Gradually She Finds Her Voice
John Janelle Backman
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SuffocatinginherenoroomtotwitchevenbetweenheartlungsdiggingofribsmustgetOUT
Mr. Johnson held open his pre-calculus lesson planner, which listed all the assignments for the year, and his finger stabbed at a column mostly of blanks. “See? Here, here, twice that week, here again…John, you’ve missed a ton of homework,” he blustered. “Figures don’t lie.”
I looked at the planner, the blank check boxes, anything but his face. He was a handsome, energetic young man, a promising math instructor in a private high school, but right now those good looks and energy were directed toward exasperation.
He only quoted half the proverb: figures don’t lie. I barely kept the whole thing from escaping my mouth: figures don’t lie, but liars figure. I’d never seen Mr. Johnson explode, and I didn’t want him exploding on me.
* * *
Picturebookgirldressbendingpantiesshowmetoo@fournowI’moutI’mout!fornowanyway
At the time, avoiding Mr. Johnson’s glare, I couldn’t believe I had missed that many assignments. Now I’m sure he was right. My record in pre-calc—a level of math I understood not at all—simply reflected my approach to education in general.
That approach began one night during my first year in high school, when I fell asleep.
The way I fell asleep set the pattern. One evening, feeling droopy but with fifty pages of English homework to read, I decided to take the book to bed. The space beneath my blankets was luscious: warm, swaddled, safe. I started in on the book, turned the page, read another paragraph, and it was 6:00 a.m.
The average private school student might have thought, Oh God NO! I fell asleep! My homework’s not done! What am I going to do? I thought, Oh God YES! I fell asleep! No one can blame me for that!
From then on I took every book to bed with me.
* * *
Over the years I’ve attributed my besetting sin of high school underperformance to all manner of things. I was in over my head—the private school workload proved too heavy—and I didn’t want to admit it. I was a very late bloomer: immature, clueless, shapeless inside and out. (A friend called me “amorphous,” then reinforced the label by defining it: “lacking definite crystalline structure.”) I’d been depressed for two full years in my teens, which undoubtedly led to the excess sleeping and inertia. Deeper down, a fear: I was simply a lazy fuckup who never learned to (in my parents’ finger-wagging phrase) buckle down.
Maybe. None of us, however—not me, not my parents, not Mr. Johnson, not the deans who could have expelled me in an instant—heard the rumbling deep down, like the grind of machinery but with words.
BoysfriendsgirlstoobutgirlsIsharemyselfwith
* * *
I don’t know how I graduated high school. My unconscious doesn’t believe I did. It keeps sending me dreams in which I forget to hand in major assignments, show up for the final when I never attended class, can’t figure out who to ask about my progress toward graduation. Even post-commencement is fraught in my dreams: I’ve missed the deadline for ordering my cap and gown, with no cap and gown I decide to skip the ceremony.
I’m pushing seventy, for fuck’s sake.
But I do have evidence of graduation. The diploma on which—in a spiteful twist of karma, tailor-made for a fuckup—they misspelled my middle name. More to the point, the photo: a side shot of me walking into the commencement area. My nose juts out from my head, a ridge in the middle of my face. I’m decked out in a suit that couldn’t be more wrong for me: a kind of knit polyester that irritated my skin, the signature boy-turning-man white shirt and dull striped tie.
My friend was right about amorphous. I didn’t know who I was then, and neither did my mother, who undoubtedly picked these clothes out for me, as she usually did.
So the suit was wrong. How wrong, though, we had no clue, because we were still deaf to the rumbling.
NightblackoceanmenudeswimfreesofreeI’moutagainagain5minuteslaterthedoorslamsshut
* * *
In college my underperformance took a different form. So many new people quickly became so many friends, and we had a lot to say to one another. Conversation spilled over into the deep hours of the morning, which led to sleep-ins till eleven, which led to missed classes. There was no time for homework, and even less desire. I waited till the fall of my junior year—the last possible moment—to declare a major, and even then I chose a discipline in which I’d taken no classes.
Somehow I graduated that too. Class of 1979. The rumbling persisted.
Allmybestfriendswomennowmaybeevenafuturewife?yesbutsomethingelseafoot
* * *
I was fifty-three in 2011 when I painted my toenails. There was something desperate about the whole activity: depression had clawed gashes in my brain for the better part of a week, and I got the idea that a wild departure from routine might jolt me back to whatever passed for normal. The next step was to figure out what wild departure meant. Three possibilities presented themselves:
I could have an affair. A non-starter from the get-go. I’d adored my wife for thirty-one years; why would I want to lose her now?
I could take up smoking. No again, for a similar reason: my wife’s asthma couldn’t take it.
I could paint my nails.
* * *
The first brushstrokes of navy blue polish sent a jolt up my spine. Whatever had been rumbling was sending me a message, and I had to keep going.
Through the toenail polish and eventually the fingernail polish, the hair growing long and curly, the reams of journal paper to figure things out, the girl inside me clambered out of her deep shell. Along the way I gathered a new name, Janelle, and a few years after that—quite by accident, with the benefit of Facebook—I told the world.
* * *
But she’d first told me her secret—really told me, in actual English words, no rumbling—some time before, a brief moment of clarity in my early twenties. One of my college friends had become my fiancée, and our frequent conflict told me it was high time to gain some definite crystalline structure. I fell in with a therapist, and he opened up a world to me: the world of how normal people communicate, manage their feelings, show love, crawl out of depression, leave self-centeredness behind, and all the other things that make people grownups.
The second therapist went deeper, and maybe that’s why the girl inside me finally told me. Early 1980s, cross-legged on a tiny dry island in the middle of a marsh north of Boston, she chose to make it all clear with one simple sentence:
I want to be a woman.
I told my therapist about it. To the best of my recollection, she didn’t respond. How could she have? We still didn’t know the language, not really. For the time being, the request seemed preposterous, though unutterably deep.
* * *
Navy blue toenails were only the first step. Next I had to reconstruct the story of my life.
Outlier memories began to coalesce. Age four, when I saw a girl in a picture book bending over, her panties showing. I decided to do the same, so I wore a dress for a while. My girl’s first exposure to the world.
High school then college then immediate post-college, when the boy friends fell away and, without planning it, I found that all my friends were women.
The occasional nude swim, wriggling free from my men’s swimsuit, the water skating over my forbidden parts, her still without words but using this exposure to proclaim the truth: hereIam.
Even innocuous choices, like where I landed during our church’s dinner parties—with the women in the kitchen, not with the men around the grill.
They all pointed to her.
She had my attention now, and it was the 2010s so she had words too, like nonbinary. The rumbling fell away.
* * *
When, last year, I started wearing my wife’s shawls with pairs of women’s pants I’d bought online, when I put hot pink scrunchies in my hair—when, in short, I had the full girl regalia and the history to back it up—I thought the gender discovery might be complete.
Not quite.
I know I’m nonbinary, not-so-equal parts girl and boy. I’ve learned how to express that to the world. I knew the patches of my history that, together, spelled nonbinary in a way that convinced me. Maybe I also realized it still wasn’t enough, which is why I kept watch over violations of my gender like an overzealous cop, correcting misgenderings in name and pronoun if only in my own mind. My conscious self had to hold the whole thing together, or so I thought.
By this time, all the therapy and journaling had made me pretty good at connecting cause and effect—tracing, for instance, a conflict in my current life with something or other my parents taught me many years ago. But whenever I pressed further to some even deeper cause, I came up with a blank, along with the sense that something back there pulled all the levers and influenced all the effects.
This past summer I stared that something—that someone—straight in the face. From my journal:
Could I see my entire high school career as consumed with the struggle to meet my own gender?
I sure could.
So many threads of my life felt like they wanted to trace back to one thing, and yet I could never find the one thing. I wonder if gender could be the one thing.
It sure could.
I go back over it all: Mr. Johnson and missed assignments, falling asleep in bed with all manner of books, the fatigue and shapelessness and sense of being elsewhere, and underneath it all I can hear her, nonstop, striving with no precise words—with no idea where she was headed—toward a clear vision of herself, toiling through the night, every night, every day, the only evidence that vague rumbling. I had never been a fuckup or an underperformer; I was simply working on something else.
* * *
Ever since then, she’s gone quieter. She thinks of herself less as girl and more as me. Misgenderings don’t faze her. She can carry a purse or stuff her valuables in her cargo shorts pockets. She radiates a quiet confidence of who she is, which includes words like boy girl other but, most of all, real.
Real, and clear, and present, inside and out. The mirror image in my personal lake.
* * *
That’s what I know of her. But she knows more, so she deserves the last word.
The air gets me every time. All around me, welcoming me, coming into me, giant lungfuls of air. How did I live so many years—DECADES—inside that body, no way out, no room to breathe, no way to speak? My God, is the air ever blessed.
So is the sound of my own voice. I’ve always known what I was saying, but for those decades I’d open my mouth and no one could hear—or they could hear but just the rumbling. Now…every word so sharp and clear.
I wish it were all as euphoric as this.
Nakedness is out there too, and loneliness, and fear. I am suddenly exposed, a lot. I used to think those nude ocean swims were liberation itself. I never saw how vulnerable I was. I do now.
I also didn’t see the malevolence I do now. I feel not just nakedness but the threats that would violate that nakedness. No one knows if they will happen.
I can see only one thing to do: stand on my own. Whatever happens, stand on those two feet that are my own, flex those two knees that are my own, see clearly through my own two eyes, use my own nose to breathe in air, that air, that life-giving air.
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John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender, spirit, karma, cats, and whatever else comes to mind. She has published in The Iowa Review, Boudin, Catapult, Typehouse, HerStry, and Braided Way, among other places. Her essays have made several contest shortlists and earned a few Pushcart nominations. Find her at www.backmanwriter.com.
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Posted in Pride: June '26 and tagged in #CNF, #boudin, #creative nonfiction, #creativenonfiction, CNF, Creative Nonfiction