The lost boy

My friends ask me how I’m doing. And I don’t really know what to answer. There are days when my emotions fluctuate wildly and are extremely intense — pain, sadness, grief, loneliness, anger, but also a sense of freedom, liberation, belonging here geographically. On days of such emotional roller-coasters it’s hard for me to say how I’m doing because my feelings are all over the place. Then, there are days when I feel nothing; I feel like an empty shell or totally disconnected from myself. 

This disconnect is happening with my body, too: I feel like I’ve lost the boy in me. 

I’m struggling with my gender. 

I’ve been off testosterone for ten days now. I stopped it at the very beginning of my trip last week because of a gut feeling, a sense of needing to stop it. 

I wanted to be able to grieve and “feel my emotions just as they were, just as they came” — although I realize this might be a perspective coming from internalized transphobia. 

I also was feeling uncomfortable and frustrated with the recent increase of body/facial hair. Uncomfortable probably because I wasn’t socialized in a way that would prepare me to accept body hair on myself and maybe also because I simply prefer bodies (male & female) without much body hair. Frustrated because despite the increase of body/facial hair on me, which I & my queer friends have been noticing, I am still getting misgendered a lot: the majority of the world around me seems to see an androgynous/athletic & maybe hairy woman in me, and I hate this. I am NOT a woman!!! And I hate to be read/seen as a hairy/androgynous/athletic woman. So I got to the point where I thought, “What’s the point of taking testosterone if all that I’m getting from it is body hair I don’t like and ongoing misgendering from the world around me?!?” 

I’ve lost the boy inside me — or maybe the boy in me is lost. He is lost because he recently lost two of the most important people in his boy-life: he lost his dad, who will never know him as the boy he is and always was; and he lost his non-binary, genderqueer European boyfriend who was so affirming of his blossoming & transforming masculinity.

I think the profound and heart-wrenching grief from having lost my father and my genderqueer European lover (the former by death, the latter by forced separation/breakup) in such short succession has thrown me off balance so much that it’s blocked the growth of the boy in me. It’s left me feeling so disconnected with myself that I cannot even feel my own gender. I know I’m not a woman and I hate to be read as one; but when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t see that beautiful boy anymore — I don’t see anything.

I see no one.