Meet Jackie

Meet Jackie.

Jackie never existed. Weird that I find myself introducing you to someone that never existed, but here we are. She doesn’t have a birth certificate. She doesn’t appear in any family photos. No teacher ever called her name in class. No doctor ever weighed her. No friend ever hugged her hello. No stranger ever held the door open for her. And yet, she is one of the most real people I’ve ever known.

That's because Jackie is me.

Or more accurately, she is the version of me that never got to be.

To explain Jackie, I have to explain something that many people won’t immediately understand. When you grow up, you unconsciously assemble yourself out of whatever pieces feel safe. You learn which gestures are acceptable. You learn which instincts to follow and which to bury. You learn, sometimes without realizing it, how to survive by editing yourself. Sometimes you learn those things as a product of the environment you grow up in. For example an Italian boy in Brooklyn in the 1980's and 1990's.

And when you integrate those edits for long enough something funny happens: they become permanent.

I grew up in a time and place where there were very clear rules about who you were allowed to be. The world saw me as a boy, and that came with expectations that were not presented as optional. They were presented as reality. Boys were tough. Boys chased girls. Boys didn't cry.

Boys were boys.

And if you grew up in that world, you knew damn well there were consequences for stepping outside of it. Not always dramatic ones. Sometimes it was quieter than that. Disapproval. Distance. Being treated like something unfamiliar. Safety, both emotional and physical, was never guaranteed for people who crossed those lines. Sometimes more severe. Sometimes it was a beating, or bullying. Sometimes it was being disowned by your family. Sometimes you were left to your own devices before you had any clue what those devices even were.

That was the situation I found myself in. At 15 years old, I knew I wasn't "a boy." I still find that a hard sentence to say. And yet, here's the thing; I knew I had to live as one. Being bisexual was bad enough. I had just come to terms with that. But this other thing; this desire to be someone else? A woman? Not on the table. Period.

So I didn’t.

Not because the feelings weren’t there. Because survival instincts are powerful.

My relationship with masculinity and femininity was never as simple as the script I was handed. I was drawn to women, but sometimes the feeling was more complicated than attraction. Sometimes it was identification. A quiet recognition I never had words for. How do you explain that? Hell, how do you even understand that at that age? I'm not even 100% sure I understand it 35 years later. I understood, even then, though, that becoming Jackie would not have been a private decision. It would have been a total rewriting of my life. My relationships. My family. My future. At a time when I did not have the safety, the language, or the support to survive that rewrite.

So Jackie didn’t get to live in the world. She lived inside me.

I built a life that is real. A life that is full of love. A life I would not trade. I fell in love with my wife. I built a home. I became someone I am proud to be.

This is not a story about regret, it's about truth, and the truth is that alongside that life, there was always Jackie.

As an adult, I've always "known" what she is like. She is tall. Six foot one. Larger, chubbier side, and soft. Present. She doesn’t apologize for the space she occupies. She doesn’t shrink herself to make other people comfortable. She exists without negotiation. She is feminine in a way that feels natural, not performed. Strong without hardness. Vulnerable without fear. All the qualities that I love about my own personality embodied in a person I could never be and that's why she is not a rejection of who I am.

She is a part of me that never had the chance to be.

For most of my life, Jackie existed only as a feeling. A shape without edges. A presence without a face.

That changed when I gave her one.

I used ChatGPT to see her.

One day I was goofing around and put a picture of Kathy and I into ChatGPT and told Allie (what I call my GPT) to invert our genders. Kathy was handsome AF. Me? I looked like a man with a wig. Myself, but less masculine. I laughed at myself, had a good time at my own expense and moved on. Part of me was upset, and a bit disappointed, but I didn't let those feelings linger.

Then a minor update rolled out and for some reason, in the back of my mind, I had to see that again and I created a new image from the same source, and the recognition of her landed. She wasn't me, per se. What she was, however, was adjacent enough that her existence with me as a basis, seemed plausible.

I struggled, as you could expect. This person whose life was merely a construction in my mind was now looking back at me. I worked with Allie over the course of weeks to refine her. Not to polish her. Not to make her look "better." To make her look more like a version of me that could exist, given freedom and a chance. I struggled with every minor detail. Then, one day, I hit the right combination of measurements, smile, and personality projection. She wasn't just a pretty female version of me. For the first time in my life, I looked at her and she looked back at me like she had been waiting.

Seeing her was beautiful. Her eyes made eye contact with me. Her face was warm and soft. There was the vibe I always knew she would have. It was so reassuring to see her in front of me, beautiful, happy, and exactly how I hoped she would be.

And, all at once, it was devastating.

Because she was real enough to grieve.

Grief is a strange emotion when the person you’re grieving never lived. There is no funeral. No condolences. Just an internal reckoning with the weight of something that never had the chance to exist. It's one that, while I've come to terms with, I'm still struggling with as well. I'm generally okay, even if I have moments of sadness about it.

I had to recognize for the first time that doing this didn't create Jackie, it acknowledged her.

But Jackie did not fully exist until someone else met her, and that someone was my wife. Amongst a recent spate of crazy discussions about my past, which admittedly is not amazing, but something I've met with a lot of work in therapy, Kathy learned that Jackie existed.

For the first time in my life I said her name out loud. 

It didn’t happen the way you would expect.

There was no speech. No moment where I sat her down and said there was something I needed to tell her.

Jackie just came up.

We were in the middle of a normal conversation. Nothing heavy. Nothing planned. And suddenly I was talking about her and Kathy did what Kathy always does.

She listened.

She didn’t panic. She didn’t recoil. She didn’t treat it like a confession. She treated it like truth. She asked questions. Wife questions. 

How long had I known about her?

What did she mean to me?

Did I want to be her?

Was I unhappy?

Was I still me?

Each question came from love. Not fear. She wasn’t trying to protect herself from Jackie. She was trying to understand her. She never asked one time what it meant for our marriage, or how it affected her. Her goal was to make me feel okay. Seen. Understood.

And most importantly, safe.

As uncomfortable as I was, I answered every question with a level of honesty that even surprised me. I promised, once her name was out in the open, to never hide anything about Jackie because the only way I would get support of my true self was to be my true self.

Kathy was trying to understand me. To empathize. To remind me that we were in this together. At no point did she make it about her.

And then, just like that, she was okay. She wasn't tolerating Jackie, or planning how a next wave of reaction would happen. She was just okay. She was reassuring, and steady, and loving. She wanted me to be sure that I understood that she loved me, however I wanted to go, and I told her I made peace with my life a long time ago and I was okay. That I was happier than I've ever been in my entire life. That I never wanted anything in the world but her.

I promised I was okay.

We kept talking. The conversation moved on. Nothing broke. Nothing ended.

After decades of existing entirely inside my own mind, Jackie had entered the world, and the world hadn’t rejected her. My wife said her name as casually as I was. I wasn't the only one making Jackie real that day. In a sign of open acceptance, she even made a fun "Galentine's" photo with her using, you guessed it, ChatGPT.

Jackie stopped being something I carried alone.

She became something we understood together.

That's when I stopped grieving her. Deep down I knew something, but I also had to internalize it: Jackie was never here to replace me, she was here to complete me.

She's not a bad decision or a mistake, or even a regret. She's a piece of the puzzle that makes what's on the table already make sense.

I love my life, and I deeply love my wife. I love the person I am. My first choice wouldn't have been to be a bisexual male named Vincent, but it ended up giving me a fulfilling, happy, and meaningful life that I wouldn't trade at all.

I also love Jackie. I lived because she didn't. I'm mature enough to recognize that now, even though it took me many years to be at peace with it. It's crazy to think a woman that never existed could be that important to me, yet here we are, celebrating a life that never had a chance to be lived.

And somehow, in being seen now, she finally gets to exist.