Rebecca Sandra Waters

1995

Still becoming better and prettier with practice. At this point in my life, I was also learning how to embrace dressing up as opposed to fighting it and thinking it was some bad, horrible thing. (Lots of trans girls go through that early on, a vicious cycle of liking being a girl but hating themselves for doing it because it's supposedly wrong.) I made leaps and bounds in my psyche as a result. The people I grew up with were narrow-minded, racist, homophobic, and just downright stupid, so the older I got and the more I embraced the idea of being Rebecca, the more I was able to detach myself from them and come to a new way of thinking. Getting out of the house and being seen by people, many of whom didn't think I was anything other than just another pretty girl, helped a lot.

		Go on, you know you're dying to make some joke about me "stroking my pussy" here.

Around this time, I bought myself a Polaroid camera. I wanted pictures of myself that were actual photographs, the kind you can hold in your hand (keep in mind that up to this point, the only footage I had of myself was on videotape). Now that the internet was alive and buzzing, I also wanted to be able to share these pictures with other people online. I was still very tentative and nervous about this, though. A couple of these pictures made their way out onto the then-called "information superhighway," but for the most part, I was still pretty timid at this point.