The story mentions self-harm and suicidal ideation.
This essay is part of Stories Within, a campaign* by It’s Ok To Talk and queerbeat that features personal essays from young people about their experiences with queerness and mental health.
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I was a quiet child. I watched the world from the sidelines, always calculating, always trying to fit myself into shapes that felt foreign to me. I wasn’t loud. I didn’t act out. I learned early how to disappear in plain sight.
But, even as a kid, I felt out of place in my skin. Something never quite lined up. Deep down, I used to wonder why I was who I was. I thought: If I were a boy, life would have made more sense. It was like I didn’t recognise myself in the body I was given. I felt something was wrong. I felt weak. Misunderstood.
I looked up to my brother. I think he felt real in a way I didn’t. I wanted his clothes, his haircut, his casual confidence. I never felt that way in the clothes I was expected to wear. Dresses, frills, anything “feminine”—they made me feel like I was being dressed up in someone else’s clothes. It didn’t feel natural to me. I hated the way I looked in them. I didn’t want to be pretty. I wanted to be me. But I didn’t know who that was yet. Or if I ever would.
As an eight-year-old kid, most of my friends were boys. I blended in better with them. With girls, I was shy and nervous, fumbling through conversations. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was drawn to them—not just as friends, but something more. I had crushes I couldn’t name, admiration I couldn’t recognise.
And yet, as I got older and hit my teenage years, I tried to have boy crushes and relationships to fit in. But the connections felt hollow. I was there— physically present but emotionally distant. I wanted to fit into the “normal”. I even dated the first guy who liked me out of peer pressure—just because my friends asked me to. I went through the motions, hoping it would eventually make sense. It never did.
Growing up as a girl wasn’t just confusing—it was dangerous in ways no one prepared me for. No one warned me that being seen as a female often meant being seen as less than a whole person, as something to be looked at, judged, or worse—owned. As if I were nothing more than my skin.
I always felt like whatever I said was given less importance compared to the boys. People didn’t see me. They saw my body. My voice, when I tried to speak, was often drowned out or ignored.
Moreover, no one had told me that this path—of growing up female—was littered with dangers of sexual harassment, abuse, and the constant fear of feeling unsafe in my skin. I faced sexual abuse, often by people I had trusted. I couldn’t even call it abuse until much later. I would just blame myself—for not speaking up, for not fighting back. I now know it wasn’t my fault.
But the weight of these experiences made me feel lonely. I couldn’t share what I was feeling with anyone. I just wanted to disappear. To shrink down until I was invisible. So that I was no longer a target of abuse and violence.
Mental health struggles
By the time I turned 16, my silence and repressed emotions had started to turn into something sharper. Heavier.
I wasn’t just confused or out of place anymore—I was drowning in it. After holding on for too long and playing the role of the quiet kid who always tried to be perfect, I couldn’t take it anymore.
I eventually started slipping. Into self-hatred and self-blame. I felt that it was better for me not to exist anymore.
Everything started feeling pointless. I started self-harming behind closed doors and spiralling into suicidal thoughts. I couldn’t do anything about it. I’d sleep for hours and hours—wishing never to wake up. As this kept going, my symptoms became more noticeable. The school authorities sent me to the school psychologist.
I ended up receiving treatment and therapy for my suicidal ideation and depression. But nothing seemed to help or work. I couldn’t open up about my struggles. Opening up about all that was going on inside me seemed even more difficult than living. And dying just seemed easier.
I believe everyone—my parents and psychologists—tried their best to help me. But I kept dodging all their questions and concerns and pretending I was alright, for as long as I could.
Eventually, one day, an attempt to harm myself went too far. A day later, the school authorities took me to the Emergency Room at a hospital nearby, where I was given temporary treatment.
As I was at a boarding school 250 kilometres from my hometown, my parents had to travel urgently to see and care for me. My family took me to another hospital because of the nature of my injuries.
The last thing I remember was seeing my mom trying to feed me. I woke up after almost a week, disoriented, bedridden, with no idea where I was. Everyone had lost hope. I had been on the ventilator for around four days. I was cut open and stitched back together. The surgery saved my life.
My dad saved my life. Later, I found out that he gave me my life back by donating a part of his liver to me. That was the only way I could be saved. I had to stay in the hospital for many days.
After that, I started taking baby steps towards recovery. I had to learn how to walk like I used to.
I had gained so much weight due to life-saving medication. My body was swollen. When I got my weight under control, I had stretch marks all over.
The hospital became my second home for a month. I kept returning there for continued tests and treatments.
I even appeared for my school examinations that took place after nearly two months. I wanted to be back at school, meet my friends, and pretend everything was alright.
But after this incident, I couldn’t stay at the boarding school anymore. So, I went back to my hometown to complete my schooling. It was difficult for me to adapt to this new life. Even though I had been away to boarding school for only a year, all my friends were there.
Shock of survival
I had hoped that the brutal experience of surviving a life-altering event would fix me. But, unfortunately, it didn’t. It brought me the raw shock of survival.
I thought I was supposed to feel guilty for my decisions. I do feel some amount of guilt—for putting my parents, family, and friends through such distress. But I can’t help but wonder: what if I wasn’t saved?
Even though I had a second chance at life, everything had changed. My already limited world shrank further.
Blood tests and hospital visits became my regular outings. Medicines were my road to survival. Because of the liver transplant, my immunity had to be lowered to prevent my body from attacking the unfamiliar foreign organ.
On top of that, I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder. One label after another, each one landing like a stamp on my skin. Labels didn’t help me, but they rather made me feel trapped. I was becoming the very thing I feared: broken, damaged, unlovable.
I lived in survival mode for years after that. Days bled into each other. Nights stretched on like tunnels with no exits. Medicines. Therapy. Disassociation. Rage. Numbness. All my dreams felt shattered.
Earlier, I had plans to study abroad, travel, and have all the experiences life had to offer. Become a skydiver, and be independent. But it seemed that I could no longer do any of those things. I believed it was my own doing. Guess I’d just have to live with its consequences.
When I went to college after school, I found myself lost again. I kept on changing colleges, moving from one to another. But none of them worked out. None of them offered the courses I was looking for. Some were in other cities and countries. And my family wasn’t ready to let me go far off, as I was still recovering.
I ended up going to another city for college. But my parents brought me back when they found out that I was still self-harming.
Eventually, I completed my undergraduate studies in psychology through a distance learning course. The flexibility and freedom of distance learning gave me a chance to explore photography and filmmaking. I did a diploma in the same.
All this time, I was looking for what I believed was the “right” version of myself. If only I could find it, I’d feel better. I’d feel real. But I didn’t know who that was. Yet.
Queer & stronger
Something started to shift gradually after I turned 18. I don’t exactly know what happened. Maybe it was a song, a movie, or the way someone looked at me—but suddenly the question I’d buried for so long ago began to rise again:
Could I be queer?
You see, I didn’t know what queerness meant. It just wasn’t something they’d teach us in school. No one told me I was allowed to like the same gender as mine. Or that there could be more than two genders.
The thought terrified me. But it also relieved me, as if I were close to figuring something out. I had spent years trying to feel something—anything—to fit in and become who I was supposed to be.
It took me another two or three years of confusion, exploration, denial and quiet heartbreaks before I could say it with any certainty: I am queer.
It wasn’t a clear declaration. It started from feelings that I might be bi-curious, which slowly turned into accepting myself as bisexual. More confusion and exploration followed. After I met my current partner, I realised I was more attracted to women.
Still, I didn’t want to box myself into a label, so I embraced the word ‘queer’—broad enough to hold everything I was still figuring out.
Layered on top of that, I also realised that I didn’t feel like the gender—female—I was assigned at birth. I found the term ‘non-binary’ in the quiet spaces queer people carve out for each other online. And when I saw it, something clicked. I wasn’t lost. I was just unnamed.
The title was alluring, but I didn’t feel any relief yet. It seemed like another thing that would keep me lonely. I thought people around me wouldn’t understand. Hell, even I didn’t understand. I felt like I had to fight for every inch of my identity. Like I was constantly trying to explain something invisible, intangible, yet deeply real. To myself and others.
I still don’t always have the words. Some days, I feel closer to masculinity. Some days, I want to burn gender to the ground. Most days, I just want to exist without my gender being questioned.
But this identity, as lonely as it can be, gave me a way back to myself. It allowed me to hold space for both—the softness and the strength inside me.
I could finally express myself the way I always wanted to, keep my hair the way I liked, wear clothes that didn’t make me feel dysphoric—till I can get gender-affirmative surgery and stop feeling dysphoric at all. Until then, I am trying to do what I can do—dress up and present myself in more masculine ways.
And in that act of redefinition, I started to heal.
Healing is a journey
Coming out, even to myself, felt like peeling off my skin. It was vulnerable. Terrifying. But it also felt like coming home to a part of me that had always been waiting.
I still found it impossible to come out to my parents. I would imagine all kinds of negative reactions they could have. Maybe they’d regret saving me after all. So, I wrote them a letter I thought I’d never send.
But recently, after holding it in for more than five years, I finally came out to my parents. I shared my letter with them too.
It wasn’t as bad as I had expected. They had a lot of questions. It was a new concept for them. Initially, they were shocked and didn’t fully understand it. They thought it was an illness that could be cured. But, still, they listened. They asked more questions to make themselves aware.
That’s what matters to me. It might take them some time, but I am hoping they will get there eventually. They still love me.
With that, I felt as if a huge weight was lifted off of my chest.
My mental illness hasn’t vanished, though. I still have bad days and medicines to take. I try to go to therapy when I can. I still have days where my brain lies to me—when the weight of being queer and mentally ill in a world that doesn’t make space for either is almost unbearable. Some days, even something slightly unpleasant feels unbearable to me.
But I am now learning how to live with it. Not against it. I’m living for the people who make me happy. Doing things that give me joy. Like chilling with my friends, spending time with my family, lying next to my partner every night, doing art, building my life in a new city and being able to do things I thought I would never be able to do. Having dreams and hoping to achieve them after thinking I had lost the right to follow any dreams.
I am almost 25 now, working towards starting my own creative studio. When I look back at that confused kid and all the painful experiences in my life, I just want to give them a hug. I want to tell my younger self that everything will turn out fine. Yes, there will be difficult times, but also the ones that are worth living for.
They are going to meet amazing people and build strong relationships. They are going to discover and fall in love with themselves.
I now know: there’s power in softness. That queerness isn’t a wound—it’s a wild kind of beauty. That survival isn’t just endurance—it’s creation. Every day, I choose to stay, to try again, to show up in the world as my weird, aching self—that’s a kind of victory.
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*Campaigns are non-journalistic projects by queerbeat.