Getting Out

I always return here. How could I not? You, my dear journal, the record of me.

A crossroads is coming up. Du mußt dein leben ändern - you must change your life. The walls appear to be closing in on my life here in the USA. We talk about fascism and blah blah blah but it's really the same as it's always been but more. Racism but saying the quiet part loud. Reaganomics squared. The Moral Majority but more. I go back and forth. Is it better to ensure my own survival by leaving, making a new life elsewhere? Is that just an exercise of privilege? When I was 19, I wanted to move to Canada because it would be easier to transition there. Maybe I should've, maybe I should now.

But I have kids here now - not my genetic offspring, or even adoptees, but people who rely on me to varying extents. Part of the allure of leaving is to go somewhere where I don't have a web of responsibilities, where no one looks to me for guidance. A new life, but a regression. As much as I feel it's part of my identity, sometimes I resent having to be the rock for others when I don't feel like I have a fixed point to anchor myself to. It kinda sucks being the final authority in your own life, as much as it is a freedom.

So, my dilemma. I don't want to leave my home - fuck the USA, I love Chicago. There's black people here, it's lit! Still, it could be good for me to put down roots somewhere else. Learn a new place, see some new sights. Understand new racisms, meet new parts of the diaspora.

 I will find a way to survive. Maybe even thrive, goddess willing.

My soul is troubled at the moment. I'm worried I'm making the wrong decisions. I took a job that I worry might be too much for me. The COVID walls are closing in. I worry that one of the relationships I feel the most dear has way past gone to shit.

Maybe I've reached the limit to what I can achieve. I worry about that a lot, maybe always have.

Usually, I would say I to myself: I need to get stronger. Smarter, better, something-er. I don't know if that's the case here. I need more clarity, maybe.

What do I know is true?

Sunny's Song

I keep think about my father, his black liberationist roots. I wonder if I'm fulfilling that mission correctly, the one he silently charged me with. Why am I still carrying it? Despite everything he was, the hands made for fighting children, his disdain for the queer, his ancient roiling rage ... I guess he taught me how to see critically the ways people and systems perpetuate racism, thrive on it.

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.

Flowers Blooming in the Church

Religion just seems like the wrong word, but it's the only one that comes to mind. My higher power, a la Alcoholics Anonymous. There's been many years since I regularly prayed to it. Tonight, I find myself in need of guidance.

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.

I pray to Luna. I pray to Althena. I pray to Alys and Shizel and Terra and you, the player. They give me the strength to strive, the security of knowing I'm protected by heroes bigger than me, the knowledge that battles against outrageous odds can be won.

Every now and then, I light a candle to Santa Muerte, my queen. Her sainthood gives her domain over the queers and the night and all manners of risky business. I'm not sure if it's some form of appropriation, given that I'm a non-Latinx PoC of vaguely Catholic descent. Still. She gets it. I'm gonna go buy a candle.

Pyre Rhino

I'm rediscovering bits of myself. I put together a mix made of music from my archives and some more recent stuff. Letting myself slow down my emotional dash lets the me of now catch up to the me of then. So many different versions of me. I don't miss being regarded as a boy, but I do miss how much less complicated that Jessica's life was.

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

This Slender Slice of Silence

The spoken word must be killed. My brother hated noise of any kind. What a terrible thing, that I've come to resemble my torturer.

I can't find peace, inside of my body or out. I retreat to my room to play video games. Not exactly an adaptive coping mechanism. Existing only as rumor, emerging to eat then scurrying back to my nest. I don't know how to fix it. I honestly have a hard time describing the problem I want to fix. Is it that I'm so socially drained that I never see fit to leave my home? That my anxiety has reached a peak which leaves me to see no gain in interacting with the physical world? Or that I've become desensitized to the feelings in my body, watching them from outside myself?

I'm mad at my sister for leaving me, for doing it in a crappy way, for making out with the younglings while loudly complaining about how the sexual politics of power. I'm mad at my job for not supporting me, for being a place of pain that preaches self-care without providing structure or resources for it. I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at myself because I can't continue doing what I'm doing. I feel like I've failed at being the person I want to be. Intellectually, I know that I'm another wounded bird who deserves care. But my gut says that I should be more, that any burden too big for my shoulders is a sign I should improve.

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.

I want to feel safe. I don't right now. I want to forge a path away from addiction and fear. I want to live a manageable life where I rarely have to worry about a fight breaking out. I want enough space away from the pain of others that I can unpack my old hurts without breaking down.

I want space. Enough that I have room to contemplate, not so much that I'm lost in emptiness.

The Process

I'm addicted to feeling powerful.

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.

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?

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.

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.