I can't fucking sit on this because I am losing my mind
Someone asked about the first story I remember writing, and since I don't have a good memory of my childhood, I had to depend on what records I could access. The earliest story I could recall was about a girl lost in a forest I wrote for english class in middle school, but I thought I never uploaded it anywhere.
So, I went looking through my shitty old deviantart to see if I could find any nuggets buried in there. I got on there in 2006, so it's a slice of high school me with all the good and bad that suggests. I figured I might get a story I could link to, just to show what has and hasn't changed in my writing.
NOT ONLY did I find the story, which dates according to the post to 2005, I also found my other first big original story on there.
Why I'm not saving this all for the response to the ask (but believe me, it's going in the post) is that BOTH ARE CLEARLY TRANS STORIES. The story No Quarter features a character named Red who gets genderswapped, and the older story, The Wolf and The Girl, specifically cites the main character as a stand-in for me in my writing.
When I talked about "when I figured out I wasn't happy as a dude" in the past I specifically cite 2008 as the year that happened, but apparently it ranges back even fucking further than I thought, what the actual fuck.
Also wild: appparently I also started using the penname that would lead to me choosing Andréa as my name as early as february 2005, with a good chance it dates even earlier, wtf
Like I had a timeline in my head for things, and it's off by yeaarsssssalzkdhfufidkddhch
And you're not alone, there. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to reclaim some things I didn't remember writing. I had an internal timeline of childhood -> depression -> "slowly coming to terms with dysphoria and realizing I was trans after realizing I was bi and grappling with it between 2016 and coming out to a small group of friends in 2020 but surely not realizing I was trans before 2020, obviously"
The confiscated papers and workbooks date back to 1987 through 1995, with a few notes from my parents about why they confiscated but couldn't bring themselves to destroy them so it goes. WAY back. Weird feeling. Still unpacking it.
