Lockdown was tough for a lot of people who are extrovert and social like me. Like many others, lockdown gave me a lot of mental health issues. Isolation was difficult for many people. Several people have spoken about the mental health issues they faced during the lockdown.
During this time I unlike many of my queer and trans friends had the privilege of living with my partner. My partner's presence and touch was a feeling of comfort for me. My partner’s emotional and physical touch gave me the comfort to survive this lockdown. Touch is also romantic. Like many other people, romance helps me stay alive, stay strong, and sometimes it also gives me validation. It is a sign of being accepted as I am. There is no experience of being misgendered while using pronouns or for the clothes that I want to wear. There is a sense of freedom from constant control. My partner's romantic touch gave me constant support to survive and be functional in all kinds of work.
But touch is also sometimes discomfort for me as a transman. I have experienced strong dysphoria associated with my body and gender. Due to dysphoria, I have made some boundaries when it comes to physical touch. Hugs make me uncomfortable. I often like to be away from the physical touch of people.
Despite my complicated relationship with physical touch, it has often helped me to deal with my mental health issues. Mental health professionals often advise a technique called Grounding to cope up with anxiety. One of the elements of the grounding technique is Touch. To touch an object or thing and feel it, describe the thing and emotions attached to it. This helps a person to calm down, to be grounded, and to have a sense that things which had happened in the past is not happening in the present moment. During this time, as anxiety gripped me, the grounding technique of touch was no longer working for me. I tried to figure out why was it not helping me but left was with no answer. At the same time, as a peer counselor, I continued to advise other people who were going through anxiety to practice grounding.
Touch is also an emotion that lives in my head and heart. During the lockdown, I was touched by the emotion of fear. My fear came alive in my nightmares. Violent nightmares in which some people were attacking me. People who are my natal family members. A family whom I left behind a year ago and moved away to my new life. With whom I am had stopped having a conversation sometime back because the conversations were disturbing for me. As I stopped my conversations, my natal family members managed to get hold of my phone number. They started sending me messages in which they gave me the information that they were aware of my location, my partner, and my work. At the same time, increasing domestic violence all around me was triggering for me. It created the fear of violent touch in my life. When I step out to buy groceries, there was a fear of someone following me and picking up me. That fear of someone touching me is caused much distress in my life.
In the middle of this distress and fear, I also found and developed my hobbies. I picked up the Colors to learn how to paint. I also learned to cook new things in the lockdown. The colors and the paint I touched helped me calm down my thoughts. I had always felt anxiety while cooking, because cooking was something I was expected to do as mandatory work for women. I was constantly told by society that I should cook because I was a girl. This past history associated anxiety with cooking for me. But this lockdown helped me reduce my anxiety about cooking. I had for long now believe that cooked has nothing to do with my masculinity. But now I have started to accept this in practice as well. Now, I have found a new hobby in cooking. Cooking was also a therapeutic exercise for me. To touch all kinds of food, feel the texture of it, make it, and then taste it. Trying new food recipes. This new hobby had a downside it to is as well. Eating all this food made me fat which further increased my dysphoria. The weight gain resulted in reducing by libido and my enjoyment of the sexual touch.
I have established a complicated relationship with touch. During the lockdown, sometimes touch helped me survive, sometimes it gave me pain, sometimes it helped me calm down, and sometimes it did not work for me at all. But through all of this, I have managed to survive the lockdown because I am privileged enough to have a stable job and income, a counselor, and the emotional support from my partner, maybe unlike many who did not survive.
Vihaan is an Ambedkarite, Queer Feminist Transman. Pronouns are He/Him
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