Rebecca Sandra Waters

1997

1997 was a pretty big year for me in terms of figuring out just how much of a girl I was and whether or not I truly wanted to live that life. I was in what I later called "the golden age" at this point, dressing up nearly every single night and loving being a pretty girl. For Halloween, I decided to go out with my friends dressed as a girl to sort of "come out" to them (these are the cheerleader pictures you see here), hoping that they would accept me in that way and encourage me to keep being a girl. Unfortunately, I found that I was uncomfortable being a girl in front of them, so I mostly played it off as a joke, and most of them were only comfortable with me if I did it that way. I'll never forget the one girl I talked to that night whom I didn't know that well who said, "You look so good; you should dress like that all the time!" But I didn't. Too many of my friends couldn't accept it, and I wasn't sure if I really wanted it anymore, either. In fact, I eventually ended up withdrawing a bit from the whole Rebecca thing for a while and stopped dressing up on a regular basis. It felt like I had finally been forced to decide if this whole thing was just a fetish or a lifestyle choice (like the girls I'd read about online). I sometimes still kick myself for choosing the former, but still, the girl in me never really died out and probably never will.