When did it all start? Birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence? It was already a seed starting to sprout by my teenage years. What would have been different if I had been assigned F at birth? Would I be looking over the fence towards M before slipping into NB? Or would I just have stayed F and left it at that, because it fit?

Don't even get me started on the species stuff.

I'll never know what it would have been to be hatched and grow up right, without species dysphoria looming over me all my life. What would it have been like to look down at my hands and see scales and be comforted? What would it have been to live with never suffering dysphoria? I've struggled all my life, all my days, dealing with never fitting and never knowing.

What the hell would it have been like to have fit in and had a place? To have belonged in my own hide all this time?

Everything I've suffered through has shaped me. Why do I feel like I would have been lesser without all these insurmountable obstacles? Why is it that "solving" the problem at its root and having always been in the right body would annul me, when all I have ever wanted is to satisfy this desperate desire to be what I'm supposed to be inside?

This world will never allow me the thing I most want. But because of that I am free at the same time that I am confined.

Species, gender... all I have wanted was to express myself as truly as I can, to let the fire within illuminate without. To wander boundless and free, without lack. Without wishing it were possible to feel comfortable in myself. Without hiding my hands from my own view because I couldn't stand seeing them. Without the lurking pain that pounces whenever I think of it.

But without all that, I wouldn't be me.