The Bridge
By Marissa Jules
I lay in my hospital bed a thousand miles from home terrified of losing my brand-new vagina while my medical team tries to figure out how to avert disaster. I’ve put an entire lifetime into getting here, into finally making myself whole. The last few years I’ve been striving constantly to get to this post-surgical bed. After so long, it seems impossible to survive if my vagina doesn’t. How could something as normal as passing gas turn out to be fecal contamination which could ruin this vagina I’d worked so hard to have?
There has always been a tenuous connection to my body. A body which has felt vaguely wrong and disconnected from awareness. My tolerance for pain has been sky high since childhood. I recall being unaware of how my body felt at any given time, not knowing if I was aching, injured, or snug. This was the truth of how my world worked. Since I’d never inhabited another person’s body there was no way to know any different. I’ve always been disturbingly healthy which limited my exposure to large scale, deep body sensations and awareness. I always assumed everybody’s experience was like this, too.
Occasionally I’d been able to find connection with my body through strong sensory input — jumping on a trampoline, riding a roller coaster, or reaching the sky on playground swings. The more visceral the activity, the more likely I was to feel something. I’d taken up cycling in my teens and found the effort, the focus needed for cycling – especially on a twisty, hilly trail – could not only keep me in the moment but make me vividly aware of my physical self. Later I discovered sports cars and racing karts. The slamming physical impact of driving hard, taking steep corners or even better, speeding around a kart track cut through the fog of disconnection between body and awareness. I found myself craving those flashes of connection with the body, able to feel and experience. Unexpected emotions flowed freely in these moments. It was as though becoming aware of the physical being counteracted a barrier which held deep emotions in check.
Mostly though I believed being disconnected worked for me. I functioned and lived a seemingly normal if rather ethereal physical life most of the time. Numb days slipping into fuzzy years occasionally interrupted by brief flashes of intense sensation. Then my world fell apart.
Lies I’d been told of a perfect childhood, which I’d repeated to myself over a lifetime started to ring less true. Disturbing memories of things long buried started to filter through the fog separating me not only from an awareness of my body, but of my past. As things long forgotten in a desperate attempt to protect myself started to surface, so did sensation. Blinding, overwhelming sensation. Experiences impossible to make sense of as a child had been stored wholesale, complete with reams of sensory information. Smells, sounds, tactile feelings, even something so indescribable as the feel of a room, its ambiance, its experience all preserved as fresh as the moment they occurred. Memories became a full body experience. Arms hurting, abdomen aching, legs cramping, nose wrinkling, spitting to get rid of a taste that wasn’t actually there, memories would take me by surprise and overwhelm my existence leaving me helpless and unaware of when or where I was.
This is the way of traumatic memory. It is stored complete, unprocessed and fully intact. Overwhelming experiences are not able to be processed in real-time when they happen, so they are put on a shelf in a storage container perfectly preserved with no loss of freshness or fidelity. Then these memories sit waiting for something to pull them off that shelf, unseal the lid, and let them out again to be relived, sometimes over and over. Each re-experiencing just as terrifying as the original trauma should have been.
I took to exercising intensely, to journaling, taking long walks, practicing yoga, sipping boiling hot tea, clutching ice cubes, and a dozen other things all in an attempt to cope with the overwhelm of what was coming forth. Sometimes these tricks worked, and sometimes they didn’t. If the first thing I tried, like a cup of tea or journaling didn’t work, I’d switch to another more immersive distraction, like a walk outside. If that still didn’t help, I’d move to something so intense I could think of nothing else, perhaps clutching ice cubes for as long as humanly possible. It drives everything else from your mind. This searching and adapting until something gave some small relief helped make surviving some days just possible.
As awareness washed over me, a deeper truth about myself started to emerge. The memories were tinged with something I’d occasionally remembered in adulthood but tried very hard not to know. That as a child I’d wanted to be a girl, I had been convinced I was a girl despite the body I appeared to be living in. I always knew there had been a gender identity crisis of some kind as a child, but I still spent most of my time not knowing this, like so many other things I’d buried.
Pieces of the story came back along with the freeze-dried traumatic memories washing over me. Playing dress up with my cousin’s clothes, wanting to keep them on forever. Pretending overalls were a dress. Finding my mom’s doll in the storage closet and playing with it in my room, the door closed so my dad wouldn’t find out. Wanting desperately to avoid haircuts so I could have long hair. Coming out on my own as a child — telling my entire first grade class, my teachers, and my parents I was a girl. Insisting my name was Julie. Being secretly thrilled when my mom threatened to use a barrette to keep the hair out of my eyes when I refused to let it be cut. The intense sadness and loss when I finally realized I was not going to get a period. So much more which I’ve forgotten.
After years of what I can only assume was worry on my mother’s part, she mentioned to my pediatrician at a routine physical I kept acting like I wanted to be a girl. There were tests and waiting. We were told there was something not-quite-right with my hormones, something beyond the grasp of a tween. Then the pediatrician told us there was still time to pause puberty to give me a chance to figure things out if a change needed to be made.
If I was indeed a girl.
Then nothing for decades. It all disappeared. Forgotten.
Having your life threatened by your own father would make you need to forget. Being told if you followed that path he’d kill you and make sure the body was never found is terrifying all by itself. Knowing somewhere deep inside from your own experiences with him that he wasn’t just trying to scare you, he would and could do those things made the threat real. Knowing you were anything but a boy suddenly became all too dangerous to know. So you didn’t remember, like with so much else in your life. It was the only way to survive.
This hidden story didn’t click into place in a day, or in a month. It took years to uncover incidentally, much in the same way a paleontologist who kept finding small mammal skeletons among the wreckage of the dinosaurs finally started to wonder what it might mean. Years to process, to understand the meaning, to feel safe enough to believe. It became clear I’d always been a girl. That was the root of my trauma. It had been visible to the world at times, far too often, and because of that, people had abused me. It was too much for a child to know. So, my mind created the disconnect between body and memory to make it all tolerable. To let us survive.
I realized I was spending a smaller, disconnected life traveling along the wrong bank of the river Styx. As my awareness grew, I was constantly looking across to the other side. The side where people lived as themselves, authentic and free. Where people felt things intensely - the joys and sorrows of life. Where people thrived and lived in the light. It looked so unattainable from my foggy, distant shore where every day was a struggle of not quite being alive. As I walked along, I found a bridge from the fog to the light. Like one of those rickety, ancient rope bridges of myth above raging torrents, this bridge was terrifying. It meant literally changing my entire life. It even might mean death.
Anguish for where I was turned to outright fear of a harrowing journey across the raging torrent, yet the only way out of my fog and pain was across. I couldn’t stay like this for the rest of a lifetime and hope to have anything resembling a life worth living. So I stepped onto that bridge, afraid of losing everything, and kept walking. No matter how afraid I was, no matter how much it hurt, I vowed to keep moving. I knew I could never be comfortable in my own skin until the original mistake of my life was fixed, until I was a girl.
The work of transition is arduous, lonely and fraught. It is medicalized and gated. Doctors, therapists, letters, approvals pile up and seem like an unending gauntlet in front of you. But then, it finally starts. It starts like any other Tuesday, a calm sunny day in April with a patch on your hip and extra pills to take every morning. After all that fear, all that work, it seems so small a thing, so incapable of changing a life.
After the initial euphoria wears off, it’s a lot of waiting. Weeks pass then, finally, I notice my breasts hurt, and slowly over months begin to swell. Skin changes start to soften the face and it even begins to glow a bit. Body hair thins, the face starts to round, changing shape as fat redistributes. Hips grow, and with lots of effort the beard starts to disappear. Disconnection from the body begins to abate as I am attuned to every little change. With little awareness I shift from avoiding my physical self to reveling in it, to finding joy in who I am. As my muscles lose physical strength, my soul gains fortitude. I am becoming who I should always have been, and I have never felt better.
As the exterior of my body transforms, I become more comfortable with who I am in the world. But I am reminded a dozen times a day that one part of this body is still not right. The very thing that made me not a girl in the eyes of the world from the instant I was born unsettles me. I am still disconnected from the nethers of this body. Having tasted the sweetness of connection and comfort with myself in other ways, it becomes very clear I will not be able to rest, to feel whole until one last thing is done. I need a vagina. This body will not feel like home until it is how it should have been in the beginning. My bridge grew longer before my eyes than I had originally foreseen. Yet I could only keep moving, and begin the search for a surgeon. Surprisingly, my health insurance is willing to cover the operation. After another somewhat less daunting gauntlet of approvals, letters, and doctors, I have a surgeon and a date. I wait.
And here I lay in my hospital bed, having reached the last few rickety planks of my walk across that scary, dangerous bridge spanning the raging torrent. I feel the old, frayed ropes creaking, threatening to break and drop me to pain and torment so close to the beckoning shore. Time stretches as it only can during extreme stress. Seconds dilating into hours as I wait for my surgeon and her Physician’s Assistant (PA) to come back, unable to move until they return.
Eventually, the pair of them walk back in, after my living an unexpected extra lifetime of anxious fear and dread which passed that fall afternoon. They are formulating a plan for how to get the feces coated bandage off my newly minted vagina without contaminating the nascent lining. That is if the feces have not already soaked through and fouled it. Their plan requires a lift straight off the bed, arching my back, lifting my hips to the sky to give them a chance to drop the contaminated bandage down and away from newborn flesh. Then they could search for any contamination and disinfect before I lay back down. There is no device to affect this lift except my body. The PA is my cheerleader, She’s working me into it, building me up, telling me to be strong— three days after major surgery she wants me to hold myself in the air and be strong - when I’ve not been able to so much as sit up for more than a moment, much less get up and go to the bathroom.
With everything ready, and the team assembled round, my wife holding my hand, the PA tells me “Lift! Hold it as high as you can!” The terror and foreboding that had flooded me starts to subside as I lift. Automatically I adjust my arms to my sides, and plant my feet a little wider. Resolve floods the body as muscle memory takes over; I can do this. This body knows what to do. In all but name, they have asked me to lift and hold a bridge pose. Years of learning to re-connect to my body through yoga pays off. My body brings me smoothly up, and holds me easily in that hospital bed for what was far from the most perfect, but easily the most glorious bridge I’ve ever done. Before I realize it, they are done. My body feels strong and true as I come down to rest gently on the bed.
The inside of the bandage is blessedly clean.
Marissa Jules (she/her) lives with her wife Veronica and their pup Thurman outside Atlanta, GA. She writes about her journey recovering from childhood trauma and photographs whatever catches her eye. Her blog can be found at marissajules.com.