15 - Embedded.

There is nothing more cringe-worthy for me than people commenting on my chest.

“I wish I had a rack like yours, couldn’t you share some?!?” people would taunt me, envious of what I was ‘given.’

I never asked for these and I never wanted them. It’s like telling a malnourished person you are jealous of their figure. Are you fucking kidding me? I would think, how clueless they were of the daily torment my chest put me through. My breasts were not up for discussion, they were anomalies attached to my body.

My lovers were generally the first to discover this unspoken taboo. I was the ultimate deceiver. People would date me thinking they were going to sleep with a woman. That I was a lesbian. It was all pretty routine until they discovered they were banned from some of their favourite parts. Some people took it better than others. Some still thought parts of my body were a right of passage, ignoring signs of discomfort. Consent was something I didn't know how to navigate when it was just about sex. If its just a physical exchange, your body is all you are offering, and if you are not even offering all of that...then what are you doing?

The more sensitive lovers learnt to develop their own instruction manual for how to work with my body. Bit by bit exploring what was ok as I learnt to slowly express what felt good for me. They could see a part of me still not visible to myself. Embedded in my own subconscious. They were just little gestures that engaged a more masculine side, making me feel comfortable to open up and be myself. I am grateful for those intimate moments where they indulged something so deeply buried in shame, it could only reveal itself behind the safety of a closed bedroom door.

Eventually my feelings made their way to the surface. I started to hear whispers from other people that were also not content with the way they felt in their body. Their feelings echoed mine, and all of a sudden these thoughts I had been convinced were native to my brain were now publicly acknowledged facts. A whole world had been operating without me! There was an entire language to describe the way I felt. Holy shit, this is amazing!

The most exciting thing for me was that I didn’t have to commit to one or the other. That it was perfectly normal to be both, or neither, you didn't even have to be on a spectrum of male and female! Once I had permission to extract myself from cisnormative life, it seemed obvious that this was the answer all along. Androgyny was more than just a clothing style. There was a whole identity that rejected the concept of a gender binary; you are allowed to be non-binary. That’s it. Take all my money.

Step one, back away from the binary. Slowly remove yourself from the category of ‘female’ and all that comes with it. Gently start merging yourself into the undefined. Look around you and pick out the things that validate the way you feel, let go of the ones that don’t. Some things are more difficult to let go than others. Some things feel like you owe it to them to hold on even though they hurt you. You wait and hope that these things will come around and stop hurting you. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t.

The dis-embedding takes time. Like you have been walking through a field for years and all the little burrs that have attached themselves to you, pretending to be a part of you, need to get slowly picked away. It is a bit scary really, makes you wonder how much you have been pretending and how much was real? I worry because maybe the real me isn’t as lovable as the one that needed to please everyone. Is the real me less patient and kind? Is it more aggressive and mean? Am i different? Am I changing? Some days the washing machine just gets stuck on spin cycle.