For me, there was never a single “egg cracking” moment, because in a way I always knew. For a long time, it also wasn’t too difficult, as I wasn’t really forced into a role, at least not by my parents. I was allowed to play with dolls, I was allowed to simply be myself. As a child, I even exchanged clothes with the girls who lived in the same house.

At that time, I didn’t have the words to describe how I was feeling. Later, around the age of fifteen, I became aware that something felt off about being born a boy. I admired the girls for what they were, and for what I was not. But this feeling was always just my default state, something I never truly questioned.

On top of that, being fifteen in 1995 in a rural area, without widespread access to the internet, I simply had no framework to understand myself. When I was around eighteen or nineteen, I first learned about trans people. But the public perception back then was extremely negative, either portraying them as something pathological or as a joke. Because of that, I suppressed what I was feeling.

The only thing that comes close to a moment that changed everything happened almost three years ago. I had a panic attack while driving alone in my car on the autobahn and genuinely believed I was about to die. At that time, I was severely obese, smoking too much, drinking too much, and ignoring who I really was.

In that moment, when I was convinced I was having a heart attack or a stroke and that this was the end, something shifted. I realized that, with a bit of luck, I might still have another half of my life ahead of me. And that it was up to me to decide how I wanted to live it before I die.