In 1998, I woke up before my parents one morning. My friend and one of my earliest crushes, Devon, had spent the night with me, so he was sleeping on the floor right next to me. I shook him awake, told him my parents weren’t up yet, and that we could do literally anything we wanted.

On our tiptoes, we snuck out of my bedroom. He went straight for the TV to keep watching the BBC Narnia VHS set I’d just bought. But me? I went into the kitchen, then tucked away into a little side room my dad used for his meditation and as an office. I flicked on his fancy new iMac - flinching at how loud the startup noise was - and felt my heart pounding against my chest.

There was only thing I wanted to do. The one thing my parents were extremely against me doing.

I wanted to play a video game for the first time. But not just any game - one game, in particular.

I wanted to play Tomb Raider.

Move Over, GI Joe

My obsession with Lara Croft started the previous year - 1997. I was around four years old at the time, and my dad was eager to show me his fancy new computer. But I was only allowed to play shitty Macromedia Shockwave games and edutainment programs at that point. When it came to “real” games, I had to sit with my dad and watch him play them. Which, as a wee lass, was still pretty exciting.

But there was one game, in particular, that I knew I had to try for myself. A game where a woman could do backflips through ancient caverns, fend off hulking dinosaurs, and dual wield large hand cannons with ease - and all in short shorts, no less. That game was, of course, the original Tomb Raider - one of the earliest 3D platformers, and still one of the absolute best examples of the genre.

Sitting on my dad’s lap, I was enraptured. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Immediately, after watching him play it for the first time, I went to the dining room floor and pulled out my markers and drawing pads. I started to draw the woman I’d just seen in all of her unrealistically proportioned glory. One picture, two pictures, three pictures… I couldn’t stop.

It didn’t let up. Months passed, and I was still hung up on Lara Croft. My parents, relatives, and friends all started to notice that I was completely obsessed. I would buy the Top Cow comics, eat the gaudy tie-in candy bars, and proudly proclaim that I wished I was Lara Croft. Ah, but therein lied the crux.

I was a boy. Boys couldn’t be Lara Croft - only girls could. And as much as older figures in my life tried to steer me towards more masculine role models, I kept coming back to Lara. She was everything I wanted to be. Fearless, rugged, cocky, funny, pretty…  I loved everything about the character, especially because I was too little to recognize that she’s a bit of a rich colonialist. Back then, she was just another superhero, and to me, she was one of the only ones that mattered.

A New Role Model

Like most childhood obsessions often do, Tomb Raider became something of an escape for me when life started to get rough.

When my dad got thrown in jail for crashing his car into my mom’s, in what was a very deliberate attempt at killing her for cheating on him, my whole world kind of shattered. He was in and out of court and jail for a while, and eventually, my mom took me from Georgia to Nevada to keep him away from me. What was supposed to be a trip to Disney World turned into a concentrated effort to keep us separated.

I was in this position, then, where I didn’t have a dad for the first time in my life. Even if he was, in retrospect, a physically and emotionally abusive monster to me for most of my childhood, I still loved him. I still looked up to him. And now, he was gone. All I had was my mom (who worked all the time to make sure I could eat,) her mom, and a babysitter I had a crush on. That was it.

So, where did I turn for guidance? I turned to my hero, of course. As a little kid with no friends in a town I barely knew, I latched onto Lara. She was also alone, and thrown into places she had no earthly clue how to navigate. But in spite of the odds always being stacked against her, in spite of how eager the world seemed to make sure she was snuffed out, she always came out on top.

Seeing that made me feel like I’d be okay. If she could jump over spike traps and fight bears, I could make the best out of my new life. And when I made that connection, I had the first inkling in my life that I was trans. Because as a seven-year-old boy, I had somebody new that I wanted to grow into. When I grew up, I wanted to be Lara Croft.

I didn’t know how. I couldn’t put words to it. But I knew I was going to be just like her one day. I was sure of it.

Pulling At The Thread

In retrospect, I have no idea why my mom decided to let my dad back into her life. I had no idea, actually, why my dad wasn’t in prison for the longest time. Years later, I’d find out that our neighbors vouched for him being really good with kids and an all-around great guy, so he got a reduced sentence and community service. For trying to kill my mom and almost killing me in the process, on top of the beatings and threats of killing me at young ages, my dad walked away from the whole experience having lost very little.

Because of that, I didn’t feel safe - especially because my mom was still largely absent and my dad was still very abusive. He tried to be a better person, and he tried to reconnect with me after he’d torn everything to shreds. That included trying to play games with me. He and I even played through Tomb Raider III together in 2002, but it wasn’t the same. We didn’t feel as close, and it felt weird having him play in this space now. Lara didn’t represent time with my dad anymore - she represented an escape from him. She was my role model, not him, and time spent with her felt like it belonged to me and only me.

Very little changed about that, going forward. As I went into my teens, and got my hands on my first PC, I squirreled every Tomb Raider I could to myself. Angel of Darkness, Legend, Anniversary, Underworld… these were games I pored over for hours without sharing with him. They were my experiences and mine alone, and in that space, I started to piece together my lifelong admiration for Lara.

Through my teens, I connected with Lara for more than her strength and her resilience. I started to see more stuff in her that I longed for. Her outfits, her posture, her wit… I wanted all of it. If I were a woman, I’d want to be like Lara. But why would I want to be a woman, anyway? That didn’t make any sense. Or did it?

In Legend, Lara can throw a grappling hook and use it to yank on things. This is usually used to traverse gaps, or to pull down vital parts of puzzles. In my mid-teens, I started to throw a mental grappling hook of my own - the question of my gender identity. And for the next decade, I yanked and yanked and yanked… until it all came tumbling down at once.

Facing My Shadow

2018 was the year that Shadow of the Tomb Raider came out. Shadow is arguably the first game to recognize that Lara Croft’s exploits often rob and destroy indigenous cultures, and while messy, it at least attempts to show the inherent colonialist rot in that enterprise. It doesn’t, uh, do the best job in many ways, but it’s a more critical look at the character that tries to challenge Lara’s image while still giving her a decidedly heroic arc.

2018 was also the year that I came out - as trans, that is. Much like Lara, I was also forced to take a critical look at my life. It was the year that I started to actually read all the signposts I’d tripped over my whole life, and finally accepted that I was trans. When I was able to finally admit that to myself, everything made sense - especially my early attachment to Lara. My whole life, I wanted to be like Lara not only because of what she did, but because of who she was. She was an independent, strong-willed woman with a sharp wit, wicked fashion sense, and a natural thirst for adventure. Even as a small child, I recognized that I wanted to be like her on some level. I knew, way back then, that I wouldn’t become a man. I knew I would be a woman.

And as an adult, I knew that I had to honor that early realization. I knew that, to exist as a woman, I had to pay constant and eternal homage to the very first woman who made me want to be one. I knew, no matter where I was, I wanted to have her with me.

So when I wrote down my new name, I flowed naturally.

Bella Lara Blondeau.

My embrace of my femininity came with all sorts of costs, as it tends to on this bitch of an earth. I blew up my strained relationship with my parents. I ended an abusive seven-year relationship. I got rid of almost everything I owned, and shipped the rest across the country to live on my own for the first time.

Living on my own for the first time came with a newfound clarity, even with some early lapses of judgment. My life was truly in my own hands. And no matter what it threw at me, I would fight. I would fight to survive. I would fight to live in a world that wants me dead. I would fight to spite all the people who told me I couldn’t be myself. I would fight to exist, and to defend others’ rights to exist.

Alone, after a failed suicide attempt, I made a vow to live. Because if Lara could outrun a fucking boulder, I could face down my own demons and survive.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider

During the last month or two of living in Atlanta last year, I was walking home alone from the nearby Valero at night. Clutching my White Claw and Zapp’s chips, I took note of every breeze, every cricket, every falling leaf. I felt so vulnerable. A car started to pass me, then slow down. There was a man inside, and he started calling out to me, trying to get my attention. I ignored him, and eventually, he started to pull away.

But then, a fear shared by women the world over came to life. He pulled ahead, just a little ways, and then started to turn around. He began to drive towards me, and even in the dark, I could see his eyes glaring me down. My heart stood still for a moment. The previous week, I’d been lucky enough to duck into some side alleys and shake two men in a pickup truck who followed and called after me for three blocks. Now, at two in the morning, I was alone and exposed on a main road.

In that moment, I flashed back to every Tomb Raider game I’d ever played. All the times that Lara just barely made a jump, or fought through piranha-infested waters, or narrowly avoided getting impaled on a gnarly spike. This was just a would-be rapist in a car. I could handle him. I could do this.

I ran. I sprinted through a front yard and leapt over a rickety old staircase. I bounded over stones and exposed roots. I tore through flowers and bushes and thorns, as they cut my skin and tore into my clothes. After hopping a few fences, then ducking behind a tree, I waited. I waited until he drove down the street, slowly, peering out his window. When the coast was clear, I sprinted all the way back home.

My heart pounded. My lungs burned. My eyes stung. But I was alive. I collapsed onto my couch, cracked open my drink, then looked up at the ceiling and began to dissociate for a bit. And as I came down off my adrenaline high, as I thanked whatever the hell I believe in that I didn’t become a statistic, one thought bubbled up above all others.

I wondered if my middle namesake would be impressed.

I wondered if Lara Croft was proud of me.