A Million Twinkling Shards of Light

Grinding Glass: Post-traumatic growth

The sun hammers down on me fiercely from a clear blue sky. It is, admittedly, a northern summer, but that doesn’t make it any less July or any less a little over ninety degrees (that’s about 32.5 degrees for people who live in parts of the world with sensible units of measurement), which means it feels actually quite hot to me, despite the air conditioning of the little subcompact I’m sitting in.

“Are you okay?” my wife, B—, asks from the driver’s seat. I nod, the floppy straw sunhat I’m already wearing wiggling in the air as I do so. She waits for a moment. “Are you ready?” she asks.

I want to be ready. Oh, my, do I want to be ready. I’ve been dreaming of today for the two and a half long years of my transition. For most of that time, I thought it’d never come, that I’d never be able to do this. A pretty big part of me thinks I still can’t.

Instead of answering meaningfully, I shrug and open the car door.

In front of us, stretching far to the left and the right, the perfect, khaki sand beach stretches, and the diamond-flashing blue waters of Lake Michigan stretch to the horizon before me. The beach is filled with people of every shape and size, every body type a person might imagine. Teenage women in string bikinis, laughing together as they walk through the sands. Mothers herding children playing in the sands, wearing conservative one-piece suits, some with swim skirts. Kids, squealing and running and splashing in the way that children only ever do when they have unfettered access to large bodies of water. Men, mostly hanging around the women, in a hundred different colors of the exact same cut of swim trunks.

My best friend—sister, by any meaningful definition of the term—and her wife, waving to us from the sand where they’ve set up their chairs, flanked by a couple of other friends. I make my way toward them, the heat of the sand stinging my feet even through my sandals. L— pulls me into a hug, and I know without having to ask that she feels the same way I feel. She’s radiant in a blue string bikini top, and I’m pretty sure her smile is the only thing brighter than the sun.

I pull away and look around the beach one last time as B— exchanges greetings with our other friends. Nobody’s looking at me. I feel certain that should be, but nobody’s paying me any attention at all.

“Okay,” I say to myself, and I pull off the white cover-up dress I wore to the beach. The sun lazily slides over my skin, and I can’t help but look around again. Still, nobody’s looking. It’s wonderful. I meet L—’s gaze again, and I have to fight the tears, because I, somehow, belong here, as I am.

Thirty-eight years old, trans, and wearing a bikini at a beach for the first time, with my best friend in the world, just as trans, and also wearing a bikini for the first time.

'“Wow,” I say, shaky with joy, because I can’t think of anything that comes close to capturing how I feel. I know L— understands.

“Right?!” L— says, her voice just as shaky as mine.

The water of Lake Michigan, when we stride in, is an icewater baptism that makes me feel free.

Moments of symbolic healing

There are moments in transition for each of us that are perfect, shining shards that fix themselves into our very souls. I’m sure you’ve had a few of your own, where the terror and uncertainty and fear were washed away and the dancing hypothetical of what might be became what is. They’re often so trivial-seeming, but in many ways, they are the product of years of work, change, and growth.

Put one way: local woman goes to the beach. Even, if we wanted: local trans woman goes to the beach. Either way, big whoop.

Put another way: a trans woman thought, wept over, mourned the idea that she would never be able to take her niblings to the beach because she was certain that her own body would forever betray the fact that she’s trans. That her body, her hair, her face, would be unmistakably masculine, proof against any hormone or surgery that might try to reveal the woman inside, the woman who was fighting with every ounce of herself to be seen. That her visible transness would put the family she loved so dearly at deadly peril.

That that beach was in a county that’s made the national news for its radical right-wing politics.

To set foot on that beach wasn’t something that asked me to step out of my car, to walk into a public place, and to greet a friend. It’s a journey that flew me around the world in search of surgeries that would heal my body and my soul. It’s a multi-year war against a dozen bureaucracies set up to deny my personhood, to erase me from existence. Strips of flesh were peeled off of my body again and again and reshaped. Bone was cut and sanded. I spent month after painful month in recovery from the surgeries that saved my life.

And amidst all that, I faced the trauma of needing these surgeries. The pain of three and a half decades of living for other people. Of my own relentless self-obliteration. I faced my dysphoria, my internalized transphobia, my internalized self-hatred, and all of the oceans-deep pain that they each represented. And instead of running from pain greater than pain, of the most horrific self-harm I’ve ever known, I embraced these parts of me and sought out the little girl at the heart of each of these so she could have the peace and the comfort she never had a chance to know. As I flayed my body to heal it, I flayed my soul just as fiercely, hoping to heal it in the same way.

Yeah. It hurt like hell.

My wife plays roller derby. I love it, but I love the heart of the game, the philosophy and the sisterhood behind it even more. But there’s this one thing they say that rolls around leagues, as unstoppable as the skaters are, that has become a refrain for me in transition:

Most seem to find roller derby in transitional periods… We ruin our bodies to save our souls, and for some reason that makes perfect sense.

—Bonnie D. Stroir

Entering the kiln

Trauma shortens the horizons of our imagination, draws the circle of what is possible close, and guards its edges fiercely. In particular, it’s all but impossible to imagine a life after trauma, after the pain of living with that trauma, has passed. Living in survival mode does that. In many ways, it’s why it seems so pointless, so impossible, to resolve the traumas you’ve lived with for so long. The comfort of old pain, seized upon by the fear of new pain—the knife with no handle, that you can’t help but continue to cut yourself with.

You see, what trauma, and especially complex trauma, does is it forms physical and emotional blockades which freeze parts of ourselves at the moment of the traumatic events we live through. When I say that this happens physically, I mean that the neuronal connections that form the experiential and emotional memory of that time and place are supercharged, lit up over and over again inside the electrochemical fire of your brain, which in turns strengthens those connections, and keeps them physically stuck in the amygdala, which is responsible for processing our feelings of fear and sadness and anxiety, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for our inhibitions and for episodic memory, instead moving into the neocortex the way they're supposed to, through a process called memory consolidation.

Yeah. Brain stuff is always complicated. The short version here is that our memories of trauma get frozen in the parts of our brains that cause the effects we see in trauma of all kinds: thinking about the painful thought over and over, worrying about it, being afraid of more pain.

What trauma therapy does, fundamentally, is use little neuroscientific tricks to light up the parts of the brain where those feelings and memories are supposed to go over time, but haven’t yet, while also activating the memories. In that chain of electrochemiocal fire, we coax things forward, and finally get all of that pain where it belongs in the neocortex.

Basically, we turn a traumatic memory into a bad memory. Everybody’s got bad memories. They just don’t trigger that fight/flight/fawn/freeze reaction anymore.

The thing is, though, those traumatic memories don’t just freeze themselves in place. They clog up similar, associated memories and feelings, holding them back like a big snarl of hair in a drain.

And when they’re removed, all that stopped-up potential generally comes gushing out in a huge torrent.

The significant majority of those who are able to heal their traumas experience something that still feels miraculous and impossible to me, even though I lived through it: an explosive, blossoming growth, which is often so dramatic and transformative that it shapes the course of the rest of the person’s life.

It’s called post-traumatic growth.

Post-traumatic growth

Trans folks in particular seem to benefit from post-traumatic growth. We don’t have an explanation in the scholarly literature for why right now, but if you’ve read anything in the Grinding Glass series, you already know what I think the cause is. Our dysphoria trauma is almost always intertwined with conventional trauma—denial and punishment and withholding of love from the people we needed to rely on. The betrayal of the people we trusted with our secret selves before we were ready to be out.

All of those things are conventional traumas, well-understood, but for us each of them carries the bright, sharp edge of our gender, and other people’s denial of it, a second blade that cuts just as deeply as the conventional trauma. In trauma therapy, we resolve those well-understood hurts, but to do so we must, by definition, also work through how they affected our feelings about our gender; the two halves are indivisible. In many ways, they only hurt so deeply in the first place because of the entangled nature of that trauma.

It’s a little strange to me to see intersectional identity played out so clearly in trauma, but there it is.

In many ways, Stained Glass Woman is the public product of my personal post-traumatic growth, which began in earnest after my facial feminization surgery and my first top surgery largely eliminated my physical gender dysphoria. In a little over a year, I’ve written or edited 54 articles, each of which ranges from just under 2,000 words to almost 6,000. Even a conservative estimation of my total word count would put this Substack at 135,000 words in total.

That’s the length of two novels, for reference.

And Stained Glass Woman, as much as I adore it, is ultimately a side project, something I put on hold when I need to, so I can focus on other things. Alongside it, I’ve done major academic writing—about 15,000 words, with a coauthor—finished a novel—about 35,000 words—and started another—another 12,000 words.

And all of that were just my various side projects. About 200,000 words worth of writing I squeezed into the cracks between my actual job, transition, therapy, and sharing my life with my family and friends, in a single year. Hell, I did it in between planning a vow renewal, and anyone who’s planned a wedding will tell you exactly how all-consuming that process is. The writing came as easily to me as breathing, most articles drafted and done in a couple of hours from start to finish, research aside.

That novel, by the way? The one that I put 35,000 words onto (all in December of last year, mind you)? I had started it ten years ago, and had been stuck two thirds of the way through, unable to continue, for most of that decade.

But all that’s just work, just an illustration, metrics by which it’s easy to see how finally clearing the trauma of my own dysphoria affected me, body and soul. Alongside that work, I went to the beach for the first time as me.

And yeah, that sounds hopelessly trivial stacked up against all of this creation, all of this production, but I have never been as touched by an article I’ve written as I was the moment I dove into Lake Michigan that day.

Stained Glass

This, fundamentally, is the promise of trauma therapy: you will never be unbroken, but you can be whole again. I’ve spoken before about my love for broken things, and for the methods by which they are made anew. Kintsugi, especially, but my greatest and deepest love for the mending of broken things is reserved for the words you read every time you come to this page.

Stained glass.

As much as I love it, kintsugi is a quiet, loving restoration of a broken thing, done bit by bit with gentle hands. That’s not what it’s like to heal from trauma, though. Healing from trauma is a hot, bright, painful process that usually requires us to break even more than we already were before we’re ready for the fire that will remake us. We enter the kiln as shards of glass, sharp-edged, piecemeal, and the fires of our own determination to heal and hope for a future that we can’t even imagine as we enter. We sit there, in the heat and pressure and pain, for longer than we think we can ever endure.

And, eventually, the heat faces.

And, eventually, the kiln is opened.

And, eventually, we find ourselves standing bright and tall, no longer a sheet of jagged shards and hopes and dreams, but a wall of light laced through with copper and tin and lead. No longer hiding or grasping our sharp edges, we protect ourselves from them, and fit them into a pattern where those sharp edges hold each other tenderly, and with power. Our brokenness becomes our strength.

Healing from trauma is not a gentle process. Neither is the crafting of stained glass.

But in both cases, we are whole because we were broken. We are beautiful because we were shattered.

And in both cases, the result is so, so much more than we could ever dream of when we began.

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Other articles in the Grinding Glass series:

• Shattered, a new model for understanding gender dysphoria.

• Growing Up Broken, an examination of how trans trauma forms.

• Slivers, a discussion of how we reenact our trauma on ourselves.

• Complex Trauma Disorder? I hardly knew her!, which helps you walk through the process of accepting a complex trauma diagnosis.

• Holding the Girl, a discussion of what healing from complex trauma looks like.

• The Glass Closet, an exploration of the trauma of post-transition stealth.