Dreams of early adolescence don’t always come true. If they did, I’d probably be banging supermodels in a spaceship while enjoying a bucket of Original Recipe with my robotic hand. (Un)fortunately, that never happened. Nor did the dreams of riding a dinosaur through town come true. Obviously, the dreams about tropical islands, ropes, the Irish, and the one about gigantic nitrogen molecules (they were everywhere, but were at least a nice shade of blue) also failed to deliver. One dream did come true, it seems. I did have a dream about becoming a girl and that seems to be working out pretty well for me.
We’ll just skip over the details of the dream mostly because they don’t make any sense. It’s a pretty common kind of dream for folks in my position. You can probably guess the theme of the dream, and you can fill in the details from there. Of course, as a young girl observing her incorrect body from more or less a third person perspective during the day and only having the correct parts in dreams, I was remarkably confused. Come to think of it, that confusion might have been why sixth grade went so poorly. This dream repeated over and over, probably several times a week, and continued for years. I don’t really remember too many dreams, but this one I can still run through pretty accurately.
Yeah, puberty was awful for most and I’m not going to minimize or trivialize anyone’s trauma by having a pissing match over whose puberty was more terrible. Folks whose gender matches their sex (the terminology here is cis-, which of course acts as counter to trans- (mmm, stereochemistry)) got their own special set of problems. I didn’t realize why I felt so alone on that day in sixth grade when the boys went here and the girls went over there and watched a special video. Probably because I was. I might have been alone and weird during the day, but in dreams at least I was right and comfortable. It was strangely traumatic to wake up from those dreams, where things made sense, and realize it was just a dream and that I still had the same stupid parts I went to sleep with.
Considering this dream, I probably should have seen this coming. Of course, hindsight is a glass house one shouldn’t walk under a ladder to get to. I think that’s how that saying goes. Pretty sure, yeah. Anyway, I’m not too interested in reliving that puberty through words here, though. I got a new puberty to worry about. I still wake up in the morning with said stupid parts downtown, but now there are two more significant parts a bit further north. Uptown, if you will. Usually, I don’t notice them right away in the morning unless I roll over too fast, or my arm pinches one of them, or they just feel like they’re being run over by a large truck for absolutely no apparent reason. There has got to be better ways to greet the day than to have one breast on fire and the other exploding in rapid succession from the inside. On the plus side, I only wake up in pain four or five days a week, so it could be worse.
I looked back a bit and noticed, with a peculiar fondness for the past, that my biggest complaint several weeks ago was just itchiness where things were growing and changing. At least back then I knew what to expect. Now, it’s just like rolling a die with middle fingers addressed to me on five of the six sides. Far more pain than anything else, really. Since we are in polite company, the face of the die that isn’t angry with me won’t be discussed. Well, ok, maybe a little. Let’s just leave it at this: I had no idea a human body could do that. Wow.
New fantastic amazing tricks aside, I have finally started doing a bit of voice work. Imagine, if you will, the sound of one hundred crickets chirping slightly too close to your head without even the pretense of synchronization. Got that? Now raise it an octave and punch yourself in the ear repeatedly. That is how my voice sounds when I practice. Oddly enough, I felt my old voice to be worse. Apparently, I prefer discordant disharmony and aural trauma to my boy voice. It’s probably not near as bad as I make it out to be here, but it is probably even worse and it is awful and there are probably orphans crying somewhere because of my attempts at voice work.
Also, as of today, I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for 10 weeks. It’s been 70 days since I told testosterone to go blow it out his ear. I have plans for the three month mark. You’ll see.
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