I don't recall traditional family-social role-play ("playing house") as an interest — likely because it was not attractive to any of my playmates — but I do clearly recall startling myself with at least one phenomenon. Around age 9, I found myself inventing a quite sophisticated backstory, along with individual characterizations, for the family structure and dynamics of a group of LEGO figurines, who were (as best I can recall) pilots, navigators, and counselors on deep-interstellar-space capital-intercept vessels. I had only “Space”-type LEGO, you see, since I never asked for any other type (although I profoundly envied a close friend’s medieval and town sets, I was also powerfully obsessed with science fiction and space opera). I vividly remember how, in one scenario, the captain (“Jonathon”), who had lost his only son in a poorly-executed military action, was faced with the task of counseling a subordinate who was the sole survivor (and a chief culpable party) of some colossal tactical slip-up (I don’t recall what it was, precisely). I must have lost most of a long summer Saturday afternoon thinking about the bleakness of the situation, writing scripts in my head for meaningful, cathartic, but succinct addresses “Jonathon” could deliver. It seguéd back and forth between character elaboration and reflections on the nature of the divine and mortality, but I dedicated hours and hours to building the personality of this compassionate, expressive, military father, facing a great grief of his own and building from it a gift of meaning for this other poor, shattered fool who had caused such suffering yet lived, and had to come to terms with his future.
Ironically, I never really explored theatrical drama or creative writing at all in my childhood, except for playing the gay kid in a production of Fame, my senior year of high school. It’s a pity, really.
The following segment of this journal entry is woefully outdated in light of coming to understand the fragmented nature of my consciousness and personality throughout much of my life. I’ll set it apart, here, and discuss the pieces ...
Again, I really didn’t do the projection thing with dolls; I could never have a tea party with stuffed animals (which, unlike dolls, I had plenty of). I imagine, though, that I could have had not other aspects of my psyche intervened. You see, from age 4 until my early twenties I had a horribly, horribly bittersweet relationship with cute … effigies: Stuffed animals, dolls, little characters and figurines … in short, representations of living things.In fact, I absolutely “did the projection thing”--I did it compulsively and powerfully, and still do. However, the Spectre of Consistency (also in its capacity as strict enforcer of masculine gender norms, specifically the limiting of expressive affection) reliably, swiftly, and destructively intervened.
My attachment would follow a very pronounced, predictable, dramatic trajectory. Immediately upon encountering any such thing (a fond/horrid example is an 18" or so plush white rabbit received for Easter, one year), I would be overcome with affection for the … creature. I loved cute things. I always have. I do still to this day.
However, this surge of warmth and attachment would swiftly hit a wall. Something in me [that's the Spectre, of course] would look closely, and see the artificiality of the item, the glass eye, the nylon whiskers, the uniform whiteness and acrylic shine to the [sweet, soft, cuddlable] fur. And try as I might, I couldn’t split-off a bit of myself to make an “other” to drive and inhabit the [awfully, gut-wrenchingly hollow] form. I tried make-believe, once or twice, pretending that the creature was alive. The hurt was only magnified. For, you see, as soon as the detached, assessing eye finished its pass, there would be a leadenness to my attachment, as the two perspectives confronted each other and the emotional attachment would bow its head to the rational detachment. The toy could never love me back; all the love I could ever pour into it would be gone, would never return, multiplied.“Rational detachment” ... UGH: What a miserable crock. The ways I savaged myself at that age are horrifying. The only thing worse is how little the rest of me defended myself.
It was my original heartbreak. There were no corners of “me” that were out of conscious scrutiny that I could allow to be externalized into the toy to receive and return my affection.There’s a degree of rationalization, here. In retrospective clarity, it was far more pervasive than simply being unable to project; I could not permit myself to have any valid target for (what I now see as healthy) sentimentality or affection.
There were no “magical” sources of creativity from which ideas could spontaneously appear without clear origin, plausibly attributable to a stuffed companion. I was viciously introspective, even then (the earliest I can recall this phenomenon must be 1st or 2nd grade, when I was 6).Describing actions of the Spectre here, again, along with the blade. Petra was reduced to Alder by age 5, and further pared-away into shreds and the bar of light by 14 or 15. And so I diminished.
I had already at that age encountered and internalized the idea of nihil novi sub sole (though not in the vulgate, directly), and ferociously followed my own ideas to their sources in memory or immediate sensation, in play or musing. Something in this sense is connected to a feeling that only living things could actually respond to me. So in a matter of minutes, or less, I would fall deeply, wholly in love with a beautiful, adorable thing, "discover" it to be an empty, nonliving object, and crash straight into grief, mourning the loss of the perceived lovable being which turned out not to exist. It was awful.It was awful, but it was not nearly as rational or causally-sequential as this skewed representation suggests. There was no “discovery” ... rather, there was a conflict of internal states and one simply violently crushed the other. And then it rationalized the savagery away. History’s authors, and all that.
Around age 11 I think I finally articulated this in its completeness to my mother, who never again gave me something that could trigger it. I had been aware of it, partially or wholly, since the middle of elementary school. It wasn’t until I was 12 or 13, though, that I suddenly realized that what it meant was that I wanted a friend and partner whom I could love deeply and expressively, and that I wanted children to love and nurture. It would be another decade before I would realize clearly how central compassion and love were to my mind and heart.
I was a very emotionally sensitive child. I thought SO MUCH about other people, about thinking, about feeling, about what I felt and what others felt (which for simply ages seemed utterly opaque). I dwelt for very, very long periods on the idea of identity. I struggled for years to discern my identity as something lasting and permanent. I was very afraid to play-act parts because in the adoption of synthetic roles and personae, I lost myself. I remember spending months, cumulatively, gazing at my face in mirrors and photographs, trying to find me.
Face paints horrified and terrified me; I resisted any and all opportunities to wear them. Halloween was a source of unbelievable internal emotional torture. I don’t really remember when it was that I realized that other children did not seem to be like that. It would have been in the elementary years, perhaps around 8. I think the best way to summarize is that I was intensely aware that I did not know who or what I was, and it was a source of massive fear and anxiety when I was forced to confront it. All the nightmare-triggering scenes or ideas that I can recall from my elementary school years center on the subversion of identity and body.
At some point, around age 9, I began to realize that part of why costuming and facepainting frightened me was that my body was my only external access to my self. If I couldn’t see my body, then I had only thoughts inside my head to know myself by, and those were clearly changeable and uncertain. I think this is the first conscious relation in my mind of identity and body. I think I started to pay attention to my body, consciously, then. I may have first determined around this time that the male genitalia were an impractical and awkward piece of tissue that was more inconvenience than anything else. I believe a sense of both aesthetic and practical streamlining played into this assessment, and defensibility was also considered. This was, in fact, before I really knew there even were other genital configurations. I hadn’t even thought about variation (“bodies were bodies were bodies,” right?). I just saw it as a piece of peculiar baggage that served no clear purpose, sort of like the “appendix” I’d recently heard about. In retrospect, I must have seemed a rather amusing little boy.
I began to experiment erotically at 12, after learning in sex-ed class what all that equipment was for. I must have spent weeks trying to orgasm via something roughly equivalent to very determined Kegel exercises (I succeeded, explosively, at last, when a falling throw pillow brushed the glans and my brain shut-down). It honestly had never occurred to me to use my hand.
I felt plenty of attraction to women and other girls. At the time I hadn’t quite begun to explore and question my sense of identification — although I’d preferred the company of girls to that of boys since I was 9. I certainly felt attracted to girls, although I don’t know how much of it was erotic, to begin with. That came along, too, eventually, but a fair amount of it was, at first, simply longing to be a part of the socializing, the friendly gossip, even the cliques. I consciously yearned to be able to wear what I consciously termed “more interesting” clothing (though the correct adjectives would have been “delicate”, “elegant”, and “feminine”), and not to feel so expected to be more athletic. Even then I had some sense that the grass probably wasn’t much greener, but I was so fed-up with the gender roles that made no sense at all to me, the exclusion from social communication I could have thrived within, the demand of masculinity, bleh. I didn’t want it, and I saw how other girls weren’t suffering it, so I was envious. It wasn’t for another year or so that I would develop a crush or two.
So, age 14, summer before high school, I overhear bits of a trailer for an episode of Geraldo, and it communicates that “Transsexuals are women trapped in men’s bodies, and use surgery and hormone therapies to ‘correct’ their bodies”. This sets some gears turning. Slowly, at first, but persistently. Finally, I try stuffing my chest, traumatize myself badly2, and discard that notion without much exploration. After the chest-stuffing I still take a chance and speak with my mother about “transsexuality”. She tells me she loves me regardless of how I develop sexually, and cautions me not to agitate myself too much, that adolescence is a time of confusing change and questioning, and to give it all time before concluding one thing or another. I interpret this as “nah, probably not, don’t worry about it” and happily shove aside the WEIRD, NOT HEALTHY label I’d been toying with.
High school, however, involved much more sexual identity and social complication than I expected. I think I’ll skip the narrative of that phase for this entry and jump straight to the next big step in my body image. It’s during my senior year, and I’m part of the Academic Decathlon team, which entails a lot of fun group study sessions at various member’s homes. These are the first real co-ed casual, unchaperoned events in which I’ve participated and the first mixed-gender friend group I’m an integral part of. My pedagogical ability, wide-ranging familiarity with all sorts of interesting historical, cultural, and technological trivia, and generally sweet, friendly temperament make me (as far as I can tell) very popular within this group, and people start looking beyond the academic, oddball shell I’ve raised to detach myself from the physicality of my [attractive,] teenage, miserably-masculinized body. They start actually befriending me.
Having a semi-eidetic memory for models and trivia, I have the luxury of sitting-out various review parts of the study sessions. This is good, because the one of my best female friends that I’d developed a crush on is also on the team. I’m having difficulty focusing on the tasks at hand, with her present and working with us, so I head off to a back room and dig-out some quirky electronica3 and try-out his biiiig stereo system in the dark.
I’m also having a difficult time with depression, and have been employing meditative techniques to help relax and direct my thoughts. I lie on the floor and fill up my body with light. Then there’s a surge of frustration, and (deep in my focused state) I set the world around me aflame. I feel, and almost hear, the conflagration, which is simultaneously gratifying and unsettling, so I extinguish the flames. Then follows a wave of disgust at my own body, feelings of dissatisfaction, and the familiar wish to wear a conventionally-feminine form.
So I take control of the light and guide it around, reducing muscle and bone in my arms, hands, and shoulders, widening my hips, searing-away my beard and body hair, inverting and smoothing-over my genitalia, and finally raising a little more flesh upon my chest. It’s an amazing feeling. Lying on a soft carpet, I’ve physically spaced-out my limbs and reclined my head so no external sensations contradict the internal perceptions, and it’s as if it’s all real. And it feels … comfortable. Correct [I believe the term I'd use today is “congruent”]. I don't feel arousal at all, which strikes me then as a little strange since I'm accustomed to fantasizing about my body undergoing such transformations followed by romantic or occasionally sexual fantasies.
I don’t know quite what to think, confused by my own response. Eyes closed, I turn the image around in my mind, my viewpoint spiraling away from my head. I can’t see my face. I wouldn’t say my image is nude, but neither do I have clothes, so I add-in the detail of what I’m wearing, adjusted for the body shape I'm now perceiving. I can feel the clothes on me … on my arms … on my breasts … on my legs … my feet wiggling in the socks. It’s all so … real. The sheer unfamiliarity of this feeling — comfort and contentment, instead of an erotic thrill — starts to frighten me a little, and I push the image away, but I don’t know how! I don’t know where my hips are supposed to go! I don’t know where my shoulders — my physical shoulders — really are. I don’t … I don’t want to flatten my chest! At this point, a little bit of panic starts to creep in, so I open my eyes and sit up, looking around and breaking the trance (as, in retrospect, I’d describe it). I feel my body, literally patting myself down, and stand up, trying to clear my head. I feel exhausted, and close to tears.
The sequence of thoughts and feelings, above, took maybe a minute or two to play-out, and was (unlike most of the experiences I recount) mostly devoid of an internal monitor, so much of the “dramatization” of the narrative feels excessively detailed, pushing raw feelings and images I can still clearly recall into words that don’t really capture their essence (but do so better than anything else). I wasn’t thinking in my normal sense throughout this; it was a different sort of consciousness.
What this left me with was a feeling of real uncertainty. I began to wonder seriously if I’d been ignoring something important (duh). I started to think much, much more clearly about gender as something separate from sexuality and other eroticism. I began to explore what I actually felt about living within a masculinized body -- of which I’d been in near-complete denial for several years at that point.
1 [this footnote is an orphan; apparently I was discussing how I had fallen-away from the Catholic church at age 11, but those thoughts ended-up deleted? Odd. Perhaps it was lost in the manual conversion from Textile.] I understood what Confirmation would ultimately entail, and I was having none of it — I wasn’t going to go falsely profess faith I did not hold as part of a socially-valued religious ceremony; it was wrong, the thought made me extremely uncomfortable, and my parents accepted this.
2 It was so … nice to see, but so glaringly artificial. Whoa. I honestly never drew a connection between my stuffed-animal trauma and the costuming trauma and the horrible-tissue-inserts-of-doom trauma before. This is why I’m writing this journal, I guess.
3 Actually, I think it was Peter Gabriel’s Passion, the concept album based on the soundtrack he recorded for Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
