I lost years. It took me a long time to realize how many. It took years of healing before I’d be able to just be friends with another woman and not carry with that friendship a weight of fear. Eight months after I left Oklahoma, a woman tried flirting with me, and without either of us being prepared for it, I promptly had a panic attack.

 

The thing that saddens me most about this relationship these days is the awareness that I might’ve been able to come out sooner (to myself and others) as a trans woman if not for what happened between me and X. I spent the summer explicitly focusing on this traumatic past in a way I’d only done in the past when problems came up. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that by August I realized I was not cis. And a month after that realization I would come out as a trans woman.

 

This awareness is layered in a social isolation I did not recognize as my body rejecting masculinity, but at a time unable to overcome pain and embrace fully womanhood. Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life calls sadness a rebellion, when you reject the things that should make you happy. As an AMAB person (assigned male at birth), I spent most of my life thinking something deeply wrong with my inability to relate to men. Something I first attributed to being “gay.” X, in some ways, allowed me to start unpacking the internalized homophobia that made me reject my attraction to men. Until we started dating, I refused to admit to being bisexual, so focused on performing a maleness. I became a very good actor. Even after leaving X and my home state behind, most of my relationships with masculinity felt like a constant violence that other men were neither aware of and invested in wholeheartedly. I was all alien. Ahmed describes it best: “It is a sadness that can be too difficult to reveal to ourselves, let alone to others because it is a sadness with the world and thus a sadness in the world.” I did not feel safe being a woman in front of men, and was too traumatized by a woman for the longest time to discover and recover the deep love, admiration, and appreciation in women that I have now. “So often this sadness is distributed in things that surround a body; her body, allowing a space to be registered as confinement, as restriction” (62). My body, laid over with trauma, became a prison, and the performance of an AMAB identity was the bars I only recently found out how to will myself through.

 

The willful interrogation of these traumatic sites were necessary to reclaim a womanhood I’d not yet realized I lost. “I suggested earlier that willfulness might be not only a protest against violence but a demand for return… a demand for return is also a demand for recognition of the theft of life and vitality from bodies” (Ahmed, 87). I found my willfulness returned to me during this trip, a willfulness to recognize the body I’d been living in but was unable to see. A willfulness to not let the pain I experienced at the hands of a woman rob me of a love of womanhood and myself. Over the summer we gathered research, I was seeking treatment in multiple forms, but I still think the work Autumn did to both encourage and support me during this trip played an invaluable role.

 

I think of our relationship as peers and scholars, and the willfulness and attention we both spared for each other. It reminds me of a passage from Sara Ahmed that I will end this entry on. The passage speaks to how care, proximity, and love return willfulness. The labor to care for each other in traumatic moments requires a deep well of empathy we must be willing to reach into in order to honor the work and lives of our colleagues.

 

Loving connections are live connections, electric connections. A charge can be what you receive from proximity to others who have themselves received that charge. Proximity can be what you struggle for; separation what you fight against. In other words, the charge itself can be a connection: a way of relating to others similarly charged. The language can be our lead: if willfulness is an electric current, it can pass through each of us, switching us on. Willfulness can be a spark. We can be lit up by it. (82.)