idk, idk. 3am again. im typing in my phone so as not to make too much noise compared to clacking on my laptop keyboard. something told me to get up and write so i did, exhausted as i am from my sickness. my sinuses are congested but here i am.
so, i transitioned. i checked every box… well, not every box but most of them—started hormones, grew out my hair, got new clothes, changed my name, trained my voice. and i pass now, i get gendered right on sight, save for the moments when my relaxed voice gave it away. it’s tempting to describe my situation in binary terms—before, after—and the transition itself with the same cadence of a self-help memoir, or perhaps the testimony of someone dealing with chronic illness. i was sick, now im healed; i was depressed, now im content; i was condemned, now im saved. unfortunately its not true. truth is most days are still hard, and my supposedly estrogenized mind is still strained with the same stresses, doubts, and dissatisfactions i had when my body naturally secreted testosterone. just like when i was fifteen, i still live with a crippling deficiency in self-love and self-respect, and despite the tricks i pull in the mirror—“stand this way, and it’s more feminine!”—i still see him underneath, an insecure boy fighting back tears. at the end of the day, i have to confront the biggest disappointment of transition, the one constant it can’t change: im still me.
i mentioned the tendency to narrativize my “journey” as sickness-then-health is “tempting,” i want to explain the shape of that temptation. i think it’s because i like the exclusivity. i like to see my own struggle as unique, somehow special, separate from the daily struggles of cisheteronormative life. i label every sorrow in my life as unique to transfemininity, portray myself as the sole martyr of a force i cannot control. it absolves me of the responsibility to explain myself to other people, and provides me with a convenient excuse to explain away why im so unhappy and moping around all the time… “well of course you couldn’t understand my pain, im a trans woman, and you’re not…!” i want to hold this pain, bear it publicly, pretend it’s mine and mine alone; then get praised for it by others, who obviously cannot help but can lament about how strong i am, how hard it must be.
i’ve been typing for around an hour, it’s 4am now, and i don’t feel liberated typing this, unfortunately. when i show sylvia later she’ll probably comment about my self-awareness, but she won’t say there’s anything particularly groundbreaking about these words. she knew them already, i knew them already, and it’s obvious in hindsight—well, yes, of course transition isn’t going to solve all your problems! did you think women don’t have problems? everywhere you look there are depressed women, sick women, women without self-love or self-respect, women who feel alone in their suffering but who are terrified of asking for help, women confused by their emotions but lacking the willpower necessary to interrogate them, women who pose in the mirror and confuse a clean body for a clean mind; women who just think too goddamn much. and i am just one of them.
i wish i could write something that weren’t so navel-gazey and wrapped up in my own inner world. you’d think new york with its constant movement and stimulus would be able to shake me out of my head, but it doesn’t do anything for me if i just stay in all day. i read the essays i wrote in undergrad with the eyes of someone experiencing retrograde amnesia. “did i really write this?” the personal essays have an air of self-reflection that tastes foreign to me now. the narrator/speaker (purportedly me) has a struggle, reflects, then reconciles. im stuck on step one, the struggling. i refuse to start step two, reflection. so i haven’t a chance to reconcile anything.
on refusal to reflect. i wonder why i publish my diary online in the first place. it’s because part of me wishes someone would do the reflection for me—some intrepid mind with a savior complex could leaf through all of the pieces, poems, and drafts of bad poems, and come up with a satisfying explanation of what’s wrong with me, with a way to cure me. it’s like if u plugged all your personal writing into an ai chatbot and asked “what do you think is wrong with this writer and how can she fix it?”, so you wouldn’t have to confront it yourself. as if healing can be done so frictionless, as if healing can be done without a mirror. i guess writing this is a start. though to be fair i should probably write at some other hour of the day and spend the small hours of the morning sleeping, convalescing. i feel sick. im congested, i have this awful headache, im uncomfortable. it’s a virus and theres nothing i can take, really. sleep provides a genie’s refuge—there’s a catch: you’ll have unpleasant dreams for most of it.
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