I grew up with a subconscious hatred of everything that I was.
I hated the facial hair, the receding hairline, the thinning hair, and my voice.
I felt like an alien in my own body, trapped in a puppet that I had no idea I wanted out of.
A figure lost in the matrix, consumed by society’s demands for a boy and for men.
Keep the facial hair, it lets you look more mature.
Keep your hair short, it slims your face a lot.
Keep that behavior, it’s more masculine.
Kill the girl inside of you because it is an abomination unto humanity.
Drown your feminine side in a flood of testosterone and anger.
You will never be the girl you needed.
It wasn’t until I actually left home for good that I finally discovered who I am.
Now, I can consciously call my inner hatred of my body what it is: dysphoria.
I am changing my body because my body is not a permanent state of matter.
I am a river, changing my path and what I look like through my own will and force.
My chest isn’t flat anymore and I don’t have as much hair in places I didn’t want it.
My hair is coming back, thicker and healthier.
I’m finding it slightly harder to fit my hips into my pants at times.
I am a garden that has come back from the dead after several harsh winters.
A field of flowers in the irradiated wilderness of nuclear disaster.
The person in the mirror isn’t the alien in an uncomfortable meat suit,
The figure in the matrix without a map and no sense of direction.
I have flung myself into a new freedom that I never thought possible.
There’s parts that will always seem off for me, but the off parts aren’t what I see all the time in the mirror anymore.
I erased the facial hair, tearing it to the ground and drowning it beneath my feet.
I grew my hair, the waves cresting along my head like an ink-drowned field on a windy day.
I destroyed the behaviors, the toxins slowly purged from my body in hormonal antivenom.
I resurrected the girl, my personal phoenix emerging from the ashes of long burned boyhood.
I rescued my feminine side, scorching the flood of testosterone as she emerged from her well.
I am the girl I needed now, safe at last from the live burial in my subconscious.
And it’s all because of moving more into the love part of the love/hate relationship with my body.
I see me. I am me.
A Gendered Experience 