Or how being sad helps me be happy.
I just finished reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I wish I could read it again and experience it again new, it was that good, to me. I cried at the end, three different times. I cried for the characters, I cried for love, I cried for my own love. It was fantastic. (The book and the crying, both.)
Yesterday, I didn’t think about killing myself. I did think about running away. I thought about leaving everyone and everything behind. Why? I took a picture of the top of my balding head yesterday morning. It’s where all of my dysphoria has been centered. Hair makes a person feminine. It makes men feminine. It makes women feminine. I have known, for two years, that I would never have hair like that. That I would never be feminine in that defining way. But I let myself fantasize about it. I let myself imagine a ponytail, a high fade, cascading locks. What it would feel like in the wind. When I slept. When I was showering. How it might look under a hat. How I could cut it short, then grow it out again. The kicker, of course, is that I had long hair in college. Then this poison that is testosterone took it away from me.
All I did was take a picture. I’d been shaving my head for almost six months, until a couple of weeks ago I decided to let it grow. It was such a relief to not have to shave it every day. When I did, there was always a shadow, it was always clear where I had hair and where I didn’t. Even entirely bald, my head looked like a man’s. So I got tired of shaving for no purpose, and I let it grow. As it grew, I let myself believe that suppressing testosterone, as I have been for a year now, was going to let some few hairs grow back stronger. I let myself believe it wasn’t as bad as all that.
You have to understand how powerful hope is. It can blind you. I have never wanted to wear a wig. I have told people that it’s because that is inauthentic, and I want to be entirely me. The truth is that I am afraid of getting old, of being incapable of keeping myself, incapable of shaving my head, my arms, my legs, my face. It is a paralyzing fear. I have been lasering and electrocuting all the hair on my body and my face for a year, getting rid of all of it, knowing well the irony of having so much hair where I hate it, and not having enough where I desperately want it.
The hope that I might not have to worry about the hair on my head… that it could grow, that I could have this thing… it was intoxicating. It was a dream into which I willingly drowned myself.
I took a picture of the top of my head.
I was devastated. I was alone. I felt sick. I sat with my phone, and I researched the hell out of hair transplants. It was encouraging. Expensive, but encouraging. I learned about the Norwood scale, an inexact but ballpark way of grading baldness. (I’m a six, the most bald.) I learned about what hair transplanting involves. I read articles, and message boards. I spent hours immersing myself in what I might be able to do about not facing reality. I found examples of people (all men) as bald as me who went through the process. It took them extraordinary effort, a ton of luck, and thousands upon thousands of dollars. And… all the photos were proof that it could not happen for me. These men went from bald to thinning, and looked so happy about it in their photos. From domes shining out of a ring of hair, to just enough hair that when they look straight on in a mirror, they can fool themselves. And maybe it’s enough for them.
It could never be for me. I felt drained. It was like I had been treading water for a year, and finally realized nobody was coming to save me. I cried by myself in bed, my dog anxious next to me. I decided to detransition. I decided to not go ahead with my genital surgery. I decided to stop taking hormones. Why would I do this to myself? Why would I do everything possible to be a woman, to be me, when I would always see that I wasn’t. When everyone else would know that, too. Oh God, I realized, they already know that. They already see me and think, poor guy, poor man, so brave, so hopeless. They love me for it, but they don’t believe I will ever be a woman. They will pretend, because it’s the decent thing to do for someone you love.
I gave serious thought to running away. From my transition, and my life, and my kids, and everything. Not because there was a better life for me out there, but because I could not make the people I love live with me. I was failed, tragic, needy. Unlovable. Unworthy.
It was a bad day. Depression lies. But it tells a really convincing story.
But I didn’t run away. In the end that wasn’t an option. I wasn’t ready to deal with the guilt I’d feel. Escape through fiction still remained on option, though. It’s been how I cope, I guess. I’ve read 59 books in five months, after reading just three in two years of pandemic. I don’t do things by half. I had already begun Evelyn Hugo, so I sat down to finish it.
And at the end of the book, I cried. I cried three times. Ugly sniffling snotty sobs. And I loved it. I absolutely fucking loved it. I imagined people I love coming to find me in tears, and cuddling with me, and I love that. So I went to find my wife and I asked for a hug, and she gave it to me, she held me while I sniffled into her hair. She’s never turned me down for anything I have asked for.
And I had a thought. This is why I am transitioning. Because this is who I want to be. A person who can feel. Before crashing my testosterone and loading up on estrogen, I had cried five times in memory. The first time I was 13, and my last sister was leaving for college. The last time was when I thought I had poisoned my baby by giving them too much of the wrong medicine, I held them and rocked them and keened while my wife called someone and then told me it was going to be okay.
Since flipping my hormones, I have cried a lot, and it feels fucking fantastic. Crying might be the best thing about transitioning. It isn’t the crying, of course, it’s being able to feel. Sad, happy, joy, despair. Sitting here this morning, crying my eyes out over Evelyn Hugo, over her life, over the craft and compassion of Taylor Jenkins Reid, who was able to write this story… I realized that there’s no way I can go back. I am purging the poison from my body, and if I let it back in, I will die.
People are complicated. I am not going to be either happy or unhappy. But I am going to make choices to be happier. I am going to choose to cry. Maybe it’ll be over my lack of hair. Maybe it’ll be over a wig that doesn’t live up to the hope in my heart. Maybe it’ll be over a picture someone takes of me, an angle I can’t prepare myself for in the mirror.
I just know it’ll be fantastic.
Leave a Reply