["She had told me what her hopes were. I wondered what would happen when I inevitably disappointed her.
Over the next few months, Maria and I worked with her experiences of being seen and unseen in the world and in her intimate relationships. When I asked Maria to talk about times when she felt visible, she was silent.
"I can't think of any," she said, looking sad.
"You can't think of any times when you have felt seen?" I reflected back.
"Well, a little bit. Here and there. But never the whole story all at once. I mean, with John, he sees me. I know he loves me. But it's like when we're out in the world together and he's passing as male, which he is, he forgets that it means I'm passing as straight, which I'm not. So, it isn't that he doesn't know who I am, but it's like we can't both be fully present at the same time. And my family, well, both of my parents like to point out the ways I look like my dad's family. Everyone thinks that I will have an easier time in life if I pass."
"So with your family you pass as white, and with John you pass as straight."
"What does passing mean?"
She looked at me, a little confused.
I continued. "Well, of course passing is in part about what people see, right? Do they see your light skin, or your lipstick and long hair? But we also embody ways of being that signify affiliations. For example, when you and John met, how did he know that you were queer and not just a straight girl?"
Her eyes lit up. "Oh! I wanted his attention." She laughed. "I knew who he was— the big queer on campus, and I thought he was hot. I was trying to get him to notice me."
I laughed with her. "So what did you do? How did you get his attention?"
"I probably was strutting a little, making sure he'd notice."
She smiled, her eyes lighting up at the memory.
"So what's different now?"
"I don't know," she said, frowning.
In body oriented, or somatic, psychotherapy, we think about body-felt reflections. We feel and explore our bodies as we move through the world. We also think of social justice in terms of bodily proximity to power and survival. Which bodies are given what kinds of attention in the world? Which bodies are eroticized? Which bodies are criminalized? Which bodies are assumed to occupy locations of power or privilege? What embodiments and ranges of movement do we understand and process as signifiers of which social locations?
Part of the work in psychotherapy is to bring attention and awareness to the body and then begin to consciously shape our movements through the world. So we set up an experiment and Maria began walking around my office. At first she walked the way she moved through the world on her own. I asked her to notice where she felt energy in her limbs and her core, and where she didn't; where she could feel her breath. Then she moved around the world in the same way she she was with John, then in the same way as when she was trying to get his attention when they first knew each other. She moved back and forth between the three embodiments, then stood still and looked at me.
"Oh, it's like my energy is, well, not gone entirely, but subdued."
"What does it feel like?"
"Sort of numb, like I forget about me"
We were both quiet for a moment, taking in her statement.
"So how would you like to feel, to be aware of yourself taking up space in the world?"
Over the next few sessions, we worked on her sense of embodied self. She walked around the room as we talked and tried different postures as she sat on the couch. Then one day she said, "There isn't a mirror in here. I can't see the differences. I can feel them, but I don't know what they look like. Will you do them with me, show me how I'm moving?"
I began moving with her, mirroring her movements. She gave me instructions on how to follow her, and she watched me as we moved around the room together.
After a few minutes of this, we sat back down. She was silent and looking away from me.
"How was that?" I asked her.
"Well, I could see the differences in how i move, and it helped me to feel the different postures and movement." She still wasn't looking at me, which was unusual for her.
"Well," she said, still averting my gaze, "when you were moving the way I directed you, following my movement, you looked so different from the way you usually look. I thought that maybe both could be true, that we would look the same, and that you would also still look the way you always look."
In psychoanalytic terms, we would call this the twinship transference: a desire for sameness. In queer cultural terms we recognize Maria's desire echoing from the first session of wanting to feel seen, and now we understand that it isn't just being seen that she craves, it's being the same. She is disappointed that I am not the same as she is. This is the conflict between us that I had anticipated. I had disappointed her in revealing our differences. And her desire and disappointment are familiar to my own experience as a mixed-race femme— a desire to be both seen and mirrored— and to not feel alone in my identity.
I want to comfort her. And I want to tell her all of the ways that I think we are similar. But jumping over her sadness and frustration is a political temptation about showing alliances. The psyche is messy and doesn't always match our politics."]
