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I spent five integral maturing years participating in hormone therapy. Medical professionals and I played with my body like putty until it grew stale and cracked at the edges. Rather, we extruded it between our digits until the material no longer had desire to bind together. Speaking to this in the past tense feels unfoundedly hopeful. Connecting words that imbue positivity or gratitude to that reality also feels loosely psychotic. 

I went through five years of hormone therapy because doctors told me something was wrong with me. To be fair, they thought something was wrong. For all I know, they could be right all along. I’ll let you know in another two years. Regardless, I now think everything is faulty inside of me. As they did, I have my evidencing data, too. Nothing is ever as it is; it must be something more convoluted and life threatening! My hand cramps from journaling, so I must have low magnesium. Nerves in my spine strike the pain center in my brain; i’m bound for relentless, lifelong spasms. The heart in my chest sprints after a simple standing up maneuver, so I certainly have a heart murmur. My eyes shutter when i’m tired: epilepsy! Vaginal burning?!You can’t imagine the leaps and bounds my doctors and I have taken on that one. 

I want to blame western medicine for the urgency I have to diagnose minuscule sensations in my body. Occasionally, I simply want to blame. 

When you don’t have an answer, you might dedicate yourself to collecting evidence. After years of collecting evidence without it leading to an answer, you might start to invest in more sensitive data collection processes until anything occurring in your body falls out of sensation and into a cold, obsessive spreadsheet of entries. On even days you might feel the spreadsheet is all that keeps you sane, yet on odd days you might convince yourself the whole damn thing is faulty. Without it, though, you’re guaranteed medical limbo. Shockingly, it’s not actually reminiscent of any of the musical episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, and I hope daily that i’ve served my final sentence there. 

I was subject to hormone therapy for five damn years. Which means my heart fractures significantly for every human who has ever had a uterus, vagina, or a pituitary gland. It also means I have to grit my teeth when my friends joyfully play with their hormones in a boutique manner to feel more energized. Prior to sexual contact, seventy five percent of birth control methods had their way with me. This continues to translate to an acute empathy for infertility. I read a lot of self help books, principally of the medical variety. My hands expressed related vulnerabilities cryptically inserted into artworks all through undergrad that, near the end, embodied rigid, mutually exclusive interpretations of spiritual or tortured. And, I need an emotional support person to accompany me to any doctors appointments ever, so we can grab tea in a drive thru café and silently sob on the ride home. My vagina and I are separate entities severed by a handful of speculums, ounces of ultrasound gel, and surely a whole cocktail of pills. My system has learned to disassociate from this body that raids my emotional cockpit without warning. 

I was an open orifice, an MRI scan, and a spurting set of veins for five of my young adult years; I’ve been stuck trying to chemically fix myself for half a decade. It’s not like a great time, but, I’m not trying to walk out of the theater nearly moments after the inciting incident because I still have Raisinets left in this smuggled cardboard box politely tucked in my purse.