still trapped under the skin (with everyone else)
All these months later and Under the Skin is still lodged uncomfortably inside me. Never has a film left such an indelible impression on me. I don’t want to see it again. I don’t think I need to; I can close my eyes and still see it playing in my head.


They say it gets better and for some it gets much better and for others it doesn’t get better at all and for me it’s gotten a little better but not that much better. I’m still trapped between the past and the present, sad about the life I never got to have and still can’t have. I’m a 23-year-old who wants youthful exuberance and adventure, nights on the town, drinking and dancing and being seen and loving someone and being loved in a place where people are young and alive, and I’m a 38-year-old who wants calm and quiet and stability, someone to cook meals with and curl up on the couch with and just occupy the same space with sometimes.
For me, 2014 was largely about grieving, and trying to accept that the transition I once envisioned and dreamed of having for myself will never be the transition that I actually get. it doesn’t mean that I failed, or that the life I have doesn’t have value. I didn’t and it does. It’s just not what I pictured once upon a time, and there’s grieving to be done for the life I wanted and don’t get to have.
This is true for all of us but I think being trans gives you a particular kind of understanding of it: Who we are in our hearts is not summed up by who others see on the surface when they look at us, but our experiences do shape who we are and the experiences we get to have are shaped by who others see when they look at us. Their perceptions of us, their understanding of us, determine our options and influence the way we can interact with them. I have spent a long, long time feeling cut off from the world of experiences I felt I should be able to occupy; standing on the outside, looking in.

But of course I understand that this feeling of being an outsider is part of the experience of being human, that in some ways, the feeling of alienation I often feel so acutely could be said to connect me to others as much as it cuts me off from them.
I think Under the Skin (which I first wrote about in April of last year) is about the ways in which all of us are limited and trapped by the societal baggage that comes along with what others see when they look at us, how these perceptions give us or deny us opportunities, how these perceptions lend us or deny us positions of power. As a trans woman, I find the film almost cruel in the cold precision with which it lays out for me all the things I wanted that I don’t get to have and all the things I don’t want that I am required to deal with. The things I wanted but can’t have: The way Laura is seen and accepted as a woman. The way she is visible and desirable on a dance floor. The things I can’t get away from: The way the strangeness of her experience and her body interferes with her attempts to actually connect with people. The way she can observe but not really participate. The way she is hated and attacked as a woman even as she cannot really inhabit the experiences of the woman she decides she wants to try to be.
One year ago right now, I was heading to Thailand where I had facial feminization surgery. I wanted what people see on the surface of me when they look at me to more closely match the person I know I am under the skin, so that I would be more consistently perceived and accepted and treated as that person. And I don’t regret doing that at all. Now, when I look in the mirror, or take a photo of myself from straight ahead, I feel like I can sometimes just barely see myself looking back. But as much as I hoped that others would see me, too, very often they don’t. I’m still misgendered, not seen as a “real woman,” by strangers on the street and even by people I try to love.
Sometimes it is hard not to lose all hope.








(The comic is by Tresenella, and I found it in this article, What It’s Really Like Dating as a Transgender Woman by Brynn Tannehill.)
Today Masha emailed me a link to this piece called Depp and Desire by Jenny Diski. Masha wrote, “Thought this might resonate with you.” She thought right.
Diski writes of the feelings brought up by looking at a photo of Johnny Depp and Kate Moss together in the 90s:
When I was young, but old enough to have discovered that I was desirable, I would sometimes see a face at a party, in the pub, in the street, and it would sledgehammer me. Sometimes, if the situation was right, I would do something about it, make myself known, available. It was and is called attraction, and I didn’t think about it very much. It was just what happened. Sometimes you are attracted to a face, sometimes someone is attracted to you. There isn’t always a matching response, and then there would be a slight moment of regret, and I’d get on with whatever I was doing. If it worked both ways, and other things were equal, we would get together, go for a walk, a meal, or perhaps skip the formalities and spend the night with each other. Maybe something else would happen and we would have an affair that lasted, weeks, months, very occasionally years. It wasn’t the only way I got involved with men, but it was the most thrilling. The sparking of desire and then fulfilling it.
A shaft, as of Cupid arrow in the heart, opening in me a memory of something, some feeling, ache, shock in the chest. The old remembered remnants of youthful desire.
I am 67. And I found myself filled with – well, something like grief. It must have been the grief of an old woman remembering youth and desire, when it hit you out of the blue, and was returned, and knowing it was possible and necessary to assuage it. I was suddenly overcome by the visual recollection of youthful sexuality beaming out from the couple. Someone once said to me with tears in his eyes on his 60th birthday, ‘No one will ever fall in love with me again.’ I stopped myself from saying sharply ‘That’s all right, no one ever has so far’, as a kind of punishment for what I took to be his drunken, mawkishness, which, even if true, really needed only a wry smile, not tears. I was in my forties then and not very tolerant of sentimentality. The moment of grief I felt looking at the picture of Moss and Depp also needed the wry smile, not tears. When I was fifty I met The Poet, who is the same age as me. We had each left it until the last minute to find the relationship of our lives. Before that neither of us thought of ourselves as finally committed to a relationship, although we had had marriages and children. Our living happily ever after together, at such a late stage in our lives, is something we both smile at as improbable. It still surprises us, but it works. I don’t really know why. I came across something new, when we met, that both took in and transformed the youthful desire; we had the attraction but built a relationship on top of it that made the already but not quite diminished possibility at my age of looking at someone else in a room, wanting them, seeing it mirrored, and doing something about it, a voluntary surrender thereafter on my part. It’s possible you can’t surrender completely to age and settled love. Perhaps you have to grieve a little – to look at a photo of a pair of lovers in the midst of an passionate affair and feel a pang but also a smile for the chances you won’t have and wouldn’t take anyway, and for the loss of the possibility of raw desire being reciprocated by a stranger.
Bindi, at 67, is grieving for the things she’s lost. At 38, I’m grieving for the things I have never had, the things that ended before they even had a chance to begin, the things I can’t stop wanting. That sense of desirability Bindi describes. The mutual fulfillment of attraction. But still I try to remain hopeful about finding love, now or, as Bindi found it, later in life, and not let the bitterness swallow me whole.

(image associated with Night in the Woods)
There’s a woman named Emma who is trans who makes Youtube videos about transition…
…and when I watch her videos, there are the two selves inside me. There is the one who takes joy in her beauty and her success, who hears the truth in what she says about revealing our true selves to the world. And there is the shriveled, sad, needy self who compares Carolyn to Emma, who thinks, “It’s easy for you to say these things, people see you as the woman you are. People look at you and see you as who you know you are under the skin. Your transition should have been my transition, too. I want it.” But it’s not my transition. I went to great lengths in pursuit of it but I don’t get to have it.
But again, so many of us in so many ways are denied the lives we wanted, the lives we might have felt should by rights be ours. That doesn’t make me less human. I just hate that this pain turns me inward, it makes me selfish, it makes me focus on the things I yearn for and don’t have, when what I want now is to be looking outward, open to the possibility of real connection, ready to give love rather than thinking about how much I want love from others. But the grief is also sometimes what keeps my heart open and alive and yearning. It’s when I give up, give in to the bitterness, accept the way things are and stop wanting anything else, that I’ve lost.
I do think that love can help save me. To know that someone I love looks at me and sees me and loves me for the woman I am under the skin.
And don’t we all want that? To feel like we are seen and recognized and loved as our true selves?
Under the Skin is a ruthless film. It offers no consolation, no sense of hope. It extracts the pieces of my life with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel and lays them before me as if to say to me: this is just the way things are, and all your hopes and dreams are as nothing before these hard scientific facts.
And what that does is it makes me angry. It makes me so angry. And anger can be productive, if channeled properly. It makes me want to say to the world, “Fuck you for trying to define me by what you think you see when you look at me. Fuck you for trying to make me feel lesser–like less of a woman, less than human. I’ll keep showing you: I’m human to the fucking core.”
Notes
yih liked this uehl liked this
thepilgrums reblogged this from agameofme
thepilgrums liked this
mercuriousness liked this fierce-imaginings liked this
sagespeaks-blog1 reblogged this from agameofme
wojit liked this
kaijuvsgiantrobotsvsme liked this
babybishiebolshie liked this
babybishiebolshie reblogged this from agameofme
fireflys-locket liked this
hectorsguitar liked this
sunny-satellites liked this
ms-awesomeface liked this
nancynarcolepsy liked this
feitclub reblogged this from agameofme and added:
I haven’t seen Under The Skin yet (did it even come to Japan?) but once again Carolyn writes beautifully about herself...
miirkitten liked this
transsisterradio liked this
murderblonde liked this
fuu-dog-treats liked this
mashatupitsyn liked this
amberhardfemme-blog liked this
hazelwych reblogged this from agameofme
nintendofunclub liked this
hugseverycat liked this
sapphicwolverine liked this
agameofme posted this