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who I am and more to comprehend it fully. Along the way I'd had help from some amazing people, two women in particular who helped me to survive the roughest two years but come that final year of high school I was on my own.

I wasn't popular in school, though I was respected by a lot of the students and all of the teachers. An odd thing to be able to say but it's accurate. The school you see was the only one in Ireland to have an indoor climbing wall and I was by far the best rock climber in the school, in fact I was at the time one of the best climbers in Ireland full stop. It still amazes me how much respect athletic achievement can garner.

What no one knew was that my training six days a week was more about keeping my body undernourished than being the best. That I was trying to fight off the last stages of male puberty by starving myself. I was nine stone and nearly six foot tall but I told myself that it was better than bulking out and any sense of even androgynous form being completely lost to me. No one knew the truth but one person eventually came to figured it out, Amanda.

I can't say she was my best friend in school, In truth there was no one I would have called my best friend and hadn't been for years. But she was someone I trusted enough to tell a lot of things in confidence to. One of those things was that I was transexual and lesbian. I trusted her enough for her to be the first person I told as an adult and I was right to she never breathed a word of it to anyone else. But what I didn't know was that when I told her I was overheard by someone else who decided it would be used against me though that didn't happen for quite a while.

Anyway I sat my exams and just about passed. Said "Goodbye." to school and prepared to live my life on my own terms. Starting with the graduation ball. Amanda and I had discussed it and I had decided to go to it as the real me. To use it as a golden opportunity to step out and show the world I wasn't scared. We had planned it well, I used the money I had saved to buy my first dress and a great pair of shoes. She got advice on how to make me up so everything would look right.

Shortly before school ended I'd had to empty my locker. I never really bothered to use it to be honest so it was an easy enough job to do. I rifled through the class notes and the novels I tended to read at breaks and had forgotten to bring home and found various notes shoved in there by people I knew over the year. A lot of them were good luck wishes

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