Quality Over Quantity

THE NIGHT BEFORE I increased my dosage of testosterone six years ago—I’d started with a teeny tiny amount, terrified of what transitioning was going to mean for my life—I called my best friend, Rice. I cried about feeling unsafe, so scared I could barely speak. I remember whimpering, practically whispering, as I choked out my fears: Men were going to hurt me, more, worse than they already had. My other new concern might have been even scarier, as my conventional desirability to straight dudes slipped further away: Men weren’t going to love me.

“It’s going to become a matter of quality of quantity,” Rice said from her end of the line in Iowa. I lay curled in the bed I’d recently shared with my soon-to-be-ex-husband in Oregon. “You’ve spent your whole life being attractive to every random guy, and it’s true it’s not going to be like that anymore. You’ll have a smaller pool of interest. But the people in it will be better than the idiots you’ve been dating so far.”

A couple of the people I’ve dated since have indeed been much nicer; a couple of them have gotten up to some of the old familiar fuckery. But all of them, without exception, knew who I was. And not just in regards to my gender and my history, which I was able to let people in on as I stopped suppressing things for myself, but also the full picture of my mental health.

“I’m feeling suicidal today,” I was able to tell my last boyfriend, who understood how chronic the desire could be.

“Okay,” he responded. “Thanks for letting me know where you’re at.”

“I reserve the right to die,” I told a bright, sparkling faggot on a beach last summer on what turned out to be a first date. We’d met for a picnic on a beautiful, still bay near where he lived. We’d paddled out to a deserted beach on a paddle board and kayak, respectively, and docked on a shoreline cove among the trees, unpacking the gifts we’d each brought: sandwiches, fresh fruits, sparkling waters, two tiny bottles of sparkling pink wine. A perfect day. Perfectly a-little-too warm. Perfectly sun-drenched and slow and serene. Perfect “ass-to-hat ratio,” as he put it, paddling behind me in my enormous sun hat and thong.

“It’s hard to live with,” I said about my childhood as we sat on the seashore, our toes close to the soft lap of the waves. “Everyone in my life at this point knows: I believe in my sovereignty and right to die. I’m not going to pretend like I don’t want to or definitely won’t.”

I remember him nodding understandingly: Okay! I’ve had full-blown, full-body flashbacks in front of or right next to my dates, all of whom I told what they were about, however horrific. Non-romantic people in my life know what’s up as well—I’m forever trying to dismantle for myself and those around me the idea that lovers are more important or even more intimate than friends, and mine get let in as much as anyone in my bed. “New rule,” I told a new friend on a first hang earlier this summer. “I tell people who are going to be in my life that if it becomes the kindest thing I can do for myself, I will die.”

It’s not all suicidey. But as the most stigma’d condition I live with, the thing people talk about the least—being an incest survivor is something that happened to me, but thinking about suicide is held culturally as a passing, not recurring, state, one you “get help” for—it’s a pretty good weathervane for who can hang. Being trans and being a survivor are hard, to go ahead and understate it wildly, and if I can’t talk about the real things going on with the people around me, I feel more isolated and lonely around them than if I were by myself.

It isn’t always easy. “This is the most important and nourishing relationship in my life,” I told the new friend above, after we’d spent more time together. He looked a little…surprised, and I felt raw, uncomfortably exposed, and spent the next couple days feeling like I shouldn’t have been so honest. Like I shouldn’t have been—I shouldn’t be—so intense. I wondered if it was a mistake, or the beginning of the end. The sparkling faggot from the perfect beach date changed a plan to share a bed with me one night after I prepped him about the possibility of nighttime flashbacks, telling me outright that that was why.

But one day, I saw my landlord on our property when I looked, and felt, pretty wrecked. I told him so instead of smiling a hello and briefly pretending I was fine. “It is Tuesday,” he responded, sympathetically—the day of the week on which one of the worst events of my life happened, which I hadn’t even been tracking at that moment. I’d spent the day, as I often do when I feel terrible, chastising myself for not feeling, for not figuring out how to feel, better. But in one second, someone I knew showed up and reminded me—held for me—why it was perfectly reasonable that I didn’t. And that could only happen because I don’t hide myself from him.

Last week, I was talking to my best friend from high school on the phone. I hadn’t woken up until the middle of the afternoon, then had proceeded to watch TV for the next couple of hours, and it turned out he hadn’t been doing any “work” himself, at least in the way capitalism understands it. “It’s Whole-Body Homeostasis Wednesday!” I said, and he was laughing and saying “Yeah!” before I even finished the sentence. Because he knew exactly what I meant. We met thirty years ago this fall, and there was so much I couldn’t tell him—couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone then. Rice was right that soon, most of the people coming into my life would be different. And that the ones that stayed would be spectacular.