There Are No Clocks In The Psych Ward

Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation

I first wrote the word “man” in relation to myself while I was inpatient at a psychiatric hospital. I was there because I was suicidal. Sort of. I didn't want to do it, but after spending 24 hours crying without a break and being unable to get the thoughts to stop, I'd checked myself in.

When I went in, it didn't have anything to do with my gender. I was having life problems and issues in close relationships that had driven me into such a dark place that I couldn't see a way forward. I felt trapped and hopeless and was in so much emotional pain I couldn't breathe.

After my first day (which were mostly recovering from medication they gave me to calm me down in the ER) I started writing. I went through golf pencil after golf pencil, and they eventually gave me a stash of them and several lined notebooks. I filled 40 pages of a composition notebook with my thoughts while I was there. All handwritten.

During that time I learned they had a guitar people could use, so I played until my fingers blistered. And I composed. I was awake late—I have no idea what time it was because there are no clocks there—and using the borrowed guitar in a room I wasn't supposed to be allowed in. While I was composing, I wrote the line, “Father, do you love this man?”

I told myself it was because it fit the rhythm scheme I was working with and “woman” didn't. I told myself it was just convenient. And then I stopped and stared at that word for a while and burst out crying. I'd been non-binary for about 4 years by then, but writing that felt like something forbidden. Something I felt but couldn't have. Something sweet and bitter all at once.

The song I wrote made everyone in the ward cry. Patients and staff asked me to play it over and over. After that folks also kept wanting me to sing in general because they learned I have a professional singing voice (I've been a professional musician for over 20 years on and off). I haven't played the song since I left the ward because my guitar needs fixing before I can.

One of the things I've been doing for the last few years, since my autism diagnosis, is unmasking. If you're not familiar with the term, it's the process of stripping away the layers of walls I built up in order to fit into society. My whole identity, for the first 38 years of my life, was built around creating someone that the rest of the world could accept. When you're neurodivergent, that's a common experience. Particularly when you're a woman.

I'm not a woman, but I was one for most of my life. Elizabeth was a sweet, quiet, kind girl who never fit in anywhere and always felt like she'd been born wrong. She wanted to be a boy as early as age eight. I have memories of being on the bus wishing that at that age. All of her characters were male. She felt like men made more sense to her. So… she was a tomboy, she guessed. In the early 1990s, when she was an adolescent, she had never heard of a woman becoming a man. Only of men dressing like women (like Dr. Frank N. Furter or Mrs. Doubtfire).

I am not Elizabeth, but it is in the same way that a tree is not the seed and a caterpillar is not a butterfly. I carry her with me and love her.

The experience of learning my identity was not as dramatic or inspirational as some. I just wrote “man” on a piece of paper for a song lyric and then had a breakdown. While gender wasn't what sent me into inpatient, my struggles with my identity certainly were what put me there. More than gender, of course. Unmasking is a painful process of trying to remember who you are and build who you are out of fragmented memories and crushed dreams. It's both liberating and agonizing. Much like any transformation tends to be.

As we close out June, Pride Month, I wanted to share this because, if I'm honest, I wake up every day wondering if this will be the day I am arrested or have my life taken apart for being trans. While I don't get as much hate as many people do, I get some. Today's politics make it dramatically worse.

I am, of course, more than my gender. Everyone is. My gender and sexuality and romantic inclinations are only part of who I am. Just as they are with every other person. I talk about a lot of what I am on the regular, too. Author, editor, spouse, friend, son, brother, TTRPG nerd, musician, martial artist, historian, watercolor painter, Christian. I'm a lot of things more than that, too.

In this world where those parts of me are under attack, though, I feel like I need to talk about them more. Nobody is wanting to kill painters or ban editors. Well, fine, most people aren't. Still.

At the end of Pride Month this year, I breathe and wonder will there be one next year. If there is, will I survive to see it? I hope so. I've got plans and things I want to do next year, but I struggle to feel like I can rely on them happening. I wonder if next year I will be in a concentration camp for being queer or trans or neurodivergent. I wonder if we will have a country at all or just a smoking ruin.

I look back to our queer elders during the AIDS pandemic who went to funerals during the day and clubs at night and danced and loved in defiance of death and government. I know people have survived worse than this before. Of course we have. I just never thought I'd have to be one of them.