Between Story and Truth

I Learned to Hate Myself for Being a Boy

Not gradually or after accumulating evidence, but early and fully. The way children learn anything before having any way to question it. Like it was something being discovered, not something being done to them.

I was four when the divorce happened. The youngest of six, seven years behind the next sibling up. Everyone got something from the wreckage of parents that hated each other, the mutual loathing and rage spilled over on us.

Born male in a house where males were defined by a man who left damage behind him. That made me the nearest available container for things that had nothing to do with me.

An avatar role doesn't get explained to a four year old, it just is.

Hands that knew where to land, early and often, sustained for nearly decade. Told I was just like him, that I would turn out just as monstrous. Irredeemable for being born a boy and for being born here. My worth existed only in what could be shaped into me by the women around me.

When reinforced with enough repetition and violence…

It stops being what's said and becomes something you are.

Carried Forward

For nearly five decades, in front of friends, partners, strangers. It was always the same narrative spoken ad nauseam by the women in my family. Men are shit, but I'm the exception. And women are responsible for that exception.

Supposedly meant as praise, but never felt like it. It's utterly impossible to be lifted up and diminished in the same breath, and still walk away whole.

I understand now, I was being asked to play two roles at once: both the proof that men could be good, and the apology for those who weren’t.

The exception and the apology, wearing the same face.

Every time, it took me back to that broken terrified little boy, made to feel shame and guilt for simply existing. My goodness was on loan and contingent on something that could be revoked at any moment. A bit much to put on a child.

It didn't stop when the child became an adult.

The Letter

I forgave them because I understood where it came from. They weren't the origin, they inherited reasons and passed them forward. That doesn't excuse it, but changes what the debt is.

Later, there was a letter to a family member who was carrying that same narrative forward. I was trying to understand the hidden grammar of survival. How old messages shape a sense of worth. I wrote the most honest thing I knew how to write. I owned all of it, the ugly and the compassionate.

She never answered.

The Door

The container of tradition, heritage, family and how it was wielded are not the same thing. Sometimes the people who share our blood carry forward the very patterns that wounded us.

Movement away was seen as betrayal, perceived a race traitor. The innate biological directive to seek acceptance, belonging and safety... Has nothing to do with race.

I was a child finding the only doors that opened.

An adult doing the same thing, just with more clarity about why. Years on from that, a lot of unpacking, nervous system regulation.

Learning to let things be without needing them to be different.

Setting It Down

The verdict was never about me. It was unprocessed pain finding the nearest available surface. A four year old boy who shared the wrong DNA at the wrong moment in someone else's unraveling.

I didn't cause it, I couldn't have. I was four.

What I carried for decades wasn't mine. It was handed to me before I could evaluate it, reinforced until it felt like fact. I mistook it for identity, for decades.

Setting it down doesn't mean it disappears, the body still carries what it learned. The history still happened and the cost was real.

The shame was never mine.

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *