I'm talking to Nancy, who I haven't seen in twelve years. A small, blonde dancer, she was femmest girl I ever met. She went too far--a boytoy. Still, she was no fool. Inside the mask I always saw the eyes of an androgynous teenage kid trying to figure out how she got cheated out of her power and how to get it back. She got cancer, did a lot of rage and grief scenes in Psychodrama, broke up with her boyfriend (who liked her as an ultrafem little girl), and went to live on a mountaintop.

I had a feeling she might win her private war on Barbie, but I lost contact with her.

Twelve years later, here she is in a bathrobe, sexy, flirting a little with me--and with her own body. No longer just someone else's toy. She owns herself now. I can feel the difference.

She says "I've been pretty happy, though I still get health problems... especially lately, I've been getting strange pains." She came to me because her dance teacher, who she respects, said something peculiar, something she wanted to check with me: "Nancy, the pain you've been feeling is the shock of sex hormones after years of being so thin that you were artificially pre-pubescent even at thirty. It's not that rare in professional dancers and models. Your body is coming awake, that's all. Like pins and needles."

I have to admit adolescence at any age for anyone is a shock--but still I wonder a little. Nancy says "You're a shaman--see if you can sense where it hurts." I psychically feel out how she moves and doesn't, where her aura feels thick and doesn't; and without knowing how I know, find myself saying "Um... your lower back, about two inches off the spine, on both sides."

Did I make that sound mysterious? It's not. I hurt there myself, all of a sudden! Feeling her pain in my body. I do that a lot, and not just when asked...

Or it may be something even simpler. I'm doing exactly what Nancy is, after all. My body too is trying to come alive! To grow out of a long childhood of powerlessness, feminine role-playing, and sexual passivity. So I'm feeling the same pains. She's just come to name it for me.

Did I imagine that adolescence postponed twenty years still wouldn't hurt?

NEXT MORNING

Like Nancy, I'm a femme dancer struggling to assert myself in relationships rather than be what/who others want. Dance has drawn me out--but it's hurt a lot too. Maybe that's inevitable. It's a massive change from asexuality to sexuality, and from passivity to power; causes a physical/hormonal storm as severe as adolescence. Like birth pains.

TWO MONTHS LATER

After this dream, that specific pain-pattern I shared with Nancy started happening... regularly. It slowly worsened until it became clear I had a kidney stone! I suffered some of the sharpest pain I've ever felt before expelling it yesterday.

So much for symbolism.

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