the room herself

notes on reflection, identity and forgiveness

It makes me sick that to think that there are people who believe I’m a perversion of reality simply because I want to live as my truest self— or at least the self that has always felt the truest.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re right. Maybe there is something wrong with my brain. Why aren’t things the way society says they should be? Why do I feel like ive outgrown a body that never belonged to me?

My skin has always felt unfamiliar.

As a child, I would stare at myself in the mirror and think, Something isn’t right. That feeling was deafening.

When I was younger, I pretend to be harder than I really was—a sheep in wolf’s skin. Softness was something I was only allowed in private. In my family, femininity in boys was treated as weakness because femininity itself was seen as weak. I was scolded for crying, for feeling too deeply, for being dramatic.

I remember my grandmother telling me I sang too much. She said singing that often was feminine, and boys shouldn’t do that.

So I stopped.

I wasn’t afraid of singing. I was afraid of what it revealed.

I was terrified of being perceived as a girl because, somewhere deep inside me, I already knew I was one. The irony is that people constantly called me a girl growing up—but they meant it as an insult.

Now, as a trans woman, I’m constantly told I’m everything but a woman. Before “girl” was used to shame me. Now “man” is used to erase me. Because I’ve chosen to live openly, I become “other.” A category. A debate. A contradiction.

And that still bothers me. But I think that what I’ve been failing to understand is that my lack of self-love is what keeps pulling me back into this cycle.

I feel like “other” because I often treat myself like “other.” I expect rejection before it’s given. I accept being diminished because, somewhere inside me, I still believe I deserve less.

The world may decide I’m some strange thing that exists outside of its understanding. That doesn’t make it true. Knowing who you are requires acknowledging who you’ve always been.

For a long time, I believed that becoming my authentic self meant the person I was before had to disappear. I told myself that scared, lonely little boy wasn’t Saige. But he was.

I have always been a girl. That truth has never changed. What changed was the body people saw. The name they used. The expectations placed on me. I still lived my childhood and my teenage years in the skin of a boy. That child deserves compassion, not rejection.

He carried me here. I don’t honor the woman I’ve become by pretending that child never existed. I honor her by loving every version of myself that survived long enough to really become her.