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