Certain Uncertainty 005: The Great Unraveling
One Year Since Realizing I Have a Body. Plus, my first tattoo, an album I haven't shut up about, and more hyperfixations
This letter will take about ~10-20 minutes to read or listen (depending on the speed you select/your reading pace).
I try to record each piece I write myself, so feel free to listen to the voiceover if that’s more accessible for you or hop around to the sections that interest you 💌
Hello and welcome to Certain Uncertainty, a monthly letter from me (Kat). Here, I talk about works in progress, fixations, and the little things I’m thinking about, scared of, and feeling.
Bearing Witness and The Ball of String
A year ago I was struggling to pack up my apartment while getting into screaming matches with my mom about the fact that I was trying to get top surgery.
I had graduated 3 months prior, earlier than anticipated and wanted to get the fuck out of my college town. I had tunnel vision on surviving till May 2nd, the date I was able to schedule surgery.
To say my mental health was poor would be the understatement of the century. It was the kind of moving through life where I was so wholly in my head, I wasn’t even aware I had a body at all. I was just kind of floating around like a depressed ghost, going through the motions needed in order to move out.
I don’t blame me for these months of haunting my Southern California college town. Sometimes you have to become a ghost in order to survive, as ironic as this sounds.
Moving can cause any person to dissociate, but combine this with trying to justify your existence to your family while simultaneously moving in with them, fighting the debilitating OCD intrusive thoughts bouncing around my brain like a pinball machine, and the dysphoria that makes me want to claw off my skin meant I was existing in a completely separate realm than the present moment.
All things considered, maybe I was doing pretty well?
I’ve been thinking about that time a lot. Not because of the dates on a calendar, but because I remember coming back to the Northeast right at the precipice of spring, a season I hadn’t been acquainted with in years.
That month between moving and surgery was hellish. I don’t recall much of it, and frankly, I don’t really want to. I do remember noticing the moss crawling over the large rock in the yard, how the sun would periodically pass over each distinct shade of green as it journeyed across the sky. I remember the stalks of daffodils like clumps of color atop a mostly muted sea of shrubbery.
This noticing was the beginning of a slow unraveling.
If my attention and way of being in the world was a ball of string, it’s been tangled between my ears for the majority of my life; knotted between the squishy fibers of my brain so that my awareness stopped beyond my thoughts, unable to process much beyond the well-worn neural pathways of fear, anxiety, existential dread, dysphoria, and intrusive thought-loops encompassing all of the above.
This clump of limited attention made sense given I spent most of my life terrified of my body; so disconnected from the sensations within and around me that the signals from brain to body or body to brain felt like some broken game of telephone.
This fracturing began with an eating disorder when I was too young to even comprehend what that meant. It continued with the ensuing relapses through adolescence, the out-of-placeness I felt in high school, into the comfort I found in conformity, in using this lump of flesh attached to my brain in order to gain some sort of capital and confidence.
There were also my attempts to numb the fractals of memories, thoughts, and sensations that still managed to travel from body to brain or vice versa. I had this idea that some magic combination of drugs and alcohol would free me from this bodily jail and bring me closer to “normal”.
Given all that, it’s no surprise that my body decided to stage a protest in the form of periodic injuries and chronic pain. It took almost four years of continuous aches for me to even reckon with the fact that I had a body at all, let alone a body that was in constant discomfort.
There’s also the gaslighting. Those who’ve experienced chronic pain, disability, or chronic illness know this too well: from doctors, well-meaning family and friends, former family and friends, and even strangers on the internet. Given my proclivity to latch onto the fearful and self-doubting thoughts and that I spent a lifetime divorced from my connected meatsack that was now screaming “THIS REALLY FUCKING HURTS PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEE!!!!”, it seemed pretty logical for me to hop on the gaslight train too.
This is what my brain sounded like for the better part of 3 years:
I couldn’t have sprained my wrist for no apparent reason! It’s simply not possible. I’ll just continue business as usual and if it still hurts, maybe it really is sprained. But what if I make it worse? Should I just schedule a doctor appointment? But what if they think I’m crazy? How do I say I injured it? Do I lie?
Is my ankle ok? I can’t remember the feeling of when I rolled it because I was completely dissociated so it could be really bad or totally fine and how would I know? I should probably spend the next three hours going over this exact same thought and fiddling with my ankle until I make it feel worse and then maybe it will be easier to tell if it’s ok or not.
Do I call my friend to tell them I can’t walk because of this mysterious pain in my foot? Or maybe I’m making up for this pain in my foot and everything is actually fine and I’m just crazy. But how would I explain that? Maybe I should just not respond, pretend to disappear.
and on and on and on and on
This was exhausting. And if the pain wasn’t enough for me to push for adequate medical care, the constant mental chatter pushed me over the edge into the soup of doctors appointments and tears that is trying to find an answer for one’s chronic and mysterious pain.
It helped when it had a name, when I could point to the very real connective tissue disorder behind the mysterious injuries. But it didn’t stop the gaslight train that my OCD had long since latched onto, and eventually morphed into this fucked up balancing act of feeling terrified to be in my body but needing to be there in order to take stock, assess risk, and avoid random injury.
In turn, this made my dysphoria all the more apparent. It had been there for years, a perpetual background whisper that I had practiced tuning out by simply neglecting that I have a body at all! But, that wasn’t possible anymore.
When I arrived back home last April, life was feeling deeply dreadful and the chatter in my brain had never been louder, especially as my OCD started to glom onto the transphobic narratives I had been hearing in the many arguments with my family surrounding top surgery.
I spent a lot of time in my room, and from my window I started to notice how the trees had started to bud, the tips of their limbs looked like plump, red berries, ready to be picked off the vine. From the buds, my eyes traveled to a small cherry tree starting to flower in the yard. Over the course of a couple weeks, I watched the buds explode into pink petals from my bedroom window and I made a plan to photograph the way the sun hit the flowers between 10 and 11am.
Even with my attention mostly confined to my thoughts, I couldn’t help but observe the seasons I so deeply missed. And each time I tried to capture or notice these moments, I created a milli-second away from the staunch mental chatter and ambient fear. In these fractions of a moment, the world wasn’t just a movie I was passively watching, but I was actually there, noticing, thinking, “that would make a good picture” and hearing the click of a camera shutter as a consequence of pressing my index finger down.
Each crumb of wonder aided in loosening the knots in my brain.
Miraculously, I made it to May 2nd. My mother, so full of contradictions, used she/her pronouns for me while helping me recover from top surgery. I slowly healed into a world of vibrant, delicate flowers and moss slick with May rain.
I developed this unfamiliar urgency to bear witness to what was going on around me. It wasn’t a change brought on by some magical spell, but real and material support: my mom helping me get out of bed when my arms couldn’t bear my weight, my therapist providing a safe place to open up about my intrusive thoughts, and my ability to even access the life-saving gender-affirming medical and mental health care that I so deeply needed.
It is a privilege to have access to that support. This safety net aided in creating conditions where my body and surroundings felt safe enough for me to even consider stepping into.
Today, that ball of string is no longer tangled in my skull, but laced between my fingers like rings, helping me notice the comforting clack clack of my fingertips on the keyboard. The string falls across my flat chest so that I can experience the sensation of inhaling and exhaling without despair about the lumps of unwanted flesh that would rise and fall. It wraps around my thick and soft thighs all the way down to my knobbly knees and feet so that when I wake up in the morning, I feel the cool tile of the bathroom floor and the pop of my ankle unlocking when I sit down to pee.
There are days when it snags around my hips, when I look in the mirror and see the wonderful folds and some voice in my head names them as feminine. Some days where it knots around my knee, swollen and painful for no apparent reason, and I oscillate between this being the normal kind of swollen given my condition, or the kind I need to be worried about.
From the outside, this year might have looked really quiet for me. I was living at home, recovering from surgery, eventually working from home, and not having the most buzzing social life. To me though, I felt like I was on some sort of big-ass-odyssey, even if that voyage mostly took place within my room. It was the kind of journey without a destination, where you don’t really realize you’re on it, where actually, your main goal is just trying to survive, feed yourself, and get eight hours of sleep.
Somewhere within that odyssey though, the milli-seconds of witnessing came together to form a second. In time, the seconds compounded into a minute, and soon enough, I wasn’t just noticing my surroundings, but the thoughts and sensations within my body without traveling into an intrusive thought spiral.
This kind of thing was unimaginable for most of my life. And the unraveling did something else unexpected: it freed up in my mind room to create and write and play in a way I hadn’t since I was a little kid.
For a while, I thought this flow of creative juices was a stroke of luck, that the ideas could dry up at any moment so I might as well make the most of it while I could. But I’m starting to realize how all these quiet, tiny, and seemingly insignificant decisions I made while trying to survive the past couple years are connected.
The thread of moving home is connected to accessing top surgery which loops into noticing the Northeastern seasons and picking up a camera which is tied to newfound embodiment which loops into asking questions and experiencing wonder, joy, and the soup of feelings that translate into any creative pursuit.
Please forgive me if I’ve veered into the realm of slightly woo-woo. I can get like this because the way I like to make sense of life is through knitting and looping ideas and experience together into metaphor and story. But I feel that I must also add that no real life story has a fairytale ending. And I’m also pretty young, so hopefully my story is just beginning.
There are still days lost to fretting about the strange pain in my hip or climbing out of the OCD rabbit-hole or feeling so bone-weary tired that I don’t want to feel anything at all except zone-out the world through watching tiny house videos on youtube (highly recommend this channel).
This string of being will never tie into some gorgeous bow, it will tangle and fall in different patterns over this meat sack that carries me through life and I am simply happy that I get to be semi-present for half of that.
As I’ve been thinking and writing about this, I’ve also been thinking about how any creative person engaged in the kind of witnessing that yields creative work can’t just shut that practice down when it comes to things outside of themselves. Noticing, as a practice and way of being, isn’t just about what’s in one’s backyard, bedroom, or studio; not just about what’s convenient.
I’m thinking about the US and Israel’s current war with Iran and Lebanon, and the Palestinians that are still without homes or clean water or mourning loved ones in Gaza. Witnessing joy and wonder also means witnessing injustice. It means asking questions of our surroundings and the stories we hear. Asking questions of the systems that cultivate these narratives, who they benefit, and who they deem as “collateral damage”. There is a reason news outlets refer to the “Situation in Gaza” or the “War in Iran”. These vague strings of words obfuscate the people and lives they affect as well as the nations and so-called leaders carrying out the violence.
I don’t have a clean call to action. There is no simple thing you can do. But you can bear witness, ask questions, comb through the passive language of headlines to find out who is responsible, who is affected, whose stories to seek out. And this witnessing has no end date, no time when hands can be wiped clean. We all live in a society that allows violence like this to happen, and we are all implicated in one way or another. Witnessing feels immensely inadequate, yet it is something where many choose nothing
In The Stack
A section where I talk about my current hyperfixations, special interests, and the recommendations I’m keeping in my literal/proverbial bedside stack.
My First Tattoo
The most wonderful, accessible, and calm first tattoo by Maddie in Kingston, NY. Click here to check out her IG !! She combined two of her flash for me, and the whole idea is largely based off what I wrote about in my last Certain Uncertainty. You can check that out by clicking here :)
As someone who moves through the world with a constant hum of pain traveling throughout my body, it was a welcome change to listen to the literal hum of a tattoo gun coupled with the hyper-local, specific pain of that continuous needle. I liked that I could focus not only on the tactile sensation of the gun piercing the skin above my hipbone, but the auditory one as well.
I also enjoyed the way Maddie pushed down on the skin above my hip; the same way I move my hand across a sketchbook or canvas, with the utmost focus and care. What a cool thing, for your flesh to literally be canvas, to be reminded of the skinsuits we walk around in. To adorn them and do with them what we please.
When I got home, I kept pulling down my boxers just to make sure the tattoo hadn’t disappeared. And strangely it feels like it’s always been there.
Everywhere Isn’t Texas by August Ponthier
Often, I speak about myself and the project of Miss Gender as somewhat of an alien. It’s not purely aesthetic, but a real description of how I felt growing up closeted, trans, and disabled in a small suburban town.
This album’s cover art, showing August grabbing the hand of their alien counterpart speaks to how it feels to get to know this alien as yourself. And it goes beyond the aesthetic too, into the whimsical, gut-wrenching, silly and beautiful sonic realm that is this album.
I love music. I love listening to music, singing, and discovering new artists, yet I’ve never identified with and appreciated a point of view like I have with August and this album. I obviously don’t know them and their intent with a song could be different that how I felt listening, but isn’t that all music? Listening to the lyrics feels like one alien reaching out to another.
New Word List
I read most of my books on an e-reader and recently went through the process of exporting all of my highlights so that I can revisit what I decided to underline. Surprisingly it wasn’t just passages, but words too. Words like vociferous, opprobrium, assiduous, copse, gowl, and anathema.
Maybe I underlined them because I was curious, maybe because I liked the way it sounded, but in any event, they were mostly words I was unfamiliar with. For whatever reason, I felt passionate about not letting them return to the ether from which they came, some swirling whirlpool of vocabulary words too daunting to commit to memory.
I started writing them down and revisiting them to add definitions when I have the energy. I haven’t actually gotten to learning or memorizing the definitions yet, but knowing that I could and having the agency brings me a strange solace, even if I’m not actually doing it it yet.
I think what I love about writing, as I love about many things, is there isn’t one way to approach it. Sure it can feel daunting and confusing, but a lot of information is accessible if we build up the courage to look for it. At least that’s how I feel about the thesaurus and dictionary.
For now, I’ll keep building up my arsenal of words, and maybe one day I’ll learn them.
Vogue Image Archive
This is a wonderful corner of the internet with photos from almost every fashion show or collection since forever. No, I’m just kidding. I’m actually not sure how far it goes back, but far enough for my needs.
I mostly use this archive for entertainment and reference pictures. I like that I can save my favorite images into a mega-list or different boards. Recently, I try to look at every single collection or show from the Fall 26 season, saving looks that A) would be fun to draw, B) I love, C) are absolutely outrageous, or D) All of the above.
I don’t know much about fashion, but looking through these many shows I’ve come to realize that I’ve always had very strong opinions about it, like some sort of aesthetic intuition on what styles I like versus don’t. Not based on any particular criteria or opinions, just a gut feeling. I think this gut feeling is part of any creative pursuit. It’s the intuition that answers questions like: What word would work here? What color for the dress? This doesn’t feel right, what is it? Am I truly done? I think looking through the archive helps me build the muscle of this intuition.
Quote(s) of the Month
A section where I share some quotes from the books that I’ve recently read or music I’ve listened to. These are the passages/lyrics/words I’m underlining in my kindle, printing out, and reading over and over.
It’s a frequent, nauseating political inheritance: come to experience the world under the reign of someone who thinks of you as subhuman, as undeserving of a future, and an ugly impression is settled that true power is the ability to do the same to someone else.
- Omar El Akkad. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
A heavy spring frost this morning. Crossing the grass I made a clean track of footprints, deep green on the white spread of the lawn. It returned me to my childhood, to the sense of secret authority, imprinting one’s presence into a place with those clear, sharp prints. I exist. The private, pleasurable sound of the finest layer of ice breaking beneath the weight of each step.
Charlotte Wood. Stone Yard Devotional
I don’t have proof. I don’t need proof. What do scientists do? They look for proof. In its absence, they set up models. An experiment, such as the one they designed to figure out how Thals might have hunted choughs. I do not set up models. What I do is live. And because of the way I have lived, I know what is possible.
Rachel Kushner. Creation Lake
on quiet midnights back in the caves I could almost imagine that all the people were gone canyons cleared of their footsteps and voices and cars the long deaths standing still trees expanding and their green swallowing the buildings and returning the original smells returning what’s needed I could see myself leaving the park and walking through an empty ellay slow and safe with all the other animals back to the deep forest and the forever water and the sun setting people can’t see it but I can their end makes everything okay scare city isn’t scare city with no one around to say its name
Henry Hoke. Open Throat
Walked into the party and
I thought about leaving
People laying by the pool
Like some strange museum
Half circle of girls around
you dying for your attention
And I fucking hate to say it,
but I joined the collection
…
Painted nails on gentle males,
a winning combination
It’s painful and it’s shameful, I’m a poor imitation
“Handsome” by August Pontheir
Betty, nice to meet you
Nice to meet you, Betty
I’m so glad you found me
Now we’re old and now we’re ready
Betty, nice to meet you
Nice to meet you, let’s be
Who we were already
“Betty” by August Ponthier
Yes...witnessing feels immensely inadequate, yet it is something. And sometimes, it's all we have. 💔