Esther Falick

It was.

And it has continued to be.

By that point, my relationship with my mom started to change.

But she wasn't like, you know, I hate to use this word, but she wasn't the cruelest one.

Like my dad was the one who had like the big reaction.

Which I think for, if friends of mine are listening to this, like, I think that will surprise them because he was such a soft, sweet man, you know?

But like I said, I think he was like drilling down into his gender and he had this reaction that just felt like it was coming from so much and just not about just this.

April of 2021, I moved back to New York, two months on hormones, starting my new life.

So excited.

I start that summer doing like standup comedy.

Oh my

gosh yes yeah okay because I had just been doing improv and then this was the thing it's like people with stand-up were like oh yeah you have to like be yourself on stage yeah and when I was a dude I was like what how do you be yourself on stage and then once I was like oh I'm a trans woman like god that had to feel so good it really did wow yeah I was like oh I know what to talk about I was losing a

control over how the world saw me.

There was this like invisibility that I had walking through the world as like a cishet white guy seeming, you know?

I didn't realize that I had until I was walking through the world as a trans woman and suddenly like everyone was staring and I like didn't feel safe a lot of the time.

So I compensated for that by going on stage and for five minutes like I controlled the narrative.

Yep.

I got to be like, you might have heard that, like, trans narratives are this.

But, like, for me, it's actually this, you know.

That felt amazing.