Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  When I was twenty-five I flew to London to spend a week with a man who used to be in love with me but wasn’t anymore. Every day he left for work and I would wash all the dishes that were left in the sink from the night before; then I would walk around the neighborhood and weep until it was time for him to come home, where I would pretend to have spent an exciting day not crying and wait for him to notice I had washed and put away all the dishes. He did not bother about the dishes, and then I would wait for him to fall asleep and crawl out into his tiny bathroom and cry in the shower. I did this for six days in a row, and grew so frantic by the end that I came up with excuses to furnish him with extra dishes to use, making cup after cup of coffee or suggesting we make pasta so eventually he’d be forced to consider how there could possibly be another mug or colander available, since for all he knew he hadn’t done the dishes in a week. It’s an embarrassing story for a number of reasons, not least because I fear the moral of the story could be misrepresented as If you can’t get your lousy boyfriend to pick up after himself, become your own lousy boyfriend instead, or worse, that my failure to demand my rights as a woman directly resulted in my opting for Door Number Two and transitioning as a means of avoiding difficult conversations about housework. What remains true about the story is that I wanted this man, like all men, to immediately and intuitively recognize something in me they consistently failed to notice, and, when that failed, I attempted to make myself so helpful and unobtrusive I would become necessary to their comfort if not to their happiness, and when that failed I ran away to face my own dishes at home.

  A few years later, when I went from passively ignoring to actively resisting the question of transition, I stopped cleaning up after myself entirely. I lived alone at the time, so there was no question of inconveniencing or blaming someone else. The idea of tending to anything that belonged to me—my home, my clothes, my appearance—was unbearable, because everything at that time depended on my not having a body. Washing the dishes meant acknowledging that I had hands to wash them with, a stomach to fill, a hunger to address, a body to nourish. I was worried and troubled about many things, although only one thing was needed. I preferred to worry about many things. The work of not doing the dishes is much more complicated and exhausting than doing the dishes, and involves sticking to a strict schedule:

  Step One: Begin to avoid the kitchen. If the kitchen cannot be avoided, if it must be passed through in order to reach more desirable environs, like the out-of-doors, avert your eyes from the sink and neighboring counters. The kitchen is now formally Unlovely; do not treat it with affection.

  Step Two: Designate a particular coffee mug as the Mug. The Mug is part of your body now and may be reused for any and all beverages, whether coffee or not-yet-flat, this-is-still-good Red Bull, nicotine gum wrappers still sparking with aluminum and chemicals, soups (including ice cream). You might rinse the cup out every now and again, but do not feel the need to formally wash it any more than you would scrub your mouth out with soap and water in between meals; the Mug is as much an extension of your body as your hand or your face.

  Step Three: The sink is a place for stacking things and leaving, nothing more.

  Step Four: If the sink must be addressed, employ a Tetris-style restacking strategy, drizzle everything with watered-down dish soap, turn the faucet on for a few seconds, and announce that you’re “leaving these to soak.” This qualifies as a chore, and no one can accuse you of task-shying.

  Step Five: “It’s growing and growing, there’s more of it every day, if it’s possible to speak of more nothing. All the others fled in time … but we didn’t want to leave our home. The Nothing [of Neverending Story fame] caught us in our sleep and this is what it did to us.”

  “Is it very painful?” Atreyu asked.

  “No,” said the second bark troll, the one with the hole in his chest. “You don’t feel a thing. There’s just something missing. And once it gets hold of you, something more is missing every day. Soon there won’t be anything left of us.”

  Step Six: When the stacking balance fails you and topples over, leave the house and take your dinner in a dark corner of a dark restaurant. Place a paper towel on top of the soapy, crumb-filled mess that has oversloshed the kitchen counter, as a sign of penance.

  Step Seven: If you have a dishwasher, open it for a few hours—“to let the air in”—and close it sometime after sunset. That’s enough for one day.

  Step Eight: “And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).

  Step Nine: Throw something you need very much in the garbage.

  Step Ten: “Is it very painful?” Atreyu asked. “Is it very painful?” Is it? Is it very painful? Is it painful? Is it very? Is it very painful? Is it very painful?

  And so on, until your life cracks open and God addresses you by your name twice to make sure that he’s gotten your attention. The question then becomes what it is, exactly, that Mary has chosen. Martha seems to think the work, whatever the work is, has fallen exclusively to her. Jesus declines to call what Mary does either work or not work, describing it instead as “what is needed,” sometimes “what is better,” sometimes “what is good.” Every so often it is written “what is best.” The question that kept me from my own dishes was the question of whether transition was necessary or merely good, namely whether I could get away with avoiding it. I wanted to know my other options. I wanted to see a different menu. I wanted a guarantee that my only alternative to transition was ruin, because to take that risk on any other terms was totally unacceptable to me; I wanted to be informed that I either had to or could not do it, assigned a formal vocation rather than encouraged to discern one. What can Martha do, at the end of that conversation? If she has been chastened, it was lovingly done; but she has received very little guidance about the nature of her own work. Is Mary’s part the best for her, too? Should she join her sister in formal discipleship? Should she compare the two of them together more often, or less? She knows more about Mary, certainly, but not if her own work is good or good enough or good-for-Martha or something else. What I wanted at the outset of transition was the opportunity to fold back the page at this particular turning point and live forward in two directions at once, in one version of my life where I transitioned and in one where I didn’t, then revisit after about fifteen solid years in each reality and make an informed assessment of which life proved the better. I had no interest in keeping my eyes only on my own work. I wanted my work, and everyone else’s, and for someone else to come and help me with mine in the bargain. I wanted a guaranteed outcome before moving forward. I wanted what was best, and I wanted to know what was best in advance, with frequent updates to follow just in case the good or the better suddenly moved into the lead.

  Brother Lawrence offers a third possible perspective on the problem of dishes and vocation (which may or may not have been Martha’s problem after all):

  He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think … We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before Him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.

  Brother Lawrence, of course, never had my or Martha’s problem with the dishes, having neatly sidestepped a number of psychosexual dish-adjacent issues by only doing the washing-up in a monastery. B
ut there is a neatness to it, particularly for a spiritually anxious transsexual: picture a sacred presence, dress it up as a boy if you like, who not only notices every time you bake a cake or unload the dishwasher but delights in it, revels in it, considers it a pure and lovely offering every time you do it. This is my son, in whom I am well pleased; I see you have done the dishes again. Trans people sometimes talk about gender euphoria, that expansive sense of purpose and delight that can accompany certain moments in transition; I found myself anxiously scanning my own brain in the first few hours after starting testosterone (“I’m just trying it,” I told my friends. “I’m not on it, exactly, just trying, there’s a difference”): Am I euphoric yet? How about now? Is this euphoria? How will I know, if transition has been founded in large part by the realization that I often can’t trust my own sense of self, because I used to think I was a cis woman and only belatedly realized I might have been in error? There was nothing to do for it but continue to go about my life, running the experiment and walking the dog and answering emails and boiling water for tea and putting away dishes as needed, all while paying careful attention. And when the euphoria came—and went, and came back, and settled into something a little more than predictable and a little less than jarring—it was enough to pick up a straw, or put away a dish, all for the love of it.

  INTERLUDE IX Columbo in Six Positions

  After a little more than two years on testosterone, my voice keeps trembling as well as thumping down the octave scale every couple of weeks. With every deepening I lose another of what I once considered my reliable impressions. My impressions used to be delivered almost exclusively to myself in the car or in the shower, but I miss them just the same. They were especially useful when I wanted to rehearse arguments I planned on having and needed to assign a certain type of personality to my imaginary interlocutors. I recently discovered that my Miranda from Sex and the City is completely gone, my Joan Didion is a mess, my Kate Hepburn sounds mannered and forced—not in the way that Kate sounded mannered and forced, but in a way that makes my ears question the sex of my throat. I love very much the baffling little burr of my new vocal cords, but I have no idea where all this is going.

  They were not many, my impressions, and they were never stellar, but they took me a lifetime to assemble and only about six months to torpedo, so I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going to take their place. I have been able, with careful study, to develop a rudimentary, preverbal Columbo, the first man I ever loved. I cannot yet trust myself to mimic the voice, as I keep going wide and skidding headfirst into “central casting New York City beat officer in a midcentury musical,” so this is all pantomime, but I would nevertheless like to invite you to share in my process. Someday soon I will be ready to speak.

  COLUMBO—FIRST POSITION

  This will be the attitude from which all more complex Columbos develop. Wherever you are standing, take a step back, while bobbing your head apologetically downward. Allow belligerent deference to bend your spine. Retract the two top vertebrae. Tilt your head to whatever side feels more unnatural. Draw down your features until you feel like you’re making a sort of “Robert De Niro doesn’t like this idea that’s being presented to him” expression. Pinch the left side of your mouth up, your left eye and eyebrow down into a wink. Place both hands with palms facing outward just in front of your face, keeping the thumbs pointed at each other and letting the rest of your fingers droop slightly. This is the Columbo of preparation, of anticipation, of eternal readiness. Breathe. Not deeply, nor restfully, but like a basset hound bent on justice, or half an accordion.

  COLUMBO—SECOND POSITION

  While maintaining first position, thrust your left hand forward as far as it can go while keeping it at eye level, dropping your three left fingers so that your pointer finger extends directly upward to God and your thumb acts as a counterweight. Pull your right hand slightly closer to your face. Pulse your left hand back and forth, as if it were asking a question. Furrow your eyebrows further, if they’re not already maximally furrowed. The truth is a very heavy jewel, and it hovers somewhere in the middle of your face; all of your features are inexorably drawn toward it.

  COLUMBO—THIRD POSITION

  Pass your right hand over your face, gently pressing your first and third fingers against your forehead, brushing your thumb over your right cheek, and letting the palm lightly graze the tip of your nose. Retract your left arm toward your body until your elbow is at a right angle. Keep the right hand light; you are not burying your face in your hands in anguish, but brushing off insincerity.

  COLUMBO—FOURTH POSITION

  Bring the left hand up to the side of your face, rubbing your first two fingers against the temple. Leave the right hand as it is. Scrunch both eyes closed, then open them wide. Yawn without parting your lips. Columbo never opens his mouth before the time is right.

  COLUMBO—FIFTH POSITION

  I know something needs to go here. I just don’t know what yet. Guess it’s a mystery.

  COLUMBO—SIXTH POSITION

  Draw both hands up and over the head, scrunching whatever hair you have between the ear and the crown between your fingers. Lean back from the shoulders, while simultaneously maintaining an overall attitude of ducking, as if before a suspicious God. Continue furrowing the left side of your face, while letting the right side go slack and relaxed (or slack and weary, as you prefer). An answer is coming.

  INTERLUDE X On Wednesdays We Mean Girls Wore Pink

  R

  I get hit by the same bus every day. At least I think I do. I don’t always know the difference between what I know and what I think. But I do know that it hurts, every time. And the day is always divided into before I get hit by the bus, and after I get hit by the bus, but it hurts on both sides. Sometimes I’m in the hospital, sometimes I’m at home, resting. Everyone calls it resting. I don’t know what they mean by that. I don’t know that resting is the best response to being hit by a bus. But I do it anyhow. Sometimes I’m back at school, and I’m in the middle of a conversation that I didn’t even know I was having, and I’ll think, I think I was just hit by a bus, but no one around me is acting like I just got hit by a bus, so I act like I wasn’t hit by a bus, either.

  Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between what I know and what there is to know. I’ll know—I’ll think I know—something, like “Everyone in Africa can read Swedish.” But I’m not sure if I know that. So I try to run tests in my own head before I say something. I’ll ask, Where in Africa do I think people can read Swedish? And then I’ll think: I don’t know. And then I’ll ask, Can I name a specific country in Africa where people read Swedish? And then I’ll ask, Can I name a specific country in Africa at all? Do I know where Sweden is? And I can’t, and so I think, I probably don’t know that after all. So I don’t say anything.

  C

  I heard she got hit by a bus. But hearing someone got hit by a bus, and actually getting hit by a bus, those are two different things.

  Once, I was on a stage and I split something very important into pieces. I gave the pieces to everyone I could reach. I think that’s sort of what happened to her.

  It wasn’t a party, exactly, and I don’t remember what I was onstage for. But someone handed me something beautiful, and I cracked it open. I think afterward people applauded. I don’t remember why.

  Now I have a boyfriend who lives very far away. I don’t know when I’m going to see him again. I don’t remember if he’s trapped, or missing. But I know he’s somewhere very far away, and I know that sometimes I feel like I’m just floating. If I think about what’s happening around me very carefully, I can sometimes get a sense of whether he’s here, if he has his arm around me or if it’s someone else, or if anyone has their arm around me at all. I don’t know what he does with his arms when he’s not here, or how he gets here at all, or what happens when he goes away. I don’t think he’s here right now. But I’m not sure. I know it’s never her arm around me. I would remember that. I t
hink I would remember that. One of us would remember. There is a limit that exists there.

  But the bus has never hit me. It comes close, sometimes, but it’s never happened to me. There is no limit there.

  D

  My curfew is 1:00 a.m. I don’t have anything else to say about this. About what’s happening to everyone. What’s been happening to everyone. I’m not getting out of the car, and I’m going home.

  J

  I’m not going to apologize. So it doesn’t matter, whether I wish I could apologize, or whether I thought I was wrong, or whether—it doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to apologize, because nobody else seemed to think that I should. So I don’t get to. Everyone else gets to, and I don’t.

  M

  Michigan isn’t in Africa. I don’t know why I have to keep telling people that. Well. I know why. But I wish they would remember that I’ve said it before.

  Maybe I’ll stop telling people I’m from Michigan. Maybe then something different will happen.

  Maybe tomorrow I will ask everyone, “Are you from Michigan?” again and again until someone admits the truth.

  D

  For the record, I don’t like it when she says it, either. But you pick your battles.