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 assigned female at birth, but I was always a queer child. Stuck in a patriarchal world, my mother hid a prayer of strength in me through my name. She called me Judith—a woman from a Jewish tale who beheaded a foreign conqueror and saved her city and people. Perhaps my mother thought that my name would help me rise through the trappings of my assigned gender.
True to her prayer, I was fierce. As Judith, I had no fears. I would talk back to my elders and to the boys at Sunday School who would tease me and tug at my hair. I had a deep, passionate love for the world. I was brimming with emotions. I would cry at the smallest thing—from a dead insect I squashed accidentally to a cartoon where the puppy gets lost.
However, being a girl child was not comfortable for me. It was simply not enough. I wanted to experience all that life had to offer, which I felt was denied to me.
I have an early memory of feeling imprisoned by my gender: one day, I wanted to play with my cousin’s toy cars. But he wouldn’t have it. “Go, play with your Barbies,” he chided me. “Cars are only for boys.” His words stung. I just wanted to play with him and his cars.
Through these experiences, I realised, as a child, that girlhood was a limitation. The world around me taught me that girlhood meant you had to confine yourself to the kitchen, keep everything neat and in order, and mostly be obedient.
Boyhood, on the other hand, represented, to me, the great outdoors where I could be messy and free.
I wanted to break from the expectations of girlhood imposed on me. I, too, wanted to be messy and free. So, at three years old, I stole a pair of scissors from my mother’s cabinet, cut my hair as short as I could, and decided to name myself John.
John was born out of the queer imaginations of my childhood. I even remember “marrying” my friend Xavier, a boy who wore his mother’s scarf as a veil. I wore my father’s oversized blazer. He named himself Elizabeth. We, John and Elizabeth, christened each other man and wife.
John and Elizabeth were the happiest children. As John, my heroes were Spiderman and Superman. And I would jump from trees without a care in the world. Elizabeth would enjoy herself by wearing her mother’s clothes, clip-clopping around in high heels too big for her feet. She would have a deep-red lipstick smeared over her face.
When I think of those days, I relish how joyful it was for us to know and recognise each other. John and Elizabeth could be themselves with each other.
Little did we know that our endless summer of queer joy was going to be so short.
Soon after, we realised that our games and behaviour were not considered ‘normal’. Other kids in the neighbourhood constantly teased us. Elders in our family would ask us not to act like we did.
Our social norms taught us that boys liked blue and didn’t wear dresses, and that girls didn’t call themselves John. We could not play or do things the way we liked and imagined anymore. Xavier started playing with other boys.
Lonely, I went back to my Barbies and skirts.
Fears made real
When I was seven, I attended a Sunday School camp organised by my church in Shillong. We would get lessons on scriptures and watch educational movies and videos in the evenings. I can’t forget one gruelling video—of the Rapture—an apocalyptic event according to the Bible, when Jesus would return to the Earth and all believers would go to heaven. It showed all the sinners left behind facing God’s judgement.
That night, I did not get a wink of sleep. I couldn’t escape the sounds of people in hell. The thought of being left behind disturbed me. Even at that age, when I didn’t have the language to identify myself, a part of me still knew that I, in all my ‘queerness’, was not going to heaven.
From that night on, I prayed to God for forgiveness, for salvation from eternal punishment. I swallowed pieces of my old self. I wanted to be saved. I wanted to be like everyone else. I let go of John, but the sleepless fear stayed with me for years.
Throughout my adolescence till my early adulthood, I was burdened with the same heavy fear: being left behind during the Rapture.
So, I tried to change myself. I tried to be like other girls. Wear clothes like other girls. But every time I did so, I felt like an alien.
I felt as if everyone was born with a manual on how to act their gender. Except me. No matter how hard I tried, I could not let go of that streak of oddness that I was born with—never fitting within the confines of girlhood. This feeling of being at odds with the gender I was assigned at birth clung to me. And I felt that I was doomed.
Queer in the pandemic
At 18, when I went to university in a new city in Assam, I realised that I could not hold that queerness back. I slowly unbound myself from the self-imposed restrictions.
I realised that I could not kill that queer part of myself. I wanted to survive and live as I chose.
I remember how my hands shook when I signed up for the queer organisation on my campus. As part of this group, we attended pride events together, screened queer films, and organised panel discussions for queer sensitisation in our college.
Gradually, I started to ask myself: Can I finally exist as I am? I made friends who loved me for who I was—even though I still didn’t have the vocabulary to explain myself. I blossomed every time I stayed in the city. And I’d feel suffocated whenever I visited my family in Shillong from my college.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, I had to stay with my parents. Away from my friends and loved ones who supported me. I could barely hold on to being in a restrictive environment, stuck at home with my religious family.
The apocalyptic scent in the air worsened my childhood fears about mortality and hell. The fear, the isolation, and the grief of mass death intensified everything I had buried. I slowly began to bind myself up again, changing who I was—hiding myself from the world.
I became a ghost of myself—anxious, depressed, sleepless. I would stay awake all night long. At one point, I wouldn’t even see sunlight. I stayed in all day long. I felt hopeless. I began to think dying might be easier than living like this.
So, when the chance came to return to my ancestral home in Manipur, I took it. I thought the home of my childhood would heal me. I packed my bags in Shillong and ran to the hills of Manipur.
Trappings of gender
But Manipur was not the peaceful escape I had thought it would be. At 21 years of age, I was now a woman in society. I was expected to clean after others, attend gatherings in my puon (long wrap-around that women are expected to wear in my community), and serve others. To sift rice and to peel vegetables. To burn myself out in the service of others. And to take my anger and condense it into a small piece that I could clamp tight between my teeth.
These social norms suffocated me. I buckled under the weight of all these demands.
Long gone were the days when I was John—carefree and unburdened from the weight of people’s expectations.
I still did what I could. To make peace and to live my life within these boundaries.
But then something happened—the straw that broke the camel’s back. One day, I overheard my father bragging to his friends about building a house in our village—with rooms for both of his sons. He meant my brothers. The next day, my uncle came to me and told me, “Judith, remember that you must build your father’s house.” His words burned like coal embers in my mind. He was asking a big task of my already-burdened self: to financially support my family and build my father’s home.
How was I to build a house with no space for me? My father, after all, wanted to build rooms for my brothers. Not me. They still saw me as a girl. How could I belong somewhere like that? I broke down that night. It had hurt me deeply.
I started going for long walks. I would cry everywhere—in the forest trails and at my grandparents’ graves. I cried for my lost freedom. I was also grieving John—the part of me I lost long back.
I grieved for months.
Seeking and finding a home
Eventually, I reached out for help and started taking therapy sessions with a student counsellor. She said something that gave me a new perspective on my situation. She asked me to draw a circle of the people I held close to my heart. “What matters most is your inner circle—the people closest to you. Don’t try to please everyone else,” she said.
After that, something shifted inside me. I realised that I did not need to split myself into parts or be someone I am not to make others happy. I did not have to please society, my family, or the church. They could only accept me for my roles that suited them.
I could just be me. Those who loved me for who I am would not expect me to be anyone else. One by one, the queer friendships I had built through my queer organisation in college over the years began to reach out.
Friends took me to the lakes, where I poured my heart out, crying deep and long into the placid waters. They held me through every broken moment and gently pieced me back together.
On New Year’s Day in 2021, my best friend—the one I had bonded with over fan fiction and K-pop girl groups—called me. “You know you’ll always have a home with me,” they said.
With that one statement, something in my heart began to heal.
All these years, I yearned for a home—where I could truly belong, where I would be accepted as I am.
I ran from place to place—from my parents’ house in Shillong to our ancestral home in Manipur—to find home. But I was looking in all the wrong places. I found it, the shelter that I needed in my queer friendships and bonds.
When I look back at the three-year-old with scissors in hand—grinning, hair shorn, demanding to be called John—I see someone who already knew who they were. Before the shame, before the gender roles were fully imposed, before the self-imposed exile.
That child lived, even if only briefly, in truth. And though I had to bury John to survive, I never stopped mourning him.
Queerness saved me
What saved me from being lost wasn’t a clear resolution. It was connection—friends who opened their doors to me whenever I needed them. Like my trans woman friend who has the same birthday as me. We celebrated our birthdays together and exchanged clothes. Their clothes fit me like borrowed armour. Their raucous laughter taught me that I, too, can reclaim joy in my life.
So, my healing arrived in fragments scattered across ordinary moments. Collapsing into helpless giggles with friends over our shared jokes. It was sobbing together over queer TV shows, clutching each other during scenes that reflected our struggles, and seeing ourselves in characters who got happy endings, who survived, who found love.
I learned that healing did not happen in isolation. It was in community and connection that I found it. I am not becoming someone new, but remembering who I used to be before the world told me to forget it.
This way, I found my way back to myself gradually, not entirely as Judith. Neither John. But a quiet amalgamation of both.
From Judith, I kept my empathy, my ability to read the room and its emotional temperature. From John, I retained my stubborn streak and the protective instinct to guard my loved ones.
What emerged in and through me was someone who could be gentle without being weak, and assertive without being cruel. I learned to speak with Judith’s consideration and John’s unwavering conviction.
Today, I have found peace with my faith by realising that, if accepting myself means losing heaven, I perhaps don’t want that version of heaven. I deconstructed the religion of my childhood and chose to believe in a God of love, not fear.
Now, as a 25-year-old, I am someone who can cry openly while watching movies like Judith. And take a stand for myself, whenever needed, like John. I am someone who writes love letters with an open and romantic heart, but also who knows how to negotiate my life and relationships with a practical mind.
This amalgamation of Judith and John isn’t a compromise between two selves. I am just becoming the person I was always meant to be.
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*Campaigns are non-journalistic projects by queerbeat.