The beginning of Mischa
Mischa stood in front of the mirror, ready for his first day of school in Canada.
His first day of school back in Ukraine had been a lot different. He still remembered his mom taking his picture in front of the door as he stood there in a little blouse and skirt, fidgeting as usual. She kept telling him to stand still. People told him that all the time.
All the way through school, he was told to stay still constantly. It was “unladylike” to be running around all the time, to have scraped knees from tripping over, to be friends with all the boys. He was always being punished for it, even though it wasn’t his fault. He was just being a kid, being who he was.
And who he was always seemed to be the opposite of who people wanted him to be. The other girls used to dance and twirl and play in the fields, while Mischa would be too busy climbing trees, playing tag, and his skirts and blouses always seemed to end up torn. Even he didn’t know how he managed it every day, but he did.
He was bullied, of course. The one little “girl” who didn’t act like the others. The other girls hated him, constantly calling out his old full name, Natalia, even though he could never stand it. The name was beautiful, of course, his mother had given it to him. But that name wasn’t his.
The other boys thought him good fun. They called him Talia, which, while it still didn’t fit, was better than what everyone else called him. For years, when he was little, he was just one of the guys.
But then his body started changing, and everything went wrong. The guys didn’t see him as just one of them anymore. They saw him as an object, an object of their desire. They kept touching his hair, trying to grab him. Hanging out with them wasn’t safe anymore. And Mischa hated it.
So, one day, when he was fourteen, he locked himself in the bathroom of his small home with some scissors, and he cut his hair. It was short, too short to grab, and still had the same wildness it did when it was long, sticking up at all of the wrong angles.
But when he looked in the mirror, he felt like himself. He’d never felt more like himself.
And so, that day, he told his mother, his biggest advocate, that he was a boy. And, while they had to keep it a secret, it wasn’t a surprise to her. She already knew. She’d always known.
Coming up with a new name was difficult, but Mischa decided to take the one his father had. His mother had only mentioned him a couple of times, how he’d left, how he never truly cared for her. Mischa chose his name as a reminder. To remind himself that his body didn’t determine if he was a man, his actions did. To remind himself to be a better man than his father, if he could even call him that, was.
Mischa learned gradually the best ways to cover up in public, hide his chest, deepen his voice, keep his past under wraps in places where people didn’t know him. But mostly, he was forced to play the part of Talia, because that’s what people expected of him. That’s what they’d known of him for all those years.
But then his mother got sick, and he had to move somewhere new. To Canada.
He hadn’t learned until the day he left that the name his mother had put on his birth certificate was Mischa. He’d not expected it, but she told him to go on and be himself, live the life he wanted. It would be wrong of him to throw away that opportunity.
So he didn’t.
Thankfully, his new parents took next to no interest in him, so it was easy for him to keep his secret. Big sweaters, hoodies, binders, whatever he could do to hide who he was.
Not who he was. Who he used to be. The body he had.
Talia never really died for him, though. He imagined the life he could have had if he was her, the life he’d have lived back in Ukraine. He was a conventionally pretty girl, he knew that, and he knew he could have lived a happy enough life back home. A nice boyfriend, a nice house, a nice family. But it would all be a lie.
Because he wasn’t Talia. As far as he was concerned, Natalia had been left behind, back in Ukraine.
Here in Canada, he was Mischa Bachinski. And as far as anyone was concerned, he always had been.
His first order of business when he got here was to buy a binder, then look up the best ways to come off as masculine. He didn’t care if he ended up stereotypically toxically masculine, that didn’t matter. He just needed to be seen as masculine enough.
And that’s how he found rap music.
He started rapping on YouTube under the name “badegg”, setting up a persona for himself. “Gangsta”, it was called. That’s what he needed to be. So that’s what he became.
A backwards cap sat atop his curls, and an oversized hoodie hung over his school uniform. He looked gangsta, rebellious, like all the men from the music videos he watched. He even had sunglasses in his bag, though he wasn’t sure why he’d need them.
Yes, he was scared. But he was also angry. Angry he had to move away from his mother, enraged that he had to come all the way to Canada to be himself, and the stress of having to hide who he was was morphing into anger because of why. Because he’d be treated differently, just because of who he used to be.
And he was angry at himself, for hiding something he couldn’t help, something that he should be proud of. His real identity. He felt like it was disrespectful to the girl he used to be, the one who scraped her knees and climbed trees and shouted at the top of her lungs for no reason. He shouldn’t be ashamed of her. She didn’t deserve that. She did nothing wrong. He was angry at himself because he couldn’t be Natalia, he couldn’t live that happy life he imagined for her in Ukraine. He was angry that for some reason, he had to be like this.
And he was angry at the way the world was. The way the odds were stacked against people like him for no reason. The way that everything was going to be so much harder for him than any other boy.
But this was a fresh start, and he had to appreciate it.
Today, he was going to school as Mischa Bachinski. In a place no one would ever know him as anything else.