I disassociated. At least, I think that I did. I didn't know what was happening until I was gone.

It’s a hard sensation to describe unless you've ever experienced it, and it's very different from the dysphoria that I'm used to. Disassociation is not the familiar, pressing, discomfort, but rather a disconnection. A complete detachment, as though the body I inhabit is a stranger -- something close to, and yet separate from, myself.

The internet tells me that disassociation is a survival mechanism: a bodily reaction to cope with trauma. But what is the trauma?

The more that I think about trauma, the more that I think about bodies. And the more that I think about bodies, the more that I think about transformation.

He beat me last night. It was hot and consensual. I wanted it. He placed my hands above my head and told me to lie there. And slowly, one by one, he pinched clothespins across my skin... Up my arms, down my sides, along my thighs. It was intimate. I felt his gaze, and the presence of its power. And I felt myself retract, slowly sink into submission, and settle into my skin. The pain tugged, pulled, and receded. The remarkable thing about being in a suspended state of pain is the simultaneous presence and removal... the way that bodies adapt. Or how S/M represents ecstasy through pain, and it is the tension that holds the transformation. And maybe it's perverted, but maybe I like it, and maybe I like being a pervert.

I felt each clothespin release with a sharp jab of pain, a momentary sensation before the departure. And he ran his hands across my face, down my arms, over my chest, bringing all of the blood vessels to the surface, and told me that I was being a very good boy.

Maybe I just like fucking with the power dynamics. Maybe it is because I am always resisting disempowerment, struggling against power held over me. Maybe it's because navigating this world means being told that I am sick, that my gender doesn't exist, and that my body is invalid. And maybe that's why we define ourselves by all the shit we hate. Maybe that's why queer, gender-fucked, faggot feels powerful to me. And maybe that's why it feels powerful to give up power -- to consent to power that actualizes rather than destroys me.

And so he hit me. He pummeled into my chest. In the past four years, I've only let one other lover touch my chest in my prolonged manner. That time he massaged the pressure points from my binder, and I sobbed like a child in his arms. Last night he punched me, landed one blow after another into raw flesh. And when I thought that I couldn't take anymore, I did. I clenched. I whimpered. And I felt my body push, felt each trauma like crack open, felt cathartic release.

And I realized that my body is fraught with scar lines. From being socialized female, from being at odds with my gender, from every time he fucked me and I cried and I didn't know why. My body is not a place that i easily inhabit. My relationship to it is long and complicated. I've learned to cope with it by ignoring it -- by getting drunk, by forgetting to eat, by hoping that my binder blisters my skin so my chest withers and bleeds. The distance means safety.

So the trauma is the return to my body. And the disassociation is the response to being to forcefully returned. It is the only response that my body has learned.

Experiencing pain on parts of my body that sustain trauma is transformative because it's allows me to connect to those parts of myself, so that I can embody them and heal them. It allows me to connect to pain in ways that are loving, tender, and healthy. It teaches me that desensitization does not mean strength, and that the hard exteriors of emotional and physical scars still contain damaged flesh. It shows me that in a world which says that my worth is determined by what I produce, that my body can also be powerful -- that my sexuality can produce power. And so pain becomes unlearning trauma, re-claiming bodies, and re-inhabiting power.