Illness taught me that something was wrong, more wrong than being born or living in the wrong place. Only decades later did I confront something that may have been there the whole time: illness, or some failure of the physical body due to something outside of me, that I did not create, that my parents did not create. Could that have caused it? Was displacement of the body literally causing a feeling of displacement in the body? I've looked for answers from my first few years on this earth, early PTSD upon PTSD, marked by revolution and then war and then refugee years, a person without a home. Many have in fact called my looks conventional, normal, even 'good.' I've accepted it while also feeling like I've deceived them. But every room I walk into I still quickly assign myself to outsider status, though it seems not everyone can see this. As I grew older, I accepted it as 'otherness,' a feature of Americanness even. As a child, I thought of myself as a ghost, an essence at best who'd entered some incorrect form. Sometimes the dysmorphia I experience in my body feels purely psychological and other times it feels like something weirder. It's deeper than gender and sexuality, more complicated than just surface appearances. A slight woman, femme in appearance, olive skin that has varied from dark to light, thick black curly hair, large eyes, hands and feet too big, of somewhat more than average height and somewhat less than average weightI've tried my whole life to understand what it is that seems off to me. Rather, I've felt my whole life that I was born in the wrong body. I have never been comfortable in my own body.

Sick by Porochista Khakpour