The Assignment
A Prose Poem by Naomi Ward
My therapist asks me to do something I enjoy once a week, as casually as assigning an errand.
She doesn’t know what she is asking.
She is asking a Black trans woman who spent over six decades trapped inside a male costume to name one thing she enjoys.
My costume was cut for someone else.
Too tight at the chest. Too stiff at the shoulders. Fastened so tightly I forgot there was a me underneath.
I learned not to pull at the seams. Not to breathe too deeply. Not to let anyone see who was trying to get out.
Eventually, I mistook confinement for identity.
That wasn’t liking.
That was maintenance.
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Sixty plus years of maintaining a life that looked right from the outside.
Now she asks, “ What do you enjoy?”
I don’t know.
I know what I survived. What I performed so convincingly that sometimes even I believed it.
But wanting is different.
Somewhere beneath all that practiced certainty, there is a woman who has waited decades to be asked that question.
She is slow to answer.
Maybe I don’t trust the question yet.
So I sit with it.
For once, I do not answer with what I think someone else wants to hear.
© 2026
