Post by Ember on Apr 4, 2016 1:48:50 GMT 8
Howdy folks. Please don't read this if you're sensitive to depictions of abuse and self harm, or allusions to religion, or depictions of sex. I need to get this out of my head and I don't have anywhere else to leave it. If this isn't the right place, just delete it and accept my apologies - the catharsis is in the writing more than the being read, anyway.
I didn't grow up with a father. My Dad stepped out of my life before it even began, but in the worst way possible - He didn't leave at all. Dad was around, but I knew him as Fred back then. Fred would come visit, help Mom watch me, and occasionally care for me. He was Mom's friend. By the time I was turning 4, it had become painfully apparent to me that my family wasn't normal, that other kids had a Mom AND a Dad, and I felt that I wanted a Dad too. Soon after, Mom forced Fred to come out as my father, and that's when it all started going downhill.
Dad never wanted to be Dad. As much as he is able to, he loves me, but his heart has been twisted and scarred by his father, my grandfather, in the same way mine has. And for my grandfather, the same holds true, and for his father, and so on, and so on. To the best of my knowledge the Desmonds have never not been awful to their children. It seems to be reflexive now, not an indication of malice but rather of rote repetition. At the risk of upsetting a number of you (you read that first paragraph, right?), I'd like to share this passage from Numbers 18:
‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’
I'll get back to that passage. For now, just hold onto the thought of it.
Dad slowly grew more and more miserable inhabiting his role as my father. The subtle ways that the abuse piled up were invisible to me then, but now I experience them as a latice of scar tissue that has interwoven itself with every thought I ever have or ever will possess. Fundamentally, he denied me love and safety. The most prominent example that I contend with happened when I was about 7. I remember very clearly coming home from school to find Fred and Uncle Sam in the kitchen. Dad was drinking heavily, which didn't really register to me at the time. I walked up to them and their conversation fell instantly silent. Dad regarded me with bleary eyes; clearly he had been losing some sort of battle all afternoon and Sam was here to help him accept defeat graciously. I asked for food and was told to go to bed. I glanced over to the time, displayed in electric green on the face of the microwave, and read 4:30. I informed my father that my bedtime wasn't for another 5 hours and insisted that I was hungry.
That was when his weariness fell away and he became possessed with cold rage. I saw his eyes change as he stood up and sighed, as if letting the last vestiges of control escape through his breath. He stumbled towards me and Sam saw the danger, Sam was up in a flash. "It's ok Fred, I'll put him to bed" he apologized as he placed himself between us. Dad's hard stare continued to bore into me from over Sam's shoulder, and I continued to cower. I was stunned... Sam took me gently upstairs and hid me in my room.
"It's not safe for you to be downstairs right now. You need to stay here in your room, where it's safe. Whatever you do, stay in bed." And then he left. I didn't know what was happening or why, I just knew that I had asked my father to please love me the way a father should, and please feed me, please take care of my basic needs, please nourish my body... And he was unable to love me in this way, for he loved alcohol better still than his own child. My interference with his love affair provoked his rage, his fear that my need would outweigh his, that I would take his bottle away and force him to love me. I see now looking back that I was, in his eyes, he. When he gazed upon me he saw the little boy that his own father had hated in this way, and having learned his lesson well, Dad continued the teaching by pouring hatred and loathing over me. It was as if he intended to anoint me with rage to prepare me for some test which never did quite come.
Dad continued to evidence his indifference to me over the coming years. Every attempt to reach out to me was through the lens of his own passion and interest. He never wanted to know me, only to find a place to rest me in his own life, a place where I could sit and gather dust and not bother him overmuch, a place where I was still prominently displayed in his heart so as to mollify his feelings of shameful guilt.
Looking back, I think this night gave birth to my eating disorders. Providing myself with food made me feel comfortable and safe. I still weigh 340 pounds, and that's down 35 pounds over the past year or so, and THAT's with putting on at least 15 pounds of muscle. Just goes to show that it's never too late to recover.
It's difficult to feel like a real person when the man who's duty is to protect you and love you can't seem to find the will to do so. It's much easier to feel that there is something wrong with you, that you are somehow bad or shameful just for being. These feelings of isolation and otherness were compounded mightily by the bullying I endured. Right around the time I started hitting puberty, my friendships started to disintegrate one by one all around me. As my body started to enter the first blossoms of manhood, my mind did not - I entered my own period of self-reflection and transformation. My body felt interesting and new, and I was developing strange hair in strange places. A world of sexual pleasure opened up to me all at once, and even as my friendships decayed and the people in my life left one by one, I barely noticed because I was so consumed with my inner world, my private sanctum.
I remember running home after school every day to explore myself, to touch my body, to see how this or that thing felt, to see if it felt different or better if it happened while I was in the bath, in the shower... Everything felt right and exciting and new. But I wasn't using my body in a masculine way... I didn't have the same inclinations my peers did. I didn't get sullen or surly, I didn't change mentally, at least not in the same ways. It's difficult to explain, but right around puberty is when I started feeling confined and constricted. I didn't move my body the same, speak the same, think the same, and my male peers felt the need to constantly push me back towards masculine ideals with their derision and mockery.
And it worked. The fire in my heart started to grow cold. I embraced every single masculine thing about me and tried to spread it out to cover all of me, like not enough butter over too much toast. I felt dry and bland and insufficient - worthless. But at least I had my sanctum, my bedroom, my private retreat of self-exploration and acceptance. No matter what the world felt about me, I knew what I felt about me, and I knew it was good enough. But in public, it wasn't safe to me. I intuited this naturally.
And this was fine for a while. When I was around 11 or 12, still newly acquainted to the blossoming of my body, things changed so that it was now Dad's responsibility to wake me up in the morning. He took to this with terrible enthusiasm. I remember hiding under the covers and cowering as he'd come to the door, jauntily humming 'Revile'. Then he'd enter my sanctum, my safe place, and lay his hands on my genitals. Not directly, at least not often - he'd grab one of my childhood protectors, one of my stuffed bears, and shove it down the front of my underwear. It felt awful just at that, but then he'd rub the plush animal against me and occasionally his fingers would slip around the soft doll and into the fold where my thigh meets my, um.
It was worse knowing that he rarely if ever washes his hands.
I still feel violated at the memory, even though the sensation is now 15 years stale. It still washes over me like a hot wave of shame and horror. I can actually still feel the very moment where I resigned to yielding my sanctum to him and I allowed him to break my safe place. It needed to be done in order to survive. I had to seal that pain inside me and let it wait until I could grow strong and confront it. This pain joined the twin pains of rejection from my peers and my father and burdened me further.
After this started, after my sanctum broke, I completely lost my sense of sexuality. Over the next 15 years, I came to depend on extreme fetishism to achieve orgasm. All of my fantasies revolved around either forcing someone else to feel as awful as I did. Eventually, they warped and shifted in my early 20's and I became the victim in my fantasies as my perception of my desire became slowly more accurate, but for most of my teen years I derived deep pleasure and satisfaction from the thought of inflicting suffering... And while that can be healthy in some contexts, I did not have healthy desires. I wanted to absolutely destroy someone's body, take away their autonomy, and enslave them. Much like I was doing to myself with my overeating, and much as my father and peers were doing to me, forcing me to conform to their idea of who I should be... And whenever I rebelled, I was punished harshly.
The worse my suffering became, the worse my grades became, and the more Dad felt he had to punish me. I remember him coming home one day (I never knew when he was coming or going, so I was always on my vigil) and he was obviously angry... I had gotten my report card back 3 weeks ago and it was all D's and F's. Dad found me relaxing after another agonizingly stressful day surrounded by people that cared about me less than not at all watching TV, which was apparently a mistake. Before I knew what was happening the TV was on the lawn and he was screaming about how I needed to be studying, not TV. Thankfully Mom came home nearly right at that moment and made Dad return HER TV back to HER living room in HER home, since it was indeed all HER rightful property.
Dad did a lot of drinking that particular night. I went to bed frightened and trembling, as usual.
Through all this I had one reprieve. My uncle Paul is a huge Chinese body builder and Martial Artist, and he ran a daycare out of his home during the summer with my Aunt. Paul never cared for me, but I also felt 100% safe around him. If I asked him for food, and he didn't want to cook, he'd bark 'I'm busy! Wait for dinner with everyone else!' and I'd know exactly where I stood. No fear, no anger, just a huge gruff man who, yes, was willing to care for me, but no, not before he had cleared this level of Diablo II. Maybe that sounds like bad parenting but it seemed and seems perfectly reasonable to me. Of course I'll wait until dinner is served, no problem at all, Paul! And then I'd be back to living. That easy.
Obviously I enjoyed being around my cousins, surrounded by the few people that accepted me fully and didn't seem to feel obligated to masculinize me. It was ok that Andy was a little tender, Andy cries sometimes, Andy doesn't really go for the manly things, Andy is a little weird, Andy has a strange sense of humor, but of course we love him, he's family and he always will be! Indeed, I'm sure that should I choose to come out to the Chin clan, they'd accept me instantly and effortlessly. So I felt safe.
One day Dad came to pick me up from the Chin's. I remember feeling the same old dread at the idea of going home with this unpredictable brute, and I decided that now was the time to be brave. Paul was standing right there, menacing and huge, and sure in his love and protection, I told Dad 'No.' I'm spending the night, I said. I'm staying here. He insisted, but so did I. That's when he decided to use his fist.
I still remember the shock of being suddenly on the ground. He had struck me square in the chest with enough force to knock me clear out of my chair (the chair didn't fall over, he knocked me out sideways). I remember him grabbing me roughly and pulling me to my feet and marching me out of the house. I remember the way my loving family allowed this to happen, the way they watched in silence.
I didn't know that afterwards, Paul had called Mom, and Mom had threatened Dad and told him that if it ever happened again, we would be leaving his life forever and that was that. I had no idea, and no one thought to tell me. No one realized that I was terrified of him.
And with one blow he shattered the last bastion of safety I possessed.
Fast forward a few years, and Dad is leaving our home for good. He's finally been found out - the reason he can't pay his share of the mortgage is because he's paying a separate mortgage on his girlfriend's home. The reason he doesn't come home every night became pretty obvious after that particular revelation. Instantly, he was gone. I cried and cried and cried with relief and Mom worried, offered to reconcile with him, offered to bring my Dad home, and I begged her not to. It took her a long time to fully realize what he had done to me. We're still talking about it, her and me, still trying to show her, still trying to say it in a way that makes sense without breaking her heart. The worst part is that Mom feels so terribly guilty, which in turn makes ME feel guilty. I still feel responsible for what he did, I still, on some deep level, believe I deserved it.
That's why I used to cut, after all. If I could just bleed enough, hurt enough, Dad would see what I'm going through and wake up and love me. The universe would stop throwing more pain at me, if I could just meet my quota. One more cut, one more carve, one more slice to freedom. This next cut will bleed the last drop, and the debt will be paid, however it was incurred, and I'll be free. But the knives never brought salvation, only blood and sorrow.
I still feel like it's my fault Mom has breast cancer. I still struggle with feeling like my debt was transferred to her, somehow. I worry that my unwillingness to struggle and suffer well has led fate to bully someone else, that I should be the one with cancer, that I somehow let her down and didn't protect her from this, I didn't suffer well enough of willingly enough.
Put simply, I've lived my life feeling that Dad's Dad's Dad must have committed some great sin, and now god himself is punishing me, punishing us, down to the 3rd or 4th generation, and I can't ever seem to quite shake the feeling that I deserve all this.
So what does this have to do with being transgender? With being non binary? Well, everything, as it turns out.
Not even a month ago I woke up. I was lying in bed, forcing myself to experience some kind of male sensation in my genitals, trying to reaffirm that I am a man, that I am good enough. In my desperate bid to flee from this pain I embraced masculinity completely and fully. Instead of it being 'suffering enough' it became being 'manly enough'. If I could just shake off these obnoxious, immascuilne habits, then the world would be more accepting. If I wasn't who I was, I could belong here. I just needed to growl more, scowl more, set my shoulders firmly, keep my hands still, avoid throwing my wrists around, avoid giggling, avoid ooohing and ahhhing over a pretty dress - I had to filter and censor every thought for appropriate maleness, it was my only chance. As I forced this all on myself for what was surely the 10,000th time, I realized how sick I was of it and suddenly all the faux arousal left me and I cried and cried and cried as it came back and finally clicked into place.
I've never had any kind of authentic sexual experience with anyone. I don't even know who I am or what I like. I stopped asking that question when I was 11 or 12... I've been asking myself that question every day now. Who am I? What am I? Only two things have become clear... I am not a man. And I am not a woman. I don't know anything else yet.
I feel ashamed for my confusion. I feel undeserving of a place to be myself. I feel that by coming here and posting poetry and prose and being my bright-burning enthusiastic self, I'll simply provoke life into biting me again, and I worry that this next time the bite will be deep and the jaws of life will not cease their vice grip until I have been shaken to pieces. But then, perhaps the jaws of life are exactly what I need to extract myself from this burning wreckage.
This is the end of my post, for I have run out of things to say.
I didn't grow up with a father. My Dad stepped out of my life before it even began, but in the worst way possible - He didn't leave at all. Dad was around, but I knew him as Fred back then. Fred would come visit, help Mom watch me, and occasionally care for me. He was Mom's friend. By the time I was turning 4, it had become painfully apparent to me that my family wasn't normal, that other kids had a Mom AND a Dad, and I felt that I wanted a Dad too. Soon after, Mom forced Fred to come out as my father, and that's when it all started going downhill.
Dad never wanted to be Dad. As much as he is able to, he loves me, but his heart has been twisted and scarred by his father, my grandfather, in the same way mine has. And for my grandfather, the same holds true, and for his father, and so on, and so on. To the best of my knowledge the Desmonds have never not been awful to their children. It seems to be reflexive now, not an indication of malice but rather of rote repetition. At the risk of upsetting a number of you (you read that first paragraph, right?), I'd like to share this passage from Numbers 18:
‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’
I'll get back to that passage. For now, just hold onto the thought of it.
Dad slowly grew more and more miserable inhabiting his role as my father. The subtle ways that the abuse piled up were invisible to me then, but now I experience them as a latice of scar tissue that has interwoven itself with every thought I ever have or ever will possess. Fundamentally, he denied me love and safety. The most prominent example that I contend with happened when I was about 7. I remember very clearly coming home from school to find Fred and Uncle Sam in the kitchen. Dad was drinking heavily, which didn't really register to me at the time. I walked up to them and their conversation fell instantly silent. Dad regarded me with bleary eyes; clearly he had been losing some sort of battle all afternoon and Sam was here to help him accept defeat graciously. I asked for food and was told to go to bed. I glanced over to the time, displayed in electric green on the face of the microwave, and read 4:30. I informed my father that my bedtime wasn't for another 5 hours and insisted that I was hungry.
That was when his weariness fell away and he became possessed with cold rage. I saw his eyes change as he stood up and sighed, as if letting the last vestiges of control escape through his breath. He stumbled towards me and Sam saw the danger, Sam was up in a flash. "It's ok Fred, I'll put him to bed" he apologized as he placed himself between us. Dad's hard stare continued to bore into me from over Sam's shoulder, and I continued to cower. I was stunned... Sam took me gently upstairs and hid me in my room.
"It's not safe for you to be downstairs right now. You need to stay here in your room, where it's safe. Whatever you do, stay in bed." And then he left. I didn't know what was happening or why, I just knew that I had asked my father to please love me the way a father should, and please feed me, please take care of my basic needs, please nourish my body... And he was unable to love me in this way, for he loved alcohol better still than his own child. My interference with his love affair provoked his rage, his fear that my need would outweigh his, that I would take his bottle away and force him to love me. I see now looking back that I was, in his eyes, he. When he gazed upon me he saw the little boy that his own father had hated in this way, and having learned his lesson well, Dad continued the teaching by pouring hatred and loathing over me. It was as if he intended to anoint me with rage to prepare me for some test which never did quite come.
Dad continued to evidence his indifference to me over the coming years. Every attempt to reach out to me was through the lens of his own passion and interest. He never wanted to know me, only to find a place to rest me in his own life, a place where I could sit and gather dust and not bother him overmuch, a place where I was still prominently displayed in his heart so as to mollify his feelings of shameful guilt.
Looking back, I think this night gave birth to my eating disorders. Providing myself with food made me feel comfortable and safe. I still weigh 340 pounds, and that's down 35 pounds over the past year or so, and THAT's with putting on at least 15 pounds of muscle. Just goes to show that it's never too late to recover.
It's difficult to feel like a real person when the man who's duty is to protect you and love you can't seem to find the will to do so. It's much easier to feel that there is something wrong with you, that you are somehow bad or shameful just for being. These feelings of isolation and otherness were compounded mightily by the bullying I endured. Right around the time I started hitting puberty, my friendships started to disintegrate one by one all around me. As my body started to enter the first blossoms of manhood, my mind did not - I entered my own period of self-reflection and transformation. My body felt interesting and new, and I was developing strange hair in strange places. A world of sexual pleasure opened up to me all at once, and even as my friendships decayed and the people in my life left one by one, I barely noticed because I was so consumed with my inner world, my private sanctum.
I remember running home after school every day to explore myself, to touch my body, to see how this or that thing felt, to see if it felt different or better if it happened while I was in the bath, in the shower... Everything felt right and exciting and new. But I wasn't using my body in a masculine way... I didn't have the same inclinations my peers did. I didn't get sullen or surly, I didn't change mentally, at least not in the same ways. It's difficult to explain, but right around puberty is when I started feeling confined and constricted. I didn't move my body the same, speak the same, think the same, and my male peers felt the need to constantly push me back towards masculine ideals with their derision and mockery.
And it worked. The fire in my heart started to grow cold. I embraced every single masculine thing about me and tried to spread it out to cover all of me, like not enough butter over too much toast. I felt dry and bland and insufficient - worthless. But at least I had my sanctum, my bedroom, my private retreat of self-exploration and acceptance. No matter what the world felt about me, I knew what I felt about me, and I knew it was good enough. But in public, it wasn't safe to me. I intuited this naturally.
And this was fine for a while. When I was around 11 or 12, still newly acquainted to the blossoming of my body, things changed so that it was now Dad's responsibility to wake me up in the morning. He took to this with terrible enthusiasm. I remember hiding under the covers and cowering as he'd come to the door, jauntily humming 'Revile'. Then he'd enter my sanctum, my safe place, and lay his hands on my genitals. Not directly, at least not often - he'd grab one of my childhood protectors, one of my stuffed bears, and shove it down the front of my underwear. It felt awful just at that, but then he'd rub the plush animal against me and occasionally his fingers would slip around the soft doll and into the fold where my thigh meets my, um.
It was worse knowing that he rarely if ever washes his hands.
I still feel violated at the memory, even though the sensation is now 15 years stale. It still washes over me like a hot wave of shame and horror. I can actually still feel the very moment where I resigned to yielding my sanctum to him and I allowed him to break my safe place. It needed to be done in order to survive. I had to seal that pain inside me and let it wait until I could grow strong and confront it. This pain joined the twin pains of rejection from my peers and my father and burdened me further.
After this started, after my sanctum broke, I completely lost my sense of sexuality. Over the next 15 years, I came to depend on extreme fetishism to achieve orgasm. All of my fantasies revolved around either forcing someone else to feel as awful as I did. Eventually, they warped and shifted in my early 20's and I became the victim in my fantasies as my perception of my desire became slowly more accurate, but for most of my teen years I derived deep pleasure and satisfaction from the thought of inflicting suffering... And while that can be healthy in some contexts, I did not have healthy desires. I wanted to absolutely destroy someone's body, take away their autonomy, and enslave them. Much like I was doing to myself with my overeating, and much as my father and peers were doing to me, forcing me to conform to their idea of who I should be... And whenever I rebelled, I was punished harshly.
The worse my suffering became, the worse my grades became, and the more Dad felt he had to punish me. I remember him coming home one day (I never knew when he was coming or going, so I was always on my vigil) and he was obviously angry... I had gotten my report card back 3 weeks ago and it was all D's and F's. Dad found me relaxing after another agonizingly stressful day surrounded by people that cared about me less than not at all watching TV, which was apparently a mistake. Before I knew what was happening the TV was on the lawn and he was screaming about how I needed to be studying, not TV. Thankfully Mom came home nearly right at that moment and made Dad return HER TV back to HER living room in HER home, since it was indeed all HER rightful property.
Dad did a lot of drinking that particular night. I went to bed frightened and trembling, as usual.
Through all this I had one reprieve. My uncle Paul is a huge Chinese body builder and Martial Artist, and he ran a daycare out of his home during the summer with my Aunt. Paul never cared for me, but I also felt 100% safe around him. If I asked him for food, and he didn't want to cook, he'd bark 'I'm busy! Wait for dinner with everyone else!' and I'd know exactly where I stood. No fear, no anger, just a huge gruff man who, yes, was willing to care for me, but no, not before he had cleared this level of Diablo II. Maybe that sounds like bad parenting but it seemed and seems perfectly reasonable to me. Of course I'll wait until dinner is served, no problem at all, Paul! And then I'd be back to living. That easy.
Obviously I enjoyed being around my cousins, surrounded by the few people that accepted me fully and didn't seem to feel obligated to masculinize me. It was ok that Andy was a little tender, Andy cries sometimes, Andy doesn't really go for the manly things, Andy is a little weird, Andy has a strange sense of humor, but of course we love him, he's family and he always will be! Indeed, I'm sure that should I choose to come out to the Chin clan, they'd accept me instantly and effortlessly. So I felt safe.
One day Dad came to pick me up from the Chin's. I remember feeling the same old dread at the idea of going home with this unpredictable brute, and I decided that now was the time to be brave. Paul was standing right there, menacing and huge, and sure in his love and protection, I told Dad 'No.' I'm spending the night, I said. I'm staying here. He insisted, but so did I. That's when he decided to use his fist.
I still remember the shock of being suddenly on the ground. He had struck me square in the chest with enough force to knock me clear out of my chair (the chair didn't fall over, he knocked me out sideways). I remember him grabbing me roughly and pulling me to my feet and marching me out of the house. I remember the way my loving family allowed this to happen, the way they watched in silence.
I didn't know that afterwards, Paul had called Mom, and Mom had threatened Dad and told him that if it ever happened again, we would be leaving his life forever and that was that. I had no idea, and no one thought to tell me. No one realized that I was terrified of him.
And with one blow he shattered the last bastion of safety I possessed.
Fast forward a few years, and Dad is leaving our home for good. He's finally been found out - the reason he can't pay his share of the mortgage is because he's paying a separate mortgage on his girlfriend's home. The reason he doesn't come home every night became pretty obvious after that particular revelation. Instantly, he was gone. I cried and cried and cried with relief and Mom worried, offered to reconcile with him, offered to bring my Dad home, and I begged her not to. It took her a long time to fully realize what he had done to me. We're still talking about it, her and me, still trying to show her, still trying to say it in a way that makes sense without breaking her heart. The worst part is that Mom feels so terribly guilty, which in turn makes ME feel guilty. I still feel responsible for what he did, I still, on some deep level, believe I deserved it.
That's why I used to cut, after all. If I could just bleed enough, hurt enough, Dad would see what I'm going through and wake up and love me. The universe would stop throwing more pain at me, if I could just meet my quota. One more cut, one more carve, one more slice to freedom. This next cut will bleed the last drop, and the debt will be paid, however it was incurred, and I'll be free. But the knives never brought salvation, only blood and sorrow.
I still feel like it's my fault Mom has breast cancer. I still struggle with feeling like my debt was transferred to her, somehow. I worry that my unwillingness to struggle and suffer well has led fate to bully someone else, that I should be the one with cancer, that I somehow let her down and didn't protect her from this, I didn't suffer well enough of willingly enough.
Put simply, I've lived my life feeling that Dad's Dad's Dad must have committed some great sin, and now god himself is punishing me, punishing us, down to the 3rd or 4th generation, and I can't ever seem to quite shake the feeling that I deserve all this.
So what does this have to do with being transgender? With being non binary? Well, everything, as it turns out.
Not even a month ago I woke up. I was lying in bed, forcing myself to experience some kind of male sensation in my genitals, trying to reaffirm that I am a man, that I am good enough. In my desperate bid to flee from this pain I embraced masculinity completely and fully. Instead of it being 'suffering enough' it became being 'manly enough'. If I could just shake off these obnoxious, immascuilne habits, then the world would be more accepting. If I wasn't who I was, I could belong here. I just needed to growl more, scowl more, set my shoulders firmly, keep my hands still, avoid throwing my wrists around, avoid giggling, avoid ooohing and ahhhing over a pretty dress - I had to filter and censor every thought for appropriate maleness, it was my only chance. As I forced this all on myself for what was surely the 10,000th time, I realized how sick I was of it and suddenly all the faux arousal left me and I cried and cried and cried as it came back and finally clicked into place.
I've never had any kind of authentic sexual experience with anyone. I don't even know who I am or what I like. I stopped asking that question when I was 11 or 12... I've been asking myself that question every day now. Who am I? What am I? Only two things have become clear... I am not a man. And I am not a woman. I don't know anything else yet.
I feel ashamed for my confusion. I feel undeserving of a place to be myself. I feel that by coming here and posting poetry and prose and being my bright-burning enthusiastic self, I'll simply provoke life into biting me again, and I worry that this next time the bite will be deep and the jaws of life will not cease their vice grip until I have been shaken to pieces. But then, perhaps the jaws of life are exactly what I need to extract myself from this burning wreckage.
This is the end of my post, for I have run out of things to say.
