Her new job coincided with a romantic relationship that would temporarily cut off her feminine expression completely. "He said 'I love you and I think you're beautiful, but I want to be with a man'," she recalls. "I embraced a new voice, a new stance, and a new definition of who I was." This was when Messina observed her privilege starting to change. "I noticed that the more masculine I was, the more society accepted me, which was a huge mindfuck, because I had existed completely feminine my entire life," she says. Things were going so well that she kept up the facade long after the two had split. But she knew it wasn't who she truly was.