Evolution

XI.

I've always hated the number eleven. From a young age I'd dreaded that vile number, dreaded the birthday where it would become attached to me like a parasite for 365 days.

Turns out my fears weren't entirely unfounded. A self fulfilling prophecy? Maybe. Or perhaps 11 was merely planted in my brain as a warning, a cautionary tale of the year that would send me spiraling.

When you're a kid, hyperactivity is amusing. And when it comes in the form of a straight-a student reading young adult novels in his first grade classroom instead of paying attention, you might dismiss it as cute. Maybe you even see it as a good thing, a habit to be carefully cultivated and encouraged.

Sixth grade teachers find it much less amusing. Especially when you forget to turn in your work.

I did the work. Painstakingly filled out each and every multiple choice question, regurgitated answers to questions like a fucking machine. And spent countless nights, like my ancestors before me, crying over math problems at the kitchen table while my father tried and failed to offer aid.

I just forgot to turn it in. Left it in my color-coded binders to collect dust while my report card collected zeroes.

And while my parents tried their best, my memory of these years have been obscured by "you're better than this" and "it's not that hard" combined with intermittent screaming matches, unhealthy friendships, and a lingering feeling of disappointment like humid air clinging to your forehead, right at your hairline, where it feels impossible to wipe away.

When I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, I shed my skin for the first time. Exposed the raw, fragile skin underneath, only half formed and easily split, easily severed.

For the first time, people began to see through my crumbling facade. I had become translucent, a waxy shell the only barrier between the outside world and my internal organs, still churning away despite my best efforts.

I thought I was done. I'd finally ascended out of that childhood innocence and into the apathy of adulthood, the suffering that forms the rite of passage to maturity.

Yeah. Not quite.

XIII.

I never had much love for the number 13 either. However, I have always been emboldened by claims of unluckiness. Black cats, or broken mirrors, for example. I'd actively seek them out, in order to challenge superstitions. To this day I'm not sure how I feel about my transition into my teenage years, but I do know that the age of 13 marked my transition in another kind of way.

I had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable with my body, and with my name, and didn't yet know the vocabulary to describe the word "transgender." Until, of course, my crush of three years, announced that they were transgender.

I lost touch with them after that year, so I don't know how their journey is going. But I know that the introduction of that concept created something inside of me, a burning quest for answers. WHO AM I?

I still don't know. But at 13, I began a new journey of self discovery and shed my skin one more time, letting go of my paper-thin, scarred exoskeleton and growing a new shell, one that fit me much better. It's a shell that's still growing, still forming around me even now.

I'm not sure what I did with the skins I've shed over the years. Perhaps I have forgotten them in a box somewhere. Perhaps I flushed them down the toilet. Perhaps they were confiscated and thrown out, like the countless twisted paperclips that became weapons of self-destruction in my hands. Perhaps I have willed them into nonexistence, buried them in a now-forgotten plot of land for some distant future relative of mine to unearth as they dig through archives of faded photographs and distorted memories to find the truth between them. Perhaps they exist in millions of other who are just like I was, just searching for a skin that was a little more resistant to verbal abuse and out of synch DNA. And what happens when we all shed our skins? Well, what happens to a butterflies chrysalis after they emerge? It is left behind, decomposed and sent back into the bowels of the earth, and we ascend to a new journey, waiting until the time when we shed our skin for the last time, and leave something beautiful behind in our wake.