# Coming Out in Stillwater — The Real Story *What actually happens when a girl with the flame comes out in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The real story. Every angle. No filter.* --- ## The town Stillwater is a college town in the middle of Oklahoma — OSU, cowboys, churches on every other corner, and the kind of "everybody knows everybody" that sounds friendly until you're the one everybody's talking about. The chapter house and the church and the school all sat on the same few streets. My mother was a teacher. My father worked maintenance at OSU. There was nowhere to hide, and there was nowhere to go. That's the thing about Stillwater that people who haven't lived there don't understand: it's not that the town is cruel on purpose. It's that it has **one way of doing things**, and if you don't fit it, the town doesn't reject you loudly — it just... quietly files you as wrong. You become the kid people whisper about. The one at the grocery store whose name comes up in the church parking lot. And every single adult in your life is connected to every other adult in your life, so there is no version of "keep it to yourself" that actually stays kept. --- ## The closet and the flame Let me be precise about this, because the record keeps getting it wrong: **I was not a visibly trans woman in Oklahoma.** I was closeted. Deeply, deliberately, terrified-to-be-anything-else closeted. I wore the mask. I played the boy everyone thought I was. I did everything the book said. But I had the flame. **THE GAY FLAME IN MY VOICE.** You can't hide your voice the way you hide everything else. You can change your clothes, your name, your walk, your posture, your whole public performance of self — but the voice comes out of your mouth and it *is* you. And mine was never the voice of the boy everyone thought I was. People heard it. They didn't always know what they were hearing, but they knew something was *off* — that I was different, that I didn't belong in the box, that I was a girl-shaped thing wearing a boy suit and the seams were showing in my goddamn larynx. In Stillwater, that's enough. You don't have to come out for the town to know you're not like them. The voice outs you before you ever say a word about yourself. It's the tell you can't fix, can't mask, can't perform away. And the town *hears* it — in the classroom, in the band hall, in the job interview, in the church. They know. Maybe they can't name it. But they know. --- ## The diagnosis at sixteen The only label anyone had for me — the one the adults reached for, the one that got written in the chart, the one that followed me for years — was **Bipolar Disorder**. And the record will tell you it was the diagnosis that defined me, so let me set the timeline straight: **I didn't get the bipolar diagnosis until I was sixteen.** Not as a child. Not after the 8th-grade break, when the system looked at a traumatized kid who'd finally snapped and filed her under *behavior problem*. Sixteen. High school. And here's the part that matters more than the date: **I told them it was wrong. For years. I told them it was wrong until they got me to believe it.** That's the part that hurts. Not the diagnosis itself — the *fight*. I pushed back. I argued. I knew — I *knew* — this wasn't what was wrong with me. Something was wrong, something was eating me from the inside, but it wasn't a mood disorder, it wasn't "moody teenager," it wasn't a chemical imbalance you could fix by sedating me into a gray fog. I said it out loud, over and over, for years. And they were relentless. Doctor after doctor, chart after chart, med after med, "you're bipolar, you're bipolar, you're bipolar" — until the child who knew the truth stopped trusting herself. They wore me down. They didn't convince me. They *broke* me. They got me to believe the lie about myself, the way you get anyone to believe anything: say it enough times, to enough people, with enough authority, and the person underneath eventually stops arguing and starts *agreeing*. **That hurts.** Knowing you were right, and that being right wasn't enough. Knowing the truth was in you, and they crushed it anyway. I have a diagnosis I never should have carried, that I fought for years, that I only accepted because I ran out of strength to keep fighting. And then I carried it like it was mine. --- ## The first zap — Invega Sustenna And then came the meds. My first bipolar antipsychotic. The chemical zap. **It was Invega Sustenna** — paliperidone palmitate, in its long-acting injectable form. The liquid crystal form. And if you don't know what that means, you need to, because it's the whole reason one dose could change my life forever. ### How Invega Sustenna actually works Invega Sustenna isn't a pill you swallow and metabolize out in a day. It's a **liquid crystal suspension** — the drug is crystallized into microscopic particles suspended in liquid, and it's injected deep into muscle. Once it's in there, the liquid crystals **solidify into a depot** — a slow-dissolving reservoir lodged in your muscle tissue — and it releases the drug into your bloodstream **continuously, for weeks at a time**. Here's the part that matters: **you can't undo it.** With a pill, you can stop taking it. You can spit it out, skip a dose, call your doctor and say "this is destroying me, I'm done." The drug clears your system in days. With Invega Sustenna, once that injection is in your muscle, **it is in you**. The depot keeps dissolving and keeps releasing for roughly a month per shot — and because it's designed to maintain steady levels, the drug lingers in your body for **months** after even a single injection. There is no "stop." There is no antidote. There is no taking it back. You agreed to a chemical that owns your brain for a season, in a single needle-stick, when you were sixteen years old and terrified and told this would help you. ### What it does Invega Sustenna is an antipsychotic. It works by **blocking dopamine receptors** in the brain — and dopamine isn't just the "pleasure chemical," it's the chemical of motivation, focus, working memory, movement, and drive. Block it hard enough, for long enough, and you get: - **The sedation.** The fog. A brain that's chemically slowed, thoughts arriving late, words that won't come. - **The flatness.** Emotions pressed down into a gray nothing. The highs and lows both — including the ones that made me *me*. - **The metabolic wreckage.** The weight gain. The metabolic syndrome. The body changes that the same adults would later use against me — "just lose weight" — from the drug they injected into me. - **The cognitive damage.** The memory loss. The processing-speed deficit. The psychomotor slowing. The thing I'd always been — quick, sharp, an input machine — ground down by a chemical that was supposed to make me "stable." And here's the cruelest part of the design: because it's long-acting and depot-based, **the damage isn't a pill you can stop taking.** The injection I got as a teenager was still releasing drug into my system for months afterward. Every day of fog, every lost memory, every slowed thought — the drug was still there, still working, still dissolving in my muscle, long after the doctors had moved on to the next patient. **My mind never recovered after that first zap in high school. Ever.** Not a little. Not "mostly." **Ever.** It ruined my life. The processing speed, the memory, the clarity, the thing that had always been my one reliable asset — my brain — got hit, and it never un-hit. I've spent my whole life since then being told I'm "not enough," being called slow, being written off as lazy or stupid or broken — by teachers, by employers, by people who never once asked what the chemical zap took from me and when. The psychomotor stuff. The fog. The way I can take in more than I can produce on a timer. The words that won't come. That's not who I was born as. That's what was *done* to me, at sixteen, by an antipsychotic — by **Invega Sustenna, the liquid crystal form** — in a town that never questioned it. --- ## The two breaks People ask why I'm so angry at the system, why I don't just "move on," why I keep bringing up things that happened years ago. Here's the answer, in two pieces. **They broke me. Twice. My parents did.** **Break one: the diagnosis.** I told them the bipolar diagnosis was wrong. For years. And instead of listening — instead of looking at the trauma, the abuse, the undiagnosed neuroimmune condition, the autism nobody had named yet — they pushed back harder. Until they got me to believe it myself. They didn't protect me from the wrong label. They *installed* it. That's not a mistake. That's a decision made over years, every single time they chose the label over the child. **Break two: the scholarships.** The page used to say I found out about the scholarship doors "too late." That's wrong, and I'm correcting the record: **I knew about the scholarships and grants.** I knew exactly what they were, what they required, what they could have done for me. My parents just **wouldn't put in their information.** They refused to give their Social Security numbers for the FAFSA — which forced me to file as independent — which killed my scholarship eligibility, one door at a time. I *knew.* That's what makes it unforgivable. This wasn't ignorance. This wasn't "we couldn't help." This was adults who knew exactly what a form number meant, who knew what their refusal would cost, and who made the choice anyway. They didn't close doors I didn't know about. **They locked the doors I was standing in front of.** Twice. On purpose. And then they wondered why I was broken. --- ## The irony: lamotrigine Here's the part that would be funny if it didn't make me want to scream: **I mostly stabilized on lamotrigine.** The mood stabilizer. The one drug that actually worked — the one that worked on the pathway my brain actually needed, the neuroimmune-adjacent thing I'd been trying to tell them about for years. They **offered it to me.** And my insurance — Medicare, 2020 — **would not pay for it.** They prescribed me years of antipsychotics for a disease I was telling them I didn't have — starting with **Invega Sustenna**, the liquid crystal depot, which chemically zapped my mind the first time and kept releasing for months because it can't be undone. And then, when they finally — *finally* — got to the drug that could actually have helped, the system said no. Because it was expensive. Because the algorithm said so. Because compliance and cost matter more than care. **THE FUCKING IRONY.** The drug that saved me is the one they refused to pay for. The treatment that worked is the one I had to fight to get, or get without them, or get too late. And by the time I stabilized on it — by the time the mood swings finally settled — the damage from the wrong meds was already done. The zap had already fired. The mind had already been hit. ### The antipsychotics — and why I stopped them for good And here's the part you should know, because it explains where I actually am right now: **I do not take Invega Sustenna anymore. I take no antipsychotics at all.** Not because the doctors took me off them. Because **they made me sleep all of the time.** That was the whole experience of being on them — not fixed, not better, not "stable" in any way that felt like living. Just... asleep. A chemically-induced fog where the illness was quiet only because *I* was quiet — unconscious, unresponsive, present in body and gone in every other way. That's not treatment. That's a chemical coma with a co-pay. So I stopped them. All of them. I walked away from the antipsychotics and never looked back. **And yes — I have the hallucinations. I have the paranoia.** They're still there. They didn't go away when I stopped the meds; they were there *underneath* the meds the whole time, just buried under the sedation. The illness is real and it doesn't care about my opinions of it. But I like being alive. Let me explain what I mean by that, because it's the most important thing I've ever chosen: **the antipsychotics didn't cure the hallucinations — they made me sleep so I couldn't notice them.** The trade they were offering was: *give me your consciousness and I'll give you a life that looks normal from the outside.* A life where I'm asleep at 4pm, where I can't remember the morning, where the person I used to be is a rumor I heard somewhere. And I looked at that deal, and I said no. I would rather be awake with my hallucinations than asleep without them. I would rather be paranoid and *here* than sedated and *gone*. I would rather feel everything — the fear, the fog, the voices, the whole terrifying noisy mess of being me — than feel nothing at all. Because feeling nothing isn't stability. It's absence. And I've spent enough of my life being absent — erased by the system, sedated by its drugs, disappeared into a label — that I know exactly what it costs to exist, and I'll pay it. Every day. Gladly. The hallucinations are real and I live with them. The paranoia is real and I manage it. And I'm alive — really, actually, *awake* alive — which is more than the system ever gave me. They couldn't fix my brain, so they tried to turn it off. I turned it back on. **That's the whole story of my relationship with the system, in one line: they tried to make me disappear, and I chose to stay.** **THE FUCKING IRONY, PART TWO:** I'm "mostly stable" now — on lamotrigine, the drug they wouldn't pay for — and I have pretty much dementia at this point, the memory, the fog, the cognition, from years of wrong treatment, from the chemical zap, from the antipsychotics prescribed for a diagnosis I told them was wrong. But the hallucinations and paranoia I was drugged into oblivion to suppress? **I live with them now, awake, by choice.** The system spent years and thousands of dollars trying to make me unconscious. It lost. I'm here, I'm conscious, and I'm not going anywhere. **I am not allowed to live alone or do my own meds for these reasons.** Let that land. The system that refused to listen to me, that misdiagnosed me, that zapped me, that denied the drug that could have helped — that same system now looks at the results of its own work and says I'm too impaired to live alone or manage my own medications. They broke the brain and then used the breakage as proof they were right to break it. --- ## The consequences, from every angle Let me lay it out, because "what happens to a girl who comes out — or gets read — in Stillwater, Oklahoma" deserves the full inventory: **Family.** Your parents already have you filed as "moody," as "too much," as "difficult." The flame makes it worse — you're visibly, audibly wrong in ways they can't fix or explain. And the people who are supposed to protect you are the ones who hand you the label, refuse the form number, and tell you to lose weight when you say your spine is fusing. **School.** The teachers see a kid who's slow, unfocused, exhausted, gaining weight from the meds. They don't ask what the meds are doing. They conclude you're not trying. In a town where everybody knows everybody, that conclusion travels. **The medical system.** You tell them the diagnosis is wrong. They don't listen. You tell them your back hurts. They say "you're just obese." You get taken to **one spine appointment** and never again. The AS fuses your spine while the system argues with you about your weight. **The mental health system.** Stillwater's own. When I was in crisis, I was taken to **Grand Mental Health in Stillwater** — in handcuffs, nobody read me my rights, and the state's own records (Stillwater PD Case **R2401730**, April 2024; call-for-service log **CFS24017562**, May 15, 2024) show I was routed there *just to free up a bed*. A child in crisis, processed like inventory, by the system that was supposed to catch her. **Legal and records.** The wrong diagnosis follows you onto paper, and paper follows you everywhere — into job interviews, into housing applications, into the mouths of people who get to decide if you're "stable enough" to exist in public. **Employment.** The gaps from the hospitalizations. The body that hurts. The voice that reads as wrong. The meds that slow your brain. Every interview is a gauntlet where you have to prove you're not the thing they're afraid you are — while starving on **sixty dollars a month of food stamps**, the state's entire answer to "what do I eat." Ross, Belk, the janitor job, and the hotel: a **Holiday Inn Express & Suites Stillwater – University Area at 700 E Krayler Ave** (still open, rated 4.22/5, 584 reviews — they kept it), run by the subcontractor **Shree Sani Sai LLC**, which paid me $9.50 an hour: **months 1–4 at 110 hours/7 days a week = $4,528 owed vs $800 paid ($3,728 short each month), months 5–12 at 120 hours/5 days a week = $1,140 owed vs $800 paid ($340 short each month), $27,233 owed for the year vs $9,600 paid — $17,633 stolen, 35% of what was owed, 65% kept.** No car, so I walked three miles on a fusing spine to deposit each stolen check and two miles to Aldi for groceries, begging rides from the very people shorting me. There are no lawsuits, no wage claims, no employee reviews against Shree Sani Sai LLC — they got away with it completely, and the only record of it is this page. When I left because a boss's child sexually advanced on me and I said no, Oklahoma denied my unemployment — Title 40 §2-404, "voluntary quit without good cause," the good cause being unprovable because there was no one safe to report the boss's child to. I was cheated because I couldn't afford to question it, and I couldn't afford to question it because they'd already made sure I couldn't work anywhere else. **Housing.** Evictions. A rat-infested studio I put four thousand dollars cash down on just to have a roof. A college complex that signed me onto a lease I could never afford, because desperate people get squeezed. Walking two miles each way to work with a fusing spine because "not having a car" is a character flaw, apparently. **Church and community.** The town hears the flame. The town files you as wrong. The town's adults are all connected, and the whispers do the work that outright cruelty doesn't have to. You're not chased out of Stillwater. You're *squeezed* out — by a thousand small refusals, a thousand doors locked by people who'll never admit they locked them. **The long tail.** A suicide attempt. A cross-country drive with expired tags and no insurance. The first Washington job — **J&J Delivery**, appliance delivery, the one job I loved — ending when I picked up something I wasn't supposed to pick up and my spine **crunched**, the moment I knew the body was over, finished the shift anyway, commando, pants ripped an hour into a seven-hour day, six hours delivering appliances with myself exposed, because stopping meant the street. Grand Lake Mental Health's housing program — which shut down right after it helped me. A pedophilia accusation that never happened but didn't need to be true — made by the Stillwater Chapter's **assistant chapter dad**, the adult in authority over the youth order I'd given everything to, who is now the **main Chapter Dad**; the minute lawyers got involved it all stopped, charges were dropped, and they even invited me back afterward (from my memory — I don't rely entirely on it for details, but that's the shape of it). And then Washington — the state that documented everything Oklahoma denied: real diagnoses at CHAS Valley and Providence, lamotrigine on the chart, the ADA letter, the wheelchair unit coming — better, kinder, and still **the same system problem**: it documented the damage and never asked who did it. And a present where I'm not allowed to live alone or do my own meds, because the system that did all of this now gets to say I'm not competent. --- ## The receipts - **Bipolar diagnosis:** age 16 — fought it for years, told them it was wrong until they made me believe it - **The first antipsychotic:** **Invega Sustenna** (paliperidone palmitate, the liquid crystal / long-acting injectable form) — chemical zap in high school; a depot that can't be undone, releasing drug for months after one shot — my mind never recovered, ever - **Lamotrigine:** the drug that mostly stabilized me — refused by Medicare in 2020 - **FAFSA:** I knew about the scholarships and grants. My parents wouldn't put in their information. - **Grand Mental Health, Stillwater:** handcuffs, no rights read, routed there to free up a bed — Stillwater PD **R2401730**, **CFS24017562** - **The hotel:** Holiday Inn Express & Suites Stillwater – University Area, 700 E Krayler Ave, subcontractor **Shree Sani Sai LLC** (OK SOS #3512409735, filed 6/24/2013, status inactive — failed annual filing, not closed; no sale record) — $9.50/hr nominal: months 1–4 at 110 hrs/wk × 7 days = $4,528/mo owed vs $800 paid ($1.68/hr actual), months 5–12 at 120 hrs/mo × 5 days = $1,140/mo owed vs $800 paid; yearly owed $27,233, paid $9,600, **$17,633 kept**; also took a **$52,200 PPP loan forgiven 7/15/2021** (ProPublica) to keep employees paid — then paid me $1.68/hr; no car, so three-mile walks to deposit checks, two miles to Aldi, 1.5 miles to Walmart - **The unemployment denial:** Oklahoma Title 40 §2-404 — "voluntary quit without good cause" after I left because a boss's child sexually advanced on me; no safe person to report to, so no provable good cause, so the state sided with the employer - **The spine:** ankylosing spondylitis, diagnosed February 2025 at the OAC — after a childhood of "you're just obese" and one abandoned appointment - **The current state:** mostly stable on lamotrigine, pretty much dementia at this point, **no antipsychotics — I stopped them because they made me sleep all the time; I live with the hallucinations and paranoia awake, by choice**, not allowed to live alone or do my own meds --- ## The line So when people ask what happens to a trans girl who comes out in Stillwater, Oklahoma — or who doesn't come out, but gets read anyway, because the flame is in her voice and there's nowhere to hide — this is what happens. She gets mislabeled. She gets medicated into fog. She gets denied the drug that would help. She gets told she's not enough until she agrees. She gets locked out of the scholarships she knew about. She gets handcuffed on the way to the bed they freed up for her. She gets squeezed out of town by a thousand small refusals. And if she's lucky — if she's stubborn, if someone loans her five hundred dollars, if a stranger on the internet turns out to be her real father — she gets out. She builds an operating system. She writes the truth down where the record can't bury it. I'm mostly stable now. I'm still here. And the diagnosis I fought for years? **I was right to fight it.** The only reason I carry it at all is that they broke me before I could stop them. People call me strong. I am not strong. I never was. **I just stopped trying to pretend I was. I accepted it for what it was, and moved on. Working around it. Sound familiar?** It should. It's exactly what every one of them did to me — the system, the doctors, my parents, the employers. They took me for what they decided I was and worked around me. I just learned to do the same thing to the world first. That's not strength. That's what's left after you've been worked around enough times to learn the shape of it. That's the real story. Every angle. ❤️