Needles by Charlie Klenk
“I chose death by a thousand paper cuts…”
Personal Essay by Charlie Klenk
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There used to be a moment before I walked into an unfamiliar room when gravity would increase on me, multiplying tenfold until my head drooped like a wilted flower and my stomach made a new home for itself somewhere around my knees. Each footfall forward felt Herculean, fighting against my instincts to run, cut my losses and start over in a mythical somewhere that doesn’t have a concept of gender or transness. The best I could hope for in a new space was to be unnoticed, a shade that passed between conversations and assignments, flower petals ripped off only because someone failed to realize I was in their path. The blow was not deliberate and so I couldn’t be angry with them for it; for this classroom, I chose death by a thousand paper cuts and so the best I could hope for was to have class finish before I bled out.
There are choices other people can make, ones that have their own exquisite tortures; my fiancé, with a loud voice and a moonshine bottle full up of pride in place of his spine, announces himself and confirms their suspicions before they’ve even started forming in people’s heads. This way he languishes on his throne in the bright, white-hot pyre of their thoughts, their opinions: choosing to set himself on fire rather than hand them the matches and wait. The fact that they may not choose to use them is irrelevant.
I knew a girl who once danced in a darkened bar with me, hands fluttering through the air in excitement when a good-looking art major asked to buy her a drink. Her hands fluttered again, desperate for something to clench onto through her agony when he broke her jaw for not announcing herself immediately to him. She hadn’t given him the requisite warning, you see, so that he could save himself the embarrassment of being attracted to her in front of his friends. The night ended in ambulance sirens and a police statement and declining to press charges because after all: it was her mistake. Even after her bones were wired back into place, she couldn’t shake the torture she’d let him choose for her. I forgot what her voice sounded like.
When I was sixteen, my mouth stopped working. My jaw, actually. Perhaps a foreshadowing of that night in the bar. In the middle of a quiz in history class, sitting in one of those temporary trailers the school swears it’ll replace with actual classroom buildings any day now, I realized I couldn’t open my mouth more than a few centimeters. This was before I realized I was transgender, when the feeling of something not being quite right was chalked up to teenage angst and a shitty high school relationship. Looking back with what I know now, I wonder if it was my transness that did it; if I had committed to my chosen form of torture so hard that I made my body lock up, my mouth seal shut, before I even knew I was torturing myself. After all, five surgeries, physical therapy, an untold number of drugs, and a grandfatherly relationship with my surgeon later, they still never found the cause of it.
My testosterone injection goes in my left thigh, my left hand gripping a handful of the muscle there and pinching it up so I can slip a needle beneath the skin with my right. I used to be afraid of needles – I was the patient getting my blood drawn who needed that table they put across your lap in order to stay sitting upright. They made me sit there for twenty minutes until they were sure I wasn’t going to faint before they’d let me get up and leave their den of glinting silver and vials of blood. I remember gripping the edges of that table tight as my world spun and my heart hammered in my chest and I struggled not to vomit at the notion of something foreign inside of me, resting in a space I did not want it in. It was never about the pain; it was about putting something inside of me, feeling the needle poking my veins with such acute discomfort that my entire being rejected it.
Whenever I would sit in the prep ward before surgery and they would approach to put my IV in, I had to turn my head and listen to the heart monitor as it rocketed out of control. IVs were even worse than shots; the needle leaves your body, but the tube remains in your veins, a portal through which they can dump all the chemicals and medicines that let you forget every single part of the procedure. Every twitch of my body that jostled my arm reminded me that there was something inside that didn’t belong there. The nurses always used my right arm, the arm they could easily reach over the rails of the hospital bed.
My testosterone injection goes in my left thigh and there’s nothing like having to give yourself your own shot to desensitize you to it. I’ve been doing it for years now.
I put a tattoo around the injection site. It was coincidence- there was already a tattoo on my right thigh and the piece I wanted was large enough to stretch from my stomach to my knee. Only when it was finished did I realize what I had done: pinching the flesh there, I came up with a handful of swirling black and red ink. Somehow my fear came back. I switched legs, found a place where I wasn’t holding the smaller tattoo on my right thigh, and gave myself the injection with shaking hands. I don’t usually bleed from my shots, the gauge of the needle I use too small to draw blood up to the surface, but I bled when I made the switch. My thighs matched then, black and red swirling over the flesh until I pressed the alcohol pad down on the blood and tried not think about how I felt like I’d betrayed myself.
There used to be a time where I wanted to pass through the world without a sound. Death by a thousand paper cuts; my surgeon grandfather calls me a brave girl when describing my case to his colleague. My parents trip over my pronouns like I’ve placed speed bumps in their paths, little annoyances to our relationship they try to pretend don’t bother them. The lady at the checkout counter calls me ma’am even as I stand in front of her chanting “please think I’m a boy, please think I’m a boy,” to myself. I’m not a boy, but it is so much better to be thought of as one than it is to be a girl. It feels like I could hang a neon sign around my neck that says “boy” in flashing letters and still be mistaken for the thing I’d hoped to leave behind long ago.
I got my first tattoo the year I started my testosterone, eighteen and desperate for some control over the body that I hated and that seemed to hate me back. All transgender people have a complicated relationship with their body. I’ve not yet come to the self-love that others seem to have struck upon. At best, my body is a beast I’ve managed to slightly tame through that most hated of ways: needles underneath my skin, pushing ink and hormones where they belong. When my self-hate is at its worst and I want to claw at my arms and legs until they weep, I can look at the pictures I’ve chosen for myself and find at least one thing to like about my body.
My testosterone injection goes in my right thigh and I feel as though I am one big needle, a walking hated thing that worms its way under the fingernails of everyone around me. A painful annoyance, foreign and rejected, wielded by an unseen hand that saw fit to make me like this. I could weaponize myself like my fiancé does, wield my otherness like a shield and sword all in one, protect myself from even those who wished to do me no harm. I could let them snap my needle as that girl did, let that sharp point clatter away and leave me with no edges, nothing to bother the people around me with at all.
Death by a thousand needle marks, tracks running over my skin until I’m one big bloody mess, a swirl of black ink and blood that bubbles to the surface of my wounds whenever I mention my pronouns.
I can open my mouth now, even if it hurts sometimes. I control the needle. I guide it into my skin once every two weeks. I push foreign things into my body and try to make them feel like home, the way I push my foreign self into the world and try to make it somewhere I belong. I don’t always succeed. I look at the pictures on my skin and find some things to like about myself there, and sometimes that has to be enough to bandage up my cuts and soothe the pain. I’ll let you know if I learn how to stop torturing myself.
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Header image courtesy of Constantinos Chaidalis. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
Charlie Klenk (they/them) is a first year MFA student at the University of Central Florida, looking to write about topics dear to the transgender community. They live in Orlando with their fiancé and their fat cat.
Learn more at at their website, here.