It’s March 14th, 2016 which means that I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for an entire year now.
jk i actually treated myself to my first gel nail manicure today
The idea that it’s only been one year is such a mindfuck for me. It’s hard to remember that all the changes I’ve experienced on hormones have somehow only taken a year. Imagine collapsing several years of puberty into just 365 days and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how jammed pack this year has been for my body.
These days I’ve been experiencing moments where I actually feel almost in sync with my body which is a refreshing experience. The best way I’ve been able to explain this sensation is to refer to View-Masters, those bulky plastic glasses/goggles/viewing-thingies that combine two flat images into a three-dimensional scene. When out of focus the images are flat and fuzzy and often nausea inducing. It’s only when those images come into sync with each other that you get the proper three-dimensional experience. For years my body and my sense of self have existed in discordant relation to each other. Areas of focus may overlap and at times come together in harmony but for the most part it’s like an out-of-focus stereo display complete with the nausea swimming in my stomach. And now? Now it’s like I’m finally able to adjust the dial and bring the two images into proper harmony.
Or at least I’m getting closer to harmony, closer to bringing the two images into focus to create the three-dimensional image that doesn’t make me want to vomit everywhere.
When this process began I assumed that I would just be bringing my body into line. I thought that I had a clear image of myself that I could bring about with some artificial hormones and a like fifty thousand nip and tucks. Over the past year I’ve begun to understand that this clear image of myself came from a complete removal from reality. At some point I understood that the image I held for my body and my life would never occur and so I was cut my womanhood from earthly constraints and built a female version of myself on fantasy and desire. I lived a life inside of my head and abandoned my body to have its own “boy” identity. My complete divorce of my body and my identity was a bifurcation that could only begin to heal when I began to engage with my body.
I used to think the language comparing HRT to alchemy was a little whoo-whoo but it makes sense to me. Somehow HRT uses chemicals and compounds and various strange things with complex names to work a miracle transform the body that I abandoned into the body that I understand as my own. As my body shapes itself from dream-life into real-life I have no choice but to bring my understanding of my identity from ideal daydream into practical reality. It’s no longer enough to know that the world should see me as a woman I now need to navigate a world that does see me as a woman (at least on the days that I get my makeup right). Starting to understand my body in the real world has pushed me one step further in understanding who I am in the real world.
This past year has been a wild one for me full of rapid changes that I struggle to keep track of. In many ways the physical changes brought by HRT are the easiest to understand and keep track of. Things like breast tissue growth and fat redistribution can be estimated and measured and neatly written up. It’s the emotional side of things, the understanding of self, that I’ve had the hardest time understanding. I still don’t entirely understand who I am but I do understand that on this one year anniversary two disparate parts of myself are coming into focus to create a stereoscopic human.
the jaded matron 