I think at this point in my life, I can safely say that I owe most of my coping mechanisms to the vast amounts of fantasy fiction that I’ve read. Cartesian dualism has been an integral part of the way in which I built my world, and up until this point has been the only way in which I know how to reconcile what happens inside of my head and what happens in the outside world.

This divide is one that has affected much more than my gender, but I strongly believe that my struggle with gender identity has been fundamental in the construction of my worldview and divide of the physical and mental. I have just recently found that the identity label genderqueer fits me best, but feel as though the way in which I understand my identity is not only enforcing of the gender binary, but of the separation of mind and body. Though my gender is more complex than anything I can encapsulate in words, the simplest way that I can explain it is that I possess mental traits typically ascribed to women and am comfortable in a DMAB body with a slightly masculine-leaning gender expression. Though I have just found the words to express this, the feeling has been with me for as long as I can remember.

In this divide, I have established an arbitrary hierarchy between my mind and body that works for me. It is when this hierarchy is disrupted by outside forces that the delicate balance that I’ve established to keep myself sane is threatened.

Recently, self-esteem issues have begun to take a toll on my mental health. My self-esteem is built on a twisted belief that if others believe that I am attractive, smart, funny, or any other variety of positive traits, I can navigate the world and interact with others as a person who is all of these things, even if I don’t believe them myself. Here is where a sharp divide between my body and mind has formed and only grown stronger over the years. I have adorned myself in clothing and changed my appearance so that I am continually perceived as attractive and agreeable to others in order to keep my self-esteem intact rather than addressing my self-esteem issues themselves.

Essentially, I have prioritized the needs of my body over the needs of my mind in order to avoid addressing my mental health needs. It is here where I reside, here where I live in this fictional reality where I present myself as confident, outgoing, charming, and admittedly obnoxious, bitchy, and cold. Who I actually am, though, is still a mystery to even me.

Mind over matter is a mantra that many subscribe to, and it is one that up until writing this blog post, I believed I was a avid practitioner of. My ability to control my bladder, bowels, appetite, sleep, and negotiate with my body in a strange reward system for completing tasks is something that I have secretly prided myself in and practiced since childhood. It was my own personal form of magic, my way to identify with the characters in the narratives that I read who could control the world around them. Instead of controlling the world around me, I was controlling my body in ways that I thought made me unique.

In deconstructing this and other ways in which my mind and body interact, it seems as though my body is the more powerful of myself. What I experience physically through my body is the only way that I am informed of who and what I am mentally. I have never thought of my body as an active part of myself, always assuming the self to be composed of the active mind and the passive body, but my re-imagining of the mind and body as coextensive because of the content of this course has cause me to reevaluate everything I know about who I am.