This Barbie Is Also a Boy

For the last five months, I’ve been contending with what gender means for me; a person

For the last five months, I’ve been contending with what gender means to me; a person whose identity can best be summed up as a girl child, a trans-masc-y dude, who’s always been a boy amongst the boys and a girl amongst the girls. Recently, I’ve had to contend with these things a bit more due to the zeitgeist of gender discussions so relevant in the social, political, and economic spheres within this country. For now, I’ll keep my thoughts on specific incidents/discussions to myself — folks have pretty much cleared those I see as painstakingly ignorant at best and silently despondent at worst. And I’d rather not add to a discussion where maladjusted folks were my topic.

Almost a year ago, I had a psychotic break. Leading up to the manic episode that left me in the psych ward — one hallway in a hospital in Glendora, California — for five days, I’d had months of raised thoughts and increasingly risky (compared to my natural disposition) behavior. I felt like I was finally entering the prophecy that had been bestowed upon me at a Pentecostal revival in the middle of July during my 18th year. I was dreaming and seeing things come true; I was meeting folks and speaking directly into their souls, I saw past their flesh and into the purest parts of them; the most honest, intricate layers that make up a complicated spirit. And during the height of the episode, I felt like I was God reincarnate and Jesus and some type of fish and Harriet Tubman. During each reincarnation, I was learning valuable lessons and the events leading up to the climax — mental collapse — were smaller lessons learned while a part of my brain still functioned in the “real world.” Two of the most freeing lessons that I started to learn well before that faithful day that left blood on the sidewalk and a group of roommates and neighbors both traumatized and terrified, were about work and gender.

Every day that neared the psychotic break was filled with a lesson on how nothing that I thought was real was real. And although my reality was folding in on itself like Elliot Page in Inception, although you may not hear my truth because you see it only as mania, those realities became abundantly clear and the weight of both seemed to fade away. Amidst mania, I was the most euphoric and among this capitalist, patriarchal reality I’ve been the most depressed.

Money didn’t matter because every day was about letting Spirit lead me. Spirit: the innermost me; the thing that connects me to Heaven and earth — and not a mythological Heaven where streets are filled with gold and pain and suffering is erased, yet a realistic one where my feet make gold every spot I step in, every place I touch.

Why would I want Heaven when I can have the world?

Gender didn’t matter because I saw people for who they were; who their souls said they were. I connected with souls who felt my energy; those who could tell that something may not have been so right in that girl-boy’s mental, but her being and words, her soul was so pure. There was no girl or boy there was simply one soul, one spirit, a connection with another connection, a spirit encountering another spirit on its own personal journey toward future. It was about presence and the words we exchanged and the power our honesty held; how much it freed us.

We saw one another for the intricacies that only spirits can see; the minutia that only feeling can explain. At times there were no words needed; there was no point of descriptive language around identity because identity didn’t matter; my flesh was only a body to hold organs that a soul stepped into.

It didn’t matter that I wore boxers to sleep, it didn’t matter that I sent a girl flowers for our first long-distance first date, it didn’t matter that a girl twerked on me in a church, it didn’t matter that I said I love you to the girl who’s stolen my heart, it didn’t matter that I kissed her in an Applebee’s parking lot, it didn’t matter that she wiped my tears as I said goodbye in person for what I’d thought would be the last time for a very long time. And it damn sure didn’t matter that Eve bit the apple, or that I’ve been downing eight pain pills during a very bloody two days every month since I was in the 8th grade. It didn’t matter that I got called a boy for having a mustache. It didn’t matter how many times I was told to close my legs.

Nothing mattered, save for the moment; the only thing any of us have ever had any control over. For a million moments is what a soul lives for; the feeling of freedom; the knowledge of a world beyond the dystopia that Earth has always been. The beauty of the here and now.

A place that makes you of this world but not it. A place where Weird Barbies and Allans abide only to sip on the milk and honey brought forth from a plentiful land, a communal nation, a place where freedom is truly free.

What a wonder, to lose your mind only to be placed neck and neck with the truth. It can't turn into a war, if you accept that reality is not real, yet a living, breathing Hell.