Those moments of hyper-awareness. When I am aware of this body of mine. Of what it is. Of what it is changing into. Of it growing into an adult woman's body. Of me being fully unprepared of dealing with this.
I was never prepared to grow up with an intersex body like this. For all of my life I have just been pretending it was either a male or a female body, even when the former was a lie, and the latter only a half-truth.
I can feel it now. My body. I can see the slender, feminine hands. I can feel my body respond exactly like a woman's body would. I'm a woman. Yet I'm also not. I can feel years of memories, of traumatic experiences fighting back against this notion. I can feel the pain of having to pretend that my body is that of a woman, even though I know that's not what I am. Even as it keeps transforming.
A puberty that takes decades, instead of a mere part of one. Nothing of this makes any sense. Yet it is the truth that I must accept. Somehow.
Even as I go through this, I must find ways to make money. Because I'm an adult. Because otherwise I'll likely die. I also must make myself see a doctor again. Because of the ascites. Because of the nausea and feeling sick. Because my body is transforming and changing in ways that may harm or kill me. Yet I cannot convince myself.
This is my body. This body is me. I can feel it so strongly. Soft and feminine. All of the masculine features I was told I had a lie.
Nobody around me can help me understand this body. I feel like a child in an adult's body. It's too soon, too early for me to be forced to grow up like this. Why did my body suddenly have to grow up like this? Why is everyone expecting me to be an adult?
On one hand this body of mine. This female body that's finally growing out of its teenage phase. On the other those fifteen... no, twenty-odd years of what surely must have been a nightmare, of me being trapped in a child's body, with adults telling me to grow up, to accept that I had to be a male, a teenage guy, no, a transsexual guy. The horrendous nightmare of endless physical examinations, of one medical judgement after another. Condemning me to be a guy. To be transsexual. To be something which I know I never was. Something which I now know that I could never have been.
My mind is tearing itself apart as it tries to make sense of what cannot possibly exist in reality. Of what cannot be held to be all of the truth in one's mind.
I'm an adult woman now. Yet I'm also a hermaphrodite. An adult hermaphrodite woman who was lied to for decades by doctors. By psychologists. By anyone who was supposed to have a clue about human physiology. About intersex. About stlarning transsexuality.
This must be what it feels like to finally wake up from a nightmare. One that has lasted for one's entire life.
Yet what to do next? I woke up to find myself alone, in a dark, cold room. In a world where my real identity doesn't exist and will likely not ever be acknowledged. Where I'm starting from scratch, it feels like. Outside it's dark and quiet. I must have a plan to deal with this outside world. Somehow I must find a way to exist in this world.
Can you help me?
Maya
1 comment:
Strange as it may sound, this identity is the one I've always known you by. You wear it gracefully. You always will be "you."
To me, that's a good person.
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