Dissociation as Trans Method II

Once More with Feeling

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One morning as I saunter into the bathroom at my boyfriend’s to shower, I linger on my breasts in the mirror. Full in a new way lately, rounded and, I clumsily imagine, ready to be what they are, I can’t help but feel caught in the contradiction of their sudden plenitude. These organs, grown from my potential but once unreal body, would now let me take care of an infant. They are apparently enough to sustain another person. Another potential person, who would have a body not so different from how mine used to be, un-breasted, which is to say unrealized and without guarantee of survival in its radical dependence on someone else. I stare at a dark brown nipple that has broken free of my pajamas and wonder at the lesson of how needlessly tortured my route was to this body. It seems equal parts miraculous and foolish, that our species would be outfitted by nature to care for others, yet we must learn to want to care for ourselves. There’s a sheer risk to that arrangement, one that lives in me now muted, as memory.

As I stare in the mirror, I think that I ought to now understand the reward for that risk. Haven’t I succeeded in being despite everything I remember? But something still nags at me, uncertain of how what’s learned can ever be as real as what’s flesh.

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I was trained in graduate school as a queer critic of childhood. I can still remember the rush of coming into my own as I wrote an interventionist sermon for a mentor on the failure of queer theory to take actual, living children into account over their sentimental figurations. It felt like I was claiming something more than just intellectual credibility. I was taking an entire body of thought to task for thinking of the queer child as a thing possessed by grown-ups, one that can only be sensed after the fact, retrospectively. I eagerly re-read my favorite monograph, The Queer Child by Kathryn Bond Stockton, and took her ingenious argument that such children are narratively birthed backwards by the words spoken from adults’ lips-- “I was a gay child”--and aimed it at the giants of my field I wanted so badly to emulate. You do that too, I huffed.

A few days ago, my heart summersaulted when a cousin digitized a home movie from my uncle’s fortieth birthday. Its fuzzy 1990s camcorder aesthetic is emblematized by short title cards introducing one family member after another, prompted to share a funny story about my uncle for the camera. My aunts, uncles, grandparents, and mom recited theirs in English and Punjabi. My young cousins and I, true to our roles as the imperfect children of immigrants, just in English.

There was plenty else arresting in the visuals and sound: the bright, garish colors of the fashion of the day; the way we all sounded much browner than I recalled, our voices tinted with a rural Punjabi timbre that has since disappeared as those born in Canada became the majority; and the shock of seeing my grandmother alive, the only person in the world I was as close to as my mom. I had forgotten how soothing her voice was.

Seeing myself was something altogether surreal. I must be about seven or eight years old in the video. And the story I tell about my uncle is clearly about me. I explain that his company’s recent charity softball game had been going rather poorly for his team and I judged it to be the fault of them not having a designated coach. Precocious as ever—but also eager to prove my worth in sport, something that everyone in my sprawling family valued, except me—I nominated myself. Even if the deficit was already too far to overcome, my uncle’s team lost by far less after I had taken the reigns.

I sort of remember that happening. But what struck me most was the raw confidence of this seven-year-old. “My turn to do a story ‘cuz you all know I’m the best at it” was my sing-songy opening line. I don’t remember this kid, brimming with expressive bravado and sitting with the same crossed legs and femme hand choreography I speak with to this day.

After years of therapy, I had recently been feeling that I had resolved a lot of my seismic dissociation, a process I had dated to age four or five, but which accumulated over the decades. After not being able to recall anything other than vague placeholders for most of my childhood, I had started to feel my way through what I reasoned had been locked up all this time: impossibly vast sadness, fright, and anger. Packaged inside an extended traumatic event in adolescence, I had constructed a blue Jules-child failed by the world. No one told her she could be a girl, no one told her she didn’t have to be a parent to her zombified bipolar dad, and no one told her she didn’t have to endure abuse from that boy in high school. Miraculously, or tragically, she was so oddly driven to persist that she overcame it all anyways, the only collateral damage being that she could never feel anything, or remember. Until she was in her thirties and had good health insurance.

Several therapists, not to mention intimates who loved me with more generosity than I was inclined to show myself most days, challenged that construction, pointing out that it was extreme. But my stubborn and old sense that I ultimately knew best allowed me to dismiss their offerings. So now I stared at a young Jules on a screen who was, alarmingly to the narrative I had worked so hard in therapy to construct, just like me. Where I had no memory of how my voice sounded, how I talked, how I carried myself, or how femme I really came across, I now saw a blatantly obvious archival record unabashedly telling me this kid is a girl. I cried, but that was more of a placeholder than anything at first. I didn’t know what to make of the idea that I was continuous with my child-self. I didn’t remember that to be true. It felt like being in an archive, researching one of the trans kids I had written about in my book.

How could she be me?

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In the first installment of Dissociation as Trans Method, I summed up several critiques of today’s SSRI + Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) paradigm of treatment for depression, anxiety, and trauma. My intense surprise came in a research study earlier this year where I was administered a mild dissociative—ketamine—that alleviated my worst symptoms and deepest depression in less than 24 hours. I was surprised to find that dissociation could be, after all, a trans method for making my life more livable, except that I also had to admit that I had been employing dissociation my whole life to save my life. There was something to that, as I wrote in that piece.

I sent my boyfriend the home video and then called him after he watched it. It was a little like I wanted to hand him the kid and let him take care of her for a few minutes while I collected myself. But his infectious joy at seeing me as a child and recognizing me in the tiny kid on the little screen disarmed me. I told him how much I was surprised to see that my grandmother was a femme storyteller, like me—or I like her— and he wisely offered that I was clearly loved by her and knew it. There was no way I would have been so much myself on camera otherwise. I softened as I agreed.

Despite doctoral level training in deconstruction, I have been embarrassingly prone to thinking in binaries in my personal life. Therapists usually call this “black and white thinking,” where my sense of the only way to counterbalance what is bad is to produce its complete and total opposite as good or as repair. (Don’t do this if you can help it.) In my body I had felt dissociation to be bad and so I thought I would simply have to completely reintegrate myself in order to be good. Yet I had also started writing about how valuable dissociation was as a trans method. I didn’t like the sensation of the brewing contradiction.

What I feel most grateful to myself for in that home video is breaking me of that binary. If seven-year-old Jules was more like me today than not, then there was no opposite of dissociation to call on. There was nothing, or no one, to reintegrate. She was already there, which I suppose is how dissociation actually works, but not always how it feels when the child appears in the depths of our flesh as real, but our culture tells us she is a figment of retrospection.

This morning I was walking home from a coffee shop, past the daycare around the corner from my house. There was a little toddler sauntering along with their caregiver, at that stage where coordinating their limbs requires all their attention. The kid stopped as I walked by, switching their attention to staring up at me, a little vacant, but also curious in an unmistakably toddlerish way. I must have towered over them. I felt a pang in my heart, the kind of estrogenated wish to hold a child and love them and nurture them that I have felt many times since transitioning. But this time I hoped that the wish encrypted in that pang wasn’t quite as much a projection of a kid I never really was, who it turns out I never needed to rescue.