What I Make My Self

Marie Skinner, First Place

My path to self-discovery has been

a subtractive process: cutting away to reveal something already there rather than building up from a bare framework.

When I was very young—let’s say four or five years old because it was before my family moved into the yellow house with the giant maple tree in the front yard, but after the tiny apartment with cut-out bricks—I went to a church and colored with brittle crayons that snapped in my hands until they were unwieldy stubs that made me color out of the lines. One girl claimed she had a baby sister who pronounced “yellow” as “lello,” and “pink” as “bink.” I thought the girl, whose dress was prettier than mine and who had her very own purse (into which I suspect many of the crayons had vanished), was a liar. That girl tried to keep every color away from me except brown, so perhaps therein lies the seed of my mistrust. After coloring, we moved hard plastic chairs over the wooden floors into a circle and the stranger who had been tasked with tending us began to teach us a song. Somehow, I knew the song! I was so surprised that I knew it, and I was incredibly proud. The teacher taught us another, and I knew it even better than the first. The teacher let me show the class the actions that went along with the song.

When my mother came to collect me, I was lost in a haze of self-satisfaction and awe. How did I know that I’m a child of God? How did I know that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam? But know it I did. It’s not a mystery now why I knew, but at the time, being in an unfamiliar context made it impossible for me to connect cause and effect, and I internalized how good it felt to know the answers. From that point on, I lost sight of any other way of being. “I” was the girl with the answers, and since the first of those wonderful, fulfilling answers was about my relationship to God, that’s who I was, too. A child of God, 110%. At least on Sunday, when anyone was asking questions to which I already knew the answers.

The answers kept coming, and “I” kept expanding. But all that was additive. New friends, new interests, new knowledge. New mistakes, new hang-ups, new heartbreaks. It’s what I do or have done, not what I am. To discover self is to chip away everything extra, like carving a block of marble and discovering the sculpture inside. Discovering that, discovering myself in all the

noise, has required a constant effort to cut away what seems essential in order to discover that it isn’t. Examples will help me say this more clearly. Religion was the most significant contributor to my sense of who I was. Until it wasn’t. My friends—every day, all day. Until they weren’t. My relationships, my interests, my music tastes, my sense of style, my hair, my hair, my hair, and my hair once again. I may seem like an entirely different person to others, but to myself, I feel the same. The sculpture inside, my self, has not changed. That much cutting away should be painful—it should leave a mark, shouldn’t it?

Some summers ago, at 33 years old and one year after the birth of my third child, I treated myself to a laparoscopic tubal ligation. Extreme self-care. An explanation is in order. My first homebirth, though difficult, was empowering. My second, more difficult, was gratifying. My third was my catabasis, my trip into the underworld. I held the plea to be taken to the hospital between my teeth for hours and through dozens of agonizing contractions. And what the midwife did to help us was more excruciating than I thought anything could be. Three natural births, with a total of over 60 hours of labor, and the last fifteen minutes was beyond my imagination. Words of capitulation nearly struggled free a dozen times before my son, blue and gray and smeared with bright blood, finally did. That was my anabasis, the return from whence there should have been none.

So the surgery that summer was certainly self-care.

Before surgery, my doctor—who was also my surgeon—warned me that the procedure is considered irreversible. Fine. Good. That’s the point. No more birth-control mishaps. No more torture through reproduction (I’d love to use a little Latin here, but it looks like a dirty joke if I do). Don’t think this is about my children, who are wonderful and beautiful and brave and smell so good that to hug them is to mainline oxytocin. It’s not about them. It’s just me. I am too selfish to provide my youngest, who is far younger than his siblings, with his own Irish twin.

My doctor and surgeon warned me that sometimes people need counseling after having themselves sterilized. We both laughed a little at the idea that I might be one of those people. I was certain, and she knew it. I didn’t save the pamphlet she gave me.

The surgery went well. I woke up with two thin incisions—stitched and taped. My mind was up with the wispy clouds. Something rhythmically squeezed one leg, then the other to keep blood clots from forming. It was uncomfortable for me to let others take care of me for a few hours—it didn’t seem like I deserved it. That still comes back to haunt me sometimes.

Sometime after I got home with the worst cramps of my life outside of childbirth and the tail end of a drugged stupor that made me say sappy things to people I usually avoid speaking to (the fam, but not my fam), I started feeling like a fraud. It was the dresses and skirts I was

supposed to wear to avoid any pressure or waistbands on the incisions—they weren’t for me anymore.

After surgery, I bought clothes and shoes exclusively from the men’s section. My hair was still growing out from a solidarity buzz-cut (mom got cancer again), but instead of the pale pink or lavender I loved before surgery, I had to cover it with sky blue or leave it platinum. I had to. And if it had been longer? Cut it. No choice. Feminine wasn’t for me.

My world became a ridiculous, hyperfocused nightmare. I hated how I looked. I couldn’t stand the idea of others seeing me. My daughter told me I should wear nicer clothes so I could be pretty again, and my oldest son asked me why I always wore his dad’s shirts. Well, they were my shirts, kiddo, and I’m not “pretty,” even in a dress and heels, sweetheart.

But the innocent criticism wasn’t easy to dismiss.

I didn’t, and still don’t, have regrets about the surgery, so I couldn’t understand the sudden changes in how I perceived myself. I no longer felt comfortable being perceived as female. Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t trying to make anyone think I was male, either. In my mind, I think I was rightly neither gender, but not specifically non-binary. But in what sane world is, “I wear dresses,” intrinsically bound to, “I am a fertile female?” None. The world, as insane as it has become, is not quite that insane, and I didn’t think I was that crazy, either. My mind was recognizing a fundamental shift in functional sex that couldn’t correlate with a similar shift in gender role. I can’t be “not as female as before,” though by some measures, I guess I am. I’ve come to terms with the irrationality and found ways to cope with it, but questions about pronouns are still aggravating because they remind me how much I don’t want my gender to be a part of my identity. My zoom tag solution: rather than (she/her) or (they/them) after my name, I put (any), though it took me years to figure that out.

In 1881, Edgar Degas caused an uproar in Paris with his only publicly exhibited sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. She is a bronze cast of a wax sculpture—additive, built from nothing, opposed to subtractive, like carved marble. But she is unique—she is clothed. I don’t mean she’s depicted wearing bronze clothing, I mean she is wearing actual cloth. I don’t know what art historians and scholars say about the reason she so upset Paris, other than that she is supposedly “ugly,” but I suspect it has a lot to do with her dress.

Since Little Dancer is wearing cloth, she can be unclothed. She would then be naked, but not nude—a distinction in art that I understand revolves around the figure’s consciousness of, and comfort with, an unclothed state.

I’ve been told that ballet dancers in Paris at the time were usually poor and pretty. They were derided, called “opera rats.” Because of their humble origins and low social status, they were vulnerable girls who were often preyed upon by older men with some measure of wealth. “Protectors,” they are sometimes

called, though I suspect the dancers called them something very different. Little Dancer’s dress, then, is a graphic reminder of her status and her vulnerability. No wonder Paris was uncomfortable to see her. But as useless as her dress is at protecting her, she herself is made of bronze. She’s impervious. Perhaps that’s what outraged Paris. We’ve lost the cultural literacy to emotionally experience the sculpture as it was received at the time it was first unveiled, but she is still useful, and she is still stunning.

Little Dancer suggests to me that even if I chisel too deep and remove something that should rightly be part of my sculpture of self, that just means it’s no longer part of the unalterable symbol I identify as self. Dancer isn’t her dress. She isn’t forever a ballet rat, though I imagine the model would have answered, “Who are you?” with, “I am a dancer,” when she was posing for Degas. Perhaps her sculpture should have cast her dress in bronze, but would Paris have talked about her that way? Would we remember the only sculpture a painter of ballet dancers ever showed the public if she and her dress were impenetrable? So, when I chisel too much, if I cut too deeply, do I change myself, or do I reveal something that changes my understanding of self?

After 33 years, I finally found something that was close enough to “self” and “I” that the foundations quaked when I cut it away. And I hate it. Why is my ability to reproduce more important to my sense of self than religion was? Why is it more important than the things I’ve been passionate about and given up by force or by choice? No matter how much I’ve lost or how much I seem to change, I’m certain it takes more than that to alter who and what I really am. I don’t know what that means, except that I am the only common thread in my own life, and deep down, I’ve never changed. Maybe I can’t change until that thread is cut, and the distinction of me and not me is too rigid. Maybe those categories don’t really exist at all. I’ve always had more questions than answers, even when I thought I had a full complement of mated pairs, but maybe questions themselves aren’t any simpler than gender or identity.