there are some cute memes going around about being sorry for talking so much shit about 2019.

it occurs to me that we all spent a lot of last year wishing for more time to self-care.

careful what you wish for, eh isolated friends?

but also, i wanna lean in! face masks and baths and exercise and healthy diets. some people are learning to cook. i am learning to tie knots and bake bread. there’s growth work to be done. it sucks, but so does everything right now. and i’m healthy, which is not a thing to squander.

i dream of people coming out of isolation looking like they had a makeover. like they loved the shit out of themselves the whole time. like they are ready to take on the whole world, now open for business again. i keep looking at that moment. will it be, can it be, anything other than debaucherous? i want to be ready.

i look great naked.

nobody said it in a while so i thought i oughta.

i now know that these things are likely inextricable: cowardice and dishonesty. i didn’t know before.

i promise myself to be unwavering in my honesty until the end of my days. i haven’t yet and plan to never be: so weak as to lie to someone i love.

The thing i miss most about D.C.

the first thing i did upon returning to DC was take the metro, where i promptly got caught up in people watching. it was more like people-appreciating and made me smile real big at strangers as they entered and exited the train… at my stop!

i ran to the doors and managed to smash-wedge a corner of my suitcase into the last four inches of space as they closed. and then i just stood there, malfunction achieved, waiting for them to open again.

i guess in the new cars that doesn’t happen? a kind human who had made it to the platform in appropriate time stopped, rolled their eyes, and reached in to wrench at the doors from their side. grateful me tried to push my suitcase further, knowing that if i had to go to the next stop i could be waiting up to 40min for the next train (wmata riders, you feel me?).

between the two of us we made a gap big enough for me to slip out through, only so i could immediately get my shoulder bag stuck in the closing doors behind me. i yelped in panic, and my helper friend paused, both of us thinking the train would move while i was stuck. with the force of that terror i yanked my should bag free. the kind stranger breathed an understandably, audibly, exasperated sigh of relief and left me, frozen grinning with relief and thanks, in a hurry.

now fully on the platform, kind of hot from exertion but utterly amused, i watched as the train doors opened casually, slowly, all the way, as if i had never been stuck at all.

six months away and i am a complete tourist, y’all. never before have i held up a train! i am that asshole. on an adventure, not a vacation.

the sun comes through after freezing rain and i am (some version of) Holiday Golightly, awed by the shimmer and gleam, holding myself from reaching toward the sparkling teardrop beads of winter that adorn all of yesterday’s bare limbs. a cold wind cuts through, sets the diamonds to dancing. as if the glory of light bouncing through frozen water were not enough dazzle! now the shiny morsels crinkle and tinkle in a soft chit-chatter; a delicate, persistent percussion, first stronger from the south, then softly all around. a million billion carats quivering, each one with its own glint. the wind persists, conducting in orchestral depth much less fragile than it sounds. the sunlight plays. a glassy susurrus bounces in the bare snow. the glitz, the glamour! a show like no other. in attendance, an audience of one, forgetting to chew her breakfast, besotted with the romance of it all.

This article is a good place to start.  From Salty, an incredible publication with a bright af future, and a 22 year old undergrad who could be confused for the author of my own journals.

The leaves were fresh this spring; they wore cool colors all summer.  These autumnal months the greens brightened to hot extremes.  Reds and oranges falling up and down, floating like so many sparks of fire in the dark, landing with finality.  Suddenly all the boughs are bare between cool gusts as if a lover has recently left, the bed cooling in their wake.  It is a chill that chafes, a penetrative aloneness hurries the fading warmth.  A beauty beloved, and departed, yet again.  This is lucky, and reliable:  that new growth would ripen, evolve, die.  How fortunate an experience for any one to possess; how difficult for a lover to lose.  A period of grief is appropriate.  A life of gratitude even more so.  Are the tree and the lover-less body so different?  The bark basks in light, removed of its decoration.  Those left standing stretch their limbs.  The sun comes through resplendent to kiss every inch no longer in shadows.  A beauty still beloved, though bereft.

One of my favorite quotes comes from The Princess Bride, as our brokenhearted hero still in his mask smirks fiercely to his unknowing, also heartbroken, long-lost love, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”

This, essentially and irrepressibly, is true: life is pain, and capitalism sucks. (Buddha agrees on both points, claro.) The pain aspect is true partly because we cannot grow without first suffering to some degree. Even something as seemingly emotionally minor as a change of job, really. Nothing gets better before becoming more difficult. We stretch and expand not naturally or passively, but with willful action. In order to become the people of whom we dream, we toil. To live the lives we believe we should be living, we must grow. There will never not be pain, but there will be infinite choices for handling it. Every day, all the time, we decide.

The bulk of human suffering isn’t really optional; there is nobody out there without injuries on their heart and soul. Patched up spots and tender pieces. Some are gaping wounds–I think this often about cruel people. I think, “You’re actively in pain. Where does it hurt? How can I help?” I wonder this, but only when I’m not distracted by my own scrapes and scars. But even the less-decrepit among us carry burdens, because Everyone does. We all have all degrees of these things. I can name a lot of my big ones, for sure, but most of those are physical traumas for which society has (only newly) myriad strategies. All the hurts are different sizes. Some ache with no established classification, still more are altogether unidentified. And this is true of me as well as you, and everyone we know. Life is suffering. How we deal with suffering is therefore what makes a life.

Pain just sits sometimes, takes forever and hates to be ignored. Everyone has at least a few sore spots, sure. Emotional damage festers if not tended well. It seems to me that sometimes the work takes a lifetime. It seems to me that lots of people don’t want to do any of that labor, even to exorcise the stuff long dead, in the background, just taking up good real estate.

Several years ago I decided to forgive as many people as possible. Quietly, I told my heart to set these angers down. Sometimes I nurtured replacement joys, especially when I knew this person would still be in my life, welcome or not. Sometimes I simply said goodbye to the shitty memories, willfully forgot the details. More fun was finding physical mementos to cry with, then throw away. Once in a while an unwelcome tchotchke still appears, but its departure then is unceremonious. I’ve grieved. I’ve healed. It took work, but it was more like scraping callouses than healing wounds. Immediate injuries are significantly more difficult to tend, for obvious reasons, not to mention the repeated ones. So this was something I did over time to some of my most painful grudges: I quit carrying them. It wasn’t easy, particularly because I’m impatient. But holy moly it freed me up for more lovin’! It was worthwhile labor.

I really appreciate my capacity for this, but recognize it’s unique quality. I dig it when people call in doctors to help tend their interior pain. That makes the most sense. I’ve done it many a time, and will continue to as needed. Why anyone in prolonged pain would not seek help is often beyond my grasp. I know everyone hates the doctor, but letting an injury go untended isn’t always effective. You can deal with a cold at home, but strep throat can fucking kill you (I once had it for too long before I got to the doctor and contracted scarlet fever, no shit). Sure, the dude in the supermarket who called me a bitch is soon forgettable, but it’s hard work to forgive the cruelty of a loved one.

I want to live with the pain, and I want to live lovingly. I am really unsure of how that would be possible without these efforts. I am happier, and more generous, for having slogged through, rather than around, or not at all. If only the slightest bit, I’ve helped myself heal. There’s always, always more work to do. But the other day a wise man sitting among loudly arguing loved ones noted quietly, “You can’t help somone who’s not asking.” Every day, each new pain, that’s a personal decision: heal or rot.

At the intersection of prolonged emotional damage and grievous mortal damage, there is one unfaltering, shared, true fate. Death, which leads to grief, is the result of a life. I want to use my skills with emotional pain to work in that space. I am pretty serious and excited about pursuing work as a death doula, which is basically as it sounds: a non-medical midwife for the end, almost like emotional Hospice, although far more beneficial for the loved ones who will be left behind than the dying. I’ve been taking classes and soon I will start learning on a practical level. I’m excited to be in Maine to do this. I think it will be good for me.

Most of all though, I want to talk about quotidian grief. Do you think we’d need this much therapy if we lived among people with whom we could freely feel through each emotional pain? I wonder. Like fresh herbs for manageable illness, genuine care to manage heart hurts. I want it to be as much a part of our conscious lives as it is our secret souls. I think it’s possible to face the pain, talk of it honestly among loved ones, maybe get yourself to a therapist once in a while, and go on to be a stronger you than before. Ultimately, we all need therapy like we all need our doctors. Maybe you hardly see them, but at least you’ll be able to heal when you need to. And on a daily scale, the more we discuss grief the more we let down the burden of it. Traditions of collective grief and healing exist in most cultures, for all sorts of reasons. As humans, as loved ones, we should be doing this together. Emotional labor is heavy work, which hearts cooperating can make lighter. I love when we cry together, hold space, hold each other. Let’s get closer. As Kahlil Gibran asks, “Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?” Let’s tend to our people in sorrow, so we can laugh louder when next we share joy.

“I don’t think they really recycle any of it anyway, so I hide the little bits of paper and plastic inside the big dumb things I already feel bad about and voila!  More gets recycled.  Whatever that means.”

I hadn’t seen his mom in nearly a year. She said, “I don’t ask questions except to make sure you’re both doing okay; that’s all that matters.” I replied, “Thank you. We wouldn’t have many answers anyway.”

This is the truth: here now we embark on a new adventure, an unpaved path. We are neither exes nor friends, not enemies nor lovers. We exist in a relational space reserved, it seems, only for we two. This cannot be the case, of course, in a world so vast and full of humanity. But there is an aloneness to this endeavor; a feeling of exploration, discovery. Of being the first.

We are in love, and truly, and deeply. Fixed. Our original foundation, amidst the destruction of everything else, has remained. We were surprised when we realized:  we fell apart as a unit, then as individuals, but we never fell out of love.

How now do we navigate? We are without guides. There is no trail blazed for us. Each move toward each other feels precarious. Every decision about our relationship a risk.

Whenever I tell a friend to ditch a partner who’s fucking with her, I get a little lecture on how relationships are difficult. These are funny little lectures, but they are not wrong. We all have different paths we want to navigate, directions we’d prefer to go. Some have their traditional bumps in the road, I’m in uncharted territory. We can agree to disagree about such deeply personal things, I hope, even as we question each other.

All I really know is that this is a direction I want to go, and this is a person with whom I love to travel.

Max said, “I remember Rob Gerring said to me something like ‘So you know your sister is trying to come out as bisexual? I think she’s just doing it for attention.'” My brother paused for effect: “Robbie Gerring! The gayest kid in the closet at Maple Grove.” He really, really was.

The irony. The difficulty of this truth of self hatred. The truth of the closet. It was lost on neither of us. We laughed, because we’re adults. The horrors of high school are long, long passed. I am out now, and I hope Robbie is too.

This morning I woke up and cried.

So many people I care about are in pain. It seems like we’re all in a more complex, grown up stage of life, but it also seems like the world is burning around us.

Have things gotten more difficult or have we simply grown more aware?

What a bizarre loneliness: when everyone who matters is busy struggling to heal themselves. To cope. To spend one day without being triggered.

And everyone else doesn’t care.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous.

I can think of at least five people I would murder with my own hands if I could.

I can think of many, many more I would heal with my own hands if they’d let me.

I can think of not much else.

I don’t know who needs to read this small, tentative reach into the void.

Directly from my heart, it comes: you are not alone.

Do you wanna hold hands and brave this burning world together?

Let’s love and light it on fire.

I have spent these weeks going over all of it, and am disinclined to do that with you. Review doesn’t change the truth:   love doesn’t follow rules.  Love could give a shit about things like gravity, time, the plans we make for ourselves, hopes and dreams.  I can’t help but think of horror movies where the evil whatever keeps changing up and startling everyone again and people suddenly die.  Love is nearly a reverse:  a chase toward, instead of from, the most beautiful and terrible human condition imaginable.  It’s certainly still a horror story:  love is fleeting, unwilling to be caught, will always hurt you regardless of your careful handling.  When there are multiple consciousnesses sharing a love, there is no taming it.  We tried, together and separately, to hold on to a love we thought was ours.  It turns out possession wasn’t an option. We were lucky to have created a space in which love was so welcome, and present, for so long.

I have learned a lot about myself, all of it surprising to me in ways I took quite personally. Until this perfectly destabilizing moment, I understood myself to be lucid about my own actions, strong, full of conviction.  I have been none of these things since facing the truth of myself, forced instead to stare down my own arrogance and watch that fire dissolve into a puddle of self pity that I couldn’t help consider as an option for drowning.  I hid.  I canceled everything and stayed in my haven of a room–notably the first room I’ve had to myself in years, and full of daylight–deep in fantasy novels (big thanks to my best friend) and Sleepytime Extra tea.  Those raw days after injury are for licking wounds, and like a shamed animal I hid alone to do so.  A part of me now, as I have allowed grief and time to flow as they do, is able to gratefully recognize (some of? ugh) my own shortcomings before they affect me and those I love further.  The rest of me wonders how much damage I have done in this ignorance of my own tendencies.  Perhaps sated by my excessive apologizing, this wondering part of my psyche has finally let up on the constant bullying.  Now I face this brutal mirror:  there is a lot about myself I did not recognize, and much work to be done.

Everyone’s expectations of our selves and each other could use a fucking breather.  There’s a whole bunch of a hell of a lot that I have to say on this subject, but when it comes to going through a breakup, wow! We need to be gentle with ourselves.  Both of us are exhausted from crying.  We are wrung out, and I personally have been missing the delightful social part of me that makes jokes.  I panicked at her immediate disappearance.  It took me a while to realize she just needed time.  Injury, no matter how well it heals, stays tender a long while.  Dave too is over here beating himself up for… I’m not sure what and it’s none of your business anyway, but for a bit we were finding ourselves apologizing to each other through tears.  Now some time has passed, and we seem to keep finding ourselves in each others’ arms.  This feels very okay, and delicate in a way that makes me not want to share any more of it.  I am newly unsure of almost everything, but I have learned some things about love.  I am glad to invite her to stay under new circumstances.  I offer and welcome tender care of healing wounds, and I trust this man to hold my heart.  I forgive us both.  I love him always.  I am doing okay. 

The suspicions of seven-year-old me have been confirmed:  adults are more than likely having a lot of fun while kids are sleeping.  We have fun with the kids, too.

Babies are still kind of gross and too fragile, but they’re more approachable now.

To the middle years kids hanging in small groups against walls and near drapes all night:  I feel you.  Do your own thing for a while.  You can come hang pretty soon.

Love, a grown-up-but-not-old kind of fun cousin*

 

*I prefer “cousin” as the most palatable gender neutral term for aunt or uncle.  This may be something I’ll have to insist on, just in case any of the young ones needs a bona fide queer on their team.  I have two step-nephews, which is unnecessarily bulky language, to be sure, but wait until you hear about my two baby first cousins once removed.  Ha!

In a bizarre twist of fate, my first office job fell directly into my lap. Right now. I’m thirty three. I didn’t apply, but after four gloriously unemployed months suddenly found myself with forty hours a week to attend to. Thank fuck it’s a temp job–that helps make it an adventure.

I spend my days listening to and transcribing calls from a massive brokerage firm. It’s such a far cry from my own world that it feels like a fiction. To begin with, going into an office for work almost doesn’t seem real, but then to spend the day listening to money people hawking and politicking and shouting and agreeing! Indeed, I can only compare these conversations to media I’ve encountered. And let me tell you, too, it’s all pretty much what you’d expect.

Still, a girl can learn something from every adventure. Some things are nice to have reiterated, especially from people so unlike oneself. For example, you need not be effusive to be kind. These people are all very respectful of each other, even when seriously fired up. It’s actually impressive. They are also kind, but they don’t mince words. “You’re all good” or “no worries” are common notions when people move on from an upset. I’ve also been reminded that few things are actual emergencies, but excitement is exciting. This, of course, I already knew too well.

Here is a really neat lesson: the idea of “color”. “Just to give you some color on that,” someone will say after sharing the feelings they’ve witnessed surrounding a certain subject. Maybe they’ve seen a lot of something in particular trading, or just a few kinds of something but not others. This shouldn’t only be a market thing. I personally need a lot of blanks filled in because I’m anxious and will easily do it on my own with the worst answers. I could never be a broker. But I could always accept some “color” on subjects of importance to me. Probably needs a better word. Let’s just normalize the concept of making calls to feel something out. Right?

Lastly, the alpha and omega of truths: these brokers all know very well that nothing is final. They know everything is always in flux. And no matter how confident they seem (or anti “woo” for that matter!) these people understand that we are all, every one of us, just guessing.

There’s a non-profit organization in Washington DC that directly assists sex workers in harm reduction.  Volunteers work with a client-centered approach determined entirely by the client’s needs as assessed by the clients themselves.  Among the options are condoms, clean needles, support groups, and showers.  Volunteers ride in a van providing assistance to people who work in the streets–they call it “strolling”–and answer calls to a 24/7 hotline.  The connections HIPS makes with the community plays a vital role in these volunteers’ ability to get their job done, so the agency asks for a minimum year-long commitment from each volunteer.

This is about 10% of the information I received today at the first, of six, HIPS volunteer training sessions.  Next, I will have an interview with a current volunteer to determine my ability to participate.  If that goes well, there are five weeks of Sundays to devote to this training, then eight (or more) hours per month of volunteering.

Today our HIPS meeting was at Planned Parenthood, where out front were standing six escorts in fluorescent vests and three anti-choice demons spouting bullshit rhetoric and handing out pamphlets.  Those six volunteers ushered in no fewer than 65 HIPS volunteers and organizers as they arrived, past the demons, to the safety of our workshop.  They did this without even acknowledging the presence of those hurting people and their rotting souls.  It was the safest I have felt among strangers in a long time.

Once inside, I had a team ready-made.  Everyone arrived for the right reasons, we created a space to count on each other, and went from there.  We got serious, spoke up, listened hard, laughed a good amount, and some of us (I) definitely learned a lot.

I learned that “THIGHS” protect HIPS.  “This Hotline, It Gets Hard Sometimes” and that’s how volunteers care for each other, how they become a family.  The van seems even more difficult, but both necessitate community.  Are necessarily of community.  Every volunteer is vital to the assistance of others.  And isn’t it always just so?

What I learned today, for real, is that there are more of us than there are of them.  I learned that the time for complacency, in any form, is over.  The volunteers outside were mostly male (presenting, at least).  The volunteers in our workshop were almost all women under 30 (! I felt so grown, and so very admiring of the upcoming generation).  These aren’t gendered issues–everyone is affected.  It is the people who go out and do something about the problems they see who will finally win the day.  It is those who are willing to stand up, and hold each other up, against demons.

Every single one of these people was hoping that on a Saturday morning they could do, or begin to do, good for others.

Today I saw hope.  I saw potential.  I learned about our future.

– – –

If you feel so inclined, you can donate to HIPS or Planned Parenthood.

 

I have promised myself life in the key of me–which I hope is not unique–built on a foundation of selfish interest, structured by passionate ethics, and supported by love, sometimes rage.

My heart is a muscle and I am ready to flex.

I am saying goodbye to established paradigms and hello to my own set of parameters. I have companions to help me. We will set our own courses in nonmonogamy, active anarchism, alternative health, and anti-capitalism.

I am excited in the same way as before any big adventure: my nerves might wish I’d vomit, my heart thinks we could fly. Standing up and living precisely my own life unapologetically is newer to me than any observer may imagine. It’s scary in the best way. I’m 33, birthing my own dreams into this rough world and protecting them fiercely.

It is with that instinct that I offer only this brief sketch for what’s next. Please pay attention, if you feel so inclined. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Long have I loved dead flowers. They remind me that change is beautiful even when it might not be particularly prized by its surrounds. There is a perfect moment, if you’re paying attention, when a cut flower refuses water, settles in to death. A whole new beauty blooms then, as the crepe comes on with the falling of pistils, drying of petals, fading of leaves. For time on from that there is continued change. Patient. Beautiful.

Long have I loved to cry. And to love with vulnerability and reckless, then calculated abandon. I am an emotional thing, dramatic and comedic with laughter and tears always bubbling below the surface. Passionate.

I went to see Bumblebee in the theater yesterday. There was some corny moment: “The darkest nights produce the brightest stars.” Corny, but correct.

Dead flowers are just the beginning.

I’ve come to the painful realization that it has only been in the past two years that I’ve started calling my home country “America”. Straight from the rhetoric. Scheisse. I regret that it took a new friend from Argentina to point this out.

North America is made up of no fewer than twenty-three countries.  South America has twelve.  More than thirty five nations with unique heritage, culture, language, and food.  These are places with diverse people, countryside, farmland, cities, ruins, beaches and jungles. They have their own wars and shitty politics and glorious uprisings.  They do not belong to anyone in the U.S, no matter what imperialist money might try to say.

The US is not “America”: it is the United States, the States, USA.

So many of us are busying ourselves mending our psyches and trying to right the wrongs done by those who came before.  We’re learning new words for things in order to correct past behaviors. Add to the list that the United States cannot possibly represent “America”.

If for no other reason than that a fascist–and overall disgusting waste of human life–began this trend, let’s end it.

I have been pursuing my self these ten mostly alone and mostly not lonely weeks in Germany.

I am expanding.

I actively create, now. I claim my space as an artist.

I have even, bittersweetly, reclaimed my space as my own primary partner. I am falling in love with me again.

I am growing.

I have plans, but they are not the plans anyone prepared for me.

I am free.

I met an androgynous person at summer camp. This was long before “they/them” and so she was a she. A girl who went to girls’ summer camp and just cleaned house among a free and willing culture of budding women. I was desperately attracted to her. Mom saw my excitement when I came home from camp. She said, “Kiah is finally encountering androgyny!” And the truth was that I had to ask her what the word meant. Like so many women who came before, this young lady was deprived a space to be herself.

Step back probably nine years to the time I had short hair and a boy on the playground with blonde locks to his waist asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I vividly remember looking at his tangle of hair just freely caught on itself and all over his shirt like so many brambles in the woods. I said, “Are you a girl or a boy?” knowing full well that no girl’s long hair would ever be so messy. He was offended and ran off. I had won.

Not long after that, maybe two years, I trailed too far behind my mom entering the women’s room. Instead of cruising in after her as I intended, I received a tongue lashing from a stranger for going into the wrong restroom. This woman tore me apart–was probably having a bad day/life to begin with–even though I tried to tell her I was a girl. I remember my mom coming out of the bathroom to find me inconsolable. I remember her looking for that woman. I can’t remember if they spoke. I do remember holding my pee until we got home.

When I was much younger my pops taught me to play ball. I played t-ball and little league happily among the boys’ teams for several years. When I started to grow boobs, somebody noticed and sent me to softball. They separated me from my friends. It was a different game and all the girls were already cliquey. They were surprised when I faked an injury and sat out the rest of the season. I never played on a team again.

Fast forward to this past year, when cutting off my curls became terrifying somehow, right up until I did it. Pause right now then, and see me serving up androgyny like nobody’s fucking business. I’ve become the person of my dreams.

I have spent much time examining my female-ness. My chosen pronouns. How I feel about “womanhood”. I am absolutely genderqueer/nonbinary/gendernonconforming.

I do not want to adopt “they/them” mostly because I don’t like the way it sounds. I also don’t want to give up my sisterhood, not ever. More than anything though, I think the conversation about gender is already growing old. I appreciate my “they/them” pals for staying strong and queer. I respect everyone’s pronoun choices.

Here’s the thing, y’all: all of this is just a really beautiful, honest and human attempt to clean up a landfill-worthy pile of garbage built on policies made by people who are either dead (byeee) or might as well be. Their time is done and they are squealing like the stuck pigs that they are.

We are still here.

We have always been here.

I am eager for the time when this conversation is irrelevant, obsolete. I hope to live to see it. Someday we will know again, as our ancestors did: human is human is worthy. Everyone, every one.

Attention, white people, hetero-normatives, cis-gender friends, manspreaders, monogamy apostles, abled-bodies, and anyone else who is super comfortable in your undisputed roles in the regular everyday world,

Move over.  Make room.

Why yes, I am cis-gendered, white presenting, able-bodied, thin, and accepting of hetero privilege on many occasions.  I’ve made space.  I am constantly checking myself, moving aside, stepping back.

Are you?  Why not?

I am writing this specifically because I want to hold myself to a standard.  I have entertained enough of the (American) white cis-male experience, in literature, art, my personal time and energy.  I will no longer spend time or money on the unknowns-to-me-personally among these people (I’m bailing on a lot of the knowns-to-me-personally, as well; sad but necessary.).  I’m not doing this out of some misplaced rage, and in fact the only person I’m angry with is myself in this case, for the oversight thus far.  Instead, this is an effort to raise the voices, art, literature, time and effort of women, POC, non-binary, trans, GNC, and every other voice that has been so long silenced by the norms.  We call it “marginalized”.  I will happily step aside to move these folks front and center.

Won’t you?

I want to have new conversations about relationships.  The expansion of touch outside the limits of sex.  The ability of intimacy beyond our beds. The possibilities of love when it isn’t caged by monogamy.  I want you to know that whatever version of love you experience is correct, not to be ignored.  I want all the bi/pansexual kids out there to know they aren’t greedy:  they are the future.

I want to see brown women standing tall.  Instead of struggling to make a point or a dollar on social media, I want to see women of color in public, at weekend markets and county fairs.  I want to see white people face to face with the beauty of native endeavors.  The work itself thus expanding the worlds of others.  I want to see more pow-wows.  More celebrations between tribes.

I want more space for people who aren’t cis-gendered.  I want to see them thrive.  I am a cis-woman, but I do not doubt that gender will die.  Gender non-conformity is the future.

Also the future:  fatness and “other” bodies.  Different strengths.  Dangerous curves.  I will make all the space for bodies that don’t fit the traditional norms.  The gorgeous thighs that rub each other.  The rolls of fat and exuberant bosoms.  I want freedom for every fucking body.

Don’t you?

In 2001 I made out with a girl friend or two.  I tried to come out as bisexual to people I thought were close friends at my high school, and consequently brought myself all the negative attention in my whole world.

I stretched my ears daily on the bus to high school because my parents didn’t want me gauging them out.  I would take out the spacers on the way home and hide my bloody, abused lobes whenever I was around my folks.  I made it to zero gauge like this, and honestly I feel lucky my ears didn’t just fall off in refusal.

I had a few really amazing, supportive, good friends.  But they were from other schools, so I would see them on weekends if I was lucky.  Some of them were gay, which helped.  We’d talk about actual things even though I was already deeply closeted by the time I became close with these friends.  One helped me pierce my tongue frenulum as well as my septum.  The pain felt exactly right.  One of those piercings was much easier to hide from my parents than the other.

Everybody at school thought the visible piercing was fake.  I continued to be a target.  Nobody else had this piercing.  Nobody else at my school wanted to tell people they were bisexual.  I was alone.  The bullying was thorough and cut me cleanly from any local friendships I’d experienced up til then.

One girl in particular wouldn’t lay off.  Everybody thought she was the shit.  I wonder if her heart was rotten by nature or nurture, because she seemed quite unloved.  I had really wanted to be her friend, even as she picked on me.  But I kept supplying ammunition in the form of “poser” behavior.  She got meaner and meaner, pretending to acquiesce and then upping her brutality a notch or two.  She may have invented cyber-bullying–after one particularly worthless session with an incompetent student counselor, she started new AIM profiles just to pick on me using everything we’d discussed.

I smoked weed whenever I could, but even the local dealers were shitty to me.  They stole my money and sold me bags of stems instead of bud.  I would be empty-handed at parties.  Nobody from my high school wanted to hang out with me unless I had drugs.  Sometimes I could find acid from older kids who were above the bullying I was experiencing.  Those were especially weird nights though.  Then those friends graduated and the abuse only worsened for me.

I learned to smoke cigarettes.  I snuck out a lot to do dumb shit with people I didn’t even like.  I applied for boarding school.  I begged to transfer to a school where my friends were.  I just wanted to be a weirdo with weirdo friends.  I just wanted to be safe.

Later, I would discover ketamine.  I wouldn’t share it, but instead guarded one baggie with my life for months.  K could help me get through a rough school day without noticing all the bullies.  I would do small bumps in the school bathroom.  I even heard a rumor that somebody thought I’d been crying in there, cuz sniffling, which is something I actually don’t remember ever doing, but I was relieved they didn’t assume I was doing drugs.  I needed that medicine, in those days.

My father would regularly repeat to me that “Everybody had a hard time in high school” which in turn made me wish that I was getting a real education, because that argument isn’t viable.  My brother seemed to be doing just peachy.  Must school be a horrifying rite of passage?  I wondered what my father, a white, heterosexual cis-male who’d attended exactly the same high school, went through to make him so jaded toward his daughter’s very real, isolating pain.

Teachers bullied me, too.  The boys’ gym teacher, who I had very little interaction with, referred to me as “Paint Chips” which I didn’t understand.  He politely explained, “You must have eaten them as a child.”  I was still a child.

One teacher didn’t like that I was smarter than she.  She and I would get into it often in class, most notably about the fact that “persons” is a word.  This particular argument, and sad excuse for an educator, prevented my entrance into Advanced Placement English my senior year.

Luckily, neurotypical English was taught by somebody awesome.  Somebody who’d been through some shit and saw me going through mine.  Luckily, he wasn’t the only one.

I also had a mother who saw my pain clearly and let me see my real friends as much as possible.  She took me to hang out with groups of university women whose power and sexuality was just budding in the most beautiful ways.  They loved me like the little pet I wanted to be to them, and I learned a lot just by being present in those Vagina Monologue days.  Mom would drive me home after and treat me to yogurt parfaits.  We’d talk.  Literal life-saving.

This was long before the “it gets better” movement and well after I’d closeted myself, but there were constant reminders from all different kinds of women I admired who could promise that life would change.

And here, here is where my tears begin.  My gratitude for those women knows no bounds.  I want them to know how dear these memories are to me, and how related to life over death those experiences truly were.  It gets better.  Everything does, even when the world is burning around us.  We have each other.  We have sisterhood.

I have no sympathy anymore for any person who identifies as a woman but isn’t actively, emphatically supporting other women.  Any woman who drags another lady for her looks/sexual choices/money-acquisition/truth can catch this mouth calling her out.  I have no patience for any moment in which feminist speech is stifled (or less than intersectional).  I have no time for women who don’t bother to lift up their sisters.

Sisterhood is magic.  Pain has made me the brave, independent weirdo babe I am today, but I couldn’t have done anything constructive with any of it were it not for the midwifery of those who’d come before.  We are all we have, and we are everything.

Berlin is definitely an Amelie moment.  Not my first time living alone in a new city and I don’t plan on finding love via photo booths.  Nonetheless I am certainly on some “walk alone noticing all the beauty, put your hands in the beans at the market, and smile at the idiosyncrasies of your neighbors” routine.  Also, quietly but earnestly trying to make the world a little more beautiful and magical wherever possible.  And a little bit lonely, but doing just fine.

Does a friendship die when two people are no longer able to communicate clearly to each other their feelings or intentions?  Are those moments of incoherence, defensiveness, frustration all part of a swan song?  Perhaps things are being clearly communicated, but the friendship was already incapacitated, mutual understanding in a flat-line.  Maybe it’s that relentless, high speed drama wears down a love, especially if it means the friendship becomes solely a resource to vent issues and seek comfort, but from which no advice is appreciated.  This seems like cardiac arrest; the cholesterol built of demonstrable patterns and habits going back over years.  Maybe yeah, maybe the friendship went comatose a long time ago.  The misunderstandings and frustrated communication seem only to be attempts at cutting through a long-term disconnect between humans.  Perhaps it’s time to consider going off life support.

New fake band:  He Who Ha-has and the Who-hoos

The internet is a vast wasteland of people explaining to their friends a lot of things they already know.  Echo upon echo.  The world outside our screens needs more oomph.  Social media cannot possibly lead to social justice.  (File under:  hellishly understated necessities of revolution.  See also:  why can’t I make new friends anymore?  Additional references:  fragile masculinity, defensive whiteness, performative ally-ship.)

Fantastic Beet Salad and Where to Find It (Now in restaurants near you)

Fuck all holidays, the one this week especially.  If you need to buy gifts this season, please spend your money on marginalized humans in small businesses.  Or, if you’re like me and have something against physical stuff, you can donate to someone hungry.

Explicitly stated physical attraction + generous, personal friendship = ???  Pretty sure the answer is romance but please correct me if you’re familiar with a different result in this equation.

Audre Lorde should be canonized as Our Mother of Holy Intersectional Feminism.  If you’re reading this and there are other authors who seem to vie for this particular sainthood, please oh please share them with me!

Speaking of:  an entire drag show of male bodies dressed in high femme and one of these deep voices–which you know belongs to a person who is proud of his body by day, has no trouble walking down the street without being harassed, makes a full wage when he works, definitely put on all that makeup just for fun, not because anybody said he was ugly otherwise, and has full permission to do whatever else he wants with his body–says, “Down with the patriarchy!” and there is literally not one woman represented on the entire stage, so what the fuck is that proudly hairy, muscular dude even saying.  If anybody wants to discuss the taking up of space by white cis male queerness, I am here (and hear) for it.  Like for real, please talk me down.  If I’d had a tomato that night I’d have thrown it.

I turned off all of my “push notifications”. What a huge difference it has made. I highly recommend it.

glasses
unkempt ponytail
blond
big, cozy headphones
zip up with recognizable scifi emblem that I can’t place
tee underneath:
“Beam Me Up Scotty, This Place Sucks”

brother,

I haven’t been an email person for a long time, so when I had the space in my life to read everything that has gone unread, I figured I could try.

Predictably, I tossed nearly all of it without reading.

But I listened to every heretofore unopened weekly song.  I devoured the poems.  I loved the videos.  Highlights for me were your inexhaustible humility, the squirrel at Mom’s cottage, the white shirts on the clothesline and you take one at the end, the sunset at the beach (of course), every single foggy video, and Sophie’s yawn with Arlo before “You’re the Farthest I Go”, which I think just popped up automatically after a weekly song.

I know you are an amazing artist.  I trust your music to be great, and it delivers to a part of my heart that only our family–including its additions–can touch.  Sometimes I get weary because your compositions can make me feel the absence of our family so acutely, but most of the time it’s like getting a hug from Mom.  And so I depend on it.

Reading these old emails though it was the poems, the other songs, that really got me.  I miss you, my brother, and when I miss you I wonder what nuggets of wisdom you would quietly, passionately share in whatever circumstance I find myself.

Thank goodness for these posts.  I spent all morning yesterday listening to that old Chance the Rapper song about being ready for the blessings.  I have gone down rabbit holes full of Yeats and Rilke and a ton of people I’ve never heard of.

I have been learning about reading being fuel.  Not for art or writing or any particular avenue.  Simply fuel for life, like food.  I think a lot of the qualities I admire in you and Sophie and other friends stem from the reading you all do.  I have come to agree with you that Netflix is the devil in this way.  Books have made me feel less alone in Germany, where I can count all of my friends on one hand and still have fingers left, than I ever felt in D.C.

I thought you might like to know these things about your sister.  I don’t need a response now or ever, but I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I admire you, and how sometimes your teachings take time to sink in.

I love you brother.

…heard over 2 hours.  French, German, Turkish, Arabic, English, and Spanish.

No joke.