When I put out the call for essays for BEGIN AGAIN, I didn’t know what I was going to get. The theme was, at the time it was conceived, definitely and assuredly springing from the fact that I’d just gone through a breakup after dating the same woman for five years and then getting engaged only to break it off. When you shed such a big part of your life, it leaves you asking things like “who am I now” or “who was I before this relationship”? There’s both new construction and remembering because time is a flat circle and we are, if anything, cyclical beings.
So I asked writers to explore a transition, a move, grief, a breakup, repeating patterns or breaking patterns, cycles and rebirth, remaking yourself, or laying out plans for the future while standing in the ashes of something you thought was forever. The responses were each thought-provoking takes on the concept and, I hope, valuable pieces for you all to read. The comfort of the paywall, too, lets writers open up a bit more, knowing that, at the very least, someone has to forego the anonymity of lurking on the internet and become a member to read about the writer’s grief or their mental health.
Katie Reilly, an Autostraddle team writer, wrote about re-framing her outlook on work and disability, Capitalism and worthiness — and just how damn hard it is to deprogram ourselves from the society that teaches us with very harsh and real punishments, that money is safety. Autostraddle team writer Em Win wrote about their many moves, across the country and across the world, prompted by their bipolar disorder — and then the way they are finding stability and healing via the family they once ran from. There was something that makes me so bone-achingly tired, as someone who’s moved slightly less but who’s started over in new cities (and in the same one) to think about rebuilding community time and again like that — and yet queer people persevere, we keep going, we find a way and we move through.
Jude Little shared with us some poignant prose about returning to the sea, post-top surgery, to swim again, shirtless for the first time. They were returning to a place where they’d swam with their father, who taught them to navigate the waters with their body, but who they lost before their transition. Stacy Grover also returned to her childhood, but this time to the media frenzy around JonBenét Ramsey’s murder and all the ways abuse and girlhood and exploitation on screens and magazines and in adults’ words wove into her own experiences of growing up and being preyed upon, then not believed seriously by adults. She’d never examined the media, actually willingly consumed anything about JonBenét until adulthood, and the return with critical adult eyes reveals uncomfortable truths about the way we handle true crime and, especially, the victims of violence in media and American culture.
Machi also took us on a Journey as she returned to Lagos, Nigeria, a place that is supposed to be underwater in a few decades, where queerness is illegal. From Atlanta to Lagos to Toronto to Lagos again, we travel through her experiences of queerness in snippets, following the path of water. Finally, we conclude with how this all began — with beginning again after a breakup. Lindsay Eanet’s written for us many times, and in this heartfelt work, she takes us through how nerdiness and drag helped her find herself again post-divorce. Her character? A barbarian named Rusty Broadsword.
As for the imagery, I worked with overlays of film over-exposures and film burns to bring about a sense of memory, things kept and things altered by time and fickle machinery. Thank you, always, for being members, for making this a space where queer and trans people can share our deepest selves through writing. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this series and that if you didn’t get a chance to dig in, that maybe this Sunday calls for a cup of tea and some deep reading.
