A lot of people don’t understand what life is like for someone like me. Most people don’t battle with the thought that they’re in the wrong body, trapped hopelessly in a vessel they neither asked for nor wanted. For the past 18 years, since puberty hit, I’ve had an explosive wave of incompatible thoughts and emotions. As time went on, my mood, self-worth, and well-being plummeted. I began to feel detached from myself, emotionally, and I felt physically ill at the sight of my naked self. Everything about me seemed so wrong.

I spent years quietly and shamefully toying with the notion of swapping my body out for one that I preferred. I’d make offhand comments that no one would pick up on (I hoped) about how unhappy I was. Most of the time, they were fairly innocuous. I would talk about how I hated how broad my shoulders are; how much I hated my body hair, or my voice; sometimes I’d lament how uncomfortable my clothes were and how jealous I was of my friends who got to wear clothes that I felt like were “off-limits” to me because of the body I’d been born in. I convinced myself that this wasn’t anything, and I’d just get over it. I got told this was normal. I mean, everyone hates their body during puberty, right?

At particularly low points, I would act out. Sometimes violently, sometimes just an aggressive outpouring of emotion. Sometimes, this was self-harm; cutting myself or punching a wall, just to feel something. Other times, I tried to drink myself into oblivion. At particularly dark times there was a combination of the two, which were dark, self-destructive journeys that I almost didn’t come back from.

This is something that is important to clarify. I never identified these thoughts as a coherent desire. As easy as it is to identify them in retrospect, at the time they were faceless antagonizing elements to my character that I couldn’t see or understand. It’s not as if I could look back at this and acknowledge that this was a pervasive problem. My mind wasn’t so convenient. Instead, these problems manifested themselves in ways similar to a psychological disorder. I developed severe self-esteem and mental health problems. I was diagnosed with chronic depression and prescribed medication. Antidepressants and antipsychotics didn’t help. I was prescribed a dozen different medications at different times all designed to resolve the symptoms I had. However, they weren’t targeting the root issue.

I worked closely with Float On for years before officially being hired on to Float Tank Solutions, so I was no stranger to floating. I floated several times with mixed results. Some floats were peaceful and euphoric, but the persistent anxiety and self-loathing could creep through at any moment, which would quickly turn the float experience sour. I’ve often heard strong advocates of floating question why people might have difficult floats, “what’s wrong with spending time alone with yourself?” When you love yourself, it’s easy to be alone with your thoughts – when you hate who you are and can’t understand why, it can be a nightmare.

 

As it goes, my life hit an unexpected rough patch. I was living in a city I hated, in a job I despised, and forced to live in an unhealthy environment. My mental state was hit hard. The only way I could calm myself down was through crossdressing. I stared at myself in the mirror, done up poorly, and wondered why this, of all things, would possibly make me feel better. But it did. It was bittersweet. If it meant what I thought it did, then I knew I could never be happy this way. I knew that there’d be judgement, discrimination, hate crimes, and whatever else society would lob at me. I’d never be accepted like I was. I was scared. As a lot of people in my situation do, I contemplated suicide. There wasn’t anyone around, it would’ve been easy enough to do. I could’ve even made it look like an accident.

The thought of my family is what stopped me. My wife, my parents, my brother… I didn’t want to burden them with tragedy. So I ignored it. I tried to change my life back to business as usual.

And also as it goes, life got better. I moved back to a city I love, got a better job, and found a better place to live. Since the primary stressors were gone, I went back to living life how I had before. And I found it manageable. For several years, I never thought about those dark days and the truth I uncovered. Despite being in denial, I was okay. Living with something for so long made it feel like a part of me.

After I joined Float Tank Solutions, I became enmeshed in floating as a practice, and it opened me up to opportunities I would’ve never had otherwise. I got to go on Float Tour, where I not only got to meet basically the entire float industry, I got the chance to really get to know myself.

I’ll have to omit some details here for privacy reasons, but one day on Tour we visited an old friend of Float On who had one of the few tanks in a State in the middle of the farm belt. Said friend gave us a warm welcome while we stopped, and even shared some marijuana with us. Despite being from Portland, I’ve never been much of a smoker. It has triggered anxiety attacks in the past, so I generally avoid it. But in this instance, I didn’t want to be rude, so I had some as well.

As I would find out, this was a particularly strong strain of herb. Before long, I was high. Like… Led Zepplin high. Our host offered floats to each of us, and I gladly obliged. In my current state, I went into a deeply meditative state while still being alert and conscious.

It allowed for intense self-reflection while still being able to disassociate in the tank. I took a global perspective on my life, my troubles and wondered why, even when so many things in my life seemed to be going well, I was so painfully unhappy. I had an excellent marriage, I had landed a dream job working with some of the greatest human beings I had ever known, and I was pursuing a career that I felt passionate about. What was missing?

The answer stared back at me. Painfully obvious in this state. I had spent the vast majority of my life looking away from in, but now it was like trying to ignore a solar flare. It was bright and ever present: my body was wrong. I had been born wrong and every day after I had hit puberty had been an awkward, painful mess just trying to carry the pieces along until someone could tell me what was broken.

Alone, weightless, in the dark, and high out of my mind, I laughed. I laughed so hard that I cried. I was so emotionally overwhelmed that I actually wept. For the first time that I could remember, my life made sense. Each of these smaller problems were connected to one giant truth that I had been afraid of – that I was in the wrong body. I understood this intrinsically without knowing the science behind gender dysphoria or even proper treatment. And much like a Mind’s Eye puzzle, once I saw the solution, I couldn’t see anything else.

I spent the rest of the Tour stealing away to do the research. I learned that this wasn’t new, and in fact every major culture throughout human history had addressed transgender people in their own ways. For Native Americans, they were “Two Spirit”; in the Philippines they were “pagkababae” or “bakla”; even the Mesopotamians had the third gender “kur-gar-ra” (literally “man-woman”) in their creation myth. There’s nothing quite like seeing your own identity issues addressed in a dead language from an ancient civilization to make you feel like you’re not a freak.

When I came home, I sought treatment. I found a gender psychologist who’d see me immediately, went to a clinic, and started hormone therapy. For the first few weeks, there were severe mood swings, nausea, and lightheadedness. I lost a lot of body mass very quickly, but things eventually leveled out.

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but one day, even though I don’t look all that different, I just felt better. In fact, even being able to feel anything was great. I had to adjust to experiencing emotions more deeply. I was impacted by things as they happened, and as commonplace as that sounds, it was completely alien to me. The self-loathing that was previously so pervasive in my life was gone.

I honestly owe a huge debt of gratitude to floating. It’s helped make me the person I am today. I’ve floated several times since starting hormone therapy, and each time is better than the last. I no longer feel anxious spending time alone with myself. I get to rediscover myself each time I enter the tanks, and there’s no longer anything to be afraid of. It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but I’m finally becoming the person I know I was meant to be.

To everyone in the industry – thank you. Getting to meet all of you has changed my life.

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-Juliet Tango Mylan