iwasbornonatuesday

[iwasbornonatuesday]

[iwasbornonatuesday]

The day i was born was rainy and two days into the new season. A Tuesday to symbolise the power i would never have as a human. I was extracted from my mothers womb, and then handed to a nurse to dry me off. Birth is a messy afair. We're put into this world through blood and screams and still someone decided it was a beautiful thing. I don't know if it was the being born that was my downfall or if that came later. Do you feel like a creature that was born? From a person, from your mothers labour? I don't. I remember being eight and being in the forest and thinking: from this moss I was created. From this moss a ball formed and it grew some fungus and later it grew me. I was made to lie by a stone by a stick on a Tuesday. I wouldn't have any power as that being either, but I sometimes wonder if I'd be less painfully aware of it then. My body still came to be. my arms grew longer, my torso thicker, my hands more capable. It never still felt like mine. Dysphoria for me isn't the wrong body, it's a body. I was never powerful because I was never me.

That Tuesday was two days late. I was meant to begin just when autumn did, but I began as I would go on, late and uncomfortable. It was a Tuesday to symbolise that I would always be late and never enough. Do you feel like a creature who's enough? Whose mothers scream filled you with enough power to last for a whole life? I remember being ten and thinking that my downfall had started long before my memory did.

In my mind I grew with the moss, slowly stretching, taking what's mine. With my legs I was stuck on a floor in a building with wallpaper that was holding on even less than I was. Stuck on yet another Tuesday. I was told my body was too much and I felt it and I remember thinking this is the curse that comes with being human. Turns out what they meant were: you don't fit into this role we made for you, you're body doesn't fit in the narrow mold that was made for you long before your birth. What I meant was: I don't fit in this body: this body was never mine: i exist too much. Sometimes I think my body was a prize my mother won on that Tuesday: look, your labour was fruitful, you grew a body and here it is. Sometimes I feel she should have kept it. Poured my mind on the moss to feed the roots. Kept the body on a shelf somewhere ornamental. Do you feel like a creature that grows comfortable? Whose mothers love filled you up with warmth to keep the coldness of the world away? I remember being twelve and seventeen and twenty-six and never once feeling like these limbs belongs to me.