Pageboy: A Memoir

by Elliot Page

My brain’s energy was being wasted, a ceaseless drip attempting to conceal and control my discomfort.

In writing this story, I have remembered each moment to the best of my ability.

This world has many ends and beginnings A cycle ends, will something remain? Maybe a spark once so bright will bloom again. —BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND, “A SONG AND MANY MOONS”

But here I was, on a dance floor with a woman who wanted to kiss me and the antagonizing, cruel voice that flooded my head whenever I felt desire was silent.

“I think I may be bisexual.” I said this seemingly out of nowhere, having never conveyed anything like this to anyone. “No you are not,” she responded immediately, a sharp reflex, giggling after she said it.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote.

Numb and quiet, nails in my stomach, I was incapable of articulating the depth of pain I was in, especially because “my dreams were coming true,” or at least that is what I was being told.

Being made to feel that I was inadequate, erroneous, the little queer who needed to be tucked away while being celebrated for repudiating myself was a slippery slope I’d been sliding down since before I could remember. And like a film stuck to my skin, I couldn’t wash it off. The compulsion to tear apart my flesh, a sort of scolding—I became as repulsed as them.

I hate tall stools, they don’t work well with my short legs.

Why do we lose that ability? To create a whole world? A bunk bed was a kingdom, I was a boy.

What did queer people do after the tragedy? Those who lost secret lovers. The closeted grief.

“Yay!” I’d cheer, always secretly hoping Peter would win.

These are important moments to remember. They aren’t small.

My mother let me exist as me in many ways when I was young, when it was just us.

What was best meant fitting neatly into our society’s expectations. Staying inside the lines. The perfect heroine’s journey preemptively and unknowingly written for me.

If I had to conform, why shouldn’t you have to?

I’ve never doubted my mother’s love for me. How lucky I am for that.

It is so sad that all the static had to get in the way as I aged. A dark rock on which to slip, suddenly appearing and taking us both down. That pure connection that went beyond appearance and expectations, both of us free in the moment—these are the memories I revisit.

Pounding her fists on the evidence, hammering in my loneliness. Why aren’t you like them?

I hope he got the help he needed, I hope he never did this again.

Research has shown that transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are four times more likely to struggle with an eating disorder.

It is not as easy to forgive my father. I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass. When his kid needed safety, when his kid needed love, when his kid needed protection, he threatened violence. Outraged because I had the audacity to communicate with an older man on the internet when I was a minor. If I didn’t deserve care in that moment, if I didn’t deserve safety and love, when would I ever? That sentence has lived in my body much longer than the man’s threats, his obsession, his fingers fondling my arm.

A lonely kid is a perfect target.

It’s as if there is a need to trivialize such endeavors, unwilling to acknowledge experiences that are not their own, unwilling to listen. Throwing around power but refusing to admit they have any. I wasn’t able to stand up for myself then. I’d fold in, taking it, letting it rest inside.

If we took just five minutes to recognize each other’s beauty, instead of attacking each other for our differences. That’s not hard. It’s really an easier and better way to live. And ultimately, it saves lives.

I’d rather feel pain while living than hiding.

I think about that moment a lot—the anger that man felt entitled to display and my response to it. In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.

Playing a character that was partially starved to death allowed me to lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself.

I’d shower at night, washing off the burns, the bruises, a reminder that I had nothing to complain about. How dare I acknowledge my silly pain as anywhere near hers.

It’s an exploration of another human’s experience. A never-ending exercise in empathy, opening the heart, hoping it all sinks in, waiting for that release of emotion.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut puts it, “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

We met making a film wherein she murders me. In the real world she was the only thing saving me.

Hurting my body to that extreme must have been a cry for help, but when the help would come, it made me angry and resentful. Where have you been? An unfair question really. I had never communicated what I’d been grappling with to anyone.

As I grew more confident in my queerness, her denial grew, too.

It wrenches my heart watching my mother afraid, a window to her pain. She’s had a lot of that in her life.

Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better. I had something meaningful to focus on after feeling unequivocally no meaning at all. Depression had sucked me dry.

For me, Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.

Eleven was the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent.

It’s an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don’t.

That pop song remained on loop for more than two decades. Now I hear it seldomly, startling me on shuffle. I’ve forgotten most of the words, thank God.

I did not want to be reprimanded for having disturbed their slumber, or eating whatever I shouldn’t have eaten.

I suppose I felt I deserved it, and why the hell wouldn’t I? My father knew and did nothing about it.

No sorry. Never a sorry. No stop. Never an “Are you okay?”

“What’s the hardest part of Rollerblading?” “Telling your parents you are gay.” Is it bad I love that joke?

I went into shock, the body a loyal protector.

I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t mind it either.

Perhaps if I have sex enough I’ll convince myself I enjoy it?

It was too much after having put on the mask for awards season. I understood that if I were to do it, I would want to kill myself.

It was too much to play a role on-screen when the role I played in my personal life was suffocating me already.

I was being told to lie and hide. It puzzled me to watch cis straight actors play queer and trans characters and be revered. Nominations, wins, people exclaiming, “How brave!”