All too often life seems to be composed out of a collection of inevitabilities. Society being one of those things, and one's course through them. If one is lucky, one ends up on a boring path. With a standard issue healthy body, standard genetics, standard intelligence and growing up in a standard environment with standard friends, family, education and job prospects. This is a simple life, albeit without many personal challenges and opportunities to grow.
When I look back on my life so far, I really do think it'd be easier and briefer to list the things which were 'standard' for me, because everything else just had to be 'different' for some reason. I guess my appearance is pretty standard. Assuming I keep my clothes on, or at least a swimsuit. Just a normal looking Caucasian woman.
Obviously all of the physical, mental and sexual abuses that occurred since I was a young child are not 'standard issue'. Nor is me being a chimera, a hermaphrodite and intersex. Growing up in a world that worships binarism, growing up believing that one belongs to one part of this binary system, only to find out that one's curious puberty was the result of said chimaeric body, with the female side of the hybrid female/male stem cell lines ultimately asserting itself much stronger.
That's my reality. One of chimaeric bodies. Of the unique nature of the individual mind. The sickening awareness of how indoctrinated people in society are. Their delusions about binarism, with a binary gender, binary sex, of individuals belonging only to one side. That one's body down to one's very brain has to follow one of either pattern. With it the complete annihilation of my existence.
Their reality is not my reality.
They call it post-traumatic stress disorder. What it does is reshape your brain itself. Reform it forever. Change your view of the world so that you'll never feel safe or comfortable again. Try as you might, you're basically an alien trying to integrate into human society. You'll never get all of the nuances, even when your brain doesn't freak out over some perceived threat and starts dragging your mind back into reliving the past with flashbacks which feel more real than reality itself.
The reality I want to believe in is one where it is possible to feel safe. Where every person is treated and regarded as an individual. Not classified by their reproductive organs or convictions about their state in the Binarist system.
Where a person like myself can actually get medical help. Help that's still needed, as the recurrent traumas remind me of. To have it acknowledged that I'm a chimera, that I'm a hermaphrodite, that I do in fact have 'male' and 'female' reproductive organs. Those are things that have happened and which are more or less in my past now. But beyond this? I had to go through so many different channels to just get those things investigated and acknowledged.
In many ways I feel like an FGM victim. Although my vagina wasn't mutilated by doctors, I was born without even the small hole that'd allow fluids to drain. Instead my abdomen had to become a sanitary pad, while I apparently am denied even the option of intercourse, painful as it may be. Trying to get the reconstructive surgery to have anything done here at all has led to nothing for over a decade and counting. Instead I'm reminded over and over by doctors that I do not belong in their reality. I'm just a disorder, a freak, a rare disease. Something that isn't their problem.
What is my reality?
Having my mind regularly torn apart by another PTSD episode? Struggling to make ends meet every month? Dream of finishing my autobiography one day and this solving all my problems? Keep telling myself that life is worth living? Drift away from my body into a less painful version of reality?
Recently, in an online group I was hanging out in, a guy told about us about this one tenant who had lived in a flat his parents owned. When he and his mother went to check up on a tenant who was behind on her rent, they found out that she had committed suicide. Weeks earlier. He'd never forget the sight and smells in the bathroom where she had OD'ed on some pills. She was only in her early twenties.
We found ourselves wondering about what her life must have been like for things to end in such a gruesome fashion. It was a poor area of the city, so likely to do with poverty, crime and drug use. People who find themselves captured by a reality that's too bleak to face sober, until one day they either escape from it, or have the bleakness forever capture their heart.
Reality. Dreams. Wishing. Trauma. Pain. Life. Longing.
Much like butterflies we all wish to fly around freely. But some of us are captured. Trapped under glass. Pinned to bits of cork with cruel needles through our bodies. Prey for hungry predators.
Unless you're on the boring path, who is going to tell you how to play the game?
Maya
1 comment:
👍👏🤗
Your value, at least to me, is in how you communicate your experience. I hate the fact that your past has required you to apply your intellect to your history, dividing it between what was and what is ahead.
You shouldn't have to be as strong as you are.
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