If you've ever felt like you were missing from your own story, this piece is for you—and the child you once were.
Like a watercolor left in the rain, I learned to disappear in plain sight before I learned to tie my shoes.
It was a slow erasure that happens when you realize the person you're becoming has no reflection in the world around you. No stories. No futures. No proof that boys like you grow up to be anything at all.
At seven, I sat cross-legged on our living room carpet, watching TV families navigate their predictable dramas. Mother, father, children. Dating, marriage, babies. The same story recycled endlessly, a future as inevitable as gravity. Except somewhere deep in my bones, I knew, without language or logic, that this gravitational pull didn't apply to me.
The silence was complete.
The Violence of Invisibility
There's a particular kind of wound that comes from never seeing yourself reflected back. As if the universe had forgotten to include you in its list of possible humans.
In second grade, we had to draw our future families. My stomach felt weird and tight. The crayon felt heavy in my hand while everyone else was drawing and chattering. I didn't know why, but I couldn't make my hand move. Nothing I thought about drawing felt right.
I ended up drawing just me and a dog. 'Where's your wife?' Jessica asked. My face got hot and my throat felt scratchy. I scribbled a girl figure next to mine, just like everyone else had done. After that, I learned it was easier to copy what the other kids drew. It felt fake, like wearing a Halloween costume to school every day.
Looking back now, I understand what that constant pretending did. It made it harder and harder to know who I really was.
The Archaeology of Shame
By ten, I'd become an archaeologist of my own defects, cataloging evidence of my wrongness with scientific precision. The way my wrist bent when I threw a ball. How my voice lifted when I got excited. Each deviation from boyhood's strict blueprint felt like another piece of proof in a case I was building against myself.
The shame came pre-installed before I had words for what I was ashamed of.