Spirals

Sometimes, weird – minor, normal, human things happen and they send me into a spiral.
Sunday we tried to un-wax my ears and I’m on day two of stuffy sinus pressure and weird wax extraction cycles that involve a lot of uncomfortableness. According to my primary care doctor, I have the tiniest ear canals they’ve ever seen on an adult, which means my ears get clogged pretty easily, and it builds up and I eventually stop being able to hear as awesome and it’s annoying and getting it out involves pouring one kind or another of liquid in my ear and trying to flush it out and it just sucks.
I remember everything about me is tiny, and I remember that’s a problem. I remember that causes pain, and anxiety, and nothing good. Being cute doesn’t really actually make up for it.
It quickly descends into hating everything about myself, hating everything about having a body because I quickly remember just how foreign my body tends to feel to me.
I feel like people talk about being at one with their body – like they are their body and their body is them and I don’t understand that feeling. I feel like I’m an identity trapped in a fleshy cage that fits awkwardly and mostly gets in the way. I feel like, I don’t and wouldn’t fit in any body, regardless of gender assignment because I don’t feel like I am a gender, and maybe that’s what the problem is. And maybe that’s why little things not working and being painful remind me of it and remind me of how disconnected I feel because I am very strongly not my body, and it’s awkward.
Because when people try to tell me my body isn’t out to get me, or that my body isn’t it’s own entity, I don’t understand, because that’s all I feel, that’s the only relationship I’ve ever had with it. Sentience trapped in a cage, a cage that tends to actively limit my ability to live unrestricted than not.
It’s frustrating, because when people see me they see my body, I’m treated like people with my assigned-female body are treated, I have to work harder and prove myself more because my body is assigned female, I choose not to go places I would otherwise love to because I know how I’ll be treated because of my body.
I can’t just exist in a genderless state, even though that’s where I’m me.
I can usually keep that from getting to me too much by mostly ignoring it and, in my mind, making assigned gender as little of an issue as I possibly can by trying to not focus on it too much (but that’s hard because there are a lot of things, a lot of bad things, that affect or can affect me directly because of my body and I can’t escape that, and I deal with being a disappointment to people because I don’t respond the way someone with my assigned gender and upbringing “should”). I generally try not to bring it up too much in my work, though, I guess it’s not really something that needs to be brought up – like the one most-unhelpful judge in NCFCA when I was 13 said “my voice is too girly”.
Usually I get by okay. I hit F on the boxes because that’s what people have decided to call this body and it doesn’t get to me too much. I do what I can to feel as good about myself/this body as I can, and sometimes the gap between me and my body is less vast and abyss-like than other times, but it feels more like I’m just at terms with my identity not hinging on my anatomy and both of them existing on relatively different planes except for when they crossover and then it sucks (but birth control and antidepressants have fixed a lot of that).
Until, suddenly, I’m reminded that I am physically human, that I do live in a body and not separately from it, and my ears getting clogged will make me grumpy and there is not currently an exchange program to make it better. When I’m really low, when things like this happen, all I can remember is how having this body makes it harder for me to do what I want to do, and even the perks have disadvantages, and even if there were an easy body-swap-shop, swapping wouldn’t fix the problem – I would feel just as trapped if I had to be a man. I’m sure there’s something good about having a body…
hard pressed for determining what though. Pizza?