Darkness of the Outer Limits

I can't stop thinking about the logical end of things. That's vague, but I wanted to save the word "death" for later on in this post because it feels like the sort of word you could overuse, y'know? Take out the sting. I've trampled any delicacy, so let's continue on in the neverending spirit of artlessness.

Source

So if you ever read trans message boards or infographics or get even a little near Tumblr, you've heard that 41-47% of trans people have attempted suicide. Which is a hard number to put any veracity into. Assuming that the study was conducted in a somewhat representative matter, you're only polling people who self-identify as trans, and not all the unlucky souls who threw themselves in front of a train once they realized who they were and what that meant. Can't poll the dead or those in denial. But still. 47%. Big number, right?

I always talk about this when I talk about death, but I used to do this drug called DXM. It's a dissociative anesthetic, which means it makes you talk like a robot and feel like you're 8,000 miles from your body. It was scary stuff, because every time I took it I felt like I was dying, was convinced that I'd ingested some fragment of my own nullification. I looked it up and pieced it together: due to its effects on the NMDA receptors, my best guess is DXM simulates the mental processes that accompany death from hypoxia. I felt my own death, I saw the tunnel of blue light. I feel like I spoilered myself for that last big adventure.

Even still, there's something sexy, something frighteningly irresistible about ceasing to exist.

There's this feeling that I get, when I realize that the hormones are at best glacial in doing their work and my body is perhaps too incongruous to ever get over to the other side of the river Passing. This total, what-is-the-point desire to just kinda stop trying. With it comes the fucked-up fantasy of taking my own life. And sometimes it sends me to this depressive lay-on-the-ground type of space, but a lot of times I just feel darkly exuberant. Wallowing in my death ecstasy.

Because, honestly, it feels way less than 50:50 that I'll get to a point in my life where I get accepted as a woman by anyone beyond the one person who I love. (I'm going to change the name of this blog to "Sorry, Leigh.") The grim fear of being unpassable for me isn't street harassment, isn't employment discrimination. It's having completed 90% of my transition plan and being recognized as one of those awful euphemisms, as a "genetically male person who identifies as female." To have people give lip service to who I am while in their heart of hearts thinking of me as that quirky guy they know that gets uppity about pronouns. It's not the people who spit at me that I fear, in the end. It's the polite ones.

As a teen, going into wealthy suburbs as a black (enough) kid in a black hoodie, I got followed around shops and saw the micro-purse-clutchings. I'm quite painfully aware when I'm under the microscope. I hate the scrutiny, but I can't live this dumb sham anymore either. So thanatoxic thoughts have become this big release, the lottery ticket you buy on your way home, the magical thinking that gets me through the day. A dip in the destrudo jacuzzi. Even though I'm too vain for a fake-y suicide attempt and too scared of dying for a real one. Clutch your pearls, girls. This story isn't feeling like it's heading toward a happy ending.

Addendum: I wanted to name this Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, but it seemed awful grim, more than I could justify. I'm pretty sure it won't be my hand that takes my life, so don't get up in arms about it.

The Pure Lands

I was around the age of 22. New to sobriety, I was lost and scared, feeling the magnitude of my aloneness in the universe. As I sat on my bed, legs crossed, back resting on the headboard, I thought about the whole "higher power" bit from step two of Marijuana Anonymous and got to praying. This isn't a foxhole atheist story - I didn't pray to a deity, but to an ideal, to the embodiment of all the qualities I aspired to. A message addressed to the void. And in the process I felt a little prick of what I've come to understand as a religious, the kiss of the divine.



Every Buddha has their own Pure Land. Achieve enlightenment by popping pills. How to start? Most of the time, I'm too material for spirituality. Which I state as a disclaimer for how uncomfortable I am explaining this thing that I deep down need to explain. There's a moment, when taking my estrogen after once again escaping the clutches of testosterone, where I get that feel. Like I'm tuned into the heartbeat of the world, like there is a candle burning inside of me, impossible to extinguish. Something I don't have enough words to explain away. Something too powerful to ignore. In some way, that is how I know - not surmise, but know - that I'm a woman.

I recoil to say it, but it has a tinge of holiness to it, this whole process of trans-ing your sex. Like giving birth, it is painful and gross and dangerous - but still retains the essence of the ineffable, the irresistible power of creating life. In this moment, I want to shake every person who sees transition as superficial. How could they understand? "We know our gender as a revelation."

And I'll Never Get The Devil Outside Of Me

I've been eating like ~1400 (kilo)calories a day. Look, this post isn't about to break in a pro-ana direction or something. I like fat women. Y'know, when they don't happen to be me and built like John Candy.  I've got a spare tire that wouldn't be out of place on the back of a Grand Cherokee, and aaaaaaaaaaaaall my fat is in aaaaaaaaaaaaall the wrong places. Go go gadget anti-androgen!

I lifted weights for a few years, but I never really tried to lose weight. Let's tick down the reasons: I was worried about losing strength. Plus, it's really hard for me to lose weight because I need to get into a certain mindset and stay there. Worst of all, I was afraid that committing to ditching the fat would be this public act. Like, it would just be an embarrassing admission of the fact that I weighed 300lbs when I didn't want to, that I lacked the control over my body.

Now, I eat like a stereotype. Yogurt, rice cakes, fruit, and tomato soup. Having the diet of a Sex and the City character, like many of aspects of culturally acceptable femininity, both makes me feel a bit better and a bit worse. Like, I've assimilated! But also, I've been assimilated. So, is this me, or just a ruse to make myself feel better.

Anyway.

This is a bit messed up, but it feels liberating to reject my body. I spent years trying to just be all zen about having a body I didn't like, and in retrospect that all just feels like wasted time. Fuck that. Use your unhappiness. Make it work for you. Have the courage to kill the parts of yourself that you truly hate.

Pandora's Amphora

Been kind of a bitch this week. It is the kind of liberating experience that would make for a very uplifting public service announcement. "Be a dear, give 'em a sneer!" Or something?

I never call my girlfriend on being hormonal, even when I have just licked blood from her vagina. Worst case scenario, when she'll apologize to me for going to the Angry Cry Nebula, I'll just say "I understand." But now she feels quite at liberty to blame my feelings on hormones. It's like, oh, double standard, hon, but you do not know the hell you have earned. I think I may have demolished my high ground halfway through that last sentence, but fuck. Do you know how much it sucks to finally have your feelings back and then have your partner explain to you why they're irrelevant? (She can read this or not. Whatever.)

Apparently, Pandora's whole curious little kitten act? Yeah it, was with a jug, not a box. (Side note: mentioning the Curious Little Kitten totally makes me want to cry. I know!) Which kinda makes the whole metaphor different for me. Like, a box? Of course you're going to open it. You've got incentive! Boxes are what Christmas presents and mail-order dildos come in! And, for that reason, a box is more verboten than a jug. I wouldn't keep anything in a jug which I would mind being infested by frogs. Maybe that's why they kept hope in there? My 7th grade teacher, the incomparable Mark Klein, always told us that hope was left because it was the greatest evil of all. I like that.

I ordered some black lipstick on Amazon. The question before me: cyber goth or goth hippie? Either is exciting.