A friend of mine asked me what it was like to still feel dysphoric "after transitioning"-while I still haven't finished transitioning, it got me thinking-so I wrote this. It's shorter than anything I've ever written (the whole "poetic essay" thing is a bit overused these days), and the voice and ending both feel a bit contrived, but I figured it wasn't TOO horrible to share hear-and hey, it might speak to some of you. Trigger warning: Graphic thoughts of self harm. Enjoy!
It lingers as a ceaseless discomfort in the corners of my mind. When I lie in bed at 4am, or walk along the crowded midtown sidewalk grinning as the tourists turn their heads, or crack a joke with a book in one hand and a joint in the other, it taunts me. I breathe it in. It gathers in my lungs and stomach and seeps from my pores, filling the billions of molecules of air that leave my body each second and infects everyone around me. Sometimes, it speaks to me in a whisper that could stifle the roar of a subway car. Always it utters the same four words, ten letters, four vowels, six constants:
You are a boy.
There are days when I know that the words are true. You are a boy. Your shoulders too broad for any girl and your hands the size of porcelain dinner plates. You are a boy. You have to rip the deep brown hairs from your face with tweezers twice a week and will keep doing this until the day you die. You are a boy. Strangers hurriedly glance at you like some roadside attraction, even though they know it's rude. You are a boy. The sixteen years of memory you beg to one day forget and the chromosome within every cell in your body that you wish you could excise, dissect, immolate because you are a boy and the three inches of foam strapped to your chest that suffocates you for eighteen hours a day and the dull throbbing between your legs that leaves you praying for the courage to one day take a knife and hack at it again and again and again until only a red pulp remains.
You are a boy.
Then the voice falls silent again. We acknowledge one another like old friends, which we are by now, and go our separate ways. I know we'll see each other again soon, and I find an odd comfort in that thought. Every day is still a struggle for me, and there is no end to it in sight. But that voice tells me exactly what I'm not, and I thank it every day. I know who I am, and who I need to become, and it's made me strong. Sometimes late at night when the screaming inside my head falls silent, I slip my hand under my shirt and feel the tender mounds on my chest seventeen months in the making. I gently squeeze one of them and embrace the pain as it washes over my body. I feel it cleansing me. And I know I can feel better.
