[Content warning: discussions of self-harm, sexual abuse]
In my lowest moments I crave men. At first I only need their words to make me feel like meat, but later, I want their hands, mouths, and bodies to actually consume me. It’s my self-harm of choice (especially since my body started rejecting more than a few sips of alcohol) and through it I’ve learned how pain heals pain. How poison delays poison. And while I’ve spent these three decades of my life so far fighting to live as an out lesbian and trans woman, at times the religious morality I was raised with, like an immune system discovering eyes, rejects an integral part of me and attempts to destroy it.
This type of self-destruction began on Omegle when I was only 16, chatting with much older men who wanted evil things, who asked for my Kik account to take things further. Thank god I’m both lazy and paranoid because I never did take that step. Still, even without Kik, we sexted, I pretending to be an older woman, and it hurt, and put sickness in my stomach, but it felt good because the pain was in my control for once. I got to re-create patterns I’d experienced, and because I had sought them out I convinced myself I was the one with the power to harm, even if the target was still my own body.
This urge never really went away, it was only made redundant for many years. But I’ve been low lately, and I’m having withdrawals. I even got a c-PTSD diagnosis to confirm that, indeed, this present low is a culmination of all my life’s lows, and it feels bad. And so my lesbian self-harm has recently migrated, evolved, finding a new exciting domain in dating apps. Where the men are not just low-bitrate video boxes from some far-flung corner of the world, but they are as close as ‘less than 2km away’. Walking distance. A bit terrifying. The pain has been exquisite.
I make them feel good. All of them. With no sense of romantic tension or carnal desire, my only drive is my lust for psychological pain digging in. And my enthusiasm, my lack of hesitance, it surprises them: it gets them going. They, for one, have all used or have dreamt of using women. I have been used. And so we both know this template, only this time I’m bringing it alive. I’m animating the fantasies they’re used to wanting but don’t naturally find. In just a few efficient strokes of my fingers across the keyboard, I have them, and they tell me things. They tell me what they want, and what they want to do with my body.
There are doctors to cook bœuf bourguignon who like my height, who say “Sorry love, will text later. Have a patient.” Faraway investors with big dreams who tell me “My friend in America says I won’t know real love until a white woman, so wherever you are, if the vibes are good baby fuck it I’ll fly to you.” And many, many, ordinary South African men who simply want me like a fuckdoll with the convenient feature of physical warmth and watching them jack off. They tell me they want my legs over their shoulders while they fuck me, that they’ll pay me R1500 if I can make them cum more than 3 times in a row, that they like that I’m taller but need to figure out “the logistics of fucking.” I thought that last line was inspired. It was the doctor.
It’s kind of perfect. I get to be wanted by all these people who I don’t want. Who I don’t find attractive. And to whom it doesn’t matter that I don’t want them as a lesbian. In fact that makes them want me more. It feels powerful precisely because it’s not, because this time I chose the powerlessness for myself. But the best part isn’t just being wanted. The best part is the rejection. It’s when I disclose that I’m transsexual and am met with sudden cold, disgust, anger, or just classic ghosting. Babe, it feels so good that my stomach churns with my disappointment with myself. The oblivion I find in it. I get to be as pathetic as I’ve always been told I am, and I have no idea why that particular type of nausea feels so good. And when I fall asleep after a night of sexting with men, I take the fantasies I wove for them into my dreams and live out those imaginary lives as a good, honest, naughty-for-my-husband Christian girl for once. I get to have the white picket fence disaster with many men each night and in my dreams it’s not a sin to have ten different husbands who each use me in their own ways.
I did have a pious phase, once. From about 12 – 15 years old, when I first started to clock my internal world as that of a transsexual sinner stuck in the body of what seemed like a good, handsome, shy, god-fearing young boy. Church couldn’t banish her so it anointed her with a lifetime of shame instead. Still, I kept going to church, researched intelligent design and creationism videos on YouTube instead of doing my homework, and gazed out of my bedroom window onto the treeline and the expanse of ocean behind it, looking for the reality of god somewhere in that matrix of living things. I felt that if I could find my belief somewhere, god would come alive and save me from my world of abuse and neglect. But I never did feel the reality of religion. As hard as I tried to find rapture in the avian symphonies of a KwaZulu-Natal sunrise, or divine mathematical perfection in a fallen tree branch, I couldn’t feel god in any of it. It was marvelous, but it wasn’t love.
All I wanted was to be that perfect small beach town daughter who wears her floral A-lines, her cross, who phones her friends from her bed every night, kicking her feet in the air. But I felt different. Not only did I not have any girlfriends to call, but I also didn’t like boys like the other girls. I couldn’t talk about Zac Efron with any enthusiasm, and that was a problem. It was an impassable rift between us, and the fact that I liked girls strengthened the illusion of being a boy. At the same time, the obviousness of my inner girlhood drove boys and men crazy. It got them going, and they treated me weird. I never felt like a boy in their eyes, just a girl more accessibly packaged and easy to hurt without as much remorse as the others. They could tell what I was, they just didn’t understand why, and frankly didn’t need to. And both the boys and the men did many bad things to me. And I learned to adjust my expectations for how people were going to treat me in this world. I learned to accept abuse for the attention it came with, at least; for how it made me feel real, and how it made me feel like I belonged to someone. I mattered, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.
So as I’m trying to get healthier now, at 30 years old, I sometimes relapse and crave unhealthier things. The objectification, degradation, disgust. The feeling of sexual attention and carnal usefulness. The obliteration of my internal world. It still feels good. It feels like something, while those objectively good, healthy days of skincare routines, morning stretches, and sticking to deadlines feel numb compared to the tumult of my life so far. So without the chaos what on earth do I do? Just live? It feels easier to seek out the pain and consume it in responsible amounts than to OD on hope and die years later amidst delayed realisations, grieving the loss of imagined utopia and all the time I once had. And I wish I could say the urge stopped at just the talking stage and hasn’t started making me want to meet up with them. But when I’m sad I want to feel worse.
I wanted to believe in love. And, I mean, I do. It is real, and it’s everywhere. You can see it in the flowers, the fish, the moon, the fields, and how all the world seems to remind you of those people with a place in your heart, and even those who once did. But what I’ve lost is the faith that love will ever exist for me in the way that I grew up wanting. Or if it does, that I will ever be able to parse the real thing from a harmful illusion. I don’t even know that if it came along I’d be capable of it. I won't get my dreamy girlkissing evenings, big- and little-spoon nights, coffee-run mornings, watching each other grow old in the haven we built together. I probably won’t ever have the children I dreamed of having. I don’t think, if that life ever happened, it could compare to the instant excitement of hurting myself with men and the delighftul agony afterwards. Because I think the fear of illusions fading is greater than the sense of control I get by making my reality undesirable, and continuing to live in it anyway.
Hope is painful, terrifying, and (somehow) the one thing I actively have to tend to in my life or else my life ceases. Oh the trials and tribulations of being alive.
Achingly honest and reflective writing.