own body. All that's needed is one thing. But then others tell you 'no.' They would rather the fake version of yourself made to hide the real you. They don't see how you were slowly killing yourself. But you push on, because you can't not be you. Maybe you lose friends or family. But you find yourself. And she is the most precious thing in the whole world.