OK. Whatever. I have this space, and there’s a lot going on, and I can type faster than I can write, and you get what I’m saying, right? Normally I would do this in my journal, but there’s just so much in my head and i only gave two friends the link to this blog.
For starters, it feels like a time of huge transformation. Work was utterly bizarre today. It’s hard to say if I was there at all. I mean I briefly noted being at work and I was there, but. What I’m describing is a sort of intense dissociation.
Put a read more here. Implement a read more. Who fucking cares.
I have therapy tomorrow morning, which is why a lot of these self-reflective thoughts especially feel like a pressure cooker right now.
u fucking bet
I feel strangely connected to my friends. Sure, my connections have been strange in the past, but I haven’t actually felt it in a while. Fran is off of work for a while taking care of her partner, but we still chat over Signal and it’s been really fun. And Lala too, who I’ve never met (Fran has, though!), but feel kindred to, which is a kind of strange connection all its own. I’m just kind of happy about the energy our group chat together brings. I’ve also been meaning to mention the really good microfic by Blackle, Bridge to eQualia (thanks Fran!) that I read a while ago that really hit home for me, so there’s that too. Proximity!
I’ve continued reading Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (U of M press) (Thanks Alice!), a book that I also found and found me through friend serendipity. I mean, it’s great just knowing people. I moved here partly for that and it’s certainly been a greater joy than I had been capable of imagining (thanks a lot of people, all very special to me). And I had a moment while reading it, for the first time in a long time, where something in an essay came as a genuine, game-changing insight to me.
Before I get to that though, it’s certainly also worth mentioning that this moving to the city thing plugs into another piece of queer lit that partly got this whole ball rolling, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. At this point, modesty demands that i stop thanking the person responsible. But what happened from that point on was that i basically just kept reading more queer lit. And in that funny Spinozan way (he’s been coming up weirdly often; 3 times by my count. who is he? what’s his deal?), quantitative change leads to qualitative change.
The quantity here being that i read a quantity of books that in some way relate to experiences of being trans, and something has qualitatively changed in my understanding of myself in the world between last night and now. I can’t particularly be bothered to articulate it here, but rest assured, i am both savoring this enlightened feeling, and feeling a little caught up in the details of feeling that it would be difficult to share with everyone that i would want to. when you find something that helps you better understand yourself and the world, don’t you just want to share it with everyone you care about? maybe that’s still the impulse im writing this from.
Um. Right, so what is left to say? I guess that reading books isn’t useless, and sometimes, reading a series of several good books is actually useful for something other than passing time? Good god, it’s like my train of thought drove off a cliff. Good thing I can always write another post later.
Or just keep going. I don’t owe anyone good or coherent writing. I am owning the insane woman moment. A key inflection point in all this was a book reading by one Vivian Blaxell for her essay worthy of the event (LittlePuss). Moving to Minneapolis I kind of rolled well on just immediately being connected to a very cool community of writers who uh. Well, you’ll see/have seen/are seeing. Just as context for this.
So I was at this book reading, and it absolutely does not merit mentioning here, that just a few months ago, i had a mini-freakout at work when fran mentioned that she was going to an art reception, and i realized that i knew what an art reception was. if you’re somehow reading this and don’t personally know me, now would be the correct time to assume i’m a bit of a ridiculous person, or maybe just understandably the sum total of my particular life experiences. Lots of people get funny ideas about class and i am certainly no exception. i think the source of the misfire was that it felt out of step with my own self-perception in that moment to acknowledge that i, a salt of the earth college dropout and all around failgirl, knew about something so superfluous as an art reception.
My parents weren’t exactly taking me to the Met as a kid. For reasons that elude me right now, ive just been hesitant to ever express an open interest in things that are for smart people, who i obviously dont count myself as being among, blah bla bla blah. So without really knowing what to expect, I go to this book reading (a book reading), because of the understanding that alice and her writing, both of which i enjoy a great deal, would figure into this somehow. What followed was an Experience.
So there I am, in a sort of theater space (the play kind) at the back of moon palace books, and im there, and i forget what exactly i was going through at the time, but there’s almost always something. burn out from work, maybe. and a lot of people i know are there, and some i dont. i know maybe like 3 cis people outside of work? this is to give you an idea of the makeup of this crowd. and i say crowd but it wasn’t like throngs or anything, but still a surprising amount of trans people to see in one place, having lived in florida until this past year.
now, this not so insignificant demographic detail is actually kind of important to understanding my headspace in that setting. most of the time, or at least. well. for a lot of my life, i really avoided thinking about myself as trans. until i moved to minneapolis its just kind of been a shit deal the whole time bar a few moments here and there. but being in a room of so many other people like me, gathered here to see two of our own, was an understandably unique and powerful experience, and doing a hell of a number on my mental. put bluntly, i was present, in my fullness of self, in a way i am not the rest of my waking life.
right. alice was gorgeous and read something that i think is at this time unreleased but. god her writing is too good not to mention here, so please go check it out. i hear that even the ny set is starting to take notice of it, so you can really get in on the ground floor here! and while alice is a vision every time i see her (and honestly kind of senpai to me), a pretty big part of this was Vivian Blaxell. wow. she really had an air about her.
not that surprisingly, ive never met anyone that might be described as a “queer elder,” barring some ribbing between friends. what i mean is, she was cool as fuck. im really having to be careful with what cliches i invoke here, but i think she was kind of an image of someone i could be that wasn’t ruled out by my being a trans person. i think of it as an awfully constraining thing a lot of times, in terms of things i dont get to have, so this was once again, a very unique circumstance to me. she also mentioned off-hand having married into money, which was my plan A as a teenager, so hey, great minds and what not.
she read from her book, which was good, and i bought and read immediately after, followed by a Q&A. i remember very little of the actual contents (of the Q&A, though the book too i guess (not by any fault of the book, my brain is just sieve-like in that way, which is part of what drives me to write as much as i do)), but jesus, the mood in that room between the speaker and the audience (at least, as i imagined it, as applies to everything written here) was just:
right. and that was that. who can say what happened next. so let’s fast forward to… last night! me reading side affects! basically. oh god, basically, im having to grapple with whether i want bottom surgery or not, setting aside questions of whether it’s even materially possible. or really, that’s the question that can never be set aside, is it?
due to having only one life, i think there’s something deep inside me that values living it on my own terms wherever possible, and this was a big part of what led me to transition in the first place. i was placed, as i see it, in a confrontational position to a large section of society, but did end up finding a really wonderful and irreplaceable sense of community with other trans people. oof. here’s the part that’s probably for therapy. ack. read between the lines!
p.s. have you ever noticed how the file deletion sound effect in Mac OS sounds sooo similar to breaking a dirt block in minecraft? it’s kind of comforting
