David Davis

body scan: mental illness, sunglasses, and butterflies

Body scan

Brain: For my last body scan, I wrote about giving up my daily weed habit of many years. I felt as if I was beginning a new chapter. Now I’m not so sure.

My diagnoses of various mental health disorders began in my childhood, so this bad brain stuff isn’t new to me. But last year, it took a new shape with panic attacks that tend to cluster across stretches of weeks or even months at a time; once I have one, I must be careful for the next fortnight, as my baseline anxiety is heightened and my triggers are more sensitive. Since then, air travel—already dreadful, as veterans of the trans-induced pat-down are well aware—has begun to generate its own panic zone, this intense irritability, paranoia, and terror that manifests as a racing heart, the urgent need to urinate (that is, a hyper-awareness of my bladder and genitalia in one of the locations where it’s most stressful to safely access the bathroom), akathisia, derealization, the fear of imminent death (paired, absurdly enough, with suicidal ideation), and a unique strain of dysphoria that makes me feel like Gregor Samsa.

While these acute symptoms define the panic attack itself, its attendant zone can begin days before and end days after my flight, which means my regular anxiety also spikes, intensifying my day-to-day hypochondria and germaphobia, insomnia, suspicion that everyone around me is trying to rape or kill me, blah blah blah—that is, everything I used to manage pretty well with weed since testosterone gave me a reason to live¹. Last week, when Jade and I flew together for the first time since early 2023, the contrast was obvious to both of us.

Jade used to joke that I was never allowed to stop smoking weed or doing yoga, as both, along with my pain practice², have kept the bugs out of my walls for many years at this point. I was proud of my first non-white-knuckling attempt at life without cannabis, as if this highlighted all of the work I’ve done to feel my emotions, regulate my nervous system, and stay in touch with reality. But of course, these things are hard for some people to do even in the best of circumstances—and the “best of circumstances” is still a cursed world in which my life happens to be one of the easiest.

I don’t crave weed in the least, but a couple months into this experiment, I am reconsidering it. This makes me feel very discouraged. But I don’t want to want to die. I don’t want to wonder if Jade, who has never so much as raised her voice to me since the day we met, secretly wants to kill me. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by my hatred of cis people and fear of men. The disadvantages of staying high being as minor as they are compared to these specters, the choice seems easy enough.

But there is something in me that still resists it. Whatever that is—pigheadedness, a problematic desire for the “cleanliness” of sobriety, the self-harming instinct that has always been there since I was just a little redacted—I’m letting it stay my hand for now. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Eyes: From April to October, I never go into the sunshine without my sunglasses. When I started hormones, I no longer needed the sensory-numbing accoutrements that I relied on to leave my apartment for so many years: baseball cap, headphones, all-weather dysphoria sweatshirt. But the sunglasses stayed, like Roy Orbison, a big love of mine. When I was a kid, someone told me that Orbison had been blind, but that was just a rumor that began when he was forced to do a concert in his prescription sunglasses after he left his regular ones on a plane³. People dug the mysterious look so much that it became his signature.

When Jade and I arrived in Mexico, we made the forced but nonetheless sensational decision to rent a car. As she got behind the wheel, I quickly braved the midday glare to clean the lenses, squinting like a mole in the white-hot sunlight. My eyes were safely darkened again by the time she pulled out of the parking lot and onto the deserted jungle highway, where, under clouds of ponderous pale butterflies, I waited for my girlfriend, an excellent driver, to crash and kill us both in brutal repudiation for a moment’s inattention.

Forearms: For the first time in my life, I’m getting acne on my forearms. Not a lot, but even a little seems excessive when it’s never appeared before. I take finasteride to keep my hairline, which means even though I’m injecting 40-50 mg of testosterone cypionate every week, I don’t grow a lot of body hair and still get my period (the FTMs of Reddit refer to this as a nonbinary-style approach to transition).

I’m sure this new development has to do with my cycle—the symptoms of which have changed lot, now that I’m no longer on my factory settings—but I don’t track it, so I’m not sure which phase it correlates to. My boyfriend does track it, however, so I’ll have to ask him.

Belly: In the Yucatan Peninsula, those butterflies are everywhere, even the beach, levitating above the surf: white clouds, white wings, white foam, white sand. Though Jade and I apply sunblock more frequently than most—I set an hourly timer when we go to Riis—the water cooked the skin over my torso over the course of a poorly chosen half-hour. Just the front, not the back.

I think I’ve made this mistake every time I’ve gone swimming in a warm ocean, which isn’t that many times, but enough to know better⁴. Though the burn faded by the next morning, my skin did feel sensitive for a few days. I’ve always tanned easily. My dad used to say it’s because someone in our history was Serbian, a bizarrely specific source of shame for the racists on his side of the family.

Feet: I did it. After years of dithering, I bought my first pair of Crocs. They’re black, with sparkles, and they’re amazing. I don’t want to wear anything else, and for the past few weeks, I haven’t. I can’t wait to pair them with thick, cozy socks when the weather gets cold again.

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1. I have a Xanax prescription that I don’t like to use because boy oh boy is “habit forming” an understatement!

2. I think of masochism as part of a larger effort toward mindful embodiment, achieved through practices like yin, meditation, psychoanalysis, and being a person in a community.

3. I’ve worn mine at the movie theater when I had no other choice and it was actually so fine.

4. Actually, I think the Indian Ocean may be the exception.