Dancing with myself

My therapist keeps asking me whether I ever "felt different" from my peers, growing up.  I did, but not in the way I think he expects.

I think what he wants me to say is that I always knew I was a tomboy.  That I tore the ribbons from my hair and threw tantrums over dresses, that I shopped in the boys' section from the time I was five years old, that I told my parents to call me "Mel" or "Melvin" as soon as I was old enough to talk.  He wants me to say that I looked in the mirror and knew that my body wasn't mine.  He wants me to say that I traded my Easy-Bake Oven for the neighbor boy's ride-on tractor, that I cried when I got my first period, that I wore five layers of clothing to hide developing breasts.  He wants me to say that I've always known I was different--that I was not a girl.

None of those things happened, of course...except for that very last.

I have always known that I was different. 

Different from the girls, of course--different from every single girl I knew, and radically so (as they were all too quick to remind me).  But beyond that.  Different from the girls, different from the boys--just different, profoundly and irreconcilably different, as far back as I can remember, before school, before language, I was as strange as they come.

That, in itself, sounds like an incredible conceit.  Perhaps I've always been this narcissistic.  Maybe that's my only real problem, here--shameless, irredeemable self-involvement. 

But that in itself is strange.  And I have always been strange.  Not just different--certainly I was awkward, clumsy, "nerdy," out-of-sync, all the sundry attributes that contribute to childhood isolation, but at the same time, there was (and often is) something so far beyond that that it becomes difficult to articulate. 

As far back as I can remember, I have felt...alien.  There's really no other way to put it.  Sometimes, I feel such a total disconnect between myself and my surroundings--so all-consumingly "Other"--that I have to remind myself that I am even human.  I have to work damn hard to place myself within the context of my kind--my gender, sure, but everything else, too, the totality of my being, everything so palpably off about me that it goes way beyond anything I think my therapist will be able to resolve.

Sometimes, I feel like I can't even trust my own reasoning--like I have the power to deceive myself, to con myself into believing the impossible, the power to will things to life.  Sometimes I feel like there IS no "essence" inside me, no doer behind the deed--like I'm just a pile of other people's ideas, a reproduction, a regurgitated synthesis of someone else's truths.  I feel like I am no one.  Of course I have never been a girl.  I have never been anything.

I feel different.  I will always feel different.  But where the therapist thinks that this anomie will dissipate given adequate quantities of testosterone, I know otherwise.  Changing my sex will not save me, for I have never felt my sex was "wrong"--I've barely felt my sex in general.  This is fundamental, unresolvable, and core-strong.  As I come "into my own," over here, I come into another copy, another simulation of a self that doesn't really exist. 

Who is he to say that this one is better than the last?