Who Am I?

A Journey of Faith, Identity, and Becoming Whole

It is a tough question to ask yourself, who am I? I can list attributes and things about myself for hours, but none of that explains the heart behind them.

Let's start with an introduction. Hello, my name is Missy. I grew up in a few different places and lots of different environments. Through all of these environments, I was surrounded by very traditional Christians and very conservative people. My viewpoints are a blend of both worlds and seem to sway left and right, which I feel is healthy. My hope for anyone reading this is to help give some context to why I believe what I do.

My Early Childhood

I knew from a very young age that I was not like the other kids around me. Making friends wasn’t something I really mastered until later on in life, so my mom became my best friend.

Watching the struggle she was going through and not being able to fully understand made me want to be the best-behaved I could be. I really took that to heart. To this day, I still love too big sometimes.

There are two different memories from the first few years of life that correlate to my identity. The first was getting into some nail polish and painting my toes, fully intending to hide them. I got caught and was told that boys don’t paint their nails by my mom, and I overheard whispers asking why I would do something like that. The second was shaving my legs and being told not to.

So I bottled all of those feelings deep down and did my best to be Momma's good little boy. I didn’t experiment much more with that side of myself past some weird things I won’t be discussing until puberty started.

The inner dialogue of my childhood before puberty was full of confusion and self-doubt. Not having the emotional maturity yet to understand what was happening to me, I naturally assumed that my experience was not unique. When I struggled to learn something, I just thought I wasn’t trying hard enough.

The bullying from my peers put me in an endless cycle of trying to be good enough, following all the rules, and feeling like a failure every time I stumbled. All this while I lay at night wondering what it would feel like to be a girl, imagining life as a girl and wishing I could just experience it so I would know what it was like. It wasn’t just a one-off curiosity. This was a yearning for an experience I felt wasn’t even possible. “Too bad I was born a boy,” was where it would always end.

This all put me in a state of depression. I got pulled out of school and was homeschooled for a little while, not even comprehending that I wasn’t happy with my life. We didn’t always know where our next meal would come from. We were so tight that even I was stressed about it. All this while having an identity crisis tore me up emotionally.

Adolescence

So many firsts. I couldn’t possibly write them all down here. I remember every time I would take a path of exploring either my sexuality or gender, I would feel so guilty because I knew who I was supposed to be. Every adult I knew told me that I was supposed to be this great man, strong and protective, destined to be a good provider for my amazing Christian wife and kids.

As I started learning how to make friends, I ended up hanging out with a lot of girls. I felt comfortable with them. The boys were always a bit too abrasive for me. As I moved into high school, I learned how to tolerate the boys around me and met friends I still have in my support group to this day.

I got my first girlfriend, and after a year or so with her, I began opening up about this side of myself. She did an amazing job supporting me for her part, especially with my shyness and fear of the taboo nature of it. During this time, I experimented with cross-dressing, mannerisms, and light gender swapping on occasion. I enjoyed every second of these experiences until they were over and I felt guilty for going against everything I was taught.

I learned to hate that part of myself and to hate others for expressing that part of themselves, all while being too emotionally immature to realize the amount of pain I was in.

Becoming Myself

Living on my own had surprising effects on my psychology and my habits. I almost immediately started cross-dressing again. I started working a job that burned me out inside, coming home and smoking weed until I passed out. I gained so much weight and did not take care of myself in the slightest. I just didn’t care enough about myself to try.

I was self-identifying as non-binary to myself at this point. It was around this time that Nick came into my life, and I felt like I could freely open up about things like this with him. I have old texts talking to him about wanting to just run away and start taking hormones to have a more feminine-looking body. I couldn’t see the woman inside of me screaming to be let out, whatever it took.

I then became more depressed than I had ever been. Suicidal thoughts and no future to be seen. I had my family around me, who said they were supportive, but at the time I knew they wouldn’t respond well.

I eventually moved in with Nick and started cross-dressing more. First in front of people, and eventually out in public. I started becoming happy again, all while still seeing myself as non-binary or femboy.

The decision process to start HRT was an absolutely torturous but necessary experience, and it resulted in my egg cracking. I remember wanting breasts for years, even taking over-the-counter supplements high in phytoestrogen that didn’t work. So the decision to take estrogen was easy. Everything that came next was not.

My plan was to hide this whole side of myself from my family, to just take enough estrogen to get some boobs and body fat redistribution, then be done. Then I had a thought. What if my parents somehow find out? The answer came surprisingly quick. Come out as trans and go all in on it.

I had just broken my final barrier to realizing who I am. I said the words out loud. “I am a woman.” I realized that the only thing stopping me from being myself was the approval of my family. I cried for hours. It took days to fully process what had been staring me in the face my whole life.

My Testimony

I cried out to God, “Why have You made me like this?” and prayed, “If this is who I am, and who I am meant to be, then take my hand and guide me because I don’t know what to do from here. I can’t afford this. How am I supposed to tell my parents?”

I laid there crying, wishing there was a way to make it all happen. The next morning, I got a text from my sister that our bonuses had been posted. I wasn’t expecting anything because our store’s sales were down. But I got a decent bonus, enough to consider it possible.

Over time, God showed me how my family would react and how things would generally go. From the emotions of sadness, loss, and anger of coming out, to the final acceptance of who I have always been. He showed me that my journey is going to be rough but that I have a reason for being. The things I experienced weren’t in vain. My journey is far from over.

My Journey Through Christianity

I’ve been in churches my entire life. I believed in Jesus and God at a very young age because that’s what I was taught. But I also learned at an early age that, in order to understand things, they need to be questioned.

At first, everything made sense. Things I got in trouble for were bad, simple as that. Then something happened that made me start questioning my religious beliefs more and more.

My sister and I were asked to participate in a Christmas play where a homeless man from the audience “interrupts” the play to show me that just because my sister stole the last cookie from the plate at the beginning, she didn’t deserve a thunk to the forehead. The audience wasn’t supposed to know it was scripted, so a lot of the cast didn’t even know.

The man who was playing the homeless man had set up in front of the church so that everyone could see him as they came in for the play. Our ushers ran him off. We had to get someone involved to let him into the church. It was ridiculous. It shattered everything I had been taught about love and grace.

Not knowing what questions to ask or how to get the answers I needed, I just grew weary and paid closer attention. I started noticing more and more hypocrisy in the church, from dictating how someone prays and worships to straight-up lies and selfishness. None of it went unnoticed by me.

I lost my faith because of these experiences. I believed, but it was harder to know the truth. By my mid-to-late teens, I was about as close to agnostic as you could be. I truly didn’t know what, if anything, out there was bigger than all of this. All while being too lazy to actually read the source material of what was being taught.

As I became an adult, I wanted to cement my beliefs. So I started deep-diving into really questioning what the Word says. What I found was exactly what was taught in Sunday school. Love one another, and do your best to be the best you you can be.

I found that Jesus taught grace. He loved all and focused on those in need. He was a healer of not only the body but of the soul. I found a renewed faith in Christ and a deep frustration with how the Church twists and corrupts His words.

I started questioning what the Bible actually says about things like homosexuality, monogamy, gender identity, how to show love, and what it actually means to love unconditionally.

I feel like I've come to a point in my learning to teach what I have learned. Having grown up in a religious conservative household and walked through coming out as polyamorous, bisexual, and transgender, I feel called to reach the persecuted, the ones the Church refused to love, to show them that there is still a place for them. That Jesus loves them for who they are, not who someone else demands them to be.

My journey isn’t finished, but I finally walk it in peace. This is who I am, a child of God learning to love as He does.