Ella D Verma Opens Up On Dealing With Inner Trauma After Transition: “Accepting Myself Was the Hardest Part” | FPJ Exclusive

For Ella D' Verma, the journey to becoming her true self was never just about changing her name or identity - it was about navigating a deeply personal, often painful path of self-discovery. Born as Dev Varma, Ella’s transition marked a powerful turning point in her life, one that came with both liberation and unexpected emotional weight.

While many perceive transition as the ultimate destination, Ella’s story challenges that notion. Behind the courage and transformation lies a quieter, more complex reality - one where healing doesn’t always keep pace with change. In an exclusive conversation with The Free Press Journal, she opens up about finding strength in her family, confronting unprocessed trauma, and why true acceptance begins within.

Reflecting on her support system, Ella shared how her family became her anchor despite not fully understanding her journey initially. “I think it was the most powerful, if I have to say, the most steadiness came from my family. My family, not even in an academic sense, they didn’t understand everything. They weren’t well-read. We didn’t also come from an academic background, not a lot of money. But the unit, the family unit is very strong. The baseline is love. Like the kind of parents who love you no matter what. So, even their disapproval only came until the point they didn’t realise this was right for me. Because the second they put the pieces together and they realised that this is right for their child, they will fight the world for it. And they have.”

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Despite achieving what she had long worked towards, Ella revealed that the emotional aftermath caught her off guard: “But actually the weirdest thing was that when I got everything I wanted, when the IDs were changed, the name was changed, everything was ready, I didn’t find the fulfilment I was looking for. Because the thing is, the traumatic things that happened on the way, I didn’t have time to process that. I had IDs to change. I had hormones to take and treatments to start, so you sort of zone out, but you know that book where it’s like your body keeps count? So it’s so crazy how I transitioned and then I would walk out of the home and people would look at me and I would still feel like it’s the same thing as being in the school corridor and people are looking at me and laughing at me. But it wasn’t. It was trauma. It was this perception.”

For Ella, the most difficult battle wasn’t societal acceptance - it was internal. “So that’s when I realised that, oh, like, I’ve won the race, but I fell along the way and scraped my knee, and now it's my time to take care of it. So that was really the hardest part of it all. I think people think coming out and making other people accept you is hard. Try accepting yourself. That’s the real hard part.”