bonebreak | HOW WOULD I BECOME

I am in mild pain most of the time. Sometimes, the pain becomes intense. These flare-ups can leave me unable to get out of bed even to refill a cup of water without difficulty. I get migraines, gastrointestinal pain, muscle and joint pain, especially around my neck and legs. My joints overextend themselves with ease. I am extremely flexible, but there is a cost. Diagnosis is slow and frustrating.

I am mildly anxious most of the time. Sometimes, that anxiety becomes intense. Sometimes, it is entirely irrational. These flare-ups can leave me bedbound, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe. I have imagined scenarios that are completely invented; I have experienced hallucination, meltdown, and verbal shutdowns. My diagnosis is complicated and I am not sure it is entirely correct.

I find leaving the house difficult. I find physical exertion difficult. I find these difficulties stifling and painful. I have been in my current job for just shy of two years, and it is the longest job I have ever managed to hold down. It’s part-time, so money is always tight. I am lucky to have a good support system. Even still, I find pretty much everything I do to be a challenge. I have sensory issues. I have difficulties socially. I don’t make the right faces, don’t make eye contact, have to sit down often and avoid crowds. I want to feel stronger; I want to look different. I know exercise would help, but exercise is so difficult I have to go slower than I would like.

When we imagine transformation, I think a lot of the time we are imagining a scenario that is painful while it happens, but which ultimately leaves us with a new, ‘functional’ body and altered but ‘functional’ mind. But I have wondered, many times, what my body would feel like if it were made canine. What it would be like to inhabit such an anxious and rigid mind within that body.

Anxious dogs are often reactive and considered aggressive. I think the same is true for me; I have been working on being friendlier, less short, and engaging more proactively. I think, however, that many people are put off by me for reasons they cannot pinpoint. I have been told I am aloof, I am unsettling, I am rude. I have been told these things during both interactions I had thought were positive and going well, and during interactions I could sense were ‘failing’. I imagine being in a canine body would be much the same; a dog who looks up at you from rolling whale-eyes; who cringes and growls when you reach out a hand to touch it; is not a dog considered ‘good’ or ‘friendly’.

The ways in which people respond to animals who attempt to establish boundaries with them always blows my mind. People who don’t like cats because they ‘don’t show love’; dog trainers who advise owners to ‘do the opposite of whatever the dog wants to show them who writes the rules’; people who complain about fish and bugs as pets because you ‘can’t handle them’. There is a level of entitlement towards animal bodies that I think parallels the entitlement I have experienced levelled at me in my trans, neurodivergent and aching human body. My mother, who complains I won’t let her touch me ‘even though’ she is my relative. Governmental restrictions on the changes I am ‘allowed’ to make to myself. The therapist who explained to me that working on making ‘appropriate’ eye contact was more important than alleviating my anxiety around social interaction.

Wolfdogs/wolf hybrids especially are often considered aloof or aggressive as a by-product of that entitlement. People want a wild animal who will not bring wild behaviours into their home. I feel like that in my human body - I don’t fit neatly into most places, though I am expected to. It makes me wonder; if I could step into the canine body I imagine most fitting for myself, what would happen to me? Would I be kept, or destroyed? Would my anxiety and need for boundaries and particularities transfer over and make me snappish and scared? If I were released to other wolves or hybrids, would I be able to read them and engage with them socially? Even if my behaviour was tolerated, by human or wolf, would my body be?

If we assume the change would alter my species but keep all the specifics of my body intact, I would go through a painful and drawn out sloughing off of my slow and aching human form, blood and tissue destroyed and remade, bone broken and reshaped, only to end up in a furred and quadrupedal simulacrum of the same old aches and pains. Who would want a wild animal with behavioural issues and a broken body? Would a pack care for me?

That said, being wanted is already a challenge I deal with in my human body. Discomfort is already a challenge to me as a human. I think, despite the pain of the change, then the pains of the old body transferred, I wouldn’t mind. I could still run faster. I would still be the right shape. My eyes would be the right colour.

At least some of my current discomfort would be alleviated by being in the right shape, and perhaps my canine form would allow me more resistance to pain, a little more durability. Perhaps being the right shape would make me far less anxious, far less people-pleasing. Perhaps wolf social cues would be much more fitting and comprehensible to me than human ones. I’ve heard it said that wolves have many ‘cat-like’ social behaviours; that people who meet them find them much more cat-like than dog-like compared to what they expected. I think people experience that same disconnect with me; that same mismatch between expectation and reality of interaction. There is something off-putting about me to a lot of people.

But I think I’m okay with that, whatever shape my body. I like to think that, were I made canine tomorrow, I would retain most of my Self. I like to think that, were I made canine, I would get along with other canines, and that my human lack would no longer haunt me. I think transformation is often considered a fantasy of wish-fulfilment. For me, it is more about two things: reality, and hope.

When I think about becoming another shape, it is because I already feel as though I should be that shape. I have an experience of feeling as though I am that shape. The transformation would be a clicking into place; a sliding of something into its correct position. A realigning of something I already know to be true. The hope is that there is a future for me wherein I am accepted, and my shape and lifestyle match the ones I yearn for as closely as possible. I want to draw a map over the one I'm travelling now, and make them overlay as much as I can.

And I am building that future. It is a work-in-progress, a constant project. The Self is not something that can be constructed overnight. Which is to say, this isn’t me coming to some grand conclusion about The Body; rather, I’m tentatively extending the tentacles of my thought into what it would be like to be In the body I half-inhabit. That body is inextricably linked to pain for me, and this is all to ask: in what ways, specifically? I’m sure I will come back with more thoughts and elaborate on the wider conversation of transformation and pain/disability/neurodivergence, but for now, this is just a brief reflection on tactility and my shape.