“bloody worm goddess, you look so pretty when you’re scared to death”- SCARED2DEATH, Black Dresses
“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”- John 3:19
I did some basic blood tests since we last spoke, which have come to demonstrate that I don’t have diabetes, kidney failure, liver failure, or anemia, which means that my affliction truly is the flu of the closet, possibly combined with a few vitamin deficiencies (I should do a panel as well).
But the death flu has now brought back a familiar symptom – a deep dread in my chest. It is difficult for me to interrogate this dread, because as I type this (and as you, sweet one, read it) the dread tickles at the inexorable things within my soul. These things have, in my understanding, existed since the beginning, and all things, including my gender dysphoria, fold into them. I can speak of these things only in vague terms, because I know of them only as such. They reveal themselves to me in shrouded, amorphous ways: homogenous shimmering blobs that bulge and contract from my chest where my mind’s eye can see, like a breathing tumour. They don’t have too much to do with my voices, but aspects of them can be traced back to the conformity-drive (refer to my last blog-post to learn more about the conformity-drive and the voices).
The conformity-drive stabilizes and formalizes itself into a list of obligations to the people around me. The obligations care first and foremost about these people’s epistemological satisfaction: their perception of what they know and not what is. I will illustrate with an example: my parents could not see me masturbate to pornography, and so me doing that did not violate my obligations. The obligation is to present myself as someone who thinks pious thoughts and does not do these things. But me doing these things creates another self: a self that is structured to exist but not present, and to quench libidinal desires in isolation. This structure is called the closet. It’s consequences are the death flu (active, sharp, loud harm in short bursts) and the dread (passive, gradual harm over time). My intuition is that sustaining such a structure creates a new drive: to expose the darkness to light. This is not particularly profound: one would naturally wish that the things they want to do are things they can do out in the light.
Christianity creates a powerful mythology around an immanent moment of all such dark acts coming into the light. Much like Christ, this moment has been long deferred, and in this limbo, the months stretch into years in which many of my acts of darkness have retreated into the dark, being unobserved for so long that they escape even my memory. This makes the powder-keg fear of the winnowing of the chaff gradually erode into a new sort of feeling: smoother, softer, rounder and smaller. This is the dread.
I live perpetually in the dread. The dread often creeps up my leg after I have sex. When I was sixteen, my mother bought me a silver bracelet, which was meant to represent a promise that I would keep myself pure for my future Christian wife. The clasp of this chain broke in the months before I had to go to college and it sits in some cupboard shelf, sending out shockwaves of dread.
For many years, I had only one pathway to sublimate the dread, which was to curse the day of my birth, because I did not consent to being under these obligations built-in. This happens to be a theme that the Hebrew Bible addresses with some sophistication, I think, by waving it away. It’s a bit silly to, like Job, wish you were never born because of the cards you got dealt. This is because, much like the complexity of marine biology (God’s analogy, not mine), birth and death are things so complex so as to be practically random to human comprehension. Who can you blame for your own birth, and on what grounds? This method quickly crumbles under its own weight, breaking from its own contradictions.
What else can I do? There is one other approach that has shown more promise in the past. Being a woman. Transitioning doesn’t act as a solution here the way plugging the right values into variables in an equation doesn’t. It isn’t psychically neat in that way. But there are things about it that help fight the dread, because it is in many ways an act of exposure. In my life, it is also one of the most extreme transgressions I can possibly do.
This is why it is imperative that I take steps to further my transition. I don’t think I will find a way to resolve the deadlock with my family until I have staved off more of the dread. And there seem to be no other ways to stave off the dread other than being a woman.