Hmmm...🙄

James already noticed he was different as a child. "I really wanted to eat meat. But I was afraid to."

James grew up in a family that proudly holds the vegetarian flag high. No meat is placed on the table, no fish either. But James has felt an incredible urge to eat meat ever since he was six.
"I sometimes really couldn't cope." he explains. There was a butcher on the way to school who grilled chickens outside. He would often leave home early to position himself close the grilling chickens to have a Me Moment. "It just smelled so good, you know."

One day something broke when he went into a Mc. Donalds with a friend. "All those burgers. I went overboard." With 23 Big Macs, surrepticiously tucked in his backpack ("Hold the salad!" he had yelled to the server), he retreated to the park to eat them before going back home. They found out. Things got bad.

"We weren't angry at him. Just sad." says Janice ('Jahneecy'), James' mother.
"And a bit disappointed. In us, we had failed." says John (plain 'John'), James' father.
James promiced to not eat any more meat, but the urge stayed.

As time progressed James felt more and more ashamed about his urges. He was ashamed for his meat-driven craving at family parties and festivities. Pining, he scrutinised the Tupperware plates only to find carrots and apple, with some vegetarian balls or cashew cheese. "There wasn't a fuck to eat." he explains.

One day, at a garden centre, James stood near the carnivorous plants. A penny dropped.
"I knew: this is what I want. This is what I have to do."
Ever since that time, he secretely eats meat-eating plants. "Most aren't toxic, you know."

He came out of the closet last week. His parents are still a bit shocked.
"It's a bit of a blow, really." says Janice, as John's jawline sharpens.
"We'll work it out." he says.

"As a child I already didn't have the patience to just sit down. I would be in one room, wanting to be in a different one."

This made it very difficult for his parents to find him a child.
"I already had a weird feeling when I was pregnant." says Laurah, Charles' mother. "I would think,'ehm... I tought I was pregnant, right?' but it felt as if I wasn't. After his birth, which was premature, they had lost him a few times in hospital.
"They would find him in a different incubator. But not a single penny dropped."

"One day he suddenly was in the coal cellar." says Geonn, Charles' father.
"He had just been in the attick, that was really a very big transition." Laurah adds, still visibly shaken. "Especially because he hadn't brought anything with him. Not a single sandwich, no water. We kept losing him all day, he kept switching rooms."

Things really went wrong when he hit puberty. He was impossible to contain in school, he would just sit down in biology class when he felt the urge to sit in chemistry class.
"It's not easy as a transmural. You can think 'hey, someone just wants to sit in another room, that's okay. But what once you're there? That suddenly becomes the room you're in and you wanna go somewhere else. People just don't get it."

As a young adult he made the decision to permanently stay outside.
"It was just not livable anymore. As a transmural, you just keep on going."

Charles now lives a bucolic life.
"Look, I can handle a small fence. I can look over that. I have progressed, you know."
But it's still difficult.

Charles doesn't have a girlfriend. He will start dating next Spring.
"It may become a bit tricky." he muses. "But" he concludes optimistically "I can't be the only one who has this, right?"