dreamgirls



(from The Americans, season 3, episode 11)
I know that I dwell too much on the life I haven’t lived. The kisses I haven’t shared. The vacations I haven’t gone on. The connections I haven’t made. People talk about FOMO–”fear of missing out”–but what eats away at me is not a fear that I might be missing out on something but rather a knowledge that I have missed out and continue to miss out on certain things.
Last week, my therapist and I did EMDR therapy–”eye movement desensitization and reprocessing”–around the bitterness and anger I sometimes feel about this. EMDR is not hypnosis but it feels sort of like a waking dream, at least to me. The brain conjures up vivid images, mixes memories and fiction, and sometimes follows threads whose logic is more abstract than concrete. One stretch of the EMDR session was a kind of dream of life as a cisgender woman who felt comfortable in her skin in a way that I almost never do.
I feel some guilt even acknowledging that, but I don’t think that it’s rooted in internalized transphobia; it’s just rooted in the frustration, fear and pain that come with my particular experiences of being a visibly trans woman.
I’m very proud to be trans, and I strongly believe that trans is beautiful. However, when I was at the BART station right after my therapy session waiting for my train, a gregarious man starts talking to me. “How you doing?” he said.
“Pretty good,” I lied.
“Still breathing and standing upright?”
“Can’t take that for granted,” I said, just trying to give him the most generic response I could think of.
His train pulled in. “Well, you have a good day sir,” he said as he walked away.
And things like this happen to me a lot. I felt the old familiar anguish of not being seen and I realized that I’m constantly kept off-balance when talking to people because I don’t even know much of the time if they think they’re talking to a woman or a man, and since I feel like being a woman is intrinsic to who I am, I want to be not just thought of but seen as a woman.
Of course, I am well aware that there are ways in which I could dress differently and do other things with my appearance to at least more consistently communicate to people that I identify as a woman–not that this would make everyone truly see me as one. I still struggle with this, since the women whose style resonates with me most actually dress a lot like I do a lot of the time–t-shirts, jeans, tennis shoes, minimal makeup. I don’t want to do what would be for me an artificial performance of femininity solely in response to people misgendering me. But I do think about making changes to my presentation sometimes.
I read this review in the New Yorker of Christina Crosby’s memoir, A Body, Undone. And while I cannot begin to imagine her experiences, reading about them may have helped me to better understand mine. In the review, Michael M. Weinstein writes:
Now, as a quadriplegic person, she is constantly being greeted, misgendered, and apologized to…Again and again, Crosby describes her sense that the accident has stripped her of some irretrievable part of her identity. “I no longer have a gender,” she writes. “Rather, I have a wheelchair.” Gender, she suggests, like so many facets of experiencing or expressing oneself, comes into being through a kind of feedback loop: unless your body can reflect your gender—and can, in turn, elicit reactions suggesting that others see you as you feel—you lose the power to feel that way.
Referencing the work of Judith Butler, Weinstein also writes: “Butler urges readers to acknowledge how central other people’s perceptions are to any person’s sense of self.”
Reading this made me feel much less guilty about wanting that feedback so much, wanting to have it reflected back to me that people truly see me as a woman. Of course other people’s perceptions of me are central to my sense of self. I realized how much more present and alive I can sometimes feel when I really believe that I am being seen as myself. The way in which I inhabit my body–or don’t–is impacted by this. If I feel invisible, there’s a very real sense in which I feel like I don’t fully exist.
But as I find my heart and mind dwelling on the life I haven’t gotten to have, I keep thinking that at some point I still have to learn to accept this as the reality of my experience, to integrate it. At a certain point, you have to stop thinking that you have lost time to make up for, and just let go of the time (and the experiences it represents) as truly lost, or it will eat you up inside.
Notes
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