Screaming Helps
on navigating trauma and grief
Emotion has been born anew within me, alongside my own rebirth as a woman.
The change has all happened so fast it’s hard to quantify. It started in my bathtub on December 25th, 2021 at 12:30am, bawling. Longest and hardest cry I’ve had in my whole life.
I’d finally faced it.
After a lifetime packing it under a mountain of shame and denial, I saw plainly what it all meant. What those nights pleading were about. What my brightest heart was showing me in all those moments it was screaming so loudly throughout my life, where I’d momentarily faced my internal womanhood, was who I am at my core.
To feel it all pour out in that bathtub. A culmination of what could not be described as anything other than years of sustained spiritual healing. Was to see it clear as day.
There were two paths forward. Truth. Or packing it back into a place of denial. Which, for the first time in my life, felt unthinkable.
This was the first time I wasn’t crippled by fear. The first time I wasn’t worried that my support network would disintegrate in the face of a transition. So much love around me in every direction. So much hope. Love felt for self the very first time.
Biggest immediate concern: my wife and I had been trying at this point to conceive for six months.
So, obvious ethical concerns arise which have to be addressed. I can’t continue this pursuit with my wife, knowing in my heart what is to come, not telling her. That wouldn’t be right.
Still, despite the very pressing need to communicate this revelation of heart. How?
I felt crippled to speak to her about this in particular. Death-grip, would be an accurate description of the way I’d been holding our relationship despite its issues. Additionally, she’d not spoken well about trans people in the times they’d come up in the past. Very particularly trans women. She felt like it was mocking and associated it with drag, which wasn’t her vibe. I understood. Those were my same internal prejudices which kept me closeted so long. Still, just like every other person I knew who had expressed opinions about trans people to me, I’d hard coded those conversations into my memory’s long-term storage banks.
Somehow though, within a couple of weeks, I had told her. It had gone way better than I’d thought.
From here is where things have gone so fast it’s hard to catch up.
After only weeks of discussion. My wife and I decide together to say yes to it all. She didn’t know that it would work for sure with a transition, but loved me, and that’s all that mattered to her. She wanted to still have a child with me. I did too.
So, we planned to do it all. In the necessary order, but as fast as life lets it be possible. And as we’d agreed, admittedly, because I was going to fucking do it no matter what, I started hormone treatment the month after she was pregnant.
April 1st, 2022 — my first day on hormones.
This is the day that everything changed.
Fucking Feeeeelings
I’d been sitting in ceremony with people for years, sharing the barest truths, hearing people share theirs. Tears flowing around the circle but never for me.
Somehow, my ability to connect in these most vulnerable spaces was blocked. Even when I led them. Even when the people within them felt and shared immense feelings of love. Despite being healed personally in these ceremonies. My heart usually just ached a bunch. But I couldn’t cry.
There was a lack of release that I’d been seeking. Long unable to cry for myself. Fiction the magical gateway that took me to emotional release. A great film or book or tv show was the only thing that could make me cry — despite those rare exceptions to prove the rule.
After having started hormones in Spring of 2022. Emotion was blooming.
Was it the hormones? Was it just the fact that I was finally decompressing after decades of self denial? Or was it both?
Certainly both.
Slow and steady, my experience of emotion has become more and more visceral. Finding exponential growth to the way I feel love, sorrow, anger, and joy. All, ever deepening.
I can definitely cry now. That’s for sure. Tears flow easily and often — as needed. Not a threat or a worry, a grace.
I’m nearing my three-year anniversary of starting hormones. It’s been a few months since I’ve experienced one of the revelatory moments I’ve had repetitively through my transition, where I realize just how tactile the change in my body and experience of living has become. Honestly, I probably have another one right around the bend.
It’s just hard to notice most of the time. The change all happens so fast in retrospect, but also gradual, day by day.
Emotion is now a whole new beast. I’m glad it’s come in waves of growth and deepening. All at once would have been unbearable. Especially with the reality of traversing this while supporting someone through pregnancy, becoming a new parent, and going through a separation.
I’ve cried a lot. Always grateful, even during the really tough cries. It’s a form of release I had longest sought. A way to let emotion flow through and not remain within your body. It’s somatically healing on the deepest of levels.
Often, even in moments of tearful hurt, I find this reflection. A simple gratitude for being able to let things come out of me which I was holding inside.
When Crying Isn’t Enough
Beyond the challenges of supporting a pregnant partner, navigating early parenthood, and my body going through a second puberty — other traumas and griefs have emerged in my life.
I’ve sought them out. Complicit in every one. Challenges of love, all.
From loosing people in my life who I’d want nothing more than to have near. To having my oldest and dearest relationships turn dark and twisted in a ways that I’d never have thought. Corrupting things cherished and harming hopes of peaceful renewal.
There have been moments in this journey where I’m locked up in the trauma. We’re my body feels a stone. Where my muscles are tight and tense. Where my mind is alight with anger and going round in thoughts of fear and lack.
They say to move your body when you feel this way, to get outside. Functional freeze — I’ve heard it called.
What do you do when you’re so distraught that you feel unable to even get out the door?
Scream in that pillow. That’s what you do.
You scream in that pillow as loud as you can, as long as you can, as many times as you can.
I remember once during this saga of ever deepening emotion, while undertaking new breeds of grief, after a physical altercation in which I had been rushed and pushed against a wall — threatened by something big with sharp corners — I screamed my fucking guts out twelve times in a row. Taking big gulping breaths between rounds. Consciously choosing to release as much as I possibly could, because the anger I felt inside was just too much.
After those screams I remember crying on the bathroom floor for about twenty minutes. I had collapsed there after going to get some tissues and seeing my mascara wrecked face in the mirror.
At the end of it all. I was laughing. Softly, through my tears with a gentle smile. I was thanking the fucking lord. I’d never let so much go all at once. It was days after the incident that I’d finally come home from work and screamed in that pillow.
Since then, this has become a practice for me.
Most often its something I do in the car. Which is extra fun because I have to disregard the fact that I’m a giant trans woman with big hair in a little sedan without tinted windows.
Fuck it though. You gotta do what you gotta do.
I try to plan it when I’m on the way home, rather than going somewhere. Because the truth is, beneath my anger and tightness — the stuff I so need to scream out — is just a bunch of sadness. Deep down I’m just hurting, always, and tears follow in short order. Sometimes coming before the screaming is even done.
Thank god for tears though. Truly.
The greatest of gifts we have to purge and heal ourselves with water from within, stowed emotions flowing without, becoming seen and existing in the physical.
Water’s Flow
I’m a water metaphor junkie. I’d blame the Cancer stellium in my astrological birth chart. But really I’m just a softy.
Regardless, I love the idea of finding flow with life.
Trusting currents, riding rapids, enjoying quiet moments, enduring whirlpools, flexible and graceful, powerful and enduring.
To wield these powers within us is a wonder. The human body is made mostly of water. We all know that, but it’s hard to really quantify and integrate. We are water, by and large.
There’s something magic in that. In this earth so saturated with it.
It’s our source of life — the healing waters of earth — oceans powerful, rains beautiful, lakes peaceful, and rivers graceful.
We scream our own ocean storms, making our thunder, raining the tears of what we hold within us, so it can flow and become apart of the earth once more.
Our great mother earth is always within us — great keeper of wisdom.
She shows the way.
