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The Epistle of Daphne to Her Therapist
Apr. 24th, 2020 09:45 pmProvidence, RI
24th April 2020
Dear XXXXX,
Firstly, I feel like apologizing for missing our last scheduled appointment, and neglecting your text message. I want to assure you that, while the past week or so has been intense and difficult for me, I’m not dropping out or disappearing. I intend to see you again, in time.
As for what happened, well...it’s complicated. So I’ll try my best to offer the important facts without rambling, but make no guarantees...as you well know, I’m a very rambly girl.
Three days ago, I made a difficult choice, more difficult than any choice I’ve faced since recognizing my need to transition my public gender presentation. It’s made me think long and hard about the difference between deciding and choosing (the former being an act of division--for example, between am/am-not, yes/no, etc.) and the latter being a selection from among various options. As you’re well aware, I have great difficulty making decisions, which shouldn’t be too surprising since I’m a genderqueer woman trying to make it in a largely binary-structured (and patriarchally biased) society. The main problem, for me, as I understand it, may simply be the fact that where most people see only two possible options for acting or being, I see many possibilities. What others see as strictly logical, rational, or deterministic, I see as...nested...native to a broader imaginative process...with rather than opposed to the irrational, uncertain, and chaotic.
Any well-programmed computer or automated machine can make decisions for itself, but it takes something far more complex, and far more organic, to make a choice.
Over the years, I’ve read many different takes on what separates self-identified human beings from “other” animals, or from thinking machines. Some are more amusing than others, and I’m not sure whether I have read this somewhere already, but I would name that crucial difference suicide. Risk of suicidality is what makes human beings neither animal nor machine but something altogether different. I think that we are, indeed, special, but that there is really nothing all that special about being special. I think that as speaking and writing hosts for language, voices, we are capable of such intense self-awareness that we became the first species to contemplate self-extermination. I think we may in fact be the loneliest species on the planet, and that the illness troubling me, in particular, as disabling as it is in my current socio-economical habitat, is not, at its root, a "mental" pathology at all, though it may very well in some cases be co-morbid with the like.
Rather I think I may simply identify too strongly with the so-called “human,” and that very few of my fellow human beings can agree on what that word really means, or recognize themselves in it, or their fellow beings. In other words, I believe I suffer primarily from chronic, externally imposed dehumanization, which is something that I, alone, cannot escape as long as I maintain prolonged contact with cis/hetero-centric and patriarchal systems of governance.
In many ways, especially recently, I do see this system (or network of similarly structured systems) changing in small ways, showing signs of evolution, responding and adapting, meekly, to the desperate cries of the marginalized and misunderstood. I hold great faith in the future of our species, as well as infinite grief for the irreparable damage already done. What I’ve been lacking, personally, is the ability to imagine myself being a part of any such governing system and surviving it.
I both love and fear other people with great intensity, and I have betrayed, been betrayed, by both myself and others, so many times that I’ve become far too sensitive to language, to gender, to systems of meaning in general, for my own good. Where I grew up, trust and belief were not a choice but a decision, one enforced by word, gesture, and appearance. I’m in the habit of trusting people automatically, and have always struggled with a very potent verbal obedience reflex. As I type this, a song just popped into my head from Primary (the Latter-Day Saint Sunday School for mormon children younger than 8, which is the age of baptism), they even had bodily gestures that went with the tune…the chorus was:
Do as I’m doing
Follow, follow me
(repeat)
Now another memory:
On “Fast Sundays” (the first Sunday of each month we "fasted. i.e. weren’t allowed to eat before dinner), during Sacrament Meeting, people were pressured to “bear their testimony” in front of the congregation. It was common practice to bring one’s younger children up to the pulpit, as soon as they could walk and speak, and whisper a “testimony” into the oblivious child’s ear for them to repeat into the microphone. Like all their prayers, testimonies tended to assume a loose formula, and almost always included these basics:
*Dad whispers inaudibly into toddler’s ear*
“I’d like to bear my testimony”
*whispers again*
“I know this church is true”
*whispers*
“I love my mom and dad”
*whispers*
“especially my dad”
*a rumble of muted laughter from the congregation. Dad smirks endearingly. The child does not understand this reaction and waits for more instruction.*
“I know that Joseph Smith is the true prophet…”
*the child becomes suddenly shy as the congregation falls silent again. and after some tearful resistance, Dad finally gives the ok*
“In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen”
*200 voices at once*
“AMEN.”
Since that time, many times over, I have trusted a lot of untrustworthy people, and as a result have been grievously damaged (though not yet, I think, beyond healing). I trust people automatically, and never really feel myself, my own feelings and thoughts, to be worthy of others' trust. I feel compelled to externalize everything, no matter how shameful or ineffable, because I’m so afraid of lying. Liars get punished. And it’s been torture, as I’m sure you can imagine, feeling like no one will believe that I’m “real” without gutting myself emotionally, and cutting myself open physically to prove it, even after I’ve already been explicitly endowed with someone’s trust or belief. This has, of course, severely complicated the formation of my sense of identity, being a woman with misleading primary and secondary sex characteristics.
I can hardly believe that I’m typing this now, that it seems to be translating so clearly. But here it is. I attribute this clarity to the “difficult choice” I’ve already mentioned, and somewhat ironically, I might add…
Brought to the edge of a seemingly impossible decision between unbearable dysphoria and suicide, I somehow delayed making any decision long enough to be tempted by a counter-intuitive third choice, as seemingly impossible as it was inevitable. There was certainly no hope at all for emergency plastic surgery, but by removing that option, and sitting with the urge to die, just a little longer, another option appeared in it’s place, an option well within my reach. The choice was as simple as it was terrifying in its ramifications.
I’ve chosen to be mute. This is something about which I once fantasized and longed for, but never executed. It was during another period of intense social isolation in my twenties, just before running away to Providence, Like I'd run away from Utah to Texas seven years earlier. After only these few days of self-imposed silence, I can say that my condition, my mood, and my outlook have improved by orders of magnitude. My mind is quieter, there are fewer echoes to distract me. I feel freer to act. Decisions have become decidedly easier for me to make, without relying so heavily on guidance or direction from others.It could have been anything, I suppose. Such choices are necessarily arbitrary and I don't know if the people who know me will accept my newly altered ability.
Needless to say, there are some serious disadvantages, and broader repercussions here. It cost me my relationship with XXXXXX, the proverbial "love of my life" (perhaps permanently, perhaps not, I don’t know), which I think is ultimately for the best, for us both, for now, but also is exquisitely painful. Still, heartbreak I can live with. I’ve already seen the other side of it many times. But the dysphoria I could not. When it comes to choosing between chronic suicidality due to intense facial, genital, vocal, and social dysphoria, I’d prefer to live as a mute, invisible woman than to die as a desperate statement, especially since I’ve observed firsthand how commonly misunderstood suicidality really is.
It’s made me realize that, at my core, I've always wanted to be understood even more strongly than I wanted to live. Fear of misunderstanding was my motivation to live, but just long enough to be understood. You could say I had no love of my life. or that I loved my self more than life itself. I had learned to long for annihilation long before I could read, but I only ever learned how to hate parts of myself, the part I couldn't identify with in particular.
Now that I better understand my self, I can finally learn to keep living because I want to, and not for any body else. And I think everyone, myself included, deserves not simply to live, to subsist, but to want to live. To love and long for life itself.
wealth, power, sex...these are just counterfeits sold to us by grifters and charlatans to distract us from the self-love, self-esteem, and self-respect that could make us a veritable danger to them; so called "men" who depend on our misery in order to claim our bodies, inside and out, as their birthright.
I’ve already broken my no-talking rule more than once, but that’s kind of what I do; I break all my own rules. Still, every time I break it, I return to it. I set it again. If my early experience with rules taught me anything. it’s that breaking them just makes them stronger, if a little more complicated than before. My little rule remains, and grows more complex every day. It gives me something to work on that is mine, that is vital to me. I think I’ve done similar before but this time, I recognize what it is, and what it means. This time I know all the rules will change. And that’s really what women like me need.
Getting my new face is still important to me, but it can wait a while. Changing the rules that make access to the healthcare we need is higher priority. That doesn’t just change my life. It changes the lives of everyone in danger of suffering the atrocities I've already suffered.
I know this probably sounds like some messiah-complex bullshit. And to some degree it is, I guess. I can’t really help it, that narrative was pretty deeply imprinted on me, without my consent. But I think what really matters is what I do with it. What really matters is what I do with me, and not what other people believe.
Which is why I'm shutting up, for now. I won’t be explaining myself further, from here, and I've got to tell you, it’s already been such a relief.
I don’t know how this will all turn out. All I know is that it took facing the false decision between life or death, yet again, for me to set this one simple, yet crucial bodily boundary, and to set it for myself, no matter the cost.
I look forward to discussing this with you further, hopefully in person at some point, if this quarantine ever ends, even if I have to face the wall, cover my face, or learn how to sign to make it possible. I miss the bus ride to your office, the quiet of the waiting room, and your kind demeanor, which I'm sure, in your line of work, costs a lot to maintain.
Everything in my world is about to change. But this time, I’m staying. I want to see how my story ends, this time. I’m just too damned curious, or just too curiously damned.
I can’t express how grateful I feel to have you in my corner.
Thank you for believing in me.
Temperately,
Daphne
24th April 2020
Dear XXXXX,
Firstly, I feel like apologizing for missing our last scheduled appointment, and neglecting your text message. I want to assure you that, while the past week or so has been intense and difficult for me, I’m not dropping out or disappearing. I intend to see you again, in time.
As for what happened, well...it’s complicated. So I’ll try my best to offer the important facts without rambling, but make no guarantees...as you well know, I’m a very rambly girl.
Three days ago, I made a difficult choice, more difficult than any choice I’ve faced since recognizing my need to transition my public gender presentation. It’s made me think long and hard about the difference between deciding and choosing (the former being an act of division--for example, between am/am-not, yes/no, etc.) and the latter being a selection from among various options. As you’re well aware, I have great difficulty making decisions, which shouldn’t be too surprising since I’m a genderqueer woman trying to make it in a largely binary-structured (and patriarchally biased) society. The main problem, for me, as I understand it, may simply be the fact that where most people see only two possible options for acting or being, I see many possibilities. What others see as strictly logical, rational, or deterministic, I see as...nested...native to a broader imaginative process...with rather than opposed to the irrational, uncertain, and chaotic.
Any well-programmed computer or automated machine can make decisions for itself, but it takes something far more complex, and far more organic, to make a choice.
Over the years, I’ve read many different takes on what separates self-identified human beings from “other” animals, or from thinking machines. Some are more amusing than others, and I’m not sure whether I have read this somewhere already, but I would name that crucial difference suicide. Risk of suicidality is what makes human beings neither animal nor machine but something altogether different. I think that we are, indeed, special, but that there is really nothing all that special about being special. I think that as speaking and writing hosts for language, voices, we are capable of such intense self-awareness that we became the first species to contemplate self-extermination. I think we may in fact be the loneliest species on the planet, and that the illness troubling me, in particular, as disabling as it is in my current socio-economical habitat, is not, at its root, a "mental" pathology at all, though it may very well in some cases be co-morbid with the like.
Rather I think I may simply identify too strongly with the so-called “human,” and that very few of my fellow human beings can agree on what that word really means, or recognize themselves in it, or their fellow beings. In other words, I believe I suffer primarily from chronic, externally imposed dehumanization, which is something that I, alone, cannot escape as long as I maintain prolonged contact with cis/hetero-centric and patriarchal systems of governance.
In many ways, especially recently, I do see this system (or network of similarly structured systems) changing in small ways, showing signs of evolution, responding and adapting, meekly, to the desperate cries of the marginalized and misunderstood. I hold great faith in the future of our species, as well as infinite grief for the irreparable damage already done. What I’ve been lacking, personally, is the ability to imagine myself being a part of any such governing system and surviving it.
I both love and fear other people with great intensity, and I have betrayed, been betrayed, by both myself and others, so many times that I’ve become far too sensitive to language, to gender, to systems of meaning in general, for my own good. Where I grew up, trust and belief were not a choice but a decision, one enforced by word, gesture, and appearance. I’m in the habit of trusting people automatically, and have always struggled with a very potent verbal obedience reflex. As I type this, a song just popped into my head from Primary (the Latter-Day Saint Sunday School for mormon children younger than 8, which is the age of baptism), they even had bodily gestures that went with the tune…the chorus was:
Do as I’m doing
Follow, follow me
(repeat)
Now another memory:
On “Fast Sundays” (the first Sunday of each month we "fasted. i.e. weren’t allowed to eat before dinner), during Sacrament Meeting, people were pressured to “bear their testimony” in front of the congregation. It was common practice to bring one’s younger children up to the pulpit, as soon as they could walk and speak, and whisper a “testimony” into the oblivious child’s ear for them to repeat into the microphone. Like all their prayers, testimonies tended to assume a loose formula, and almost always included these basics:
*Dad whispers inaudibly into toddler’s ear*
“I’d like to bear my testimony”
*whispers again*
“I know this church is true”
*whispers*
“I love my mom and dad”
*whispers*
“especially my dad”
*a rumble of muted laughter from the congregation. Dad smirks endearingly. The child does not understand this reaction and waits for more instruction.*
“I know that Joseph Smith is the true prophet…”
*the child becomes suddenly shy as the congregation falls silent again. and after some tearful resistance, Dad finally gives the ok*
“In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen”
*200 voices at once*
“AMEN.”
Since that time, many times over, I have trusted a lot of untrustworthy people, and as a result have been grievously damaged (though not yet, I think, beyond healing). I trust people automatically, and never really feel myself, my own feelings and thoughts, to be worthy of others' trust. I feel compelled to externalize everything, no matter how shameful or ineffable, because I’m so afraid of lying. Liars get punished. And it’s been torture, as I’m sure you can imagine, feeling like no one will believe that I’m “real” without gutting myself emotionally, and cutting myself open physically to prove it, even after I’ve already been explicitly endowed with someone’s trust or belief. This has, of course, severely complicated the formation of my sense of identity, being a woman with misleading primary and secondary sex characteristics.
I can hardly believe that I’m typing this now, that it seems to be translating so clearly. But here it is. I attribute this clarity to the “difficult choice” I’ve already mentioned, and somewhat ironically, I might add…
Brought to the edge of a seemingly impossible decision between unbearable dysphoria and suicide, I somehow delayed making any decision long enough to be tempted by a counter-intuitive third choice, as seemingly impossible as it was inevitable. There was certainly no hope at all for emergency plastic surgery, but by removing that option, and sitting with the urge to die, just a little longer, another option appeared in it’s place, an option well within my reach. The choice was as simple as it was terrifying in its ramifications.
I’ve chosen to be mute. This is something about which I once fantasized and longed for, but never executed. It was during another period of intense social isolation in my twenties, just before running away to Providence, Like I'd run away from Utah to Texas seven years earlier. After only these few days of self-imposed silence, I can say that my condition, my mood, and my outlook have improved by orders of magnitude. My mind is quieter, there are fewer echoes to distract me. I feel freer to act. Decisions have become decidedly easier for me to make, without relying so heavily on guidance or direction from others.It could have been anything, I suppose. Such choices are necessarily arbitrary and I don't know if the people who know me will accept my newly altered ability.
Needless to say, there are some serious disadvantages, and broader repercussions here. It cost me my relationship with XXXXXX, the proverbial "love of my life" (perhaps permanently, perhaps not, I don’t know), which I think is ultimately for the best, for us both, for now, but also is exquisitely painful. Still, heartbreak I can live with. I’ve already seen the other side of it many times. But the dysphoria I could not. When it comes to choosing between chronic suicidality due to intense facial, genital, vocal, and social dysphoria, I’d prefer to live as a mute, invisible woman than to die as a desperate statement, especially since I’ve observed firsthand how commonly misunderstood suicidality really is.
It’s made me realize that, at my core, I've always wanted to be understood even more strongly than I wanted to live. Fear of misunderstanding was my motivation to live, but just long enough to be understood. You could say I had no love of my life. or that I loved my self more than life itself. I had learned to long for annihilation long before I could read, but I only ever learned how to hate parts of myself, the part I couldn't identify with in particular.
Now that I better understand my self, I can finally learn to keep living because I want to, and not for any body else. And I think everyone, myself included, deserves not simply to live, to subsist, but to want to live. To love and long for life itself.
wealth, power, sex...these are just counterfeits sold to us by grifters and charlatans to distract us from the self-love, self-esteem, and self-respect that could make us a veritable danger to them; so called "men" who depend on our misery in order to claim our bodies, inside and out, as their birthright.
I’ve already broken my no-talking rule more than once, but that’s kind of what I do; I break all my own rules. Still, every time I break it, I return to it. I set it again. If my early experience with rules taught me anything. it’s that breaking them just makes them stronger, if a little more complicated than before. My little rule remains, and grows more complex every day. It gives me something to work on that is mine, that is vital to me. I think I’ve done similar before but this time, I recognize what it is, and what it means. This time I know all the rules will change. And that’s really what women like me need.
Getting my new face is still important to me, but it can wait a while. Changing the rules that make access to the healthcare we need is higher priority. That doesn’t just change my life. It changes the lives of everyone in danger of suffering the atrocities I've already suffered.
I know this probably sounds like some messiah-complex bullshit. And to some degree it is, I guess. I can’t really help it, that narrative was pretty deeply imprinted on me, without my consent. But I think what really matters is what I do with it. What really matters is what I do with me, and not what other people believe.
Which is why I'm shutting up, for now. I won’t be explaining myself further, from here, and I've got to tell you, it’s already been such a relief.
I don’t know how this will all turn out. All I know is that it took facing the false decision between life or death, yet again, for me to set this one simple, yet crucial bodily boundary, and to set it for myself, no matter the cost.
I look forward to discussing this with you further, hopefully in person at some point, if this quarantine ever ends, even if I have to face the wall, cover my face, or learn how to sign to make it possible. I miss the bus ride to your office, the quiet of the waiting room, and your kind demeanor, which I'm sure, in your line of work, costs a lot to maintain.
Everything in my world is about to change. But this time, I’m staying. I want to see how my story ends, this time. I’m just too damned curious, or just too curiously damned.
I can’t express how grateful I feel to have you in my corner.
Thank you for believing in me.
Temperately,
Daphne
