From birth my father endowed me with the three things that have regulated and controlled my life ever since. Embarrassment, Humiliation and Shame shaped me, forged me and eroded me. Even long after he’d died his personality kept me in the place I’d been since birth, not a shadow, nor even a ghost of the person I should have been, for his domination was such that I could never have been a me of any kind. I could never have owned a personality. I was the eldest of four, the only boy and though the girls didn’t know it they were his puppets too. Their dislike of me, their contempt for me and their hatred of me was all of his doing. From the outside my life seemed normal enough, I sailed through school and university and eventually became a world class theoretical physicist and a world class shell of a human being. I had no hope of ever becoming a person. I’d never had any hope of becoming a person.

I expected to die as a shell. I’d never had a relationship of any kind with anyone. I’d lived an entire life completely alone. The only conversations I’d ever had were about my work, or to order things from shops and the like, though latterly I’ve done most of my shopping over the internet. There never was the possibility of light at the end of my tunnel because my world was so dark I had never been able to see the tunnel. Then the last of my sisters died and I felt a slackening of the ropes that had bound me since birth. That enabled me to respond to a chance encounter in a packed coffee shop when I sat at a table for two with the only spare seat in the place facing me. I was asked if I minded her sharing my table. I could hardly say yes I minded. After five or so minutes of silence, out of the blue, she asked, “How long have you known?” There was a long silence, and my blank face prompted her to say, “Known that you are a woman I mean.”

I was stunned, but now I have a friend, and at the age of sixty-seven I have started to become a person, started to become the woman I should have started to become all those years ago. My lights have been turned on, but there is so much to see I don’t know what to look at first.