Thursday, August 24, 2017
Sunny's Song
But I spend all this time around these white trans people and queer organizers and I feel lost. I look back on my life and see how much of it has been transactions of social and economic survival with white people. It leaves me feeling so estranged, so painfully in-between. I recognize that colorism is what gives me the privilege to hand-wring about the subject.
Sometimes I tell a story I half-stole from Kate Bornstein: I imagine two teams playing football, only to realize that I'm the football. White/black, gay/straight, man/woman; every border that my body lies upon is another set of teams looking to spike me into the astroturf. I didn't identify with my blackness as a sapling because my femme-ness made me smell foreign to my black caretakers and peers. Failing to uphold the code of black masculinity is often seen as traitorous, an affront to our fathers and their fathers. I carry that weight still, try to help others dismantle it while I'm doing the work.
I feel a need to balance the perspective, to offer up the sins of white culture so I don't come off coonish. I want to be a help to my people, not an anchor or another light-skinned person who accrues socioeconomic capital off the struggle. But I'm not woke and I know it. There's layers to unlearning, more than there ever appear to be at first. I see people with white privilege who feel as though they're done unlearning their prejudice but, baby, that shit's bone-deep. Sharing a community with a gaggle of faux-woke white communists has made my rose-tinted glasses turn a deeper shade of gray. They see me in fractions, reflections, 2D cutouts. They ignore their black trans sisters fighting tooth and nail, then justify their paranoia and xenophobia by citing the murders of black trans women. They move to Bridgeport and Pilsen and only make space with other white people. It's exhausting. I hoped I could galvanize them to change, to create a bridge between south and north. I now see that goal as far-fetched.
I grow increasingly underwhelmed by the social scenes that appear to be available to me. As I consider how to grow my life there don't seem to be people around me who care about the same things, who share my drive to build. I retain the ability to fit in most social circles, but it requires me to expend social energy disproportionate to how little I seem to care any more.
This is a prayer for the estranged. This is a song for isolation and healing. I don't know what the way forward is, but may it look different from what's behind me.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Flowers Blooming in the Church
The prophecy of the Nerevarine: you are not the one, but you may yet become the one. Being the hero doesn't matter. It's walking the path that counts.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Pyre Rhino
I broke up with the girl I'd been dating for six months. I think I regret it now, but at the time it was a relief. No more being obligated to talk, no more managing her abandonment feels when I couldn't be present, no more of someone touching my body. I still love her. She still loves me too, I think. But I kept breaking up and getting back together with her, and that is a sucky thing to experience and I couldn't keep doing it to her.
Right now there's a wall between me and other people. I'm having a hard time maintaining friendships. I get messages on OKCupid and ignore them. Why start what I can't keep up? Maybe it's my BPD/CPTSD flaring up, sending my into an avoidance spiral. Or the fact that, for me, doing social work makes being social feels like work.
My job is an exhaustion without end. Spending three hours a day in a loud room full of triggers and potential violent energy is making my mental illness into an even thicker stew. I'm jumpy and irritable and my memory's worse than usual. I feel so inadequate. Shouldn't I be able to do this? If I can't sustain the work, does that mean I've failed? I want to be kinder to myself than all that, but the stakes are always so high.
It's hard to maintain my center in so many survival situations. I feel sad, angry, and hurt most of the times I'm not numb. Trying to smoke less weed. It's been helping
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
This Slender Slice of Silence
I want to love that broken little girl inside of me. It's hard to know what she wants because she's spent so long avoiding pain instead of pursuing life. I want love and companionship and a bank account that grows and a body that can do anything. I want to feel freedom. I want a car that runs and a love that endures. To find a midpoint between stability and chaos. I want to see tomorrow as possibility instead of hardship. I want to feel sexy without always needing to prove it.
Friday, August 19, 2016
The Process
I'm addicted to being the right person for the moment.
I'm addicted to learning.
I'm addicted to love.
I'm addicted to feeling helpful.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
The Tao of Surviving
There are days where all I can focus on is subsistence. My life is unbearably survivable. I get home from work, I drop into low-energy mode. I'm trapped in a gravity well, sustained indefinitely in some fraction of a life.
Experience made me excellent at enduring the untenable. It's a powerful skillset, and not one I seek to lose. Violence and torture can't stop me. Being without friends won't end me. Fear becomes courage. The price of this limited immortality is living half a life, separate from the ability to enjoy purposeless moments. I avoid the bad without being able to steer towards the good.
I ache for a romantic relationship. Everything comes back to that, circles around it. Now that my apparatus for avoiding bad relationships has been refined, I can't bring myself to go on a date. I want a new kind of love, the kind that doesn't rely on caretaking, but I have no idea what that looks like. How can I seek something when I don't know what it'd look like?
Saturday, March 12, 2016
The Mommy Effect
I want to make a family that will take care of me. But, in the process of putting that family together, I put myself at the head of it so no one can victimize me. I place myself in a position where I give more help than I take. There's safety in that; I don't have to admit my needs and face the possibility that they won't be met. I'm still not taken care of. I'm still satisfying unreasonable demands. But now I can blame it on others and their needs rather than the ones who made me this way.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
The Woman
She wants more of me than there is. When I'm around, she seems to feel better; I soothe the broken parts of her, doting and cooing. I play the companion, nurse, and daughter. Many hats.
I feel trapped. I don't want to admit that I like feeling trapped. She needs me. Maybe she won't say it outright, but she lets me know in her ways. It keeps me coming back.
I worry she'll leave. I try to anticipate needs, think of reasons we need to be with each other, find any reason she wouldn't leave someone as shitty as me.
It gets worse in the winter.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
On Enduring Constant Thoughts of Being Raped
Thursday, March 05, 2015
Ataraxia
I hit a new bottom. I saw who I was, who I am, the anger and pain and dysfunction that came from being raised by people who abused me. I saw how it worked. I let myself say out loud the things my mom had done to me. I began to reckon with how dependent I am on the other people in my life and the shame that came with it.
I don't feel triumphant about any of it. It just sucks and makes feel feel uneasy, like I've perpetually committed some misdeed in need of punishment.
I don't know what I'm doing right now. Teetering on the edge of adulthood again. Small. Empty. I can't take care of myself. I don't know if it's the depression or the BPD/C-PTSD, but I feel powerless to change the course of my life.
Now that I understand the extent of my mental illness, I can't trust myself. Every blind spot I find is another reason to question my judgment. Every move seems like another twirl in the spiral down.
Death has reappeared in my fantasies, the maiden I daydream about when desolation overwhelms. I want to embrace her with all my heart, consummate my marriage to Santa Muerte. I went goth a bit more. It's who I am in the deep-down places.
The people I live with scare me. All the drinking and denying and aggression make this house feel a bit too much like home, the familiar drama of dysfunctional people bouncing off one another. It's hard to watch this new band of players say all the same lines straight off the script. Unhappy families may each be unhappy in their own way, but they tend to express it in the same frustrating storm of slammed doors and drunken challenges.
I'm done. I've got nothing left.