Well Dear Reader, I have a confession. Since going off the hormones, it has become increasingly difficult for me to write. When I entered middle school all those years ago, when I was first entering male puberty, something very similar happened. I just couldn't make the connections when I was trying to describe the world. My grades went in the tank. I almost failed both sixth and seventh grade. I'd been doing great in school. knocking the shit out of the standardized tests, and then suddenly it was like I just couldn't hack it any more, even in the simplest of classes.
My parents freaked right out. They just couldn't understand why i was having so much trouble. They just couldn't figure out where their brainy, bookish son had gone. And the thing was, I didn't know what was going on either. I knew I could understand what I was learning, what I was reading about, but when I tried to put it down on paper or on a test, it just got mixed up and ugly. I felt like such a moron. There was always a great deal of anger and dissapointment directed at me.
Now, of course, I was aware that I wanted to be a girl. And yes, I know that's one of the big contradictions, one of the big paradoxes of being trans. On one hand I say that I am a woman, that I always have been, that I was created this way, but ah, ah, on the other hand I say that I want to be a female, that I have this awesome and terribly longing for womanhood. How can both be true? How can I not be liar?
I don't know, but that's the way it is. In the Episcopal Church we talk in much the same way about Christ's resurection, and his defeat of all evil and Death in the world. How can Christ have destroyed Death and Hell if we continue to suffer, if we continue to die?
Once again, I don't know, I don't know how, but I know that it is. We call it the “Already But Not Yet.” It's a wonderful concept, even if it only makes a tiny, tiny bit of sense.
But friends, I'm having so much trouble writing. I know what I want to talk about, but it jut doesn't come together. I end up with three or four bearly connected sentences after an hour or more of work. The frustation is like having eaten a piece of glass. I want to write so badly, I want to pt something down on paper, I want to trap this place and this experience on the page.
But it doesn't happen, or worse yet, I do write something and it is wholly insipid and worthless.
I've been rewatching the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I want to discuss it episode by episode, explaining how it functions not only as action adventure cartoon, but also as a psuedo-scripture. How it functions in the ancient traditions of the god-man walking the Earth with his saints. Oh, there's so much to say, so much to dig into, but friends, but when I start to write there's a wall, and nothing comes, nothing happens.
I didn't realize at the time, but my writing really took off about three months after I started HRT. I didn't put it together that it had anything to do with the hormones until I went off them. It was like a facet being turn off. It was like concret being dumped into a creek. It's like the part of me that is the Combat Queer is going dormant, and all that's left is this shell that was built to serve in the military, that was built to survive the sandbox.
I don't want to just be a shell. I don't want to just be a soldier, doing my duty, resting, doing my duty, resting, doing my duty, resting, waiting for the rest of my life to start, waiting for something else to happen. I want to engage this experience as me, not as this created shell. I don't want to just sleep walk through the next year.
I'm so scared.
But even then, even now, and even in what's coming, I survive, I continue. It's hard, and it is almost certainly going to get harder. But, Christ help me, there's only one way to go, and that's forward. The time to consider giving up has past. The future must be grabbed moment by moment, pulled past the present. This time will not last. There is more, and I will have it through the goodness of the Lord.
This is not the end. This is barely even the beginning.
Hang in there. You're not just the shell, even if it starts feeling that way sometimes.
Posted by: Thene | July 02, 2009 at 04:28 PM