Well, it's kind of like you live your entire life feeling like there's a wire crossed. I went through my childhood, teenage years, pre-teen years, everything up until 20 with that kind of feeling of, “I don't feel right. I feel different. I feel out of place, out of mind.” I didn’t feel in touch with my body in the way that I have that I wanted to, and that started from early childhood. When my mom walked around in a big T-shirt and some small shorts before she went to bed, I was like, “I want to dress like that.”

My parents didn't know how to articulate what was happening. They didn't know that what I was feeling was gender dysphoria. So, when my dad looked at me and said, “That's not what boys usually wear,” they couldn't tell me what I needed and I couldn't even tell myself what I needed.

I got to high school, and it's like, “You go to football practice, you feel out of place with the boys. You go to lunch, you feel out of place with your friends. You go to another place, you feel out of place.” It's just a constant like, “There's something up with you.”

Of course, all that interlinks with my sport, my fitness life. I have been playing sports since I was a kid. I played sports through high school, played football. After football. I was in the gym, day in, day out, 2 hours a day, running, lifting everything I could. When I got to college, I was convinced that my depression and my anxiety were my body image issues. So of course, I'm in the gym two hours every day eating perfectly. I get my body to where I thought I needed it to be and it's not good enough. And I'm confused. I'm like, “What? What's going on?”

All this leading up to the egg cracking: me realizing that I'm a girl. And then it's taking the small steps. I'm gonna put on a bra, I'm going to wear some eyeshadow, I'm going to paint my nails, I'm going to do small things, I'm gonna keep my face shaven for a long period of time. Day by day, it's like another thing just clicks in and it's like, “That feels good. That feels good.”

I feel like my entire life — not taught by anybody, but unconsciously drilled into myself — I don't chase what feels good. And I feel like a lot of us do that. We kind of get scared when things start to go our way or things start to feel good and we start doing things that are out of our comfort zone that make us feel validated.

And so that process after breaking the egg and that yearlong process until I started the hormones was me just slowly just picking away at the shell. Slowly saying, “This feels good. I shouldn't be scared of this. This feels good. I shouldn’t be scared of this.” Finally, I made the call for the hormones. I got the pills in my hand, got all my preparation done, and threw them down.

I went to work the very first day of hormones. There were these bright orange flowers that I always, always walk by all the time. And I'm walking by these flowers and they're glowing, like glowing orange glistening and the sunlight is hitting them and they’re just reflecting off it. And it's like, “Oh, my god! It's so vibrant and beautiful!” And I look around and the colors are all green, and I can still do it now where I can look and be like, “That looks so much more green than it had ever been before.”

Colors got brighter, smells got stronger, tastes got better. Hugging people, a sense of touch. It was like the wires instantly uncrossed. Like my brain had been operating at 75% capacity for my whole life, and all of a sudden I was at 100%. Then you look in the mirror and over time, the body starts to change. The muscle mass drops off. You start to see the rounding in the shoulders and in the hips. And your chest has to do things that it hadn't been doing before. And you're like, “Oh my God, I feel amazing. These changes feel amazing.”

It was removing that fear of those good changes, removing that fear of like, “I'm doing something crazy in my body,” and recognizing that this crazy thing that I'm doing, it's just me taking further ownership of my form.

The biggest thing is taking the small steps. You got to do the small things. I feel like we're all so focused on very large steps. I think a lot of trans girls, the first thing they do is they go home and they randomly throw a dress on and shave their face and throw a full face of makeup. They don't know how to do any of these things the way they need to. Then they go outside and they're horrified by their experience.

Take the small steps — and I think that's for anybody with anything, right? If you're starting any new goal or job or plan or anything, take the small steps that not only validate you and your path, but also make you feel good. You shouldn't shy away from the things that make you feel good, like I said. And the more that those small steps stack up, they become large steps, and then one day you're doing all these things automatically that you didn't even realize that you were doing. And you look around and you say, “Oh, wow, I built all these habits and I took all these small steps that made me who I am today.”