childhood girlhood boyhood

written on 26/7/2025 to avoid crying because i needed to throw some birthday cards out

i'm cleaning out my room. i'm switching rooms with my sister soon for several nonimportant reasons. but switching rooms means that i have to declutter my entire room, including boxes i haven't opened in years, and going through fond, forgotten and unwanted memories.

i'm terrible at throwing stuff away. everything holds a memory for me. my mom is helping me out a bit because it's been hard. will i ever look at my schoolbooks from when i was 7 again? no, but it still hurts to throw them away.

it feels like i'm throwing away my childhood. i already feel like i don't remember that much (though it's probably the normal amount that people remember from 6 to 12 years prior) and i'm scared of forgetting things. plus, being trans, it feels like i haven't had a childhood at all. like i'm throwing out the little things i have left of it.

in two months i'll be an adult, a trans adult. the type of adult i looked up to. an age i never thought i'd get to. i'm throwing my childhood, my girlhood away, while being reminded that i've never experienced boyhood.

i do not think i would've been any more typically masculine than i am now, if i had been a cis boy. i would most likely not have been into sports, or fortnite, or been in youth organisations for boys like my cousins. but, i would've been a boy.

and even with my short experience of boyhood, i did not even slightly "pass" until i was nearly 16, and now i do mostly pass until i open my mouth. my gender clues don't match. i wear" boys clothes" and have short hair but have a feminine voice, which in my hometown means i'm a 14 year old boy but at school/any more open minded space i suddenly don't pass anymore because my voice is high so i could very well be a lesbian. when i first started questioning my gender i used the "male bikes" at school and was euphoric. last summer i tried out my cousins bike and i fell. i did climb in a tree last year, but it didn't count because they had cut steps into the tree so i didn't really climb, just ascend. i did sit in it though. i was happy.

my point with that was that in most spaces i wasn't treated as the boy i was, but as a trans boy (read: femboy/twink/one of the girls/confused girl/strange person). my friend group mostly consisted of girls as soon as i started middle school at 12. some groups were nice. some groups treated me as a girl. some groups forgot i was trans at all, which was nice.

anyway. my childhood. i think i'm in some sort of a mourning process. mourning the girl i was and mourning the boy i never got to be. i grew up too fast. i hung out with adults at family gatherings. i talked about philosophers with my mom at the ripe age of 9. i think i might've been a girl for some time. i did not know or care before that. i tried peeing standing up and got scolded at school when i was 4. i don't think i ever was a woman, or felt like one. i think i mostly felt like a stranger to myself and to the rest of the world. i want to go back to my childhood yet never return.

i was just talking to my mom about the future. she asked me if i was scared, and i said no. i said, i don't know how it will go in 10 years, i barely know how the following year will go.
i've never really worried about the future, more about the past. though, that was mostly because i didn't think i'd get this far.
YET, HERE I AM!!
18 in two months. starting a degree i never thought of starting before this year.

i don't know if i'll call myself a man right away, being an adult and everything. in my heart, i'm still a child who needs assistance and support and a kiss goodnight. but i think, i hope, i'll make a pretty good man.