Breathless

While I don’t usually look in the mirror and hate what I see, there are days when I am scared to look down at myself. There are days when I wake up and I just know it’s one of those days. It is apparent for the moment I wake up in bed that it’s one of those days and I feel sick to my stomach. I am under the covers and I daren’t move out from under them. I breathe carefully because I can feel my breasts rubbing against the quilt and I hate it, and at the same time I’m reminded that they exist I’m reminded that my nipples have almost no sensitivity. I roll over and feel my legs rub together. There’s space between them where I think a dick should be, but the feeling of long black hairs all over them make me feel just as queasy.

I reach out to my stomach and there’s even more hair there, there’s hair on my chest, which should be flat, and my hands that feel all of this are far too big to be female but far too soft to be a males. I feel my face with these odd appendages that can’t be my own and there’s this alien stubble and far too supple cheeks, far too strong a jaw and forehead, too small a nose, so I put my arms at my side and just try to keep my breathing steady and stable with my eyes tightly shut.

See, it’s hard to even breathe when you can feel your chest rise and fall, and it’s hard to move at all when you are in a body that just isn’t your own. All I can describe it as is being claustrophobic; stuck in a room with no windows that you can’t get out of, because the cruel reality is that you are in your body and you will never ever get out of it until the day you die. Think about it, if you woke up in the wrong gender, how hard it would be to function on the most fundamental of levels. 

Breathing. Is. Hard.