I never expected to wake up.

I wasn’t supposed to wake up.

But there was no mistaking it, I was waking up. And I wasn’t at home. The beeping from the device next to my bed was unmistakable, as was the feel of a breathing tube up my nose.

I knew in that instant that my suicide attempt had failed. My stomach felt queasy, no doubt an after effect of swallowing so many pills and likely having them pumped out, and my eyelids were still heavy. But as I slowly opened my eyes to take in my surroundings, it was clear that I was in the hospital.

And I wasn’t alone.

“You gave us quite a scare,” she said in a voice that was more comforting and less angry than I’d expected it would be. I was still coming around, so I couldn’t quite see who was talking to me, but it didn’t look like a nurse and it didn’t sound like my mother.

I tried to speak, but my throat was so dry that words wouldn’t come out – not that I would have known what to say in that moment. What do you say to someone when you never expected that you’d have to speak to anyone ever again?

I wondered if she’d found the note I left, if my parents had read it yet. For that matter, I wondered where my parents were. Did they know about this? They had to, right? How angry would they be with me? I didn’t want to think about having to face them, but it was all I could think about. This wasn’t supposed to go like this. I was scared, confused, and – worst of all – alive, and I just wanted to be left alone to die. But all I could do, strapped to this bed, was cry.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Do what,” I scratched out in response, my raspy voice starting to come back slowly.

“You’ll ruin your makeup,” she said as she got up from her chair in the corner and walked over to my bedside. Her hand touched my shoulder, and, like magic, I felt an incredible sense of calm, something I hadn’t felt since...

“10 years,” she said. “You’ve been keeping this secret for, what, 10 years?”

I nodded and sniffled, trying to stifle the tears. One escaped, and she took a tissue from her purse and wiped it away for me.

“You did a pretty good job,” she said. “With a little more practice, you’ll really get the hang of this.”

I was fairly certain she was just humoring me, but I had to admit the compliment felt nice. It’d been a long time since I heard anyone say anything positive about my appearance, and even if she was lying, it was a good lie. A necessary lie.

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I know plenty of girls who couldn’t do makeup half this good, especially without any help from your mom.”

“You know what is lying,” she asked as she turned away from my bed and looked at the far wall.

I nodded my head, as I knew exactly what she was going to say next.

“That’s lying,” she said, pointing at the mirror on the wall.

“That’s showing you the person the world has told you every day that you need to be, but it’s not showing you who you are.”

They were my words, direct from my note. When I sat down to write it yesterday – well, when I sat down yesterday to re-write the note I’d written dozens of times before, I found myself reflecting, coincidentally enough, on the song “Reflection” from “Mulan.” I remembered watching that movie as a child and understanding for the first time what I was experiencing. I thought writing those lyrics would be enough, but as I looked at my note, I realized I needed to put that sentiment into my words.

And now they were her words. But in her voice. And in her voice, they didn’t sound as harsh, or defeated. They sounded… defiant.

She ran her hands through her blonde hair and stared down her own reflection in the mirror.

“It must tear you up inside to look into this thing every morning and not recognize the person staring back at you.”

“I hate him,” I said. “I hate everything about him.”

“So that’s why you tried to kill him,” she asked, turning back at me. I tilted my head on my pillow, desperately trying to avoid eye contact.

“But it wasn’t just him you were killing,” she said. “There’s a strong, vibrant, beautiful woman laying on that bed right now, and you tried to kill her too, even though she never did anything to you.”

I could hear the anger rising in her voice. This was the tone of lecture I’d expected to be hearing from my mother when – if – I woke up, but the message was different.

“You probably expect me to say something like ‘why would you try to kill yourself? You have so much to live for. So many people who love you,’” she said. “But I’m not here to tell you that. You’re gonna hear that from enough people in the next few days, probably even people you’d never expect to say that to you.”

I tried to interrupt, but she was on a roll and my whisper-quiet words weren’t about to stop her.

“Your parents are going to smother you with love, love that you don’t think you deserve, and, you know what,” she asked, though she had no intention of letting me answer. “You’re right.”

I turned my head back toward her and gave her that eye contact she wanted. I was still groggy from the drugs – both the ones I’d taken and the ones that were dripping into my body from the IV connected to my left arm – but I couldn’t help but be entranced by her impossibly blue eyes.

“You don't deserve their love, or their scorn, or anything they could give or take from you,” she said. “But that girl… that woman who you tried to kill? She deserves all of it.

She continued to raise her voice as she fought off tears of her own. But I could see them welling up in her eyes, and even though I didn’t know her, I felt like I’d let her down.

“All the bad things in your life, and all the good things – and trust me, you might not believe this, but there are way more good things than bad things – she deserves all of them.”

She closed the door, not to give us more privacy, but to show me what was hanging from the back of it: the dress.

I started to cry again, but these weren’t tears of sorrow, they were tears of joy. The second thought I’d had when I’d woken up just a few minutes ago – the one right after “why aren’t I dead?” – was “I’ll never see that dress again.”

But there it was, perfectly preserved, the shimmering blue fabric shining even more brightly than when I’d first taken it out of the box in which it arrived.

“She deserves to wear this dress to her senior prom,” she said. “And you were going to take that away from her.”

I hung my head, the seriousness of what I’d done hitting me for the first time. I didn’t want to die, not really, but I didn’t want to go on living the lie that I lived every day of my life. Every day for the past 10 years.

“Am I a boy or a girl,” I remember asking my father that day.

“A boy,” he said, laughing that deep and hearty laugh that you’d expect from a man like him, big and broad and strong and… well, a man.

“But I don’t want to be a boy,” I said. “I want to be a girl.”

When you’re a kid, people tell you that you can be anything you want to be, but they don’t really mean it. When you tell your first-grade teacher that you want to be an astronaut when you grow up, she humors you for a little while, but then eventually tells you that very few people become astronauts and that you should pick a different job for your future. When you tell your summer camp counselor that you want to be a professional basketball player, he tells you that you’re not going to be very tall, so you might want to consider a different sport.

And when you’re a 7-year-old boy who tells your father that you want to be a girl – not just a girl, but a princess… a queen… a goddess – you get told you’re a boy and you’re going to grow up and become a man and you’re going to marry a beautiful woman and have children and grandchildren and that’s just how things are.

But that’s not how they always have to be, I thought, as I picked up my head, seeing her dazzling smile brighten the otherwise-depressing hospital room. I have a choice in my future – I have the choice to have a future.

I couldn’t wipe the tears away from my cheek – my hands were still strapped down, I assume as a safety precaution to prevent me from doing anything stupid (well, more stupid than I’d already done) – but there were no more tears flowing. I wasn’t sad anymore, at least not in the way I’d felt when I looked at my awkward reflection while wearing my dress the day earlier. And I wasn’t angry; the time for being angry with myself for not doing something – something smart, something right – earlier was past.

Those feelings had been replaced by a new one, or at least one I hadn’t felt in a very long time: confidence. Maybe it was knowing I’d come through this, my lowest point, and somehow survived. Maybe it was seeing the confidence she radiated as she walked back over to the door, brushing off the tiniest speck of dust from the dress hanging, waiting for me to put it back on.

“Now it’s perfect again,” she said, echoing my thoughts.

Her smile waned a bit as she walked back to my bedside; I noticed the sound of her heels clicking against the hard floor for the first time, as the sounds of the hospital monitors faded into the background.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said, as she stroked my far-too-short hair. “There are going to be a lot of hard times. Times when you feel like the whole world is against you. Times when you want to give up … again…”

With what little voice I could muster, I said I wouldn’t, and she pressed her ruby red lips against my drying cheek.

“I know,” she said.

She walked toward the door, then turned back to me one last time.

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all,” she said. “And you… you’re going to be truly beautiful. Trust me.”

I did. I couldn’t explain it… I didn’t even know who she was, but I trusted her more than I’ve ever trusted anyone about anything.

My eyes grew heavy again, and before I knew it, they were shut. Before long, the beeping sound of the life support machines filled my ears. Then, there was something else: the unmistakable voice of my mother.

“I think he’s waking up,” I heard her say.

She was right. This time, I really was awake. And for the first time in my life, I was alive.