but Facebook might be woefully misinformed. I dropped it at the beginning of my transition period, when my egg was fully falling out around me, so to speak, and so the legal business of at least one ill-advised billionaire does not know that I am anything but cis. It could piece the facts together, taking data from many websites to create a single whole "truth" about my person, but facts will never add up to being a person; they will only add up to being more facts.
The real truth is that my facebook page for many years existed only as a gravestone: Here Lies The Person I Did Not Want To Be, the person who dated a girl who hated the idea of being gay, the person who acted like a fool because it was the only shoe that fit her size twelve and a half feet. Incomplete data is the mausoleum that houses trans ghosts, the ones that are very real because they have already died outside of the fragile Web and the ones that think themselves to be fake because death, like everything else, is a form of method acting that only gets harder the more you do it. Like so many others I stepped off of that website, where my family members dryly soaked themselves in misinformation and contempt, and onto the Web of Strangers that existed outside of it. Leaving a social circle is yet another form of death, a death that I have died many times, if only for the sake of seeing someone new that doesn't already know everything I already know about myself.
On each new Social Network I step bravely into the unknown with my heart in my hands and begin the process of dying again, more slowly each time, as the appeal fades and I realize that I have to build yet another mausoleum to the regrets of my current self. On that server it gets to live forever, and the tyrants who think themselves webmasters sit in that graveyard and dig up each and every stone looking for new gems: A hint of someone's interests, a pattern in a human's data, and they ship it off to the pawn shop of The Companies that feast on it like rabid dogs. My Facebook tombstone has already been lifted out of the freshly upturned soil and sold to the highest bidder, and I suspect that the tombstone I'm writing for Google is having pieces chipped off before I've even had the chance to mark them. My mausoleums are being torn down. My ghosts are being disturbed.
When my husband is forced by an invisible hand to watch an ad for period pads where a woman with a fat ass sells him on the idea of comfort by rolling around naked in a bed that is larger than one he will ever own, and the dysphoria fills the room like electricity, I like to think of the internet as a train— an electric eel riding the third rail of self-loathing that comes from only knowing a person as a name and a place, a data point in a data sheet, like a tarot card reading for your least favorite dead family member. Scrolling down a list of Names and Places and Words has become tantamount to diving headfirst off a cliff, because I don't know if you've noticed but when we talk about having children someone tries to sell me baby formula and when we talk about needing a new car somebody tries to sell me on a pickup truck and I have no idea who heard that conversation or how much money they made by selling me out but I sincerely hope it's worth it.
There is a sense of accomplishment that comes from knowing I'm worth something to someone and a deeper sense of hatred that I hold towards the places and spaces that claim to be all about me, the reading-between-the-lines that places my identity at the forefront of my identity; the knowledge that Target is selling my soul in the form of a pride pin for $5.99, but only for one month, and only while the buzz still lasts. The flag that is supposed to represent me is already a symbol for colonialism in another country that I will never visit because Google tells me that it's not safe for People Like Me, and that search is logged to be used to sell me vacation plans in a few years when I don't expect the urge to creep up on me. I am a tourist in my own ocean. I am a pollutant. To so many people and places and websites I am a pile of junk, a label that can spread to other human beings like an infectious disease, a machine with no owners manual because I can only be owned by people who have never seen my face. And I will still go to that pride parade where they are selling Target's pride pins for less than $5.99 because I don't know what else I am supposed to do, and I look out on the conquering flags of the people who outlived the revolution they were supposed to be a part of, who have nothing to do and nowhere to go, who sit and rot on the internet like all too much mold on the inside of a house that no one lives in. The rent is too high.
The unbearable Waiting dominates everything. It dominates me, when I am awake in the cold hours of the night and realize that I will never really be somebody else, and that my ghosts are all a part of me anyway. I scroll down the dashboard of my phone, of every website where I haven't died, and wonder if there was a time before I was born when people were able to do things that didn't involve selling yourself out to other people. I take down my pride flag because it makes me feel like a new kind of liar and stare at a pride parade through the window of a hotel because the noise is too much to ever be a space where I can belong. And all the while I am being sold; my body is sold and my mind is sold and my data is sold and all the while there is this sinking lurching puking wretched feeling that I can never escape from (no matter how many pride parades I go to) that tells me that something is Wrong with the world that I live in, and no amount of Waiting is ever going to fix it, and I become sick with the possibility that there are changes I still have to make now that I am older and colder and more kind to myself. Why not be something fundamentally un-artificial? Why not chase away the promise of acceptance through acceptability and make myself unacceptable? I will lose my way again, but that is only another opportunity to find it. I can create new pride parades. I can do something that isn't a parade, where the cops can't find us and there's nothing between us and the thin white walls to prevent us from talking about what really matters. You don't need a permit to live, but you should really need a permit to sell somebody's life story away for a penny. If I could sell myself on my own time it wouldn't feel quite as cheap.
Again I cut myself off, plant flowers on my graves, and move onto somewhere new. I haunt other people's graveyards. I move back into my mausoleums and redecorate just to get a kick out of it. I try to find a place where I can live a real life. And someday, with a bit of luck, my ghosts and I will find a resting place that's more than hard stones and cold soil.