Often, I imagine how this body, this body that belongs to me, would have suited me were I to be born on an island of my own. A surface free from foreign footsteps, a land free from others, a body free from glances and judgments.

A body without resistance.

Would those hips have seemed too wide to me then? My voice too feminine. Would femininity have been a concept on an island with only myself? Would I have developed my own language or none at all?

How would I have defined this body without language? And would this, my body without language, not have been free?

Is language the problem?

At fourteen, I started comparing myself to the people around me. Classmates, passersby on the street. Boys, especially boys. The conclusion: I looked so different. Something must be wrong.

Later, in the hospital, they would call it dysphoria.  You are indeed different. Different from them.

That private island is a sanctuary. Often, I wander around in it, naked, without resistance. Without mirrors, so without knowing how this body, my body, is shaped. Like an animal. One with coarse, greasy, curly hair and beady eyes, without knowing it has. The animal has no reflection and no language. No dysphoria.

Like an animal, I walk around with only the soft sand beneath me. At times, irritating my toes. Without others, there is no high or low pitched voice, no short or tall stature, no flat or arched chest. There is only my voice, my stature, my chest. What I look like is strange to me because I don’t compare.

In the warm sand, I leave a footprint that is mine. And the only one.

In a hazy memory, I was once the true inhabitant of that island. I was only very little, a baby. Or rather, an embryo. Everything that others account for, became:

Look, the heart! Look, the little nose!

I was a heart and a nose on an island of my own.

But people assailed it the moment I entered the world. We deem this to be a girl, a boy. Quite a lot of hair, for a baby. How loudly it screams. Doesn’t it look ugly, actually?

You grow.

And suddenly, you’re behaving ‘girly’ while possessing a penis. Or boyish while lacking a penis. Boyish, another strange word. Strange, still, for a baby without language. A mystery for a child who started on an island of ones own. A logic for a person/human (living) among people.

What are we doing to ourselves? What are we doing to our little ones?

Could it be possible for everyone to have an island of one’s own yet live alongside one another, in the same ocean? Would I have felt so different then; not alone in the water, but still able to shape my own lands?

Or would we have invented binoculars, just to get a glimpse of the other’s domain, and see how things are over there?

Is comparing simply the nature of the beast? “Your body is more like how I would want mine to be.”

“My body is not quite right.”

On this island of my own, would I have felt the need to cut things off my body? To add things? Or do I take what I see around me, and shape accordingly, to what suits me better than what my mirror image reflects?

Your brain is wired differently, they said. Maybe you’re on a spectrum, but you’re not alone.

But that’s the whole problem: I’m not alone. A human is nothing more than an animal with a reflection and language. Language pulls us onto each other’s islands; lets us accentuate our differences. Articulate our judgment.

A fat animal, next to a thin animal, is nothing more than two animals next to each other. Two domains.

A fat person next to a thin person sets language in motion. Invents a story. Words like healthy, unhealthy, happy, unhappy. Ugly, beautiful. Two islands merge into one and people are constantly stepping into each other’s footprints.

Everyone has their opinion. And a body is left seeking the path of least resistance.

As with dysphoria. Revise the body so it doesn’t stand out in the sauna, in the pool. In bed with someone. So that others don’t look at it strangely. So that it fits.

In my daydreams, I escape sometimes to that island. That island of one’s own. Would it have been necessary, there,  to refine myself as I do now? On all fronts? Your brain is wired differently. I could have adapted; shaped my island to suit that. But you stormed it, and now I am no longer alone.

On my own island, would it have been necessary to refine myself? Would I have experienced dysphoria without others around me?

I don’t know.

I look down from my office window onto the schoolyard, roughly fifteen children are playing. I so wish them their own island, but they all seem like copies of each other. Or of their parents.

Their islands are merging — already.