I listen to a song by the rock band CAKE titled Short Skirt/Long Jacket when I miss the person who stopped me from taking my own life. I was seventeen when I attempted suicide. The person who physically prevented me from following through was my cousin’s then-boyfriend. Today, I am twenty-four and don’t know how to talk to him.

I was in sixth grade, sitting in fourth-period art class when my flip phone beeped. I opened it and saw a text from my cousin. It was a picture of a white muscular guy standing in front of a gray sky and an emerald lake, wearing a lime green hoodie and faded jeans. His blue eyes twinkled behind his wire glasses as he smiled back at me. I immediately knew he was her new boyfriend before she sent a follow-up text confirming my prediction.

My cousin and I both grew up with emotionally unavailable parents, leading us to embark on a painful journey that many adult children find themselves in—searching for unconditional love. I watched her fall hard for someone who reflected all the rejections she endured growing up in her childhood home. Their breakup, pending under the weight of a seven-year relationship, resulted in a custody battle over her dog, chopped trees, a ransacked house, and a restraining order.

When I was a child, my mother kept a box of Starburst candies on the medicine cabinet’s top shelf next to a bottle of Tums. My sister and I were not allowed to steal the candies. But on several occasions, when no one was looking, I would grab the step stool, quietly leap onto the countertop, and snatch a handful of the fruity-flavored squares. 

I hid the wrappers under couch cushions and stuffed them beneath wads of toilet paper in the bathroom trashcans. I made a secret out of my insatiable desire for sugar, and this skill of sneaking away sweets came in handy in a way I’d never imagined. 

I was bullied quite regularly in elementary school. My classmates, jealous of my teacher’s pet and honor student status, would trip me in the halls, steal my books, tug at my clothes, or make fun of the Indian food my mom would pack in my lunch box. Some kids were worse than others, and while a single insult felt like stepping barefoot on a dead bee, dealing with the swarm of ridicule day in and day out was equivalent to landing face-first on a mound of fire ants. 

I kept stealing sweets, but eventually, I stopped eating them.

On a breezy summer afternoon in late May of this year, I entered the Trader Joe’s parallel to my high school and paused when I saw glittery miniature graduation hats hanging over the store’s entrance. Students were bustling in and out, and I overheard snippets of their conversations. Their smiles and squeals sparkled with excitement about finally reaching graduation week and entering the next chapter in their life. 

As I have done on countless occasions, I swallowed the lump in my throat that was beginning to clot like blood. It happens every time I am reminded of my teenage years. I am part of Palo Alto High School’s (Paly) graduating class of 2018. The campus is located directly across from Stanford University.

My high school experience was far from the traditional set of adolescent milestones. Instead of going to dances and formals, my “socialization” happened in behavioral group therapy sessions. While most of my peers were attending parties and sleepovers with their friends, several nights of my sophomore, junior, and senior years were spent staring at the ceiling of my psych ward room. I almost didn’t attend my high school graduation because I knew I was one of the kids who wouldn’t have a four-year university mascot on their cap in Paly’s sea of Ivy League-bound students. 

A version of this essay was published in the October 2022 issue of the American Swimming Magazine.

As a child of hard-working immigrant parents, I was raised to be an achiever. Shortly after my mom graduated from the top of her class at UCLA, she was offered a job by the CIA. My father earned four college degrees (including a Ph.D. in economics) before he went on to work at some of the top banking institutions in the United States. Watching them progress in their careers while I grew up instilled a strong work ethic in me; driving me to succeed in everything I do. I was trained to win. 

Although I was fiercely competitive, I also embodied wavering confidence and an overly empathetic heart. My childhood was spent in a dysfunctional home environment. Growing up, I navigated my way around a marriage that was treading on thin ice. I thought this was normal. It wasn’t until much later that I realized this wasn’t the experience of most of my peers as I had imagined. 

When I was five years old, I started swimming lessons. By age nine, I was competing on a USA Swimming affiliated team. I dove into the dream of my accomplishments, washing away the struggles I faced at home. Unfortunately, swimming also became an unsafe place for me after I came across an abusive coach who I trained under for six years–an experience which I go into more detail about in a Swim Swam Magazine article titled, “Sometimes holding on does more damage than letting go." In this piece, I want to focus more on something that developed from the multiple stress factors that I dealt with during my childhood.

Twelve years ago, hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, along with singer and poet Mary Lambert, released a summer pop hit about same-sex rights titled Same Love. The song came out in July of 2012, which was the summer that my friend and one of her female classmates started seeing each other secretly, with my help. To this day, a swirl of convoluted emotions comes up when I think about the number of times she asked me to help hide her sexuality from her parents. 

“Just come over!” my friend would plead, and I knew I would get stuck with keeping an ear out for her mother’s footsteps from the bedroom door as she and her girlfriend hooked up at night. To this day, I can recall my thirteen-year-old self trying to block out the giggles and whispers from under my friend's bed sheets while I sat guard by the door. I felt sorry for her but also for myself. This is one of the many painful memories that helped me understand why the celebratory word for the LGBTQ community is pride. 

In my experience, it is heartbreakingly common for individuals who identify as queer to struggle to come to terms with and eventually embrace their sexuality. I am one of them. My name is River, and I am a twenty-four-year-old transgender person of color. 

I was seventeen when a joke that hinted at my sexual orientation leaped out of my mouth and shattered on the living room floorboards at a family gathering. "Should I slap you?" my mother hissed in our native tongue — a threat that has held weight since I was a child. I had tears of grief and rage in my eyes when I begged her for an apology as we walked back to the car after the party.

I've never been able to convince my parents to accept who I am. While growing up in Dallas, Texas, my sexuality came into question around the time I started having crushes. A different friend of mine at that time overheard my mother asking hers if she thought I was lesbian. My friend’s mother comforted mine by saying, "No, of course not. If anything, my daughter is much more masculine than yours."

On November 24th, 2023, I posted a poem on Instagram that read, “How I wish my desire to be loved was less than my desire to be myself.” 

I am a twenty-four-year-old transgender person of color residing in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. My state offers relatively more accessible gender-affirming care than other parts of the US, but despite living in a progressive bubble, I have a suicide attempt in my history. This decision unfolded after nearly two decades of suppressing my true self.

Since I was a child, I felt like something was off, but never had the words or awareness to articulate it. I was disgusted with the feminine parts of my body but ended up attributing those feelings to the common discomforts that come along with puberty. “Everyone goes through this. You’re not the only one,” I told myself countless times after adjusting a bra strap or tossing out blood-soaked underwear. 

I am originally from Dallas, Texas. My family moved to the West Coast during my junior year of high school. During this time, I was in the midst of grappling with gender dysphoria and other mental health issues. I felt myself becoming more distressed and trapped with each passing day before I finally did the unthinkable — I came out to my friends and family as a transgender male. Most of my family did not accept me.

The first time always hurts.

This is one of the first statements about sex that I came across while growing up in Dallas, Texas. Sadly, it predicted my experience perfectly. My first time was an assault. I was sixteen. My abuser was my swim coach’s nephew, a man twice my age.

My teenage years were far from the glittery homecoming high school experience. My grandmother passed away on Christmas of 2015, which was about a year before my assault. After her death, my family, which was already struggling to hold itself together, disintegrated before my eyes, causing me to fall into a suicidal depression. 

Because of the fraught relationships at home, I tried to insert myself into my swim coach’s family, someone I felt close to and trusted. That was when I met his nephew. We bonded over our troubled pasts. Early on, he shared with me that his father had committed suicide when he was fourteen. It was through revealed secrets like these that I began to see how our family portraits stood in front of each other as mirroring patchworks of dysfunction. The familiarity caused me to feel like I had found a place to belong. 

During the final exam week of my junior year, my coach’s nephew picked me up from school during my lunch period, took me to an empty parking lot, and assaulted me. I still remember the January air cutting through my hollow body as I stepped out of the passenger side of his car after he drove me back and walked through the school’s double-door entry to take my last test. To calm myself down, I pictured the wooden wind chime in front of my grandmother's cottage. As a child, I would look at it and wince when a strong gust of wind would go by and toss the pieces around, causing them to clink against each other so that we could have music. 

When my dad was about my age, in his twenties, he regularly worked night shifts at a pizza place to make ends meet while he finished college. Sometimes, I picture him walking back to his dorm room after one of his midnight shifts, counting his tips and dreaming of how they would provide a future for his first child. I wonder if he would have still wished for me had he known I would put the flaws of his parenting on display.

My name is River, and I am an adult child, meaning I grew up in a dysfunctional household and moved out with a suitcase of emotional damage. Growing up, I became deeply attached to my emotionally absent father. I love all of my dad; even if there are parts of me he will never have the capacity to learn how to love. My father is an oblivious expert at making false promises to my mother and me. He promised love, security, and honesty, to which he delivered the bare minimum. I wholeheartedly believe that this was not his intention, and rather, he merely doesn’t have the ability to live up to his word. Over the years, due to his inability to be available, I began keeping my dad at arm’s length. But when a tangible version of him enters the room, the boundaries I've trained myself to hold up evaporate. 

I experienced this recently when I accepted a position last summer as a swim instructor at a local gym. A former manager of mine, who has become a close friend to me over the years, sent a glowing recommendation about me to the hiring manager. A week or so after she sent the email, the hiring manager reached out to me with a welcoming interview request. I still remember his warm smile when I shook his hand before walking into the conference room. During the interview, he asked me expected questions about my experience and threw some possible swim instructor scenarios at me to get an idea of how I teach. I immediately noticed a strong pull towards him. It was so much so that I knew if I got his offer, that I would decline the few other opportunities awaiting my response, and that was exactly what happened.