Wave-Collapsing Transitional Cusp
By: Paige Yes Treebridge
Tags: Queer, LGBTQ, Transgender, Family, Feminism

A shipping container floating slightly under the cold, clear water of the ocean. It is white with green writing that looks to be Nordic. The thick paint is scraped, too much and too old to be from the recent storm. It is buoyant enough not to sink. Already sunk. Moving. Disoriented, out of place, unnatural. Despite the mass relative to my very human body, despite my limited understanding of what it means to be in motion beyond the mass of a human or maybe a car or truck, this massive steel body is in undeniable, terrifying motion. It has volition and it is so much more dangerous than I can know. It rises, and the rounded metal edges break the surface. Channels of water are dragged off the top by gravity as the cold container moves out into the air with dignity, and a sense of grace.

It settles back down, displacing salt water until it is slightly under the surface again, dropping. What must that sound like? What must that feel like? What currents moved it up out of the depths and what lack pushes it back down?

It slows its descent, and begins moving back upward again. Water moves the fuck out of the way.

Cusp

For all of 2018, laying in the dark until I fell asleep or I repeatedly fell asleep and fought my way back to awareness, I wrote in a journal. From January to November, I wrote about physics, reincarnation, time and existence outside of time, linearity and non-linearity, and phenomenology. I was really writing about gender, and how I needed to either come out or die, I just didn’t really know that until December. I kept writing about awareness and reality all year long.

Apr 29, 2018

I am awareness. I cannot be aware of something I am not aware of. There is memory and there is awareness but until the remembered returns to awareness, it is not part of me. Or…I am more than awareness. My concept of myself is made up of how much I extend “myself” beyond my awareness. My memories are part of my identity (even when they are false). What else is part of my identity?

June 22, 2018

We live in a loop of time, which is itself an error of perception. We live in time which is an error of perception. The eternal return does not exist as reliving the same life eternally but a return in each moment.

July 10, 2018

You could fairly easily convince me that I have never left this room, and everything I think is “my life” I created in my head. Those things that resist that sort of thing are our reality anchors.

Oct 15, 2018

I have no interest anymore I’m raw attention. Thinking how much can you do. What is. The surrender signal? I have needs too. I’m made of nothing more. Than a loop. Variables. My matter repeated. Stuck in my closed system a future lost forever. Pass thru drive on. I’m not going anywhere.

November, 2018, my shoes are on the dash of the car, which Jess doesn’t usually appreciate but it’s a rental so I am getting away with it for the moment. My new socks are feeling very visible but no one knows what they represent. I will later share with a Deleuze scholar I meet online that I deterritorialized my feet and ankles, before I liberated the rest of my body. I had to let Jess know that I am buying these socks because they stand out, for me. My entire wardrobe consists of 4 pairs of faded blue jeans, black socks, black boxer briefs, and many extra large black t-shirts. These socks are very different. These socks are brightly spotted and beautiful. In these socks, I am beginning to feel…something.

I also bought a tube of progesterone cream, but without telling anyone. I put it on my nipples for a week for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, in terms of what the hell I expected to happen. I hoped to feel something definitive, maybe? Whatever the reason, I knew it was related to why I used to drink Sailor Jerry’s to the point of slurring words and then find myself alone, shirtless, crying over my tiny, inverted nipples. It was while deeply medicated that I could confront knowing I would die having felt something was deeply fucking wrong with everything in my otherwise pretty good life. It was while dissociated on top of dissociation that I was able to feel anything about this strange sense of never having begun life, despite a beautiful family and a successful career. It is post-transition, where I am now, that I can almost enjoy that horrible sense in retrospect, as something that was forced onto my body and life, oppression that I overcame.

The progesterone cream made me incredibly cranky, but mostly I was upset knowing that whatever I was doing was not the right thing. Not yet. It was close enough to be terrifying, and it made me feel lost to know I was still so fucked up and far from whatever fix might help me. It felt definitive, in terms of knowing and denying, at the same time, I hoped for breast development. I was cranky and impatient because I knew whatever was coming, whatever I might feel when I got done denying my feelings, was better. I knew it had to be, or that I might just stop everything.

I threw the cream away before we left for our trip to Colorado, but I began cycling the seven pairs of socks, one for every day of the week.

Transition

I did not journal about gender in November or most of December, but I started talking about it with my family, vaguely at first. In affirming, careful conversations that are too beautiful and personal to ever be anything but private, I came out, repeatedly and progressively until, by Feb 2019, I had come out as trans woman and filed the paperwork to change my name. By March of 2019, I shared that I would attempt to correct the hormonal imbalance I (and my primary care doctor and therapist) believed was the cause of several persistent mental health issues, primarily anxiety, depression, and serious dissociation. Two weeks later, with the sense I had found a miracle cure, I knew I was going to socially transition, and would remain on HRT for the rest of my life. In retrospect, “miracle” seems understated.

November 2018, as I sit in the car, my socks are completely visible and a chocolate edible is keeping me very warm. I know enough to know everything has changed but mostly I know I can already be so much happier than I have ever been. I am not a man. I’ve shared enough about what I might be to feel free of the sense that I had to be that thing, a cis man, an identity forced on me and a presentation that to me meant less than nothing.

I am not even aware that I have come out to myself yet because I am in between worlds. I am floating outside cisnormativity. I am happy. Emerging. I have no idea how amazing, intense, or reality-shifting transition will be, or that I am already transitioning, and have been for over a year. I also have no idea how much I hate myself, my body, my gendered being in the world, or how fucking awful the process of realizing all of that will be. In four months, I will shave my beard expecting genderqueer liberation. Instead I will see the blue hair still remaining under the skin and completely break down for a while.

I am asked to remove my feet from the dash. Inside my head, I am the happiest I have ever been and far more at peace than I would be until December 2019. Even with my socks, my only gender, now safely hidden back under my jeans, I am high, and with my family. We are headed to the mountains. I have beautiful socks, finally, and I am experiencing a dangerous volition that will carry me so much further out to sea than I could have known.