There’s a thing called “dead-naming” in the trans community, which is making use of a trans person’s birth name after they’ve rejected it (usually by selecting a new name of their own choosing). This is, naturally, a very rude erasure, but I have been going through some things lately that got me thinking about the choice of words for this concept. “Dead name.”
When I was born, my parents named me Jason. Jason was a miserable, miserable person. As anyone would be who not only had no idea who they were, but also did not realize that that was the problem in the first place; that every struggle they had with mental health and self-esteem and relating to other people stemmed from that. Jason spent basically his entire life from some point in early puberty until August 12, 2014, wishing for death.
He would see news of people’s deaths in horrible tragedies. 9/11. School shootings. Theater shootings. Helicopter crash. And he would feel even more horrible. Why was he still living, when all these people who wanted to live were dying? Why couldn’t he somehow trade places with them at the last possible second? Why couldn’t they be alive, very confused, but alive in western Washington, while he could finally be free? People with families and futures and hopes and love, dying, for nothing, while he was living for nothing.
It was not technically death that he wished for, though. He wished to not continue living the way that he was living. Every day was an agony so severe that he had largely become numb to it, and every other sensation. Being unable to conceptualize a life that was so completely different from that as to be an acceptable condition in which to live, he most often said that he hoped he would die. Every day. Literally, every single day.
He would wake up, and his first thought would be, “oh. I guess I didn’t die in my sleep last night.” He would try to make new friends, because on some level, he understood that he needed them, but he hated himself so relentlessly that he was perpetually confused by having made any new friends, every time it happened. He would try to find girls to date, but even when things went somewhere, he would find a way to sabotage them, and hate himself while doing it.
When Jason realized who he was, that he had always been she, it was as if a great cloud had lifted from her ecosystem. Not a fog of pure water vapor, but a polluted, murderous miasma of soot and carcinogens that made breathing a chore, and not an affirmation of being alive. A cloud that was slowly but surely sucking all the life out of joy, and all the joy out of life. It cleared as if beneath a sunburst.
And yes, some things about her changed. But she was, at her core, still the same beautiful, charming, funny, intelligent, and compassionate girl she had always been. The only real difference was that she refused to beat herself up, she refused to hate herself, she refused to reject herself. She immediately loved and appreciated who she was, all that she knew about herself, and was eager to learn more, to fully discover who she could be.
Jason was born dead, for lack of a better way of putting it. His parents literally gave him a name for a dead person, someone that would’ve been happier stillborn. Jason was a shell for Sera, a protective husk that she needed to hide in to survive when she was little. To hide from everyone, including herself. The Jason Construct just kept running for far longer than it should have. I suppose it was well-built.
I made many friends at Everett Community College, mostly through theater and improv classes. But lately, over the course of the last six months or so, many of them have disappeared on me. Never with a word of explanation, and often after having been very supportive of me and my transition, my revelation about my actual identity. They will unfriend or block me, without any warning, without any sign that there has ever been any problem between us. In milder cases, perhaps they stop inviting me to events, whether because they themselves do not want me around, or because some formerly mutual friends might be made uncomfortable if I am there. This is, I feel, just a precursor to joining the others, and cutting me out altogether.
In one case, a very very close friend blew up on me with this bizarre and completely unfounded rant about how I was freeloading off of taxpayers, because I am using the G.I. Bill. It felt like a kick in the face. I explained, as calmly and non-aggressively as I could, why that concept of things was completely baseless and wrong, and then told them privately how hurt I was by their comments, and that I really needed them to acknowledge that they’d been terrible to me, and were sorry about it. I got no response at all. Nothing but “Seen.”
They ended up being one of only two people that I cut out, after I concluded that someone who could treat me so horribly, but fail absolutely to acknowledge it in any way at all was not really someone who loved or respected me as much as I deserve. Not because I’m so amazing, but because I’m a human being.
The fact that all of these phantoms had been so supportive up until the very moment they cut ties is baffling. It’s also very painful, and mildly crippling. I call them phantoms because they are still in my life, in some way. I hear about them from people who are still friends with both of us. I am left without any explanation at all, but also without the finality of death. These people whom I love were not taken away from me. They have, en masse, willfully decided that I am not worth loving. That I do not deserve their time or their respect. And I cannot make sense of that, especially now that I love and respect myself.
I still love them, so this is very confusing. Now that I am finally happy, now that I have self-respect, self-esteem, self-love… NOW is the time that they don’t want me in their lives anymore? Was I only tolerable when I cared so little for myself that I would put up with nearly anything? I can’t get my head around people wanting me in their lives BEFORE I knew who I was. Surely the non-stop wry cracks about how I hoped I would die on my way home that night were more exhausting than almost-daily pictures of my smiling face in a new outfit on Facebook. How could that not be the way of things?
I have made some new friends. I have reconnected with some old friends. Maybe this is all for the best. People who liked me miserable and dark and in constant need of attention do not like this new me, who is basically happy, usually emotionally bright, and, while she does indeed love attention, does not have a ravenously insatiable need for it as she did for most of her life.
But it still hurts. And I still miss them. Every. Single. Time.
No comments:
Post a Comment