Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  There are moments when the power of fantasy is brought up humiliatingly short by real life, and this was one of them. Big time. As I looked the table over I realized that all the spears and knives and other weapons I’d seen gleaming so beautifully menacing in my mind’s eye were in fact made of plastic. Yes, plastic. They were toys. Toy Viking and conquistador helmets and breastplates and machine guns that went rat-tat-tat when you pulled their triggers. I couldn’t believe it.

  I had to laugh at myself. Here was the ultimate clash of consciousness, a bunch of boys playing war, and me wanting a butchering at their hands. I felt like a twisted babysitter. I had come to the retreat worried about what might happen to me, but with the possible exception of Paul and the wolverine guy, I was the most dangerous person there. The other guys were pussycats to a one.

  As we assembled I saw that people were half dressed in various costumes. One of my group mates was wearing his commando pajamas, a kind of camouflage sweat suit he’d been wearing all weekend. Corey was wearing a short bathrobe, the top half of which he soon dribbled over the belt and let hang from his waist. He danced topless that way for much of the evening, as did many of the other guys. Gabriel had donned a tragic thespian mask and was scampering around the room in a crouch, cowering periodically behind chairs and other people like a dog trying to dodge a beating. One of the middle-aged guys was wearing nothing but off-white long-john bottoms. His cock and balls wiggled and dangled as he skipped around in circles to the sound of the drums, his pecs drooping and withered, a look of awkward concentration on his face.

  My commando-pajamaed group mate picked up one of the plastic axes and spent a good ten minutes mock wanking with it between his legs, running an open fist furiously along the shaft, arching his back and falling to his knees in ecstasy at the climax.

  He said later, “I wanted to get in touch with my balls and my orgasm—my cum.”

  How original.

  Corey eventually joined a small group of guys writhing together on the floor, half wrestling, grunting and groaning and throwing themselves around. Nobody dared throw anyone else around in this group. They were having a hard time letting go, and most of them would have been too scared of what such a gesture might unleash. At any given time five to ten different guys were off squatting in one of the corners, watching uncomfortably. Paul would go over periodically to shoo them out and they would move away reluctantly into the dance, only to peel off ashamedly into another corner to hide. The whole thing would have worked a lot better if we’d all gotten stoned beforehand or taken other hallucinogens, as native cultures often did and still do in such rituals. The whole idea was to get out of yourself and have a vision, but nobody here was going to do that sober, including me.

  I sat cross-legged in one of the corners with a pair of bongos I’d picked up off the long table. As long as I was engaged in music making I figured I could remain outside the circle and watch. But before long it became clear that there would be no collective zenith in the dance, no fever pitch reached and passed. People grew tired and disappointed by revelation’s failure to show.

  Yet for me, revelation was showing even then. It already had at the Ping-Pong table with Corey, though I would understand it only later when I caught up with it. My conflict was happening to me without prompting and when I got home I would have it all out.

  The spirit dance ended without fanfare. It wound down with a final group shout at the end, something we always did to cap off our biweekly meetings, gathering in a tight circle, joining hands, raising our hands and letting loose. At those times I could always hear my own voice higher than the rest, reedy and incongruent, beside but never quite joining the struck note.

  The retreat finished the way the spirit dance had, uneventfully, with a quiet, mostly reflective breakfast on Sunday morning and a thankful parting of ways thereafter. I said nothing about myself to anyone.

  I came back from the retreat with a host of accumulated feelings in tow. No one found me out and, of course, no one cut me. But the malaise inside me was still there and growing.

  I was coming close to the end of a year and a half spent masquerading as a man. The men’s retreat was the culmination of that masquerade, and in certain ways the hardest part to pull off. I had gone to the woods with these guys not knowing what the retreat leaders were going to ask us to do. I had envisioned all sorts of things, none of which, thankfully, came to pass. Yet somehow this didn’t relieve the pressure in my mind, and I continued to imagine scenarios in which I would elicit some violent reaction from Paul or someone else.

  Once the retreat was over I knew that I had accomplished the last big task. Some part of me knew I didn’t have to hold Ned together anymore, or the girded mind-set that made him possible. And once I knew that, all the guilt about being an impostor, the anxiety of getting caught at it and the by then extreme discomfort of contravening my own gender identity came rushing in. I didn’t have the resources or the reasons anymore to stop it.

  I could use the term “crack-up” to characterize what happened next, but it doesn’t really describe what it felt like. “Nervous breakdown” is another handy term of art, but it too does little more than brand the experience as some filmable catastrophe that makes for good TV. The reality was not nearly so dramatic. There was no earthquake. The floor of my house didn’t open and swallow the furniture.

  It was all very quiet, as if I had gone out one day to do errands and come home to a summer house where all the chairs and tables had been covered with sheets.

  I did not become paranoid or hysterical or make a scene in public. I didn’t feel overwrought or afraid. I felt nothing, and that was scarier. There was no break with reality. None whatsoever. I heard no voices. I saw nothing that wasn’t there. If anything, the opposite was true. The everyday unremarkable scenery became so heavy, so imaginationless, that I felt as if I were wearing my surroundings like a cement suit.

  I simply quit, or some part of me did, and then left the rest of me to work out the particulars, which in my case meant checking myself into a hospital.

  The event itself had been so subtle, or perhaps my notion of what mental collapse is really like had been so overblown, that I wasn’t even aware that it had happened. I knew something had happened. I knew that I had taken steps to prevent or mitigate some impending disaster, but once in the hospital I found myself bewildered by my fellow patients and my presence among them. Absurdly so at times.

  Over institutional pancakes one morning I asked one of them what he was “in for,” and he told me he’d had a nervous breakdown after his wife left him for another man.

  “Oh, really,” I said. “What is a nervous breakdown like anyway? I’ve always wanted to know.”

  It seemed at the time as though I had checked myself into a locked psychiatric ward for no particular reason at all. I didn’t associate my condition with anything that had happened over the previous year and a half. I thought my antidepressant medication had simply stopped working, and accordingly I had tripped into the nearest hole. That was my official line: “I’m having my medication adjusted.” A euphemism at last. As if checking yourself into the bin was no different or more involved a procedure than irrigating your ears.

  The truth was I had been what the experts called “passively suicidal.” I was walking around in a trance looking for Pauls in everyone I met, Pauls, that is, who happened to be carrying real knives on their persons and were practiced at using them. Given that such people are all too easy to find in New York City, my therapist thought it wise to suggest that I take myself off the streets, and the waking part of me agreed.

  It wasn’t until I sat in the day room of the mental ward talking to various social workers and med students and distracted psychiatrists that I connected this episode in any meaningful way with Paul or Ned, or even came to realize that Ned was over.

  Sure, Paul was someone associated with Ned, he was the focus of my guilt, that much I knew going in, but he was not the only or even the most prevalent
cause of Ned’s demise.

  The deeper cause was in Ned, inherent to him, and had been there from the start. First of all, Ned was an impostor and impostors who aren’t sociopaths eventually implode. Assuming another identity is no simple affair, even when it doesn’t involve a sex change. It takes constant effort, vigilance and energy. A lot of energy. It’s exhausting at the best of times. You are always afraid that someone knows you are not who you say you are, or will know immediately if you make even the slightest false step. You are outside yourself in two senses. First because you are always watching yourself from beside or above, trying to get the performance right and see the pitfalls coming, but also because you are always trying to inhabit the persona of someone who doesn’t exist, even on paper. You don’t have the benefit of a script or character treatment that can tell you how this person thinks, or what his childhood was like, or what he likes to do. He has no history and no substance, and being him is like being an adult thrown back into the worst of someone else’s awkward adolescence.

  But there was more to it than that. Ned was also a man, albeit a Potemkin man, all facade and no substance, but I was still very much a woman peering through his windows, and the cognitive dissonance this set up was simply untenable in the long term, like holding two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind while trying to juggle and ride a bicycle at the same time.

  Being him was a bit like being a zebra who is trying to pass himself off as a giraffe. Trying to be a man when you are a woman is not just being a horse of a different color, or a person who has traded in her old trappings for new ones: new clothes, new makeup and new hair. Through Ned I learned the hard way that my gender has roots in my brain, possibly biochemical ones, living very close to the core of my self-image. Inseparably close. Far, far closer than my race or class or religion or nationality, so close in fact as to be incomparable with these categories, though it is so often grouped with them in theory.

  When I plucked out, one by one, my set of gendered characteristics, and slotted in Ned’s, unknowingly I drove the slim end of a wedge into my sense of self, and as I lived as Ned, growing into his life and conjured place in the world, a fault line opened in my mind, precipitating small and then increasingly larger seismic events in my subconscious until the stratum finally gave.

  I left the hospital after only four days, not because I was cured, far from it, but because listening to my roommate talk all night about the Swedish troll people, or about how DJs on the radio were calling her a whore, wasn’t helping me to get better.

  It took me a solid two months of meticulous care and home rest to get myself out of that state. Several times during that period I reached for Paul’s number but didn’t use it. I could never quite trust my motivations for wanting to see him and tell him about me, so I put off any meeting and concentrated instead on purging myself of Ned.

  Ned had built up in my system over time. This allowed me to convey him more convincingly as the project went on, but it was also what made me buckle eventually under his weight. It was to be expected. As one rare (rare because insightful) psychiatrist would later put it to me when I declared that my breakdown would surely impeach me as a narrator, and hence impugn the whole project: “On the contrary, having done what you did, I would have thought you were crazy if you hadn’t had a breakdown.”

  In an odd way I think that what happened to me as Ned is what happened in some form or another to most of the guys in the men’s group, though I experienced the alienation more intensely because I was a woman. Square peg, round hole and all that. My effort was disastrous of necessity. But for these men, living in their man’s box wasn’t a particularly good fit either, and learning this in spades may have been Ned’s best lesson in the toxicity of gender roles. Those roles had proved to be ungainly, suffocating, torpor-inducing or even nearly fatal to a lot more people than I’d thought, and for the simple reason that, man or woman, they didn’t let you be yourself. Sooner or later that conflict would show, even if you weren’t trying to cross the boundaries of sex.

  Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man.

  True enough. But what to do about it? I can hardly write those words and defend them. Men’s liberation isn’t a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabilitation: the oppressor as oppressed. In our age we feel no political sympathy for “man,” because he has been the conqueror, the rapist, the warmonger, the plutocrat, the collective nightmare sitting on our chest. Right? Right. “Boo hoo,” we say in the face of his complaint. “The tyrant weeps.” When the bellowing image of the Great Oz turns out to be the befuddled homunculus pulling levers behind a curtain, we are understandably lacking in sympathy.

  Yet as Paul, who has spent years in the men’s movement trying to defend it to angry feminists, once put it to me, “It is women who are paying the highest price for men’s dysfunction. We are not in opposition to them at all.” And he’s right. Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. From the feminist point of view this sounds at best like an abdication of responsibility, an easy out for the inventor, and at worst an infuriating instance of blaming the true victim. But from Paul’s point of view it means that men and women are finally agreeing on something: the system sucks.

  All of this is why the men’s movement has remained a largely clandestine affair, relegated to retreats in the woods. Being a victim is far less practicable politically when the victimizer is also you, and the rending yoke is self-imposed. Can anybody really march the streets crying j’accuse and mea culpa in the same breath? Can you be “The Man” and the rebel at the same time?

  Not in our revolution, pal.

  It’s hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can’t exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fathers’ love. These, it would seem, are matters for the therapist’s couch. Private matters.

  But, of course, men’s private lives are ours as well. Paul was right about that. Whether or not you’re a feminist has little bearing on the matter. If men are really still in power, then it benefits us all considerably to heal the dyspeptic at the wheel. And if they’re not, they’re still members of our families and they still make up half the breeding population of the planet. We can hardly exist, much less live or change without them. And as the feminists might say, it doesn’t get much more personal or political than that.

  I don’t really know what it’s like to be a man. I never could. But I know approximately. I know some of what it is like to be treated as one. And that, in the end, was what this experiment was all about. Not being but being received.

  I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in group and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Only in my men’s group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room.

  In the end I decided not to tell Paul about me. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, but I worried that the embarrassment he would probably feel for not having sussed me out somewhere along the line might put him on the spot in a way that by now seemed unfair and unnecessary. This was an aspect of my previous disclosures that I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time but now saw all too clearly. I had expected people to be shocked o
r bewildered, even angry, but not embarrassed. Yet embarrassment was I think at bottom what most people felt when I told them that Ned was really Norah. I had learned a lot about the chemistry of male/female interactions by talking through the transition with people, but I had done so somewhat at their expense. I had done it unknowingly then, but now I knew enough to know better. I wasn’t going to make Paul squirm, and that, I feared, was most of what telling him would have done.

  I never said good-bye to the guys for the same reason. I just stopped going to the meetings. I was tempted, however, to go back as myself. I wanted to tell them that I had heard what they had to say, that what they said had helped to buttress my own discoveries about manhood and helped me to see my own life as a man in sharper relief. Their honesty had made that possible and I was grateful to them for it. Most of all I wanted to wish them well, to tell them that I thought they were doing important work and that maybe, before long, a few more people would know it.

  8

  Journey’s End

  It was hard being a guy. Really hard. And there were a lot of reasons for this, most of which, when I recount them, make me sound like a tired and prototypical angry young man.

  It’s not exactly a pose I relish. I used to hate that character, the guy in the play or the novel who drones on and on about his rotten deal in life and everyone else’s responsibility for it. I always found him tedious and unsympathetic. But after living as a guy for even just a small slice of a lifetime, I can really relate to that screed and give you one of my own. In fact, that’s the only way I can truthfully characterize my life as a guy. I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t like how wooden I felt and had to make myself in order to pass as a believable guy. I had to do a lot of crossing out when I crossed from woman to man. I hadn’t anticipated this when I’d started as Ned. I had thought that by being a guy I would get to do all the things I didn’t get to do as a woman, things I’d always envied about boyhood when I was a child: the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with my legs apart. But when it actually came to the business of being Ned I rarely felt free at all. Far from busting loose, I found myself clamping down instead.