The First Sentence of My Life:
I used to know the first word I spoke, as well as the first sentence I uttered to the Earth I didn’t yet know. Once upon a time I had a baby book…
My Baby Book:
I often wonder where I misplaced it. It was full of pictures, first experiences, and other tidbits. If I ever found it, I’d make my autobiography’s first line the same as the first line I spoke. But since its current location is unknown, I’ll have to choose another line to enter with in: haze, haste, and happy days.
My Mind:
For a transgender man, diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school, and what appears to be a liberal sized scoop of autism. I do see some impossibility in picking one sentence to begin my autobiography with.
Life for me started in fragments I found while piecing together my identity.
Axton
Shedding a lot of skin that no longer fit along the way.
The Beginning:
To make a long story short when I was barely two years old, my mom and sperm donor divorced. Mom took me and we left Virginia Beach to move back to Warwood, West Virginia. Where we lived with my great-grandmother.
For awhile I spoke fluent Polish. I was about ten when Butchie, my great grandmother, had multiple strokes overnight. I was the one who woke to her in need of help, she went to the nursing home after that incident put her in a wheelchair. Butchie had lived in the mobile home with us and my step-dad for a few years by then.
The poster child for pick a struggle.
– Axton
The Summary
To sum up my formative years domestic abuse, toxicity, and drug use make up as many memories as the good things I can think of. Along with things like abandonment issues, sexual assault, and child abuse at the hands of my stepmom.
After my mom left Todd, I basically grew up in a single-parent, low-income apartment, under the poverty line. I had my first hit of nicotine by the time I had spent a decade here, followed by my first Vicodin within the next year.
Just a Little Peek at my Pieces:
-Axton
Poetry, Rocks & Minerals, Tarot & Pendulum Readings, Spirituality, Nature, Spell work, BPD, ADHD, Depression, Grief, THC, Nicotine, Transgender Female to Male, Multiple Coming Out Stories, Camping, Animal Lover, Advocate, Tree-Hugger, Sky Watcher, Waterfall Chaser, Cat Dad, Older Brother, Healthcare Worker, Outside, Summertime, Horror, Flowing Stream, and Wanderlust.
A Few Tidbits of Me I Found Along My Way.
I am a poster child for pick a struggle as a queer, transgender, neurodivergent, poor, metal health and personality disorder diagnosed individual, and advocate. Welcome to my slow burning opioid use, at Appalachia’s edge.
A Line to Start My Memior.
My story is not a uniform line from point A to B. I wasn’t given a map with a layout of how to exist in liner fashion. My life is not neat and uniform.
- A series of evolving identity
- surviving layered mental health symptoms
- emotional contrasts of living in only black and white through BPD
- grief
- abandonment issues
- An inner light shining through
The Burden
The line burdened with starting my life’s memoir has to be layered, loud, dramatic, and holding at least a bit of light. It needs to feel like me, so readers see it the scope of the roller coaster I call life.
Autobiography Opening Lines:
I have a four different themed options I wrote for opening lines. Each one represents different pieces of me stuck together artistically. You’ll find creativity, nature, spirituality, neurodiversity, and identity layered hypothetical autobiography first lines.
First impressions are important, or so they say. I think?
The truth seeker:
When rockhounding one must pick up many stones and crystals before finding a keeper. The same can be stated when searching for fragments of identity.
The Neurodivergent Reality:
I shuffle my deck. Tap each card with finger three times as I shuffle my fate. Cards that never stop moving, patterns I latch onto, images swim and pulse at the edges of my vision, my attention bouncing between shuffled cards and burning frankincense. Then I feel the card that speaks to me, let’s turn it over and see.
The Truth of Survival:
I climb up a sloppy muddy slope, boots pressing into the earth, with a squelch. Tree roots jutting from the hillside towards my face sometimes brush my arms. Every scrape a reminder that I am moving forward. Step by step, until the ridge opens and the sky spills across the horizon.
The High School Ghost:
I write, erase, and trace the feelings of my words until the rhythm fits. Pen, smooth, sleek, gilding across notebook paper. I drift the hallways, a body moving without claiming space, a chemical i feel hum under my skin, a numbness I used to pay to feel. Shadows of my words cling to everything inside of me and I leave behind a life that was not for me, piece by piece.
Hey before you go!
What Opening Statement?
I want to know the epic first line of your story. Not the one you tell at job interviews but the one you layer to put together with little pieces of you in the seams.
Comment below with your opening lines. Let us make this thread a collection of shared creativity.
Do you want to help me?
I cannot pick my opening line. I equally like them all for different reasons.
If you had one stick out to you more than the rest for love, hate, or even cringe let me know in the comments.
I love to hear from you creative individuals, make connections, and create.
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Internal Links
2026 Legislative Landscape for Transgender Individuals in the US
A Transgender Man’s Vulnerability is on Screen in this Poem to The Little Girl He Was
External Links
Creative Community Discord – All Welcome Who Welcome All
Coffee Helps me Create aka Redbull –
