They called it the Great Shift. A cosmic event no one predicted, no one understood, and no one could reverse. In an instant, nearly everyone on Earth swapped bodies with someone else. I was brushing my teeth in my dorm when it hit. A blink, a wave of dizziness—and suddenly, I was staring into the mirror over my parents’ sink, looking at my dad’s stunned reflection.
That was nearly a year ago.
Now, I’m Robert Mathers. Forty-eight years old. Insurance adjuster. A man whose body groans when he stands too fast and who wakes up with a sore back more mornings than not. But inside? I’m still Tiffany. Nineteen. Loves iced coffee, sad indie playlists, and lavender nail polish.
When I found out there was a support group called Daughters of the Shift (DOTS for short) for girls who ended up in one of their parents’ bodies—it sounded ridiculous. But then I realized: what else wasn’t ridiculous anymore?
That’s how I ended up on this camping trip with seven other “dads” who, like me, are actually the daughters of the bodies they’re now in. The world may have adapted to the Great Shift, but sometimes, we need to be around people who really get it. So here we are, squatting and flexing on the muddy banks of a lake like a bunch of off-duty wrestlers, trying to pretend this is normal.
I’m in the middle of the front row in the photo we took. I remember the moment clearly. The sun was hot over my balding head. Maddy—throwing up a peace sign in her dad’s gym body—kept joking about how she finally understood why her dad used to grunt getting in and out of the car. Stephanie tried to pose like a Baywatch model in her dad’s heftier frame. I laughed so hard I almost pulled something.
The world hasn’t ended. It just… shifted.
My friends still talk to me. They know it’s me. It’s not weird to them anymore to hear my dad’s voice answer FaceTime with a bubbly “Hey babes!”. We all had to accept this new reality. It’s only weird when I forget how I look—and then catch a glimpse in the mirror and wonder when my dad started wearing pink flip-flops.
After dinner, we all sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows and swapping horror stories—like the first time one of us accidentally walked into the men’s locker room and completely forgot where we were supposed to be. Or when I tried to do yoga and heard my own hip pop like a bag of microwave popcorn.
But there were softer moments, too. Quiet ones. Stephanie told us how her dad cried the first time he had to brush her hair. Maddy admitted she wears her old perfume on the inside of her dad’s shirt collar.
And me? I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like this body is mine. But in that moment—laughing around a fire, surrounded by people who saw me no matter what I looked like—I felt something close to peace.
The Shift may have taken my body. But not my identity. Not my memories. And not my future.
Even if it’s lived in size 12 sandals.
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