He has made everything beautiful in its time · 8:17am Nov 8th, 2018
"So you go out in drag, then?"
I wince, and shift in my seat, and reflexively look down at the counselor's shoes.
"I... Well, no. I don't," I say. Looking down at my nails, painted black for a host of reasons, the right hand messy and haphazard and the left hand almost decent. "Drag is a performance. It's entertainment. I'm not crossdressing. Sure, it's women's clothes, but I didn't go borrow them from a cis woman. They're mine. Cause I'm..."
My voice always falters there, but I shrug. Some things are hard to say because they are wrong. Some things are hard to say because they're correct, but you fear what saying them will engender in the person across from you. Some words are just difficult. They sit at the tip of your tongue, look down into the abyss, and lose their nerve. No exhortation will move them. No matter how you prod or cajole or threaten, they will stand fast. Sometimes, when I struggle to call myself a woman despite being able to scream it in mind, I think about Balaam's donkey and how fucking pissed off he must have been about it.
I always wondered what happened to that poor animal afterwards.
Open Arms is nice. They seem a little overworked, but its a clinic that does a lot of things at low costs, and any place that serves several of the demographic categories I fit neatly into is going to find itself with a lot of work. Happily, it's right down the road.
This is the second visit. The first was a needle-filled rollercoaster of being asked about my sexual history as a nurse attempted to find my vein and I attempted not to panic. I hate needles. A therapist I had once suspected it had to do with my poor eyesight, and she may be on to something (try seeing a needle without glasses on if you need them. It vanishes) but it's more about bloodwork itself. I'm sure that this is irrational, but I swear that I can feel the blood seeping out into the syringe. If I watch it pool, my whole body tenses like a rubber band at its limit. A delusion: that I can feel every fiber of every muscle coil like men at arms to the alarum bell.
But the conversation at hand is only about me, and what I wear. Not about bloodwork, or pills, or the poorly painted nails, or the cat food I forgot to buy last night.
"Ah, so it's not the right word."
"And not the right idea. Like..." I sigh. "So, some trans people do drag? It's a thing. Cis people, too, I guess. Drag is an entertainment thing, a performance," I say again, trying not to think about Judith Butler, "an Act you put on and everyone buys in because it's more fun that way. Acting is actually a better way of saying it. It's kind of weird to compare me just being me, and just doing stuff, to the whole Drag thing." I manage to smile at this nice woman, whose time I've gotten for free here. She has the air of a social worker, a counselor but not in the way that you expect of a more plodding psychologically minded spirit but of the direct and material procession of the case worker. When I came in, I could tell she saw many--too many--people today and that she will see too many tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It creeps in, that petty pace, and it dulls the edge of time, and etc.
We move on. She asks about what's got me so stressed, so I start trying to explain.
*
I remember a conversation in my life that is divorced from time. It exists without context, like some kind of platonic thing, adrift in a sea. The only part of that conversation that matters can be summarized like so:
"What you do reflects on us. If you do bad things, your dad loses his job."
My parents did not mean to terrify me so much as instill in me some sense of common sense and forethought. But instead it just terrified me. By their own ommission, it was perhaps a bit too young to impress that reality on me, but in their defense I had clumsily but innocently used a church computer to go to some Dubious places on the internet and they were pretty freaked out.
It's not something you hear about as much outside the church, but ministers in Baptist churches occupy a strange space. They must be accessible, personable, warm, human. They must also be perfect. Their Houses Must Be In Order. A minister of the word without his house in order resigns to set it right. It's not a thing you write in charters so much as expect as a matter of course. It's why divorce means you're out. It's also why if you're kid comes out, your position in the scheme of things gets Murky.
*
"When I come out... Strike that, when I come out fully, it'll be cataclysmic. Biblical proportions." I crack a smile before looking back at the carpet again. "This is Mississippi, you know?"
The word Mississippi is loaded with meaning that would take books to express. It's, to summarize again, a melange of agony and hopelessness trimmed with music. Reminding one's interlocuter that you are both in Mississippi can communicate two dozen things in a single word. It's fascinating how much we pick up just from the air.
She takes a breath.
"It is. But I have a feeling--"
She has a Feeling. This is, of course, very Authoritative. I almost want to ask how I cite that per the MLA, but she is a nice woman and she's seeing me for free, and that would be cruel. So I don't. I just think it.
She has a feeling that my family will come around, that things will come around, that one's family comes back. I think that the moral arc of the universe is long, and struggles ever upwards, but that doesn't mean that individual struggles along the way won't end in heartbreaking failure. Campaigns are long, and battles are lost frequently. All weather is bad campaigning weather. All battlefields are skewed against you, and the enemy always controls the heights.
So, with the image of the valley between two zero'd in mortars batteries firmly entrenched in my mind, we continue. She suggests writing letters, even if I don't send them. Honestly, it's not a bad idea.
*
Dear Mom,
I have terminal cancer.
Psyche. I'm just what the folks at church would call a faggot (when you're not in earshot). Also I'm one of those weird T****** who just wants to use the lady's room in peace.
*
What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.
So This:
He has also set eternity in the human heart
is, amusingly, alternatively rendered:
also placed ignorance in the human heart,
And I'm not sure which I like more.
*
I'm not very Confrontational.
I could blame this on a few things. I've sometimes placed the blame on a history of sexual assault between ages 12-25, and on tangential but related abuse intermixed from a variety of sources. Truthfully, I was never very confrontational even before. My life philosophy, such as you can have one at 12, was all about seeking harmony. I like stories where the villain was overcome and redeemed. I always played the part of bridge between disparate friends. When I was scolded, I was always far more concerned with whether or not I was still "Good with" people than I ever was any sort of punishment. To lose a person's good graces was the greatest failing.
A nice thing about being out to basically all of my friends is that there's no need for confrontation. I no longer need to unveil bits of myself and invite speculation.
Okay, that's a lie. There are moments of conflict. Friction. Just smaller ones.
The ladies at waffle house thinking that I'm a very weird sex worker with an obviously drunk client is much less jarring yet far funnier than a friend telling me that he misses my beard with a grin. I reflexively grin back. Because that's what you do. You smile back. That's how the world works. Even if it hurts you and you feel like leaving all of a sudden in ten seconds flat and even if you know him well enough to know that he means no malice, and that he's always been okay with you, even if merely acknowledging you used to have one of those fills you with a dread you struggle to properly describe without either being melodramatic or way too gross. Even if you want to cross that out. Even if you want to douse your cigarette and call him a bastard and go home. Even if you want to stay because you're lonely and you miss this old apartment and your tailgating chair throne on the balcony wedged between the coolers you used as tables next to the mosquito candle you lit night after night, and the corpse of the candle before that one on the floorboards.
Sometimes, it's less of the Sartrian Look and more of just a blunt, half-laughed "Oh, I thought you were a girl for a second there, dude," at a party from a (probably) high women handing you back the lighter she borrowed.
Side note: she was also the person who I get weed from second hand? So that was kind of surreal.
But I had been smiling as I offered her a light, and that smile was stillborn on my face. Deliriously (read: drunkenly) I imagined it dying on my face with a shudder. I meet the eyes of a friend sitting beside her, one who knows me and knows that I'm not a dude by any means. We are both of us frozen. I am told later I looked like a startled deer on the road, and before she could say anything quietly, I had attempted to speak, and then, reflexively smiling like a quisling fellating a nazi boot, I took my lighter back and then retreated in haste.
*
The first time I did my own eyeliner it was absolute garbage and I laughed at myself. It wasn't a bitter laugh. It was an honest one. I looked like a strange teal raccoon. It was the only color I had, and was just practicing in my bathroom in the old Clinton apartment. I'll give myself this: I was taught in the front seat of a car at night by the girl who gave me that eyeliner. I'm still not any good at it, and I still laugh at myself when I do use it.
I rather enjoy makeup, even if I'm kind of clueless on the whole regarding it. I've always been idly creative. I doodled as a kid. I painstakingly recreated pages out of the Wolf's Rain manga and maps of Europe just to do it. I loved the craft itself, the act of making something. Some of the trancelike focus I get when I write or doodle or plot out things is present when I'm blinking at myself in a mirror, figuring out how to finally for sure this time figure out how to a smokey eye. (Still can't really do it.) But I enjoy it. Makeup is a way for me to make up (ha!) for lost time. It's a vehicle not only to a younger Cyne who never got to exist, but to a different Cyne who always has. It's a way for me to partake in a nebulous concept of femininity which is, again, difficult to articulate well.
It's also a trap.
"I like this" quickly becomes "If I don't do this, my friends will call me a dude". The vehicle for truth becomes a twisted paranoia engine that carries every thought that I don't want or need. I start to think a little too much about what my friends think of me. I start staring into their eyes, seeing past my own reflection into the white voids trying to read something out of them. I start longing to strap their psyches down to beds and dissect them, asking-- "Did you see this coming?" "Did you know?" "But what do you really think about it?"
If I start shaking anyone by the shoulders, hand me a drink and some american spirits and exile me to the Koi pond out back, and I'll be fine. I've spent a lot of nights out there thinking heavy thoughts. I've also spent a significant part of the parties at Alex's house just laying around staring at that pond between drinks.
So sometimes I don't wear any. And I feel exposed, and Seen in that Sartre way, The Look, the Look that spears you like a bug on a card to be gawked at and made an object. Comes the most uncomfortable hulking shape to ever wear a dress descending upon you.
*
"So," the doctor says, "you've been taking them for awhile then."
Sheepishly, I nod. "Yeah. Shipped in from the republic of Vanatau. Amazing what you can get on the internet from companies using obscure Pacific Islander domains."
She laughs.
"Noticed anything yet?"
If possible, I become even more sheepish. "I have. Some things I know are different, and some I imagine are so. I know I have uh, breast growth?" It's silly how silly that sounds coming out of me with my voice. "Not a lot, obviously, but it's there. Weight has shifted around," I say, vaguely so as to not have to inform the doctor that my butt is a little cushier than it was a few months ago, or that my skin is softer, or that I smell a little different, or that estrogen made me cry A LOT and destroyed my libido only to change it. "My face looks different, though I think that may just be my imagination."
She just nods and doesn't comment on it. I get results back from my bloodwork--testosterone is low, if you're curious--and some guidance on how and when to take the hormones I already have stockpiled. She keeps me at the same dosage, and I try not to sigh in relief. Scolds me about smoking, and hums approvingly when I explain that I'm generally down to 8 of those perique Spirits a day instead of 15-17 a day. She asks if I have any questions. I manage to mumble a question or two about a timeline and get the answer I expected (it's a gradual thing, it's a second puberty), and after I leave the therapist's little office I step out into the sun off Fortification Street and go vote, and then go to work like every other week day, nine to five.
Those things which loom over us still loom over us. Ragnarok does not stop its advance just because I'd like a few extra months to grow more proper boobs. The Promised End still comes.
But for now, lunch. Time goes in a line. We live it, as Kirekegaard said, forwards and understand it backwards (and often only in pieces, he did not say but should have). And for now, all I need is lunch, and to go to work, and if I'm lucky the office cat will let me pet her.
That's enough for right now.
For everything is beautiful in its time. Even me.
Nice writing as always.
i love you so much <3
you are amazing
Thank you for choosing to share this struggle and change with us. I was about to write something positive and encouraging, possibly pony-flavored, but...
I think you have this, Cyne. Good luck!
So you can still smoke in restaurants in Mississippi?
Lucky.
4964874
No. You can in bars or at house parties tho. And you can smoke in the parking lot in a little semi circle and if you go behind the big ole AC thingy at Ole Miss law school you can smoke with the older prof who teaches legal writing
4964891
Sounds comforting.
Unfortunately for me, it appears smoking has gone largely out of fashion in these parts, so I doubt I'll be able to connect with any people of import like you seem to have.
You, Cynewulf, are brave.
Right with you there on the needle thing. For me, it's not a vision thing, though (I do have poor vision, but not bad enough to need corrective lenses in my daily life, and I actually do worse if I see the needles than if I don't). I really am not sure why they freak me out so badly, although two explanations seem at least partially compelling: 1) I've had a lot of bad experiences that happened in conjunction with the presence of needles (including an appendectomy in which I woke up on the operating table; and at least two cases of fainting during a blood draw, which is just one of those downward spiral things). And 2) I am ridiculously needy about having a philosophical distinction between Me and Things That Are Not Me, to the point where letting go and giving in to the transcendental experience of a drug trip involves a lot of vertigo and severe control issues. Piercing the skin, destroying the body's fundamental barrier between it and the outside world in order to transfer material between the two, carries an underlying existential component (in a way that mere blood or wounds somehow doesn't, but I never claimed this was a perfect explanation).
Also, if you do ever get to the point of sending a letter, you could probably do a lot worse than that one.
You go, girl. :D
Damn, this should be a novel.
I love it because I like seeing people able to express themselves and in their own awkward honest way be truthful and real with everyone.
I hate it because I want to say something in response but my words run away and all I can offer is silence. Which... really isn't all that helpful.
I want to be able to sit here and say it will be ok, but that seems tart and like I'm lying.
I want to say I've been there, when I haven't, and while your experience sounds painfully familiar to decisions I made years ago, it isn't the same.
I want to say that I'm proud of you for writing this, but that seems... horrifically cliché and trite, and doesn't get into the depths of pride and admiration I have for your ability to articulate yourself in a way that is so very... well, what I know of you.
So I'm... left simply with saying thank you for sharing. And... that doesn't quite seem like enough.
This was heartrending and relatable. It always feels like an uphill battle dealing with the bureacracy within clinics and what not and the questions they ask and "oh no did I say the wrong thing" but I think you've handled yourself pretty well.
You certainly showed more patience than I'd have shown, maybe. It's hard to tell, as I simply don't feel as if I'd be ready to go to a clinic for that, specifically, at the moment, being locked in a sort of malaise of depression and need to be elsewhere than Mississippi.
Also, as a theatre student, I can confidently say that anyone who figures out makeup is officially a magician and I envy them <3
All the positive thoughts and wishes.
4965280
hahaha It's just the basics. I do a bit of eye makeup, lipstick, etc. The minimum. Same tho! It's truly an art and I'm in awe of it.
4964811
Thanks, Rares. I hope moving out goes/went well for you. I always hated moving.
4964920 I appreciate it, but I don't really think so.
Not in a self-efacing way, tho I'm happy to do that, but in general. Trans people are brave only in the sense that it is brave to not let someone slaughter or imprison you--in a purely technical way. We call the partisans of Europe in the 40's brave less because they didn't like their occupiers and more because they went an extra mile. I'm always torn on the whole "trans people are brave" thing because in many cases it is very, very true, and yet emphasizing it also undermines what we would all like to say, which is that we're not a social issue or an idea but just people who want to have normal lives. I appreciate you saying it, however, because it was kind of you.
4965075
Horizon, you're endlessly fascinating. One day I will finally succeed in having you read tarot for me or some other suitable esoteric act.
It's actually generally the opposite for me. I have chased the blurring of alternate states, from minor drugs to the warm sleepiness of waking up, precisely because it dilutes the Self in a way that invites in the Not-Self. It blurs the burden of Recognition and thus makes it less of a pain to keep up with. One is able to escape both the necessity of Being and agonies of Consciousness for a moment. It's odd that I'm so afraid of needles and things, but I think perhaps for me it is less the violation of the me/not me dichotomy but a more purely adrenaline lizard-brain reaction.
4966002
Probably worth noting, then, that I occasionally do online Drunken Pony Tarot Readings even if we are geographically unlikely to meet in person! About a week ago I threw a few readings at my Discord drunkwriting server, and announced it there with an @everyone. It tends to be dead silent when there's not a Tarot or writing event going on, so feel free to join and lurk!
I always find myself checking FimFiction for your updates and stories Cyne. They mean a strange amount to me. They always have since I first stumbled in here.
This was beautiful, Cyne. Thank you for writing this.
Heck, I just randomly stumbled over this months later and after having read it, I'm glad I did.
You really are a beautiful person
I grew up "next door" in Alabama, and even though some people can be bigoted, ignorant racists, we'd comfort ourselves by saying "Hay, at least we're not in Mississippi."
Thank you for sharing your story with us.
5227880
It's alright, we say that about y'all and Arkansas too. Actually, we used to joke that at least in Mississippi, we had the decency to marry our cousins first, unlike in Arkansas where you tapped and ran, lol.