"Dysphoria Before"

A creative post! I wrote this back in February 2021 (six months ago) when I was feeling really angsty about not hearing back from the CGSP and convinced myself that surgery was never going to happen. Some of the feelings inspired in this piece come from a stunning essay by Cyrus Simonhoff, called "The Want" - I still visit this essay all the time and would highly recommend checking it out!

There are days when I am only desire. How dramatic: an existence of want, aching, salivating against my better judgement. I can understand my range of desire and my ability to meet it where it is, where it invites me. I can walk to the store for sugar. I can flick a match, light a candle. I can sing. It’s not the breadth of my desire that worries me - it’s places where it’s so deep I can hardly imagine the source, let alone witness or touch it. If, as I believe it is for me, my gender is about desire, it is nonetheless confounding regardless of where it comes from. Let’s imagine:

As much as this is not a game for me it also is, and I admit that humbly for the right people, which you probably are. I am cat and mouse (and desire, remember) and dysphoria is the chase. The thrill, the let down, the speed, the waiting and timing and planning and reaching. I watch it build up all around me - let’s pretend, for the moment, that I am even able to act so passively - and then crash, some seemingly self-timed backfire. Desire makes me question everything I thought I knew about control, which is to say that wanting bottom surgery so much is an incessant reminder of my own physical bounds and capacities. The more I want it the more I notice my margins. This is not to say that I can’t stretch! I am skin, after all, flexible, soft to suture, miraculously self-healing. There is absolute gratitude along with the pangs.

I email the surgeon’s office every other Friday. Always before work, earlier than I know their office in the time zone next to us is open. Friday: maybe the patient correspondent is in a better mood before the weekend, maybe they see my email first because nobody else would be emailing them at this time, right? “Just checking in!” - I am so cheerful, so personable, so much someone who you ought to respond to and appease, right? Control, the game, the chase, the desire: sometimes I do let myself pretend, play along. Anyone who has had to wade through medical bureaucracy will recognize the submission it demands. I am no stranger to the feeling of my own tail between my legs.

In this before, the preparation time, I feel that everything is happening in every moment. The correspondence alone - with schedulers, insurance, therapists, caregivers - is enough to trick my brain into believing that surgery itself is only a day away every single day. Lurching forward and stopping, lurching and stopping, lurching. All the while knowing (and not knowing?) how far away it is and attempting to reconcile that in a body that is stretching to the future with every fiber.

Months later and the responses to my emails wane, I know the information and the state of things: the scheduler reminds me that we are in a pandemic (though I had not forgotten) and that their timeline looks very different right now than it usually does. I want her to know, to tell me what that different is. As if by wrapping my head around it I could squeeze it hard enough to make it mine, to manipulate it somehow. I remind her in turn that I appreciate her, that I am flexible. And I do and I am: it is only skin, after all, soft and stretchable. And this learned flexibility, often a forced flexibility? It leers. It is rarely willing to say what it’s thinking. The secret desires are quelled more simply than the ones we show the universe - a gentle lie in the mirror: the strings of hope and cynicism are my own to pull.

Today, right now, I sit in my desire (which is to say I sit fully in myself, or am learning to, at least). I tried to read, I tried to talk, but the bursting of the desire had no patience for such unrelated things. So desire, I have you here and I am going to put you on the spot. Tell me, in as many words as you have, how did you come to want something so much? Can I teach you how to wait? What happens when I give you what you’re looking for?

February 14th, 2021