Vivienne Andersen - I Don’t Have To

 

So, it's like one of those old war movies, where the grizzled old sergeant is walking through the forest, and he stops, and he looks at his men and he says, "It's too quiet." Except I am in sixth grade, and I have just come home from school, and walked into my house. And it is indeed too quiet. Like, my dog is not running up to me throwing that little party that your dog throws for you. [audience laughter] Even my refrigerator is like, "Dude, it's getting warm in here, but I am not going to click on and draw attention to me." [audience laughter] 

 

So, I know something's wrong, and I don't know what it is, and I drop my bag and I head straight for the kitchen. Because if I am about to meet my doom, I am going to have a snack first. [audience laughter] I get to the kitchen, I open up the refrigerator, and I pull out the milk and I am about to take a swig right out of the container. I see out of the corner of my eye, I see my mother sitting at our dining room table. She is sitting perfectly still, perfectly silently, like this big black widow spider just waiting for her favorite prey to come home. [audience chuckles] And spread out in front of her is the contents of my stash. [audience chuckles] 

 

Not my drugs, but the things that make me feel most okay about myself and about living in this world. There are my bras and my panties and my nylons and my skirts and my tops. And just as I make eye contact with my mother, all eight of them, [audience laughter] she starts, "What the hell's the matter with you? What kind of a faggot are you? I'm going to take you to a therapist and he's going to fix you. You're a real son of a [beep] You know that?" That one was always my personal favorite, because technically, I couldn't argue. [audience laughter]

 

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last time that I would endure one of these sessions. And they could go on for hours. And the way I would make it through was I made myself a promise. I promised that as soon as I could, as soon as I turned 18 and I could get out of the house, I would do it and I would go and I would have the sex change operation that I so desperately needed, and I would never look back. As long as I could make that promise to myself, I had hope. That was sixth grade.

 

Seventh grade, two important things happened to me. The first was that I sprouted from about five foot nothing up to about six feet tall. The other thing that happened was my voice dropped. It went from being like happy little kid voice to being somewhere between James Earl Jones and Barry White. [audience laughter] Now, when Barry White's voice comes out of a 14-year-old white boy's body, people tend to notice. [audience chuckles] And they tend to like it. 

 

I mean, I had a girlfriend in high school, who referred to me as having a pure sex voice. [audience chuckles] Later still, when I became a pastor and I would start preaching on Sunday mornings, “Yeah, baby. [audience laughter] Jesus going to love you just right.” [audience laughter] Unfortunately for me, towards the end of my seventh-grade year, I realized that at just over six feet tall and with Barry White's voice, that there was no group of women anywhere on the planet that would accept me as one of their own. I also realized that I had zero chance of ever walking into a ladies' room without being hit with purses and shrieks of terror. As soon as I had that realization, I no longer had hope, which brings me to act 3.

 

When the curtain goes up on act 3, it finds me sitting alone in my bedroom after school. I am surrounded by the contents of my stash, and I have an X-ACTO knife in one hand, and an upturned wrist, and I am crying. I am crying big embarrassing sobs, just tears running down my cheeks, because I don't want to die. And that realization in that moment is perfect. Like, that is exactly what you want in that moment. I don't want to die, but at the same time, I did not know how to go on living. I knew that something had to change and I didn't know what it could be, I didn't know how to make that change. 

 

And I ended up in the next 20 minutes making a bargain with myself. And the bargain was this that only part of me was going to die that night. Only the best part of me. Only the part of me that people liked, only the part of me that contained joy, only the part of me that was feminine. She got bound up, and buried alive deep in the back of my mind where even the most dedicated therapist would never, ever find her. I wiped away the tears and I bucked up and I endured for almost 20 more years until one day when I realized that I could no longer keep up my side of the bargain that I had made with myself that day, and that I no longer had to. Be well, Milwaukee.