21:55, 23/07/2008

The Lost Girl

Untitled, photograph by Miss K, Sept 2006

I was woken up in the wee hours by a group of young women walking home after a night out. They were talking animatedly - not too drunk, but drunk enough to not care about volume in a residential area of town at the hour of 4am. They sounded happy - whatever they'd done together had been good, I think and there was plenty of laughter.

I lay awake listening to them outside my window as their bright chatter receded into the night's renewed silence and was gripped by a sense of desperation, loss and regret for the young woman I never was.

I do wonder sometimes what my life might have been like had I been born female. Sometimes I have a desperate yearning to be a woman which I find almost overpowering and I'm in one of those moments now where my life as a genetically male individual seems desolate and full of regret.

Regret's an emotion I hardly ever feel as I'm an in the moment kind of person, and it's only really in phases of gender anxiety like the one I was plunged into this night by the happy chat outside my window that I really feel it.

Of course, the "what if I'd been born female?" question is an inponderable one. It's quite literally in the category of the fantastic.

But "what if I'd actually transitioned when I was young?" is one that's closer to reality and it's one that tortures me sometimes. Is my later life since I backed away from that decision - my band, my photos, this whole "Miss K" persona, somehow a shrine to the lost girl who died when I made that decision?

The answer is "of course not". That's the maudlin imaginings of someone who's been woken up by chatter in the night. And let's not forget regret in this case can go both ways with devastating consequences.

Probably this is just some kind of mid-life crisis.

Fuck, that is depressing.

Notes:

Originally written 14 October 2006 on draGnet 4.0.

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