I remember standing outside the dog track on a country road wearing my mom’s dress, the flash of the light bouncing off my pearly ghost skin. I don’t think someone like me was in the Kerry newspaper’s before… I was scared.
The first time I was on the radio in Ireland, they said ‘Think of all the people you are confusing…don’t you think it’s selfish?’ – I remember pacing around my small room in Cork on the phone. I was fighting to explain why I existed…I was scared.
I worked in a video game shop in Cork when I started to wear makeup. I was writing a book about being non-binary and the day I got my first copy I was told about a complaint about me, a man came in and said that I was dressed in ‘circus makeup’ and that I was a man. He sent the complaint all the way to head office and I had to be investigated…I was scared.
I went home for Chirstmas a few years ago and a drunk man and his friends started to shout at me saying I was gay. All my childhood friends were with me, and they watched as I fought back. The man laughed, and I was angry. They all stood there and afterwards, one of my childhood friends said ‘That was an overreaction, you should calm down’ . It was like I was always fighting…and I was tired of fighting.
I remember one of my oldest friends ignoring me in Tesco. I was with my mom and sister. He said ‘I don’t want to be associated with someone like you’ and that was the last time we ever spoke.
I remember reading the comments on the internet when my newspaper articles went online. Hundreds of comments that made me break down in tears. I deactived my instagram and stopped putting myself out there. It was too much, and I couldn’t handle the hate. I was so sick of fighting.
My universal credit coach recently told me that they keep changing my pronouns from they/them to he/him on the internal system, and that he’s trying his best and has left a note for them to stop doing that.
I remember sitting with my old best friend at a pub and how he told me that ‘what I’m doing is hurtful and wrong’. The amount of friends who I have lost along the way has been crazy. It goes to show ya- you never know someone until they spit at you. Or something like that!
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this and that I was just a boy. How easy life wouldv’e been for me.
And now, trans people are having to fight yet again. People will kill themselves…and if you’re not scared and angry…you’re part of the problem.
I remember the journalist for the Kerry neswpaper asking me ‘Do you think it’s getting easier for you to be who you are?’, that was 5 years ago now. I’m not sure what I said at the time…but now I think about it and I’m not happy with the truthful answer..
I wanted to share little real life expereinces of what it’s like, and how hard the every day moments can be. I want to send all my love to people everywhere who have to fight!
We rushed through the overgrowth of thorns, our torches burning in the spill of night. This wasn’t our first time trying to escape the orphanage, so we knew how to stay quiet and had to hurry.
“They won’t be far behind,” Sebastian whispered.
The orphanage was by no means a wicked place; it was, of course, where we all met. The three of us spent every waking moment together. And truth be told every good memory I own belongs to the times in the orphanage with them by my side.
They told us of the beauty of the outside world, the flowers in their many colours, and the green grass that stretched far and wide. How one day we’d see it for ourselves, but not until they were ready to accept us. For you see, this was no ordinary orphanage; this was an orphanage for monsters.
We made it to the surrounding walls, the furthest we had ever come. Sebastian reached his fingers into the mud, and the stems started to pull up from the ground. They chased up the wall in a cross-hatched pattern, forming a ladder for which we could climb. He heaved over, baring his teeth.
“After you,” he huffed.
I handed my torch to Nori, and I scaled the wall. When I reached the top, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The fields were dry, and the trees were without leaves. It was as if a forever winter had come to haunt the land.
“Guys,” I yelled.
But before I could get their attention, the howl of dogs filled the quiet. They had found us. Nori caught hold of the ladder and quickly made her way beside me. She grabbed my shoulder and let out a giddy laugh.
“Close one,” she smirked.
We jumped from the wall and down onto the dry fields. We fell heavy on the ground, and it left our knees bruised and bloody.
“You okay?,” she asked, dusting herself off.
“I’m fine,” I said, wiping the blood with my shirt.
Atop the wall, Sebastian stood looking at us with a cheeky grin. He gripped the side with his fingers, and he kicked himself to the ground.
Suddenly, the orphanage gates swung open, and the hounds were on us! They were terrible creatures, vicious, crawling skeletons with searing red eyes. Their yellowing bones sparkling in the halfmoon.
“Stay behind me,” she squeezed my hand, as she said it.
Nori was a girl who appeared like a lark. As she swanned her wings and furled her back, there was little space for anything to exist. But in the middle of the blur, the scarlet flare of torchlight flickered. My eyelashes blinked as she burst the sky open with fireworks of magic. She grabbed my arm, and before I knew it, we were hand in hand, soaring through the fields and away from the orphanage.
“Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about,” Sebastian shouted.
The hounds scratched against the barrier of fire magic but couldn’t penetrate it. THE BIRD MOTHER looked on as we fled into the distance.
Even though I had seen this all before, every moment and every detail, holding her hand and running beside her was like a dream that never ended. I wished to live here in this place, in this memory, with her, forever.
“We did it,” she squealed.
“This isn’t how they told us,” Sebastian said.
A darkness was growing like a plague, turning tree barks into blistering shards, blades of grass into pools of mud, and causing the flowers to wither and die.
“Did you know?,” she frowned at me.
“No. This is new”
I had the power to see into the future. When I was born, I saw how I died. When the nurses wrapped me in a muslin tarp, I saw how the rats would eat their bones and how their children would mourn at their death beds. I was cursed with a wickedness that I couldn’t understand.
Up to this point I had known how everything would happen, but I never saw this in my visions. A great well of sadness took over me as I wept at what I saw, for the feeling of not knowing was too much. The tears in my eyes made my sight blurry. When I came to, it was her face that I saw.
“It’s okay,” she said with a warm smile.
“We should keep going,” Sebastian called out.
We all turned to face the orphanage, the home in which we found each other and where we grew up. It was small from this far away. And even though none of us said it, we were sad to be leaving it behind.
For hours, we walked through the dry fields, with no idea where we were going. We kept our heads down so as to not stir up attention, but no matter how long we walked, we didn’t come in contact with anyone.
“They really wanted us hidden away,” I joked.
“Knew we’d be too much trouble,” Sebastian laughed.
Eventually, we came to a broken-down farmhouse. The porch was covered in larvae spooling out of a dead horse carcass. They circled around the dry blood like a marching band. I watched as their shiny bodies glimmered in the last of the sunlight.
“We should take rest in here,” Nori kicked down the door.
The floor creaked as she stepped on it, and the wood snapped in front of her feet.
“Careful, watch your step,” she warned.
Underneath the rotten exteriors, there lay a beauty unlike anything I had seen. Picture frames with family portraits, patterned wallpaper, and a golden brown spinet piano in the corner.
“What is this place?”
“Looks like it’s empty,” Sebastian drew open the piano hood.
The keys left out an untuned cry as he hit them hard with his fingers. He quickly jumped to his feet and rushed towards the kitchen, and pulled open the drawers.
“Ha! Enough tins here to feed us for weeks,” he yelled out.
I bowled over onto the bed of the upstairs room as the night fell. I couldn’t help but feel scared, for I had no idea what was out here and what kind of future awaited us.
Nori knocked slowly on the open door before she came in and lay beside me. We stayed in silence for a long time until she spoke.
“I wish I had some place like this growing up,” she said.
“You had…me,” I let out a short laugh.
“You know what I mean,” she was serious.
I leant in and faced her; we were so close that our foreheads were touching. I pushed my thumb into her chin, and she shook her head and smiled.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“If there’s a house, there has to be people” I tried to be hopeful.
“But, what if…,” she stopped.
I swept my hand through her hair, and I looked down at the top of her nose. I was so scared that she might be right and that we could be the only ones left. Our whole lives, we had been lied to, and my powers had betrayed me. This was the only thing I knew that was real, being here beside her.
“Never let me go,” I said softly.
She placed her hands on my hips, and she held me. And I knew that everything would be okay.
THE BIRD MOTHER would come looking for us; there was a reason she kept us hidden so far away from everyone! I had seen it the day I was born, the reason why she’d stop at nothing until we were found and taken back to the orphanage. For monsters were not welcomed in this world.
Nori looked into my eyes, and it was true, love is the most ultimate monster of them all. For when I was born, I saw how I died.
Author Note: This is a hard story to tell. And the only reason I’d like to share it is that maybe it makes someone else feel less alone. This is a story about the height of my eating disorder in 2023. I would like to say that I’m doing much better now. The disease still exists of course- but I have learned to handle it a lot better and I’m in a much healthier place.
I was heaving over the toilet bowl like a fiery skank. I was fingering my mouth to try and make myself throw up. There were shit stains and baby powder around the insides of the toilet. I gagged, twisting my fingers aggressively. Suddenly, I coughed out all the sick I could. Spit dribbled down my chin as I stood up, and the blood circulated back into my legs.
The bath curtain had a brown mildew tint, and the bath itself was a duck yellow. I stripped off and stood in. The water was hard and unforgiving as it hit my back, and the tea-tree smell of the soap was making my eyes water. I rubbed the minty gel on my eyes to see if it would sting, but it must have been made with this in mind because it didn’t hurt at all. I splattered shave cream all over my body and hacked against my skin with a cheap razor. I bent over and made odd shapes trying to shave my hairy arse, but I ended up making it look all patchy and like a clown’s haircut. Afterwards, I dried myself down and dressed inside the toilet. This wasn’t my house after all.
I had been living with a Venezuelan couple in their late 80s on Madison Street in Brooklyn. I moved to New York on a whim in late 2023 to try and find myself. Carlos was a pointy little man who put baby powder on his dick every night, explaining the dust on the toilet rim. I’d put money on the shit stains being his too. He whistled around the house like an openly gay prison warden looking for ass. He watched me cook and told me stories of when he was a gunner in the war. He said it was the perfect role because from all the way up in the sky, it was impossible to tell if he killed anyone or not. His eyes filled with blood as he held his hands together and rapped out ‘pew-pew-pew’.
Maria, the poor woman who had to take care of this wiry little man, was a retired university professor who rarely stepped foot outside their room. She watched a lot of telenovelas on full volume, the sounds of overly acted arguments and cunty sad piano ballads always filling the house. When I did see her, she was always ill-stricken and looked very near death’s door. But truth be told, they looked after me, and we became a kind of fucked up family.
New York was the height of my eating disorder, and it started to really take a toll on me physically. I had suffered the mental effects for a while before this, but the physical tiredness, my bones touching, my breath being short, and my stomach unable to break down food, meaning I ended up with chunks coming up as baby vomits, were all new additions.
Early-stage eating disorders are hard to notice at first; you understand that something is wrong, but you don’t expect it to keep getting worse. At first, you just don’t eat as much as you did, but not enough for anyone to notice. You’ll stop having two biscuits with your tea and only have one. You know you’re making your stomach smaller, and that means you won’t be as hungry, and therefore you’ll get skinny. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing until you notice it.
But eventually, it catches up with you. I went days without eating a substantial meal, drinking black coffee whenever I could to fill me up. I lived off jelly sweets, pasta with no sauce, and a croissant. Eating disorders are funny because they allow you to feel okay with eating some things and make you feel sick to your stomach eating other things. I could eat sweets and pastries, and for some reason, it wouldn’t get to me, but I couldn’t stomach real food. People started to notice, and so I decided to tell people I was a vegetarian. That would buy me some time to keep it hidden. Meanwhile, my clothes started to hang loose off my body, and the bones of my ribcage started to pop out. I would eat meals and purge them back up, and I wasn’t getting better. Something had to change, and quickly. I was losing all my energy, and I desperately needed help.
My sister and I were forced to drink health-kick smoothies every morning before school. Let’s be honest: that works great for two kids with early-stage eating disorders. I remember getting together as a family to watch VHS tapes of Billy Blanks’ revolutionary Tae-Bo workouts from the 90s. We would work out with my dad in the sitting room every day, and he would get us to do the splits against the corners of the room. He would push one of the dining room chairs up against my thighs and force the stretch as much as it could go.
“Turn around, don’t let me see the tears,” he would yell.
I faced the back wall, and I cried so much I wet the collar of my t-shirt. My sister was always stronger than me. I wiped the tears quickly with my sleeves, and I joined back in. My sister looked at the drips of tears in my eyes, and the wet of my collar. And I remember feeling like such a disappointment.
My dad was hard on me, but he taught me how to be strong. At the time he didn’t know how badly I would need that strength, and how often my thick skin would come to save me. My dad made me a scrapper. He taught me how to bite, and how to draw blood.
“Did you forget about me?,” my willy interrupts.
“Not everything is about you,”I say.
Everyone’s eating disorder can be different, but for me, I knew I was skinny, and being skinny made me feel desired, and it made me sexy. And to eat would be to lose all that magic. I was treating myself like an underage model in line to sleep with DiCaprio. He’d only have me if my belly looked like the curve of the letter C. Heave into me, Leo; you can take everything.
My eating disorder made me feel like I was winning at something for once, and that was really fucking nice.
In another life, my dad would have looked at me and said, ‘It’s okay to cry’ and maybe I would’ve told people sooner that I was sick. But he didn’t say that. I sometimes wonder if things would’ve been different. Or are our lives set out like storybooks, and either way, no matter what, even if the chapters are mixed up, eventually we end up on the same path, like that’s what’s meant to happen to us.
I took the E train uptown to Queens. It was 11 pm, and the train car was loud and reminded me of a party bus. New Yorkers were always one inch away from getting into a fight. I was on my way to meet someone from a hook-up app. When I arrived at her place, it was dark, and the streets were busy. Food trucks were grilling burgers and dogs, and older women were dancing at the intersections. The energy was palpable and delicious. It made me perk up and want to join in with the festivities. That’s the beauty of New York; every day is a fireworks display of people who, despite their hardships, can’t help but smile and dance together. There’s a real sense of community, unlike anything I’ve known before.
Her building was huge, and it reminded me of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. We climbed four flights of stairs, and she invited me inside. Her place was homely and cute, and she had a year-round Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.
“We keep it up all year,” she pointed at it.
She poured me a glass of water from her fancy Brita Filter, and I slugged it back, not knowing how thirsty I had gotten. She lured me into her room and showed me around. She had stuffed bears on the bed, and she made sure to tell me all of their names. She took off her top and leaned back against Henry the Teddy Bear’s head. She had pure white skin that seemed to almost sparkle in the bright light. She slipped off her pants, and she tugged at my neck and pushed me down, and between her knees. My heart started to race. Things were moving too fast, but I didn’t want to disappoint. I tried asking if we could slow down, but she just ignored me. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her hands were forcing heavily on the back of my head. I was. unable to move and my breath became short. I pushed against the weight of her fingers, and I sat on the edge of her bed in silence.
She put her top back on and said that I should go and that she had work she had to do. I wanted to tell her how she made me feel and how she had forced me down on her. I put on my shoes, and I left without telling her any of that. On the train home, I cried, pushing my head between my knees so nobody would see.
The nicotine patch that I had been holding down was peeling off, and underneath, my fibromyalgia rash was getting worse. I was covered in tears, and my belly was rumbling. So I did what any normal person would do in that situation. I walked for 4 hours on an empty stomach in the middle of a panic attack, and afterwards, I took a train home and forced myself to get sick into the toilet. I heaved out the acid lining of my emptied stomach. And look, it would be fun to lie, but this was my life, and it’s important that I tell ya that.
Carlos insisted that he would cook a traditional Venezuelan feast tonight and that I had to join them! Their kids had travelled from Ohio, and he was excited to introduce me. I hadn’t had a real dinner with people like that in months, and so it made me nervous, but I said I would. Maybe it would be nice. He made Arepas, which were corn flour baps with ground beef and beans inside, but he made some with fish too, as he knew I didn’t eat meat. He made Guarapo, which was a sugarcane drink, which was very sweet but delicious. And we all sat down and said prayers and shared stories and food. It was nice, and for the first time in ages, I forgot about the eating disorder, and I just enjoyed the tastes of what I was eating. They all cheered for my success in the city and said that I would do great things, and I really felt welcomed and loved. Looking around the table that night, I realised how much I missed home, and I acknowledged that I had an illness that I needed to get on top of before it destroyed me.
I took another bite of my food, knowing full well that I’d make myself get sick that evening.
This is a picture of me from that time smiling enjoying my favourite coffee ever – Dunkin’. I miss it a lot and the one in London isn’t the same. Please look after yourself. Sending you all my love and hugs. It’s a tough world out there but it’s also the most magical and amazing gift of all- to be here and to be alive!
THE QUEER PRAYER BOOK 