I remember my twelfth birthday vividly by virtue of having a horrible transition into high school. Mum managed to get a day off work and we went to the new Pizza Hut off the A14. We ate only stuffed crust and destroyed the salad bar (habits I have carried into adult life). Mum sourced a birthday cake, the whole restaurant sung. I was happy, which was rare. As I blew out the candles, I wished the same thing I did every year, to finally get my own body, the one I was supposed to have. I bargained; I was willing to wait. Seventeen years later, slipping in and out of institutions, both mental and academic, I’m still waiting for my Pizza Hut wish, all be it in a different, messier form.
Trans people are accustomed to waiting, being on pause. I often think about the extraordinary levels of patience we have, both on ourselves - as transformative beings, and on others – as relentless justification. Some dead White philosopher, who I refuse to cite, wrote that patience was a virtue. What is missing from this narrative is the disconnect that patience causes when it is enforced on a person. I am patient because the body I was born in feels like a waiting room, and a great deal of my felt life has been spent imagining ways out of it. Which, when bent backwards, might be viewed as patience, or at the very least a longstanding ability to endure. Patience, under these terms, is less of a stoic virtue and more of an active affect. As a trans person I am not being patient. I feel patience, and it is itchy, a contradiction to stillness. I embody it so as to work through it. I have to, otherwise I would not survive.
Nevertheless, In amongst all this itchiness, when oriented the right way patience as affect is embedded in liberation and empowerment. Emotions are not explosions of light; they do not exist in a vacuum. Audre Lorde taught us the importance of feelings, of radical care and self-love as tools for resistance. This of course is easier said than done, and despite many of us performing Audre’s words, and performing them well, the blunt reality of loving oneself is actually really fucking hard. It demands a great deal of effort to undo trauma, let alone injury that stretches across histories, and sticks to us like glue. Patience then, is the kindness amongst the hardship of self-love. It is fundamental to care work. I tell myself this when the itching, and the binding, gets to much.
It’s my birthday next month. I’ll spend it with my locked in siblings, and my zoom trapped friends. I’ll demand a cake, I’ll make my wish - but this year is different, there is a finality to my wait, and a reality in my imagining.
My body is close. I am patient with my body.