The Impeccable Scar | COMPLETED ✓

F O U R T Y - F O U R

ADVIK

Without wasting a single second, I turned to next page.

I guess I was quite lucky that things turned out to be in my favor. I didn't get lost in the crowd instead somehow I landed to the doorstep of a family who helped me to figure out my life.

There are good people in this world even if the world doesn't seem like a nice place to live.

I started as their maid which eventually shaped my life.

After couple of years, I earned enough money and knowledge to consult a gynecologist because I knew that something was definitely not okay with me. I never got my periods and that bothered me. I always believed what I heard and I did remember everyone telling me that it was never okay to not have your periods.

I know I was naïve but I needed answers. I was curious about my body acting differently than the girls of my own age.

My gynecologist did some testes and later I was diagnosed with complete Androgen insensitivity syndrome.

'What is Androgen insensitivity syndrome?' You must be wondering this right? Well surprise, I asked my doctor the same thing.

Stranger, have you ever felt that one moment in life when everything came crashing down and even if you want, you couldn't do anything?

That moment which was supposed to be happen once in life, came twice to me. First when I was married to that man and second time when gynecologist told me about the genetic disorder that I have.

She told me that all of us, men and women, have a mix of both male and female hormones running through our system. And AIS in women causes secretion of huge amounts of male hormone testosterone but their bodies can't process any of it and they turn it into the female hormone estrogen.

Let me simplify it for you-

I am the perfect woman on the outside, and inside I do feel perfectly female but I am genetically male.

So, let me guess.

All the sympathy you had earlier about me are now long gone, isn't it? Now you're feeling uneasy? Disgusted?

I can understand. I felt the same about me when I first got to know about it. My new found identity made me ashamed of what I was. I cried for days not knowing what else to do. It was difficult for me to accept the fact that I was not a proper girl and it made me realize that maybe someone like me will never be able to fit in the society where genders are always seen as masculine or feminine with no deviations in between.

My new identity wasn't an actual definition of an identity recognized by the society.

I started having pathetic thoughts about me. Demons started crawling through my skin, tempting me to hide my truth. I wanted to forget everything and act like any normal girl. I was ready to hide my secret from the world but then all of sudden, my mental health played a fucked up game with me. I went into depression.

Ah. Depression. It might sound normal to you but trust me it's not. I've seen myself going into the abyss with no way to return and smile ever again.

And you know the fun part was that I thought I deserve to be disgusted. I felt worthless and ashamed of my body being different. I was different but my different never felt beautiful. It felt as if my body was no longer mine, it felt stranger to me.

And I did thought about ending my life. But before that could happen, my gynecologist suggested me to see a psychiatrist. Without any hope and few notes in my pocket, I took an appointment.

To my surprise, the psychiatrist already knew about my problem. She prescribed me medicines and said only one sentence to me that 'Different is also beautiful.'

I didn't believed in her but after few weeks of medications, I wondered if being different from others could ever be beautiful? But the answer was still unclear.

And then one day, I finally found the answer.

We always think of being normal enough to disappear in the crowd. We as a human need nothing more than a camouflage to follow the norms put forward by the society; the norm of perfection. We are taught from the very beginning to blend accordingly so that any deviation could never be accepted.

Maybe I learnt the same thing. Maybe it was my parents, maybe it was the society or maybe it was me to always believe that humans are meant to have XY chromosomes as male and XX chromosomes as female and any deviation from the above mentioned pairs will never be counted as human.

I realized that if I wasn't like this then most probably right now I might me living in that hell with my monster of a husband. He would've raped me every night and till now I may have given birth to his children.

Maybe for me being different was beautiful after all.

How could I hate my body when it saved me and my dreams?

You are thinking right that Androgen insensitivity syndrome was definitely a blessing in disguise? Well I never thought the same. For me, it was my savior because even after everything that I've been through, I had a chance to rebuild my life. I escaped from my home because I wanted to live and just because I got to know that my genetic makeup is different from other female that doesn't mean I am any inferior to them. I am also a girl, I also have feelings in my chest and I do deserve my own identity in the society.

With everything running through my mind, I decided to get a tattoo in Italian which reads 'Different is also beautiful.' So that if someday I don't feel enough, this tattoo will remind me the reason to accept my body.