Images

Today’s topic was sparked by some pictures of me that a friend recently emailed, from an event we’d both attended. She had kindly withheld them from the rest of the set that she was posting on Facebook, lest I be uncomfortable with them.

You see, I’ve long had a hate-hate relationship with cameras. I hated them, and they hated me.

In fact, it was more than hatred, on my side. It was an inexplicable, explosive, knee-jerk reaction whenever someone brought out a camera and pointed it specifically at me.

I have joked about it, grumbled about it, and pissed people off with it - and I never could figure out the WHY of it. I am generally a pretty rational and easygoing person, but stick a camera in my face and you’d see another side of me entirely. It just set something off inside; I’ve been rude to friends, left the room, left the building, acted like a sulky teenager... if it was guaranteed to offend, I’ve probably done it in the wake of a camera.

Now, just to further confuse the subject, I should mention that people take pictures of me all the time when I’m performing, and in that context I’ve never had the urge to flee the eye of the lens. I’ve never had any problem with video being taken of me, either. Nor have I tended to worry overly much about ending up in somebody’s candid shots when not onstage; I would sometimes move out of range if I noticed the camera, but as long as I didn’t feel like they were intentionally trying to get me in the frame, I didn’t actually freak out. No, what really brought on The Reaction was someone trying to take a picture specifically of me, or being asked to pose for a shot, no matter how large the group being posed. It was the... well, the intentionality of it, I guess... that got to me. The sense that the camera (or its wielder) wanted ME in its lens, whether alone or as part of an ensemble. It didn’t want to capture what I was DOING... it just wanted... the ME-ness of me.

And  there it would be - a sudden boiling in the blood, a fight-or-flight response, that get-me-the-hell-out-of-here feeling! Maybe a little like some people seem to feel about needles, or heights, or whatever... a sort of calm panic that seemed totally out of proportion to the problem.

It’s not like I’ve ever been particularly self-conscious about my looks (at least not since high school, when everybody is). Nor am I exactly the kind of person who can easily hide in a crowd - I’m a big fat person and I take up lots of space! And I am generally comfortable taking up that space; I don’t try to shrink down like big people sometimes do, to make themselves feel smaller.

Moreover, I’m an entertainer who is happy being on stage, with a group or as a soloist, and who doesn’t mind in the least being the center of attention. In other words (*cough*) I’m a terrible ham, as my friends will all affirm. Not exactly shy about being seen!

So WHAT is this weird thing about photographs, I’ve asked myself? I am generally not an irrational person, so the apparent irrationality of this bothered me, big-time. And up until recently, I have been at a total loss to explain it.

I’m still not sure I can fully explain it - but now I have some theories. Because “The Camera Thing” seems to have gone away - quietly and unexpectedly, just poof! gone - when I came out to myself and others as being transgendered.

Now, of all the changes I’d expected, all the shifts in my thinking and feeling that I knew were in process - that wasn’t one of them. It came out of the blue.

I noticed it one day when I was looking at some photos from the last event my a cappella group had performed at. Now, I should explain that, even though I never felt the need to evade pictures while I was performing, that doesn’t mean that I was ever pleased to see them afterward! On the contrary, every view of myself evoked a wince at best, and often a much deeper discomfort. There was some sense of... I don’t know what the hell it was... but some profoundly negative emotion attached to those visuals, those images of myself.

But suddenly, here I was just browsing through them with essentially no negative feelings at all, even laughing - laughing! - at the really bad ones. It was a stunning moment for me... stunned as in “hit on the head”.

Fast-forward to the next time someone asked me to pose for a shot. I think it was my ex, wanting to commemorate a special moment. To my everlasting surprise, her request felt perfectly okay. I shrugged, said, “Sure,” put my arm around her and smiled for the birdie. All the while thinking, ummm... excuse me, but... what just happened here??

I’m still working that out. And the complexity of it still stuns me a little. Because I think there are at least two or three separate streams of experience converging there, and trying to disentangle them has been an interesting process!

It’s certainly partly about the expectations of gender. After all, I was supposed to be a woman, and no matter how well I managed to ignore, on the surface, all of those things that a woman is “supposed” to be, there’s no doubt that they affected me on some deeper, largely unexamined level.

We know that women are daily bombarded with unrealistic, painfully idealized and highly commercialized images of the feminine. I very obviously didn’t fit what society seemed to expect of me - and I didn’t want to! But I’m not sure that “want to” has as much power over “supposed to” as it should have. Part of me was flabbergasted to realize that, even as someone who has never really been able to embrace a female identity, I still could not wholly avoid all of those destructive “shoulds.” How, then, are those who DO identify as female supposed to manage it?? Ye Gods!

Of course, even on a more everyday level, I also never fit the image of being feminine that, say, my mom expected of me. Which had nothing to do with how I might have looked in a miniskirt (ugh), but did involve, in Mom’s oft-repeated words, “not sitting like a baseball player”!

So there’s one stream of confusion... feelings of embarrassment, maybe even shame, evoked by those gendered expectations.

Another, I think, is that I could never really see MYSELF in those pictures. Not only was I failing to present properly as a female, but at the same time, I was failing to present comfortably as a male - unwilling and unable, in fact, to see myself as a male. For reasons having to do with the needs of my complicated family system, and my own horror of rocking that boat - as well as the just-plain-confusion of being trans in a world that doesn’t expect it - I seem to have spent most of my life trying not to be me.

After all, I had just about completely disowned my body after it so horribly turned traitor on me at puberty. This body, my physical self, has been “the place where I live” only by default, because I couldn’t get rid of it. It hasn’t been ME, in any real sense, for many, many years now.

So who WAS that in the pictures? Nobody I knew. Add confusion to shame.

And I think that the last, hardest bit... was to be reminded that, for others, this WAS me. That it was this big hulk of crazy awkward wrong-gendered whateverness that got read as “me” to the world at large. And it was painful and confusing to have those two different images of self - the internal and the external - come crashing together.The person in those pictures doesn’t look like someone who could charm an audience. Which “me” is the real one? Which one should I trust?

Add uncertainty to confusion and shame. Ugh. What fun (not)!

(My ex has mentioned to me several times lately that my favorite words are “complex” and “complicated”... somehow I don’t think that’s likely to change any time soon!)

Anyway, the sudden and unexpected demise of “The Camera Thing”has been not only immensely freeing, but also one of the best possible confirmations that I’m on my right path now. And it has brought up a whole mass of new and old thoughts about image and self and how they intertwine.

And while I’m busy thinking those - and inviting you to join me - I think I’ll tell my friend to go ahead and post those shots to Facbook if she would like to.

~Phoenix, 7/23/2014

P.S. I just noticed that I mistyped the date in my first post - 6 (June) instead of 7 (July) - ah, well. You readers, if there are any out there, have to TELL me these things, LOL!