Untethered: You Need Help
“You need help.”
It’s an insult sometimes, right? It’s a controversial phrase, one that implies judgment. In true Autostraddle fashion, we have a whole column named after it. Usually “you need help” is uttered in response to someone’s perceived mental health issues, but I also think it says So Much about the ways we look at the idea of “help” and who needs it. If you “need help” you’re failing in some way, whether that’s with being the “right amount” of sane, or more often, when it comes to conforming to whatever niceness and politeness and respectability look like.
Asking for help, the kind that requires another person to set aside time for me, to exert themselves physically, feels as easy as touching a hot stove.
If I had done everything right, I wouldn’t be in the position of needing help, would I?
AND YET, I know we’re sick of how So Many People (and often people who have some kind of inheritance or family money) talk about “bootstrapping.” We know “girlbossing” and “leaning in” are things that can actually only be supported by the labor of others in some way and by a certain level of money and class privilege — the ability to buy prepared meals, to pay someone to do housework. Still, the mythology of self-sufficiency gets recycled and fed to us again and again from different angles, whether that’s the idea of having some off-grid cottage in the woods or of being able to find some sort of balance, some semblance of being well when everything is on fire. It’s too much of a challenge not to internalize it, to escape the lingering sense that everything should be Absolutely Fine when my ex only moved out in September and I’ve been working and working and working to burnout for who knows how long — and guilt when it’s not and I’m not somehow magically productive every waking hour and able to accomplish everything I wanted to just because I put it on a to do list.
Part of the rewiring I’ve had to undergo while embarking on this project of being a person without an infrastructural relationship (for the first time, really, in so many years) has involved the getting of help. I’ve been happy to make time when someone else has needed to rearrange a garage or move something heavy. But even with offers from other people, it’s been a difficult process sussing out just exactly how I want to approach getting help from the people in my life — how much I can ask for, from whom, and what I can do in exchange.
With one person, it’s been easy. We’re both working on our houses. I help him hang some drywall one day. He brings his truck and loads out some of my debris and takes it to the dump another day. This makes sense to me and is pretty easy. If I need a ride when my car’s in the shop, or if I’m sick and need food, I have a different friend I know I can ask, and I’ve done the same for her. I found out from yet another friend that if I had just texted them when I was alone on Christmas, that they would have been happy to hang. I just should have asked. As counterintuitive as it’s been to remap these pathways of care in my personal life, it’s also been a huge part of healing. It’s made me so much more resilient, too, I feel. In the past — and especially with the pandemic — I slid into the trap of relying too much on one single relationship. Breaking out of that isn’t so much a breaking as it is months of building connections.
It’s not like I’ve built up these friendships with this end goal in mind, of being able to ask for and give help in a multitude of ways with a small network of people, but because the process is a pleasure. Still, reflecting on it makes me feel like this is some solid measure of how far I’ve come since I began this column. I know that talking about networks of care is nothing new, especially among queer people, but it’s really something else to find myself there in a deeper way.
But, dear reader, why am I reflecting on this right at this moment? It’s because my dad and sister have come down to my place as a special Birthday Treat. Their treat? They’re helping me clear out old junk and home reno debris so that I have a fresh start to continue forward from. Everyone I’ve told about this has been blown away by how actually helpful this gesture is. And it has been! It’s also been strange, and hard. Until my dad and I repaired our relationship in a big way several years ago, I didn’t have much to do with my family in terms of actually helping each other out like this. It’s weird to have him and my sister digging through my things, and letting go of how odd that feels is a whole internal process in and of itself. Like, sure, go through my old art projects and my photos and my keepsakes from times in my life when we barely spoke and comment on it. This is fine. Everything is fine.
At the very least, there’s something cathartic about hearing your dad grumbling about the mess your ex-girlfriend’s left behind. It makes me feel like getting some help with it all isn’t so unreasonable.
The Big And
feature image by Tanja Ivanova via Getty Images
Home for the holidays last week, I sat on my bed, in the room where I lived from ages 12 to 18. The laundry machine sang its song, signaling the end of its cycle, and I, without thinking, sang along. I smiled at the familiarity, the sounds of childhood, the sounds of home.
And then I remembered, this wasn’t the laundry machine my parents had when I was growing up, when I lived in that room, when I was ages 12 to 18. They replaced the laundry machines sometime when I was in college, I think. I frowned and tried to remember the song of the laundry machine before this laundry machine, if it even had a song. Nothing came to mind.
Sometime in middle school, or high school, I’m not sure, someone drove their car into Javaholics. It closed.
We tried out a few places after that, and none of them felt as right as Javaholics. I went to college.
After a few years of cafe-hopping, my parents discovered this new place, called Arsicault. My brother went to college, too. I moved to New York; he moved to New York; my parents still go to Arsicault every Friday. I’m not home as much, but when I am, on a Friday, I eat a chocolate croissant, and it’s the best chocolate croissant I’ve ever had, every time.
So as 2023 drew to a close, I found myself wondering, what did I learn this year? What’s my biggest lesson? Over the summer, I started a newsletter called Questions I Have, in which I explore — you guessed it — questions I have. So you can imagine my surprise when I asked myself the question of what did 2023 teach me? and found, shockingly, that I thought I had an answer.
The answer is “and.”
In 2023, I felt worthless, and loved myself more than I ever have before.
In 2023, I admitted how badly someone hurt me, and I forgave them, and that process is over and ongoing, and it changed me privately, and it changed me publicly, and I stayed the same.
In 2023, I talked to myself for hours, and I gave myself permission to shut the fuck up.
In 2023, I read a lot and got high a lot and watched artistic movies and watched a lot of reality TV.
In 2023, I realized how well I know myself and how much more there is to learn.
In 2023, I gave up, and I strove for improvement.
In 2023, I was a kid and a grown-up.
In 2023, none of it mattered, and all of it mattered, and some of it mattered, and some of it didn’t.
It’d be so much easier if it was “or” instead of “and”, wouldn’t it? If every pain really could be traced to one specific catalyst, or another, and not to both. It’d be more clear-cut, and there would be a lot less hemming and hawing, at least from me. I spent a lot of 2023 trying to decipher what is right and what is wrong, who is right and who is wrong, who is to blame and who is innocent, who’s on my side and who is not, only to realize it’s all and. This realization makes me angry and relieved and excited and scared.
“I’ll never get medicated for the first time again,” one of us said.
“I’ll never get laid off for the first time again,” another of us said.
“My mom will never die again,” another of us said.
If time is blurry, and I think it is, then so is everything else. A friendship that ended is a relief and a tragedy and a detail. A lover lost is a lesson and a mourning and a motivation. Death is awful and inevitable. Cats are loved ones and mysteries and apex predators.
I feel a distinct desire to narrativize life, to divide it into categories and sort it accordingly. I don’t think I’m the only one. But there is something compelling about the blurring. When the categories — of time, of emotion, of memory — obfuscate and intertwine, what is left?
Us. I find myself thinking, we’re all just little guys (gender neutral), living our little, big lives.
I am sitting on my bed, on the couch, eating a croissant, eating a scone, eating a different croissant, loving my family, mythologizing my family, creating family, loving myself, hating myself, learning, growing, shrinking, embarrassing myself, making myself proud.
Welcome to the new year. Embrace the and.
Untethered: A Great Lady
I’ve been eulogizing, just to myself, in the moments between other moments that are claimed by tasks or thoughts of the present or literally anything else. But in the minute or so before the kettle boils, after the bag and honey are in the cup, I’ll stretch my mind back to the days when staircases were mountainous and I was still learning the names of birds.
My grandmother cared for me a lot when I was young, in those pre-Kindergarten years. My grandpa was alive then, but in his final years, so spent most of his time either at the kitchen table with his oxygen tank or on the living room couch with the same. So, that left my grandma to amuse me — and to our delight, we made excellent companions.
I had a hunger for exploration and, even at that age, would happily walk for long periods (for a child of three or four). This meant we spent countless hours just walking places, including around the quarter mile path in Buffalo’s Delaware park where I’d balance on the old cobblestone curb that bordered the grass, playing an endless game of not getting eaten by crocodiles. I’d accompany her on errands, to the cobbler or to the deli. On special occasions, she’d take me to a museum or to the zoo, where I turned to her as the holder of All World Knowledge and asked about everything from why there were so many naked ladies in the art museum to why the “Lucy” skeleton of an early human in the natural history museum was my-sized if she was an adult.
On the most special occasions, we’d go to the cemetery where we’d look at the graves and feed the ducks. At one point, on one of these cemetery visits, my grandma had picked up what might have been a guide pamphlet at the main office, and read to me aloud the story behind a particular mausoleum featuring a sculpture of a young man in repose with an angel above him. He lay with one hand on a Bible on his chest and his legs crossed in a number four shape. The angel, apparently, had been a maid, Katherine, he’d been in love with whom his parents forbade him from marrying and who they fired after sending him to Europe. When he died after a lingering sickness he contracted upon his return, clutching the Bible Katherine left behind, she supposedly became the inspiration for the angel above him, perpetually welcoming him into heaven. Did his rich parents ever do right by the maid they fired who became the model for an angel in their son’s grave? Probably not. I know what I did do, though, which was decide, in my childish superstition, that the best way not to die in my sleep was to sleep Exactly Like This Man. When we returned, my grandpa joked with me that a ghost had come by looking for me.
And why did I have such an intense dread of dying in my sleep? Well, because when I would kneel with my grandma during those days, at the edge of her bed to say our evening prayers before we crawled in and slept next to each other (my grandpa slept downstairs), we’d recite:
As I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
When I asked her about it, she explained exactly what it meant: that we were asking for safe passage to Heaven if we died in our sleep. This, naturally, presented me with the concept of Dying In My Sleep, which would plague me for most of my early years in one way or another. I slept like that man from the mausoleum for years to ward it off. For years!
I always knew my grandma was intensely aware of her mortality, of my grandpa’s, of mine, of everyone’s. It threaded itself through our conversations and our days together. Thanks to her, I learned early on what a DNR was, that she did not want to ever be kept alive by artificial means past the point of having agency. She was born during the Great Depression, lost a brother as an infant, lived without indoor plumbing in the Polish neighborhood in Buffalo, practiced Air Raid drills in World War II, and lost countless people — in all kinds of ways — along the way. My grandpa was also in the process of dying at the time and would pass by the time I was in the 1st grade. It had to have been heavy on her mind.
Last week, I drove through a wintery mix in my old Subaru up to Buffalo to see her for what might very well be the last time. As I approached my grandma’s bedside and my uncle woke her up, I had a feeling — despite the many “she probably won’t recognize you” warnings I’d received from my mom — that she would know me. Her eyes opened. I said, “Hi, Grandma.”
“What are you doing here?” She looked at my face and held my gaze. The question was bewildered — I didn’t live there! But it wasn’t unkind, and it was steeped with recognition. I told her I’d come to visit her, that I loved her. It’s hard to remember what I said, trying to have a moment in a room that’d become crowded with my uncles, my mom, my sister. My mom had put out a blast that I was coming up, so all of my grandma’s children were present to see me see her.
But here’s the thing. I think, on some level, I do really see her. When I was 13, I lived with her during the week for most of a school year. My dad was deployed, and my mom had decided it would be easier on her because of my after school running practice and such if I just stayed with my grandma who could drive me around or whatever. I’d pack up my bag and stay in a little spare bedroom where the entire wall next to the bed was a bookcase, stuffed with my grandma’s reading material. For most of her life, she was a voracious reader, and she certainly read the classics. A hardcover copy of Crime and Punishment sat in her living room at all times. But she liked the pulpy stuff, too. I distinctly remember her reading the entirety of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest series, as an example. I’d pick through her books, read them, know the things she had read, devouring some of the more scandalous books in secret. She didn’t speak down to me even when I was younger, just addressed me with a matter-of-fact tone that complimented my early grasp of language and child’s curiosity. As a kid, I was considered odd, except, looking back, I fit the mold of “The Little Professor” quite well, which would have suited her, someone who I suspect was and is also autistic.
When I lived with her as a teen, I noticed some things that stood out. She kept to a breakfast schedule, for one. Each day of the week had a specific breakfast she would prepare and eat on that day. She repeated this infinitely but still had it written on a leaf of paper she kept square to the edge of her kitchen counter for reference. She was particular about her routines, and I remember her quitting her book club because no one read the whole book and they “just wanted to chit chat,” which, valid.
Our connection, and the reason I pissed off my uncles for years by occupying the status of favorite grandchild over their kids, was one of neurodivergents who just kind of “got” each other, whether or not I grew up to be a gender-nonconforming tattooed bisexual. And in a lot of ways, I have my grandma to thank for the ways she showed me how to navigate the world, and this meant — often — with a kind of quiet disobedience, a distinct and singular approach to claiming the right to plan her own journey, even with whatever limits her life placed around her. She mythologized this part of herself, too, telling me stories about being a trendsetter; “When I started smoking, everyone[referring to her sisters and mother] decided it must be okay [for women to smoke], and they started smoking, too,” and “When I started wearing Tampax, everyone started wearing Tampax” are just two small tales from her vault.
When she found out the local state college was free (at the time), she decided she was simply going to attend because why not? She wanted to and that was always a good enough justification for her to do something. I still have the typewriter that her father bought for her off a fellow barfly while bragging about his daughter who was the first in the family to go to college at his usual nighttime haunt. She was conversational in Polish and told me stories from the neighborhood, like about how every man who came into the card shop she worked at with my grandpa’s parents got two gifts on Valentine’s Day, one for the wife and one “for the sweetheart.” She seemed unperturbed by this reality. It just was. She told me about the first time she painted her nails red and walked, head held high, through Buffalo’s Polish neighborhood while older women hissed at her and said “Devil, Devil!” when they saw her crimson-tipped fingers. And though she dropped out of college the first time, she returned, much to my mom’s dismay, at the same time she went, and to the same school where she fought with an advisor who told her women didn’t study history. She won that fight.
She also had a temper, was inconsistent in many of her narratives, and, ultimately, needed my grandpa’s help getting a job because she was so notoriously tactless that she couldn’t do so on her own. She would scoff at sappiness, unless it was directed at her. She could be hurtful without meaning it, through her bluntness. I remember being nine or ten or so, having drawn a self portrait that was on display at some school art show situation, and her remarking, “Hm. That doesn’t look like you.” Which, sure, 10-year-old me wasn’t going to be Michelangelo, and I am sure, factually, it was not an accurate representation of my face, but is that what you say to a kid? But even this, her just existing and saying the wrong thing and going on living, was a lesson.
Her approach to taking up space as herself, to finding her own company agreeable, to not needing to bend to other peoples’ will had my uncles, when I visited, calling her A Great Lady. It was an odd homecoming, reminiscing about her by her bedside while she lay there dying of a combination of a long battle with dementia and a recent fall. It’s been years since I’ve seen these uncles, for various reasons. I watched them be humans, grieving — whether that meant trying to hold a normal conversation through tears, insisting that my grandmother should still take her vitamins (for what?), or kind of dissociating and ignoring the Great Lady in the room to chat with me.
One thing I heard over and over again was that before the fall, one of the things she had still loved to talk about were the early days with me, our trips to the park, our walks and the fun that was just between us. I remembered that from when she could still do phone calls. I knew her memory was going, pre-pandemic, and so when I called her to say hello sometimes while walking to work in the morning, I’d just talk with her about the past. It kept her more engaged than the present, was more hard-wired in.
As I drove my sister back to her place where I was staying, we agreed without hesitation that our grandma probably hates this current state she’s in, that if she’d had a proper say, she would’ve chosen euthanasia. “She always said to pull the plug!” We talked about family dynamics, about how hard it was on our youngest uncle, clearly.
I visited her again on my own the next day, with only an aid, a family friend and a nurse out on worker’s comp, present (so no circle of uncles this time). I helped the aid get my grandma up and to the toilet, as well as into her wheelchair so she could go sit in the living room and have an egg and some Boost at the table. I sat talking to her for a while, and she recognized me again, this time saying nothing, but glancing around my face with her eyes. The aid gave me some time alone with her, and I said a real goodbye, told her how much I loved her, reminded her of our times again, knowing she could still hear me, even if she didn’t respond.
While my grandma was asleep, the aid told me she hoped my grandma passed soon. We’d built up a rapport that afternoon, and she told me why, that my grandma talked in her sleep when the aid was there, and that recently she’d just said, plain as day, “I just want to die.”
I said I knew that, talked about how she always talked about her DNR. She was clear, but there was nothing we could do. I said I hoped she felt like she could let go soon, now that all the family had come through.
And I drove home, back to Pittsburgh, thinking about her and the influence she had on me, on the ways she encouraged some of my more antisocial tendencies, for better or for worse. I still smile, when I think of her rocking me back and forth in a hammock one summer night, when she said, as we complained together about being annoyed by other people out in the world, “A wise man once said, ‘Hell is other people.'”
Queering Time: The Offering of ‘Kairos’
“We aren’t our bodies. I believe when we die our soul pops out,” my aunt Monica’s eyes get big, and the hand not holding her electrolarynx voice box goes full jazz hand. Extended fingers. “It pops out and enters another dimension where time doesn’t exist. And it’s okay.”
“Ah, like reincarnation. I think I believe in that. I’ve been going to a Zen Buddhist center lately. Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I’m Lutheran so it’s a spirit-lives-on type of thing.”
“So, same same, but different. Have you seen the movie Past Lives?”
She shakes her head.
I tell her I think she’d really like it. I tell her about in-yun, the Korean term to describe how our souls transcend time and space; that fated paths entwine people across past, present and future. That when you marry, it’s thousands of layers of in-yun over thousands of lifetimes. Even when you make eye contact with someone in the street, you’ve known them before, and it’s in-yun.
I realize I may be conflating in-yun and reincarnation, but I find the concept comforting, and I tell my aunt this.
We start walking outside. She wants to show me her sculpture art project. Despite being in painful cancer remission, she has been spending her time spray painting in the yard.
“A philosophy conversation right away. We haven’t even had coffee yet.”
Awkward laugh.
“Yeah, I like that stuff.”
The book in my bag was Jenny Odell’s latest nonfiction work, Saving Time:Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. As advertised, “this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time — inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales — that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living.” The book’s been loosening my reins on time. Or maybe, the reins time has on me are loosening.
I’ve shifted my attention to “vertical time”, known as “Kairos” time to the ancient Greeks, which questions the rigidity of “horizontal time”, “Chronos”.
Kairos appreciates how moments and memories stretch, warp, forget, color, burst, blur, halt, slow or speed up time. I’ve seen it referred to as “God’s time” and “effervescent moments.” We all know how a certain kind of kiss can eclipse time. Units of time, like a minute, are not created equal. Our sensory, feeling, perceiving selves can’t be clocked up.
Saving Time is a call to question time and capitalism — and everything, really. To tilt our heads at how we define living. Are we moving through life in minutes or moments?
I scanned my QR code and walked into cymbals and stomps and big straw hats. I forgot mine, so I held up the program at my hairline and proceeded. I saw altars for bikers, for migrants on the California/Mexico border, migrants on the Phoenix border, and family lineages I’d never heard of. I saw a Dia de Los Muertos Barbie photobooth and a peafowl exhibit. Banana and apple and orange offerings baking in the sun. Open-air castles made of marigolds. Incense floating up up up to the Heavens.
To my left, a modest booth with colored popsicles, sharpies, and mini sandboxes. A place to pause, where we could write the names of our lost loves and stick them into the sand. It felt like I was bringing their ghosts together. Hang out up there! Play a game of bridge and say “far out!” Make art together. Be a beautiful band of misfits. I’ll see you soonish.
She passed away a week after we shared coffee in her backyard next to her bunny sculpture paint project. She was about to start a Phase 1 clinical trial for her returned cancer. The chemo she last tried wasn’t working. Now she’s entombed beside her late husband, Richard.
Monica went to Dia de los Muertos every year and wanted to take me. I went solo. And I saw her in it: the joyful revelry in music, dance, and embrace of loss. A reimagining. A positive spin on death. The end of the note she left her brother read, “…and then go on cheerfully about life and living.” Cheerfully marching behind the dancers, I sipped my $20 horchata out of a plastic skull I planned to keep, a sensitive mortal clinging to mortal things.
To me, this practice, and the belief in reincarnation or in-yun, is an extension of Kairos time. What’s more fluid and questioning of the clock and Western constructs than that? And what’s more queer than questioning?
The “God’s time” of Kairos surprises us. Catches us off guard. Doesn’t have a schedule. Love is like that. Queer love, even more woah. How a moment in time can quicken your heart, take your brain offline and place you in a time vacuum. A smell that hugs. A song that transports.
Moments in your embodied life today are intertwined with ancestors, known and unknown, love ghosts deceased and living. With people you shared a dance studio with; you dated; you sat on the same bench as decades later. Sometimes, you’ll get glimmers of that when you’re not looking. A butterfly settling on your sleeve or a perfectly timed text. Sometimes, it’s in an intentional act of meditation, in the receiving place at the bottom of your ‘hara’ exhale.
For those of us with our feet super-glued into a world of status calls, scrolling “breaks,” and steps tracking, Kairos is an offering. The word spiritual might spook you, or ick you, but I must say, this vertical time is a generous place to be.
Even when love is expansive and unbound, our time on earth, in this specific body, this life, these relationships, isn’t. We can have infinite love, but if love gets expressed through attention, and attention is time, then what? I vote we reach toward infiniteness and come up human.
The average person has 4,000 weeks to live. Society and technology work overtime to keep us to a schedule, to keep our time productive, to feed the insatiable machine. Perhaps inviting a Kairos counterbalance is the move; perhaps there’s no such thing as wasting time; perhaps we should all go collect shells and rocks and think about how, in this life, we’re just little babies compared to them.
If you welcome how time stretches and snaps — if you let time be weird — I don’t think you’ll float away too far into the ether. If you do, please say hi to my love ghosts.
And last but not least, a mnemonic to carry with you: Chronos is clock time. Kairos is kiss time. Go forth and Kairos.
For My 30th Birthday, I Moved Back to New York
Feature image by Nico De Pasquale Photography via Getty Images
During my freshman year of college, when my peers and I were still high on the possibility of New York — the city, the concept, the fantasy — my professor assigned us Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.”
This much referenced and imitated final essay of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem documents her youthful pull to New York at age 20 and her disillusionment eight years later. Stubborn, thorough, and curious, I read the entirety of Bethlehem before writing my class rebuttal. (And I read Play It As It Lays and The White Album soon after.) The detail I returned to again and again was that Didion came back. Beautiful essay aside, twenty years later she came back. At 28, she may have called New York “a city for the only very young,” but at 48 she returned. Not only did she return — she remained for the rest of her life.
Like Didion, I also grew up in California. Like Didion, I also resented the boredom of my personal corner of the state, longing instead for New York City. And, like Didion, I moved back to California in my mid/late 20s.
I didn’t leave due to disillusionment. I left due to circumstance. I got a job in LA that led to another job in LA and then I broke up with my girlfriend and decided 3,000 miles might make things easier. In lieu of disillusionment, I narrativized. I rounded up to seven years spent in New York when the reality was more like six. I emphasized to people that I wasn’t moving back to Los Angeles, because I technically grew up in Ventura County an hour away. With every reframe, I insisted that I was not someone who left their hometown for college only to return. I was simply moving from one major city to another major city. If work or love called me, I might move again. Chicago? Portland? Paris? Who knows!
I first transitioned while still in New York, but I was reborn in LA. Coming out as trans isn’t like coming out as gay. A week into being gay, you can have sex with another woman for the first time and feel your entire world erupt. A week into being trans, you can only shave your legs for the first time and feel your skin erupt in cuts and rashes. Transitioning takes time and it wasn’t until I got to LA and ended my relationship that I felt settled enough for the fun kind of new beginnings.
Even with the trauma of the pandemic, I’m grateful for my five years in Los Angeles. I’m no longer afraid to call them a return to LA. It was a homecoming of sorts. Maybe I needed to go back to where I grew up in order to reparent myself, to rediscover who I was and who I could be.
But once that work had progressed — it is never done — I felt the itch to leave again. Work had failed to call me away, but love brought me to Toronto. I’d made it international (barely) and had another major city to nest within. And yet even as I fell in love with Toronto, I longed for home. And yet back in LA, I became aware that being an hour from where I grew up would never be the answer.
As a teenager, I was desperate to move to New York. I made myself sick trying to get the grades and resumé that would allow entry into a NYC-based university with a scholarship. I succeeded, but I wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t. Before transitioning, I worshiped the false idol of expectations. Going to New York at all was a rebellion; I’m not sure I would’ve managed to get there without the excuse of school. It’s silly to me now. I exhausted myself in order to pay (let my parents pay) for a socially acceptable excuse for me to live where I wanted to live. The NYU corporation wasn’t totally useless — the professor who assigned Didion was among those who were life-changing — but the city itself was the worthiest aspect of my education. I didn’t need permission from the NYU admissions team to go where I wanted to go.
I’ve fallen into the same trap even after transitioning. I didn’t decide to move back to LA. I got a job. I didn’t decide to start splitting my time with Toronto. I fell in love. I could only make a choice with an excuse. Sure, I could’ve passed on the job, I could’ve ignored my Instagram crush. But they were excuses all the same.
I turned 30 this week — an age that is both annoyingly young and undeniably adult. Almost everyone in my life is older than me, so I’ve been hesitant to let myself have a crisis. But I have spent the last six months reflecting on the choices that make up a life. I’ve started to realize the difference between a passive choice and an active one.
Of course, I came up with excuses for my return to New York. It’s easier to split my time with Toronto. Since the pandemic, LA has become increasingly difficult to navigate without a car. The company I work for is based in Manhattan. But, if I’m being honest, this was an active choice. I moved back to New York because I wanted to. I moved back to New York because when I closed my eyes and longed for home I knew what filled my mind.
I hope my 30s are filled with active choices. As I sit in my new Brooklyn apartment, half-filled with new old furniture, I hope I’ve realized the control I have over my life. Because the truth is even though I love my job, like most people, I’m not where I thought I’d be at 30.
I’ve wanted to make movies since I was four years old and I spent my childhood studying the career paths of the cis male filmmakers I admired. NYU was as much about following Martin Scorsese as it was about moving to New York. But when I transitioned, my timeline changed. I was suddenly a woman filmmaker and that changed the expected timeline. Not to mention my queerness and transness. I’m so proud of the short film I made this past year — I still mourn the part of me that assumed I’d be making features in my 20s.
But if I can choose where I live, I can also choose what I do. Even as the job I love consumes most of my time, I can still find time for the other, deeper job I love more. Part of being an artist is balancing the realities of life with creativity. I haven’t written for myself as much as usual these past few months. I can change that in the new year like I changed my address. It’s easy to let the months, the years, pass by. But nothing is inevitable.
Essays about turning 30 are almost as annoying as essays about moving to or from New York. It’s like telling someone your dream. What feels of overwhelming import to us as individuals means little to others. But I love listening to other people’s dreams. And I love acknowledging that something as mundane as a birthday can feel monumental to the person experiencing it.
In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion wisely admits the personal limits of her subject. “Of course it might have been some other city,” she writes. “Had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York.”
There is nothing uniquely important about New York City, unless for you there is. There is nothing uniquely important about any birthday or any artistic pursuit, unless for you there is. Each of our lives have their own textures — details and desires grafted upon us and those we manifest.
When I turned 20, I was a film student living in New York. At 30, I’m back in New York with dreams left to fulfill and dreams fulfilled I never could have imagined. This move was a way to prove to myself I have free will. If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.
Untethered: Mercury Retrogayde
USPS has been sending my mail to my ex.
This is not her fault. To be clear. She did a normal thing, which was to forward her mail to her new address. However, the mail carriers have decided there is no way that two separate people could have lived at one address, and that then, one could move out while the other remained.
How did I notice this? I wasn’t getting my Christmas cards. There weren’t that many cards on their way, but the few I was supposed to get never appeared. When I realized the cards hadn’t come, I opened my front door, leaned to the side, stuck my hand into the little black mailbox, and slid my fingers around the inside, like there was somehow going to be mail hiding in the corner of a box that wasn’t six inches wide.
This went on for a little too long before I decided the mail wasn’t just slow, it was missing. I had no idea why my mail was MIA, did not at all suspect it was all being sent to my ex. And aside from catching one of the — at least three — mail carriers, I had no idea how I was supposed to deal with a situation like this. If most of the mail was missing, then surely something bigger was going on. I resorted to leaving a Post It Note on the mailbox saying I wasn’t receiving my mail, leaving my name and number, but after a day, the embarrassment overcame me. Was it me?
It wasn’t me. After calling USPS customer service, I had a case number and instructions to be sure to answer my phone when the investigator called.
“It says there’s a forward on your address. Did you move?”
I know where this is going.
“Nope. I’ve lived here for five years. Haven’t moved. Am calling you from my mailing address right now…But I did have an ex move out.”
In the course of talking about my ex, there was that pivotal moment when engaging with phone-based customer service where it can either go fine or — as happened once when I mentioned my ex-girlfriend while on the line with our car insurance — get you hung up on. This went fine, good even. The agent promised to let the carriers know to keep delivering my mail, and also, advised me to in fact leave a note on my mailbox.
So, then, there I was, putting all my business on a series of Post It Notes for the mail carriers to see. I still haven’t gotten certain cards, and they haven’t been returned to the senders. I’m assuming they’re just lost at this point.
The fact that I was facing down a communication mishap that was somehow ALSO linked to an ex is so very Classic Mercury Retrograde became impossible to ignore.
She didn’t quite recognize me, and the event was a memorial event on the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, so it really wasn’t the place to get into my past workplace drama. But seeing her again — as a person existing on her own, outside of the connections she’d had to an institution and people who had immensely fucked me up — gave me a chance to get reacquainted with her on her own terms, on my own terms.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had more than enough opportunities to contemplate the ramifications of basing your opinion on someone because of what you’ve heard about them. It was a delight to mentally slough off the bullshit that really belonged to other people that I’d somehow associated with this person and to let them be them.
When I later told the person who asked me to the memorial that I did in fact know how this person and I had met, before I could get another word out, they said, “I hope it was through fisting!” followed by a series of cute emojis.
I had to say, no, it was not through fisting, and also had to ask why it might have been through fisting. The answer was really obvious when I got it, but still. Conclusions were jumped to! I had to laugh at my phone and at the whole situation. I’m looking forward to being able to talk one on one the next time I run into her.
To soothe myself, as one does, I put on The Taking of Deborah Logan in the background. I hadn’t seen it before, and it always comes up as being a rather good horror movie, so without thinking too much about the content of the piece, I let it play.
About halfway through the movie and my work, the texts from my mom started. First of all, my sister wasn’t able to go to our dad’s gathering because she was sick. But I didn’t expect my mom to send the following:
“[Redacted] is sick. So looks like we all spend Christmas alone. Weird huh.”
Now, mind you. Yes. If you, like my mom, fight with all your fellow traumatized siblings so that you can’t have holidays together, and then you also go super rightwing and alienate your queer child, you might find yourself hanging out alone for Christmas. But, knowing her, she was probably happy to be able to send me this text and rub it in my face.
She’s also assuredly in a weird place, which tends to lead to an escalation in this kind of behavior. As The Taking of Deborah Logan progressed and followed Deborah’s descent into a possession that originally manifested as Alzheimer’s (I know. I spoiled it.), my mom texted me again. My grandma’s not doing well, she told me, which I knew. She’s dying and has been for a while as the dementia progresses. She also recently had a fall, which I know from having other people pass is usually the beginning of the end. The last time I visited her, I praised her for eating some fruit and told her it was good she’d done that. Her face lit up, childlike, at the reassurance. She might not have fully understood who I was. I know it can’t be easy to tell someone your mother is dying. I imagine this led, in part, to my mom wanting to point out she knew I was spending Christmas alone, just like her, just like my sister. But there has to be a better way to phrase things than “I know that means an abrupt change of plans for you,” as though a loved one’s death ever comes on some kind of schedule.
Everything feels like it’s on a loop. The person I’m fighting with over text has someone dying, too. We’re all just shooting electronic barbs at each other.
It took a call from my incarcerated penpal, actually, to pull me back out the pit I’d sunk into. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. My 60-something-year-old gay incarcerated friend cheered me up and asked me if I wanted to get on a video call. By the time we were done chatting, I felt a bit lifted. I hope I did right by him, too.
On the day after Christmas, a friend came by my house with cookies from her and her partner’s families. She and I sat on the porch and talked about the things that were making us depressed, and also New Year’s Plans. I looked at my cheetah print pajama pants and at her rather smart butch work clothes and breathed in the smell of the rain bouncing off my aluminum awning. It was a sweet moment.
By the time she left, I had a text on my phone from a friend I thought had ghosted, had perhaps wanted to end our friendship in the spring of this year. But no, they had…tried to send me a letter that was never delivered. It meant the world to me that they weren’t gone, that I could pull their memory back out of the pile of people and things that I’d lost this year and that they wouldn’t have to be a memory anymore, but instead, a friend.
But, also, this text was not about the fact that I hadn’t yet received the letter (thanks USPS), but about the fact that my friend had accidentally sent a letter intended for me inside of an envelope sent to a different friend. They knew this because this friend had texted to say they’d clearly gotten my letter. Who knows what it could say. “Dear Nico, fuck you,” etc. is where my mind goes immediately, even if I know this friend would never bother if that was the case. If I got the envelope addressed to me, it would likely contain the letter for the other friend. I said I would keep an eye out for it and that I would probably have to call USPS soon, anyway.
There’s something here about perception and about intention and about, as much as we talk about communication around here, about how our words just sometimes come out wrong, or not enough, or messy. And about how dealing with the aftermath of mistakes is a part of communication, too. Now my whimsical ass is thinking I should send a letter to someone, I think, just to see where it goes. And if I can take a lesson from this series of mishaps, it’s that this coming year, I hope to give as many second chances, or more, as I’ve been given.
Gaza, We Carry You With Us
feature image by Guy Smallman / Contributor via Getty Images
Every few days, Healthcare Workers Watch sends me a google drive folder with lists of names and photos of healthcare workers killed and abducted in Gaza. Healthcare workers who, like me, spent years learning how to listen to breath, assess skin, pack wounds with gauze so skin would not form around empty space, intervene when death threatened to overwhelm a body, and evaluate if what we did worked. The list, as of this writing on December 22, holds 340 Healthcare Workers who have been killed in Palestine, including 104 nurses and 59 doctors, and 52 known abducted. There are additional reports of the Zionist entity detaining, torturing, and interrogating dozens of healthcare workers from multiple hospitals. The list does not include those buried under rubble still, those who have disappeared without a trace, those who family members are still looking for.
When I was in nursing school in 2007, I thought I’d go to Palestine after I trained as an ICU nurse. Palestine was at the forefront of my consciousness, and that land pulled me, and the care I hoped to embody, towards it. But after that first job, where daily experiences of racism eroded my sense of self, where I learned to drink away my pain and to rely on white people to tell me who to be and how to live, I turned to travel nursing instead. I thought I’d go to Palestine in between contracts, but, gradually, I came to believe I was not skilled enough, or confident enough, or enough enough, to go there. Every few years, when the genocidal settler colonial Zionist entity attacked Palestinians, I’d remember those younger yearnings, google a flurry of options, and scheme a journey. It never panned out; like I hid my queerness for so long, I didn’t speak these desires out loud.
Through travel nursing, I was led to care for a different Indigenous people. I got sober, moved to Dena’ina Land, and cared for Alaska Native people throughout the COVID pandemic’s most intense years. These hands: primed tubing, braided hair, pressed gauze to gaping tears, bagged bodies. This heart: witnessed death, ached for the dying, pounded when someone crashed. These lungs: shielded by mask and PAPR, breathed in the fresh air of hallways, dodged the virus during work hours. These eyes: cried and cried and cried.
When I gathered with 25 healthcare workers on Dena’ina Land this month, we read the names of the 264 healthcare workers who’d been killed at that time. Each name was listed with their profession: Nurses, Doctors, Dentists, Medical/Dental Students, Medical Scientists, Paramedics, Pharmacists, Lab Technicians, Physiotherapists. Optometrists, Administrative Staff. Four of the Optometrists shared the same last name, many of the professionals killed side by side shared the same last name. I imagined husband and wife, father and son, uncle and nephew. I imagined the conversations that led people to follow in their family footsteps; I imagined the sense of duty that accompanied learning the work of one’s father, or father’s father. As each name was read, I breathed and cried. Snot dripped down my masked upper lip and into my mouth, and I was reminded of those deep pandemic days, when we hadn’t yet gotten used to the pace of COVID death, and a mother talking to her dying son through our walkie talkies made us all cry beneath our PAPR hoods and masks. We couldn’t wipe away the tears.
I didn’t know most of the people who showed up. After the names had been read and a small length of Devil’s Club stalk had been distributed to each person, I drank a cup of yarrow, labrador, and nettle tea and met a few people. One asked what group organized this, and I said, “A scattered bunch of sad queers.” Another asked if I was the organizer. I didn’t want to be seen as the organizer, nor do I want to be an organizer. Throughout my 12-plus-years of nursing, I’ve wanted to be just a nurse: to deeply trust everyone else to do their own work so that I didn’t have to take it on. I wanted to stay within my scope of practice, to center the kind of direct care work that offers a soul-to-soul connection, to see how my hands impact another person’s body when I [caress their hair] [hold their hand] [swab their mouth] [suction their airway] [wrap their wounds] [wash their feet] [place an IV] [draw their blood] care.
At some point, I got overwhelmed. I told a few people I’d meet them at Cafecito, the queer POC owned coffee shop, and my friends reassured me they’d take care of packing everything up. I arrived there before anyone else, ordered a chamomile tea, and took a few breaths. Soon, three of the other healthcare workers, whose voices carried the names of murdered Palestinian colleagues, and three of the organizers who supported us, arrived. Nithya, a Tamil person whose ammah fled genocide in Sri Lanka, said it was the first time they’ve felt hope in a very long time, because of the care embedded in each part of the ceremony. Esther, who brewed the yarrow, labrador, and nettle tea, shared that the ethic of care was present both in the words we shared in the statement and the act of reading names, and also in how the space was curated: intentionally slow, present, opening circle and closing circle, offering gifts for all who came. It was not only theoretical care, but the practice of care, that Esther noticed.
Sasha, an Aluutiq community member who smudged each of the participants in the ceremony, said, “When each of you read the professions of the people, I thought about each part of the body that wouldn’t receive care.”
Eyes. Teeth. Muscles and joints. Blood. Medicine.
The moment when a heart stops, or injury finds a body. We call for help: emergency response.
We are parts of a whole. We are only able to do our jobs if there are other healthcare workers with complementary specialties who can do their jobs. A body cannot be carved up, a body is not only a collected assortment of organ systems, but requires all these systems to work together, communicate. A hospital cannot work if there are no nurses, a body cannot survive if one of its systems is lost forever.
To be just a nurse is to be dependent on the collective body of healthcare workers. Marxists teach that capitalism compartmentalizes labor through the assembly line, so each person only knows a small part of what they’re creating. So, a worker might build bombs but think their job is to put one highly specialized part with another highly specialized part. They become alienated from the result, they do not see themselves as complicit in the deaths of Palestinians, they never see the product of their labor.
I’ve questioned ultra-specific specialization within the medical system for a long time. When a specialist only sees a tiny part of the body, how can a plan of care encompass the entirety of a person’s needs? How can a whole person be cared for?
Stefani, a writer friend and mom whose baby was born with a very rare difference, spends an incomprehensible amount of time in the company of medical professionals. She has reminded me that ultra-specialization offers a unique intensity of skill. Her kid is alive because of the high skill level of people who’ve dedicated their lives to the study and treatment of specific parts of the body. They look at a body through a special lens: gastroenterologists, colorectal specialists, infectious disease doctors, urologists, pediatricians. When each highly trained professional comes together, with all the others, they’re able to create a collective power, a collective force towards life. We are not cogs in a machine: We are each playing our one small role, we are prioritizing the project of life.
Healthcare workers are nothing without each other. At the Cafecito table, I said, “I’ve felt a tension around solidarity organizing around professional lines. Because it’s not that Palestinians killed who were healthcare workers are more important than Palestinians who were not. Our lives aren’t more important than those who don’t have our professional titles.”
Julia, a social worker for whom this is the third memorial in three weeks, responded, “And yet, there’s a way in which we all rush into the room when there’s catastrophe. We all know how to respond in crisis. We’ve all been trained a certain way. We learn how to show up in times of distress in our roles. We speak the same language. And so, there’s something we, as healthcare workers, are experiencing that’s specific, that allows us to empathize with other healthcare workers.”
Esther added, “I think about how the healthcare workers were working, were in the line of duty when they were killed. How their training didn’t give them a choice to leave. They were trained to prioritize other people’s lives, and they often were separated from their families before their deaths because they couldn’t leave their patients.”
For all the saltiness I might have as a nurse whose work is devalued compared to that of doctors, I also know I can’t do my work without doctors. I don’t want to do my work without doctors. Because doctors diagnose, I don’t have to learn to piece together all the disparate symptoms and signs and decide what’s going on. I get to focus on the body before me, and I get to take direct action to [stop bleeding] [increase blood pressure] [decrease heart rates] [increase urine output].
When my healthcare worker kin read the list of medical/dental students, I thought about how the genocidal settler colonial Zionist entity is killing not only this generation of healthcare workers, but also the next generation. The people who can teach the next generation of healthcare workers, and the generation after that, are being murdered.
When I read aloud the names of Medical Scientists at the vigil, I thought about how gauze, the porous fabric used to dress wounds, shield hurt from injury and infection, and absorb blood, came from Gaza. Thirteenth century Palestinians were skilled weavers and created this cloth that has become integral to medical care. In solidarity with Palestinians, doctors and nurses wrap rolls of gauze around their arms. We have store rooms full of boxes of gauze in different shapes and sizes, woven and unwoven, with a slit without a slit, rolls and squares, but Gazans in the 21st century have none. No supplies with which to care for each other: The world has appropriated their means to soak up the blood. I wonder what these medical scientists were working on when they died, and whether their projects would have forever changed how medicine is practiced, the way gauze has.
Each speaker finished their set of names with the words, “We carry you with us.”
I slip gauze in my pocket for a blood draw: Gaza, we carry you with us. I thread gauze into a tunneled wound: Gaza, we carry you with us. I open packs of 4×4’s for a coworker to stop the blood loss: Gaza, we carry you with us.
If you’d like to see more from the Anchorage Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine Vigil, a video is available here, and a statement is available here.
The Unexpected Loneliness of Getting Divorced
This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself sitting in Arthur’s office. He probably doesn’t remember me, but I came to see him a few years ago when my mom got divorced. She’d given me her wedding ring from her ex-husband and told me, “I don’t care what you do with it. I just never want to see it again, and don’t tell me what happened to it.”
I picked this particular jewelry buyer, not because they give better prices than other shops in New York City’s diamond district, but because they actually have an office. An office with a receptionist with whom I can make an appointment, and where I can sit in a comfortable, air-conditioned waiting room while I wait for Arthur to reduce the value of my marriage to the total carat weight of the items I’ve brought to sell him today.
I’m a 31-year-old Black, queer woman, quasi-single mom, and I’m getting divorced.
Where I was once surrounded on all sides by leagues of support, I suddenly found myself standing in the sand alone. The people who were once part of my support system were suddenly standing in judgment of me, comparing notes and making assumptions in group chats I wasn’t invited to join.
One of my favorite podcasters, Dan Savage, likes to give a piece of advice that fits perfectly with this scenario: “You’re going to tell them one thing about you, and the way they respond will tell you everything you need to know about them.”
For my married friends, watching my marriage fall apart was like catching a glimpse of themselves in the hall mirror and wincing at what they saw reflected back to them. It hit too close to home: a professional queer couple of color, a two-mom family with an adorable toddler, trying and failing to patch the cracks in their relationship.
Instead of leaning in to offer support, they dissected my approach, vultures circling overhead as a lion takes down its prey.
“Well, what did you do wrong?”
“How are you going to fix it?”
“You can’t just leave things like this; I need to know what you’re going to do. I need to know how this is going to end.”
That brazen sense of entitlement to a neat and tidy end to my marital problems was somehow both comforting and insulting. In their own twisted way, these once-friends of mine were trying to provide a vote of confidence. As a highly educated and well-heeled group of professional lesbians, they were used to getting their way. If they wanted something, they made it happen. If they didn’t want to deal with something, they threw money at it, and the problem disappeared.
You can do it, they were trying to say. Just work harder, complain less, and fix it.
I didn’t know how to tell them that I was just as disappointed as they were that a stiff upper lip and a strong cocktail weren’t going to fix my marriage.
They didn’t want to hear about the hours I spent begging my ex-wife to talk to me, to tell me that we were still in this together. They weren’t interested in how volatile things were at home, how hard it was to leave the house and put on a brave face while living through the painful, slow, inexorable death of a decade-long relationship.
Deep down, I wonder if they were afraid that the honesty it takes to face the fact that a relationship needs to end might be contagious. If they stood too close to me, they might realize they wanted to take a closer look in that mirror too, but they didn’t have the guts to deal with what they might see.
The months of painful cohabitation and strained co-parenting interactions I endured with my ex, while waiting for our lawyers to disentangle the strands of our now-to-be separate lives, made the judgment and rejection I experienced at the hands of my married ex-friends look like a cake walk. Little did I know, the courage it took to ask for what I needed was nothing compared to the courage it would take to withstand what was to come.
If you’ve spent any time in the city, you know that New Yorkers are infamous for their ability to ignore each other on the subway. So, while I frantically searched for tissues – and on one notable occasion, a panty liner – to stem the flow of blood gushing out of my nose and attempted to salvage my outfit with a Tide to-go pen, everyone around me went on with their lives like they didn’t notice me, my distress, or the biohazard I was working very hard to keep from impacting those around me.
In some ways, the loneliness of my divorce was a lot like these nosebleeds – it caught me completely off guard, and I suddenly felt like there was a spotlight on me, relentlessly highlighting something I was desperately trying to clean up before it got out of hand.
With this newfound bravery, I used the harshness of that spotlight to look at myself and my choices through a different lens. It wasn’t always pleasant, but it was necessary. I took a hard look at the life we’d built together. I had become so used to pouring all of myself into my marriage and our little family, that I had almost forgotten who I was before I took on the roles of wife and mother.
It was painful to see the ways I traded my own happiness for the stability of married life. Without realizing it, I had started to conflate the two: if my marriage was stable, then I must be happy. Unfortunately, that stability curdled into stagnation, and the sense of comfort I used to derive from that stability started to feel more and more like quicksand. If I wasn’t careful, it would swallow me whole.
When I talk to my mom about my divorce, she tells me how proud she is of me. “I’ve been married three times,” she told me, “and it’s taken me over 65 years and three divorces to figure out what makes me happy. It is so wonderful to see you asking what makes you happy in your 30s. Don’t wait until you’re my age to figure it out.”
After spending so much of her life pouring into others, my mom is finally pouring into herself. For the first time, she has built a life that prioritizes her happiness over the happiness of others. Those decisions haven’t always been the most popular or well-received, but the joy I see in her face and hear in her voice makes it clear that they were the right ones.
On hard days, I remember the happiness my mom has cultivated for herself, despite the criticism of others. She didn’t let the stability or routine comforts of relationships she’d outgrown keep her stuck in a pattern at the expense of her own well-being. She took a risk, and put herself first. She was brave.
Some days, it’s hard for me to be brave. Getting divorced is exhausting, time-consuming, and expensive. Dear god, it is so expensive. Holding space for myself and my daughter as I navigate this process takes a level of strength that I didn’t know I had, right up until I needed it. In those moments, when I’m not sure I can hold anything else the world throws at me, I remember that I didn’t just make this decision for me. I made this decision for my daughter. I want to show her what it looks like to choose yourself, even if it means disappointing others, even if it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. I want her to know that she is brave, too.
Every time I open it, I find something new to help me think about and process my divorce.
When she talks about her decision to finally tell Craig she wants a divorce, Glennon says, “I don’t owe Craig the rest of my life, but I do owe him my honesty. It’ll be hard, but it’ll finally be the right kind of hard.”
Being the one to say my marriage needed to end was the hardest, loneliest decision I’ve ever made. Every day, it is hard to wake up and navigate this new, messy, world I live in, doing my best to make sense of my life in this new context.
But for the first time in a long time, it’s the right kind of hard.
Untethered: I Have To Stop Getting Engayged or Married on Holidays
Listen. On this road trip of life/death, sometimes you gotta share the AUX cord with a ghost. Readers of The A+ Insider know I recently recovered my bluetooth speaker only by promising the ghost in my house I’d throw him some “Freebird” and other similar tunes once in a while because it’s true that as a roommate who probably does not share my taste in music, he’s putting up with a lot.
And speaking of ghosts, the Yule/Holigay/Christmas season sure is a time for them. Famous guy-who-attempted-to-get-his-wife-committed-so-he-could-have-guilt-free-time-with-his-younger-mistress Charles Dickens re-popularized the Christian holiday with a ghost story, after all. Then, there’s the fact that the time between Christmas and The Epiphany (Three Kings Day) is also the most haunted time of year according to European tradition, something I love to remind everyone of when they start to lament that Halloween has passed. Things are just getting started!
So, what better thing to be haunted by with the turning of the seasons and the marking of special days on the calendar than the ghosts of relationships past? A lot of things. There are a lot of things that would be better than this.
My ex and I mutually proposed to each other on Christmas last year. This year, it’s the anniversary of a broken engagement. Last Christmas held the promise of an entirely different future cradled in the plastic boughs of the tiny, artificial potted pine tree we displayed in the center of our living room. There’s a sense you should maybe be collecting ornaments, marking the years of your relationship, the milestones crossed together, the places you’ve visited. I still have a Sasquatch ornament from a visit to the Pacific Northwest with my ex. That’s the only one we accrued.
There have been other ornaments, other trees. When I left my marriage before that engagement, I did not take any of the ornaments we’d carefully collected and curated. Some of them were my ex-husband’s family heirlooms, which of course should stay in the family I was no longer part of. I remember some of them, the way his grandmother had crocheted doily-esque covers for glass ornaments in snowflake patterns, a beautifully old-fashioned touch. Others were gifts we bought each other, or multi-packs of things we thought were cute, and all of them were tainted.
My dad warned me about getting married on Halloween. He seems to think Halloween weddings are actually cursed, set up to fail because of the choice of day. He’d gone to one when I was a kid, wearing a pirate costume that then made its way into the dress up box my mom kept for me. It was a plastic tub she’d put old Halloween costumes and discarded yet interesting pieces of clothing into (from an old prom dress of hers to outdated hand-me-downs like flowery Polish lady headscarves). At some point, each of us wore the pirate costume. It got a lot of use. Our family loved Halloween when I was young. It was all fake cobwebs and plastic spider and skull rings and the special treat that was dry ice. My mom hosted Halloween parties for kids my age a couple years in a row, sweetly peeling grapes and cooling cooked spaghetti so we could stick our hands into shoe boxes she’d cut holes into so we could feel the “eyeballs” and the “guts.” Sometimes, my parents really did things right. It would have been impossible not to notice I adored horror and the supernatural. I asked my mom to check out the entire nonfiction section on monsters and ghosts from the library when I was only three, and it just never stopped. They leaned into my special interest by making sure we went all out for the holiday in the kind of DIY way they could afford. The Halloween marriage, though, that hadn’t worked out. My dad would only shake his head and say “it went wrong” when I tried to press him about what exactly had occurred with the couple, which was very Stephen King Character of him.
So it happened. On Halloween of 2017, I was standing in my living room in a vintage red prom dress because I was going as Lydia from the wedding scene in Beetlejuice to our small Halloween party that was the actual, real, official wedding. There’d already been a wedding ceremony and party, all in the same location and relatively secular, all for our extended families, coworkers and friends, but we hadn’t gotten around to signing the papers, yet. It was almost certainly a portent that we were both, perhaps, dragging our feet, that things would not work out. We’d invited our close friends to our house and had prepared the marriage license, a self-officiating type available in Pennsylvania due to the legacy of Quakers’ leader-less ceremonies. We scrawled our names on the paper just before midnight, and two friends signed as witnesses. We celebrated. My ex kept his fox mask on the whole time which was, in retrospect, creepy.
And then the marriage? It went wrong.
What had started as a queer partnership full of bisexuality and gender fuckery descended toward a place where my ex became increasingly aligned with cis-heteronormativity, and I was continuing to make my bisexuality known and let myself slip back into a gender fluidity I’d ignored for a long time. During one of my more masc moments, he yelled at me, “You LOOK like a boy!” I yelled back “So? You FUCK BOYS!” To which he had no answer. As the gaslighting came to a head, to the point I wasn’t sure whether I’d made up entire conversations, agreements, scenarios, events in my head, to where I’d actively started contemplating suicide, I found a way out with the help of a few friends, and stumbled into the sunlight just shy of six months after Halloween.
The first Halloween that came around after this, I don’t think I dressed up. I don’t remember what I did. I think it wasn’t anything. It was a reminder that my best friends of a decade who’d signed the marriage license stopped talking to me when I asked for a divorce, that I was rebuilding, that I was tired. But over time, it got easier, and I kind of forgot that Halloween ever would have been my wedding anniversary. This year, when I was tits out as The Slutty Grim Reaper at the punk bar, I certainly didn’t recall, or if I did, it pinged and flew away again, like a fly in the room, a little nuisance but nothing interesting, nothing I’d remember. Time’s like that.
But I have to say, it really does ruin a holiday if you go and make it a special day for a relationship that ends painfully. Why, why, why did I do it twice after doing what I did to my beloved Halloween?! I’m also a Yule Gay! I love this season and all its gingery, nutmeg-laced, Krampus-whippin’ goodness. What have I done??
I feel like the answer is twofold. On the one hand, I can really be romantic about holidays! I’m a seasons person, someone who wants to mark the turning of the year. Smells — fallen leaves and rain and the first snow and wood smoke and cinnamon — unlock memories and I get this urge to smush all of the comfort and delight I’ve always wanted holidays to hold together with people I love. On the other hand, sometimes, romantic gestures are a last-ditch effort, and the trappings of a holiday are perfect for disguising the cracks. On Halloween, you can wear a mask and hide in the candlelight, and in December, you can warm everything up with glowing lights, smooth over difficulties with the sheen of wrapping paper.
I hope I don’t do this again. I really have to quit. On the other hand, it would be delectably cursed to go with any of the holidays I have left. A St. Patrick’s Day engagement? A Leap Day Las Vegas wedding? ANYTHING on The Fourth of July or Thanksgiving — ugh. What if I just keep getting engaged/married/divorced and I decide to keep picking holidays to do it on in order to punish myself but also because I think it’s kind of funny? I do appreciate that I have a lot of potential ahead of me in this life, including the potential to continue to make some truly messy decisions. But I also hope I don’t!
And as for this year? This tree? This Yule? I got myself a Mothman ornament recently when I visited the (very caked up) Mothman statue and museum in West Virginia on a solo trip. I’ve got a friend with a truck who’s agreed to take me to a tree farm, and I have a tree stand I joyously thrifted. I think it’s time to get a small, evergreen tree, to decorate it with dried orange slices and lights I got from the flea market and exactly two cryptid ornaments, and to say that, of all my decisions, I’m happy that I’ve slowed my roll.
Worth it? Worth it.
Untethered: In Defense of a Messy Bed
I think I’m regressing.
There’s a certain kind of comfort to me in dishevelment. A staged space with everything in its place does not say “home” or even “safety.” And often, the people who have occupied said spaces haven’t been too safe, either. Now, a matchbook from a trip decorating a windowsill, a trinket my dead grandfather gave me, a tube of lipstick on a dresser or a binder slung over the back of a chair make me feel like the space I’m in is reaching out to kiss me. It’s not about a lot of garbage or a dirty kind of mess, but there’s a certain love affair I have with seeing little reminders of who I am sprinkled through a living space like glitter.
It’s been two months since I moved back into my bedroom. Before that, I spent the spring and summer sleeping on a camping mat on the floor of my office. When I moved back into the bedroom, I washed the bedclothes and re-made the bed. Started putting items into trash bags, moved my night stand back into the room and placed it on the side I’d never slept on before. At first, the bed was neat, just for sleeping, the way it has always been in coupledom. When there are two people in the bed at night, there isn’t much room for other things to creep in. People with pets, I am sure, can attest to the fact that even adding a cat to a bed with two people in it starts to complicate the situation.
But over the past two months, I’ve started dragging things into my bed with the same energy as a gremlin collecting Neat Trinkets to decorate my lair. Maybe it’s that the weather’s gotten colder and The Bed has grown in its cozy appeal, so sometimes I’ll spend a good amount of time (that I never had before) reading or writing or watching a movie in bed. It was odd, not having a bed for so long. When I returned to it, I almost wasn’t sure how to relate to it. If I used to lie in bed to relax instead of just sleep within the context of a relationship, those memories are distant, fuzzy.
But what I do remember are my teenage years when drawing supplies and books sat on my bed with me, my early twenties when there was the same with the addition of a laptop. A bed was an all-important multi-use piece of furniture, intimate, and while sometimes shared, belonging, always, just to me.
In the winter during my last couple years of high school, my best friend and I would climb under the covers of her bed after getting high somewhere outside in the cold. We’d drag snacks onto the comforter and put on a movie like Rocky Horror on her TV with the VHS player built in. Her room had red walls and red bed covers, and with the only light coming from the glow of a TV, we were ensconced in something like a womb, a space safe from any drama, where we could enjoy the things we liked without the boys in our friend group talking over us.
There was something about sleep hygiene, or still is, where I kept hearing that beds are to be reserved only for sleeping and sex, that one should have a sleep routine where you wind down before bed, put your phone away. But the world is burning and I live alone in a haunted house, and considering that I regularly fall asleep mid-texting conversation or to the dulcet ASMR whispers of Jocie B (have you seen their Halloween videos?), I really don’t think my phone’s keeping me awake.
It’s the memories that make it hard to fall asleep sometimes, the intrusive thoughts, the agony of not knowing what’s wrong at three in the morning. On nights I can’t sleep, no amount of not having worked on a short story in bed earlier would have solved it. But it does help to be able to snake my arm out across the bed and pull a book toward me, or to find a writing implement and a pad of sticky notes to take down whatever radical or rancid idea I’ve come up with while groggy, which will only be up for further evaluation when I wake up with the sticky note adhered somewhere on my person.
To let my bed grow messy with objects, replete with books from my ever-evolving to-be-read pile; to use it not-just-for-sleeping, feels like a return to a kind of youthful solitude that I didn’t think was open to me any longer. It’s a kind of space-as-utility that rejects space-as-class-presentation, space-as-aspiration, space-as-who-we’re-supposed-to-want-to-be, space-as-queer-assimilation. If I’m “regressing” it’s because I’m not attempting to move from something messy to something tidier, from someone whose most intimate spaces are my own to someone whose every space is ready for commodification and display, from something that is “youthful” to something that is “adult.”
This is Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
Where Are All the Scream Kings?
When I was in fourth grade, I got in trouble for discussing how fast my body would decompose if I was stabbed. It was far from the first time I’d discussed murder and rotting flesh with my classmates, and it definitely wasn’t the last. I wasn’t trying to scare them or get attention; I was genuinely interested in all things murderous and bloody. That was just who I was. Gore girl. While other kids watched Cartoon Network and the Disney channel, I consumed hours of horror and crime television, especially Bones. Even though I didn’t always understand what was happening in the movies and shows I watched, I found myself fascinated and strangely grounded by the fictional violences playing out on screen.
I began to more heavily rely on horror as a place of solace as I made the shift from elementary school to middle school to high school. With each passing day, I felt more and more like I didn’t belong in the world presented to me. It wasn’t just that puberty had brought with it a blanket of unwelcome hormones and clinical depression; it was that I was coming to understand the particular pains of being queer and being a teenage girl. I started to more fully contextualize the men who yelled at me from their cars and interrogated my friends and I on the sidewalk. The hardest part was that the danger wasn’t just coming from men I could disregard under the label of “stranger danger.” The boys I’d previously considered friends and casual acquaintances started to show me the cruelties they were capable of. In seventh grade, a girl a few lockers down from me told me she’d put duct tape around her pussy in case her boyfriend wouldn’t listen when she said no. The words gay, dyke, hoe, and slut served as staple insults. Girls were rated, and the ones with the lowest ratings were treated as inferior and annoying. None of these experiences are particularly unusual. I ignored my own growing anxieties and spent my days pretending to be a girl I wasn’t. At home, I obsessed over the show The Following and read all the Stephen King books I could get my hands on.
As I got older, I found the language I needed to explain my constant buzz of anxiety, depressive dips, and the gendered fear the world normalizes. I got on medication and fell in love with horror franchises like Halloween where I could easily point to villains and say: That guy. That’s the problem. He’s the evil that needs to be defeated. When he’s gone we’ll all be safer.
One thing to defeat, not a world to change. It was a simple understanding of violence that couldn’t be applied to anything else in my life (though of course as Stef Rubino writes in their Horror Is So Gay essay “Elm Street Was a Nightmare Before Freddy Made It One”, even horror’s monsters do not exist in isolation from the horrors of society).Watching horror also gave me a way to have power over something that scared me. I can’t walk away from my mental illnesses or ever guarantee someone isn’t going to hurt me because they feel that’s their right. But when I watch something scary, I can always close my laptop, turn off the television, or walk out of a movie theater.
During my college orientation, new students gathered to listen to a presentation on how not to be raped. We watched a video about how we should think of sexual assault like a bear attack. Wouldn’t you take precautions if you lived on a campus full of wild bears? A girl left the auditorium in tears, and a sports bro in the row ahead muttered about his time being wasted while leveling up in Candy Crush.
The presentation confirmed what I already knew: You need to protect yourself and others because institutions aren’t going to. That night, I started looking into transfers and wondered if it’s possible to escape the apparently inescapable. I later celebrated finishing my transfer applications by watching The Purge alone because I hated leaving my room at night. I already knew about the fucking bears.
In the end, I graduated from a different college and started work at an outdoor education center in Vermont. The job came with housing, and living with cis men gave me an anxiety that was both warranted and unwarranted. We become close in the way people do when they are living and working together in rural Vermont. But I made a miscalculation about what that closeness meant. Because there were things they never understood. They never understood the piece of my life that made me hate when they stood in door frames. They nodded in sympathy and confusion as I shared my anger over the coverage of Amber Heard’s defamation trial and the Roe Supreme Court Draft Leak. They gave allowances to men known to be misogynists. When I found these men sitting in my house, I’d go on long runs and hide out in my room watching Black Swan on a loop.
I was relieved when I got funding and a teaching assistant to start my MFA at a university far away. My mental health had been on a decline again, and I just wanted space to write, run, and focus on better strategies for dealing with my mind. I dedicated myself to my novel and routine and being the best teacher I can be. I see my student’s keychain pepper sprays and pray they never have to use them.
On Thursday nights, I attend a reading series usually followed by drinks with my cohort at a local bar. On one of those Thursdays, a man I didn’t know stopped me and started asking me questions. Was I a college student? Did I have a boyfriend? Did I live alone? Hadn’t he seen me before leaving that apartment building? I did what I’ve trained myself to do in these circumstances. I walked away, gripped the whistle I carry harder in my pocket, and got ready to dial a friend. After he saw my whistle, he walked away too, allowing me to go back to my apartment to have my panic attack in peace. I was too rattled to sleep, so I decided to calm myself down by making my way through the Saw franchise. About halfway through, I started laughing to the point of tears. Maybe I’d be stalked, but there was no way that man was smart enough to put together a reverse bear trap.
After I finished my journey of death traps, I added to my notebook a list of men I’d seen scream in horror movies. Not men panicking or yelling, but men reacting with a gut-wrenching scream. It shouldn’t have been a hard list for a horror fan to make. Men aren’t free from the terrorizing events which take place in horror movies. They have their own dangerous encounters with murderers like Micheal Myers, Ghostface, Leatherface, and Jason Voorhees. They experience the same petrifying paranormal events which dominate the genre: ghosts, haunted dolls, and evil clowns. Where were the screaming men, and why was their absence bothering me so much?
The genre’s lack of Scream Kings was a problem I’d been discussing via text with a crush who I’d never met and who lived on a different continent (sometimes to be gay is to be unhinged and irrational). She was a horror fan too and seemed interested in the list, so I spent an unhealthy number of hours watching movies alone and going through online horror discussion boards. What I eventually came to realize is that men do actually scream in horror movies (rarely), but almost always under four set circumstances. The first is torture or extreme physical pain, which is why a good number of the movies on my short list ended up coming from the Saw franchise. The second is when a male character is queer or queer coded, as Jesse and Grady are in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. The third is when they are screaming for a joke, over-the-top shrieks played for laughs (this second and third scream often occur at the same time). The last is when they are going through possession or body transformation, like Peter in Hereditary and Wallace in Tusk.
The message behind these specific gendered scream choices and the infrequency of screaming men in horror in general seems to be that screaming in terror is ultimately a feminine act which straight men simply aren’t capable of even in the most dire of circumstances. This message is as unbelievable as it is disappointing. The genre is designed to push our understanding of both human behavior and the human condition. That’s part of the reason I fell in love with horror in the first place. We’re willing to accept everything from sexually transmitted demons to armies of murderous doppelgängers, yet we are still unwilling to accept the very real possibility that a frightened man might scream when he’s scared. Why is that the boundary directors and screenwriters are so unwilling to push on?
Perhaps the answer lies in all the “nonviolent” men who have followed me and commented on my body with relative frequency since I was 11. I used to tell myself I had this problem because I usually walk alone, look young for my age, come and go from queer spaces, and socialize with other queer people in public spaces. These are definitely factors, but I know better than to see myself as the one at fault. If there’s one thing horror movies have taught me, it’s that looking for a reason doesn’t help you when the call is already coming from inside the house. I’m sure a good number of those men know they aren’t going to get anywhere with me and aren’t planning to do anything beyond verbal harassment (though I can never know that for sure). They just want to see my fear because they know that scaring someone is a way to demonstrate power over them. That’s why fear is one of the most powerful tools of patriarchy and why our screens are full of screaming women. Screaming being the ultimate encapsulation of fear and not something audiences expect from men.
To be clear, I’m not saying Scream Queens themselves are only a manifestation of patriarchy. It’s natural for terrified people to scream and for horror films to want to show that terror. Scream Queens go back almost as far as the big screen itself, beginning with Fay Wray’s show stopping scream in the original King Kong. She started the parade which would later go on to include horror icons such as Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Neve Campbell, Tanedra Howard, and countless others. I have deep respect for the work of every single one of them. Have you ever let out a full body scream? Have you seen Samara Weaving scream? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s an exhausting art form and one which shouldn’t only be practiced by women. The Scream Queens aren’t the problem. The problem is the relative silence of men.
There are certain things I never really see changing. I can never guarantee that people will react well when they read me as queer or when they find out I’m a lesbian, something I’m very open about at this point in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable running at night or getting rid of my pepper spray. I don’t think people will ever stop voting bigots into positions of power. Is expecting fear to be displayed equally in the face of deep fictional terror too much to ask? It might not change the world, but I do know more men screaming their heads off would bring at least one dyke a little bit of satisfaction.
Horror Is So Gay is an annual Autostraddle series of queer and trans reflections on horror.
Untethered: Into the Woods
The woods are Escape. They have always held my personal ideal of “freedom” cradled in their branches.
As soon as I was more or less conscious of being a being with some kind of relation to the world, four or five or so, I began to look off into the woods. This was easy to accomplish, because I grew up in the country. Our little house sat on a little bit of land that abutted a long stretch of field, full of high, natural grasses. It was also full of yellow jackets and so was impassable as far as I was concerned. The closest I could get was the short willow tree, really more of a bush, at the edge where the short green grass met its tall yellow counterpart, and where there was also a curious boulder, in which you could see the fossils left from marine life. Sometimes, rocks in our region were just placed there by ancient glaciers, torn up from somewhere else and long ago. And just beyond the young willow and the old rock was the field, and beyond the field was The Woods.
I would stare at them and feel my little heart beat, making plans for the day I would take off into them. There was always, always something unsatisfactory about the life I was presented with, and the woods in their lush greenery or their white icey webs or their fall glamor seemed like the best answer. All of my favorite characters went into the woods. Sure, the woods were ultimately, usually, dangerous. But the woods were also where it was at.
So, then, it was not surprising that when I was old enough and my best friend was old enough, we were allowed to go by ourselves into the woods behind her house, past the farm land that grew strawberries and corn in the summer and pumpkins in the fall, and play among the trees. We clambered past rusting farm trash and down a long ravine to where the 18-mile creek wound its way over smooth, flat rocks. For hours, we’d walk and talk and make believe, two avid readers obsessed with the same stories, the fantasy and the magic and the darkness of the woods. We made plans to run away into the woods. We tried to see how far we could make it, coming back just as the sun was setting, into the yellow glow of my friend’s mother’s kitchen where we would wash our hands under the faucet that pulled water up from a well so it was always so, so cold at first.
And as I write this to you, from a tiny cabin in the woods where I’m at a writing residency, I am sitting at the intersection of the personal symbol of a thing and the realization of that thing. I am in the woods and I am escaping and I am returning because I have escaped here before.
Last night, the sun set while I drove through the mountains just past Roanoke, where white settlers famously disappeared (as in: were gonna die but instead joined local Native American tribes or, yeah, died), on my way down to Tennessee. All the while, I was admiring the fall foliage, grateful to see reds so bright they were practically fuschia lining the edges of gray cliffs, to see rolling leaves of gold and orange and burgundy and brown and evergreen that I would never have seen if I’d spent this whole month in the city. I knew the whole time how far I still had to go and how that would mean over three hours of driving in the dark. I’d wanted to start earlier, but my ADHD had other ideas. Once I got on the road, I knew I was relatively fucked, but there was nothing for it but to do it. More often than not, when trying to go anywhere involving a multi-hour drive, I wind up in the “now you’re completely fucked” category. It’s not not a disability! This really sucks, to be honest, and always has, and also it’s embarrassing on top of it all.
I could see the sky, but I could only see the absence where the trees and the mountains were. They stood on either side of the highway, obsidian. The thing about this escape is that it’s full of life, but you can’t see it.
After about two hours of exhausting twists in the dark with semi trucks barrelling up behind me, blinding me with their lights before passing me, I pulled into a combo Dunkin Donuts and gas station situation. After the only other car parked at the moment in the parking lot stopped and a dude got out, he stood for a moment by the pumps, inhaling the last of his cigarette, staring me down. I am good at keeping my face neutral, so I did. He stared. I pumped gas. He went inside to get whatever. After my tank filled, I pulled right in front of the Dunkin Donuts and went in to find a couple queers and maybe a token straight dude goofing off. I got some old donut holes and a hot coffee and told them I legit did not care that they were in back doing nothing while I looked at the donuts for a few minutes. I wanted to ask them where I was, but I didn’t. They were distracted, making the most of their shift.
Back in the car, I encountered the fact that I have good friends. Not one, but two people had checked up on me on my drive. Platonic buds. People who value our connection and who knew I had a long, solo drive south. Where once, where often, where always, I had a partner in these adult activities, I had other people showing me with their actions that it can in fact work other ways, that friends can be a bulwark against the dark. The stares from unfriendly straights were, as always or perhaps moreso, present on this drive, but so was my knife — and the queers in my phone.
And as I write this, the sun is setting again. There is an inevitability once you’re out there, in the woods, in the dark. The queers reading this who spend endless time in the woods are laughing at me and know. Like anything, it gets easier with experience. I only have a couple more hours of daylight, and then I’ll be asked whether I am so brave, whether I really want to be alone, whether I want this “escape” when All The Lights Are Out and there is scratching outside.
Not all nights are dark. Not all woods at night are pitch.
Just a couple weeks ago, I was camping with a lover on the side of a mountain in central Pennsylvania in anticipation of a long hike the next day. It was also a full moon. I left the tent to pee in the middle of the night and was pleasantly surprised, because I have spent too much time away from opportunities to see this happen recently, to not need a flashlight. Everything was gorgeous and visible, if without much color. My pale ass hands showed up perfectly fine in front of me, and I easily found a spot away from the tent to pop a squat and stare up at those milky leaves.
Whenever I’m reminded the moon can shine bright enough that most humans can see well enough to complete basic tasks in the middle of the night, I’m reminded of the reason a harvest moon is called such (because it allowed for late work on harvest nights), and, yes, I am reminded of the alienation we feel under Capitalism and in a Colonialist state, a part of a fascistic project that urges us toward abandoning the simple, free, impossibly ancient utility of the light of the full moon in the woods on the side of a mountain.
Everything is silver, and you can see.
Amazon has a camera you can affix to your front door to monitor yourself and your neighbors. It can also see at night.
Stay off of social media because the horrors will upset you. A social media blackout can be more obscure than a dark night.
Maybe the woods are not so scary.
The other residents and I talked, one of our first conversations, about how weird it was to arrive at our scheduled residency, in our part of the world, while a genocide was taking place.
The scratching outside right now is for sure just rodents. I just saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I was looking right at a mouse, and it looked at me. I’m going to have to move my oatmeal off the floor.
Or if the scratching is some man who wants to do me harm, it wouldn’t be the first time.
But the woods can burn. GPS location can pinpoint you. Drones can fly overhead. There is no real seclusion in 2023. It’s an illusion, and it’s afforded until it isn’t. The natural world, any semblance of freedom of movement, our lives, are here until they aren’t.
And then there’s the fact that it’s largely white people saying things like this, that they could run from a society and out of it into nature, as if that’s even possible while still existing within the same ever-more-fascistic state. Because it’s a colonialist idea that there is a “nature” separate from us and from human society, that there is a presumed access for white settlers to the land we’re on, the “nature,” the woods in North America and at the sites of other colonial projects that is not presumed for the land’s Indigenous peoples.
The woods are soaked in a bloody history of genocide, a word pulsing through my mind and body this week. The National Parks and State Forests and signs with Smokey the Bear that inform us what the fire risk is for the day are all reminders of wrongs yet to be righted. I feel like, in recent years, I’ve seen an uptick in knowledge and awareness around Land Back movements, and even some good news coming out of these movements. Part of learning and unlearning around Land Back, too, is trying to burn away the colonizer inside my own head, letting controlled brush fires destroy ideas that aren’t serving us, trusting that there have to be other, better things that can grow in their place.
The woods are not neutral, are not virginal, are not something that exist outside of the influence of human interaction and touch. Indigenous peoples in North America have cultivated food forests for thousands of years, contributing to the biodiversity of forests, and also, resulting in the sense from Europeans who entered these forests hundreds of years ago for the first time that they were somehow abundant of their own accord, Eden-like, as though the trees had just up and assembled themselves into orchards that grew alongside medicinal and culinary herbs and berry bushes. Now, the traces of these food forests could be used by Indigenous tribes as part of land back claims, demonstrating that these forest areas, that the woods surrounding villages were actively cultivated, tended, inhabited before colonizers forcibly removed or murdered native populations. The sense that the woods are “untouched” by humans is a relatively recent development; it feels like it’s part of the same colonial-capitalist project to keep us unmoored from our surroundings, to leave the management of these woods to corporations, to governments, not to the people who have known what they’re doing, to mentally, passively sign onto theft. When I pass brambleberries in the woods, which have no poisonous look alikes in North America by the way, I wonder if someone played a part in putting them there, if those are the descendents of berries that were intentionally cultivated in a patch for convenient picking, or if they’re here now because birds carried the seeds from a food forest that is still winding its roots into the ground even as the uncultivated woods around it bleed into its edges. In cities, our local governments have planted mostly male flowering trees, so that we can have the aesthetics of these trees, but none of the fruit, so that the trees can’t feed people. Because that’s not allowed.
When I was a kid and I wanted to run from what I could sense around me, from a town that hated queers and parents that imposed religion and schools that restricted thought, I longed for the woods. I didn’t see cities in my mind, didn’t imagine cities as a point of liberation, not when I was a kid. I imagined solitude or a few friends and leaves and roots and roaming. Now, on Google maps, I can see how the woods are sandwiched neatly between highways. When I walk into the forest, I can often still get a couple bars on my phone.
When I was on the side of that mountain and my lover and I were sitting by our fire, we heard something that, at first, sounded like human voices, talking in the distance. We sat, tense. We didn’t see any lights. This carried on for some time. Then, it coalesced into what could have been wolves, could have been coyotes, more likely, based on the fewer voices we were hearing. But then, it got closer and closer until it sounded like a single owl.
We opted to hike the remains of our food out of our camping spot and back to the car to the dark. On the way, I looked into the woods. I saw figures, tall and with faces unlike anything I’ve really ever seen before, just looking at me, standing in among the trees. While I felt pins and needles, I didn’t panic. They were just looking. I was just looking. I said nothing to them or about them until we were out of those woods, remembering what everyone says about the Appalachian mountains.
A particularly relevant part of my project here, my pursuit of myself after continued and mostly cohabiting partnership, has been to be okay with defining and holding my own beliefs. It can be hard to parse out what is yours and what is a partner’s when you live together, spend so many moments together. So, now, I just have to ask myself if what I saw in the woods was real. And regardless of what you think, I will tell you that mostly, when I think of them, I just feel a mourning.
It’s not an escape, it’s just something different.
When I first came up here, in April, I was monogamously partnered. The experience was, in the writing I was working on (a forthcoming project!) and in my personal life, hand-in-hand with facing some long standing fears. Staying in this little cabin then was terrifying. I was sleep-deprived. Every sound set me on edge. I powered through and played it off in the daylight, only to return to a place of panic when the sun set. Similarly, any time I was left home alone in the house we used to share, every stray sound elevated my anxiety to near-panic-attack levels.
And now, I think, because there is no alternative, suddenly, it’s easier. I wasn’t expecting that.
I wasn’t expecting it to be so easy to listen to the house creak at night. And now, it seems like such a silly thing to have worried about. It makes me wonder what else is keeping me constrained in ways I am not even seeing. What else is restricting my better self out of fear?
Sometimes a symbol is just a symbol. It’s helpful for understanding ourselves and our place and our capabilities. But once we know more, it’s time to figure out what to do past the purely symbolic. TikTok ideas of escapism are futile and honestly counterproductive. My childhood ideas were beautiful and important and also childish. I’m still unpacking why I always felt so anxious while partnered when I was alone at night but feel less so now. I am not sure I like the answers. And I know ‘little me’ wants something even better, something more right than just running away.
This is Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
This piece was written while I was in residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts. Thank you to Sundress Publications and their staff for their work and support of writers.
My Jiddo Fled Palestinian Genocide so I Could Be Free
In 1948, at the age of seven, my jiddo (grandpa in arabic), his parents, and his six siblings were forced to flee from their home in Haifa, Palestine. A few years ago, my jiddo told me his memory of standing on a balcony, seeing naked dead neighbors in the streets, hearing screams in the distance, children “going crazy” because their family was gone. That morning, they ran for their lives to the Mediterranean.
My family was privileged and wealthy: They owned an olive oil mill and property in Palestine. So they had resources to flee and survive for some period of time.
When they got to Sur, Lebanon, my great grandmother, Badrieh Al Khamra, started to sell her jewelry to keep everyone fed. This kept my family alive for a while, but after five months, it was gone, and everyone started to starve.
So, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they got on a cattle train to Aleppo, Syria. The trip took a few days. Eventually, they arrived in Aleppo, where they stayed for six months, before settling in Damascus, Syria. What ultimately helped pull our family out of starvation and survive were two things: My great grandfather, Ahmed Izzat Taha, spoke English and also had a college degree.
From Jiddo: “Khmara Square Haifa, Palestine pre-1948 before the Zionists forced the eviction of Palestinians from the homeland in Palestine. Now it’s called Paris Square. Palestinians might forgive but we will never ever forget.”
It was incredibly hard for Palestinians to get jobs at the time, so having an education meant everything to my family. And for the Tahas, they experienced how a degree could mean the difference between having dinner and not. Over his life, my great grandfather published and translated 46 books, including The Oregon Trail and Cheaper by the Dozen.
In 1959, my jiddo Nabil was accepted to Purdue University with less than $20 to his name. He worked as a dishwasher making $0.80/hour to pay for school and housing. In 1964, while at a church event to get some food, he met my grandma: Sharon Elizabeth Hood, a young, white baptist, small town girl from Texas. Not long after that, on February 24, 1965, my mom Rhoda was born in Baytown, Texas to a white Baptist mom and Muslim Palestinian dad.
My grandma’s unexpected pregnancy forced both families to reckon with how they were going to integrate their lives — and so they did. My grandma not only supported my jiddo, the father of her child, in becoming a citizen, but numerous of his other siblings as well (writing Congress, filling out immigration paperwork, etc.). And on March 6, 1969, under the affirmation and witness of my maternal great grandparents, Earl Winfred Hood and Elaina Marie Hood, my jiddo was recognized as a United States Citizen by the District Court of the United States in Houston, Texas.
The wedding photo of Ahmad Izzat Taha and Badrieh Al Khamra, my great grandparents, 1931-32, Haifa Palestine
This narrative of a wealthy family, turned poverty stricken refugees, turned American Dream may seem like the inspiring story the colonizer propaganda machine wants us to hear. But, this story continues to be marked by tragedy.
With a darkness looming over him, I can hear my jiddo saying to me: “I am completely broken at this point.”
The impact of this apartheid, of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, continues to impact this generation and generations to come. Genocide carries itself in our bodies, beckoning us to tend to its healing and to honor the pain and devastation it has caused. Every few months, when Palestine is in a news cycle, we are forced to relive the trauma our family went through while watching other families continue to suffer. It’s incredibly painful to witness, and all people who come from Palestinian bloodlines are survivors of this tragedy. Regardless of what’s in the news, my jiddo, now nearly 85 years old, still gets night terrors.
Rhoda, senior school photo age 16, 1980
I called my mom the other day to let her know I was writing this piece and to check in with her about how she’s feeling about the news. She was struggling, talking about how her whole life she has felt so confused and hurt and disconnected from the struggles in her heart about Palestine. She told me when she read this essay that I put words to feelings she has long struggled to put words to. This is what she wrote to me after our conversation:
“In a world where colonization still draws painful borders around Indigenous lives, through silent echoes of the past and loud clamors of the present, the narrative of my dad’s shattered dream and unyielding survival stands as a testament. It is a soul-stirring reminder of the human spirit’s unyielding flame, burning fiercely amidst the chilling winds of conquest, illuminating the paths of resistance for generations to come.”
In the spring of 1992, I was born to a Muslim Lebanese dad and my mom. Today, 31 years later, and 75 years after my family escaped the Nakba, I live on Confederate Villages of Lisjan territory in Oakland, California. On Trans Day of Visibility this past year, I posted a photo of me after top surgery, talking about what it means to me to be trans. This is what my jiddo said: We see you and love you as you are.
My jiddo fled genocide by Israel in 1948, and I get to be free as a transgender person with access to things like gender affirming care and community in 2023. My jiddo always tells me he is proud of me for just being me, and I truly believe him when he says that. He has endured so much, and to see his grandchild live in such a loving and fulfilling way, is a dream come true for him.
A few months ago, when I asked my jiddo if he considered me a Palestinian, he said, “nothing would honor me more.”
That is why I’m sharing this story. I carry my Palestinian elders and ancestors in my heart and body everywhere I go. It is not a separate part of me; it is me. It is part of where I come from. I come from the land and people of Palestine. I am a transgender Palestinian.
A free Palestine means a freer world. Wall-shattering resistance from Palestinians is a direct result of 70+ years of colonization, land theft, occupation, and apartheid. It is the result of traumatized, imprisoned, and oppressed people fighting back.
Do not be silent. Have conversations with people in your life. Call and email your legislators and demand a ceasefire. It matters when you stand in solidarity with people as they fight against militarized and global forces that want them extinct, especially when those forces are backed by biased mainstream media.
I hold all oppressed people fighting for liberation in my heart. Black liberation, sex worker liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, transgender liberation, Palestinian liberation — it is all intertwined as we aim to decolonize and return home.
I read this piece to my jiddo before publishing, and I asked if there’s anything he wanted me to add. With a glimmer of hope in his eyes, this is what he said:
“We [Palestinians] are not going away. We’re in this world to stay, and the world is going to have to deal with us.”
Laila and their jiddo (Nabil) at an ice skating rink in New Jersey, 1997
Before and After the Library
feature image photo by Kilito Chan via Getty Images
I’ve used a lot of words to describe myself in the many years I’ve lived on this planet. Some were nice words, others were not. But the descriptors that have stuck with me the longest are the ones tied up in my expectations of myself. They reflect who and what I love.
Lesbian. Novelist. Librarian.
It’s that last one I want to talk about now. The library! It’s where I spent all of my twenties and most of my thirties. Working, sure, but also doing a lot more than that. I found my best friends at the library. I discovered my voice there along with a real sense of self-worth. Most notably, I penned my first novel in a library, typing furtively on lunch breaks. I’m no longer the girl who took her first job there out of sheer desperation, but I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that part of that person stays wedged inside me, always. And for the sake of this story, there are two iterations of self to consider: pre-library and post-library.
These “before” and “after” versions hinge on the birth of my son. In the before, I was 18-years-old and beginning my first year of college. In the after, I was a young mother in dire need of a paycheck. Thankfully, I found employment at my local public library — a small city branch that was basically four rooms duct-taped together with stacks holding up the tiled ceiling. What did I know about libraries before I began working there? To be honest with you, not very much. I had grand notions of dusty rooms and carefully selected tomes, peace and unending quiet, some grey-haired spinster steadily shushing everyone like a balloon slowly leaking air.
I was wrong about almost all of that (there was still a good amount of dust — libraries tend to have terrible cleaning services). In my two decades of collection work, I became an integral part of the library’s intricate machinery: public, academic, and law. There was shelving and reference and weeding. InterLibrary Loan. Puppet shows and flannel boards and glitter covering the floor as well as the soles of my shoes. There was shelf reading, a seemingly never-ending task. I didn’t just work at the library; I worked with the library, my brain and body employed in tandem with other necessary library cogs. I was one of many, part of an expansive community that fought (and continues to fight) an increasingly uphill battle when it came to securing community spaces and rights for users.
Banned books bridge the pre- and post-library versions of myself.
Growing up, I wasn’t allowed regular access to books. We were Southern Baptist, strongly evangelical, which meant that unless you were cracking open a bible or something biblically adjacent, the written word was something that had to be approved before it could be viewed. I received textbooks in school — ones handed out each year in classrooms, battered things I pored over religiously — but we hardly ever went to the library, and any media center materials had to go through my parents before I could read them. We were also poor, which meant I did not have money to buy any of my own. Unlike my brother, who would have rather done a mountain of chores than be forced to read a book, I was desperate to get my hands on any. I craved the smell of them, their weight and texture. I wanted to fall inside their pages, get lost in worlds that looked vastly different than my own colorless existence. Because falling into a book meant my own world disappeared. I didn’t have to think about the things that made life harder, my queerness, my otherness. I could simply cease to exist.
Sometimes I stole books from classrooms. I can admit that now, positive my teachers have likely forgiven (and long forgotten) their theft. I snatched paperback copies of things, Matilda and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and Island of the Blue Dolphins. These books I snuck home, shoved beneath the dresser I shared with my little sister. Stories made me ache and cry and wonder. Libraries, inaccessible to me, but stuffed full of books — things I considered holy — became exponentially more significant than the actual biblical texts my parents wanted me to read. If church meant submission to something greater, then the library was a place where a person could be given complete autonomy and control. Freedom to learn. Freedom to grow.
So yes, it makes perfect sense that when I think about the term “banned books,” my mind immediately slinks back to my childhood. To ban is to refuse, to expressly forbid. And I’m unable to separate the way books are banned in the political sense from the way books were denied me in my childhood. After all, isn’t it the same argument? The notion that a child couldn’t possibly know their own mind well enough to make important decisions? These political parties cry “think of the children” and “moral objection.” Well, so did my parents. But this kind of pointless rhetoric never stopped me from reading. It only taught me how to hide things better. Learning how to stop hiding — my thoughts, my feelings, my identity? That took years to undo.
Libraries are repositories for books, but they’re also a place where you learn your voice is valuable and important. I was technically an adult when I gave birth, 18 and old enough to vote, but mentally I was still a child. I’d grown up very sheltered and had no resources, no skills outside of those learned in the church. I couldn’t legally drink for another three years. I wasn’t able to rent a car on my own. I had a baby, one who needed lots of time and attention, and I knew almost nothing about how to take care of him, much less how to take care of myself. That first library position — the one that paid twenty thousand dollars a year, plus stolen toilet paper and leftover food from events — saved me. It wasn’t just a job, it was access to information. Access to community. I grew up there, alongside my son, and the passing years sped by in a flurry, like a snowball tossed downhill, steadily picking up heft and momentum.
I live in Florida — have always lived here. I’m third generation, and it’s common knowledge that we currently boast the second most book bans in the United States. This information isn’t surprising to me (or to anyone else who’s lived in a state where “otherness” means difficulty existing). You get used to the people in charge telling you what you shouldn’t want. Living with a bad thing for so long can lead to apathy; the way your eyes slip unseeing over objects you’ve owned for many years. But by pressing our fingers against the bruise of these “bad things,” we’re reminded they’re still there and still affecting us. I repeatedly tell the story of my relationship to books and libraries and my family because it’s not a new one, and I shouldn’t forget how it continues to impact me. Book bans are the same today as they were yesterday. Not much has changed when it comes to people thinking they know better.
Here’s what I know for sure: Talking and listening to each other keep communities closely knit together.
Storytelling. It’s what I’m doing right now, isn’t it? And by sharing the facts about my own relationship to libraries and book banning, a reader might get an opportunity to compare my experience to their own. Possibly they’ll tell some version of it to another person. And so on, and so on. When we continue to talk about book bans, we are sharing something bigger than the ban itself. We’re telling each other an uncomfortable story that needs to be heard and reheard.
So, here’s mine. Take what you need from it. Because telling each other stories doesn’t blunt the ache of our individual pain. It allows us, instead, to share the load.
Autostraddle is honoring Banned Books Week 2023! Today is Let Freedom Read Day, the final day of Banned Books Week. For more information, visit BannedBooksWeek.org.
On *NSYNC and Being a Lesbian Who Loves Boy Bands
feature image photo by John Shearer / Contributor via Getty Images
The year 1998 was a big one for me: My world had been rocked ever since I saw Angelina Jolie’s boobs in the movie Gia on HBO. It was also the same year I fell in love with *NSYNC. In my mind, there was never a conflict between those two things. I could want Angelina to kiss me like she kissed Elizabeth Mitchell, and I could also want Justin Timberlake to kiss me like that, too. But as a 12-year-old girl, I didn’t have the language to share those latent bisexual feelings with anyone else. How could I explain to someone that when I went to see Armageddon twice in the movie theater, I was interested in Liv Tyler just as much as I was interested in Ben Affleck? I couldn’t, so I decided to keep the parts of me I couldn’t explain to myself until I could explain.
Liking girls was a thing I couldn’t figure out in relation to liking boys. It was always a feeling that simmered below the surface, and only I could access it. When you’re very vocally boy crazy, how do you add in there that there are some very specific girls who make you crazy too, even if you don’t have the words for it yet? You have to remember, it was the late 90s, and bisexual wasn’t a word that got used often in my world. It would be years before there were queer female characters on TV shows for kids or teens, and I didn’t really watch a lot of TV back then anyway. I was all about music. Musicians like Hayley Kiyoko and Fletcher were still learning how to tie their shoes — female singers who sang the kind of pop music I loved were definitely not queer.
Being super vocal about things I love is a huge part of my personality, so of course when I was a teen, all I talked about was boy bands. It was the thing I cared most about. Algebra has yet to serve me, but you never know when you’re going to have to explain that the letters of *NSYNC are actually the last letters of each of their first names and that the original fifth member of the group was named Jason. My love for *NSYNC became a core part of my identity. I say they’re baked into my DNA, and I’m really not kidding. Without them I would have never met some of my dearest friends, started my interest in pop culture criticism, or found my love of writing.
When I was in high school, I discovered fanfiction, and it became yet another obsession. It started with *NSYNC, even though I did occasionally read fics where the boy bands cross pollinated. Fanfiction was actually one of the ways that I could explore my bisexuality. I didn’t write sapphic stories, but I enjoyed reading them when I could find them. I remember reading them late at night when I was sure my parents were asleep, the same way I had watched Gia on HBO multiple times. I would never print it out and read it the way I had stacks and stacks of *NSYNC fanfic (both het fic and slash) printed out to read whenever I wanted. Despite the volume of fics I had, I kept them largely hidden. Even though I hid them (even the het fic), it felt easier to explain to my mom why I was reading stories where the members of *NSYNC were gay than why I was reading stories about Christina and Britney getting it on at a slumber party if she ever found them. Because then I would have to admit to her that I was attracted to girls, and I didn’t know how to have that conversation, or if it would go over well.
I never used my love of boy bands to cover my attraction to girls. Mainly because I didn’t have to; people in my life did it for me. When all you do is talk about Justin Timberlake, people just assume you idolized Christina Aguilera and not that you wanted her to kiss you. It was easy to keep my bisexuality tucked into my back pocket back then because it was still so abstract to me. I had never met a girl in real life that I wanted to kiss or date, so why did I need to tell anyone?
I did consciously hide behind boy bands to explain why I rarely had crushes on real life boys. I had a few crushes in middle and high school, but those boys felt abstract, even when I saw them in the hallway every day. Sure, I liked seeing them, and they were nice, but I also wonder how much of that was me liking the idea of a boy but not really liking them romantically. Most of my friends in high school had boyfriends, so even though I didn’t see myself as less than because I didn’t have one, I wanted one so that I felt included in their world. As much as I attributed my lack of a boyfriend to being awkward around boys, I also knew how to pursue someone I was attracted to. I spent the entire summer of 2003 hooking up with a girl, and even though she initially suggested the idea of hooking up, it took me no time to run with it.
When I told my friends that I had spent the summer hooking up with a girl, it was not well received. I don’t know if it was because they could not reconcile the version of me who spent all of her time writing Justin Timberlake fan fiction with the version of me that was hiding behind cars kissing a girl, or because of their own internalized biphobia. Either way, it sent me running back into the closet.
During my “aggressively heterosexual” phase of life (aka my twenties), I buried my fangirl tendencies because I thought guys would find it weird. This proved true with my boyfriend. He couldn’t seem to accept my love for JT, nor did he appreciate the way I swooned over him. When *NSYNC reunited at the 2013 VMAs, he was ambivalent about my excitement, and didn’t support me the way I hoped he would have. He knew I loved them as a teenager, but he didn’t seem to ever want to understand why they meant so much to me. He also knew I identified as bi, but he was really only ever interested in it if it could have served him in some way.
It’s no surprise that my coming into my queerness coincided with my becoming reacquainted with my fangirl side. Those two things are intrinsically tied deep in my mind. But unlike when I was 12, I leaned way more into the whole liking girls thing than I had before. Now that I was choosing to live out loud as a queer woman, I couldn’t shut up about it. One of my friends from middle school remarked that my whole identity was being queer and astrology and iykyk.
My reaction to this year’s *NSYNC reunion is no surprise to anyone who knows me really well. I have been waiting for this day since 2002, and there was no way that I was going to shut up about it. While most of my fangirling has been happening irl (sorry to my amazing partner who has to hear most of it!), I have also been posting about it incessantly on social media. It’s really good that social media didn’t exist back in the day; I would have probably gotten in a million discourse arguments about boy bands.
But in my posting haze, I started to think about something that never occurred to me before. So many of the people I interact with regularly on social media have little to no idea about how much of an *NSYNC fan I am. How could they; the band has been broken up for 21 years!
For the last five years, I have been very loud about being queer on social media. It’s basically the totality of my online life. I have gained a lot of followers because of it and created a bit of a community in my way. And since my brand became being queer, would people be turned off by my sudden simping for the boy band that made me? Is it weird if I post memes about eating pussy in my Instagram stories and then follow it up with a picture of Justin Timberlake and the drooling emoji? In my mind, I’ve never had to reconcile those two parts of myself, but when so many people see me one way, how do I make it clear that those parts are two halves of a whole?
As I posted story after story — a clip from *NSYNC’s episode of “Hot Ones”, a reel of them acting out the dialogue from Friends as a teaser for their single from Trolls, still photos from the VMAs — I began to wonder if my fangirling was changing anyone’s opinion of me and the way I represented myself and my queerness on social media.
It’s taken me a long time to get comfortable with who I am — language, and the discourse around who can use certain self-identifying words have led me to really grapple with who I am and how I see myself. Bisexual isn’t a word I use to describe myself because it’s not a word that fits me anymore. But if I say I’m a lesbian* (*except my love for Justin Timberlake), are people who are lesbians without the asterisk going to tell me I’m not who I know I am? Some people may say it’s internalized biphobia back to rear its ugly head, and I don’t know if that’s true. I am not afraid of being bi; it simply doesn’t feel like that’s who I am anymore. Unlike in my teens and twenties, I don’t want to have sex with Justin Timberlake. I’d kiss him to fulfill the desires of 12-year-old Sa’iyda, but then I’d be like, “this has been a blast, do you want to go get cheese fries?”
Also, it may sound ridiculous, but I wonder how to tie my queer self together with my *NSYNC loving self from a branding standpoint. One of my writing dreams is to write a nonfiction book about the 90s boy band craze, more specifically about *NSYNC because they’re my favorites. But since so much of my writing is about being queer, will it get in the way of one of my ultimate career ambitions? Do my queer readers and followers want to read my analysis of the greatest boy band of all time? (PS: if you do, you can here.)
If you had to make me into a pie chart, being queer and loving *NSYNC are basically the same size. They’ve both informed so much of who I am that even if I sat down and tried to undo the knots of each part, there would still be a ball of string holding them together. Even if I’m freaking out about it, maybe it’s okay and I’m freaking out for no reason. My very online brain tells me I have to be stressed about how my fellow queers perceive me or else I will fall victim to discourse. If liking Justin Timberlake didn’t change the way I felt about girls when I was 17, does it really matter now that I’m 37?
I don’t think I have an answer for that, so I guess I’m just going to stream “Better Place” for the millionth time and chill out.
Untethered: On Living Alone, Reimagining Family
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
It’s not like I don’t have role models for people in my family living alone. I do, in fact — and they’re, specifically, women. My parents divorced when I was 15, and my mom never remarried. I spent my high school years living with my single mom and little sister, and because of my dad’s deployment, it felt like that had been the case for years before then, anyway. My grandma never remarried after my grandpa died when I was six. For most of my life, she lived alone, alleging that she was content with her own company, getting help from her three sons and her daughter (my mom). My sister lives alone and likes it. Now, I live alone. Now, my mom takes turns with my uncles and various aides to go to my grandma’s house and cartake. Her dementia’s advanced to where she doesn’t recognize her kids anymore. I said hi to her over the phone the other day, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know who I was either. My mom’s fallen deeper and deeper into a mix of alt right conspiracy theories and white lady appropriative hodge podge mysticism. By the time this publishes, she’ll have probably gone through with her plans to flee to a park during the national security alert test because it’s supposed to activate a microchip we all got injected in us when we got the COVID vaccine. You’ve been warned. I don’t know what I’m warning you about. Zombies, probably.
I’ve been dredging through the remains of my life since my ex and I started living in this house four years ago. It feels like shoveling shit from one pile to another. It’s hard work putting this right, cleaning up debris from home reno and just the inertia that can occur when two people with ADHD cohabitate. I have garbage bags on my garbage bags. And because cleaning is distinctly not a preferred activity for me, I spend a lot of time screaming and yelling at the trash while I throw it away, bringing all the drama and elaborate sighs to my little all-by-myself huffy fits, and trying to find things to listen to while hauling boxes and garbage bags around. It might sound like the house is very, very messy, and while it is by my standards, it’s also that I can only piece together an hour here, a couple hours there. Life is hauling me forward. There’s work, of course, and that is many hours a week. Sleeping, working out, cooking, friends and dates and sex and writing all take up time. And then there’s the way that cleaning gives my mind space to think. When I’ve strung together a few evenings in the house, alone, cleaning and cleaning and sorting and throwing things away, I have ample opportunity to start to process past traumas, to really think things through and see how they’re popping up again for me, to watch the cycles winding and unwinding themselves through my current timeline. This may have resulted in my gladly accepting an invitation for drinks at a punk bar only to burst into tears at the counter in front of everyone about something that had bothered me for…decades? You think you’re going to settle into finally living alone with a cup of tea, to gaze out of the window into the middle distance, but instead it turns out your inner child is waiting in the closet, and they’re dual wielding hammers.
Is that one of the reasons so many people would rather stay in a relationship than face being alone? Because if you’re by yourself, there’s no one to take up the space, so then it’s up to you to fill the room with chatter and thoughts, and the thoughts can twist into all the things you were pushing deep down into your basement. There’s that, and the fact that being alone feels dangerous in a hyper-literal sense. I’ve gotten used to the creaks and moans of the house, the occasional ghost seen walking behind me in the room in the reflection of the kitchen window, the way my leaning against something can cause the wood to sound like footsteps. But I’ve also become more and more aware of my position in my neighborhood, where the houses neighboring me are vacant, and the best I have are neighbors a few blocks down. I know them, but my part of the block is eerie in its quiet, dark and unlived-in. Next to me, a vacant house’s front yard has grown thick with thistles. The sun is setting earlier each day, and the time we’ll be spending in the dark is getting longer and longer. One night, while I walked up the 20+ stairs to my front door, past the scraggly and sharp and deep thistle patch, a pair of yellow eyes flashed at me. It was just a city deer, one of the several that flit in and out of my yard with regularity, but it made me want to jump out of my combat boots for a second. I tuck little weapons into pockets, look around a lot, check spaces I feel a less paranoid person would ignore, and wear shoes I can run in. With this, I think about what I said in my conversation with Stef Rubino about strength training about the way I want to move through the world, how I want to be physically stronger because of how I live my life, because I’m “visibly queer” (whatever that may mean), because I don’t orient my life around cis men or their “protection” and also because I’m by myself a lot and I value my solitude, not just in a way where I’m doing my own thing in well-populated areas, but alone in a only-person-I-can-see-around-me-for-blocks-and-blocks kind of way. I don’t know, maybe you think I’m silly. How do you deal with it?
Haunting me, still, though, and making me think of my grandma’s fate, my mom’s future, my sister’s, my own, is something someone said to me recently, in conversation. I’ve been thinking about my age, and regardless of however I may feel about it on a gender level, my uterus, and the potential that hollow little organ holds for having a kid. I brought up the fact that I was considering having a kid in this conversation, and my friend said, “Do it. You should.” They went on to tell me about an elder lesbian they’ve been helping to care for. I’m unclear on the details of how this got started, but apparently her wife died and my friend’s been helping her clear her yard. More sudden alone-ness. More clearing and cleaning of debris. But this lesbian, according to my friend, drinks a 12-pack of beer or more a day, is having trouble recovering from her surgery, and acts out in frustration and rage at times. According to my friend, she pulled a gun on them at one point during a heated altercation where the lesbian raged at my friend for leaving for the day, telling them she knew they were abandoning her. My friend tells me to have a kid because she’s seen too many old dykes with no one. It’s a reason. A single reason to consider it, but also, not the best reason to have at the top of the list when thinking about bringing a whole child into the world.
And then I think forward to how I might want my life to look when I’m 50, 60. Do I want younger family members? With mindful choices and a lot of luck, having a kid could mean having a good relationship with said kid for years and years, for the rest of my life, even. With my ex gone, so is, too, the fact that she never wanted to have a baby, and that I didn’t want to either at the time. I’m still not sure about it, but I’m making myself sit with the possibility, as a choice a person can make for themselves, outside of monogamous relationships or marriage or cohabitation, outside of cishet or capitalist expectations, but just as a thing to consider on its own merits. When I think about throwing wrenches into the gears of the relationship escalator, I also think about what it might mean to grab hold of one of the cycles my family’s in and to see if I can crack it, break myself free — and what it might mean to do that not through completely rejecting a part of life as though it’s bad in and of itself, but by considering what I can do differently.
One of the reasons my grandma might be in such steep cognitive decline is her isolation. Family lore says that she was cruel to her kids. I’ve also witnessed it to a certain extent. She also was stubborn and wouldn’t socialize much. She kept to herself like an anchoress, walled up, doing less and less each day. Her kids have mixed feelings about her, or my mom certainly does. To my knowledge, they made little to no effort to seek out memory care, to do any research, to do more than maintain her physical body. Then, my mom, too, makes little effort to bridge the gap with her brothers, with her kids. She’d rather be right, be vindicated, be a bigot than have closer family ties, than maintain friendships. To consider trying to make family is to consider reimagining family from the ground up, to summon into being a healthier approach I’ve never really lived in, only seen from the outside. It would take a ton of effort and faith and queer magic and sacrifice and who knows what else. And the clock is moving steadily forward, always, while I think about not just the possibilities I saw when I first entered onto this journey — moving my body and making new friends and reveling in the heat of a slutty summer — but also the ones that have come knocking, ghostly knuckles on a pane of glass in the back of my mind, with the turn of the seasons into fall.
Untethered: In Pursuit of Abject Sluttiness
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I committed to stepping off the relationship escalator, but I didn’t commit to being celibate, okay? I faced facts and said to myself, look, I’m not going to go through my mid-thirties without having sex just because I’ve gone and had a breakup. That’s absurd. Or, it’s absurd when I think about what I value. It can be a valid choice, but it’s not one I’m making.
Putting yourself out into the world can lead to getting hurt. Most of the time, when we’re talking about “getting hurt” while dating and hooking up, we’re talking about emotional wounds (or, like, very serious threats — the kind that make you send the address you’re going to in a text to a trusted friend). But in the pursuit of what I’ll term abject sluttiness, I’ve been running into scrapes and cuts, drama and ego-bruising, unresolved trauma, exhaustion, and a UTI…to name a few things.
My right leg now has a light scar from scraping myself on the ruins of an old stone hearth while making out with someone on a hike. Since then, I’ve developed a love of antimicrobial spray, which also comes in handy when someone pulls my still-healing nose piercing. After a particularly liberating fingering on a crusty rooftop while I was also on my period, I developed a UTI. I know I know, this is not a surprise at all considering the convergence of factors here, but I still woke up and sobbed because it hurt so much. And it did mean a depressing march on foot to go pick up antibiotics and those handy little pills that turn all your fluids orange and numb the pain. I rewarded myself with a matcha latte and sent a photo of me drinking it while holding up a peace sign to the person I’d had sex with to tell them I had gotten a UTI from the interaction, as you do.
I lost my wallet after queer country night drama — or after, rather, someone tried to make a threesome happen by letting their other partner inadvertently crash our date. The other partner had no idea and said she felt bad, but overall, when I marched out of that apartment at 3 a.m. to catch a Lyft home, I lit up one of my going out cigarettes (we don’t officially smoke anymore) and explained that I did not appreciate not being thought of. Instead of sleeping over, I was now catching a Lyft home in the early hours of the morning. Over the next day or so, I turned my therapist begging me to stick up for myself over and over in my mind until I tapped out the kind of text message people make fun of, long and blue and multi-paragraph, and sent it. I received a sincere apology and the opening to a conversation about making the situation right. Something inside of me clicked back into place then, like a tiny dislocated joint. I didn’t have to put up with feeling mistreated. I could just say something about it, and the worst that would happen would be that I’d end the fling. But also, someone might just respond with sincerity and things would be fine.
Last conversation I had with my therapist, we talked about my boundaries while dating, and he did the thing we all wish therapists would do — he told me I was getting an A+ in therapy. Bless. I had just made a joke about how a lot of people online will talk about wanting to get a good grade in therapy, to win therapy, but his response was so sincere. “You’re actually trying. Good job. Keep going.” While I’ve been cautioned about (and am avoiding) some kind of jumping into an ever-escalating monogamous relationship, dating and dating poly or intentionally single people has allowed me to look to myself as the authority on how my days are spend, on what my boundaries look like, and what I’m willing to put up with, where I bend, where I hold myself firm. As a chronic people pleaser, this is obscenely difficult because at once, I want to throw myself out of the window and leave a perfect shadow standing where I was, someone intensely likable. And on the other hand, I sometimes find myself meeting unexpected calls for emotional intimacy — but especially emotional labor — with repulsion that makes me want to defenestrate the entire connection with the other person, to boot it, to burn it all down and become a hermit solely so no one will ask me to hold their hand through something hard, which is, also, unsustainable. I’m still working on that balance.
The other night, when I was faced with a frustrating situation that left me splashing around in a pool of rejection and irritability, I pulled out my phone to find someone to vent to, texted my sister briefly, and then just went up to bed and watched a movie, grumping alone by myself in an effort to self-soothe. I woke up feeling perfectly moored, steady, like the fact that I’d trusted myself so deeply to handle these feelings on my own had brought me back to shore overnight.
While visiting the LGBTQ clinic for periodic STD tests and answering the questions they ask in a very bisexual manner, a doctor came in to talk to me about PrEP. I now take a chalky white pill every morning. PrEP: It’s not just for cis gay men, it can be for slutty nonbinary dudes, too. During my PrEP checkup, they also asked me if I wanted a MonkeyPox shot. As someone who was planning to go to a party in a gay bathhouse that night, I was like, you know what, stick it in. I’d also always wanted to get the smallpox vaccine, and apparently this is related, so it was fun for my nerd brain to receive, even if it left a bruise lasting for weeks. When I take my PrEP with breakfast every morning, or look over my calendar and see my every-three-months clinic checkup coming up, it stirs up a lot. Over coffee, I feel, at once, medicalized, a part of a population where we’re trying to control things like MonkeyPox, and also, so, so myself.
And then there’s the healing nature of having a bunch of people think you’re hot. This cannot be underestimated! It’s been glorious, and it gets easier every time to tell someone you think they’re hot or cute or pretty or whatever they are. It’s good to know that years and years ago when my ex husband screamed “You look like a boy!” and I screamed back at him “You fuck boys!” that his assessment of me would actually be a bonus in others’ eyes. There is a lot that treating yourself with kindness can do, but there is also learning to accept kindness from people who have good intentions and all the sweetness that comes with it.
Lastly, I keep dating people who regularly take shrooms and who share them with me. While I can’t say that body doubling and working on creative projects together while micro-dosing or seeing a psychological horror movie while tripping are the stereotypical kind of deep, spiritual experience one might seek on shrooms, these periodic forays into psychedelics have served as a kind of medicine, too. When you have to face reality getting a little wobbly, where you have to trust fall with another person while colors grow bright.
There’s a theory around healing trauma where you have to heal at the site of the wound. If a lot of my wounds have come from relationships in the past, then those can only be healed by relating to other people. If my wounds come from a sense of rejection, then I have to face the potential for that rejection. And, apparently, get a little injured by ruins and needles and everyone’s various piercings, too.
You Came Out As Queer; Now Come Out as an Artist
I did not come out of the womb writing, of course.
My earliest memory of writing is dictation. Urgently, fervently telling my mom a story I believed needed to be recorded for the annals of history. My mom listened, hunched over a small green notebook about the size of her hand. A notebook I called, for reasons unknown, “Anya’s French Notebook.” (I did not, and do not, speak French.)
There’s a home video of me, about three years old, wandering around the kitchen, past a pile of stuffed animals, and glancing up at the video camera, or rather, at my mom, holding the camera. She asks, “Would you explain to me what you want me to do? What do you want me to do?” and in response I mumble something incoherent. She goes on: “And what about the animals? What was it about the animals?” Something clicks in my toddler brain, because I answer quite clearly: “I’m going to tell you a story.”
In my childhood bedroom, there is a shoebox I covered with clear duct tape to make it waterproof (interesting technique). Underneath the clear tape is an index card, with looping letters of different colors and designs, forming the word “JOURNALS”. I remember telling my parents and brother that if they ever read any of my journals, I would never forgive them. It wasn’t a threat; it was a fact.
I cannot remember a time when I felt anything but obsessed with, compelled by, and committed to the act of storytelling, of writing. It has always felt so important, so loaded.
And yet, I still have a hard time saying: I am a writer. I am an artist.
So I reasoned, I wasn’t really queer, was I? I was waiting for someone to confer my queerness upon me. And that someone wasn’t going to be me.
I expressed these anxieties to an older, wiser queer, who told me I didn’t have to figure it all out all at once. In fact, I might not be able to. Instead, they suggested: What if you allowed yourself to experience the world as though you might be into women?
It seemed like a weird solution, because it wasn’t an answer; it was another question.
But I was plum out of options, and I am nothing if not a good student, so the next day, I woke up ready to complete my assignment and experience the world as though I might be into women.
I walked around campus, asking myself: What if I allow myself to experience the world as though I might be queer?
I viscerally remember the weather that day: It was early fall, the tiniest shiver in the air. I looked up and saw the sun breaking through the clouds, like a way-too-obvious metaphor, but that’s really what it looked like, I promise. I looked around and suddenly saw so many beautiful, interesting, fascinating women around me. I remember going to my Russian literature class, seeing this soft butch and being like, I’M ATTRACTED TO HER! OH MY GOD! The world had just burst open. I had thought it was a novel with a predictable plot, but actually it was a choose-your-own-adventure, or a poem, or something I’d never read before. Anything could happen. It wasn’t uncertainty — it was possibility.
It still took a while before I could say I was queer. I obsessed over what word I should align myself with, seeking vocabulary that encapsulated my exact interiority. I flipped through a lot of different words, some of which are cringy in retrospect. My desire to label was palpable. If I could name it, that meant I understood it.
At some point, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, I began to feel that maybe it is possible to know something without fully understanding it. Perhaps a degree of mystery — even if it’s coming from yourself — does not preclude knowing. At some point, I knew it deep in my bones: I’m queer. Even if I didn’t fully understand it.
And then, I could say it. I’m queer.
It was 2017. Sitting in the black box theater, listening to a panel of playwrights, I wrote in my notebook, in big handwriting spanning four lines: I’m a playwright.
I was participating in the 24 Hour Plays: Nationals, a four-day theater extravaganza culminating in the creation of six new plays — written, acted and performed in the span of 24 hours. Playwright Kristoffer Diaz had just said that if you think about your play for ten minutes everyday — you could be in the shower, on the subway, whatever — you’re a writer. I remember talking about that moment with Jess — my partner; we had just met; we were both playwrights; we had no idea we’d be living together six years later; this is how I know four days is enough to change your life — because when I heard it I remember thinking, oh my god, maybe I really am a writer!
I think that was the moment I allowed myself to believe I might be an artist.
But then, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was when I finished writing a play — not my first play — and felt a surge of emotion, realizing with shock that what I felt was pride. Maybe it was when I got to the subway station after a playwriting class in midtown Manhattan — exhausted, excited, open. Maybe it was when an actor told me they wanted to keep working on my play with me. Maybe it was getting an MFA, simple as that!
The truth is, I don’t know exactly when it happened. But then, when does anything happen? I didn’t become queer — I just realized it. I didn’t become an artist — I just realized it.
My favorite playwriting professor, Deb Margolin (an absolute legend), used to say there are only five original things you can say, and they’ve all already been said. The only original thing left is the desire to speak.
If you experience the world in such a way that you feel compelled to try to express it back, you’re an artist. Maybe when you see buildings and trees, you see shapes that could become dishes or patterns. Maybe when you overhear people talking, certain phrases stick to your brain like glue. Maybe when you walk by a stream or an ambulance, you hear a timbre. You can ignore your artistry for as long as you like. You can try to pretend it’s not there. You might even succeed. But if you have the desire, deep down, you know it’s there. The only original thing left is the desire to speak.
No one can claim your queerness for you — only you can claim it for yourself. No one can claim your artistry for you – only you can claim it for yourself. So why not try it?
What if you allowed yourself to move through the world as though you’re an artist?
Untethered: On Miss Havisham-Style Decision-Making
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I’ve been sleeping in my office, right next to the shelves where I keep Autostraddle Plus perks and shipping supplies, since mid-June. The first night I rolled out my camping mat onto the old pine floor, I tried to self-soothe by watching more of The Ultimatum (the queer one). This is, in fact, not comfort TV. My ex and I worked out a separation agreement over the course of those months and signed it in August. Just this past Saturday, she moved out, and I slept in my bed again for the first time in almost three months.
She left whatever she didn’t want, discards from our life together and from her life before we knew each other. There’s a motorcycle helmet in a box. We’ve never ridden a motorcycle together — that’s a different ex. I have to go through each room, throw away and donate things, take debris from our interrupted home reno to the dump, re-sort and rearrange whatever’s left. I need more lamps.
At least this room has an overhead light, I think to myself while turning a light on to take a look. The fixture sparks, and the light goes out with a plink. This room also has no outlets. Now I don’t know how long it will be dark in there. Until I can get to it, I guess. What I really need is an electrician.
Deciding to stay in the house I’ve lived in since 2019 came from a series of factors: a chance encounter with someone at a gathering who said she had hoped to buy a house here but now can’t afford it, knowing people who are only able to buy houses because they’re getting foreclosures and gutting them themselves, living in shells they painstakingly re-build. My house is, while relatively affordable and in need of work, not a gut job. Then there was this column, and the challenges I set for myself, to put myself out there, to go to events, to make new friends and try new activities. (Like, guys, update: I think I might really like kickboxing?) As my therapist said, “Pittsburgh is really autistic and queer.” And Pittsburgh is so full of cool people trying their best that, in spite of its hellish infrastructure and systemic problems, it’s also my home of eight years. In unusual-to-Pittsburgh circumstances, both of my longest-term exes have also left the city and the state, so even though I might see mutual friends or acquaintances, I’ll never run into them. When I’m crossing a steel bridge or re-reading familiar graffiti in a bathroom, it’s comforting to know when out and about, in terms of my exes, at most, I’m only going to encounter ghosts.
And now the house is quiet, except for its ghosts. I woke up this morning to the bells I have hung on the front door jangling. No one was at the door, nor could anyone have walked through. Correction: I woke up from an hour nap I managed to squeeze in after breakfast and before work because, for the past two nights, I’ve only been able to sleep for about three hours.
A lot of what I’m remembering is Mya, my dog, who died just over a year ago in July 2022, in my arms, on the kitchen floor. It was 7 a.m., and she had given me one last wag, one last faint flick of her paws before she went. I held her while she got stiff and cold, and then my ex and I got her cleaned up and brushed, lit a candle in her dog bowl, and held space for her. I could not call the vet until 9 a.m. When I called, the vet told us they could cremate her, but that we would need to bring her in. We would have to bring an 80 pound [dead] dog down over 20 front steps and load her in the back of my old Subaru. My ex and I wrapped Mya in a blanket. I tucked one of her favorite stuffed toys (which she was gentle with and so kept forever) in between her paws. Then, we carried her down the front steps, concealed in the blanket.
It looked, friends, like two queers were disposing of an 80 pound body. I know this because someone waiting at the bus stop saw us come down the stairs with a body wrapped in a blanket, promptly turned on her heel, looked the other way, and minded her business with her back completely away from us, tucked as far around the corner as she could go without missing her bus. I still laugh about that.
I’m not used to staying in one living space for this long. I know it’s something people do, that they walk past — in some cases — a space where someone died or a cabinet that got chipped when two kids who are now grown were wrestling or their grandmother’s favorite sitting spot for decades after these events. It’s not a practice I’ve had to keep. Now, it seems like it might be. Right now, it feels like I’ve chosen to shroud myself in all of my recent past, to wear the scraps of my past relationship around me like Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress.
I know the worst of this initial wave will pass. These thoughts have only seeped in through the cracks because the newness of the quiet let them in. The hum of the refrigerator and the squeak of the breaks of the city bus on its route are not enough to keep them out right now, but in time, I think I’ll fill the space with more of the current, living, breathing me.
Part of this unease is rooted in the fact that I’ve never lived alone. I’ve always had roommates or a partner, people to please and consider and work around. But I made this choice because I knew I needed the space. I have old patterns of letting myself get smaller in a living space, of trying to please other people and then wondering why I don’t feel comfortable even hanging a picture up.
Now, no one can hear me talk to myself (except Bill the Actual Ghost, I guess), and no one cares if I want to pace around endlessly. The other day, after an informal kickboxing lesson in a friend’s garage, I cleared the kitchen floor so I could practice. No one needed the kitchen for anything else. Once in a while, I remember to relax my shoulders. I can work from different rooms, now, and I don’t wake up in the same room I work in. It doesn’t matter if I need to turn the light on at 3 am. and read. I’m not bothering anyone but myself. If I get a shred of a minute, I think I’m going to start putting together a pinterest page so that I can think about slowly decorating the place, over time. Right now, it’s all books on the floor and upturned boxes and empty echoing walls with outlets that don’t work and studs that need to be crow-barred off and cracks that need to be patched, but I’m dreaming of dark themes and whimsical touches, maybe finding some furniture on garbage days and at estate sales, and figuring out how I want to organize my bookshelves. I’ll also have to find a spot for this painting of Mya (by Riese’s girlfriend Gretchen).
Painting by Gretchen
Untethered: The Gelatinous Descent
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
This is a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve lived through recently:
- Falling through a log I was trying to use to get myself down a small cliff, but the log was actually so rotten it crumbled like chocolate cake underneath my boots and absorbed me into its sticky sickly sweet cakey maw. Reader, I yelled.
- Getting the cops called to my house by a truly very annoying straight woman.
- Having to explain to my ex-girlfriend why the cops are at the door.
- Seeing landscaping goats and their protector donkey at the park! We love Goats With Jobs!
- Sleeping on a camping mat on the floor of my office…like I have been for the past two months. Then, subsequently, realizing my back has not felt this good in a while.
- Being forced to consider whether “Western” (a problematic term) style beds are…a conspiracy? Are they (beds with a mattress, a frame, etc.) bad for us (humans)? I’m not being unserious. I feel like this is a legitimate point of inquiry.
- Getting so stressed that I stayed up until 4 a.m. making chocolate chip cookie dough. Then having to reckon with the fact that I was trying to comfort myself by making cookies for everyone I cared about because sometimes showing affection is hard.
- Being touched when everyone received said cookies with grace. Well, except for my one friend who screamed “I NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA SAY TO ME” when I told them I made four batches of cookie dough while stressed and then just handed them cookies as I got in their car.
- Sleeping with an Epi pen next to me because the house was filled with yellowjackets, displaced because city raccoons or city coyotes ate the nest near my front door I’d called exterminators about and now the yellowjackets were unhoused and in my house and throwing themselves with a very loud buzz — and yeah “stingers up” — at the windows but also at anyone (me) who got too close.
- Watching a PowerPoint presentation under a bridge with cigarette smoke wafting around me and a happy new haul of zines crinkling in my backpack.
- Listening to a certain audiobook, describing it to a trusted friend, and having that friend yell in the cutest frustration possible about how right the audiobook is.
- Finally, finally perfecting my vegan sparkling wine aspic recipe, but only under the utmost pressure.
So, yes, let’s dive in there. Will you descend with me into what someone described as disturbing air quotes around the word “gelatin”? (Because it’s agar agar.) I do think this is a much more comfortable descent than the submersion into a rotting log, for what it’s worth. Take my hand?
I arrived with the aspic still stuck in the bundt pan, confident that a party full of cooks and restaurant workers could probably extract it more artfully than I ever could. Together, we worked to get it out with a hot water bath, lots of communal whacking, and a knife. The aspic emerged like Venus out of the sea, glorious and bouncy as one of those really low-quality dildos — all in one piece, too! The group retired to the rooftop, carrying all the dishes and drinks we’d assembled. We gathered around on blankets and ate. Someone reacted with a “perfect!” when the aspic held its shape during slicing. It tasted really good, too, a cold dessert on a hot day. We opened cans of tinned fish, ate mystery dip, and discussed Barbie and being talked over by cis men. I listened to restaurant gossip and connected with a couple really cool people.
One of these cool people served as a stark reminder of my face blindness. Several days after the rooftop potluck, as you might have guessed, I attended Spaghetti Disco and ran into a woman I’d met at said potluck.
“NICOO!!!”
This person is delighted to see me and I canNOT place her because — again — context is number one here, and she has appeared so wildly out of context. I mimic her excitement, because obviously I know her, I just temporarily have no idea where the fuck I know her from. She’s wearing a hat that is also, somehow, a disco ball, so I compliment it and do small talk while desperately staring at her face until it clicks — hard — like I’m in a cartoon and someone just dropped a piano on me.
I had talked with this person for like A FUCKING HOUR on the roof. We looked at the moon together and shared tinned clams! I really wish people in real life came with the kinds of labels they do on the internet, or in Slack. Whenever a coworker’s name pops up in our office, I’m never like “oh who is that” because it SAYS WHO IT IS.
Once I recognize her, my shoulders sink down and I can ask her how her week’s been. She goes to dance, and I slink out to the patio with the smokers for a while to contemplate why my brain is the way it is.
This is the book my friend said hit too hard, too close, with too much realness. They’re right. This is a difficult read. Are you prepared to face patterns in your childhood, your family life, your friendships and romantic relationships, your relationships to school and work, your everything in a way that is maybe just as, if not more, cutting than your relationship to your sexual orientation and gender? How many mind fucks is one person supposed to take?
So, I’m at the autism assessment, at the ADHD assessment, at the combination autism and ADHD assessment, and these questions are scathing. I’m super comfortable with the assessor, though, despite the questions. He appears to be a queer man who tells me he’s autistic and has ADHD himself. When he asks about things that might be special interests, I rattle a few things off and then make myself admit to the one that makes him laugh.
“The history of ceramic heating devices,” I mutter, and he is like, “We can move onto the next question.”
He asks something about how I do the dishes, and I am like “of course I do the dishes. You have to do the dishes.” And he asks me how easy it is. Then I have to tell him that I wash one to two dishes, walk away, look at something else, and then make myself go back to the sink where I repeat the process. More scribbling on his end. He pulls up my pre-assessment paperwork, nods his head, and says “nonbinary.” To which I am like, yes, that’s what I put down.
Mr. Assessor then cheerfully informs me that research he’s aware of estimates that 25% of trans and nonbinary people are autistic / have ADHD and that he feels the percentage is likely larger than that due to the manner in which autism and ADHD are undiagnosed in many (non-cis/het/AMAB/white) demographics. I knew there was a correlation. After all, I work here. I work with y’all. I’m also on Tumblr. (LOL) But, listen, this diagnostician read me for filth. It was comment after comment like this.
This man even told me that apparently going dancing all the time is, in part, a common way for people to access a societally appropriate form of stimming, and I’m mad at him forever for saying that. Don’t call me out like that, bro!
On top of it all, one of the most difficult things about the diagnosis has been the reflection. Mostly, I’ve been looking back at the times — many of them very recent — where I’ve been treated like a cold-hearted bitch for not interacting with people in a way they expected. Frankly, in a way they expected that I suspect is rooted in an expectation that I adhere to some kind of traditionally feminine, emotionally giving (and sacrificing) role.
I think this is as much tied up in my sometimes femme-ness as it is in my all-the-time autistic-ness. If I put on lipstick, if my face is shaped the way it is, if my voice is high-ish pitched and I really lack the skill (your dude also can’t sing) or the time to alter it, there’s a certain amount of tenderness or enthusiasm or bubbliness expected — but I’m not necessarily going to deliver on that in the ways people might expect. Throughout my work and school life, this has always meant being docked for my inability to provide the kind of emotional labor that cis men, especially, expect of me. It’s not even necessarily a deliberate protest (though, sometimes it is). It’s more often an oversight. Like, “Oh, I didn’t see that heterosexual expectation there. Sorry I tripped over it. Y’all should really clean that up or put one of those orange cones out or something because this is both unnecessary and slippery.”
I will never forget seeing my ex-boss from a past non-Autostraddle job break into tears when I pushed back on feedback her cishet white male colleague gave me in a performance review insisting I was too brash and harsh and cold. (He’s also an asshole, and so I’m not sure why he was surprised about this treatment.) I said I’d gotten that feedback since I was five years old and that I honestly didn’t know what to do about it but that also I didn’t think it’d be as much of an issue if I was a man. She started crying, and I could see her processing the information. He looked admonished. I followed it up with my performance stats, which were impeccable. Like, I’d gotten them — a small to midsize theater — a literal million dollars in grant money in the year I’d worked for them — couldn’t we lead with that? My ex-boss is still my friend — she’s the one who you might in fact remember being the one who hooked me up with the D&D group — so you know she’s ride or die.
It’s always been with me. That could be its own essay, its own book. But I will say that looking back at a five-year relationship, an engagement that was called off, through the lens of the neurodivergence that affected it — it’s a heady experience.
It’s a lot, buds — Redwallers, Romans, friends.