I Could Kill Stephen Bennett, But I Won’t
Yet another day, yet another post. I know I’ve been writing a lot here lately — sorry (not sorry). It’s just that in this stretch of recovery, every day seems to unearth something new I need to get do
There’s something nobody tells you after FFS. It isn’t the swelling, or the pain, or the bruising. It’s the peculiar mental split that arrives once the dust starts to settle, the strange sense that you’ve done something so radical you’re no longer sure how to connect to the person you were.
This morning I woke up and very deliberately chose to put on The Unforgettable Fire. That U2 album has been an emotional anchor for nearly forty years. I don’t care how uncool it is today. The astonishing sonic visions produced by the Edge and Brian Eno back in 1983 totally transformed my view of guitar playing in the eighties. Whenever I’ve been in turmoil or just needed an anchor, fifteen years old, twenty-five, forty, it’s the one I’ve always turned to.
And I think I put it on today because I wanted to merge the dual history of my life as it exists now. I’m not averse to what was before, because it was all me. What I’m trying to do is create a fusion of the old and the new. Learn to carry Steve. It’s hard to explain, but that feels the truest way to say it.
Plus, I can still belt out a half-decent version of A Sort of Homecoming, still hit most of the notes on The Unforgettable Fire. And I want to carry on like that. I don’t care if I’m a trans woman, I’ll keep up my Bono impersonations.
Later I opened up TradingView, professional stock and crypto trading software, and checked the custom liquidity tools I programmed last year, just to see whether my old predictions about global liquidity and bond volatility were still holding. A completely Steve thing to do. My market predictions from twelve months ago are holding nicely. “Sit back and do nothing folks”.. And it felt grounding. Comforting. I was still me, just with a different surface.
And yet, there’s fear. Right now my face is so swollen I look like Rocky Dennis with features, barely able to move it, wearing a frozen girl mask. And I worry: what if the expressions that carried across from Steve into Stevie don’t survive? What if my familiar little quirks of animation vanish under all this? Because that was me. I wasn’t ever against me. I just wanted to strip away the masculine parts, not erase the human underneath.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve wandered into Face/Off, that film where one face gets swapped for another. The mirror reflects a stranger, yet inside there’s a thread tying back to a fifteen-year-old with headphones on, lost in U2, trying to make sense of life.
And here’s the nub of it. Once the swelling goes, once the bruises fade, I could very easily look so female that nobody, if I walked into a new city, would know my history. I could effectively kill Stephen David Bennett off, clean dead. He’d be gone. Some who pass well do exactly this, and I’m not criticising, but personally I would feel hollow if I were to try to pretend I was never a man.
And that’s the tension I live with. I really don’t want to. I love that dude, Stephen Bennett, with his stupid antics, his obsessions with Bitcoin dominance and Austrian economics and how the world’s going to hell in a handcart. I love his innate scouse sense of “don’t kid a kidder” and how to hustle in the world to create money. That was and is me too. That is me. And I don’t want it to die.
But I know I could. That’s the power of this. I could reinvent myself as someone who isn’t that person anymore. And it’s hard to gauge, because I have emotionally changed inside too, and quite a lot. A mix of hormones and a gradual letting go of armour.
The equilibrium I’m trying to form is this: to keep everything together as one person. To refuse the temptation to erase, and instead to carry Steve with me. To let him breathe inside me even as I step forward into this new face, this new life.
Because I haven’t burned the past. I’ve just changed the wrapping. And maybe what I’m really doing now is learning how to fuse the two together, carrying forward the voice, the charts, the music, the quirks, into a face that finally matches the life I always wanted.