[15] Tournelle du Soleil (Patreon)

CW - today's instalment mentions body image, disordered eating, transition

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

• 15 May 2023 • Day 1 at Cirque IHQ: First Fitting, continued •

I look exactly like what I’m expecting to look like: like a muscular body wrapped up in a thin, revealing one-piece swimsuit.

My thighs are thick with muscle that’s starting to show new definition with all the ballet training I’ve been fitting into my schedule. My stomach is flat –something I used to be self-conscious about the absence of before starting testosterone– and my waist is thick from all the obliques that straps training has built. My chest and shoulders are broad, and below them my arms and wrists are thick and roped with muscle, too.

I look the way I want to look.

Simultaneously, I’m not sure I do.

Having top surgery and starting testosterone were catalysts in finally not feeling a mentally consuming fixation on controlling my body, trying to make it look a certain way. Over the last year I leaned into how good it felt to build muscle. I noticed how much better my body felt when I built muscle, ate in a way to build that muscle, trained in a way to build that muscle. I let my body take up space. I stopped trying to make it smaller, finer, slimmer.

Before this, I went through uncountable cycles of restricting my diet: trying to be leaner; never succeeding no matter what cardio I did or how few carbs I ate. Wishing that I looked like people who went through puberty already in elite athletic condition and then just … stayed there, as their stasis, their set-point.

Surgery and hormones haven't been a magic solution to the above: new body insecurities found their way to me, this time taking on the shape of the things I've heard cis men in my life saying about the aesthetic pressures they feel, the things that I've seen produced and re-produced by the media towards men. 

But I'm better than I was.

Or maybe it's just that the new insecurities feel like a mental break from the old ones.

Who knows.

I stand as still while Anton and Genevieve discuss whether or not some pieces of the mesh need to move or not. They both kneel down eye level with my hips and start dissecting the details of the silver appliqués there.

Great.

My eyes follow their hands at work and then – Oh.

I stiffen a little and I take little sips of air through my nose.

Why.

WHY.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil arrives tomorrow at 7am EST / 1pm CEST! Until then, stay strange & wonderful - XO ess