You Blight Up My Life

I had a Travis Bickle channeling a couple days ago. I stood in front of the mirror, put up my fists, and let my rage take me. I punched the air – right! left! – where loomed the cackling if misty visage of my nemesis.* If I wasn’t such a lazy tranny I’d construct those awesome shooter-sliders like my hero Travis and go on a mad rampage, but fortunately for the world at large, there’s endless Bravo reality tv and Facebook and I’m easily distracted.

Is this the anecdotal “T-Rage” I’m experiencing? K says men punch things because they cannot access their tears easily, or at least, that’s what happened to him when he began injecting testosterone. I’ve certainly noticed that place; it’s like trying to orgasm on a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. It’s as if your body just forgot. That part is on vacay, happily sunning somewhere away from your insistent demands upon its exquisite release.

But how could I not experience rage? Transitioning is a little like living in Manhattan; it’s as if there’s a jackhammer right outside your window working two union sanctioned shifts beginning ½ hour before you wake and ½ hour after you repose. Don’t get me wrong: the foundation needs to be shattered. It was erroneously built, mistakenly created, full of flaws and fractures: it needs to go. But the process of dismantle is omnipresent and unsettling and LOUD. To be destroyed, even as it means transformation, freedom, can be frustrating and painful, insomniac and exhausting.

For my research I’ve interviewed several (born that way) men, all of whom I admire, all of whom have soggy sagas of fisticuffs, restraining orders. Now I had a history of volatility, I aint gonna lie. I am deeply ashamed of having hit people I loved, mortified at having punched through walls, destroyed dinnerware. My past holds a violence and a rage and I am unashamedly nervous about revisiting any of it.

I have also recorded this phenomenon:

I broke up with Hadley well over a year ago. We’re the best of friends, with no romantic ties whatsoever. I absolutely adore her – the things that made our relationship great are still available and the things that sucked ass about it are gone. Nonetheless, I have experienced an odd sort of jealousy, a sense of ownership, if you will. Hadley has been with the same man since we broke up, a man I have genuinely loathed, but now I pretty much just pretend to (which is charming, right?) for her benefit. I have no attachments to either him or her – but once in a while, she’ll say his name, and SNAP! Up comes the lizard collar! I want to…what? Something dire! Punch him in the puss! Pull his hair! I don’t know, but he can’t have her! That’s MINE!

I’m having difficulty sorting out what’s strictly male, and what’s just retarded human. And by “retarded” I mean not mentally challenged, but literally retarded, like my emotional growth.

I have an emotional situation in my life right now where my mind insists on feeling victimized and self-righteous. It has a distinctly male flavor to it – I feel very Christian Bale in this rage but that’s because I need even my disgusting fury to present well, look stunning. Christian Bale is a human penis, and I mean that in a good way.** I, on the other hand, am just another schmoe who was done wrong by a dame and there’s just no way to really make that look appealing, especially by spinning it as having been taken advantage of.

I guess that’s the thing for guys: you can’t win. You leave a broad and you’re heartless, cold, emotionally unavailable, and I have been that guy, over and over and over and over, and it has been true that I was heartless, cold, and emotionally unavailable. If you’re dumped by a broad, you’re weak and pitiful, a loser because you were emotionally totally available. It’s the Man version of Virgin/Whore. There’s a piece of that paradigm that makes a guy want to punch things. It’s not like you can’t find a wealth of buddies to commiserate, but at my age, even as people identify, they’ll still laugh at you. Still, at the end of the day, I’d rather be angry abashed dude with my head slung low than razor-wrist girl. But since I have a choice, I think I’ll just do something else entirely.

*Say that fast three times.

**If I were Christian Bale I would stay at home all day long licking my vascular musculature like a big gay cat. I just heard you go "eeeew." Danny Bonaduce also looks like a human penis, but in a really really REALLY BAD WAY.