Dear Nicole, my Infant Self,
This is your Adult Self speaking to you. There are many things that you should know about yourself.
You were AFAB (assigned female at birth). Throughout your childhood, you will be experiencing different things as you grow older. First off, you will start off playing with Barbie and Hello Kitty dolls, playing pretend and tea party with your stuffed animals, and even putting on your mom’s makeup behind her back. Then, by the time you turn eight, you will be getting rid of all your dolls, dresses, and skirts, but still be obsessed with the color pink, and start being into what your two older brothers are into, such as Pokemon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and even their favorite video games, because by the time you reach that age, your parents will start telling you “no more getting Barbie dolls” and you will soon outgrow them. Later on, you will experience more masculine things your brothers introduced to you, such as wearing baseball caps and learning how to out burp them, even on inappropriate times. You will also start experiencing wearing more masculine clothes than you thought.
By the time you reach middle school, you will be bonding with more boys than you thought. You will start becoming one of the boys because you will have to deal with girls who do not share the same masculine interests as you; most girls will be considered too feminine for you since all they will care about is kissing boys, wearing makeup, carry purses, and talk about fashion, all of which you are not interested in. You will become a tomboy by the time you start sixth grade and all the way throughout your adolescence. You will even go through a phase where you want to skateboard with the boys and girls will judge you for being one of the boys, albeit that will soon pass since you do not care what the other girls think as you will be proud of being a tomboy.
Then, there will be high school (your new favorite color will be purple, by the way). You will start worrying about not being feminine enough, so you forced yourself to conform with the girls by joining the cheerleading squad in freshman year. You will soon hate cheerleading because you are too much of a tomboy to be one of them, and then quit the squad by the time you hit sophomore year. Starting from sophomore year, you will be experimenting a multitude of rock and metal bands and becoming a rocker and metalhead. You will start wearing gothic clothes and become a nonconformist; you will hate all the girly girls in your school and be thankful that you will never become one of them. This will resume until you reach college.
Throughout college, you resume your nonconformist self, your tomboy self, and your love for hard rock and death metal, without worrying about being one of the girls. Simultaneously, in college, you will be pressured to be one of the girls by wearing makeup and carry purses despite that they are not your fortes because college guys will be more attracted to feminine college girls rather than tomboys. You will soon experience dating guys and having thoughts of losing your virginity, even though you will be perplexed about your sexuality; you grew up being attracted to more girls and all your relationships with boys are platonic, meaning you will never be attracted to boys.
By the time college ends… that will be the time you will start considering about who you truly are. You will experience changes in your gender identity.
March 2018, which you will be twenty-four that time, will be the day you transitioned.
You will be no longer Nicole, but Nix (at least as a sobriquet for now).
You will transition into a nonbinary person, also known as gender-nonconforming. You will identify yourself as agender, as in neither male nor female. Your pronouns will be they/them, no longer she/her.
As a nonbinary person, you will experience a myriad of challenges, such as having to use gender-neutral bathrooms, being misgendered by strangers, dealing with families attempting to get used to your new gender identity and gender-neutral pronouns, and, worse of all, having to shop for pads and tampons publicly from stores as you will still be menstruating in spite of not becoming a woman anymore. All of that will pass eventually; you just have to combat it all by standing up for yourself by correcting people your gender identity and pronouns. They may not understand, though it’s part of life to deal with people who are not familiar with this gender identity in this generation. You just have to accept that life cannot always be how you wanted. You have to respect other people who make mistakes with your newly found gender identity and you can always correct them with all the audacity you have within yourself.
Overall, you will experience this new change by the time you reach your mid-twenties and start living a new life with a new beginning as Nix.
Remember this, Nicole. People are unique; you will always be one of a kind. If people don’t like you, either they’re just jealous of you or just holding a grudge against you, then just ignore them and move on. Part of life is to deal with rejection and social abhorrence, and you will have to learn to move on from the past, from people who don’t like you and vice versa, and learn to accept life the way it is. You cannot always get what you want, no matter how unfair it is. Life is never fair, but that’s just how it is.
Keep this in mind: you have families who support you in regards to your sexual orientation and gender transition and they will always love you for being you. They will always include you in their lives; I can promise you, they will never disown you. You may still be Nicole to them, but as Nix, they will always support you regardless of who you will become.
Remember, you will always be the fighter you have always been since you were born.
Keep that in mind and in your heart.
Go on and live your new life as a queer, nonbinary person named Nix.
Love,
Your Adult Self, Nix