In summer 1996, I, along with my twin sister Lauren, entered the first year of college, which starts when you’re 12 and ends when you’re 18. The school had enough students to form a ‘vwo’ class, which is pre-university/pre-scientific education. And so for the first time I was around people of equal intelligence. It was all very exciting. Traveling by bus and walking through the big city without parents for the first time, with huge bags on the back of our backs. My mother thought classic bookbags were better than regular backpacks, so I had been guided by her opinion, as I often had. At school it turned out that everyone had a regular backpack, and people laughed at our bookbags. It took me some time to get used to it. Occasionally I was bullied by people from other classes, for example at gym class and at recess, and sometimes, to avoid this, I spent the breaks in the school library. In my class there were some people with whom I did not feel at home, but there were also some with whom I did feel at home and I spent most of my time with them. For the first time I had the sense of real friendship. I got along particularly well with Frank, a smart guy who played the trumpet, and who got punished right away during our first French class for throwing a flyer across the classroom just as the teacher entered. We would have a good laugh during those first years, and our math teacher would often reprimand and lecture us with: “Gentlemen up front…” I had a comic book agenda and it was full of hilarious Dirkjan comics by Mark Retera. So we looked at them one by one and that caused a lot of hilarity. Frank had an absurd sense of humor, regularly watched Jiskefet and The Fast Show, which he imitated at school, which made us laugh again. And he also got me excited about those shows. His mother was hilarious, you could always laugh with her, but his father was a bit of a stranger. Once, when he dropped me off at the bus stop after I had been at Frank’s house, he told Frank that I had been talking to myself during the drive to the bus stop. At least, that’s what Frank told me later. Oh my God, no, instead I was really talking to him. I tried to strike up a conversation, but he didn’t respond at all. That father was so out of touch and unsociable that he never rang the doorbell at parties when he came to pick Frank up, but stayed in the car until Frank finally saw him standing there, forty-five minutes later. Very weird!
I also hung out a lot with Johan, a smart piano-playing son of a critical entrepreneurial couple. He was very interested in politics, music and culture and adhered to high standards in everything he did, except for empathy. He regularly proclaimed that he didn’t need others and showed no empathy when people died. One of his exes even calls him a predator. And yes, in hindsight I can somewhat understand why, because he doesn’t really show his weaker points at home, that’s not allowed, because he always has to be the best at everything, and he receives a lot of criticism, which does make him stronger. He is by no means neglected, and that is why I look up to him. What strikes me about him is that he often pretends to listen obediently to authority, but actually he just doesn’t give a damn and does his own thing. This sometimes causes problems, but also sometimes leads to wonderful moments. We got along very well during school because we both strive for quality and I felt very welcome at his home.
Lenny is also a one-of-a-kind guy who I have known since the first year. He played the piano and could occasionally get very angry when he saw injustice! But he was a great guy. His parents are divorced and his father is a drum teacher. His mother often cooks Indonesian food: we can eat very elaborately, especially at parties. Only Frank finds it disgusting. We usually played soccer at parties. The rest were always much more fanatical than me. I just hung around, because I didn’t care much for soccer. His mother always brought us home after those parties in her Daihatsu “cookie box” car and Lenny thought they should just bomb my village. He often didn’t bring a present to parties, but nobody minded.
Abdel also sometimes joins our group. He is a Moroccan guy who claims from the start of college that he does not talk to girls. He later reconsiders this. (Who doesn’t?) He once put Red Bull in my drinking bottle, after which he laughed so hard, that he almost lost consciousness. He also once came to school with his head completely shaven, which prompted me to ask if he had bought new shoes. We regularly play tricks on each other. He regularly shakes his head no when he means yes, and vice versa. He is later admitted to the psychiatric ward of a hospital and we see him again some time later at school, where he makes a flashy impression with a newfangled walkman. I also see his sister, unfortunately for her, later back in mental health care.
In the first year of college, we performed Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales with several classes. And I was in charge of the sound effects. It was a bit of a makeshift job. The cassette recorder that was connected to the speakers in the cafeteria where the play was performed was actually upstairs, on the railing of the auditorium. I couldn’t hear anything that was happening in the cafeteria, so Frank had to give me a sign when to play each sound effect. That went completely wrong, of course. But it did provide some hilarious moments for the audience, which actually fits the piece. In the second year, Frank, Johan and I also played a few songs at a recital evening at the school.
In the first year of college, we also see, quite by chance, Mrs. Meeren from the GME (General Music Education) lessons we had when we were in primary school. She becomes our teacher in that first year. She still finds it ridiculous that we have continued to play the recorder, but later, when she performs the piece Poème Montagnard by Jan van der Roost with her harmony orchestra, she looks for two recorder players who, together with two other recorder players, introduce the main theme of the piece in the middle of the piece, after which the whole harmony orchestra takes over. That makes for a lovely concert and a very enjoyable experience, and I still listen to the recording (not ours) of the piece that was once released on CD. My sister got the flowers from the conductor, by the way. Very nice.
The school regularly organizes concerts at which students perform. I have now formed an ensemble with my sister Lauren and a regular recorder friend named Janneke, and we regularly play together, sometimes in three parts, sometimes in four parts with our teacher joining us. The three of us regularly perform at these concerts, which is always fun. We also regularly perform pieces by Mr. Winkel, our music teacher in second through fifth grade. The low point of our performances outside of school is when we are ‘forced’ to walk through the sports hall with a drum band while we play some silly tune, and they even put little hats on our heads. So I allowed myself to be made a fool of again, and instead of getting angry and refusing, I dutifully went along with it like a fool, because standing up for myself was not an option. What misery. I can still see the devilish smile of the woman who put the hat on my head. The highlight of our performances outside of school was a summer concert by my parents’ choir, where our ensemble played a beautiful piece together with our teacher, and where I also performed with Mr. Winkel with a wonderful sonata he had written. Unfortunately, Janneke also ended up in mental health care.
The closer we got to the end of college, the more fun school became. But unfortunately the great fears I had kept coming back. I suffered from great insecurities. I didn’t always feel safe and puberty only intensified this. Who was I? I was incredibly critical of myself. I developed a big problem with clothes and felt extremely insecure in new clothes. It often happened that I no longer wore certain clothes because they caused so much anxiety. A plaid shirt was not really popular at the time, but my mother thought it looked so nice on me, so I had let myself be convinced. I had absolutely no sense of style. I had no idea what to wear. At school, a pretty girl in my class made a comment about it. She called me Farmer Zeke. The same girl told me I should shave when the first whiskers started to appear. I often felt criticized and not at all safe. With every comment or mirror held up to me, I thought that the other person was very dissatisfied with me. And it felt especially awful when it was girls I was very focused on and wanted to impress. I cared much less about what boys thought, because I didn’t give a damn about romance with them. I only became anxious around boys when they really threatened or bullied me.
By then I was often very hyper, I demanded a lot of attention in class by making noises and I was constantly teasing everyone and everything. These were all ways for me to deal with the intense, overwhelming fear I felt inside. But it also meant I could show my energy to the rest of the class.
The school vacations, however, were a disaster. I had no more distractions, almost no friends around me and was hopelessly confronted with myself. Fortunately, I had one friend in my village, Kevin, who lived one street away, and we got along well. We met regularly and bought lots of computer games at the store that we played extensively. We also regularly played soccer on the lawn next to his house. At certain times we would even viciously walk the streets looking for victims to fight, usually very cowardly boys younger than us. Once I even grabbed a younger boy we came across who was messing around by his legs, twirled him around and then let him go on the lawn. A cowardly act that I still regret. During the yearly four-day march, we were constantly harassed by a group of younger boys. At a certain point, I grab the leader of the group and throw him in a ditch, which felt more appropriate than the previous incident. Unfortunately, he says he will bring his older brother the next day, who is notorious throughout the village for being so aggressive. But apparently I already had a guardian angel, because this brother was present the next day, but remained calmly in his car. But I was so scared.
Kevin also comes to judo with me at one point, and it becomes a fun time. My sister is also doing judo at the time and is a real fighter. She accidentally gives Kevin a bloody nose in a fight. To which his father gave him a lecture in the car on the way home and called him a wimp again. His father was a pain in the neck, constantly calling his son a wimp and giving him a kick in the ass if something wasn’t done quickly enough. That is typical of the baby boomer generation. They try to toughen you up with that kind of behavior, but you are not allowed to set limits with them, you should definitely not show any anger, and they themselves (supposedly grown-ups) smoke big cigar to calm their aggression. It is disgusting. How can a child ever develop a strong personality with self-confidence with such a jerk at the helm? It is precisely because of the aggressive behavior of such figures that children develop problems with their self-confidence or a somewhat spineless attitude, and instead of such a father seeing that and wondering what his part in it is, these figures then constantly call their sons wimps to undo the effect. By which time it has lost all its impact. And they can continue to do this, so to speak, their entire lives. It is disgusting, but the entire boomer generation consists of these types who have absolutely no self-criticism. And the baby boomer women get off on this. I say this with little respect, cause I see it happening so often. It was also somewhat the case with my own parents. My father also always came across as rather full of himself when we were young. Full of confidence and masculine energy. And many women find that quite appealing! My mother certainly did. But he didn’t dare to stand up to his own parents, afraid to disappoint them in their very unrealistic demands. We didn’t really have much contact with my paternal grandparents. After my parents got married, he broke off contact at one point. I think, as he once told me, it was because they criticized my mother too much. Hats off to my father for choosing his family. Later, when the children were a bit older, they reconnected, and I only got to know my paternal grandparents from the age of about 12. My grandfather was a very concerned man, but he also came across as very unpredictable, and would often preach his disapproval of something you had done out of the blue. Grandma was demanding, and my father never dared to contradict her. I always saw my father trying very hard, he ran around like crazy to keep them both happy. Because if they were disappointed, you just had to put up with it. In his youth, my grandfather sometimes even slapped my father hard in the face when he did something wrong. Apparently that was his way of communicating and it also happened that my grandmother and my father came to blows. So it becomes completely understandable how problems with your own parents arise. It often starts generations ago. And that makes it understandable, but what is more important is that it is your job as a parent to deal with such problems in time, so that you do not pass them on to the next generation. But this often requires therapy and working on yourself, something that only the Millennial generation, to which I also belong, has started to do on a large scale. We are cleaning up the mess left by our ancestors. And that is a good thing, even though many people who have not had any problems themselves paint you as selfish, as a wimp or a sissy who can’t handle anything and who should have been spanked more. They are not well in the head. Most Millennials do not even confront their parents because they have little insight into what actually caused their parents’ problem behavior and how it influenced them. But meanwhile they have many complaints and a lifetime of wondering where it comes from. They lost contact with their core long ago. And that is not due to too little spanking, but rather too much spanking at too young an age or too high expectations.
But back to the school vacations, because I have a lot of baggage in this area. And it mainly comes out during the vacations, when I would worry myself to death. The fears were omnipresent then. I completely destroyed my nails by biting them until they bled. This gave me a sense of control. When I watched a scary movie, I would lie awake for nights on end, sweating in bed as usual, afraid of ghosts and other such things. I was also afraid that I would go blind or get sick. I missed my friends terribly. I also lived in the middle of nowhere and had to take the bus 25 kilometers to get to the city. In the first years, I especially missed the fun I had with Frank in high school during the holidays. I had never had that in my life. But don’t think I picked up the phone to arrange to meet up. I didn’t dare. It even caused me to doubt my sexuality. But it wasn’t that simple, because I was truly disgusted by the idea of being intimate with him or with other boys, I couldn’t get an erection at all when I thought about boys, but the fear of being gay kept intrusively popping into my head whenever I thought about cute girls, especially when I was alone. I talked to my parents about this. When they said they would love me even if I were gay, I felt they were forcing these feelings on me, I was so impressionable. I thought they would rather have a gay son than a heterosexual one. And they would rather have a girl than a healthy boy. Fortunately, I could shake this idea when school started again and could then focus on all the cute girls at school. I had always been interested in girls; during puberty I also became sexually interested in them. I often fantasized about them. But unfortunately I was never able to make contact with them because I was very afraid of what they would think of me. So I kept my love interests anxiously secret.
During breaks, Johan and I often went to the music room to make music, sometimes with Frank too. We played the piano and drums, and that way we started to enjoy music more and more. At home I did a lot with the Cakewalk Pro Audio music program that I had copied from Mr. Hans. I listened to music on a CD or on TV, and then tried to recreate it note by note. I really enjoyed that. I also wrote my own music with this program, not popular music, but more like orchestral pieces.
In the fourth grade, Johan had the wild idea of writing the music for the upcoming school play. I was cautious, but in the end I went for it. We worked very well together and were very supportive of each other, but we could also be really critical of each other. I learned a lot from it. And the result was cool! Unfortunately, it sounded better on the computer than when the orchestra tried to play it. They were nice songs, but the orchestra’s performance wasn’t very good, and we hadn’t taken the level of the various orchestra members into account enough when writing the music. The following year we would do it again, and it was of higher quality than the year before. But this time too, the orchestra was not that fantastic. And unfortunately everyone just sort of muddled through, even Johan, who did not play an entire piano part of one song I had written because Cakewalk notated it rather strangely. The parts were often too difficult again, and some were therefore completely dropped in the final result, even entire melodies. That was a shame. And very few people practiced their parts. Meanwhile, we would sit with the orchestra during the plays and secretly make grilled cheese sandwiches. Hilarious, but you couldn’t say there was any concentration. And meanwhile I would just give angry looks to everyone when we really had to play and they made mistakes. Very unprofessional, but I also really felt like I wasn’t allowed to criticize the orchestra members or explain anything about how they should play something, because that task was assumed by the conductor, Mr. Winkel, our music teacher, and unfortunately he didn’t have the same love for music that Johan and I did. We also never played the recordings from the computer for the other members of the orchestra because Mr. Winkel put his own spin on some of the pieces. Much to my displeasure, but I didn’t communicate that either. We also had one good drummer and one who still had a lot to learn. The good drummer couldn’t make it one evening, so we had only the drummer who still had a lot to learn, who kept slapping on a wood block. It was awful.
Mr. Winkel leaves at the end of the fifth grade and because we owe him so much, we record a CD with a group of musicians from the orchestra. Complete with a farewell speech, spoken by me, with dramatic music behind it. He thought it was very funny. Johan had a printer and printable CDs, so they also looked nice. In the sixth grade, we had Mr. van Doorn as a music teacher. He asked me if I wanted to join a music tour as a recorder player, where we would perform with a large group of people. I went to one rehearsal, but I had so many problems at the time that I canceled at the last minute and did not join.
Only when I meant something to the school could I be proud of myself and feel like I really belonged. But then it was vacation time again and the doubts started to creep in. I realized that I found a woman’s body beautiful, but that I could also find a man’s body beautiful. It didn’t turn me on, but I did find it beautiful. This caused me to become very anxious again. It was a real problem for me because it destroyed my self-confidence. For years I had periods where I was constantly testing myself: am I straight, gay or bisexual? I was tossed back and forth and felt like a different person each time. I was obsessed. It was horrible. If I saw an ugly woman next to a handsome man, fear would grip my heart. Once back at school, those identity fears disappeared like snow in the sun. Then there was structure.
Whatever else happened during puberty, I became extremely afraid of transsexuals. When I took the bus home from school, there was always a woman who boarded at the station in a neighboring village on a certain day who had somewhat masculine features and a slightly deep voice. I was convinced that she was a transsexual (which, by the way, turned out not to be true), and every week on that particular day, I would be panicked (inside) when we approached the station where she got on.
Fortunately, there were other wonderful moments at school. For example, the trips abroad. In the third grade, we had an exchange with Italy. You were paired with an Italian based on letters. And I was paired with the biggest loser in the eyes of his classmates, how surprising. He wasn’t a loser, but he was a very clumsy boy. I will spare you the details of when he was here, even if they are hilarious. But he made a big mess of things. Later in the year we went to Italy. For the first time abroad, because as a family we never went further than Ouddorp. My sister was not doing well in Italy at the time. She felt very ill. I was feeling better at the time, but I had to run a few kilometers with Johan during a sports competition. I fainted from exhaustion while running because I just kept going and going without setting any limits for myself. Johan just kept running: he didn’t usually care so much about others. But I lay still on the track and my legs were bright red. Soon Frank and Abdel came running and they lifted me to my feet. I barely had the strength to walk, and my blood pressure was taken at the first aid station, where they advised me to go see the doctor when I got home and to tell him about this incident. Eventually we were picked up by a partly filled bus from the parallel atheneum class that had been to a different city than us. I was one of the last to board the bus, and I ended up sitting next to the biggest bully, a girl that no one wanted to sit next to. She started making hurtful remarks at the beginning of the trip, and continued to do so for the entire journey. Until something snapped inside me, and I started beating her face like crazy. By that time, this lady had scratched my neck. “Bunch of monkeys!” shouted Johan, who saw it happen, and Frank was doubled over by laughter when he suddenly from the back of the bus saw my fists flying wildly above the back of the seat. Well, it’s not something I’m proud of, but I can’t say I’m really ashamed of it either. What a horrible person she was. The rest of the trip was wonderfully peaceful…
In the fourth grade, we went on a trip to Rome, which fortunately went without fights, and during which I took many photos. We made a stopover in Florence. And our classical languages teacher had told us which train to take for the onward journey. Frank, Abdel and I decided to go into Florence for a moment to admire the beautiful Duomo. We didn’t have time to go inside, but we were all impressed. When we returned to the station, we saw one of our supervisors from a higher class on the platform where the connecting train would arrive. She said that the train that was there was the one we should get on. So we got on the train. The train started moving pretty quickly. Huh? Did the rest of the class get on? We turned out to be the only three on the train, because the rest had been told at the last minute that they would be taking a different train. There we were, without a phone, on our way to Rome, while the rest of the class was still at the Florence station. Abdel immediately panicked, but Frank and I were doubled over by laughter. We went straight to the conductor to explain. He would have the name of our teacher announced in Florence, which he invariably mispronounced, making his name ambiguous, which made us doubled over again. We finally arrived in Rome and the conductor took us to the front of the train where we would get off. The door opened and who would be standing there, but my brother Anton (who had also come along on the trip as a supervisor) and our teachers. They had taken a faster train for which they had received a discount and had caught up with us. A wonderful adventure, and luckily Abdel had calmed down again. Until his bag with passport was stolen in a junkie park, but otherwise I think it went well…
In one of the last years, there was also a trip of a few days to Ypres and Bruges in Belgium, which I made video recordings of, a beautiful moment, in which I came alive again. School was a great distraction for me and I had achieved a lot there. From the fourth grade onward, our classes had different people. A new girl named Anna came to school. She was from Bosnia and had lived in Germany for a while. Now she lived with her sister Mina and her parents in a beautiful house near the school that her father was renovating. She had a wonderfully fresh, sparkling appearance. She could also talk very proudly about herself or her family, which made some people laugh. Half the class (the boys) were after her. This was also evident in the Ypres video where three boys followed her closely during a photo opportunity and I was filming it from the bus while other classmates were commenting extensively. It was hilarious and she clearly made an impression on everyone, including me.
Frank changed a lot in his later years of college. He became a bit eccentric, developed indecipherable handwriting and started listening to modern 20th-century composers such as Shostakovich and Bartók. Unfortunately, we didn’t laugh as much as we had before. He also became very interested in art and designed the set for the second play that Johan and I wrote the music for. I also made a film with him and another boy from the class about the Belgian town of Tongeren, which the classical culture teacher did not appreciate because we had not followed the assignment at all. He gave us an unsatisfactory mark, much to the displeasure of the culture and art teacher, who then consulted with him to see if we could get a satisfactory mark after all. We ended up getting a 6- (on 10). But we had only ourselves to blame, because not only had we not kept to the assignment, but we had also shown a non-serious version with sound effects after the serious version, which was very funny, but rightly not appreciated. The credits also listed roles such as ‘umbrella holder’, ‘tripod holder’, ‘catering: McDonald’s’ and ‘mental support: Ambiorix of Tongeren’, which I don’t think he appreciated either. Ambiorix of Tongeren had a statue in Tongeren and during the movie we had taken some beautiful shots of it, accompanied by a chorale-like piece from part 2 of Bartòk’s Concerto for Orchestra. It was a beautiful movie, if I say so myself.
When Frank changed a lot, I also started hanging out more with other boys in the class. One of them was called Theo. He was a very busy and clever guy who kept his youthful energy until late. At that time he hung out more with Chris and Lenny. They went on vacation together, for example. Chris was a boy I had also had music lessons with in the past, because he lives in the same village as me. I can still clearly remember him almost choking on his recorder because he forgot to breathe. He also had no idea that there were boundaries and that he could say when he didn’t want something and that people would listen to him. He seemed quite anxious at the time. It was clearly the idea of his dominant but to us very kind mother Tiny, that he should take music lessons. He too did not dare to go against her. Later he wore contact lenses, and became quite popular at our college. There was not a single person who did not like him. He had a great sense of humor! And he listened to all kinds of bands with Theo. In the last years of college, my sister, he and I often took the same bus. Then he would tell us his latest puns, or we would make music (noise) on the bus. His mother Tiny had already made an indelible impression at the information meeting for the Italy trip in fourth grade, where she asked our teachers everything under the sun about the details of the trip. She talked for almost the entire evening. Something that made us both laugh our heads off, but which was less funny for Chris.
At Theo’s house it was always very cozy too. He had a very nice mother, who was always very warm-hearted too. And his father was a physics teacher who loved all kinds of good bands. Theo also had three little brothers. He was the oldest and there were three more boys, each one a little smaller than him. During a party, his youngest brother rolled down the stairs on a mattress. And you saw scenes like that quite often. We usually sat in the TV room, a separate room off the garage. There we watched silly comedies like Dumb & Dumber, The Hot Chick and Deuce Bigalow, which we later started calling Theo-and-Jesse movies. When Theo, Chris and Lenny were on vacation, along with some of Lenny’s friends, I visited them on my bike. It was quite a long way, but I was not carrying an ounce of fat on my body and made it a sport at the time to cycle as fast as possible. On the road to their vacation spot there was also a section that I had to take a ferry to cross. The weather was beautiful and I intensely enjoyed the summer and the lovely view over the water. Once arrived, we enjoyed ourselves at a beach, but I unfortunately stepped on something sharp in the water, causing blood to gush from my foot for which I needed stitches. So I couldn’t cycle back anymore. My father came to pick me up. I often had such things happen to me.
I never cycled as fast as Frank, because he rode his racing bike to school every day, 15 kilometers there and 15 kilometers back. I lived 25 kilometers from school, but occasionally I would go there by bike. It would take me 45 minutes to get to Theo’s in the village, and then another 15 minutes to get to the city where our college was. That was quite a feat for me, because I wasn’t athletic at all. Frank, however, was very athletic and sometime in the third grade, I believe, he had a major accident in which his bicycle fell apart while he was riding it and he slid face-first across the street. He was found by someone and looked pretty beat up when he recovered and returned to school. He had also lost teeth.
When I was in the sixth and final year, we had to choose our field of study. What should I study? Why does college have to end now? In my final year, I spent a lot of time filming and, together with Anna (the sparkling Bosnian), I made a film for social studies as a practical assignment. That became more and more fun, and at a certain point I told her that I liked her. Not some kind of flattery that only gives a false representation of yourself, which only disappoints the other person when it ends, but simply expressing my feelings directly. We got something together. But I was so afraid of how others would react, and I was so ashamed of myself that we kept it a secret for a while at my request. I also had no idea how kissing worked, so I messed everything up in that area, but Anna was very patient with me and little by little it got better and better. We often wrote each other letters, which we would then give to each other at school. By the end of the school year, everyone knew, it went gradually, that I also felt more at ease. Anna taught me a little Bosnian, and introduced me to her family, very warm people. Her father always joked about the Dutch. He found it funny that I did not know the word ‘municipal beer’ (which means “water from the tap”), and he corrected me for calling a speed bump in a route description a ‘bulge in the road’, which he did not understand. And he always asked: “Hey boy, is everything clean?” Anna’s mother always provided a stack of food that I could take home for the bus. I regularly visited them with my sister Lauren and sometimes with Chris too. We also went to their house for the moment we would receive calls to let us know whether we had passed or not. For us it was festive. But unfortunately Frank and Chris had not passed their exams. So they had to do the exam year again. For us it was a wonderful time, but when the school year ended and it was time for vacation, the doubts returned. I started worrying again. And it got worse the more intimate I became with Anna. I morbidly compulsively tested all the men and women I saw to see if I found them beautiful and if they turned me on. I was once again tossed back and forth between heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality, and once again it appeared that I had no clear identity, but I did not know that at the time. And that caused me to have some very anxious moments. Every time I thought of Anna, sexually speaking, a man would come to mind who took away all my desire and made me afraid, which made me afraid that I would not be able to get an erection, and as a conciliatory gesture to that inner man I had cuddling fantasies that made me completely upset, purely to dampen the aggression of men that I let wash over me inside. I couldn’t get this out of my head: it was really a result of the trauma I had towards my parents, although I didn’t know that at the time, and it was especially a problem because it destroyed my self-confidence, and I felt weird about everything, and I also wasn’t functioning sexually at that time.
A new side effect was that sometimes it seemed as if I had a woman’s body. It was bizarre. My self-image was so distorted: as if I had breasts and a vagina, even though I absolutely did not want that. And when I was little, that was also one of my fears that I had talked about with my mother: I was afraid I would get breasts. I even became afraid that I would have to undergo gender reassignment surgery, against my will. Because I didn’t want it! But I felt forced to do it. And I also had the compulsion to make feminine movements, but only when I was alone. Of course I knew that it was all not real, but I could not correct my feelings with my mind. I was very depressed at the time. I was prescribed an antidepressant for the first time, Efexor, and that immediately brought some relief. But meanwhile I took out my problems on Anna. If she didn’t pay attention to me for a moment or was very excitedly talking to another boy who looked more masculine than me, then my blood would boil, I would be incredibly jealous, and this was really very painful. Only when anger at shared attention is allowed to exist, then a person can share attention, but in my case my anger was severely restrained, it was not allowed to exist. And I felt like a pathetic wreck. Because I also wanted to feel like a man with self-confidence, who was satisfied with himself. But I was far from satisfied with myself. And I became angrier the more intimate I became with Anna. When I was annoyed with her, and that happened more and more often (simply because so much of my own aggression came to the surface, which I didn’t know what to do with), the love was immediately gone. It was very black and white. Instead of communicating with love the things I found annoying, I pushed her away in a very immature way and did not communicate what it was really about. I could not go any further with her in this state in which I was overwhelmed by fear. During the graduation gala, which should have been so beautiful, I felt terrible, even though I had a beautiful girl next to me who admired me most of the time for who I was. She really made me feel that, but I couldn’t let it get to me, precisely because it hit so close to home. I simply did not feel a clear difference between my sister, my mother and myself. And this played itself out so deeply within me that it affected my body, giving me the feeling that I had a woman’s body, which I found horrifying. I could not let go of women, which is absolutely necessary to be able to feel like a man, but I only realized that much later.
And then the vacation started. Anna and I were supposed to go to Paris at that time, and I was angry with her about something trivial. We talked about it on the phone and she defended herself. I wanted to come to her to talk about it, but she didn’t want me to because I “would say the same thing”, and then I hung up in anger. Later, I tried to call her in tears, but she was no longer there, at least not for me. I didn’t speak to her for the entire vacation, and it was clear that it was over, and she wanted me to feel that strongly. I was in a very bad state and it devastated me. But the medication helped me put it into perspective. I thought: How could I be so stupid, I just let her walk away! What had I been worrying about all this time!? All of a sudden, I was rid of my ailments, and for the first time in my life, I felt a healthy fighting spirit. That had been long gone. At the end of the vacation, just before I went to university, I visited Anna and gave her a large framed drawing that I had made of a photo of her as a farewell gift. I thought it looked just like her. And then I was able to get on with my life again.
