how to want things
i don’t get to have top surgery and i’m feeling fine about it, honestly
Wanting things has changed me. It’s mortifying to want things, quite literally. Desires only exist in a life that moves forwards. Wanting things to change in your life is being alive. Being alive is knowing you’ll one day stop.
For a long time, I didn’t let myself feel any desires for my body. I kept them away deliberately, knowing they might be dangerous, knowing that wanting things is a terrifying risk. But slowly, slowly, they crept up on me. I decided I wanted forward movement, towards something coherent, towards an idea of myself.
It is difficult to avoid the feeling that I’m being punished for that.
I track my mood every day in my little app and I obsess over how to keep myself from getting too depressed. The testosterone, the progestin, the SSRIs I thought I could finally stop. There I go again, thinking I could change things for the better. Old, dark neural pathways tell me I can’t, that I was stupid ever to try. I want to make new ones, but you see the problem.
I look at my chest every day and think, well, you’re here with me now, I should find a way to tolerate you. I tolerated you before this wanting took a hold of me, I should be able to again. But any peace I find will look different to the way it looked before. Wanting things has changed me.
I am thirty three years old and I still write myself instruction manuals to remind me what to do when I feel sad. Will I still be writing them when I’m forty, fifty, sixty? Will I have committed them to memory by then? I can just about accept spending all of my twenties working out how to be alive. But the decade couldn’t contain all the working out I need to do. It leaks. I let it leak, by wanting things.
I need to feel like I’m making progress and getting better. Of course, that’s a problematic linear ableist narrative, which I need to rid myself of. Once I’ve rid myself of it, I’ll be better. Ah. You see the problem again.
Some things I believe: that fat bodies are beautiful. That nobody owes the world a coherent gender presentation. That body parts have no inherent gender. That, just to take an example, it’s perfectly acceptable to call yourself a guy and have your partner call you their boyfriend and give yourself a mostly-boy’s name and generally, most of the time, ask other people to talk about you as such, and all the while have unavoidable, undeniable tits that intrude rudely on the conversation even though other people are usually gracious enough not to mention it.
It’s not fair to say I believe these things in the abstract. I believe them as fierce, embodied reality - for other people. For myself, they ring false, like a jarringly mistuned instrument.
A new set of desires, then. Whisper them, in case someone up there catches on. That I might extend the grace I allow to others to myself. That I might forgive myself for having wanted things. If I could just have that, it would be something.
