Today, I was walking down the street. A woman dropped something. I bent down to pick it up for her. 

“Thank you, sir,” she said. Then, after another second, “Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am.”

In general, my dysphoria isn’t nearly as bad these days as it was for so many years. But experiences like this still have the power to yank me out of the moment I’m living in, to flood me with hurt and make me turn inward. The whole point of transition was and is to not feel like a prisoner of my dysphoria anymore, to get to a place where I felt I could connect with others in ways that were true. Growing up trans makes one acutely aware that we are not our bodies, that our bodies are not accurate representations of the souls inside them. But our bodies are what we have for experiencing the world, and for years and years, my soul was cowering in a corner. That’s no way to live, and it’s no way to love. 

I like Death Cab for Cutie a lot but usually find this song too precious. Still, when it played on my phone this week, it seemed just about perfect. Where soul meets body is exactly where I want to live. I’m closer than I used to be, and still trying to make peace with the fact that I’ll probably never totally get there.

This week I reviewed Transistor, and wrote about it here. The game is about people who are connected but separated, people who are close but not close. There’s an ongoing concern with holding; “Don’t let me go,” the voice says, and later, “I won’t let you go.” And the game’s heroine, Red, is a singer who can’t sing–she is silent, having had her voice taken from her–but, for the person speaking to her from inside the transistor, she is omnipresent. “When I look to where the sky should be I see you and I know you can hear me.” 

And Ben sings,

And I do believe it’s true that there are roads left in both of our shoes, But if the silence takes you then I hope it takes me too.
So brown eyes I hold you near, ‘cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere.