I was a woman far before I was ready to understand what it meant to be a woman; my sense of identity was shattered. I invested no time in reassembling this fragmented self. I left shards strewn across my psyche, I even sharpened them. Masochism became my closest companion, and the thrill of degradation replaced the thrill of sex. In my adolescence I exploited my sexuality. In adulthood I repressed it. I denied it. I willed it out of existence. I attempted to destroy it. I have spent a decade chasing Death.

I.  Latency


I have always been small inside, like an infant sleeping in the carcass of an adult. I was flesh and blood, but only an implication of life and not life itself. I was seeking to regress not into the womb, but into nothingness, into Death.  To lust was to desire something from life, and so I condemned it. To eat was to further the inquisition of life, and so I condemned it. I was a woman seeking to exorcize the life that possessed her body. It was a Crusade against my flesh, against the inherent power of my gender.

II. Repression

See the pale tributaries of my veins, see them as they coil around my bones. See as I declare victory over Biology, as I taint the body's meticulous drive for life and instruct it to seek Death. Watch as my womb withers. My heart slows. My body chills. My skin becomes a field of blossoms; little blue and purple subcutaneous hemorrhages nourished by my rotting organs. Make my thighs tremble, they are too weak; implore them to spread and reveal nothing. My body is broken and submissive. In its quest to survive, it will eat itself. Watch me. I become like an ourobourus. See me. Do I resemble a child or a ghost?

III. Genital; Puberty to Death

The Death Drive inhabits me, still. It settled in the marrow of my bones and there remains trapped. I am becoming a woman for the second time; soiled, sullen, ripe, and wounded. I am inhabited by hunger and lust. I am reborn. I am full. I am flesh. I am sex. I am an incarnation of Willendorf still hollowed out by shame. I trace my body like braille, dwelling on the rise and fall of my pulse: What does it mean; is this a victory or a failure?

Obedient Shame

I want to arouse you, and in that process, achieve communion. I want you to know that the disgust you feel, we share and I have given it to you. I want to summon in you the same shame that I have, and for it to inhabit your flesh like a possession.  I want you to recognize my shame as it exists in you; the self-conscious fear of original sin, and of being permanently and irrevocably tainted. I want it to spread in you and make you suddenly aware of yourself and whatever questionable material your character has been whittled out of. I want this shame to permeate you, and I want you to realize that you hate how it feels, too.

I want to tease you with the vulnerability of flesh. I want it to excite whatever traces of primitive desire still exist in you. I want to make you want, and for that wanting to envelope you. Excite you. Tempt you like all disobedient women were meant to. But the liberation of lust will not last. It will be robbed by faceless figures that tinker in the no-man's land between Ego and Id. These figures will become your all-devouring mothers, wrapping their legs around you in a strangled embrace. They will teach you how to feel, and it will be whispered with rotten breath. The loneliness of realizing you are a sexual being in a Puritanical world, will fester into guilt. The loneliness of believing you are dirty, will consume you. You will take up arms against your own flesh and condemn it for being so soft and human. Your cannibalistic matriarchs will teach you shame, and only the shame will survive for it is too bitter to swallow.

Regenerate

re·gen·er·a·tion (r-jn-rshn)

n.

1. The act or process of regenerating or the state of being regenerated.

2. Spiritual or moral revival or rebirth.

3. Biology Regrowth of lost or destroyed parts or organs.

Some people are unable to carry the weight of their own presence on this Earth. It drives them mad. It stirs up something sad and angry in them because they cannot reconcile with the futility of their existence, or their inability to prevent whatever danger lies ahead. Their perceived powerlessness reaps them of their power. There are others, though. People who aspire to do the seemingly impossible and transform their lives. Renew their lives. Perform alchemy and turn their worn existence into something reborn. Who is right? Is it foolish to empathize with the latter because a life of darkness has grown burdensome? Is it naive to assume that someone can shuffle off the carcass of an ineffective life and build themselves a new one? Is it only a wild imagination that tells me creation and destruction are one in the same, and that as we stand upon the precipice of something disastrous, that new and better and more beautiful things shall flourish from its ash? 

I want to be naive. I want to be foolish. I want to have my head hopelessly buried in the clouds, because I have been residing in the anticipation of my own grave for far too long. It is about time that I start anticipating life instead. I am yet to really take my first breaths. I was born dead inside because I didn't let myself survive. For some reason I came into this world with a preternatural fear of it. I was born stillborn and walked for nineteen years that way, suspended like a ghost between life and death. I have never truly lived and life has never truly managed to penetrate the callous of my body until now. It hurts to finally let something seep in. It hurts to have finally made an incision in my flesh narrow enough for a sliver of life to come through. It stings the way your first glimpse of sunlight stings. 

It is true that it was pain that made me finally want to live again. It is true that the thing I have spent so long fortifying myself against has proven itself to be a gift. My fear of being hurt is far more frightening than the hurt itself. In fact, hurt has been illuminating. Pain has allowed me to experience a broader spectrum of emotions, like joy and anticipation, and the inexplicable pang of mourning. I never mourned. I have never mourned any of my losses because it frightened me to be vulnerable enough to mourn. I never knew though that pain was not the end...there is something after it. I suppose I always assumed that if I dared to feel something unpleasant, that I would remain trapped in that place forever. On the contrary though, there is a lot to be had after pain, because indeed pain does end. Not only does it end, but it is integral or growth. It makes me sad to think how many years of growth I have missed out on because I have become such a cunning evader of pain. I am still a little girl inside. The calendar does not tell my age, but how long it has been since I left. 

I cannot wait to see what might lie ahead or me, even if it still feels odd to hope at all. Optimism is uncharted territory, but I am glad for it. I am still terrified, but there is something new mixed in that terror. I am excited to have a life. I am excited to meet new people. I am excited to be independent. I am excited to have my own place. I am excited to travel. I am excited to learn how to accept a healthy body and a healthy lifestyle. I am excited to be challenged. I am excited to grow. I am excited to love again. I am excited. I want to seize this. If this is naive, so be it. I'll embrace it.

Retrospective

“I went outside to smoke a cigarette today; it was pitch black and cold. The rain has not stopped in several days, so I feel like I am trapped in the same dreary moment that keeps looping into infinity — no break in the downpour and no sign of daylight because I sleep until the moon crawls out.

I was standing there with my cigarette surveying everything. The rain, the puddles, the constant swoosh of cars on a wet road, the absence of life. It was like I was the only person in the world for a moment, because all of the animals were hiding and all of the people were warm and dry inside of their homes. I felt this incredible emptiness at that realization, an emptiness that actually felt a little painful because it was so deep.

It was as if the literal emptiness of my stomach was drawing from the deeper reservoir in my soul. I wanted to keel over and curl up, because I ached from my heart to my gut. The world seemed so vast and so intimidating and I was unsure of my place in it. I looked over at my front door and realized, really realized, that I lived alone and what that meant. I was alone. I had already gone all day without speaking a word, and could go many more because I had no one to come home to and no one to tell my day to. That was lonely and I felt it in my body like a dull ache.”

Corporeal.

“Adam and Eve covered themselves in shame because the vulnerability of their flesh was too heavy to bear. I exist this way, reaching for whatever meagre resources my surroundings offer, to hide that flesh. I hide in shrinking. I reduce the shame inherent in my flesh by reducing the flesh itself. I shrink the area it occupies. I break down and destroy the most human part of myself, my skin. I don’t like being human. I don’t like being.”

Maturity.

This is an assignment I wrote while in treatment. My dietitian was curious why I had such an aversion to weight gain and to femininity. She actually asked if I was trans, or if I would rather be a man than a woman, to which I replied I would rather be neither. I would rather be a child. Anyway, this was a journel assignment I had been given on the connotations of “weight”.

“Flesh. In German the word is Fleisch, it means meat. In Spanish its Carne, carnal, something dirty and primal to be lusted after and repented for. Flesh is expansive and I resent it; its soft and so human and so vulnerable. Adam and Eve covered themselves in shame because the vulnerability of their flesh was too heavy to bear. I exist this way, reaching for whatever meagre resources my surroundings offer, to hide that flesh. I hide in shrinking. I reduce the shame inherent in my flesh by reducing the flesh itself. I shrink the area it occupies. I break down and destroy the most human part of myself, my skin. I don’t like being human. I don’t like being. I am self-hatred trapped in a flesh cage. I hate myself right down to a molecular level and I want it to suffer. I can’t hate myself sufficiently and be healthy. Be full. Be full-figured. Nourished. So I must continue this assault against my flesh.

The Venus of Willendorf was a fertility Idol. Prehistoric pornography. Full breasts and full hips with a pendulous belly; she is an abundance of flesh and of health proudly flaunting her ability to conceive and bear life with her body. It is demanded in her heaviness. I am repulsed and fascinated by this piece of art. I live in fear of becoming ripe like her, full like her. It terrifies me far more than death. Gaining weight and watching as the borders of my skin expand, means watching as the hatred I hold in my body, expands with it. Losing weight manages that hatred and keeps it at bay. It protects me, even if only on a superficial level, from having to exist like her. From having to exist at all.”