Unprotected Sleep

My sister always wants me to write. I never really try explaining to her that I can't. I have experiences and people that I can barely keep in my head, but I can't take that first step. When I'm high, I can't write, because the words just don't flow like they do otherwise; they jumble, they scramble somewhere between the brain and the page. I want to say something that sounds introspective. "Could I not write because I smoked, or did I smoke so that I couldn't write?" Bullshit, but bullshit that looks good.

I've been let loose from a claustrophobic studio cell into a huge, beautiful one-bedroom, and I just feel alone. Being alone in a space like this feels so unfamiliar. Intensely empty. Frightening. I don't many have friends and they feel more like a support group right now than people who I share a mutual world with. I can't have friends until the real me exists, in all my vulnerability, and somehow no matter how I construct that possible reality it scares my shit right up into my stomach. I don't have the tools to make friends. My parents didn't pass them down to me and I didn't come out of my hole enough to make my own. My mortality is finally clear to me and it frightens me into action, but I don't feel there's anyone with whom I can discuss my matters of import or personal crises without just dropping my shit on his/her doorstep.

Being TG is a really weird experience. Success, at least under the definition I understand,
involves becoming invisible. The only people you can recognize who haven't made themselves truly plain to the world are those in transition. The internet is full of those who I term my people, but the internet is to me a source of reference only. Noone's real online; just archetype and invective and idealized self-image. That the layers of deception surrounding many transfolk (myself included) are only shed in a place predicated on the falsehood of identity is an irony I can't really participate in.

When I take my primary identity as being trans, I feel rotten. Not unlike a liar, but more akin to those whose personalities lie by virtue of whatever dominates their face to the world. Super macho man, the politically over-aware, the goth, et al. And I feel a different unease when I'm able to reveal all but my crossing gender; the difficult schoolyard feeling, the unthought taunt that's still heard. The elegant solution to both of these problems is obvious and fast approaching, but I hesitate on the first step. After which it can only get easier and easier.

I can't write fiction because I'm too caught up in writing my own personal story; it will come to dominate any tale I weave, and I'm afraid of putting too much of myself into my work. When I read something that channels the author's life to ill effect, I kind of hate the writer for it, for rubbing their existence in my face. And when the inseparability of artist and art is executed properly, I feel that beautiful heartbreak that wrings tears out of some crevasse in my center. I don't know if I fear fucking it up more than getting it right. Even as I write this now, I can't tell if it's grating tedium or something pure. I usually can't read my own work, and when I do, some part of my can't make sense of it. Leads to lots of spelling errors, but the stories themselves always feel unfinished because I have no clue what to do with them once the rough draft is done.

So many stories I've read have followed in the Joseph Campbell heroic tradition. The writer keeps giving the hero obstacle after obstacle until s/he finally goes into the underworld. That moment of greatest despair, after which comes apotheosis, the realization of the fragmented godhood that the hero has carried within him/herself since before birth. When an alcoholic does it, it's called a moment of clarity. It's the signal for the story to start turning around, for the return from death.

I started writing this because I had an epiphany. After my acid trip down , I woke up dead. Some part of me turned off to survive my grief, to cope with my intense fear of myself, and in deference to my mother for housing me in my convalescence. I vowed to snuff out that part of myself that transgressed gender, the part of me that contained my heart. I couldn't really feel the absence because what was missing was my ability to feel. And then one day I made a simple decision and it was just there again and it hadn't left at all.

And that's where my words fail me. It's so odd because I can only talk in vague terms, not as before to skirt the issue, but because it's how I feel: unformed, immature, but some small part of me is constructed of something of ageless beauty which I can't pronounce. Being disconnected from that flicker at the heart of myself just seems so awful, even if I can only truly appreciate the horror of it in retrospect. I've been grappling with other problems (namely, being an alcoholic and dealing with the results of childhood abuse) and yet this seems so simply massive. The problem is that being in the middle of a transition forces you to oppositionally define yourself by your gender to retain your identity, just like being in the closet forces you to define yourself by your sexual preference, moreso even than the out and proud.

Luckily, my world is changing. My disease, the mota blanket I've wrapped my self in, its time is mercifully coming to a close. With it some of my fear falls away, and the world is revealed for what it is. Maybe I'll start writing again. We'll see.