Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  J

  Did he say he didn’t like it when I say it, either? He did, didn’t he? But he didn’t say that he doesn’t like it to me. So what am I supposed to do with that?

  R

  I’ve never eaten cheese fries. I’ve never actually gone shopping, if I’m honest. I just drive around for hours until eventually I’m the only one left in the car. Then I go—home, I think? I go somewhere. When I go home, the phone is ringing, and there’s a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. She always wants something from me, but I can never make out what she’s saying. She never hangs up, so neither do I, and we fall asleep to the sound of each other’s questions.

  D

  She could stop saying it.

  R

  I know that there is only one pair of pants that fit me right now. But I don’t know where they are. And I’m not going to ask anyone. It’s not that I don’t trust them. It’s that I don’t know if trust is a reasonable expectation to have of another person.

  J

  I was never talking about you, when I said that. When I said—that thing I always said. The thing you don’t like me to say.

  D

  I know that. Do you think I didn’t know that?

  J

  Then why—okay. Okay. I don’t think I knew that you knew. And I didn’t know that I knew. And—you should know—you know that I’m not going to apologize about it. I can’t. But I won’t say it again.

  D

  I function.

  J

  I know you do.

  D

  I function like an ecosystem functions. Like a galaxy functions. I function.

  J

  Maybe you should have joined the Mathletes.

  D

  Is that a joke?

  J

  Yes.

  D

  It’s a good joke. You should tell that kind of joke more often.

  J

  Look—

  Okay. Maybe I should.

  D

  And I’m on the Mathletes.

  J

  You are?

  D

  I’m an alternate. Three years running.

  J

  You know I can’t say it.

  D

  You could say it. It’s not as hard as you think it is.

  But you don’t have to say it.

  G

  I don’t speak Vietnamese. And—obviously—they know I don’t speak it, but they never do anything about it, and there’s always a seat there for me, so I keep coming back, and I think, God, just please don’t let me say anything today, but then I can feel it coming over me all in a rush, and I hear myself start to speak whatever it is that I’m saying, and I’m horrified, but I can’t stop. I wish someone would stop me. I wish I would stop me.

  K

  Ever since she got hit by that bus, I can’t stop coughing. “I’m sick,” I say, and people nod their heads like they’re agreeing with me, but then nobody does anything, or says anything in response. So I don’t think I know what agreeing is. I thought I did, but it can’t be this. It can’t be nodding your head and not doing anything. Maybe I’m not sick at all. Maybe I’m sicker than anyone has ever been, and that’s why nobody’s doing anything.

  A

  There was a week—I think it was a week—when I knew, I absolutely knew that everyone around me wanted me to go to the projection room above the auditorium. Everyone wanted me to go to the same place, at the same time, and for the same reason, but no one asked me to do it. They kept trying to—I would see people I knew, but they weren’t the people I knew. They were in disguise. I know how that sounds, but they were. They were all a part of it. And I didn’t know why. I just know that I hated it.

  R

  I don’t know why we still have the bus. The day is going to be over soon, and the bus is going to come, and nobody is going to do anything about it.

  K

  Everyone gets pregnant and dies. He was right about that much. That’s how I start the morning announcements now. That’s all I say. They don’t let me on the air anymore, but I keep saying it.

  C

  The bus is going to split her wide open. Into pieces. But all I can do is solve the problem that’s right in front of me. And she’s not in front of me right now.

  R

  Everyone is going to let it happen again. I’m going to let it happen again. And when she calls tonight, I know I’m not going to answer any of her questions.

  C

  There is a limit to certain things. There is a limit to me.

  R

  Sweden is a country. I know that. I know that I know that. Africa not a country. Africa is a continent with fifty-four countries, none of which is Sweden. I know that. I know that I know that. I looked it up in the library today. I’ve never eaten cheese fries, and I’ve never gone shopping, and I never put my arm around her. I’m never going to. I don’t know that. I only think that. Maybe I will put my arm around her tomorrow, or maybe she will put her arm around me. When the bell rings, I will get up and I will go outside, even if I don’t want to, and the bus will come or not come, and then something else will happen. Something else is always happening.

  C

  Whenever someone has put something beautiful in front of me, I have always tried to solve it. I don’t know if that’s something I should apologize for or not.

  J

  I’m not going to say it.

  D

  She thinks that she can’t say it until someone makes her say it, but that’s not how anything works.

  CHAPTER 10 The Golden Girls and the Mountains in the Sea

  Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

  I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

  Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

  Ay me! How hard to speak of it that rude

  And rough and stubborn forest! The mere breath

  Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood.

  —Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers

  I first came to experience transition as a series of structural collapses. Before I had any sense of what I wanted, of what I believed myself to be or need, I experienced a falling-away, a loss of social and physical fluency, a sense of foundationlessness. It is tempting, now, from the relative safety and security of my current position, to absorb that interval into the new narrative of a life that makes sense to me: my old understanding and self-conceptions had to first give way in order for something realer, truer, braver, more radical, more modern, more exciting, more zeitgeisty to take charge, to wrap up various dramatic arcs of my life like a season of television. But I find myself resistant to declaring, That was false and this is real; here I did not know myself and there I did; this was something not-me and that was my true self. This fondness for disavowing old mission statements and replacing them with new ones was, in fact, the most characteristic habit of my drinking days, where every morning brought with it a fresh announcement, a new resolve, a declaration of profound and immediate change, even if the declaration was only broadcast inside my own head and crowded out by more pressing matters by the time I reached the front door. Now I know what I need to do to get out of this fix. Now I truly know myself, and in knowing myself I can master myself, and by mastering myself I can start building a brand-new future this instant. Getting sober had less to do with finding a better way to more effectively stick to a new resolve and more to do with permitting collapse and abandoning resistance. I found it both discouraging and distressingly on the nose that transitioning seemed to mirror sobriety in that respect. It sounds like an evasion, or at best a euphemistic bromide: “Just stop trying and everything will work itself out somehow!” There are times when I look back over my life and see roots of a potential transition long before I began to consider the possibility. Not ironclad evidence, not portents and prophecies, but something that might have been tended and watered into growth, had I recognized them as being anything capable of growin
g.

  By the time I reached my thirties, I believed the main narrative cycle of my adult life had been resolved. Not finished, of course, but having achieved the kind of balance I assumed was a natural result of addressing the main hindrances to my personal growth, I envisioned a future that simply played out gratifying, interchangeable variations on the major themes of the present: A financially self-sufficient woman, who ran her own business and managed her own career, living independently and liking it, contentedly childless with perhaps the occasional wistful fantasy of what might have been, extolling the pleasures of eating alone and wearing caftans, entirely and cheerfully divorced from the world of men. A one-woman Golden Girls act (never mind that the Golden Girls ends with Dorothy getting married and leaving the rest of the girls behind to run a hotel in Miami). The story of my life, then, was for years that I was a woman because it did not occur to me that I might have other options, if I cared to investigate them. And there were so many wonderful things about being a woman! If I experienced moments of dismay, or disappointment, or discontentedness, that was easy enough to account for; life is often made difficult for women, so those moments were in themselves further evidence for my cis womanhood. Then came the question, the sudden uncertainty, the loss of faith in my future, the giving-way of self-satisfaction to panic. I imagined the solution to my problem to look something like this:

  SELF: “Excuse me, my womanness is broken and I’d like to speak to the manager of … girls, I suppose, so that someone can repair it or exchange it for another womanhood of comparable value.”

  MANAGER: “Ah, welcome to Being-a-Woman. Yes, I see your problem right here. The good news is that there are many ways to be a woman. Here are a few options we have available in your size—if you’d care to step in the back and, ah, try them on? It’s a poorly lit fitting room and you’ll feel terrible wearing them. That’s how you’ll know it’s working!”

  SELF: “Thanks very much. I’ll take the gray with the blue trimming. May I have a receipt in case I need to make another exchange later on?”

  MANAGER: “But of course. Bonne journée, madame.”

  Followed, of course, by a graceful exit and a renewed zest for living.

  The story of my drinking had been much the same. If I experienced moments of panic, or terror, or loss, or mental degradation, or bewilderment, or lost time, or found myself in places I did not wish to be, that was easy enough to account for, too; there was something broken with my drinking and I needed a better drinking strategy, of which there were thousands, if not tens of thousands. So many ways to be a drunk, so many ways to be a woman; it was simply a matter of trying another set of combinations and waiting for them to take effect. I continued to drink long after drinking had stopped working, by which I mean it no longer reliably produced the same familiar cycle of crisis-panic-abandonment-release-crisis that enabled me to feel like my life contained useful forward momentum. Entering into sobriety necessarily involved resigning from the unpaid, unpleasant job of crisis management and developing a new relationship to momentum entirely—not attempting to manufacture it, but attempting to move along with it, and even sometimes attempting to rest in its absence. It required a great deal less work than drinking had. The mental and physical energy required to formulate a brand-new drinking strategy; create a plan for off-loading shame and avoiding disaster; pilot a worn-out body into work reliably enough to keep a job; and steel my nerves for the hours between the old hangover and the next day’s drunkenness was immense. Every day began in fevered preparation for the turnaround that was always just about to begin, in the certainty that today I had solved the riddle of how to drink as I needed to without giving anyone else cause for concern or finding myself in the hospital—as if I had just discovered I was about to come into a great inheritance, and needed to prepare my house and my body and my social life and my bank account for the new and glorious work of stewarding that inheritance.

  The delusion that this work was real or meaningful or profitable to me in any way was persistent, impenetrable, and deadly. Progress, at least in terms of sobriety, looked at first like regression, like loss: loss of certainty, of direction, of habit, of routine, of activity, of the ability to envision a recognizable future, of the sense of momentum. But what I experienced first as loss I would go on to experience as necessary, invigorating, useful, even pleasant. Even, on occasion, as a relief.

  Transition was much the same way. After a year of trying very hard every day not to transition, trying to isolate, control, and obliterate the desire to pursue it, giving up the idea that I could manage myself out of my own body came as such a relief. “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30). But I had to desire rest for my soul more than I desired to cling to cis-ness, and I fought that exchange every step of the way. It was too late, I was both too young and too old, I should have said something sooner, it would not work for me the way it worked for other people, I would lose my family, I would be reneging on the promise my body had made to others, I would humiliate myself, I needed the heavy yoke, deserved it, owed it to the people in my life to go on carrying it; I did not believe an easy yoke existed for me.

  One of the most common admonitions in the Bible is “fear not.” Sometimes it is offered as advice, sometimes as reassurance, sometimes as command. Sometimes death and disaster follow regardless, as in Genesis 35, where a midwife counsels Rachel not to despair as she delivers her son before dying. So “fear not” is not the same as a promise that all will be well, that life will go on. Rachel, dying, names her son Ben-Oni; Genesis tells us that her husband Jacob goes on to rename him Benjamin, though it does not say why; nor does it say whether Rachel died in a condition of fearlessness or despair. But we who read the story are told the name she chose, even if no one ever called her son by that name except herself.

  One might understandably grow a little frustrated, encountering the same reminder to be not afraid again and again, especially if one interprets it as an instruction missing a few key details about how, exactly, not to fear. It is the same frustration shared by the alcoholic who wants to just stop drinking, the transition-shy who want to just stop thinking about it. It reads better, I think, if one considers fear not to be a descriptive rather than a prescriptive remark, as informative rather than exhortative. The feeling of safety and the condition of safety are not the same; it is both the nature and the purview of God to exchange the former for the latter. So it is that the forty-sixth Psalm reads,

  God is our refuge and strength,

  a very present help in trouble.

  Therefore we will not fear,

  Even though the earth be removed,

  And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

  Though its waters roar and be troubled,

  Though the mountains shake with its swelling. Selah

  This is no mere anxious fancy—there is reason enough here to be afraid. Destruction and death are at hand, mountains develop rootlessness and the foundational security of the earth itself is at risk. More distressing than even the prospect of the earth’s wholesale removal is the description of God’s career:

  Come, behold the works of the Lord,

  Who has made desolations in the earth.

  He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;

  He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;

  He burns the chariot in the fire.

  Be still, and know that I am God;

  I will be exalted among the nations,

  I will be exalted in the earth!

  The invitation to come and look on desolation, to prepare for God’s inevitable and terrifying exaltation, the reminder that wars can be finished—not ended, merely finished—at the unknowable whim of the divine is hardly reassuring in the face of mortal fear. The source of safety, then, cannot c
ome from a certainty that dangers will pass and one will be permitted to resume the previous course of one’s life. It is a portrait of God that is bewildering, conclusive, irresistible not in the manner of being delightedly drawn in but in the manner of being devastated, unaccountable. The Psalmist suggests that true safety, then, cannot be found in what seems secure, cannot be found in reliability or predictability or contentedness, that desolation will come and must be met rather than forestalled or foreclosed upon, that safety itself lies upon the other side of the fire and the broken chariot and the collapse of the mountains into the sea. One might be forgiven for seeing such an account and deciding against the idea of safety altogether.

  The first time I actively sought out the company of trans people came after I gave up on the idea that I was going to solve the problem of wanting things by sitting alone in my room trying as hard as I could not to want anything. It was a terrible, dizzying day; I wanted more than anything for solitary despair and self-recrimination to provide me with the tools to build a bright and livable future, never mind that solitary despair had never produced anything for me but additional solitary despair. I snuck into a local trans support group well after the meeting had started in an act of complete surrender, having given up yet again on the fantasy of the successful operation of crisis management. Progress looked, once again, like regression: I had failed to cope, failed to maintain a secure and sufficient cisgender sense of self, failed to force peace upon myself. I was emotional, embarrassing; bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Worse still, my greatest fears were realized when I entered the room: I felt comforted in the presence of other trans people. It was not that I felt immediate kinship and recognition with everyone in the room—many of us had relatively little in common, some of them I liked and some I did not—but the effect was nonetheless immediate and came in the manner of a reprieve after a long day’s thankless work. I experienced relief when I had not come seeking relief but resolution and a promise that the mountains would return to their original position at my command. The forty-sixth Psalm and the Friday night meeting of trans Californians served as a necessary reminder that the mountains do not move under my imperative, and that safety cannot ever be reached in trying harder to make sure my orders are obeyed by things that fall outside of my personal power.