method acting (just mangled guts pretending)

a meditation on gender, feeling wrong for a long time, and the corresponding anguish of not fitting in.

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God, so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled, and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then get up. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

from Act 2: Perestroika | Angels in America, by Tony Kushner

I suppose I have always been in search of self. I’ve never really felt like a person, not an individual, not really. More an amalgamation of loosely connected pieces, not an inch of me fitting to the rest. Every part of me detaches. I’m connected with more tape and glue and staples than I am with skin. More artificial than true, more empty than whole.

I’m all discarded doll parts — Barbie and Ken and Barbie again.

Fractured and fractured and fractured and glued back together again. Does this composition retain any echo of the original?

I imagine myself an apartment wall, painted and repainted in varying shades of white. Close enough to be white, but you can see that there are different colors layered, spots where the paint chips, reflections of damage. All of me, struggling in unison; collective effort of pretending to be a whole.

I suppose the only thing that has ever united the different parts of me is the desperate effort of pretending to look and feel like a person.

I have always been little more than a poor emulation of a human being. Six different concepts of what a man looks like, all stacked in a trenchcoat. I’m hoping it’s enough to convince the waitress. I’m straightening my shoulders and hoping she doesn’t see the shapes beneath the fabric. Don’t look too close.

People say that the solution to this amounts to self-love, that this feeling is nothing more than self-hate. Learned product of judgmental society. Body broken by hateful wandering eyes. Some of them say this is all the product of magazines and the male gaze and not being loved enough by my mother.

With enough positive reaffirmations and assured compliments directed in the mirror, I will stop feeling like this. With enough yoga, I’ll wake up and feel right. If I drink enough water and eat my vegetables and get enough sunshine, I will be whole. With enough time, this feeling will fade. I can learn to love myself.

But how can you begin to love a person you can’t really see?

I wish it were so simple. Enough bitter pills swallowed and one day you learn to love the taste.

This does not ring true within this skin. I have taught myself to swallow every poison and formed immunity to each and everyone. Feed me cyanide and I’ll give you a smile, but I still have never learned how to swallow myself. My body has never been something small enough to force down. I always find myself choking.

And the Mormon Mother says, it’s up to you to do the stitching.

The older I get, the more I am becoming more stitches than skin.

Five steps forward, five steps back. Pacing in circles. Checking the mirror. Memorizing the shape of my body and the angle of my face. Look back, and it’s an entirely different image. Not me. Never was.

I don’t like it. I don’t want it. Please, I’m begging you, do not make me look again.

Try learning to reconcile with a body that looks more like a nightmare, and see how you like it.

I want to take all the mirrors down. I don’t even want to see how I look in the eyes of other people. No more reflections. Burn it all. Stop showing your confusion on your face. Stop showing me your pursed lips, tilted head, disgusted glance. Stop seeing me. I don’t exist. I don’t exist. I don’t exist. I have never been more than a concept attached to a physical stone. My body drags me down. Soon, I will reach the bottom. My body will not stop fighting. I sink. I sink. I sink.

I cannot figure out the formula in which I allow myself to exist. Perhaps I am best invisible.

I don’t fit in. My whole life, I have always been pretending. Even when I feel like I am seen, I am only seen in fragments. No one ever sees me how I want them to, but I cannot offer them a map or directions. I only know where the center of the maze is; even I have never seen the outside.

Ask me how to guide you blindly through this labyrinth. I can offer you no guidance. It’s all wrong. It’s always been wrong. That’s why there are sheets on all these mirrors.

Don’t make me tell you. I don’t want you to have to ask.

What are your pronouns?

Does this upset you?

What bathroom do you use?

Why do you do that?

Have you started transitioning yet? Do you want to?

Allow me to respond; my skin is a shell, my heart is pinned butterfly wings, I stretch past the bounds of my body. Peer down my throat, and witness the edge of the galaxy, tipping into nothingness. See how my skin is less skin and more a boundary. See how my voice is a shallow projection. Let me tell you why my flesh feels more like rope. How my body feels more like a noose.

See how I am everything and nothing at all.

I have mastered the art of the simple stitch. See? That’s how I keep all these misshapen bits together.

And the Mormon Mother says, just mangled guts pretending.

I have always had to treat myself as an admission for safe spaces. I am a person that exists only behind closed doors. It has been so long, I have forgotten that not everyone lives hidden. My soul has learned to live in cupboards.

I have learned to hide a flinch, deep beneath my skin, only a ripple of the vein and a sour twist in my stomach. Don’t look at me, don’t see the hurt. You will never see it. If I cry because of those words, you will not hear it. I have taught myself how to absorb the shock and swallow the tears.

Let me tell you my ABCs. Arsenic. Sodium Hypochlorite; common name Bleach. Cyanide. Let me show you how the body learns to breathe poison.

Open your mouth.

       ***

I have these Fears, fears that are too big to bring to anyone; to sate with any amount of therapy or writing or drinking. When you’re burdened with Capital-F fears, you often find yourself feeling like the only person in the universe. Lonely in a crowded room, surrounded by a hundred others and still becoming one with the wallpaper. I envy the chameleon, always swapping skins.

Dear background, show me how to become one with you. Show me how to never be noticed again. I am so very tired of being seen.

I try to emulate a person I might like to be. This has been a game I have playing with myself since I was young. Imaginary characters, fictional compositions. I’m building bodies on stilts and stitching flesh of fabric. I weave my own cocoons and come out looking new, but I am always the same underneath. Copy after copy after bloodied copy.

I am always trying on new selves, forcing my body into new skins, switching between imaginary self-constructions. Quiet now, I am memorizing my lines. Show me how the body moves when the spirit is self-assured. If I learn to pretend, perhaps one day I will slip past pain and into being.

If I was someone else, maybe things would be easier. I spent my youth envying the common shapeshifter. All too similar to me. Order primates, family hominids, species homo sapien. Suborder transsexualius.

I have this fantasy where I wake up and feel like everyone else. Perhaps nothing changes. Perhaps it’s all in my head. I’m always pretending, cheap emulations of someone who knows how their body occupies the world. I don’t realize I’m doing it until the mask slips, revealing the gnarled, ugly thing underneath.

I used to say I felt ugly. Ugly feels like a close enough word, near enough to the ballpark. It’s a word that sits in the parking lot of the stadium. I reach in darkness and ugly is the first word that feels familiar.

Still, I don’t feel ugly. At least, not most of the time. It’s just that I’ve never once felt right. Not broken, just wrong.

Don’t look at me. Look at the mask. Pretend the mask is my face. Pretend it never slipped at all. Don’t look at me. Don’t see me. Don’t see me, because I can’t see myself. Don’t see me, because I won’t like the person you see. Don’t make me acknowledge the presence of the heart beneath. I am empty. I am empty. I am empty.

I am playing a shell game, persistently moving my heart between mismatched cups on a stained coffee table. Guess where it is, now. Guess which one I’m hiding under.

(Secret is, I slipped it back into my pocket a long time ago.)

I have never been able to be anyone else. I have tried and tried and tried. I have twisted and warped myself until I cracked under the weight of false selves. I am trying to teach myself to be metal and rubber all at once. Shape me, mold me, let me keep the form, but let me return to myself again. Teach me how to make my heart a more convincing mold. Teach me how to hold an unfamiliar shape until it becomes my own.

In elementary school, I bought the same clothes all my friends bought. Emulation. I run better as a program than a man. Copy and paste. Memorize how everyone else looks. Absorb and repeat. Perhaps if I can look the same, it will fix me.

I suppose I thought if you can manage to become a mirror, no one will ever look at you again.

Dear strawberry print shirt, show me how to be like the other girls. Dear skinny jeans, show how me to become someone else. Dear pearl earrings, show me how to get lost in the crowd.

Dear oversized hoodie, show me how to cross the river, or I will simply resign myself to drowning. Dear tennis shoes, show me how to float and not sink. Dear sweatpants, show me how to disappear.

Dear beating heart, take me back to a time I felt whole again.

I’ve been told time and time again I’ve got the drama of someone fit for theatre. I never mention that I’ve been playing a role my whole life.

You just can’t see it. I’ve become very good at method acting.

New skins everyday but I am still no one at all. I think I purchased most of my clothes with someone else in mind. I’m always cycling in and out of different fashions. Does this fit a version of me? Can I pretend to be the person who wears this sweater? If I could, would people like me more?  Rainbow sweater, teach me how to become someone I like to see in the mirror.

My friends show me pictures of myself, and I want to burst into tears. I’ve been telling myself it’s just bad angles for years. My whole body is a bad angle. My voice is caught wrong on camera. I am not meant to exist in the minds of others or inhabit the space of a screen. Don’t see me. Don’t record me. I don’t wish to exist anywhere but inside myself. Let me shrink back into a shell. Let me unbecome myself.

Dear smartphone, teach me how to make myself invisible anywhere except for the periphery.

I keep finding that myself is not who I’m pretending to be, but who would I be if I stopped pretending?

Maybe nothing at all.

                                                                          ***

I’ve wanted nothing more than to read others’ minds. To see me how other people see me. It becomes a manic obsession, tucked into the pockets of late-night fits of anxiety. If I could see me how they see me, would I feel whole? Would the recognition of others teach me who I really am?

Or would it simply cleave me in two?

I write and write and write, but the feeling always comes back. Tell me how you see me. Make it something good.

See me, don’t see my face. Don’t see the mask. See past me. See in me. See through me. See something — pray, see anything, and tell me what I look like.

I need so desperately to be seen, but I’m not so sure I’d like what I find.

Tell me, do you see anything at all? Have I always been invisible without my knowledge?

Self-composed constructions are not enough. I have never recognized the person who looks back in the mirror. New clothes and new bodies and new hairstyles, I become marketable to the rest of the world. I shift myself to look like the reflection of a person badly drawn. I am forever an abstract image.

Warning colors to keep the eyes from the rest of me. I learn to be neon to distract wandering eyes. I make myself a traffic vest. Look at this instead. I seek to hide the human underneath in the blackness of the night. Let me disappear. Only see the colors. Don’t see me.

I wish I could exist without the concern of the eyes of everyone else. I wish I never existed at all.

***
I want to be pure again.

Take me back to childhood, where this didn’t matter. Take me back to before the breasts began to form on my body and I could still run shirtless in the backyard in the boys. Show me how my body looked before everything went wrong.

Take me back to the last time I was whole. Take me further past the womb. If I ask the divine realm nice enough, do you think they’ll let me make myself again? This time, let it be my turn. This time, I’ll get it right. I promise, I’ll get it right. No bruises this time. No scars.

I’ll do all the trimming before I come out.

Perhaps I was never sated with human existence alone. The body is a composition of limitations, cans and cannots. Perhaps I never learned to be a body, not really.

Perhaps I’ve always been drowning in my mind.

See me, don’t look at me, see in my mind alone. Consciousness, thought, feeling. Just the shapes and colors. Nothing physical. Look past the nose, the lips, the eyes, the skull. Touch my face and see within. I am teaching myself telepathy. Can you feel me? See within my mind alone. See how it bleeds and blooms in red and violet.

Is there something beautiful? It’s the only place I ever learned to inhabit in entirety. Tell me there is something about me worth liking.

It’s never been just about desire. I can’t remember the last time I felt desired – not really. Not as I am. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted my body to be an object of desire. Not this one, not this skin. No amount of cutting or shaping to reconcile with that feeling. Don’t see me that way. Don’t think of me like that.

No, not just the lights off. Close your eyes. Imagine someone else.

My ex asks me, when I think of you sexually, do you want me to imagine you as you are, or post top-surgery?

I swallow the knot in my throat.

Post top surgery, I guess.

Don’t picture my body like this, don’t picture me at all. Make up a person, someone worth liking, and imagine them instead.

Tell me what they look like, and I’ll learn how to be them instead of me.