via Alice Rose Dejak

I look at myself in the mirror. Well, I look at somebody in the mirror. It might be me, but I’m not sure. Whoever they are, I feel weird about their body. It’s not mine. Maybe it’s not even a body, maybe it’s not even real.

Exactly 14 months after I started, I’m taking my last 2 mg of estradiol, my last 200 mg of spironolactone. I start coming down from a two-year high, or more aptly a two-year low. I’m not her anymore, but I’m not back to being him either. I just am. Or maybe I’m not, I’m not really sure.

Two years ago, I was in an abusive relationship. It destroyed me. Literally. It destroyed me in the sense that I no longer could be who I was. My entire consciousness, my selfhood, my soul, whatever you want to call it, died. My body and my mind had been so thoroughly controlled, coerced, and corrupted, that they were no longer of use to me. I had to reinvent myself.

During the abuse, I started questioning my gender identity. At the time I identified as a bisexual man. But I started to feel acutely alienated from my body, from my personality, from everything I thought I knew about myself. I chalked it up to gender dysphoria. Maybe I was a girl. Everyone around me reinforced the narrative. “Cis people don’t feel that way!” “If you think you might be trans, you probably are!” And so on.

I had cracked the code, or at least I thought I did. I would live as a woman. That would make the dissociation go away. But I didn’t even know to call it dissociation. I hadn’t yet come to terms with the fact that I had been abused. I thought it had to be gender dysphoria. Any other explanation was just an attempt to hide my true self.

I came out as a trans woman. I started on hormones. Don’t get me wrong, it did really help to an extent. It might have even saved my life. I just had to get out. I had to escape my body, my sense of self. I had to be somebody new, just to alleviate the dissociation. In that sense, it did help. But I was still suicidal. I was still having flashbacks and frequent emotional breakdowns. I still wanted to die. I was still dying.

I lived as a woman for about a year. I still felt alienated from my body. I was still dissociative. Sometimes that meant I was watching my life, like a movie. Sometimes that meant I was floating on the ceiling. Sometimes that meant that my body and my mind were on two different planes of existence. I’d get that deep pain, in the pit of my stomach, and I’d stare off into space. I’d forget where I was and what I was doing. It’s a constant fight trying to stay present. Living as a woman didn’t solve that.

The problem was, I hadn’t escaped who I was. My new self was just a negation of my old self; I was living in reaction to trauma. I hadn’t escaped the logic of trauma, I merely inverted it. The transition was only ever, at best, a temporary solution. I was still incomplete. I was still destroyed.

A few months after I came out as a girl, I figured out (with the help of a professional) that I had been abused and that I am now living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Great. Now I’m trans and mentally ill. But I still hadn’t thought about how my gender related to my illness. I continued to transition.