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Charlie Vance was born on June 20, 1999, and for the next twenty-six years, he spent his life trying to disappear. From the soft-spoken, awkward elementary student to the quiet, unremarkable college drop-out, Charlie felt like an outcast-a gay cross-dresser trapped in a business administration track who desperately longed for the life of a woman. His childhood was a constant performance, fueled by the terrifying realization that his authentic self, whom he would later identify as a transsexual woman, could never fit in with the world's expectations. At eighteen, he fled the pressure of college in Manila and retreated to a provincial job at Aurora Trading, hoping anonymity would be his shield. Instead, he found a new kind of prison. For eight grueling years, he endured the insidious emotional abuse of his colleagues, subjected to constant gaslighting and manipulation that convinced him he was too "soft," too "distracted," and too fundamentally flawed to ever be worthy of ambition or belonging. By the age of twenty-six, Charlie was exhausted and defeated. His life was a silent dual existence: the miserable, dutiful male employee at the office, and Charlotte, the vibrant woman who only dared to emerge behind locked doors.