Self-image versus reality

 What do you really look like? It's not a question which many people struggle with. After all, we grow up with ourselves and see this face and body every single day of our lives. Some of us could probably even draw their own face from memory. Yet despite this what really hits me more and more as I try to be more... extroverted, expressive and I guess myself, I find myself constantly running into the realisation that I do not really know what I look like, and that this is a major problem.

The clearest indication of this problem was probably in 2007, when I could literally see my reflection in the mirror shifting between what I apparently imagined I look like and at least part of the actual reflection. Experiences like those remind me of just how much our experience of 'reality' is coloured by our interpretation of this reality. Everything we see, touch, hear, taste and smell is filtered through these layers of experiences and memories. And traumas.


I was supposed to look male, but as it turned out I did not as the people around me simply do not see me as such. My body has been further hammering that home the past six years by rapidly continuing this female puberty so that the curves and such are even more pronounced female. And yet I find myself struggling to make sense of any of this. Of course it doesn't help that part of my memories are of this 'male' part of my life, when it was assumed that was what my body was, and I merged that into my self-image because it made sense.

Then decades of doubt and uncertainty, as my environment struggled to see me as male, me finding out about being intersex and a hermaphrodite, and yet the constant efforts by those professionals who were supposed to have my back medical and psychologically to make me accept and believe that somehow my body was actually male, but I just wanted to see my body as being female.

Cue the 'autoparagynaecophilia' nonsense and the brainwashing attempts with the 'transgender' thing. Many years of trying to figure out what this 'feeling male' or 'feeling female' thing even was supposed to be about, even as my body got thus classified into a kind of superposition of both male and female. So many hours that I spent in front of a mirror, looking at my reflection and trying to make sense of what I thought I saw.


Having the feedback from people whom I felt I could trust to be as impartial and objective as possible was incredibly helpful during that period, as it provided some kind of lifeline and form of stability. That I wasn't deluding myself into seeing my body as something which it wasn't. Here I felt disturbed by the idea from mental healthcare professionals and doctors, but also from some regular people that it would be okay to 'just be what I felt like'.

To me that never really made sense, because I never really felt like anything but confusion. Maybe if I was a case like those who suffer from the notion that they need to have certain limbs or genitals removed or resized, tucked and nipped because seeing their body in the 'before' condition makes them unhappy. Have they ever really seen their own body, I wonder.


When I go through the motions of setting up a new recording studio as recently and I find myself confronted with having to look at myself, and listening to audio samples of me talking... that's tough. I really notice how I have some days when I feel fine with how I look, whereas other days I can only see some kind of horrible freak which barely looks human. Is that weird?

Even today, there are still medical professionals who would classify me as being 'transgender' or having some other psychological disorder. Regardless of the state of my body. Clearly their opinion is irrelevant. Yet where there should be clarity, where I should be able to just look at myself in the mirror and see only my body there, what I really see are those decades of confusion and trauma.


A body is so much more than just 'male' or 'female'. That's a nonsensical simplification, really. Your body is you. Every part of it is a bit of your past, present and what will carry you into your future. When I look at myself in the mirror, I cannot just see a body, but I see all those years reflected back at me. Although the most recent memories and reflections are much better, some days I mostly see those bad years and memories reflected back at me.

When this dissonance between reality and one's self-image gets too strong, only dissociation can follow. Where one's mind tries to protect itself against this inability to make sense of the body and what it is or means. It's just a thing, a robotic contraption that moves the mind around. Something that doesn't mean anything and whose reflection is irrelevant.


Perhaps me endeavouring to keep doing video logs and more is a good thing, in that it may slowly help to rebuild that healthy self-image that is so damaged and tattered. Yet what would be simple tasks for others, like watching back footage and editing it suddenly turns into a minor retraumatisation event as I have to relive all those memories that seeing my body and hearing my voice bring back.

You can't escape yourself, I guess.


Maya