I found a new screensaver today. It's called Hotel Magritte, and it's a series of interconnected rooms in surrealist style.

It made me think about my life.

So I'm supposed to be figuring out my identity now. Taking apart the bits of me and putting them back together in various ways, until I found out which way I like best and what sort of story I want to tell about the resulting collage. But there's no end to the layers of me, like there's no end to the randomly generated rooms in this semi-virtual hotel. Each layer I peel away, examine microscopically, and discard or rearrange, represents only another fiction. Or rather, not fiction...

Superficial is a term of relative positionality. Skin is superficial to muscle, muscle is superficial to bone. Some muscles are deep to bone, and some internal organs are superficial to others. The layer of my persona which is concerned about physical appearance is superficial to the layer of my persona which contains my gender identity. The layer of my persona which contains my gender identity is superficial to... what? the real me? I'm no longer under the illusion that there's a real me to find; my identity is constructed out of all these layers and their interactions. My bones are no more the real me than the muscle and skin above them, or the internal organs below them. No, I have to wait for the scalpel to reveal whatever is deep to my gender identity. And that takes a pretty extensive exploratory surgery.

Wandering these rooms of my mind. A nice, friendly image. It's not so bloodless, so clean, as all that. I'm taking a scalpel to myself intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. My friends, if you wonder why I'm sometimes snappish, or why I disturb your emotional rollercoasters by collision with my own, remember I'm required for my survival right now to dissect myself. Layer by layer, I'm bound to hit a nerve. I had to get under my politeness to the anger I was keeping hidden for a long time, and I wasn't always successfully able to wrestle that anger out of the way without splattering innocent bystanders. Now I know that anger is not some inner core of rage; just an irritation, scar tissue, the result of an unfortunate conflict of my layers. I know its relative positionality. I understand where it is. That's something.

I'd like to thank the people who love me enough to stick around in the surgical theater and watch while I perform this delicate operation. You're all my colleagues. Even if you haven't done this particular kind of surgery before, you know what it's like to take the scalpel to yourself in similar ways. You know the general warning signs, and if the patient needs a shot of adrenaline or another dose of anaesthetic, you can alert me to that fact just in case I'm distracted, caught between the layers of myself for a time. It takes a strong stomach, of course. Surgery is beautiful in a way, but that doesn't mean it's always pretty.