Making A House A Home

‘It looks like a model house’ my mother would joke with more than a tinge of jealousy when we visited friends who kept their place so clean and clutter-free it seemed unlived in. “It’s almost eerie.”

I agreed with the eerie bit. There was something alien about it, all the pillows on chairs adjusted at perfect symmetrical angles, the floors waxed to a shine. It wouldn’t have been out of place to see a bowl of wax fruit on the kitchen table. It was only a display: a house pretending to be a home.

For a very long time, that was exactly what my own body felt like to me.

Around the age of sixteen, I started feeling increasingly uncomfortable with viewing my physical form in the mirror. There was something uneasy and wrong about the curve of my hips, which I began making efforts to obscure with straight-lined, baggy clothing. My chest was a no-go zone. I got the same advice every afab person does when puberty starts: check your breasts for lumps every now and again. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put my hands on that part of me without dissociating from the experience, looking away and shivering.

I had no words at the time for what I was experiencing. It was only in my twenties that I’d connect these things to the way I felt to the discomfort I felt when my friends would say things like ‘just us girls’, or ‘guys just don’t get how we think’- like they were in a club in which I was a secret imposter, who didn’t know the secret codes and hand-shakes, and at any moment I’d be discovered for a fake. In my teens and early twenties, you rarely ever heard about trans people, and you never heard about genderqueer or nonbinary people.

In my twenties, I found the drug that helped me feel just a little more connected to my body: like a lot of my fellow millennials, I fell hard for tattoos.

I’ve heard the quote “the difference between people with tattoos and people without tattoos is that people with tattoos don’t care if you have tattoos or not.” I have yet to find the lie in this statement. A lot of people who dislike tattoos have a lot to say about them; it’s almost as though they’ve been caused personal offense. In this way, tattoos are the loud paint jobs and above-ground pools of the neighborhood, decreasing the value of the property in the eyes of local Karens.

Tacky? Maybe, but I’ve always loved messily, imprinting on my most valuable things by defacing them tenderly. If my stuffed toy doesn’t have at least one tear in his fur, some chipped paint in his eyes, how will he know he’s loved? How will he be velveteen-rabbit real if he remains a perfect shell from the factory? With my books, my love language was spoken in turning down corners and scrawling in the margins, for breaking in the spine and inhaling the pages.

People will say the body is a temple, but I disagree. A temple is a sacred place you only visit in times of great reverence. A body is home on wheels. It is not a thing to be worshipped and placed on a shelf, it is a thing to care for but to enjoy, to ride hard and sometimes put away damp. What’s one person’s dream kitchen is another person’s nightmare.

Won’t you regret your tattoos? I was asked more than a few times. Here’s the thing; plenty of the tattoos I have now are not tattoos I would get over again at this point in time. But that doesn’t mean I regret them. They don’t speak perfectly to my obsessions in the moment so much as to all the places I have been and all the things that have made a lasting impact on me. They’re a map of pretty scars. Some of them may not be ‘relevant’ any longer but they are still a part of me. I am not embarrassed of them any more or less than I am embarrassed by my past. They tell a story written in code that others can admire but only I can read.

I don’t know what it was about tattoos that helped me deal with dysphoria, but there was something in it that was therapeutic, like hanging up your favorite pictures on apartment walls you can’t paint. They helped me feel more present, less disconnected from my physical form. Every burning sweep of the needle gun, every smudge of ink and blood said I am here.

The most important moment for me that made the biggest change in my relationship with my body happened in 2018.

From the moment I heard about top surgery, I knew I had to get it. I had saved up my money to pay for it up front, and had a letter from my therapist (I found it incredibly odd that I needed this when if I’d been going to enhance my chest it wouldn’t have been necessary to have something ‘wrong’ with me, but I digress). I remember my parents coming to me because they were concerned for my expectations of how things might change after the surgery. ‘You know people aren’t going to treat you any different because of this,’ they told me. I had a small chest to begin with and most people wouldn’t even notice that I’d made a change.

There was a house on my street that neighbors kept when I was growing up. They travelled a lot and most of the time they weren’t home. There was a feeling about this house that was different than the others. I felt it walking past. The lawn was never overgrown, the grounds were always well-kept, but somehow it was too pristine. You could just tell that it wasn’t lived in.

Somehow, I always felt this way when out in public. Yes, realistically I knew other people probably sensed nothing ‘wrong’ with me, but it didn’t stop me from feeling like I was that unattended house. Like people could walk past and know that I wasn’t home, that I was putting on a show and the fruit on my counters was made of wax.

My breasts were like a useless sign that had been up when I moved in and I wanted to take down. People in the neighborhood probably didn’t notice it: they were so used to it that they didn’t even read it anymore, but I didn’t agree with what it said. The words scrawled across it were irrelevant and misleading. Leaving it up felt wrong, made me uncomfortable in my own four walls. Because even if they didn’t know the difference, even if they had forgotten, I couldn’t. I’d always know it was there, like an ill-fitting add-on, or the beginnings of rot in wood.

And even though my parents were right and most people continued to misgender me- I felt so much freer. Like I could let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding in and let myself expand.

Some people have negative feelings about body modification. I’ve heard a lot of them. Some come from the weirdest, most unexpected places. The doctor who did my chest, for example, told me how tattoos were bad and I shouldn’t get any more of them because- and get this- I was inserting something foreign into my body. She said this with a straight face while I eyed the silicone molds of implants hanging on the door behind her.

Regardless of what anyone says, a home is just a house, sometimes even when you’re living in it. It is nothing more than a collection of spaces that belong to you on paper until you imprint your spirit on it. And however that looks to you is fine. You are allowed to move into your own life. You are allowed to take up space.

For me, every act of modification has been an act of acceptance- of ownership instead of detachment. I am reclaiming my body from the void it felt like it existed in; I am decorating and remodeling as I see fit.

I am making a house a home.