Month: May 2020

My Body, My Identity, My Experiences

Lately, I have struggled to feel excited and comfortable with the idea and experience of being pregnant. I have felt like the more visibly pregnant I get, the more invisible my nonbinary identity becomes, both to myself and others.

Recently, someone in one of the online groups I am a part of stated something similar to what I have written below and it resonated a lot with me. I wanted to put these thoughts into words so I can remind myself of them as often as I need to in the upcoming months. Hopefully they will resonate with others as well.

I identify as nonbinary. Regardless of how society views me, I am the only one who gets to decide how I identify.

My body is my own. It is the body of a nonbinary person. Regardless of how society views my body, this means my body is a nonbinary body.

For me, the experience of being pregnant and gestating a child, something that my nonbinary body is able to do, is a nonbinary experience. I cannot separate these experiences from my own identity, nor should I have to.

For most people, being pregnant is a female experience because they are female. But for me, it is a nonbinary experience. For a trans man, it would be a male experience. Not all people who get pregnant are women and the ability to get pregnant is not required in order to be considered a woman.

If everything goes well, I will get to be a parent, a mother. For me, parenting will be a nonbinary experience. All the aspects of parenting that are typically associated with motherhood will be nonbinary experiences. Motherhood will be a nonbinary experience.

My ability to have these experiences does not diminish or negate my identity as a nonbinary person. Nor should my ability to have these experiences as a nonbinary person diminish anyone else’s identity as a woman.

No matter what society tells me, and even if all the people around me that relate to these experiences are women, my body is nonbinary because I am nonbinary, and therefore, my pregnancy is a nonbinary experience.

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In My Body

Note: Although this post is specifically about my experience of being pregnant, you might find what I talk about relates closely with other major life events such as health challenges, injuries, and aspects of transitioning. I hope you find it interesting, if not relevant to your own experiences.

Being pregnant is a weird experience. Everyone who is or has been pregnant experiences it differently, both physically and emotionally.

There are both positive and negative aspects to the process that we have to navigate. Some of the positive aspects can help offset the negative ones, but sometimes our only ways to cope with the negative ones also diminish the positive.

I am currently trying to deal with physical body pain as well as physical and social dysphoria while trying to stay present and experience the wonder of being pregnant.

Generally, the easiest way to cope with both physical pain and dysphoria are to distract myself, decrease my focus on my body. But that also takes my focus away from the internal changes related to being pregnant. This can make me feel like I’m missing out on the experience of being pregnant and decreases my ability to convince myself that the negative aspects are worth it for the sake of growing a human. Regardless, if the pain and/or dysphoria are bad enough, distracting myself from my body becomes a necessary survival tactic.

Most of the time, some amount of focus on the specific parts of my body that relate to the positive aspects of being pregnant actually helps offset the pain and dysphoria by making them feel worth it or at least by giving me something positive to focus on. These aspects include the expansion of my belly, the sensation of the baby moving, and knowledge about the baby’s growth and the changes in my own body.

So focusing on my body in specific ways can heighten my awareness of the positive aspects of pregnancy and offset the negative ones to some extent but too much focus on my body can actually cause the negative aspects and my awareness of them to get worse. This balance point is different every day and in different situations. For me, finding this balance point is an instinctual process.

Lots of prenatal programs encourage meditation, yoga, stretching, and breathing techniques, all of which require or encourage a certain amount of focus on or awareness of your body. Depending on where I need that balance point to be, these activities might do more harm than good for me at any given time.

Everyone’s strategies for managing the positive and negative aspects of pregnancy will be different. Some people may not even be aware they are using a strategy similar to mine. I only recently became aware that I was using this strategy myself. Some people may not be able to understand how this strategy works for me or why it is necessary no matter how much I try to explain it.

Our connection between our mind, body, and emotions is strange and complex. The more you understand how it works for you, the better you will be able to navigate these types of complex, conflicting, and life-changing experiences.

So far, I feel like I’m doing ok.

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