winterwight

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Dysphoria, body issues, weight, surgery. Also completely unfiltered pain. I share so you know but I don’t have the spoons to contain your emotions if this makes you worry for me. I will be OK, through the actions I am taking. I just want witnessing. Airport, as usual hard to think but I believe the cashier sir:s me as I buy my drink. I stay calm and resigned. It happens rarely, and as it bothers me due to its implications for me, intent does not matter. But it drives home, leaden-heavy, that my body isn’t ready yet. In the restroom I watch the body language of the other women, wondering if any of them are afraid of me but socialized too polite to say it. If a stranger reads me as male without thinking, how many times does that happen without me knowing about it? Those thoughts are dark like poisoned sludge, fallout-heavy pond water, that I drown in in the midst of the coldest possible winter. Cold in my dead bones. There is nothing to do but what I must, to do whatever I must in order for others to think of me as I need them to. I need for others to feel about me as just another woman (unique and weird as any other woman, but not standing out in my womanhood). I don’t know what tells those are, but I had not spoken when he sir:red me, just as I had not with that US gas station clerk either. So this is physiognomy, habitus. I am not too tall, but my head likely too wide, my neck. My overall body, if that looked more like that of women shown in public media, that could compensate for other properties. Losing fat and muscle alike could help. That will happen if I get really really diligent with dieting and exercise. Which is good because that would also counter the beginning heart and liver issues that my overweight and alcohol-as-nootropic consumption and stress may have driven, according to tests. So that has to happen. It can now, because finally I resolved most of the really difficult work tasks – filed the grants, wrote the papers, negotiated offers, almost at the finish line – I did all those things “at any cost”, which were these costs. Sugar, fat, energy drinks and alcohol and drugs, just to be able to meet more deadlines, rewards to dangle in front of me because when I have a reward to come, there is nothing I cannot persevere through. I may not be a genius, but I have grit, willpower and pragmatism. So now I have to take dieting and exercise seriously the way I did back in 2017 when I lost 30kg in a year while interviewing for JGL positions and finishing papers. I did it before, I can do it again. But this won’t be enough. There are other factors at play here too. My face is wrong. I keep frowning when I speak with people or on pictures. This, I have realized, is actually because that changes the position of eyebrows in a way which makes me look more like other women. Other things – nose and jaw, to some extent, some brow ridge. Mostly forehead though. Experts will be able to refine this better. And yes, becoming truly thin, that would change what my face looks like, and most likely resolve some of this. But I can’t assume any longer that will be enough. Some facial surgery will be needed. If what I want is to be sure that people know I am trans only when I tell them, and that the thought of me as “male” will feel instinctually wrong to strangers when they see and hear and smell me, because their senses remind them rather of other women, then it is needed. That surgery is the most expensive there is, and no insurance would cover it for me. I am looking at potentially up to 50k, though hopefully substantially less. I have no way currently to get that. So I have to succeed in what is to come in somehow becoming better paid. At least that motivates. There was a time I felt money was not so important, which is a privileged as fuck thing to think, but either way that changed when I realized that having my body read correctly would require costly procedures. So somehow I have to do that. I don’t know how yet, but I will work that out, just as I will resolve the losing-fat-and-muscle thing at any cost. And then, that remaining operation I was afraid of – risk of nerve damages, scars on face, drilling into forehead bones maybe, more recoveries. More anaesthesia, and perhaps eventually the risk of cognitive damage from too many episodes of that. Pain, not that I care any longer. These experiences have hurt me enough in worse ways that I don’t care about concrete pain or fear any longer. So I’ll work towards these goals then too. However long it takes, however hard that gets. And in the meantime, though I’ll be worried always that people look at me at some sort of man they are too frightened to call out, I’ll try my best to not hide away. I’ll stay in the world and I’ll try to be as happy as I can along the road. After all, any one of us could die at any moment. And I know how lucky and privileged I am. I’m in pain but more importantly, right now, useful numbness. I guess I will be for some time. And I guess I will use that constructively. Because there is nothing else I can do.