How we see ourselves is a hundred more times important than how others see us. Aside from the ties to capitalistic excess, the bedrock of the global beauty industry and the mission statement to probably every clothing-line ever created, it also sinks its hooks into our scripted personality, all three levels of Freudian identity as well as what we subconsciously look for when we’re looking for others to befriend, mount and/or start families with.
Like what we see, or told that we are ok and congratulations, you have one keystone at least to start a life with, despite what the world might say.
Don’t like what you see, or appear different to your surroundings and yeah, I can say you’re pretty hamstrung as you fire out the blocks.
Just to get something out of the way now, this IS NOT a blog about anyone else except me. I have friends and colleagues in my life of all shapes, ages, ables, colours and religions. I have an idea of how SOME of them see themselves, but they have told me their stories in confidence and I will not be breaking that here, even if 99% of them don’t read this. I don’t have morals but I have principles, and breaking oaths of confidence ranks near the top of that list. That being said I will talk about people, and if I name anybody they will be pseudonyms.
I’ve never been happy at my body, nor how I look. And I think a lot of that has to do with my career. Wearing blues 12 hours a day is hardly flattering. Having to wrap your hair for 12 hours is hardly feminine. No nail polish, some make-up but not drag levels, and a job that involves loading, unloading, blood & guts, and all manner of infection controls (especially currently with our friend Corona) makes me feel like a grunt in all manner of ways. Not least of all in a sexless androgynous, ambiguous way that does little for my own self-esteem and confuses the utter f**k out of any newbie who ends up working with me.
I’ve had people ask friends if I was a man or a woman. I’ve had staff ask me if I’m gay on account of my height. I’ve had staff ask me early in my career if I’ve had The Operation. And later on staff exclaiming gleefully that they didn’t know I had had The Operation when they met me for the first time. It’s a confusing assault on my identity, to be sure. Everything from “I want to ask you a question?” In which I always respond with a “Okay, fire away.”
Then they pause, because like most British they expect me to give them some kind of help into opening themselves to the possible blowback that might result.
“I’ll ask you later,” they mutter, then wander off. Which translated means ‘I’ll go and ask a third party.’ The clinking sound they don’t hear as they leave is my opinion of them dropping by degrees. Stand by the courage of your convictions.
To those who don’t know me, this is me:
5’11’’, 158 lbs at the last weigh-in, blonde straggly hair, lots of ink.
Feminine, but stick me in an active scrub dept. and watch me switch. Lumbering, sweaty, and hardly Runway acceptable, which I know some will raise their eyes at considering the environment, but compared to working in an office, even a governmental one, it does reduce your ability to look anything other than just a “member of staff.” a generic title in an profession than does its best to reduce people to little more than ranks, with a set hierarchy of clothing colour-scheme, different coloured hats, and persistent reminders that you must change clothes to be able to access specific parts of the building. Understandable from an infection control perspective, but also giving an unconscious reminder, intended or otherwise, that you are different to the people who can go anywhere they choose.
I can choose to play that game or not. I choose not. I doubt it hurts anyone. On the locker I have in the break room, I’ve stuck two badges. One is a smiley face; the other is a thundercloud with the title “Grumpy”. Needless to say Full Metal Jacket’s interpretation of human duality had a lasting impact on me. But seeing non-clinical staff with their hair and nails and clothes that don’t feel two sizes too big I can’t help but feel the envy, and thus the internalised shame that I look like I do, or more accurately I don’t look like I wish.
“What you doing, Duffy?” Gaigin asked.
“Meditating,” Duffy replies.
“How you know it’s working?” Gaigin persisted, clearly puzzled the way Duffy sat, cross-legged, eyes shut, with a t-shirt stretched back on his head like a snood.
Duffy was huge. Not fat, just big. Standing inches taller than the others, broader across the back, with an albatross wingspan that did nothing to belie the thickness of his frame, they were always at the back when promotion stills were distributed. In that respect he was akin to Henry Dobker in Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried.’
And that’s why naturally they’re both assigned to haul The Pig (or M-60) because it was big and weighed a ton compared to regular rifles hauled by the other members of the platoon.
I remember being that big when I was in college. Anyone over 5’10’’ will be on the back row of a group photo, unless they’re a substitute for the college basketball team. I was a regular for the karate dojo in my senior year, so the group photos show me at the back, and off to the side, a pillar of the snapshot if not the club.
But I hated my body.
For years I avoided the gym, even as I grew. Not because I didn’t want to be healthy. But because all I had to do was look at a weight stack and my upper body ballooned like a WWE wrestler. And I didn’t want to look like that. So I started controlling my diet to keep the weight down. And it’s an approach I’ve never really stopped following.
That’s not to say I have a disorder as such, but I knew if I ate a lot of food, I will stack on the muscle and become something I hated even more in the mirror. So, holidays aside, I decided not to eat that much.
In nursing school money was so tight that I existed on coffee and ham sandwiches and not much else for weeks. When I returned home after the penultimate semester I was 130 lbs. Under 10 stone. My mom was horrified.
I’d already begun transitioning then, both legally and illegally. The drugs I was acquiring through universal healthcare were supplemented with what I found online. But I was still this toothpick frame, someone with no boobs, or bottom, whose arms were too long and hands too big to be anything other than what was obvious to those disinterested to care.
I don’t know what the perfect body would be like, either.
If I could use magik to change everything I would make my wrists smaller, feet smaller (I hate not being able to buy sale rail shoes!) two inches shorter, and boobs maybe a little bigger.
I actually went to London two years ago and had a consultation with a plastic surgeon on whether he could make my face look better. Because being stuck in baggy pajamas and surgical hats all the time I’m catcalled as a man more often than I’d like, and every time it happens I feel like everything I’ve every accomplished in my life is pointless. Because the one thing I desire more than everything I cannot have.
The surgeon was nice, and said all I needed was cheek implants and a retraction of my upper lip, which is naturally long, and comes from my mom, apparently. My mom and I would later hash out the details for financing over a bowl of Wagamama, and we decided to go ahead with the procedure even after the final predicted bill of £7,000 came through the mailbox a few days later.
In the end I decided not to go ahead with surgery. I lost my deposit, but I wasn’t bothered. My decision to do this was a mix at the time of rationale, economics, and self-belief. And while I think two of those three remain justified as evidence against the surgery, I do think the third is becoming progressively shaky as these situations of mis-gendering and malprompting occur again and again in work, and my mental health seems to have no defence against them.
“I’m sorry, I can’t evac you, Duffy,” explains Doc, exhaustedly.
Duffy grins, there’s blood from the wound on his collarbone and a second one that ripped a chunk out of his jaw.
“Ain’t no problem, Doc,” Duffy replies, wrapping a field bandage round his neck and lower face, while Gaigin looks on, worried about the look in Duffy’s eyes that seems to flare more as the rivulets trickle from the saturated red gauze.
Duffy can still walk, so Duffy can still serve, and it clearly doesn’t bother him. There’s a job that needs to be done.
‘Hamburger Hill’ is a movie that has the unfortunate legacy of being sandwiched between movies of similar genre and superior quality. Not as Oscar worthy as ‘Platoon’ and not as Kubrickian as ‘Full Metal Jacket’ it exists between the two, a lesser sibling in everything, a clear example of “middle-child syndrome.”
But it does a few things the other two do not.
It notes the racism that was evident in the Vietnam War, in the relationship between white and black GIs, and how each views the other.
It details what it’s like to be the greenhorn in any group. Being new, inexperienced, the butt of every joke when all you really want is acceptance.
Its focus on the mental health of those affected by the war, even as they served. The unfairness many GIs feel about how their country sees them, and worse how they admit that they aren’t sure how they will act when they do go home, to live in a world so removed as the one they’re now forced to endure.
The enduring phrase “It don’t mean nothing, not a thing!” which of course is a double-negative. It means everything, but there’s nothing that you can do expect swallow the hurt, unfairness along with the choler and keep moving.
Finally it shows the single-mindedness of both sides. The Americans attacking a hill again and again, burning off the foliage with napalm and dynamite so that what starts as jungle soon become little more but a wasteland of mud, barbed wire and death. Winning the battle and claiming the hill but losing over three-quarters of the characters we’ve come to know over the last 2 hours.
And this includes Duffy.
After picking up The Pig once more, Duffy storms up the hill, cutting down anyone and anything in front of him. Gaigin can’t keep up, and despite his cries for Duffy to wait, Duffy breaches the top of the hill… just as the US airstrikes engage everything below them that they see as hostile.
It’s left intentionally ambiguous to whether Duffy is killed by friendly fire. All you see is Gaigin clambering over a shell hole and seeing his friend slumped back, lifeless, chest saturated where the bullets ripped through him.
“Another round of bullets hits my skin!” – Keala Settle, ‘This Is Me.’
This song tore the house down on Britain’s Got Talent last night. But to me it rang so hollow, because I see so much rhetoric being spewed by the media (the failed hashtag #BeKind) towards positivity about difference, and facing down the people who criticise any who want to live as who they are, love who they want, or happen to be faced with disabilities or limits they endure every day, but then are nowhere to be found when these critics voice their poison.
When these critics are allowed equal-platforming to compare UK gender support for kids to Nazi experimentation on children.
When people voice opinions in my workplace and no one hears, or hears and looks on quiet and guilty while my insides dissolve into a puddle of grief and despondence.
Advocates in name only. Good for a soundbite, or maybe a celebrity share, but nothing really substantial and only responsible for building scar tissue and distrust from anyone who are facing these problems every day.
Forgive me if I sound jaded.
The other point is that bullets hurt. And while it’s a great moment – especially during a global pandemic – and a fabulous song, I still feel like this song doesn’t speak for my own experience.
My experience is Duffy.
Aware that I’m unusual in my environment, that I don’t fit the stereotypes, that most people firing bullets at me are uninformed, or judgmental.
Focused with a single-mindedness to keep my patients alive, keep my krew happy and fed, keep my surgical list on schedule and hopefully get everything in place for the following day.
And that’s that.
I’ve never surrounded myself with anyone from the LGBTQ+ community, not since I left training.
I had to work. And I wanted to be accepted in my job, even though that was at a time when the LGBTQ+ community had zero traction in the UK workplace.
That was over a decade ago. But now I’ve joined a dance class that has a lot of sway in the city’s LGBTQ+ community. And it means I’m meeting people like me for the first time, and I like it. Because it’s feeding a part of me I didn’t know was starving; because I was solely focused and single-minded about holding onto my job.
And then a global pandemic squats on all of this. Terrific.
Well, whenever this thing goes away, I hope my dance class can reform. I hope I can keep quietly tiptoeing forward into a space that is seen as safe to me and people like me, but is still scary for someone who’s used to the world raking me with bullets whenever I open my heart and try and do anything other than punch the clock.
I hope so. I live in hope. I need that hope, otherwise I’m gonna lose any kind of light I might have nurtured to be better, better than just a body in scrubs.
Because if I don’t achieve that, then my truth will be worse than ending up riddled with actual bullets on a mound of dirt, thousands of miles away from my home, with nothing to look forward to but a body-bag and a pine box.
Vida's Crucible 