Chapter 8: The Burial
Stevie didn’t die with some brave, decisive flourish. There was no triumphant “this is it.”
It ended in chaos.
One night, after days high on speed, I stumbled to the dealers flat like a ghost. I’d been Stevie for days, raw and wired, so I knocked on the dealer’s door for more. Nobody answered. I could see them through the window of a house across the road. Rough, Skelmersdale scally types throwing a party.
I walked over. I didn’t belong there, but I needed the drugs. Someone started running their mouth about trans people. I uncharacteristically got defensive, protective about trans people, I was feeling brave, and then BAM, a fist cracked across my face. Nearly knocked me out cold. Broke my nose.
I stood there, surrounded by these strangers, with my shaved legs and a heart full of shame, and I realised: What the fuck is this life? This wasn’t freedom. This was a slow-motion car crash.
And then came the real crash. A few nights later, drunk, dressed as Stevie underneath my clothes, trying to explain her to a friend who didn’t care, I wrapped my Audi 100 around a lamppost.
The police station was packed with people who knew me from school. My bare legs, my neighbour recognising me, it was humiliation on a public stage. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.
That was it. Stevie had to die.
I wanted out. Out of Skelmersdale, out of poverty, out of the chaos. All my life I had ached, not just wanted, ached, to be normal, to be middle-class.
We’d grown up on my mum’s social security cheques, buying everything from the Grattan and Freemans catalogues; the cheapest washing machine, the cheapest radio cassette, no phone or car, the cheapest everything. I hated it.
I saw Harrison Ford in Patriot Games around that time, a family man, a house, respectability, and it hit me like a sledgehammer. I wanted that so badly it hurt. And Stevie… Stevie couldn’t get me there. She was all drugs and danger and failure.
So I killed her.
It wasn’t dramatic. Killing Stevie was like quitting cigarettes. You don’t believe it’ll stick. No elation, no clean break, just a slow, grinding effort to put distance between you and the thing you can’t touch anymore.
I left Skelmersdale. A couple of months later, I was in London, writing code for a software firm, clawing my way up. By 29, I was earning close to £300,000 a year in today’s money. Glamorous apartments. Designer furniture. I thought money was the key.
I didn’t care about my body. I told my sister once, “It’s just a vessel to carry my brain.” I drank, I ate, ballooning from 150 to to a huge 280 pounds. I was running from Stevie, not toward myself.
But Stevie never vanished completely. Late at night, alone, I’d read every trans forum I could find. I watched strangers transform into the thing I wouldn’t let myself be. I’d Photoshop old pictures of thin me into the girl I secretly dreamed of being.
And still, over the years, I thought I’d erased her. By 2015, I would test it, pick up one of Sarah’s dresses, dare myself to try it on… nothing. No spark, no rush. I thought, She’s gone. You’ve done it. You’re free.
But freedom came at a cost. Self-hatred. Isolation. A nuclear burial, sealed in concrete, deep enough to last a lifetime.
If I could go back to that night, to that wreckage of myself, a young transwoman, I wouldn’t scream at her or drag her out of it. I’d take her hand and say this:
“You have to go for a while. I’m sorry. It’s not you, it’s the world. It’s not your time yet. Let me build something first. A life. A foundation. One day, if we’re lucky, you’ll come back. And when you do, we’ll finally be ready.”