Shame While Writing My Detrans Memoir

Confronting My Past Mistakes at the Halfway Point of Editing

Shame—it’s inevitable when reflecting on the entirety of one’s life.

I’ve been procrastinating writing this essay precisely because reviewing shame is a dark experience. But it’s been preset throughout the duration of my memoir, which is now at the halfway mark of my first deep editing pass. In the first half of my book I go through birth to age 24, covering childhood, adolescence, teenage indoctrination into the transgender cult, woke brainwashing in college, drug-fueled foibles of early adult attachment injuries, and detransitioning.

Halfway There

By the halfway mark, I am out of the cult and enrolled in art school, I’ve had my spiritual awakening, and subsequently relapsed in my early healing process thanks to spiritual bypassing and narcissistic abuse. There’s A LOT of shame in the formative years of my life, it colored my every belief, conditioned by parental abuse and gaslighting that I was inherently worthless and deserving of maltreatment.