Liza Olson
Phantom Body Syndrome
It starts to hit around the time you get regularly, effortlessly she/her-ed without
even trying. When the laser’s done its job and the shadow isn’t visible and you can go a
few days without shaving and you no longer feel the need to put on concealer every time
you step outside. When you get ma’am-ed over the phone when you’re sure the voice is a
dead giveaway, remembering all the time you spent reading the Dune series out loud in
your brand new femme voice, trying on voice while reading about Voice, imagining
yourself as some Bene Gesserit picture of grace, remembering that Paul Atreides was
supposed to be a girl but his mother had other plans, decided on his AGAB in utero, she
had that power, but that’s just mothers, isn’t it?
It’ll make all the other moments stand out in your recollection: talking with your
mom over the phone, through text, in person, and her somehow finding a way to
misgender you or, failing that, say or ask something wildly inappropriate, put you on the
spot, make you explain yourself, make her feel comfortable with your existence. The
moments will add up like secondhand cigarettes out of windows on drives, a third of a
Coke can spilled out the window before she’d turn the engine over, light up. That one
funny time, as a kid, when you told her you know you’re a “boy” but that you feel more
like a girl most of the time. The fact that she still enrolled you in an all-boys Catholic
school after that.
You won’t want to be so bitter, so angry, so resigned. The hypochondriac had
cried wolf so many times over the years, especially when called out on her shit,
threatening cryptic diagnoses after blow-up fights, cancer as a comeback, that it was only
a matter of time before something finally caught up with her. Everyone’s gotta die of
something eventually.
You read of face dancers in Herbert’s sci-fi mythos, how easy it is for them to
completely change every part of their body, assume a new form, become someone new
entirely. But someone inevitably finds them out, traps them in a corner, cuts them down.
A shapeshifting time bomb is what they are.
Even your fucked-up fiction was overly optimistic, you realize when you’re in
gallows-mode. Your first novel’s protagonist came back to his hometown to make peace
with his estranged mother before she died of the cancer she’d always wanted, and it
wasn’t perfect, hardly a feel-good ending, but there was something, anything that wasn’t
this self-directed told-you-so, realizing that after all those years, all she changed about
herself was her restraint in saying what she really thought, that maybe the fuck-yous and
the shouted insults stopped, maybe she learned how to sprinkle some sugar over her
interactions, but there was nothing underneath. There was just nothing.
You can’t remember the term when it hits you, so you Google “ghost limb” and
hope the internet will throw you a bone. It does, and so you transplant the word, find the
exact feeling: phantom body syndrome. When you look at photos from before your
transition, you cannot recognize the person you see. You don’t look like a femme version
of your past self, you look like an entirely new woman. So why these phantom feelings
and thoughts, these glimmer-whispers of who you were, what you looked and felt like?
Self-loathing like a cough you can’t kick, taste of iron in the back of your throat. You’re
done. You did the thing. You reached the other side. So why these ghosts of a you that
never really was?
You find out about the heart attack through your little brothers, the clogged
arteries too, the impending bypass surgery. When you hear these things, you cannot
process them, or you won’t, so you go back to work, you write copy and you do a good
job and you finish one assignment, start another. You want to cry later, you think you
should cry, but the person you’d be preemptively grieving, you realize, isn’t an actual
person at all. Not your mother but the concept of a mother, the mother you could’ve had,
should’ve had, and even the novel you’re writing right now is an attempt to keep reality
at bay, look at the alternate paths a life can take, all the ways the here and now can be
made to be not here, not now. You want to cry. Maybe this is the way you cry.
In the universe of Dune, cycles occur and recur, history repeats again and again,
even when humanity is hardly recognizable anymore, off and into an unfathomable
future, a great Scattering. You want to forgive her. You want to give her another chance.
You’ve hurt people, you tell yourself. You remember that she was hurt by her mother, a
deep, unclosing wound she never got treatment for, so she cut you open instead, gave you
a matching hole so she wouldn’t feel so alone.
You don’t know if this is the end or just another end. You don’t know when
the pain will stop, the phantom rememberings, the dysphoria and feeling like you
need to prove something, to make something out of your existence, to be
exceptional. But maybe that’s just another trap. Maybe it’s enough to be a person, to
suture your wounds, not give any more to anyone else: to do no harm. Maybe it’s
okay to not be okay and to sit with that. Accept it. To breathe and watch as the ghost
passes you by, goes out and through the far wall.
It starts to hit around the time you get regularly, effortlessly she/her-ed without
even trying. When the laser’s done its job and the shadow isn’t visible and you can go a
few days without shaving and you no longer feel the need to put on concealer every time
you step outside. When you get ma’am-ed over the phone when you’re sure the voice is a
dead giveaway, remembering all the time you spent reading the Dune series out loud in
your brand new femme voice, trying on voice while reading about Voice, imagining
yourself as some Bene Gesserit picture of grace, remembering that Paul Atreides was
supposed to be a girl but his mother had other plans, decided on his AGAB in utero, she
had that power, but that’s just mothers, isn’t it?
It’ll make all the other moments stand out in your recollection: talking with your
mom over the phone, through text, in person, and her somehow finding a way to
misgender you or, failing that, say or ask something wildly inappropriate, put you on the
spot, make you explain yourself, make her feel comfortable with your existence. The
moments will add up like secondhand cigarettes out of windows on drives, a third of a
Coke can spilled out the window before she’d turn the engine over, light up. That one
funny time, as a kid, when you told her you know you’re a “boy” but that you feel more
like a girl most of the time. The fact that she still enrolled you in an all-boys Catholic
school after that.
You won’t want to be so bitter, so angry, so resigned. The hypochondriac had
cried wolf so many times over the years, especially when called out on her shit,
threatening cryptic diagnoses after blow-up fights, cancer as a comeback, that it was only
a matter of time before something finally caught up with her. Everyone’s gotta die of
something eventually.
You read of face dancers in Herbert’s sci-fi mythos, how easy it is for them to
completely change every part of their body, assume a new form, become someone new
entirely. But someone inevitably finds them out, traps them in a corner, cuts them down.
A shapeshifting time bomb is what they are.
Even your fucked-up fiction was overly optimistic, you realize when you’re in
gallows-mode. Your first novel’s protagonist came back to his hometown to make peace
with his estranged mother before she died of the cancer she’d always wanted, and it
wasn’t perfect, hardly a feel-good ending, but there was something, anything that wasn’t
this self-directed told-you-so, realizing that after all those years, all she changed about
herself was her restraint in saying what she really thought, that maybe the fuck-yous and
the shouted insults stopped, maybe she learned how to sprinkle some sugar over her
interactions, but there was nothing underneath. There was just nothing.
You can’t remember the term when it hits you, so you Google “ghost limb” and
hope the internet will throw you a bone. It does, and so you transplant the word, find the
exact feeling: phantom body syndrome. When you look at photos from before your
transition, you cannot recognize the person you see. You don’t look like a femme version
of your past self, you look like an entirely new woman. So why these phantom feelings
and thoughts, these glimmer-whispers of who you were, what you looked and felt like?
Self-loathing like a cough you can’t kick, taste of iron in the back of your throat. You’re
done. You did the thing. You reached the other side. So why these ghosts of a you that
never really was?
You find out about the heart attack through your little brothers, the clogged
arteries too, the impending bypass surgery. When you hear these things, you cannot
process them, or you won’t, so you go back to work, you write copy and you do a good
job and you finish one assignment, start another. You want to cry later, you think you
should cry, but the person you’d be preemptively grieving, you realize, isn’t an actual
person at all. Not your mother but the concept of a mother, the mother you could’ve had,
should’ve had, and even the novel you’re writing right now is an attempt to keep reality
at bay, look at the alternate paths a life can take, all the ways the here and now can be
made to be not here, not now. You want to cry. Maybe this is the way you cry.
In the universe of Dune, cycles occur and recur, history repeats again and again,
even when humanity is hardly recognizable anymore, off and into an unfathomable
future, a great Scattering. You want to forgive her. You want to give her another chance.
You’ve hurt people, you tell yourself. You remember that she was hurt by her mother, a
deep, unclosing wound she never got treatment for, so she cut you open instead, gave you
a matching hole so she wouldn’t feel so alone.
You don’t know if this is the end or just another end. You don’t know when
the pain will stop, the phantom rememberings, the dysphoria and feeling like you
need to prove something, to make something out of your existence, to be
exceptional. But maybe that’s just another trap. Maybe it’s enough to be a person, to
suture your wounds, not give any more to anyone else: to do no harm. Maybe it’s
okay to not be okay and to sit with that. Accept it. To breathe and watch as the ghost
passes you by, goes out and through the far wall.
--
Liza Olson is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow. A Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she's been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, and other fine places. One of her proudest achievements was getting to run (mac)ro(mic) for four incredible years.
Liza Olson is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow. A Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she's been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, and other fine places. One of her proudest achievements was getting to run (mac)ro(mic) for four incredible years.