"By foot it's a slow climb"
A few months ago, I remembered that the apartment building I lived in as a child had a basement. I spent a lot of time there, one way or another, between helping tend the courtyard where we planted bulbs every fall and impatiens every spring, spending hours in the superintendent’s workshop with my father learning how to strip paint and use hand tools, and folding endless quantities of laundry with my mother. Outside the laundry room was a single community bookshelf, where I picked up a lot of age-inappropriate reading material. I still have the copy of American Gods I found there, six apartments and many years later. It still smells a little bit like liquid preservatives. One of the books I only read part of, but still remember, was I was Amelia Earhart, by Jane Mendelsohn, which fictionalizes Earhart’s final flight and imagines what came next.
She doesn’t know how long it was after they left the island that they ran out of fuel, found themselves lost once again over the Pacific Ocean. It happened in the morning. The heat was terrible. Everything happened as it had happened before: the plane stalled, then sputtered, then seemed to stop. She was frightened for a moment but then her sense of humor returned, and she guessed that somewhere, someone might be thinking she was a heroine.
When she woke from the lucid dream that carried her three thousand feet down, in a tumbling parade of images from the farthest reaches of her memory, her first impression was that she had died a violent death and gone directly to hell.
But this time she wasn’t afraid. She knew that when she opened her eyes she would find a new island, more beautiful than the last, with the palm trees taller and more elegant, the beach wider and softer, the surf more accepting, calm.
This concept — of an iterative afterlife, one where each repetition is a little closer to perfect, but never quite there — is one I’ve encountered a few times. It stays with me, always. It turns up in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles Of Narnia:
“I see,” she said at last, thoughtfully. “I see now. This garden is like the stable. It is far bigger inside than it was outside.”
“Of course, Daughter of Eve,” said the Faun. “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”
Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden but a whole world, with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains. But they were not strange: she knew them all.
“I see,” she said. “This is still Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the stable door! I see…world within world, Narnia within Narnia….”
“Yes,” said Mr. Tumnus, “like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.”
And it turns up in The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren, more widely known as Pippi Longstocking’s creator:
“Nangiyala?” I said, “Where’s that?”
Then Jonathan said that he wasn’t quite certain, but it was somewhere on the other side of the stars. And he began to tell me about Nangiyala, so that I almost felt like flying there at once.
“It’s still in the days of campfires and sagas there,” he said, “and you’ll like that.”
[…]
Then he told me about Nangilima. He hadn’t told me stories for a long time because we had had no time. But now as he sat by the fire and talked about Nangilima, it was almost as if he were sitting on the edge of my sofa-bed at home in town.
“In Nangilima… in Nangilima,” said Jonathan in that voice he always used when he was telling stories. “It’s still in the days of campfires and sagas there.”
I couldn’t tell you what appeals to me so much about the idea of a metaphysics that is predicated on the idea of practice — of doing something over and over again, and doing it a little better every time. Maybe it’s because that is the kind of optimism I find easiest to believe, that every year I am a little better and a little smarter and more grown-up, as they say, and that every mistake I make teaches me what not to do next time. I am the sum of my choices and actions, and the hope it is easiest for me to have is that the best-fit line on any chart of that data will show growth, and thus the structure of existence that I find most touching, that slips unerringly between my ribs every time, is one that functions in the same way.
When I took weekly trapeze classes, I woke up in pain every day — from hand rips, when friction tears pieces of the skin on your palms or fingers away in coin-sized flaps, from bruises on my shins and thighs where it pressed against the bar, from the aching muscles in my shoulders and upper body, often so fatigued that I could barely lift my hands over my head for several days. But towards the end of each week, there always came a morning where I woke up and couldn’t place what was different until I realized that the pain was fading, or gone. This is a vocabulary I learned from listening to people talk about their chronic pain conditions — one where the definition of comfort can be as simple as the absence of discomfort.
Trans people talk sometimes about gender euphoria. Contrary to that word’s usual definition, one which connotes intense happiness, euphoria in the context of gender more generally denotes the opposite of dysphoria, which I’ll broadly define as the distress caused by being aware of the disparity between the gender that you know you are, and the gender that your body indicates, or the gender that other people identify you as. By those standards, euphoria is not necessarily the presence of delight. It may just be the absence of pain.
I’ve written about that before, but I’ve talked less about what it actually means. What it meant for me was that I spent my entire life trying to speak in a pitch that my vocal cords were not physically capable of producing, trying to move and exist in a way that would change the shape of my body, aching to be perceived in a way that I never was, no matter how much I changed my presentation, no matter what I did. I felt like a ghost that had been assigned to haunt the wrong doll. But I also assumed that everyone felt that way, and I think that many more people do than are willing to admit it. Their logic, if I had to guess, runs along these lines: Why acknowledge that something is wrong if you can’t do anything about it?
In many ways, I was lucky. There was something I could do about it. Just because it wasn’t easy, and just because I had to do it anyway, doesn’t change that. I spent my entire childhood as so many people do, convinced that one day I would receive the call to adventure that all the books I devoured promised me was in store, waiting and hoping that one day the life I was meant for would come knocking. How many people actually get that? How many people get to choose joy in such a fundamental, tangible way — to experience what I can only characterize, can only describe in any legible way to people who haven’t experienced it, as magic? I no longer feel quite so much like a haunted house. Part of me, now, is flesh and blood.
The winter I was born, my parents told me, the Hudson froze from one bank to the other. I was born in winter and it became my home. I was meant, or perhaps made, for scarcity; I feel sanest under conditions that bear little resemblance to those widely agreed upon as ideal. Extreme isolation is not healthy, and yet I thrive in it, turning my attention inward, refracting it through the mirror-maze of my skull. Overwhelming stress and anxiety are not healthy, and yet they focus me, make me think about what really matters to me and then act accordingly. Being constantly on deadline is not healthy, and yet it is the only way I can reliably make myself work. Living in survival mode is universally agreed to be unhealthy, and yet it is under those circumstances that I feel most confident, most able to manage my own anxiety and handle whatever is thrown at me.
This is the first time I have found myself in such a position in my new body, one haunted only by the actions of others and no longer by the mere fact of my birth. It is fascinating. It is just one more way that I am lucky, one more experience to learn from, another data point for the best-fit line that says: Next time, I’ll know more. Next time, I’ll be able to help other people more usefully. Next time, always, there will be more to do and more to learn: another winter, another spring, a season for hunger and a season for harvest. A little closer to perfect, every time.
—R.