I live in Providence, but because I spent the last two years as a staff editor at the recently shuttered Boston Phoenix, I knew the best thing I could do was get my Boston followers the information they needed to get off the streets, where police warned there could be unexploded devices anywhere. All day I sat in a coffee shop an hour south of Back Bay train station, my commuter rail stop. I would have been at work, would have been one of the frantic folks trying to make it home. That I wasn’t was dumb luck.

I remembered how I felt when I was at Emerson College on September 11, 2001. This was before Twitter. A professor interrupted my 9 am class to tell us what happened. In the Public Garden near the spot where marathoners and spectators now met family members, I’d stood outside my evacuated classroom, scanning the sky. Rumors abound, but all we knew for sure was that the planes that hit New York left Logan, and the sense was Boston might be next.

As I Tweeted and ReTweeted information yesterday—tip lines, which restaurants were serving free food, road closures—I thought about the kid I was back then, the long ride home on the red line, the absolute unknown, the free fall feel of it.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice the editorializing and conspiracy theories clogging up my feed—almost all from people outside of New England. I disregarded them mostly, except for Tweeting the occasional plea to remember that folks were still navigating blood-soaked streets, or being operated on, or trying to find a place to sleep. I know we all handle trauma differently, and that even those far away are affected by the very real feeling of terror. But I was particularly disturbed by the circulation of a Daily Mail article about a US drone strike that killed an Afghan wedding party. “Three here, 30 there, which is bigger news?” was a pretty typical response. A horrible and disturbing tragedy, but not—as many were led to believe/led others to believe—an event that happened yesterday. For reasons that I can’t fully grasp, someone had doctored the 2002 article in Photoshop with yesterday’s date.

There’s so much potential in social media at moments like this. All day people behaved in ways that affirmed our connection to each other. Boston folks created the hashtag #BostonHelps to crowdsource housing and food information. Many local reporters in the region where very careful about what they reported, understanding that the information was vital to the many people still on the street. I watched friend after friend check in on Facebook, especially grateful to see the avatars of folks who worked downtown or who had run the marathon in years past. Citizens spread and respread information at the behest of the BPD, including important directives about sweeps and evacuations.

The first step in containing the potential for trauma is safety. The second is to welcome the injured and fearful, the grief-stricken and the shocked back into the fold. This is animal logic—trauma research has found that prey animals, upon escape, need to rejoin the group and discharge their nervous energy, the stress hormones that kept them alive.

I understand that in the aftermath of tragedy, bystanders feel helpless. I felt helpless. I feel helpless. Today I have to face my students at a college just south of Boston. Many of them are from the area, and I have no idea how they’ve been affected.

I know that we are angry and bewildered and saddened as a country, and though it’s tempting to be cerebral and to stump our agendas as a way to regain a sense of control, I know that we are capable of more than that. I saw it, as you did yesterday, in the people who brought food and blankets into the street, the folks who donated blood, the first responders who ran into the horror.

We are not helpless. They made Boston safe. And you, every one of you, can welcome the city back into the fold.

***

Photograph by Essdras M Suarez.

Related Posts:

• The Wind-Up [Marathon] Chronicle
• Boston Marathon Roundup
• Stunned Silence
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• “Trying to Illuminate the Darkest Places”

Two years into the weekly shots, the needles no longer intimidate me, their hollowness a wormhole I shoot the magic through. Genes get turned on, I’m told: we’re born with both sets of blueprints, we all have a male and a female body inside us. One cannibalizes the other, you could say. That’s not a medical fact, that’s how I feel when I see my sideburns, when I smell my own spicy skin, when I get called bro by a tollbooth worker in western Mass, and then another closer to home.

I’m being honest: beginning again is a monstrous process, a real horror show.

I’m a bro, sure. Just like my friend, a new mom, says I’m like her—a body forever changed, passing between worlds. I’m an ex who no longer exists. I’m a brother that never was, a sudden-husband, a twin—the meaning of my name, Thomas. My birth name rests right alongside it, a reminder, a refusal to forget.

And yet.

Sometimes I get this ragged wind in my chest. It’s a graveyard in there, too: instead of clothes holding my ghost shape, it’s my old self that calls out from beneath bone. Change isn’t all beauty and biceps, sometimes it’s zombie parts hurtling on alongside my heart. The zombies, baffled, can’t squeeze into my old clothes. They haven’t caught up with the truth of this body: they walk me into a gay bar and then react with dumb indifference to the men who cruise me. They don’t understand that the queer women no longer recognize me, they smile chummily and everyone looks away.

At the coffee shop, I stress about how long to interact with the woman I see every week. She has taken to calling me “dude” suddenly and with strange regularity, the word like a bit of garlic, a “bro”-like periphery between us.

Maybe not, that’s the thing. Being a man in the world is often, still, alien to me. There’s the young guy at the bar beside me this weekend, in dress sneakers and too much cologne, trying to impress a date who’s clearly indifferent to him. His desperation has him speaking up an octave, exposed in his brand-new blazer and theatrical kindness, and I wish I could tell him to be gentler with himself, I wish I could say, “Bro, let it go.”

Adaptation begins with acceptance. You probably don’t know what it’s like to hold your breath in an X-Ray scanner in a suburban strip mall, the beeping machine inching closer to your pelvis, the pad covering your groin but not hiding the fact of your difference from the lady behind the glass.

But you know about exposure. You know where you are vulnerable, where you are not who they expected. You have zombies shaped like memories or loves long-gone, you have clothes in your closet that hold selves you’ll never be. Maybe you’re still waiting or maybe, like me, you’re just beginning to let it go.

“You’re the same, but different,” everyone tells me. I am a bro, an ex, a husband, a twin. I am a new mom, a toll booth worker, a hormone, a ghost. I get right with that, I give my shirts away so they can be brought back to life by new bodies.

My zombies aren’t alive but I am, and I care for them so they know the difference. It’s a real horror show, but you know—they’re just asking to be considered, like that man at the bar; like you reading this; like me in my shirt that fits, thankful for the technician that saw all of me and handed me the X-ray film, saying everything by not saying a word.  

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body
• SELF-MADE MAN #15: Everybody Passes

I’m struck by the ways we show up for each other, knowing that we will confront the limits of our bodies just by walking out the door.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about dignity as a kind of tension: there’s the understanding of reality—not your ideal imaginings of hot cocoa and ice skating, but the flutter of your heart as you’re walloped by that first cold blast, the knowledge that the man holding a sign near I-95 is exposed in a way you will never be, his body ragged in ways you are lucky not to understand, and if you are willing to look you will really feel the luck, your selfish, animal gratitude, the truth of the dollar you give him—so hopeless, so essential.

So there are the ways we map it, in real time: knowing your own dignity is bound in not visiting indignities upon others; seeing the ways the ideal makes you blind to the shivering truth of it; allowing the exquisite earthquake in your chest at the sight of a flock of geese, squawking merrily across the sky.

Dignity makes us witnesses, aligns us with what’s essential. It shows us where we draw the line, but that isn’t all. If we stop there, we become rigid, righteous. There’s the dignity of limits and then, more tenderly still, there’s the dignity of knowing how to love yourself past your best defenses.

***

Each Saturday morning there is a moment where I wonder if I can do it. I hold the needle, poised, and I wait. I don’t say to myself, “Quitting is not an option.” I don’t ignore the primal part of me that does not want me to stab myself in the thigh. I know that this practice, this stubble, this muscle, this life I’ve built is an exercise in delicately pushing past fear to whatever lives beyond it.

So I wait.

I wait until I can feel my muscle relax, until my mind can see the needle’s smooth flight into this tender place, and I’m so grateful, each time, for a body that surrenders to the daring of my mind. Dignity is in the resistance and the relenting, the part of me that cares for the boundaries of what I know to be true, and the part that respectfully insists that there’s so much more.

***

For my 30^th birthday, I went scuba diving in a cenote—an open pool of clear blue water, part of a winding mass of interconnected caves leading to the Pacific. I was deep into the Yucatan, suspended in scuba gear among the wicked stalagmite and serious divers and cave mappers, speed-learning how to clear water from my goggles, how to not surface to quickly so as to avoid the bends.. This was a few months before I began injecting testosterone, a period where I lived like a kite, open to wherever the next gust took me, dreaming myself bearded each night, awaking into a more and more dissonant reality each morning.

But my waking hours weren’t any less real than my dreams, even if two years ago feels like a lifetime now. If dignity is a core sense of inherent worth, than I won’t deny any part of myself. Back then, I softened faster, I fit into smaller spaces, I was more easily held, and held often, by my wife, my mother, my friends.

Back then, I wanted to see what my body was capable of, and so I took the black rubber mouthpiece in my teeth and learned to breathe underwater. As we practiced in the shallow end, I panicked and returned to the surface, again and again—staying under a little longer each time.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” I told my wife, so embarrassed. I’m not sure I’ve been as embarrassed since, but that’s part of it, too, the blush of pride and terror, finding that authentic place between the two that allows you to move, with honesty, toward your best self. The rakish instructor smiled sweetly at me and said, “Let’s go.” As he did, I did; I dove because I knew, somehow, that I could.

I could hear my Vader breath, see the delicate reality of my body. My flat chest felt smooth against the wet suit, and I realized that I’d transition, saw I could be frightened and let go all at once. Because dignity isn’t something you manufacture, it’s something you find, tough and fragile, alive as the coral that the instructor motioned us toward, the baby barracudas with tiny teeth bared, the suck and release of my breath, nevermind how foreign—always, only, mine.

***

When I was 12 I fractured my leg skiing, and never got on a mountain again. I was gangly and out-of-touch with my body anyway, and the shock of hitting the tree, the ski paramedics snowmobiling me down the mountain—it soured me on a certain kind of speed.

By then my body had already been subject to a violence so profound that it’s hard to fathom, even now—years of my father’s searching, humiliating hands and then the sudden earthquake of their discovery, the therapy and the infinite adult concerned looks, the boundaries of what made me a kid shrinking faster and faster.

But the tree: it rattled me, confirming concretely that I was fragile and subject to the whims of a world, and even sometimes a body, I didn’t always understand.

So for my birthday this year, two years after I learned to breathe underwater, I dangled my rented snowboard off a ski lift in Rhode Island. I’d fallen down the bunny slope enough times to move to falling down the green trail, which I did, unceremoniously, as soon the lift deposited me at the top.

I fell epically: I toppled, I slid, I flew backwards into ditches. Snow found its way up my back, into my gloves, behind my neck.

But I also went fast, faster than my body wanted but as fast as I knew I could, fast as the two years that have past since the dive in Tulum, fast as the 80 injections since, fast as anything’s been taken from me, fast as I’ll fall again, fast as it’s all been redeemed.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Into the Fold
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• “Trying to Illuminate the Darkest Places”
• Ode to Orlando Cruz
• “How Do We Become More Than What’s Sold to Us?”

needles as conduit

forgiveness as belief                                     complicating masculinity

love as prize                                                     identity as metaphor

restrooms as geospiritual location

But I’m a body, not a metaphor and certainly not a static shape, so what I’ve left out—my raw materials—are more relevant than I allow here. My leg manifests a strange allergy at the site of my injections; my anger prickles more hot and more often; my empathy is erased easily by minor transgressions; I torpedo my internal, benign authorial narration with counternarratives from less empowered times.

This year, as I wrote this song of myself, I grew a self-consciousness that lacquered over every night out until I’d cocooned myself at home, until the days darkened fast.

On the phone I had the same conversation: I’m great, never been better. I walked into rooms burning with self-consciousness—I’m thinking now that I shouldn’t be telling you this but if you were me, 10 years ago or in a different body, I’d want you to know that you’re doing it right.

***

It’s just easier to be transcendent than it is to be honest.

***

Here’s the negative space: I wrote a pretty snow angel of my best self and then I lay down inside it. I’m a self-made man because I willed myself into existence. I made myself real.

In college, I had a professor who taught fiction this way: imagine a character. Fill in the blank. Thomas is the kind of person who ______. Here’s the good stuff: is sympathetic to suffering, resistant to cultural norms, thoughtful in small exchanges, measured in conflict.

Behind the scenes, of course, there’s the harsh rub of this bristling face, the hangnails and wayward cowlicks. Behind the scenes, I’m hurtful, I cry wolf, I fear, I fail, I fail again. I won’t write this in past tense: I fight myself, I give up, I grow impatient.

Right now, as you read this, I’m cutting, judgmental, tired. I fantasize about hitting the man ahead of me in line at the grocery store; the man who cuts me off on 95; the man who stares, googly-eyed, at me, my wife, my friend, me.

I think a lot about the problem of hope.

Hope paints a pretty picture of statues that will never be you; but faith pilots you through the messy moment. I’m home alone, I’m doing leg lifts on my chin-up bar in the doorway of my office because the fact is, to have faith you don’t need a story, you need a core.

***

“If you bring forth that which is within you,

Then that which is within you

Will be your salvation.

If you do not bring forth that

Which is within you,

Then that which is within you

Will destroy you.”

— The Gnostic Gospels

***

I’ve known what many would call evil: child abuse, a close call with a murderer. I know about other people’s dark impulses, and so I’ve been all the more terrified of my own.

I think Carl Jung was equally troubled witnessing of Hitler’s rise to power. Unlike many of us, he wasn’t content to dismiss the despicable as foreign to the human experience. When you bear witness, when you bear the weight of another’s actions, even as a victim—you are no longer able to distance yourself, and the arrogance of that position becomes clear. Because where does that leave us, those left to make meaning out of the handprints on our bodies, the guns, the horrors of history?

So he designed the shadow theory: that what we repress returns, that we act out our hidden selves. In this case, it’s a moral imperative to make oneself vulnerable and to find the familiar in even the unthinkable. He’d say to deny any aspect of humanity is to deny all of it.

Jung charged that our work, individually and culturally, is to bring our shadows to light, to integrate what we most fear within ourselves with the snow angels we create in their place.

***

On a puddle jumper back from Nashville after Christmas, we hit turbulence. A better, cheaper story would claim an epiphany as we bumped over New York, Central Park visible from our windows, this little life above bearing witness to the little lives below; but that’s a conflation.

What’s close to the truth is that an hour before we could see the city, tiny and twinkling, beneath us; before the plane lurched and hiccupped through the sky, I listened to the song that soundtracked my cross-country move from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, almost a decade ago. Because I’ve been shining flashlights in my corners, I remembered everything: the sweaty anticipation, the bittersweet twinge that grew as the landscape changed, the cocky phone calls with the girl I thought I’d marry; how certain I was, how it was the first time I believed in myself and how I was right.

I imagined the body I once had, nesting within this one like a Russian doll. I remembered, too, the hope it held: that if I were to just change hard enough, I could be free of cold sweats and flashbacks, shame and grief, disconnection and fear.

Hopeless now and suspended, shuttling in time but beyond it, I felt a small grace among the sick bags and the hot smell of other people’s skin. I thought, I will no longer abandon myself.

And then I pictured you, all of you, with your bad breath and fear of failure and bum knees and dashed dreams and credit card debt. I saw you as the plane dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, and I thought as long as we don’t crash, I will tell you this.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body
• SELF-MADE MAN #15: Everybody Passes

Discovering I’m not a friend, but in fact, the guy from The Rumpus, there’s a minor, charming kerfuffle as she confesses that she’s forgotten after all the rescheduling, not that it’s any excuse, I’m in her appointment book. I offer to call back at a different time but she insists I stay where I am, and leaves the phone somewhere I try to picture (a mahogany office? A sophisticated yet elegant living room?) while presumably herding her family elsewhere and gathering herself.

I think, in the muffled interim, about 2001: my sophomore year at Emerson College in Boston, spent half-drunk and reading, among other things, White Teeth, Smith’s glorious, Whitbread-winning debut about immigration and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain. Smith, herself then a recent graduate from Cambridge, had captured something profound and hilarious and exact about not just her native England, but assimilation and relationships and the way so much of life is pure chance, from every angle. Until I myself was twenty-five, her age when the novel was published, I don’t think I fully grasped the sweep of her achievement. In the stormy, egocentric heart of her youth, she created a world, much like the one we lived in, where we could all find ourselves.

That’s what I’m thinking when I hear a voice, maybe two, in the distance: the fractured culture and warring selves exposed in NW, her most recent novel, which focuses a hyper-close lens on four characters in a pocket neighborhood in London, and examines the messy intersection of their very different lives. It’s got a darker edge, it’s honest, and relentless and beautiful, too.

“I’m sorry.” She’s back. “Are you still there? One moment.”

This is Zadie Smith, our international literary darling, her slipperiness of location fitting since her work seems to mostly revolve around people pushing back against stereotype, expectation, reduction, even if she’s clearly a Brit at heart. Her professorship at New York University makes her an honorary New Yorker, at least, and to the delight of anyone who read her profile of Jay-Z in The New York Times, she’s turned her famous mirror on this country in the same way she has her own.

More muffled movement, and I can tell she’s finishing up her arrangements: there’s a gathering urgency, an uncovering and covering of a mouthpiece. I know I should be preparing but instead I think about Jung’s shadow: his theory that for each ideal we make conscious, there is a flip side that lives just beneath our surface. Smith’s characters live in a world where both sides are visible. So is it too much to note that, given Smith’s defining quality as a writer is her precise, darkly funny, deeply cerebral commitment to uncovering our multiplicities, the tension that keeps her removed intellectualism in place is the tenderness beneath it?

She’s back. “Go on,” she says, as if to pick up a conversation we haven’t yet started, her voice exactly as British as you imagine—a multitude in a moment, the whole interaction surely a scene Smith would have written herself.

***

The Rumpus: I just read your New York Review of Books piece that came out—I think today, right?

Zadie Smith: Oh, it did? Oh yeah. Christ, yeah.

Rumpus: I really like the way that you use the complication of joy to make it distinct from pleasure. You write a lot about your family in the piece. How do you find the process of writing about your own life publicly?

Smith: I mean, I don’t do very much of it, to be honest. When I do it’s quite circumspect. I never wrote anything personal at all for years and years. I’m about to have another child so I imagine I’ll be busy for awhile. I don’t think I’ll be doing any writing of any kind, personal or otherwise. I don’t know, I’m not very interested in memoir. It’s just a way of extending outwards, otherwise it doesn’t really interest me that much.

Rumpus: I think I actually read an interview with you where you’d said that, so I guess that’s why I was curious if there’d been a shift along those lines with this last piece.

Smith: No, not really. When you’re writing, you’re just curious if other people have had the same—part of it is that you’re just trying to work out if you’re alone in one sensation or another, so to do that sometimes you have to give a little bit. But I guess I’m not really a splurger on that front. A little goes a long way with me.

Rumpus: I was wondering, along those lines of fiction and nonfiction, about that idea of constructing yourself as a character—

Smith: There’s a kind of personal writing that argues for this kind of subjective experience that says, “I don’t have children and so it’s really important not to have children.” Or, “I do have children so it’s really important to have children.” Or, “I like cheese, so it’s really important to like cheese.” I never understand the point of that kind of writing. To me, you’re trying to find some objective position on your own experience, you know? Just because we felt it doesn’t mean that it matters at all. That’s my feeling.

Rumpus: I guess, in that way then, is fiction a more honest way, then, to write?

Smith: I’ve written a few of these more abstract pieces but that urge comes upon me very rarely, like once a decade, so I don’t think it’s going to happen again anytime soon. Fiction is just more complicated, you’ve got a lot more balls in the air.

Rumpus: I don’t know if you’ve ever read that Tim O’Brien story from The Things They Carried, “How to Tell a True—“

Smith: No, and I’ve heard so much about it! I will read it!

Rumpus: Well, it always struck me because I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, and that one story, “How to Tell a True War Story” is about using fiction to tell a truthier truth and is really interesting.

Smith: Yeah, I think that’s the case. The problem with nonfiction these days is that everybody wants—this idea of a personal vision is very important. “Where do you stand?” I find all that pretty tiresome. I’m not ever saying anything unusual, you know? I’m just trying to think about general things just a bit more specifically. I’m not claiming to any unusual emotions, tastes, opinions—I have a very average taste in most things. It’s not that. It’s just trying to express, as precisely as you can, these perfectly average things.

Rumpus: So do you imagine a reader who reacts to your work when you’re trying to get an exact expression?

Smith: Well, now you don’t have to imagine anymore because people e-mail you. It’s not in the realm of mystery anymore, you find out quite directly. That’s another thing which is healthy about fiction, you don’t have to listen to anybody for sometimes a decade at a time. I think constant feedback is not a very healthy thing for a writer, one way or another.

Rumpus: That’s probably true.

Smith: People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Rumpus: Are you able to avoid reviews of your work?

Smith: No, I read reviews, I’m a critic myself. I’m always interested in reviews. Again, I’m helped by not writing that often, so I can go seven years without reading reviews because I haven’t written anything. If I was writing a book every two years I’d find it more stressful, I think.

Rumpus: I guess I was asking these identity questions because I read NW and I really enjoyed it—

Smith: Oh, thank you.

Rumpus: And I was thinking a lot about identity the whole time I was reading it, which I’m sure isn’t a surprise to you. I like about your work in general that there’s not a single reader who could just see herself alone in your work.

Smith: Right.

Rumpus: To me, I’m a trans man and I think a lot about the art of passing—

Smith: Oh yes, such an interesting state to be in.

Rumpus: Indeed.

Smith: I know a comic book artist who’s a trans man—anyway, go on.

Rumpus: I think that, actually, everybody passes. I was wondering how you feel about that, since it seems like something you explore a lot in your writing.

Smith: I write against things, I suppose, and the thing that doesn’t interest me is gathering a cabal of people exactly like yourself to read what you write. The thing which I like about my writing—I don’t know if it’s a symptom of its generalness or whatever—but I have old ladies e-mail me, or write to me, more likely, who are age eighty-five and then I have very young people: sixteen, seventeen. I like the idea that the writing has no precise identity. It doesn’t block people, it doesn’t force them to think, “Oh, this is me in a very precise way.”

I teach a course on the 20th century novel and I teach a Dennis Cooper novel, a great novel, called My Loose Thread. A lot of my class are against it, you know, or take it personally, or find it aggressive. Cooper is one of those people who writes very specifically for the people he wants to attract towards him. It’s an incredibly narrow group of people, and that is one way of writing. It’s just not natural to me. So I admire it when I see it, but I also like this idea that prose is open enough to let the cool and the uncool and the old and the young, whoever. I like people, so I like to be around them one way or another.

Rumpus: Do you hear really different readings of your work? Do people just sort of end up projecting themselves into your work?

Smith: Yes, tremendously... That’s one of the things which is odd. Or they end up aligning themselves really precisely with characters as if they were real people. So I have, I don’t know, black women who love the black female characters, boys who like the male characters. It’s always a bit disappointing, because the whole attempt was to try to cross those lines a little bit. But that is a natural instinct—as a reader I have it, too. I wake up especially if I see someone who’s my echo in some way. So I understand it, but also my intention is to disrupt it a little bit.

Rumpus: It seems like, especially in your last book, it seemed very much like you’re forced as a reader to not identify with one character, especially because of how interior it was.

Smith: You’re so used to this kind of smoothness in writing, this feeling that you, the reader, or you, the writer, are this great empathic, wondrous soul. I would love to be that, but of course when we see the way we behave in the world really to other people, we’re confronted with a different version of who we are. Not just this wonderful, tolerant, broad person who sees humanity and everything, but someone a little more narrow, self-defended, sometimes cruel, sometimes selfish. I wanted to try and show that. And also, someone who—people who live in a city, who are able to switch off these famous values of empathy and tolerance and love quite suddenly when you need to. Or if you need to. I wanted to be honest about that experience, but it’s not something you want reflected back at you perhaps, it’s not a pleasure. But reading can be many things: sometimes it can be a pleasure, sometimes it’s a bit tougher. It’s a broad church that way.

Rumpus: It sounds almost like your interest is around documenting what exists, rather than making any kind of statement about what it might mean.

Smith: I personally get a lot of pleasure just out of watching and seeing and having things be. I grew up in that way, I don’t know. We had, for instance, a Muslim family to the left and an Irish family to the right. This was a street of people I just found engaging. It never struck me as an innate conflict. I’m always interested in the way people live, and I try to keep that in the fiction.

Rumpus: You told NPR that you wanted the reader to ask themselves if we get what we deserve when reading the book. I think that extreme interior perspective of each character really gives us an insight into the extreme difference that can exist not just in one place, but even in interpretations in what’s going on.

Smith: Yeah. I mean—sorry, go on.

Rumpus: I want to hear whatever you’re about to say, but my question was, do you believe that creating these dissonant narratives can challenge dominant ideas? It’s a pretty loaded political question, if we get what we deserve, so I wondered if—

Smith: I think what interested me is when you ask yourself what makes a person innately conservative or innately liberal, it’s really interesting. It’s more than the political argument, it’s a personality trait, one way or another. I was just trying to think of the fundamental questions around which the poles revolve. What really is it? It seemed to me that one of the most fundamental answers to this question is whether people get what they deserve, whether all things come to people in the right order, and whether there’s an unfairness in the world. The different ways you feel about this very basic question stack up in a political way, one way or another. That’s what interested me. I kind of wanted to make a book in which you had to think about such things on a very basic level. Not, “How do I feel about 20,000 immigrants coming on one day into my country?” but “How do I feel about a girl at my door?” Fundamentally they’re the same questions, but they’re reduced to a very local form. That’s what interested me—and to try to write it honestly.

It’s very easy when you’re writing a book to have already decided the answers to all these questions, it’s a little more difficult to feel your way through. I try to recognize that people’s fears are real fears, they’re not just there for no reason. They also have a validity, and should be thought about and considered.

Rumpus: Do you think that the answer’s different if someone’s at your door versus if you’re thinking about something on a larger scale? Or did you decide, at least with your exploration, that the answers would be the same?

Smith: I think the anxiety is the same. The idea of what you owe this person who arrives at your door, or what they owe you, and how much they have to be like you in order for you to sympathize with them is, I think, a fundamental question. The idea—when I was in school, anyway—that the first principle was that they should learn your language. Right, that’s the idea, that whoever comes into your threshold or enters your world should at least learn your language. Which is a common sense view, I suppose, but when I was a kid it was never particularly clear to me. I always thought, well, it might be interesting for us to learn their language, seeing as I’m going into their shops or meeting their children. Some of these “common sense” views, when you think about them again, are complicated, you know, they’re interesting. A lot of that was in my mind, just thinking about the fundamental choices one has to make.

It’s easier to make general political principles and large statements, but day by day we’re always making these kind of choices: who we let in, who we don’t let in, who we approve, who we don’t approve within our little circles. What our community is. And also being incredibly hypocritical on the same principle. You know, I was really struck—there’s this argument recently about Lena Dunham, and there are lots of journalists who say that they’re aren’t enough black people in her show. I kept on wondering how many of those journalists—it’s a genuine question—have black people in their lives. I thought, Probably not very many. It’s like a strange accusation thrown from upper-middle class white New Yorkers to an upper-middle-class white New Yorker. We can project our anxieties onto other people rather than looking at our own lives and saying, “Well, wait a minute. Is this a terribly prejudice show, or an accurate reflection of my own circle, of my own life?” That kind of thing interests me.

Rumpus: Well, I think especially, going back to what you said earlier about how artists, I guess, are people. I’ve been thinking about that a lot too, where we look to people to be transcendent human beings because they make something, rather than allowing that they’re just reflective of the rest of us.

Smith: Yeah, there’s absolutely nothing transcendent about making things, in my opinion… It’s the same old lives.

Rumpus: Do you find reading to be transcendent?

Smith: Yes, I do. That’s why I understand why they should feel that way, because reading is a magic thing. But writing, I actually feel, is considerably less magic. It’s a lot of work and a lot of daily grind, where reading is a true pleasure.

Rumpus: Do you think that your early success has made you especially aware of the work element?

Smith: Maybe that’s true. I was working when everybody else was getting drunk; I was writing. That might have something to do with it. I like the work, it’s beautiful work, I’m glad that I do it. I feel with my students that they feel there’s a magic trick, you know, like you go into the room and something magical happens, and that really isn’t my experience. It’s a very worthwhile and satisfying labor, but that is what it is.

Rumpus: Do you ever experience anything that less-experienced writers do around anxiety around your right to be a writer? Or did you get over that a long time ago?

Smith: You read my work and think I don’t have anxiety every day about being a writer? Incredible! Of course, yes, I don’t come from a background in which being a writer was even a conceivable fantasy. Of course. But the way I deal with things is to focus on the page I’m writing. Otherwise I’d find it impossible to work at all.

Rumpus: I actually have one more question around that, but it’s my last one so I have to ask you this one first. It’s a little bit of a non-sequitur, but it seems to me that you engage with style in your work in a deeply thoughtful way, and I used to edit a fashion blog and I promised the people I worked with that I would ask you about your actual fashion.

Smith: Yes, what about it?

Rumpus: Well, our whole thought process was that we were a really diverse mix, and we were writing about fashion in an intellectual way, and because people were coming from different backgrounds—we had people of color and trans people and queer people—and people were really thinking about the way we fashion, literally, ourselves, through what we wear.

Smith: Yes.

Rumpus: So, I’m just wondering if, for you, there’s a connection between fashion and identity as a person who seems to care about her style?

Smith: Now I’m heavily pregnant and fashion is far from my mind, to be honest. When I was young, for all kinds of reasons, I didn’t engage in—I considered that world not to by my world. My world was books and I had a lot of contempt for visual things at all. I just wanted to live in the library and wear a sack. But as I got older—I tried to write about it a little bit—you know, I come from a Protestant culture, where things that are beautiful are always a bit suspect. To be in Italy, where beauty is taken seriously and enjoyed and it’s okay to enjoy it, was a big shock for me—all the way down from houses to shoes. Now, I think this also just happens with women, as you become old, that you appreciate the idea of a beautiful fabric or a nice dress. I never cared about those things when I was young.

I do think that I understand the Italian phrase, “The eye also has its part,” which I think is true. I hadn’t recognized it before. There’s a lot of pleasure in looking at beautiful things and considering beautiful things, and clothing is part of that. But in my youth, it was not—so it’s been a late revelation. I have a deep love for High Street clothes, that’s what I grew up on. My mother always said I make expensive clothes look cheap and cheap clothes look expensive. And that’s true…but there’s something about High Street clothes, I don’t know, I really like them.

Rumpus: Well, you just have a really specific style, and I think it’s always worth asking someone that because—I think people do think it’s frivolous but after a long time of thinking about it, as well, and obviously as a person who’s had to change physically, I think the way I wear my clothes is really important.

Smith: I think it is important. If you read Virginia Woolf’s diary, she was absolutely obsessed with what she wore. Obsessed! Everything about her mood, about what she was writing, depended on whether she bought a nice dress or hat. She thought about the money she earned for those wonderful essays in terms of how many hats and dresses she could buy. It mattered deeply to her. She wasn’t a frivolous woman, and she would’ve said she wasn’t a pretty woman, she was a handsome woman. She was very vain, and very concerned with what she wore. I think it’s always of interest.

Rumpus: And, either way, it’s true that you’re constructing yourself and how you are in the world.

Smith: Yes, you are. Everybody’s doing that, no matter who they are, whatever they’re wearing. It’s always happening.

Rumpus: Okay, I’m glad I got to ask that question. People will be happy.

Smith: I’m glad you asked it.

Rumpus: Okay, so the Guardian asked you to do these ten rules of writing. One of my favorite things you wrote was, “Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.” Has your perspective on your own nature as a writer shifted over time?

Smith: You know, I wrote those rules in about five minutes. I was trying to be as honest as possible so I thought, I’ll just write them quickly and I’ll get down ten things that need to be true. Regarding change, I don’t—I don’t say, in faking virtue, but that is my honest sensation. I don’t know why that is, but it seems to be my mind works. But I think that’s okay. Who are these artists who walk around thinking they’re awesome? I think it’s a pretty natural state to be in, fairly common.

Rumpus: Have you come to know why you write, or what compels you to do it?

Smith: No. No I don’t feel compelled. It was a job. In more recent years, I’ve seen that’s not quite true because if I don’t write—I do apparently need to write. Maybe it’s true. The way for me to deal with writing is to deal with it as a daily task I set myself and then I carry on. I don’t look at the big picture very often, I don’t know why that is, but it suits be better that way.

Rumpus: So you find joy in it, like you wrote about finding with your family in that NYRB essay?

Smith: I like making something, and finishing it when it’s short—I think that’s quite nice. A day when you finish a short piece is a great day, I guess. The novels—it’s not such pleasure to write, honestly. Then end can be good—I think it changes as you get older. I talk to older novelists, and when they were young they remember writing with a great deal of fluidity and some pleasure. As you get older every part of the novel becomes a struggle, it never comes clear like it used to when you were young and suddenly you were spinning downhill. The whole thing is painful.

Rumpus: Oh, god.

Smith: Young people have a lot of confidence, and they’re free. As you get older you feel more anxious. I do, anyway. And less free, one way or another. So it’s always a bit slower. That’s okay, too. Sometimes it’s good to take your time.

Rumpus: Well, I appreciate your brutal honesty.

Smith: Is it brutal? I didn’t mean it to be brutal. It’s a great life. It’s just one where you have to think about what you’re doing so it can be a little anxiety-making. You can’t write thoughtlessly, that’s the problem with writing. You have to think about the damn thing all the time. I think that’s why it’s sometimes difficult. But rewarding, right? It’s rewarding.

***

First photograph © 2012 by Sebastian Kim.

Second photograph © 2012 by Dominique Nabokov.

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I’ve changed my mind.

I’ve come to think that the interplay between our constructions and realities are, in fact, the metaphor for what makes identity meaningful. You got me at this angle, and that doesn’t make my image a lie any more than passing does.

Online, people say IRL—In Real Life—the distancing code of it hiding the underbelly of need. In Real Life is where awkward pauses live. I’m in real life with onion breath and too many drinks. I’m a million failures per revelation; I’m not just constructing myself but absorbing each reflection of who I am -  divided by all of your eyes, spinning like a disco ball.

In real life I’m a man, a trans man, an invisible man, walking among you. Is it any surprise that it was a passing queer poet Walt Whitman, who wrote, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

***

In real life, today I smell of talcum. I’m with my barber in Jamaica Plain shooting the usual shit. He’s a big-bellied Italian guy, a little leather, a little bear, a little old-school New England. Picture the accent, the gruffness.

“What do you do?” he asks, and I say I write.

“About what?”

“Gender,” I tell him, struck by the simplicity of the word, how it can hold me, the man getting his hair clipped and the me here with you.

“You know what would be a good story? Trans guys have been coming in by the dozens, wanting men’s cuts.”

My mind pinwheels. Which me is he speaking to? The writer, the trans man, the guy in glasses with a fine spray of glimmering grey hairs and a day job at a magazine? You can Google a pristine version of my depths, or you can take me at my face value and in both cases you’d be wrong to think you know me.

Here’s what I think passing is: that moment when one reflection eclipses the rest. The party pic that doesn’t reveal the panic attack, the scruff that doesn’t tell the story of the needles and the hormones I’ve metabolized to produce it.

He’s still talking. “I work hard to make them feel good about themselves,” he says.

Them: I hear who I am to him in the pronoun. I look at my face and see the many truths of it.

“It breaks my heart,” he says, shaking his head. “These guys, being trapped in the wrong body?”

It’s a question and it hangs there. I’m a man, a trans man, a considered man, a man who doesn’t know, in real life, what to say.

***

Something important: at the University of Chicago last month I gave a talk about taking control of trans narratives and the importance of diverse masculinities in general.

It was called, “Born in the Right Body.”

Here’s what I told the students and not my barber: My body’s never been wrong. I’m suspect of such a simplistic translation.

After, here were my two favorite questions:

Do you ever worry that being trans will define you?  

How can I, as someone who’s not trans, tell a counter-narrative about gender?

***

The barber asked if he could find my writing online and I said yes.

Hello, if you’re reading this.

***

This is not a joke: a trans friend goes to the same bar after work most nights. He’s a blue-collar guy among other solo blue-collar guys and they talk about work and relationships, and if they’re sloppy enough, maybe about their disappointments or (similarly) their fathers.

He says later he wishes he felt right telling those guys he’s trans. He says he feels like he’s betraying them. This bugs me – sits heavy in my gut. The word betrayal, of course, but the scene in my mind: this guy eating peanuts with some man who wants to know him, and my friend doesn’t see his reflection in the other guy’s affirmations. I know because this is how it happens: a guy calls you “bro,” he says, “Being a man, I…” Guys really do say these things. My friend, though, he doesn’t see a refracted version of reality, a facet of himself looking back at him.

He sees a betrayal. I want to tell my barber that that’s what breaks my heart. Not a guy just starting hormones whose sideburns aren’t square, but the sense that that we need to warn the world of who we are; that because we have always been defined by the force of our difference we must now announce it ourselves.

***

There’s another way to tell this story.

I had the best conversation with a guy I interviewed for an article about masculinity a few weeks back. He was friendly and smart, and he called me “brother,” not knowing I was trans. He said something about grappling with negative role models growing up and how tough it was to break out of masculine expectations.

“You’re a man,” he concluded, “you know.”

And the thing was, I do. No fucking question.

The shame of passing is a shame of deferring: you either are or are not the monolithic identity projected on you.

I think that we need to quit feeling obligated to trumpet our multitudes at the start of every interaction. We’re all angles anyway, and there’s one I might be missing in someone else’s interpretation.

***

In real life, I cannot possibly keep up with the construction I’ve made here for you. I may pass as compassionate or contained. I may be this story but it’s important to note that I’m another one, too.

So, the answers are related:

Do you ever worry that being trans will define you?  

No. I define myself. All I can hope is that you’ll stick around.

How can I, as someone who’s not trans, tell a counter-narrative about gender? By understanding that you too, have a gender and a story to tell. Tell it, because if you’re not a singular self, then none of us are.

***

There are as many ways to tell this story as there are many ways to know me. In real life, my sideburns have grown square. In real life, I’m the only man I’ll ever be.

And if you are my barber: I’m no more trapped in my body than you, brother.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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What makes a man? When I started testosterone, I posed this winking refrain, but the notion of “real men” still stung, each joke T-shirt and black-and-white bus-stop admonishment a nick on my heart. No one’s a “real man,” I figured, but most definitely not me, with my weekly shot and unique plumbing.

What makes a man? As I grew stronger and more confident, the question remained the crux of my core anxiety. I didn’t want to be a “real man” if what was meant by it was the hypermasculine ideal or the reactionary response. I’d spent 29 years struggling against a bad translation. I wanted to be my own man, to comb my hair with Brylcreem, to tailor my jeans, grow a beard, wear a shirt: This is what a feminist looks like.

 ***

We all get the message of what a man is meant to be but, unlike feminism’s unbraiding of the ideal feminine, hypermasculinity sits like an elephant on steroids, stinking up the living room. It’s complex to examine what being a man means because most of us, whether we realize it or not, are committed to a monolithic answer.

We might pretend we’re not all engaging with the mixed-message at the heart of our every interaction: we value masculinity in all bodies because we value men more than women. Conversely, those of us who’d like to disengage with patriarchal, problematic stereotypes of maleness, even a little bit, are undermined and satirized, bullied and belittled. Every man I care about is troubled by other men, but there’s still a Stockholm-syndrome-feel to the framing:  a shrugging, “That’s just how guys are.”

That’s just how guys are.

I’ve been on testosterone for 16 months. After the muscles bloomed, after my beard began to appear, after my calves widened and my jaw squared, after I mastered the politics of the men’s room, after I learned not to take personally the newly cool greetings of women strangers; a pattern began to emerge. The elephant was real, trumpeting its answer to what makes a man? Here I was, becoming one, forming at bars and backyard barbecues and work meetings; confronted at every turn with an expectation and whether or not I would meet it.

What makes a man? Here I was, not the question but the answer.

 ***

My brother and I grew up in a house where one man’s failure defined masculinity for both of us. Our father, who abused me, was domineering and manipulative, double-crossing and compulsive. Later I would come to see that he was also lonely, lost, and scared, a link in a chain of male violence that ended, turns out, with me.

“Men!” my mom would say, a single word that held the universe of her rage, everything we needed to know in the way it was bathed in acid. In elementary school, my little brother would sometimes tear up his room, blank-eyed and sleepwalking. After years of bullies, B went to the gym and grew chiseled, played varsity hockey, then American Dreamed his way into a dot-com. In college, he made a bronze sculpture of grown men crouched with his arms around his knees. “You remember?” He asked me once, and it was the kind of man he became that allowed me to believe in something better than our father.

Now he’s sensitive and muscle-bound, successful and stylish and, like me, a little brooding. I told him last April, in a bar in the Mission, of my plans to take testosterone, back when I also lived in San Francisco. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was more nervous to tell him than anyone else. That’s a lie. I was nervous to tell him for the ways I’d grown up projecting my father onto his little-kid frame, seeing their similar grins as proof something dark. We’d thrown around a baseball, beat each other up, gone to the movies, but we’d also fought bitterly. I sat in that bar waiting for his “I told you so.” He knew intimately the ways I’d misunderstood myself.

He smiled wide, shrugged. “I’ve been saying my whole life that you’re a guy,” he said.

That was that. We ordered another round, he reported some work trouble, and we were like the brothers we were meant to become, if I’d only been paying attention.

***

Last I saw him, this summer at our grandmother’s funeral, B looked at me meaningfully and said, “Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t look totally different.” I swear he was teary eyed.

Still, a sticking point for us is his interest in the destiny of biology, the reassuring, essentialist refrain of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Sometimes his understanding of me feels limited by hormones and science, the framework that helps him understand his maleness. But as he tells me how terrified he was of becoming a “monster” growing up, I begin to understand the comfort of biology. Being a boy, the strange rush of testosterone, the two-faced dad: he worried he was broken, much in the way I did. In his worldview, there’s room for me, and he’s eager always to compare lifting strategies. “You’re cut like a Band-Aid!” he joked on a recent picture I posted on Facebook.

I feel it, too, the need to make muscle to guard the pinkest, most scared parts of myself. I watched him spend hours at the Y and come home calmer. There’s something to pushing all that anger and confusion into a weight that can bear it.

“I felt this shame growing up,” B told me a couple weeks ago, when I told him I wanted to write about us. “I remember sitting in the van with you guys when you told me what Dad did to you, and I felt dirty. I felt, ‘That’s my father,’ one; and two, ‘I’m his son.’ It was the beginning of this whole thing for me when I felt ashamed.”

“I struggled with the fact that I was a guy. I think it’s been a lifetime struggle,” he said. It makes me curious how many men are fighting similar fights, shadowboxing the worst aspects of maleness, trying to grow something sweet from the toxic waste of inheritance.

I asked him how he feels about other men, if he’s suspicious of them in the way the world has taught us to be suspicious of ourselves.

“A guy that doesn’t show any emotion? That’s scary.” I think of our father, his silence, his far-off stare. I think of how, almost always, naming what scares you is the primary way to avoid becoming it.

“I’m very up front with people,” B said, as if an answer. “They know how I feel.”

***

Before I transitioned, the struggles of the men in my life felt gritty and strange to me, a little unwashed. They’d get uncomfortably vulnerable over beers, easily crushed about fathers and exes especially, like animals without shells. It was a little foreign and often so raw I’d leave wondering how it was possible that the young women I knew seemed so much more resilient in reclaiming their identities in a world of intense violence and inequity, while the men seemed genuinely baffled as to how to make it all add up to something meaningful.

How naïve, I see now, to think the crush of gender expectations only affects the most obviously oppressed.

My best friend in high school, a wiry eccentric whose religious parents didn’t know he was gay, was my first exposure to a man wrestling with masculine expectation. Late at night, stoned in his beat-up Camry, he said he felt alien next to his jock brother, afraid to disappoint his father. He was hilarious and well-liked, John Waters meets Robert Smith, but it was clear that a girl of a similar stripe would have an easier time finding a template through which to translate herself. Hell, even before I was on testosterone, I was treated by pretty much everyone as a dude without much issue, while the many interesting and sweet men who marched through my life, arriving on cue in Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, seemed to always be head-butting masculinity’s brick-wall boundaries.

So the crushed-shell seemed to me, eventually, to be about claustrophobia, the way that the sexism underpinning hypermasculinity is a vice grip on even the most rebellious among us. To be your own man is to acknowledge that you’re not “real” unless everyone’s “real,” that all the power located in a monolithic masculinity is a house of cards built on your back and you, pulling yourself out of the stack, are helping to upend the whole foundation.

What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay.

We eat peanuts, drink beer in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston. A guy tells me, upon his marriage, that his mother reminded him to be good to his wife. A real man respects women, says the ad campaign, which only exists to tell us exactly what real men have failed to do, a reminder of what isn’t expected.

***

A memory: in Napa for his birthday a few years ago, before I was on testosterone, I looked up my brother’s astrological chart. This is a thing I do, inevitably, at parties and birthdays and long car rides. Anyway, I told him he was a Cancer rising, started to read the description off my phone as we drank coffee near the French Laundry, surrounded by tourists despite the drizzle.

“What does that mean?” he asked, his aviators mirroring myself back to me.

“It says you’re imaginative,” I told him, “and sensitive, and nurturing.” He looked chiseled and young, a little out of place still, living in a city after so many years in wintery, industrial towns. I could see, in the months since he’d arrived, that he was becoming himself.

“I’m nurturing!” he echoed, his thick arms crossed across his chest. He turned to his girlfriend. “I’m nurturing,” he told her.

Since I’ve transitioned, I’ve revisited that moment: my surprise at his enthusiasm, the emphatic way he announced it, the pride in his voice. What a reward it must have seemed to him to be seen as the man he was, not the father he was afraid of becoming, but the person he’d grown out of thousands of reps and all those cracked-shell moments when the vice squeezed too hard. Here he was, the person he’d been all along.

“I’m nurturing,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you know that about me?” We were leaning against a car, the two realest men you know, and of course I said yes.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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The isolated feel was unnerving, the whole place half-empty on a Saturday. So, creeped-out as I was by the long, fluorescent hallway, the surprising, murder-y backwoods vibe, I went with what felt safer.

When I opened the door a lady at the sink saw me, startled, then sneered. She packed up her make-up kit, made a production of checking the sign on the door, then let it close behind her, a trail of toilet paper flapping from her heels. I still had to pee, so I did, washing up and softening my expression for a beat, anticipating the mall cop, who arrived just as I toweled my hands.

A big guy, he thrust out a gut and assessed me in my jeans and T-shirt, my high-tops and tattoos. There was a long moment, just me and him in almost companionable silence.

“Sir?” he said, finally. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”

I knew I’d have to show ID, I knew I was in the middle of nowhere, that I was alone. But, fuck it.

“Maybe,” I said, a Big Bang located where our words collided. “But so are you.”

The expression on his face was worth it.

***

Eight years later, I made the mistake of conflating the howl of my body in the mirror with the perspective of the mall cop and the pinched-lip lady. So I watched that first needle heading for my thigh and thought, not a little sadly, that it symbolized a certain compromise. I figured being a man meant a blind faith in the gender taxonomy, a byproduct of hormones and ease of bathroom use, sure as facial hair and increased muscle tone. Because we’re primed to believe in binaries: before and after, say, or the real me versus the me I thought I was. Most of us would rather pass than be seen.

And so I did. Like a trade made in a fairy tale, I moved through the first few months a projection of my former self, trying to keep up my end of the bargain. I was more a ghostly highlight reel of social conditioning than anything else. I reluctantly nodded along to a run-down of last night’s game, I kept my voice low, gendered cocktails, and quit crossing my legs.

But testosterone can only bring your body into alignment, as the story goes. Everything else is up to you. I saw that I was trapped in the right body, and I couldn’t stick a needle in my thigh every week, couldn’t risk cancer and prejudice, just to wrap myself in stereotype and keep my head down.

It’s an elegant physics, not drawn in bathroom signs but in the radical shift of a world waiting beyond four-wall boxes, one where comfort is snake oil, where life happens whether or not we can define it.

***

Before I got my math straight, my body seemed to float restlessly on my bones. I strapped myself together with endless, spooky narration: you comb your hair with the black plastic comb, you run the rubber track, you kiss this girl,  knocking teeth.

If I tightened my abdomen back then, a weird trauma whirlpool would swirl into a wily predator no one else could see. You lie on a stinky mat. Your sweat slicks your upper lip. You see that cloudless sky. The air’s cool like it was made for you.

On testosterone, I looked for the narrator, but it was gone. There’s no tidy world for the man who embraces paradox. Binaries are luxuries I can only study clinically; they lost their soothing qualities when I prioritized my reality over yours. Now I can’t read the news and see right and wrong, I can’t gloat in my goodness, I can’t see politicians or parents or partners as more than their own mysteries, shifting in the light, just like me.

Are you a different person? That’s the question, the big fear, what pins us tight to what’s familiar. Of course, I say. The landscape inside me changed: there’s the new anger, hot and resistant, flapping to the surface like a bird let loose. There’s the soreness of sadness, a wet choke in my throat, a ragged refusal to manifest. There’s the sun-blare of my focus, the muscle of my energy pulling me wildly forward. Then there’s joy conjured, incredibly, by simple splash of a diving seabird, or the sweet pain of teeth knocking teeth without a mediating story.

What you mean to ask is if I’m more me.

I can’t tell you, but last week a firework sparked my chest, twinkled through my limbs, a neon realization: I love my body. It seemed impossible, but I actually thought those words, and there was my electric self, aligning, all the answer I need.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak and Gertrude Novak, age 1½.

Related Posts:

• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #15: Everybody Passes

Back then I was a kid with short hair, steeple hands, and only a vague idea of who I was asking. Bargaining is the better word, I suppose, in my first of many rides on the grief —-> acceptance merry-go-round. I’d give up anything. I’d be anyone. I just wanted to get old enough to forget my dad’s greedy hands, just wanted to have a chance to grow up unbroken.

My father? I figured him a childhood-stealer, burgling my potential for sitcom-simplicity, and I wanted it back. I was on a backwards hero’s journey, looking to be returned to an earlier state, a better version of myself. I bumbled along, seeking a quantifiable substance, the antidote to my ivy-ing weirdness: the dissonant dude in the mirror being the most troubling example, but you could also eventually cite the whirlpooling anxiety pushing me to lock myself in my college dorm room most nights with a six-pack and a dozen cigarettes, or the classic fear of intimacy that hovered like Dad’s shadow, swiftly swallowing the face of every woman I loved.

“Somehow you learned that being different is wrong” –everyone.

“Being different is wrong” –everyone else.

It wasn’t until I was mugged at 29 that I stopped trying to pass as normal. In the moments right before I thought I was to die, I saw the ways I’d learned what to do in the face of unfathomable fear. This was me, gun-to-head, holding perfectly still. This was the adrenaline that blew through me as my feet hammered out an escape, the way my chest opened to breathe in everything I’d almost lost. I could never pass as someone who’d not seen the ugliest side of life, but hallelujah, I knew now that my fluency was my life fuel: I had triumphed over annihilation not once, but twice.

A year later, a month before I began injecting testosterone, I went to see my estranged father in Oregon. I flinched when he used my birth name, but I was on my way to changing everything, and the last thing I wanted to do in the soft, narrow version of my body was talk to this huddled old man. I expected defiance, so he surprised me when he launched, unprovoked, into a painfully stilted apology and accompanying white-knuckle rendering of his own childhood ghosts.

“Do you think you could forgive me?” he asked in his lilting, South Carolina accent. I don’t know if I’d seen anyone more vulnerable.

I knew then how he must have felt, hovering above me as a child.

He was 71 years old, and we both knew I’d never see him again. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” I told him, “no one deserves that.” He nodded, smiled with a frozen, faraway look. I couldn’t give him anything but animal honesty, but I like to imagine that when we parted ways in his cold mountain town, he knew that my shaking his hand was its own kind of forgiveness.

In that moment, on a street corner in a summer coat, I was both Thomas and not. I was the child I’d been and the skin I was in and the man waiting me out on the other side, breathing fog and watching my dad shuffle away, not passing for anything but myself.

***

Now here I am, unicorned in the body testosterone unlocked, the person in the mirror only now beginning to show up in my dreams. When I’m plagued with just the sort of terror I imagined would disappear when I Became Myself, I’m most comforted by envisioning a naked, muscular man moving freely thorough scenic landscapes, Adam-like in his joy, but with anatomy that mirrors my own. That’s me, I realize, shocked somehow, that my most yearning subconscious ideation could really be a happier version of the body I’m in, belonging.

The truth about passing: sometimes it’s necessary, efficient. It’s an ugly word, and yet something about its crudeness is accurate, like fucking is not the same as sex. In an exact inverse of my former queerness, difference is the destination, passing the invisible cloak that allows me to move through the world, locating myself.

I knew I was a man when I stopped fearing men. I knew I was a man when a guy with a gun made me see that my defining trait was my not my failure to be normal but the space between the poetry of my mechanics and the narrative I’d constructed to bridge that gap. That opening is where I changed the story, and as I ran I could feel that I was no longer who I thought I was, but who I’d been quietly as I passed for someone less affected.

I was nothing if not affected, running gratefully away from a man who looked like death with an engine-heart and a rush of hormones that knew exactly how to guide me.

***

“What do you mean?” The therapist said, his teeth small, his smile irksome. He meant about the running, how I said that I found myself because the two traumas collided, and it was like a wrecking ball. The only thing left once the cops showed up was me, exposed and facing a choice: pass or don’t. It was a repeat of a moment I had when I was 10, except then I’d prayed to disappear. So the backwards hero’s journey started again. This time I knew the elixir wasn’t located in the hallowed halls of therapists’ office, or the meaning made by sitcoms.

“It’s like your life flashing before your eyes,” I offered, ever the translator. “I just knew, in the escape, everything I’d been hiding from myself.”

He didn’t believe me, I could tell. Never matter. I left his office and folded myself into the busy foot traffic below; one of many black-haired, tattooed men with a story in his heart and not a stranger to tell it to.

***

Passing. There’s an uncomfortable implication, a suggestion that I’m not “real,” that the politics of my body are public, that I should announce myself like a debutante at a ball.

And sometimes I want to, because being male is a forcefield. Look, here I am de-boarding the rush hour train at Ruggles, six inches of space on all sides. Women jostle beside me but no one breaches my perimeter. No one wants to touch me.

These are my muscles, my hairy thighs, my broadened face. This is my relationship with myself. If you crack me open, I’m pink muscle and heartache and hormones still seeking homeostasis. I’m not my father, or my mugger, but I carry the weight of their crimes because I’m a son in their world; our world—it’s my world, too.

Passing is what happens when expectation meets body. I smile at another dude and quickly pull my mouth back to neutral. When the friendly man at American Apparel holds my gaze a beat, I look away, clip my tone.

So much of being male is about space: protecting it, making it, asserting it, projecting it. So much about being me is wanting to close the gap between us.

I don’t want all this room, I tell Michael.

She wants it, she says. A guy followed her down Broadway, yelling from his car; he said stuff so abusive she doesn’t want to repeat it. That’s what she talks about when she talks about being a woman—not being given any room to move.

“I mean by cis guys,” she’s quick to clarify. But. We both know what propels the high-heel clicks to quicken ahead of me on an empty street: my body is the push-end of the magnet. I may have passed as a woman for 30 years, but I’ve never known what it is to be one.

Naked, my power shifts. I’m my brothers who’ve been denied care for breast and ovarian cancers, or who’ve been held in the medical and legal limbo of our unrecognized bodies by systems bent on destroying anything that defies it.

I want you to understand that it’s not about passing.

When I put on a pair of pants and walk outside, passing is the side effect of being my body in space. The world parts for me but it eyes me—it eyes us all—carefully.

***

Everybody passes. You’re a tomboy in woman’s clothes, a functional alcoholic, a mother afraid she’s losing herself. You’re passing as something more than human because we are all walking through life as if what mattered most were the symbols of our acquisitions and not the fluttering flags of our hearts.

I don’t pass when I’m alone. Different as I am, the elixir wasn’t hidden behind a many-headed monster; I didn’t need to destroy something else to become myself. The privilege of masculine space and its attendant expectations are troubling and erasing, as gender expectations are for most of us. I don’t want this much space.

Nothing can disappear whatever toxicity we carry, whatever bad dad or hollering psycho or bruising fingers or state-sanctioned threat you defend with whatever armor lines your heart. We pass because the world asks it of us, a baseline of small talk, a frustrating reduction of what makes a person vibrant is now what I see in the space I once mistook for normalcy. Give me your tattered, scarred, lonely selves; your small forgivenesses, your holy contradictions.

Because now I pray for something else: may I be the light enveloping my father’s shadow, interrupting its long reach. May I know the truth of who you are and not the person you want to be. May we get the chance to move through the world defined by the boundary of where our darkness meets our light, invisible then, yes, but only in passing.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body

What I find, though, is that I’m invisible—a passable male, a hormonal reconstruction, a head nod-and-move-on. I am a square jaw, sideburns, a mass of leg hair. Testosterone in its amber vial, the science that produces it, the manufacturers that bottle it, and the pharmacy that dispenses it assure my safe passage.

Like Victor Frankenstein’s stitched vision, I am a man born of medicine. I’m not saying that I’m a monster, just that he’s not, either. I see that the parallel is uneasy, that the implication is uncomfortable. But I’ve read that book over and over because I think it tells us something brilliant about the slippery nature of monstrosity: that the body is not ever evil; it’s the mind that bends.

I relate to the “creature,” the gentle man who was brought into the world a collection of parts. The scorn that turned him lonely and, finally, violent was at the hands of those with untroubled bodies: smooth-skinned villagers who feared his difference. But my sympathy rests with the haters, too: only because everyone knows that letting fear vine through your heart makes hate inevitable: that you will direct all your noxious energy somewhere eventually, and that — if you pay attention — everything that makes you sick will look like a twisted version of yourself. There is a mirrored quality to our most evil acts.

I am queerly bodied, and I’d rather be an open-heart than a pitchfork-toting villager any day. Because, unlike some trans folks, I don’t think my body is tantamount to a birth defect. I believe I was born in the “right” body, and still had to change it.  I may be safely drifting among the urinal cakes, paradoxically visible and invisible at once, but I know I’m not a ghost.

I don’t want to pass the smooth-skinned like a perfect reflection. I don’t want to keep my arms at my sides to hide my surgery scars, to worry about the press of my swim trunks, to sit in an ER bed and wonder if the doctor notices the shape beneath the paper gown and what she will say when she does.

I’m already here. I don’t want to pass at all.

***

I ask non-trans people about how they imagine transitioning, and on a good day the answers mostly make me laugh. On a bad day, the gulf between us echoes; a game of telephone.

No, it’s not like wearing a mask of your face on your face. Also, it’s not addition and subtraction, not a math of beating heart – breasts + beard.

I want you to understand the sort of dissonance that pressures the body into a kiln of synthetics, the needles and scalpels, the drains filled with blood. I know our bodies are driven by the same yearning engine, that you, too, just want to be naked with yourself. I know that you are fractured, and that the mystery of how you got here and the ways in which you get stitched solves the puzzle of who you are. We’re all chasing monsters, that’s the moral. Whether we’re holding torches or hunting our father across a tundra, it seems humanity’s lost when we see our bodies as splintered, discrete.

That’s why I need you to know me. It’s selfish, but I don’t want to forget the way I fit together.

So, I try to translate. Here: my uncle, a spry 80-year-old with sparkling eyes, described it perfectly by accident. He’s a hiker, a dam-builder, a pocket-knife-carrying former Boy Scout. He’s the first on the rollercoaster, the leader of camping expeditions, wiry and calloused. He’s had heart trouble lately, and that sidelines him. “I wake up every morning, go to the mirror, and expect to see myself,” he told me recently, his voice softer than usual. “But I just get this old man, instead.”

I know you know this feeling: the crow’s feet, or the stretch marks on your belly, or the plate in your knee. Age is the equalizer, the hardest adjustment. I know the pinch of it, too, the double-take.

So start there, but back up. Let’s get broad, think about that niggling feeling you get when you see yourself as more than a sum of parts. Maybe it’s after a regrettable night with your ex, or the second you realize you’re pregnant, or upon the survival of a car accident. Maybe you’re bloody or gleaming, triumphant or lost, and you look in the mirror and think, This isn’t what I expected. You can see it: the distance between who you thought you were and where you stand, and even if it’s all glorious growth and poignancy, it’s disorienting.

Is this working? Can you magnify it out? Can you squint and imagine a moment of truth, squirming or cool, expansive or buckling? Can you multiply that magnification, imagine a mirror of parts coming together, a growing distance, a wail of worry: I’m doing it wrong I’m doing it wrong I’m doing it wrong.

For me the siren howled four years before the hormones and a year before the surgery. I’m in a bar in Los Angeles. I’m under a baseball hat and hoodie, I’m social anxiety. I’m so drunk I’ve eclipsed even philosophy; I’m just fucked up. I’m watching a cokehead sing ironic Journey. I’m thinking about when I stopped believing, and then I’m staring at my face over a dirty sink while a woman pees endlessly behind a shower curtain divide.

I see all the parts of me that look right: nose, eyebrows, eyes. But I look long enough to notice what I skip: my small mouth, the feminine delicateness of my jaw, the high swell of my cheeks, the billboard bulge of my chest. They all come together and I really see myself, you know?

Just as some tomcat howls “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” I telegraph myself a SOS: This isn’t what I expected.

Then I went home, slept it off, and went back to living in parts.

***

Even a year later, after top surgery, which brought my chest out of a fuzzy blur into something cleaner — I still relied on a Picasso flattening of my image: haireyesnosechestarms. I wanted skin that stretched over all of me, I wanted a recognizable face. Instead, I’d settled for keeping the floating pieces sort of in the vicinity of each other.

Everyone wants the trans narrative to be triumphant. But one thing you don’t know about me is how hard I tried to not be trans. I thought that to inhabit my birth body was authentic. I thought I shouldn’t have to inject anything in order to be myself.

But here we are. The story always arcs the same way: I had no choice. The parts drifted more and more until I looked in the mirror and it was all eyes and teeth, until I was a body on the brink of disappearance. That’s a poetic way of suggesting suicide, but that’s not what I mean. I mean I was fading, an amplified version of my uncle, shaving a wrinkled cheek.

I looked at my wedding pictures and thought: This isn’t what I expected.

I thought: I’m doing it wrong.

I thought: That’s not what I look like.

***

And so I am a man of medicine.

When I carefully label my needles and the accompanying vials and display them prominently in my luggage, when I walk through the body scan at the airport, I wait for the alarm to sound, for time to stop, for the parts to detach and crumble.

I’m constructed, how can I forget it? On days my hand shakes and I worry I won’t be able to stick myself, I take a deep breath and push because without that oil, I will divide, an astronaut orbiting my befuddled body, looking for a home.

The arc is supposed to end here, I’m supposed to distill it down to  “1 year, 2 months on T and I’ve never been happier!”

I’ve been happier.

But my body, my body, my body. I am the person I expect myself to be. You know what I mean, right? It’s something about growing up, you find yourself sober under harsh lights, down the hall from the person who sees through all your bullshit, thinking about what it is exactly that shines through the stubble and tattoos and scars, and aren’t you just trying to align that tremendous light that blasts through your stitches with the person in the mirror? Aren’t you trying to be a better Victor to your stumbling creature, a better parent to your flesh?

Yes? Then you’ll believe me that sometimes I do really say, I’ve never been happier.  Me, the self-made man. I am the technology and the beating heart. I am the result of latex gloves and operating rooms, but I see the parts welded together, and I know that the difference between me and Frankenstein’s monster is that I’m not a misguided ego or a cautionary tale, not a parable or an invention.

Those are the sorts of stories the villagers tell.

My body is not troubled. I construct myself.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body