Haruki Murakami made me a girl

Or: The Empathetic Power of Narratives

I get that’s an out there title. Stay with me. Find out why in my rambling coming out letter to my psychiatrist, I described Creta Cano’s relationship to pain from The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

Several years ago, I was curious to try running. It was my late dad’s favorite exercise, and I didn’t like the idea of getting muscles. The internet told me to read Born to Run, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Long story short, I do run recreationally. I wear real shoes instead of going barefoot. I still got some gnarly foot leather going on, but Microplane makes a great little rasp to grate it off. It’s gross.

And because I liked Murakami’s meditations on why he runs, I read the novel Norwegian Wood, and then moved on to his more oddball modern fantasy/scifi/experimental works, like A Wild Sheep’s Chase, Dance Dance Dance, and Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World.

I soon began to relate with a theme of Murakami’s protagonists. They all, at least emotionally, lived in a detached, dreamlike state. Things that should have bothered them felt far away, they didn’t understand their feelings, the world behaved in strange and arbitrary ways that just felt blasé.

My dissociation/depersonalization/whatever was never truly complete, but it was enough to make life feel empty, and cause a major depressive episode in college.

I realized the protagonist from Dance Dance Dance and I were basically the same emotionally, and the character was designed to embody passivity. At times, I found the book funny, as he’d get a lead in a mystery he was trying to solve, and then spend the next day playing Ms. Pac Man and taking naps. It was funny as a subversion of your typical mystery plot structuring, and also funny because it was far too familiar to me, and how I connected to life. When it became obvious I was like that, though, I was so angry, at the circumstances that made me this way, and at myself.

I’d certainly read plenty on mood disorders. I found psychology interesting, and took several electives on it when I was stuck in community college. But being a bit on the spectrum and having few friends, actually understanding and describing feelings (empathy), was hard. But reading gave me narratives to explain feelings, rather than simple labels for things I may not even have experienced.

I took this as a reason to start pulling threads as to what makes me feel, other than the nasty emotions that dominated how people knew me. Yes, I could get annoyed, but that wasn’t much of a feeling. But sometimes I could feel envy, or longing. Sometimes over material goods and comforts, but that’s just capitalism. What was more out there? What was my motivations?

I first saw a “HRT timeline,” these galleries trans women make to show how much hormones fixed their bodies over time, when I was surfing the web during my depression. It was on a site that archived copypasta images people post to 4chan, if I recall. She was a brunette, first a sad, fat, kinda beardy guy, then a happy, nerdy looking girl. I felt such longing.

That’s a lead. Let’s look at that. I realized HRT timelines gave me more longing than anything else that follows that “before and after” format, like people who got in shape, or people who lost a lot of weight. And I began to feel despair imagining myself never transitioning, to die as an old man.

The final bit of confirmation came when I decided to shave my legs. Yes, that’s a cultural practice rather than a sex characteristic, but it was easy, and nearly every woman I had met shaved her legs.

That day, I looked down, saw my own legs for the very first time since middle school, and went for one of the best runs in my life.

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