It's all in the initials - Who Am I? (part 5)

Ok so here is where I’m edging closer to darkness. Now I’m going to preface that I love my family and have actually cleared up this issue, but here are my unfiltered thoughts.

As you may have noticed, my initials are DW. Now I think most of you might remember the PBS show Arthur, and that he had a little sister called DW. Anyways let’s just say that I was around 5 years old. So here’s the traumatic childhood experience. My mom and brother tease me about having the same initials as the girl on the stupid PBS show. I’m a little kid and easily upset and offended. I tell them to stop but they don’t. Little did they know that in that moment I was deeply scarred. I’m trying to be a boy as best as I can even though I’m not as good as it as my older brother. And all I’m hearing is that as hard as I’m trying I’m still like a girl and that’s something to laugh about. Oh and why in this situation am I like a girl? Because my freaking name. You fucking gave me the initials DW. I had no say in the matter. Even linguistically my first name has only one rare female counterpart. So you’re telling me that because this fictional character goes by her initials that makes my initials feminine. That’s just stupid bullying. But wait, here’s the kicker than makes it so much worse. I don’t think they knew I overheard or that I was old enough to understand, but a while back I heard them say how my mom wanted one boy and then one girl. So as the little son who’s pretty damn good at counting, let’s see my brother came first. One boy, check. Then came me, oh fuck, I’m not a girl. Are you saying you want me to be a girl or that you would rather have a girl than me. So I was a mistake? Not like a oops where did that baby come from or a bastard/love child. Nope. They wanted another child, they just didn’t want me because I was the wrong gender. So you can see how that can screw with a five-year-old struggle to be a real boy and the potential (and eventually realized) psychological repercussions those careless but very sharp words were. Maybe the worst part, the part that made it all too real, was that they picked out a name for the her that wasn’t me. Abigail. It made me feel like I killed me twin sister in the womb. Like I killed this Abigail. Except she was never there. It was just me. DW. So for the longest time I resented being called by my initials even when all the guys in high school went through a phase were they called each other by their initials. (So another way I wasn’t able to be one of the guys.)

So let this being a warning, a cautionary tale if you will, that you should be careful what you say to or in front of your child at ages that you think they won’t remember because maybe they won’t but what if they do. And as you can see I took something that might have been small for my parents, but it was freaking the biggest bombshell of my little lifetime. And I think I did an ok job at explaining why I was insulted in being called a girl. It was screwing with my gender identity. It wasn’t this patriarchal dictation that being like a girl is bad thing. Totally a feminist here. And I think I’ll keep saying this, but girls are freaking awesome. And this whole story came back to me recently because this BuzzFeed article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed: 23 Times D.W. Was The Realist Bitch Who Ever Lived And I am now completely proud to be have been compared to this little girl from a PBS show.

Imaginary Self - Who Am I? (Part 3)

As I left off in part 2, when I was little I wanted to be a prince. This was the start of my imagination adventures that I still go on to escape the boredom of reality. It's why I have always seemed so content in silence and so patient. I never really had imaginary friends. I had an imaginary reality that I entered to entertain myself. And it was all in my head, I didn't tell anyone or verbalized the dialogue running through my mind like I was directing and acting in a tv show. So I could be getting a haircut or just sitting on the floor staring at unplugged fan and no one would know that I had left this reality. The only physical thing I really did was use my two fingers to run as my characters were moving. For this post I'm going to psychoanalyze my four-year-old-self and see how this fictional world I created reflected one of the fundamental aspects of my personality and how that made me vulnerable to depressing and suicidal thoughts.

So the first character I created was named Silver. He was a prince with yet-to-be defined magical powers and his weapon was a whip. But instead of this being my imaginary friend, he was my idealized self.

What Would Jesus Wear - Who Am I? (Part 2)

So as I left off in Part 1, I struggled with my gender identity. Of course back then I didn't know what gender identity was so I was just plain confused about everything and I had no way of getting answers because I didn't even know what questions to ask.  Now, I was born male, and I was fine with that. I didn't even know what transgender was at the time, and then when I learned about it, it was something I seriously considered, but I have decided that I'm not exactly transgendered since I still mostly identify with being male.

So yeah, I was a boy who wanted to be a boy, but the struggle was that I didn't fit in with the other boys. I wasn't built for sports and that seemed like the only thing my brother and all the other boys at my school wanted to do. I was awkward

From Big Red Book to Bright Blue Screen - Who Am I? (Part 1)

So I was a very inquisitive child. I wanted to know how everything worked. My parents, both incredibly smart in their own right, but also incredibly busy and not always readily available, soon answered every question the same: Look it up. Now this was before the internet was a thing so I looked everything up in this big red dictionary with a nice hard cover and glossy gilded pages and little indents on the side for each letter, the perfect size for my little fingers. Fast forward a few years and I’m like 10 or 11.

The internet is now a thing, and the answers to all of my questions have moved from the big red book to the computer screen which used to be just for educational video games. Now it’s extremely educational in a whole new way. I’m a preteen, starting puberty pretty early for a boy, loaded with questions, and I’m already programmed to skip people and go straight to the text. And that was the closest thing I ever had to “the talk.” This is also how I figured out I was gay. It started with me innocently looking up information on my changing body, and then I was like whoa I like what I’m seeing and how it’s making me feel.

I was already slightly struggling with my gender identity since I had more in common with girls than boys and some other issues that I'll discuss later. So I’m not even in middle school yet and I was already significantly different than everyone I could ever know in my airtight conservative Christian life bubble. So just barely starting the second decade of life and I started to question if I wanted to continue.