my body is a woman I love
does a soul have a gender? whatever mine doesn't but my body is my wife
My body has always felt very different from me. There is a distinct line, in the way I experience the world, between the I-self who thinks, and feels, and observes those thoughts and feelings, and the body which vessels my self into the world. There’s so much about my body I don’t understand. Our relationship has not always been a good one.
That’s not true: our relationship has been frequently adversarial. I have resented my body. I have been ashamed of it. I have hated it and hurt it and punished it. I have rejected it, longed for different ones. I have sat around and named everything I didn’t like about it and I have run out of breath before I finished.
Sometimes I think about the all-consuming, limerant, unrequited fits of desire I would fall into as a hormonal adolescent — mowed over with devotion for someone who didn’t care if I lived or died. I used to live in this fantasy world where my love would get so big and perfect and selfless it would be impossible to deny, like a convincing argument. I treat my body with indifference or desdain. I think of it cruelly, or only when I have to.
It thinks only, ever, always of me.
I don’t have a significant spiritual or ontological attachment to womanhood. Being a woman feels largely accidental, to me — like being Canadian, or from Toronto. I think I have a soul, or something like it. That soul is not a woman’s soul — or it’s not a woman’s soul exclusively. Or something. There’s woman stuff in there, but also man stuff. Also, what does that mean? Sometimes I think of this as my having both a woman-soul and a man-soul and their having a kind of non-hierachical, deliberative relationship, which is also how I’ve heard at least one person describe being two-spirit. Sometimes I think souls just do not have gender, because gender is made up. Honestly, I don’t think about it very much. I have a woman’s body, and I live a woman’s life, but that’s a social and political role more than it’s an identity.
If I had been born into a boy’s body, I think that also would have been fine. I don’t actively desire to be a man and the process of becoming one doesn’t call to me, but I did have to think about it. There are things about the social and political designation of womanhood I find frustrating, because I think they’re largely arbitrary — socially-derived power structures I am subjected to whether I want to or not, like the law, or an economic system. Some of the socially-enforced conventions of womanhood are nice, and I think I’d do them whether I was expected to or not. Talking about the weather is actually interesting to me, and I look forward to doing it at the post office. I also look forward to wearing long skirts and taking care of babies. If I was being forced to do these things under pain of some kind of punishment or legal ramification, I’m sure I would feel very differently.
My woman-body has had trouble filling its woman-role, and this might have something to do with the fact that I don’t care about being a woman in the way that I am maybe supposed to care in order to fulfill the social and political role particularly well. I have a really hard time doing things I don’t care about. I have felt very angry about how difficult it’s been. I haven’t felt able to be angry at the actual things that have made me angry — big, sprawling, at-once-pervasive-and-elusive expectations and definitions of womanhood, and their consequences.
Instead, I just get angry at my body.
I try to think about my body as being me and it doesn’t work. I feel my body screaming out for help and I bring it to the doctor over and over and every time I’m sure that this time, I took it too far and it’s going to leave me. I treat my body with disdain. You are healthy, the doctors tell me. You need to take better care of yourself.
My body forgives me. My body thinks only of me.
One day, I stop trying to think of my body and I as the same, because I’m not always a woman but she is. I stop calling her an it. I still feel the same as I always have: like a soul who’s not a woman, or not only a woman, in a woman-body. My body is separate from me. I think about lots of different things. My body thinks only of me.
In therapy I’ve been exploring the idea that there are lots of different stories I can tell myself about the same set of information, and I can find a way to tell myself a story that makes me feel better, helps me make different choices. I tell my practitioner that my body is a woman. I don’t feel like I deserve it, but she loves me. And I love her too, you know? That’s my girl. You gotta do right by your girl.
Here’s the thing about me and my girl: we don’t speak the same language. This is very romantic and cool of us, that we’ve fallen in love like we have, not speaking the same language. I speak in thoughts and words and she speaks only in feeling. Love — real love, the kind that lasts a whole lifetime, that stuff takes a lot of work, so I’ve been trying to learn her language. Picking up some words, here and there.
I haven’t always been a good partner. That’s not true: I have frequently been a really bad one. I’ve been an abusive husband and I have hurt her. I have been a neglectful workaholic and a crazy girlfriend. We have had a codependent relationship and we have suffered lesbian bed death. I have been withholding and I have held grudges for years. I’ve been thinking about all these other things while she’s been thinking only about me.
Lately I’ve been buying her nice things. We’ve been spending more time together. We’ve been doing transgressive, naughty, silly things together — to keep the spark alive, you know. I’ve been giving her what she needs, or trying to. She’s been talking, and I’ve been listening. To make a relationship work, you can’t wait to feel the right things to decide you’re all in. I have decided I am all in, so I’m going to feel the right things. I’m going to do the work. I’m going to be there for her, like she’s always been there for me, like she’s been since the very beginning.
Like she will be until the end.