My deadname is Rhyanna. It's a beautiful name, and my parents chose it with love. That's why I kept the 'h' in, when I changed my name to Rhyan, even though Rhyan is also a girl's name. (It's Welsh.) No one in the USA knows that this is a girl's name, really, unless they're Welsh, too, so it works. Over the phone, my name doesn't matter. Neither does the beard my testosterone has allowed me to grow. Over the phone, I am a woman, almost always; sometimes, when I correct them, they listen. Usually, they do not. I remember when I was a high schooler, in a red hoodie (my passport, which has since expired, in the front pocket), and I was dancing to The Beatles (I cannot remember which song but know that it has a horn solo of some kind). I pantomimed using a trombone. The men from the car called me a fag. It was, in some ways, the best day I'd had for a long time; I did not regularly pass, and women do not get called fag. It is, in retrospect, a little heartbreaking that my response to hatred was be affirmed that I was, at least, being hated correctly: as a gay man. Of course, as you know, it is not all slurs, not all misgendering. I am joyful. Rhyanna was a lot less happy than Rhyan is. She didn't know what was missing in her; he now knows that nothing was missing. I was just hiding, and now I am not. Through this all, I have been writing. I started trying to write novels on Microsoft Word in Fresno, California, about 2006, maybe 2007. I was in third grade, and Yoda was a main character. (It was not long before someone told me about copyright law, and that story was quickly scrapped.) In eighth grade, I learned about NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. That November, coached and encouraged by my English teacher, I finished my first successful first draft of 30,000 words. I continued to participate, usually successfully, every year through my senior year of high school. My high school was in South Carolina, a magnet school in Charleston. It's nationally awarded, or at least was when I went, for its creative writing program, which is what drew me to it. For my senior thesis, I wrote a 200-ish page fantasy novel titled "The Fall of the Nafar." I self published it, a requirement of the thesis; it's on Amazon still. I have hopes to re-write it. As for why I write, I cannot say. I know that when I am seen as a writer, it is the same joy I feel as when I am seen as Rhyan. It is who I am, just as indelibly as I am a gay, trans man. I know that when I write, I feel whole, and when I do not write, I feel hollowed out. I pursue the joy and enthusiasm of writing as much as I try to escape that hollowing.