My family were always very adamant about getting the best education possible. It was a conviction that went for generations, not just limited to Shafiqs or even jadukara: it permeated across Bengal, crossing through the Subcontinent, spreading through most of Asia. Education was the key to everything - livelihood, freedom, power, success. And for my family, only the best would do.
They did wish they could send me to the Cadet College where they met, but after the Liberation War there were just not enough resources left to bring it back to even just pure functionality, let alone its former glory. My parents left Bidesh, left Bangladesh, to find better futures - especially for me, their only child.
So I am well aware that I sound like a petulant, ungrateful child when I say that being in Hogwarts was very rough and difficult for me.
I arrived in Hogwarts a year or two after the Second Wizarding War, where Lord Voldemort was defeated in the Great Hall, causing the school to take a short hiatus to rebuild. I was both a little too young, and a little too transient, to really know much about the Bilati war. My parents had moved to England not too long before I was born and had mostly kept to Muggle society, since you were more likely to find other Bengalis there - even a few jadukara. They left to avoid the worst of the war - trying to get involved in another one would be folly.
When I arrived at Hogwarts - via an acceptance letter that my parents were both highly surprised and very elated to receive, since they were well aware of Hogwarts’ prestige but didn’t think immigrants were eligible - a lot of students had bonded over their shared experience of the war. Many had lost family or friends to it; a few had been in the frontline. I thought I might have something to contribute too - my family just went through a war themselves, my entire culture was at risk, I too am a war survivor. (Sort of. Maybe.)
But that didn’t seem like enough. Their war was sequestered away from the Muggle world; if you weren’t a wizard, you wouldn’t understand. My war made no magical distinction, but upheld a rich cultural heritage that underpinned our magical ability - a heritage alien to their world.
I didn’t quite know what to make of the Hogwarts letter. My family had talked about it, had talked to me about jadu and some of their experiences, but they mostly wanted me to adjust to regular British life. Sometimes I heard them grumble about how they weren’t as free to practice jadu as much as they wanted to because of the Statute, how they figured that their knowledge was probably banned in Bilat anyway (they did ban flying carpets, after all), how if there was no Operation Searchlight, no war, no suppression we could have had a very luxurious bountiful life of being a jadukaranoble.
Perhaps they felt that me being at Hogwarts meant that I could get the time and space for magic that they missed. I wouldn’t be bound by statutes or restrictions. I could really dive into my birthright. I could revive the name of Shafiq, return what had been forcibly taken from us by bands of colonizers.
All that ambition and desire for greatness was likely what got me sorted in Slytherin. There were a few others in my house that had descended from families of much renown, families who also treasured prestige and power. Like me, they were sent to Hogwarts with big expectations - to rebuild names that had been torn apart by battle.
But we were only eleven, twelve, thirteen. Not even puberty yet for some people. What would we know about power and prestige? We just wanted to play.
My house seemed to have a harder time at Hogwarts than most others. People talked about unearned bad reputations, about everyone else assuming that we must have been on Voldemort’s side, about how we can’t trust the other houses just yet, just because you don’t know how they’d regard you. The only ones you could trust were your fellow Slytherins: we took care of our own.
Except I’m not sure that quite happened for me. I wasn’t ostracised or bullied, oh no. I did manage to make some friends, and a lot of the classes were…not easy necessarily, but not agonizingly hard either. (History of Magic and Muggle Studies were the main ones that gave me headaches, only because they were both so restricted in subject matter and some of their facts were dubious. Not every magical culture uses a wand, for Gods’ sake.)
But I think when you’re entering a world that is already so abstract to you in multiple ways, when you’re somehow supposed to be part of the secret In-Crowd yet you feel like you’re only qualified enough to be the Outsider, when you’re having to navigate multiple new cultures at once…that gets tiring after a while.
I couldn’t trade war stories: I wasn’t there, no one I knew was there, we were all fighting a different war. I couldn’t talk about learning magic from a kindly elder as a child: the only elders I had were my parents and the odd uncle or two, but the very limited amount of magic they exposed me to wasn’t even the same sort my classmates learnt. I couldn’t talk about what my family did over the holidays - we had a completely different set of holidays to work with, and the extent of my participation with Christmas was to visit some friends of my family’s for dinner.
I generally got along better with the Muggle-borns; they too were grappling with culture shock, not quite knowing if they’re allowed to claim themselves as witches or wizards, not when the effects of the Muggle-Born Registries were still fresh. There were a few Muggle-borns that had arrived later to Hogwarts than usual because the War-time Ministry did not allow the school owls to let them know they were eligible to study, and they had to play catch-up a lot, possibly for the entirety of their school years. Always a little bit behind, never quite getting it, objectively skilled and competent but still struggling culturally.
And even then it was a little tricky, because they were British, always had been. Technically so was I: British culture was the best culture I knew, more than Bengali culture or any other culture my parents would have known. But it’s such a different experience of Britishness when you had kids stab you with ‘paki’, when people keep asking you to repeat yourself because 'your accent got in the way’, when no one quite believes you when you say you were born at the hospital down the road and instead insist that you were born in the Ganges River.
To Hogwarts’ credit, I didn’t get as much of the racist backlash here. But I still had to deal with the clueless questions, the people thinking my last name is Patil, the attempts to fix my accent in Charms class.
Maybe I’m just oversensitive. I don’t know. The whole school was recovering from major trauma. They don’t have time to deal with one student’s identity issues - not when the school had an identity crisis of its own. Especially Slytherin House: who were they, without the blood supremacist stigma, without the easy stereotyping of alliance? How do you maintain your own core being when everyone and everything else parses you by your supposed history? Who can you trust to be just youaround?
I don’t know if I am destined for greatness, power, prestige. I’m not sure the rest of my house, or my school, quite knew that either.
[[source:kawaii palace on flickr - her friend theladyvon makes the robes in the picture for AUD$60 plus s&h. this piece was long delayed because I could not obtain any Slytherin art with someone vaguely resembling Ayesha in it. and my comp’s too old to really do graphics editing. sorry!]]
I have been on hrt for over a year now and I have never felt better. That being said, I have changed a lot over the past year. I am no longer masking my behavior. I am free to express myself in ways I couldn’t before. I’m just all around happier. Living as my chosen gender, and as a trans person, has also undoubtedly changed my perspective and feelings. I am different from when I started. In a good way.
I am left with the question: Am I the same person?
I feel like I am…
I feel like I have changed in many ways that are just me being free to be myself without fear. Or in ways that are just me responding to things that I have never experienced before. Changing as time changes a person.
When they finally uncovered their nemesis’ identity, they expected to feel elated. Smug, at least. Instead they just felt- “Shit.”
The hero glared up at them, a raw red stripe outlining their eyes. Tears glittered even as they gritted their teeth. “What,” they snapped, “prettier than you expected? Younger? Less famous? I’m a nobody, I told you. There’s no way for you to find out who I am.”
But the hero wasn’t a nobody, not to them. They were a friend, a best friend, and…a crush. Shit. Shit.
Ah this is one of favorites! I think this was my first finished multipart story - one of my favorite prompts I’ve filled!
Throwback Post Pick is a weekly feature where I fling open the vaults of past works – no matter the naivete they reflect – and revel in the making of progress! So come, TBT with me!
Identity crisis.
This is something that I have struggled with since I was first in my double digits. Perhaps it’s because I was a well behaved middle child second girl that made me predisposed to feel a need to…
I feel like an absolute bastard. (cw gender stuff, names, pronouns, family drama)
As a way to update my parents about Janelle Monae saying in an interview that their pronoun is “free-ass muthafucka” (because gender goals x infinity!!!), I casually led into it by mentioning that my new therapist wanted to know my preferred name/nickname and pronouns—all as a means of getting to my stupid punchline, “they/them seems so much easier now, doesn’t it!” ha ha ha I thought we were cool, I’ve been making pronoun jokes since I came out to them last September because I know it’s weird for them to go from having a daughter to having an adult child / offspring / neither daughter nor son. I get it. And I’ve really tried to be cool about them continuing to Female me while also trying to gradually/gently push them with things like… my Kirk haircut, sharing trivia or articles about NB stuff with them (e.g. the Janelle Monae news), etc. Anyway, I didn’t think any of that would come up again, but I’m clearly an idiot because I’ve spent 32 and a half years with one parent who Never Forgets Anything and Never Lets Any Little Detail Go Unnoticed.
Six hours later, my mother asks me what my answers had been when my therapist asked me to pin them down more concretely than “either way, whatever you prefer.” ((Aside: apparently therapists want to know the Real You? and having other people decide who the Real Me is… is not what they mean by that??)) I knew I was trapped but I never want to lie to my mom, right? So I told her honestly that my therapist will be referring to me as “they/them” and “Jim” (aka Not my legal name/what my family calls me, as well as a name which traditionally is given to people who are the “opposite” of my agab). (I also reminded her that my previous therapist knew me as Jim, too, hoping that might soften the blow.) Again: I get it. I knew before I said it that it was going to hurt her because I’m choosing to have certain people call me by a name that’s not the one she and dad gave me when I was born. I understand that it’s hard for them. I understand why it’s hard for them.
(And this makes no never mind, but… it’s hard for me, too. But I know, that’s beside the point.)
After a long, very uncomfortable silence, she said, “Is it okay if I keep saying she/her?” So I counted to five in my head and said it’s fine, because I honestly never expected her or my dad to be fully understanding of any of this. But now (and not for the first time) I’m very much wishing I’d just never come out to them at all, because at least that way I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up when they responded by claiming that my being NB was fine and claiming that they would be totally supportive/accepting of it. My expectations were low before they knew because I assumed they would be honest with me about how it made them feel, which I assumed would be along the lines of “betrayed,” “inconvenienced,” “confused,” “disappointed,” “skeptical,” “disrespected,” and/or “we failed our child.“ It seems that when they were so chill about it up front, I forgot to keep expecting those reactions in delayed forms, and I guess I let myself believe that they would actually make the effort to shift some of their thinking about me, maybe even start using they/them for me, etc.
Turns out they were enthusiastic to declare their support (which I greatly appreciate, don’t get me wrong) but putting that support into practice has proven to be harder than I think they realized. “Too much has changed too fast” is what I’ve been told now… even though I’m not transitioning to male, I’m not doing HRT or having surgeries, I’m still dressing the same on a daily basis (just changing my “fancy” wardrobe), and the only thing that’s physically different is that I’ve stopped shaving my legs (which neither of them has even noticed because I only wear long pants).
Anyway she just happened to ask me all this as she was on her way to bed. So there was another awkward silence before she said goodnight, and if 32 years’ experience has enabled me to read any of her moods correctly, then she started crying as soon as I was out of earshot. (I would have confirmed and/or tried to get her to talk to me about it but I’m running, like, a spoon deficit at this point.)
So is my lack of much visible change the problem, then? Is this breaking my mom’s heart because I’m not different enough from my “old” self? Would this be easier in some way if I was transitioning and she could, idk, genuinely mourn the daughter she no longer has? And despite losing a daughter at least she would have a “replacement” kid whose gender still Made Sense to someone entrenched in the gender binary for almost seven decades? Or would it just make things worse?
Should I have simply lied and said I’m going by my legal name with my therapist, because how will my mom ever know that anyway? Has this name thing crushed her so bad because not much else has changed about me otherwise, so she didn’t see it coming? Or am I genuinely the asshole for expecting her to be more supportive/validating too soon, and I just need to be more patient?
((Tangent: she witnessed a really bad impostor-syndrome meltdown of mine a few months ago. I was trying to figure out what to wear to a church function and eventually got so frustrated—and convinced that I’m not really NB, just a pathetic ugly female who hates herself/her body—that I told her to pick out a damn dress for me and take me to a wig shop so I could try and undo everything I’ve done to try and hate my biologically female body a little bit less. And she responded by telling me to wear the pants/button-down/sweater aka “masc-ish” outfit I’d started with. So… is it only if I’m in crisis/panic mode that she can get on board with my being NB? Did my meltdown help her put her own misgivings about this aside? Or was she only okay with my being NB before it included having new people in my life call me by a different name??))
I keep trying to pinpoint what I’ve done wrong, and every time I re-do the math I still can only come up with, “…I was born.” But that wasn’t even my fault. I just feel incredibly selfish for trying to get them to see me the way I see myself. I keep thinking that if I don’t feel female, that’s my problem and I should have kept it to my damn self. If my identity is, in fact, Jim + they/them + non-binary, fine, but I feel like I should have known better than to reveal—to the people who named me and raised me—that I don’t really feel, and never really have felt, like I actually am the person we all assumed I was for 31 years because there didn’t seem to be an alternative.
And this is precisely why I started things off with my new therapist by trying to make her decide whether to call me she or they, Jim or my real name. More than anything—more than being sane, healthy, or alive—Iwantnotto be a burden on others.
But that’s all I ever seem to be able to do without fail.
What if I really am just an ugly, lazy female with no self esteem like I assumed I was for 31 years? What if I’m not nb at all and I’m just making the nb community look bad by appropriating the label? What if for me it’s never really been about “not feeling female” and instead I’ve used that as an excuse to avoid admitting to myself that I’m simply Not Attractive and that being unattractive (as a female in particular) makes me feel worthless?
What if I never stop having nightmares about my abuser? What if the abuse was the one and only time in my life that any person would or will ever want to touch me? What if my nightmares are the closest I’ll ever get to “romance” for the rest of my life?
What if my parents both die tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and I’m left with no more excuses, motivation, or means to continue living?
currently having an identity crisis. not sure wether it’s because of my mental illness, the fact that I’m on my period or because I might not be as cis as I thought I was
![Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/682149c701c5bcad056abacd7233b0c0/03c055758477b8b6-55/s1280x1920/9e101c6d1ffb882b8901cf3c86bbd01c79822a4b.jpg "Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)")
![Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/95c3f69e8ef2493b0b5532162048809b/03c055758477b8b6-9c/s1280x1920/5c55d43a7ae7fa80d98b406082053a9d6a3b922c.jpg "Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)")
![Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/dd9f7b4eba9bc796b2f8548bdc447f73/03c055758477b8b6-58/s1280x1920/2f451dcc23820e3f3e672032dd6f48c0eff38f10.jpg "Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)")
![Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7419078db2e783cf74c9a6adebc1ca8a/03c055758477b8b6-ef/s1280x1920/b5289ac9a3c3deb1bd6b956e3ccc7bc1b15b35fb.jpg "Exil [Exile] (Visar Morina - 2020)")
