For me, this is the beginning of a journey. A journey back to help better understand my past so I might be more accepting of the person I've become. I'm quite certain that my journey began before I was born. Prior to coming into this world, an architected roadmap had already been formulated and the pieces to come already put in place for me. I was to be a boy. Not just any boy, but one that would grow up to be polite, respectful, never talk back, excel in school, become a successful doctor or a lawyer, and have many children to carry on the surname of my family. Needless to say, from the moment I exited the womb, I began to fall short of all the expectations set forth for me. Over the course of the last thirty years, my parents have had to come to terms with my lack of a Y chromosome, my tendency to question their decisions and commands, my mediocre grades, not to mention my inability to register for the MCATs, and worst of all, my incompetence in finding a boy who wants to marry me and make little babies.

Today, by most accounts, I am considered successful. I've got a great job that pays me plenty, I have an advanced degree that allows me to put initials after my name on a business card, meaning I am one of the very blessed. However, I still constantly feel haunted by not only missing letters in my genetic makeup, but all my parents' other dreams that I feel short of. So this journey is an attempt for me to find the person I lost over the course of the last 30 years, trying to make sense of my mind, my dreams, and most importantly, myself, along the way.

The question I find myself most frequently struggling with is "what girl do you want to be?" I look around at the other women in my life and wonder how they've made their journeys to that place and whether they've also had to make ammends with the person they've become. What is it about being born a girl that forces you to ask so many questions of yourself? Or is it that at all? Had I been the treasured first born male of my generation, would my life had turned out much different? Instead of being kept in the shadows, told to be quiet, would I have been held proudly and heralded as the next great thinker, inventor, or leader of the world?

I'm a novice when it comes to blogging. Not sure exactly how this works, how big the "blog world" is, or whether anyone will ever hear my voice in the sea already full of mermaids. I'm just hoping this anonymous stream of conciousness verbalization of my mind will help me to somehow make better sense of all the various vestiages of memories that come across my thoughts. Here's hoping that this is the first step to many eloquent reflective proses to come.