f-2-fgt: IT'S T TIME!

IT'S A T PARTY! rex leonowicz from qnz dishes the t(ea) on being a poor bicoastal trans/queer/poet/artist freak starting (& later ending) tesosterone therapy. topics may include: transpoetic time travels, cats, menopause + puberty 2.0, drag aspirations, mom, pizza angels, mood swings, etc.

[rexylafemme]

i am who i am because somebody loved me and my reciprocation of that gift is to love as fully as possible

10.30.2017

dearest grandma,

i miss you a lot. i’m sitting on a tree stump at sunset park & just watched a flock of chimney swifts swirl down into the chimney of a building. they were flying in this way where they looked like one-dimensional paper at alternating intervals as they spiraled down, swerving into focus as three-dimensional bodies at other intervals. oh, there are more now. against the light—vague pastel orange/yellow/pink/turquoise slow sunset. there are two flocks, one above the other in the air, sometimes parallel, dancing. they just became one flock. it’s been sixteen years. things are coming together in this strange, beautiful way in our family. not as i would’ve expected or imagined, everyone engaging as they are, a kind of acceptance of those individualities despite flaws. it’s hard. it’s lovely. i wonder what you think about it. if it gives you peace. i wonder what my role means or has been, how it’s shifted & transformed, how it’s stayed the same.

i love you so much. i feel i understand you more, i feel closer to you, even though i haven’t “SEEN” you in sixteen years. something still about our souls & hearts. i wonder about your journey, what time feels like for you, what it’s like to be intimately aware of us, from whatever perspective & place you have now. i worry about disappointing you or causing you sorrow. i look out at the east river & i see red hook & i know you, we, are from that river. & i know we are so much more than it & come from much further. both geographically & spiritually. i’m trying to be my truest, most intentional self. i do that by remembering you—how you could command a room, but with tenderness. how much warmth & light you gave off. how comfortable you always seemed. so natural among the people you loved, the community you cared for. the dedication & care you gave, seemingly without effort. i admired your faith & belief, your spirituality, attention to ritual. how you studied & took notes. it was all your own, your private work. private, not as in secret or protected from others, withheld from others, but just—your own. you shared your knowledge & wisdom around it all, but had your own personal practice & learning system around it. i remember you in your chair by the living room lamp, reading. your notes & papers poking out of the pages of your books on catechism, etc.

these times lately when i’ve felt the most alone, craving for comfort, i’ve wanted you. to curl into your chest. to hold your hand. your radiant kindness. i felt, feel, bonded to you in a way i’ve never felt bonded to anyone else. but i do feel it with my mother, too. with linda. it’s different. i think you must’ve sensed my difference. that there was something about me, a depth & desire that you knew too. i’m proud & honored to be from you. of you. & i know there is more to me, also. i’m gracious of, & in a lot of ways, still uncovering, all you taught me, all you encouraged in me. i was always so excited to sit with you, helping you cook. as you showed me how to clean carrots & potatoes. how to peel them. explaining about eyes & scooping out rotted parts. nothing ever without value or use because of imperfections or parts gone bad. you taught me not to waste or take for granted. & when you handled food, your hands were dexterous in their tasks, but also so loving & gentle. your instruction so loving & gentle. & you trusted me. to trust a kid of five with sharp objects—knives, peelers. you showed me how to be careful, how to not hurt myself. & i was so happy to do anything to help you. or anything that made you happy or proud. you would ask me to sing for you & gave me such loving encouragement for it. it filled my heart with joy when you would sit & smile & hum along, so much so that i overcame my nervousness & fear. for a long time, i felt really guilty that i didn’t sing for you the night before you died when you asked me to.  i was stressed, had so much homework, & i think i was frustrated & short with you. i didn’t know it would be the last time. i told abbie a few years ago that i felt singing on stage & pursuing music would be a way to redeem myself because i would be doing it for you. a dedication. but doing it for you is really doing it for myself. not in a selfish way, but in a way to honor my gifts & what i love. & you always said it was a “sin” to waste gifts & talent. as in, to deny the world of what you have to offer from your heart. a loss.

it’s getting darker & the sunset casts a tangerine stripe across the sky, below a deepening cornflower blue. the leaves move in silhouette against it. & the shapes of buildings and rooftop doors create sharp dark contrasts against the colors. natural & industrial beauty. it’s an odd thing. there are glimmering lights from manhattan, brooklyn, staten island. thin clouds of pollution. maybe the ferry easing across the river. i can hear the kids’ murmur as they play soccer with their coach behind me on the field. the sound of a whistle. it’s getting cold, my nose is running a little. there’s so much i would say, but i know or sense i know that you’ve already heard it from me, though i haven’t said it, wrote it, maybe haven’t even thought it. i have a sense that my bones ache in old ways you are familiar with, that come from times neither of us have known physically.

i used to tell my mother that i never understood that trope in movies & tv shows about how kids dreaded & hated going to grandma’s house. i was always so excited to see you. how i would wait on wednesday afternoons on the corner of 83rd and 34th for you to come home from 1 o’clock mass. we got out at 12:20 those days. i would stand on the block in front of your house & wait to see you coming down the block & walk to the corner to meet you, so excited to hug you. & always a sort of protectiveness as you crossed the street. i would get worried when you crossed against the light, as if you were fragile or in danger. there was always such an overprotective maternalism in all of us femmes. the other day, my mother & i walked through sunset park, light cool in the air, leaves beginning to turn—late. the swings were totally empty & so we went on them & it was just sweet, playful fun. she told me about how she & her friends used to stand, two on one swing together, one on another’s shoulders, swinging until they jumped off. she asked if i ever did that. no! i’d be too scared. “that’s good,” she said. as if to suggest safer. i teased and said i got my fear from her, always nervous and protective. she protested & i told her i was kidding.

i think about how you were always able to access joy & sweetness—another thing i learned from you. & how there was always this sort of mutual exchange of wisdom & youth between us. but not just one-way—as in you in your old age imparted wisdom & i in my young age imparted youthfulness. i learned about keeping a young vibrancy from you as much as you learned something about an old depth from me. i was a serious, intense child in a lot of ways, & you would frequently ask, “where did YOU COME from?” i wondered, too. there was something about growing up & growing older together, our life stages, that bonded us together in this way that was special. there was a magic we brought to each other & that we shared that i will always cherish. leo sun. leo rising. for the last three years, i’ve done shows on your birthday & they’ve all been so special. you were the most inspiring, bright, glamorous, & beautiful woman around. you always had a LOOK for any outing. so stylish, put-together. you were so BIG in presence, yet so humble. so generous. i learned about loyalty & sacrifice from you. i learned about the deep sorrows of care with you. i know we saw ourselves in each other. i wonder about your young life. your dreams. i know you always wanted to take care of your family. to have one. and so do i. i always thought it a kind of loss to be an only child, growing up inside of generations of many siblings—my mom 1 of 7, you 1 of 9, your mom 1 of 11. times were different though. & circumstances.

i look at the palms of my hands like orlanda, lehna & jova’s mentor & friend-family said, & i do see your hands. she had said last new years’ eve, “to find your ancestors, all you have to do is look down at your hands.” i think often of the sense of home you created through yourself, not just in your household, but that was part of it. how it was a hub, a gathering place, a safe haven, my sanctuary for sure. i wanted to replicate that in my homes & i have. in oakland & here. even in college. we welcomed friends to stay who had no place to stay—were wayward, in-between, in crisis, needed a break—at my & talya’s place, at ruben, micah, & my place, at my place here in brooklyn. my dorm room in bennington. we fed & hosted dinners, performances, parties, holidays, game nights. folks always welcome. i think of how full of life & comfort you & your home was. & i feel so lucky to have experienced that & to carry it on. i’m so thankful for you.

& i’ve had to learn from you in other ways, too. i learned a kind of nobility that is admirable, yet overly sacrificial, which i’ve had to check & moderate in myself. i learned to be restrictive of my body & pleasure in a way that’s been hurtful to me. it’s not your fault—the conservatism & shame—but it did have a big influence on me. you weren’t the only one to give that to me though, & i know it was a product of cultural & social ideas.

i love you thoroughly. i appreciate you thoroughly. i accept you thoroughly. i wish i could know more of your stories, but i have these imaginations, these visions in my head. i have these senses in my body, too. joys. also pain. there are questions i think i know the answers to that i wish i didn’t. i felt the tremors of before i experienced the same kinds of heartache. i know you always had a similar inability to understand how we could do so much harm, how our world could be built on so much cruelty & suffering. we hurt about this in the same way, reacting to the personal & to the collective. oh, what a world, what a world. & yet, such beauty. & such goodness in you. nothing stopped you from giving, trusting, loving, trying. resilience. i learned all this from you. from your children, too. thank you for the gift of you, the gifts of your children, for my mother, for your role in my own life—how it began & how it unfolded & how it is ever unfolding.

love always,

rex renée elena

notes and thoughts from matters of desire, later that evening, a talk at the hemispheric institute with daniel alexander jones, andreas weber, and david kyuman kim

how to make something out of this chaotic moment?

how to make our way through?

“when i was 14, i had a vegetable garden & others had girlfriends” –weber, on being more connected to plants and animals, on being otherworldly

“the only thing you weren’t allowed to feel in biology was love for other beings.” –weber, on studying biology and why it didn’t fit for him

a body can be touched AND has inwardness

you produce your identity with and through others.

you form yourself and understanding of the beings and surroundings around you as a living being, through reflections and most importantly, feeling.

all living beings are processes of desire, from the smallest cell to the organism.

organisms and cells are actions and desires becoming transformations and changes in specific space and time.

nature is a process of mutualism and relationships. nature is a web of connections mediated through desires.

we exist as desires that are flesh!

we are selves caring for our continuity.

if we listen to our hearts, we feel the world, which answers to how we are touched by it and how we touch it.

the chimney swifts anecdote: they are an element of the air, but also an element of happiness – to riff off of this from the future (aka from after writing these notes on the 30th): weber shared an anecdote of sitting in a small cabin visiting a dear friend. they heard a rustling coming from her chimney, and he went to see what it was, she said she’d been hearing it lately. though he was nervous, he reached his hand inside the chimney, and feeling around, scooped something into his palm. he could feel it moving, could feel chimney dust, squirming, the heat, the quick heartbeat. he drew his hand out and into the light—a chimney swift. he walked to the window and opened it, and out it flew. they watched. there was more rustling, so he went and reached in again—another chimney swift. again, to the window, and release. he talked about how all he and his friend could do was look at each other—laugh and embrace while laughing. how there was this sense of not knowing if they would survive, given they were weakened—lacking food, etc. but that in that moment, they were the epitome of happiness, of freedom. and there was no way of not experiencing that feeling. that they were an element of the air, that they were air—seeing them fly, becoming themselves in their element, of their element. anyway, i was floored, having just been watching the swifts while writing to my grandmother. i was laughing and crying and shaking my head. he also mentioned something about how when we love others, we try to hold onto them, cling to them, to siphon what we love about them or what feels good, but it is in our freedom with each other and only in mutual exchange, that we really can experience love.

we are processes of relation in mutualism—which give rise to self.

we live in a world of bodies and also a world of inwardness

bodies are not separate, autonomous structures. we need others in order to live and to make sense of ourselves

transformative mutualism yielding self and desire

an ecosystem is a process of relationships

an ecosystem is also eros, the body. open to caress, touch, tenderness

this world is myself in a different mode of mutualism and experience

artists give us invention through imaginative minds

DR. KIM:

mercy is bending our hearts toward suffering. what if this was at the core of who we are and what we did? mercy and love, generosity, compassion, forgiveness. what would that look like? later thoughts: approaching transformation requires using our imaginations to envision what this could look like.

racism is the structural compromise of an integrity of a people.

what are the challenges of love and regeneration in this moment?

what has the compromise of integrity and humanity systemically done to us? there is a gap between who we are and who we ought to be, who we could be, who we deserve to be, who we hope to be. and it eats at hope and possibility.

we need to regenerate our hearts

the legacies and traditions of love and ethics and spirituality that we come from. how we learn about treatment in relationships. focus not just on legacies of violence and trauma we inherit.

where do we come from? our families, our ancestors, our traditions. who are the people who loved us? who are the people who hurt and wounded us? who are we? who have we wounded? thinking in personal terms as well as in terms of power, how do we proliferate oppressive conditions and treatment, and the opposite?

we have a responsibility to the people who follow us, who come after, to heal, to mend, to change. what values do we want to pass along? thinking of rivers of values and traditions through time.

“to act is to be committed and to be committed is to be dangerous.” –james baldwin

what if it were: “to love with integrity is to be committed and to love with integrity is dangerous.”

we have to learn how to be with each other and to hold each other and lift each other up and help each other.

JOHN ALEXANDER JONES:

family was the introduction to love and to the natural world.

encountering the natural world as a kid decentralized humanness and centralized ecology, being a part of a larger system of everything, being with and of nature.

ecology and revolution

protect yourself by being vulnerable!!! –constance bergley

there are forces at work that are bigger than impending violence and death

regeneration

WEBER:

biology of the commons—interdependence

vulnerability is an organ of perception

nature doesn’t need a facelift, s/he’s continuously rejuvenating because s/he’s continuously dying

we need “other” to be ourselves

we are constantly dying, living, eating, breathing

the process of interrelation and sharing between other and self generates inwardness and a perspective

identity comes about by incorporating other—all kinds of beings—water, plant, animal, air, people

you need ‘other’ to welcome you into being.

mainstream biology and capitalism proliferate the myth of survival of the fittest and organisms as separate and contained

we need to face death

DR. KIM:

radical love involves learning how to die (in all kinds of ways, especially spiritually)

we need to die so that we can live, so other parts of us can live. let the lies die. let the feelings of self-hate die and doubt and hatred and lack of worth.

parts of us waiting to be birthed

i am who i am because somebody loved me and my reciprocation of that gift is to love as fully as possible.

tender-hearted and tough-minded, soft, vulnerable, and precarious in how you feel

we are in exchange of broken humanity with each other as well as in ecological exchanges

a black woman speaks- beah richards (the book of poems) and the lisagay hamilton film:

identity has something to do with love and the amount of love that is absorbed –beah richards

we forget how to absorb love

we need to rehabilitate ourselves to absorb AND offer love

the moment we are in and how it creates a worry that love isn’t real or possible. we are saturated with structural oppression and hatred: how do we wring ourselves out? how do we squeeze this self and mutual hatred out?

we need an overflowing and excess of love. to heal our damaged hearts.

our society itself is in a deep state of trauma.

and an effect of trauma, or trauma itself is concerned with not being allowed to be. something happens, the traumatic experience, which stalls our ability to be ourselves (in some way, shape, or form, or in multiple). it severs the actions of the natural process of unfolding ourselves, especially through our desire to connect with others.

full self is always an exchange with others, with all kinds of beings

if you sever this exchange, if trauma severs it, as a defense mechanism and to protect ourselves from further harm, we unlearn connection to others. where connection was dangerous.

if this is a trauma survival mechanism: if you can’t create relationships (if it is difficult as a result of trauma), you create a reality in which creating relationships is impossible. if you are not allowed to be, you create a reality in which being is not real. you believe it is impossible to create relationships or truly be, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. it is not this way.

societally, we need to do trauma work.

art and play is trauma work.

unlearning

we need to be young again

we need joy. the joy of being with others, of receiving love, of glimpses of freedom

in the seed lies the will to become.

i will make my peace with birth

marlene:

religion is weaponized, punitive, a force of war and colonization. science and nature are deeply distrusted and rejected.

you can transform yourself, then others see it and are amazed—i want that, what is s/he doing—and you are being yourself and people want that.

mutual transformation and teaching and learning

we can’t deal in crude forms and stereotypes

there’s more to being alive than matter

can plants hear? scientific american

is the earth a sentient being with self-awareness?

every cell is sentient in the sense that everything matters and has value

the self going through the other is love

love can be a politics and “economy” in the sense of participation and mutualism and exchange. love also always includes letting go. you are the only one who can decide to die.

an intersectional feminist cosmology: fundamentally different ways of understanding reality.

TAURUS FULL MOON

to think about the love you’d like to manifest in your life. something i hope for us all: big self-love & nurturance: to manifest an ever-more loving, empathic, and forgiving relationship to yourself, ourselves. to manifest love in everything you do and interact with and to key into your romance for life and living.

to fill your life with good food, friends, family, experiences, creativity, beauty, and nature. to experience appreciation for all of this. the beauty in every moment, the magic of experience. to manifest stability and passion, surprise and ease, comfort, deliberation, and loyalty. most importantly, loyalty to yourself and your needs, desires, boundaries. to enact all your desires and deal breakers around relation with yourself.

loving care! cherish the day!

love is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

[rexylafemme]

take every wave

the following are notes i took from a tarot reading i gave myself earlier in the week. and what follows is a mix of excerpts from my personal written journal and addendum stuff as a result of transcribing:

·      connect with what you know will make you happy

·      don’t rely on old habits

·      remember the good, but don’t dwell in the past or romanticize “the good old days” in a problematic way

·      don’t be afraid of new experiences and the unknown

·      happiness is fleeting, not constant. enjoy what you can, in the moment. nothing is a miracle cure, tho

·      known joys. familiar and reliable

·      comfort

·      live in the present, accept current circumstances

·      look back at the good for inspiration and transform the painful

·      look at all you’ve endured and overcome: AND you are still kind, generous, loving

·      heal. don’t focus on the negative

·      positive memories of the past to influence the present and future

·      inner child and child-like wonder; art!

·      spiritual self/deep self/real self/authentic self

·      children as role models

·      open heart, pleasure

·      the past with all its memories, the present with all its gifts, and the future with all its opportunities

·      sharing. well-intentioned

·      working through trauma from childhood: be patient and don’t be so hard on yourself

·      it’s ok if your life doesn’t look quite as you expected yet—it doesn’t mean you’re not getting there --> faith

 knight of cups

 ·      many changes with emotional ups and downs

·      moody, dreamy, sensitive, deep

·      poetic, romantic, sullen, lone

·      depression, escapism

·      fiercely loyal

·      be mindful of your moods and how you manage them. let them flow

·      messenger

·      active creative imagination

·      feminine, emotional, intuitive: you use for your own good during quests

·      charming, attractive, expressive of the romantic, poetic view of life in your own way

·      in love with love itself

·      use your emotions to provide a map for your life

·      heart-focused --> inner direction, friendliness, warmth, love, and the need to share these qualities with everyone

·      wisdom from dreams and pleasant experiences that can help you overcome obstacles

·      direct your imagination into the real world

·      idea --> action

·      commitment

·      explore your passions and grand dreams actively

·      take proactive steps to achieve your goals, it’s possible

·      don’t jump to conclusions or be incapacitated by your feelings—flow

·      disappointment: situations that seemed exciting but turned out different and not what you expected: think of as redirection

 ace of swords

·      new challenges for the mind, rewarding challenges

·      clarity and sharpness and focus

·      converse, connect, write

·      a new bird feels the wind and wants to try its wings; an age-old feeling

·      trying out your knowledge and talents

·      success

·      balance intellect and emotions

·      you have great power and drive: use it for the greater good and to benefit positively

·      tap the potential

·      insight and breakthroughs--> easier to achieve goals

·      believe in yourself

·      inner truth

·      action and setting your mind to it

·      inspiration and creative vision

·      truth and justice

·      defending yourself and others

·      you have passion and  are willing to fight and overcome challenges

·      believe in your power and your visions and your imagination, act from it, claim and trust your truths

·      patient, steady movement toward goals

·      be thrifty and shrewd in your efforts

·      financial security

·      don’t be over-indulgent and luxurious, save 

·      pay attention to cash use, budget 

·      deep emotional insecurity below the surface --> toughness

·      tenacious, ambitious, opinionated and somewhat unforgiving nature conceals a vulnerability that seeks solace in material possessions

i am so depressed now, as well as motivated. sleeping more, for once. but waking up tired, achey, sad and not wanting to get outta bed, but also feeling overwhelmed by what i want to do and accomplish, a drive to be very productive. having a hard time with working less and having a hard time just allowing myself to not be constantly ON and constantly productive, as if i don’t do enough. but i feel incapacitated by all i want to get done and by family processes. then guilt and shame, and why can’t i just snap out of it, while also trying to be gentle with myself. and honoring for once, too, that fall has always been an intense time of year: anniversaries and trauma experiences. i feel aimless and lost at times, suspended, but know intuitively and logically that i am not. i just am not in the present, i am anxious of what i am trying to achieve for the future, which is a slowed-down process right now due to my aunt’s illness. part of it is making the choice to really face sexual trauma stuff and relation stuff through therapy and my own processes, part of it is this process beginning lining up with the outpour on the internet and in mainstream in a public way, part of it is family, being in nyc, etc. charmed and cursed.

i’m not afraid of change, i want everything to change. i want a complete overhaul to challenge and break up everything from childhood that hurts and lives inside me in this way that i feel hinders me. to garner strength from it. i honor it. i don’t blame myself. i don’t want to save people. i want mutualism in everything.

my inner child is a sweet, loving, trusting force who believes in wonder and the good cores of people and who always just wishes those things to win out, hoping for change—that people can, that they won’t keep hurting you in the same way. it is at the core of family stuff, how i’ve always related, and also there is a lot breaking open, changing, healing there—in ways i could’ve never imagined. a sense that family is family. you have to forgive, love is bigger. but also, there are boundaries, and we are creating and respecting them. it’s truly great 

i have everything i need at my disposal, i just need to see it and give it to myself.

help me be more humble, honest, compassionate. help me be more bold, but in an intuitive way. help me work through my pain and anger. help me be less defensive and more intentional. help me channel my feelings or express them through art, performance, and movement. help me communicate my emotions. help me be less self-conscious an more self-assured. help me be poised and graceful, full of gratitude and wonder and resilience. help me make good choices around food. help me listen to my body and treat it well. help me heal my body—physically, emotionally, sexually. help me allow myself to be cared for. help me appreciate the positive intimacy i have in my life that fulfills my needs and desires, and help me find more. help me acknowledge the pains and desires of my inner child and help me be kind and compassionate and loving with all parts of myself. help me forgive myself and take care of myself. help me learn. help me love myself unconditionally. i think i can do a lot of caring and loving and accepting the complexities and all facets of other people, care for them regardless, but struggle doing that fully for myself. i do it sometimes, but i would like to be better at it MOST/ALL of the time. not egotistical self-love. following up with the question from the performance piece i did to emerge, the question addressed to myself, but changing from ‘you’ to ‘i’: when did i decide i wanted to destroy me?

 maybe first instances don’t solve the problem. i think we try to look for origins because then we might be able to make sense of it all. or we think it’s easier to “fix.” but it’s more complex than one beginning point. there isn’t one. there’s the intergenerational, there are the memories we don’t have access to, womb stuff, early early childhood. i don’t know. i guess it’s not about solving a riddle, coming to a conclusion, it’s about dealing with impact and feelings. i’m being unearthed. i am breaking shit open and being more understanding within it. owning my limitations. owning what i want, need, deserve around relation. realizing everything, the unearthing, the deepening, the asserting, has been really hard. really painful.

 i want to manage my emotions as healthily as possible. i want to move past old responses. there’s no right way to deal with the drama of terminal illness, of family dynamics and transformations therein. i have the willpower and desire to move forward. i know what feels best: art, exercise, singing, moving, breathing, feeling. doing things for me. maybe a specific sadness just sinks into a more general sadness. the ocean of it. i want to get out of this place. sitting on the porch of the historic lefferts house in prospect park with the campfire, the smell of damp slightly chilly earth created a semblance of true october and a semblance of where i’d like to be. i’m tired of this city, i don’t want to be here, i don’t want to build here. and yet i do want to be present in my family. i forgive them all, everything, i do. i have always seen how deeply hurt they are, always have wanted to change that to help it. and i think i always have. denise said i was a gift to them, even if they didn’t know how to appreciate the gift fully. and i have figured out ways to engage in the healing process, while also stepping back and not taking it all on. i feel grateful that i can listen to them, that i can offer them comfort and help them see nuance, help them understand beyond their personal viewpoints, beyond their own pain. it feels like friendship. it feels like coming home and i don’t want to lose it. 

 i do and don’t want to speed up time because i know what will give me the freedom to move, gives me a great loss. a loved one’s death. maybe part of what hurts, too, is knowing i won’t be fully destroyed by it. i’ll keep going, even when i don’t want to. as with maureen. a lot of people using the word resilient to describe me lately, from summer to now. and i am maybe at times eye-rollingly tired of being strong. sometimes i want to collapse, to fall apart. i don’t want to be so capable. also the chosen family i have is spread out so far and that is hard and painful, too. i know it’s partially not allowing myself to be fully taken care of, partially from being used to always caring for myself, depending on myself since childhood, and partially because i know it is scary for me, feels like maybe i need too much or am sacrificing my own agency. i’m seeing it so clearly with my aunt, she’s holding on to her independence for dear life. i really respect her for it and it’s always been frustrating for me. i do seek a lot of support, or i have, in the last year, from my kin people. and it’s made all the difference. sonia sanchez said last week, “ one thing we do know is people do the best they can do.” it can often be very disappointing because it’s not the best we want them to do, but it’s what they can muster. we get caught up upset over not doing our own best, also. forgiveness and compassion are necessary. 

i am so sad. so many things hurt and i can feel it in my body, my bones, joints, muscles, my heart, my stomach, my lungs, my chest. i’m exhausted. i experience joy and togetherness and sometimes they make me sad, too. beauty tugs at my heart. i’ve always been this way at times. i told an old therapist years ago that i was frustrated that the baseline in my life was melancholy. she said, “well, but of course, you’re a poet!” and i laughed resignedly.

 when i met sonia sanchez last weekend, we hugged and she radiated warmth, actual physical warmth i could feel passing to my body. she thanked me for working the event.  i thanked her for her work and her wisdom, told her it’s meant so much to me. she said her wisdom is “ebe yiye: it’ll get better,” i said, “that’s an important word of advice,” she said, “oh yeah, the only one. at 8am tomorrow, wherever you are, if you can’t scream it, mutter it under your breath—ebe yiye! it’ll get better.” i guess what makes me sad is i know it will, but at what cost. what grief we have to pass through, what wounds we have to tend to. it’s easy to contend with a physical wound, it’s exciting when you see them transforming from open, painful, bloody to scar, watching the scar fade, the pain fade. with losses, deaths, with emotional wounds, there’s a kind of guilt and sadness for getting over experiences, getting over people who are gone, for the losses to be experienced differently. i don’t know what that is, and that may not be universal. i know there’s something cultural to it for me. growing up in a poor irish/italian/lithuanian catholic situation. in which women especially are supposed to grieve forever. wear black forever. the women in my family didn’t wear black forever, but they did certainly hold the grief forever. we are so afraid sometimes of it getting better. because it means change, because we don’t know what it could look like. i think giving up the opportunity for better in service to known is the saddest thing. 

[rexylafemme]

time together with time to spare; time to learn, time to care

i feel seasick with grief. my stomach feels like a rubber hot water bottle being tossed about between two hands, sad water sloshing around, springing up through my throat to my eyes which keep welling up. my heart is beating and radiating from it is a dull burning feeling that contracts and expands through my chest as i breathe. my fingers are trembling and i can’t keep them steady, my whole body is slightly tingly, vibratory. tears keep surfacing, a wall of water over my eyes, cascading from behind my eyebrows, but then i breathe and they don’t fall. it’s 12:10pm and i must be hungry because i haven’t eaten since early afternoon yesterday, having been at hospice all day in new jersey until close to midnight. my mind feels hazy, my stomach is sour and i feel empty all over.  it feels like a hangover, but i am just living through death.

i’ll stop writing to eat soon because i know i need to care for myself well through this, but right now i need to write through what i feel first. i’m telling myself i will neglect everything i need to get done today, but i’m not sure that’s true. i’ll decide if maybe being productive toward tour tasks, making my video collage for my performance, making some important phone calls, going outside, anything other than just being in this, will be helpful to me today. if it won’t, i won’t allow myself to be stressed by obligation. i don’t want to use anything—workaholism, frenzied cleaning, substances, tv, sleeping—to distract myself or to numb myself or to get lost in something else.

i put two slices of bread in the oven, i’m going to eat toast. i think about orange juice, but my whole torso already feels like it’s coursing with watery acid. i sigh and i think “it’s unfair.” i wonder about spiritual justice, i wonder about consequences, i ask myself, or my thoughts vocalize themselves in my head, asking the void, asking the matrix, asking the ether—why?

i was supposed to spend the day yesterday at my aunt linda’s with her and my mother. my mother texted me on saturday night at around 10 that we couldn’t hang out because instead, she, linda, and my uncle, tommy, were going to go see our cousin, maureen, in hospice. cousin is kind of misleading, given maureen  is my grandmother’s niece. she’s 77 and more like an aunt to them, a great aunt to me. funnily, i was sitting on the rocks of the east river in red hook, off the street maureen grew up on when i get the text. i call my mother immediately, to ask if i could come with them. i call my uncle and leave a message, asking what the best way for me to link up with them tomorrow is if they are going.

i didn’t know how badly my mother was really doing until i saw her yesterday, or i did know, but haven’t been able to deal with it. and none of us knew how badly maureen was doing until we saw her yesterday, her dying. my mother didn’t come. she’s in a really fragile mental state, she’s not eating or taking care of herself, she’s foggy and quiet, and my uncle picked a fight with her before i was heading to queens and then she felt too sick and upset to come. my uncle was a huge, mean asshole lacking compassion as usual, and it’s his fault she didn’t come because the miscommunication about scheduling was his fault, but instead he just did what he and a lot of them tend to do in my family, blamed my mother, yelled at her, shut her down. she’s an easy target and she’s very sensitive.

i burnt my toast, but i’m going to eat it anyway, with half an avocado and some salt. i bite it, i chew, move the food around in my mouth until it is mush, swallow. it doesn’t taste like anything, it just feels like changing textures on my tongue, between my teeth, against the soft inner walls of my cheeks.

i saw my mother briefly around the corner from the house, felt hopeless and heartbroken. she kept saying she was okay and i kept saying she wasn’t. sometimes loving my mother, a lot of times, loving my mother, has meant begging her to care about herself enough to stay alive. she is slowly killing herself it seems sometimes, the house—how tommy hoarded it, how tommy and dorothy began hoarding her apartment after my mom took dorothy in—is killing her, their cruelty, their verbal abuse, the meanness, is killing her, me, us. i know i’m going to have to decide to restructure things in my life to take the reins to help her because she can’t do it herself at this juncture, in this way. but i do have faith that once she’s back on her feet a bit, once she’s shown some care, she can push forward again. nobody in our immediate family has a lot of faith in her but me. no one takes any responsibility for her well-being but me. because she’s the crazy one. because she’s the punching bag. i try to think clearly, i try to think of ways i can step in here without it overwhelming my life, without having to sacrifice what i need to do with myself. i try to be reasonable about what i’m dealing with here, i try to not catastrophize—i can deal with this after i return from tour. is there time for that?  will she be okay by the time i get back? will she be alive? reasonably, yes, she will be alive. she may not be any better than she is right now, though, but what i could accomplish toward that in a month in a fucked up personal state is unclear either way.

i think about next year and how i’ve been considering not going to the conservatory, been weighing my options and thinking about my dreams, my goals, what i’ve made and not waiting to live my life the way i want to. how i’ve been thinking of actually just extending the tour, starting the performance/organizing collective with the emerge people, working and traveling and using the money i raise toward performance programs that aren’t THE WHITE RICH ESTABLISHMENT and that also provide more financial assistance. not going $40,000 more into loan debt on top of the rest and having to raise $4-6,000 a semester on my own, just to go, not including housing, life expenses, everything else. i think about how i can take classes with laverne cox’s acting coach, singing classes with julia, queer-oriented body and movement classes, the doors that have opened for me through emerge with connections, fellowships, residencies, how i can develop my own framework for education and pay less for it, while also maybe getting more of what i need in ways that honor me. in a way where i wouldn’t have to, on top of being at school from 9-5 or 6 each day, and working  some nights and weekends, have to do the extra work to just teach everyone about who i am, about trans-ness and identity and privilege in general, on top of the psychological struggle it will be just to be in a program like that where the point is to delve deep into emotional landscapes and embodiment, but also—the psychological struggle of having to be a woman, literally, in scenes (and like rich wife canon characters). i think about all the work and energy i’ll put into transforming an institution that will revert back to itself for the most part upon my leaving. because that’s what i do in these settings. i think about being one of the only trans poor people there and i wonder why i would do it. i wonder what i would gain.

i tell myself if i don’t go, if i just run with what i’ve made, this book, six years in the making, run with what i’ve built in performance and with emerge, see where that goes, i also could always reapply and get in again. i got in with no training whatsoever. i got in because i wanted to, because i gave it everything. but maybe i want to give myself everything, maybe i want to go for my dream in a different way, in a way i’ve been dreaming about for a long time. maybe just because i am used to running myself ragged, running on empty, on fumes, used to being an exception in an affluent establishment institution and codeswitching and fighting my way through it, doesn’t mean it’s what i should do. maybe that’s an old dream, maybe that’s just what flashdance and gypsy and some theatrical version of meritocracy told me to do.

i’m diverging, i want to focus on yesterday, but i can’t separate the future, my future, from the present. my mother gets inserted into my planning. i wonder if that’s wrong. i think, maybe choosing not to go, well, i know choosing not to go, will make it easier for me to support her. but what kinda role should that play in my decision-making? i think that our radical communities, steeped in academic theories on what’s right and wrong in terms of how to be and act and live can be as blindly and naively individualistic as any other framework, sometimes don’t speak to the lived realities of poor families and what we have to do to survive and help each other survive. but also, codependence has been a sour reality in my family life and i’m constantly evaluating what support needs to look like in my life. as my cousin denise, maureen’s daughter, said yesterday, take care of yourself first, then take care of your mother. which is, i imagine, what has sustained her through taking care of her own mother.

i think, too, that going might be a bad kind of drain on my mental health, a bad kind of obsessive attention to my craft at the expense of a lot of other necessary parts of my life: like focusing on self-care and community-care and my family, blood and not, and herbal transitioning and just nourishing myself in all the other passions and desires and needs i have. i worry that the program won’t honor a much-needed and awaited dedication to balance in my life that i have been working hard and successfully (in some ways) to cultivate. because the kind of rigorous it is is the kind that tells you to push yourself beyond what you are reasonably capable, that kinda ragged discipline where you break yourself and don’t be a wimp/baby/sissy. no crying in baseball kinda system. i don’t know that i believe in that anymore. i believe in pushing myself, i believe in breaking, i believe in rigor, but maybe not in that way. and maybe not in that setting. who will hold me there?  

yesterday, like my whole life, and maybe anyone’s, especially where family is concerned, i was a child and i was an adult. precocious in my emotional intelligence, seen and held mostly by myself and by denise, maureen’s daughter. it was like years collapsing. it was like when grandma and donna died, like when maureen and denise showed up for us, for them? my aunts and uncles, their cousins they raised or grew up with. tables were turned. denise is a year younger than my mother, denise. maureen and denise were integral to my survival through my childhood, especially through the first couple years after my grandma and donna’s death, all the chaos that ensued. which was just a continuation of other chaos.

time collapsed. it was so ordinary and normal to talk to denise. it was so ordinary and normal for us to be all over each other with sweet, familial, friendly affection. we saw each other as we always did, denise, 58, me, 28. having these beautiful and complex relationships with our mothers. being two people who were always kinda different, always set apart. two people with so much exuberant love for people, two creative and eccentric and short people. and, interestingly, tho i was an only child, i always was treated as a kinda sibling to my 6 aunts and uncles and my mother, and denise, tho she had 3 siblings, was always kinda like an only child, much closer to maureen than to her siblings.  linda said, “denise is going to be so lost.” because she has been so close with maureen, living with her since before i was born aside from her own stint in the bay area and other moments in NYC, and, recently, taking care of maureen through the last two years, two years i didn’t realize until yesterday had been so extreme. taking care of her almost exclusively, as her siblings live out their married lives with children and ordinary career paths (no judgment, it’s just how it is). denise being the eldest.

and not knowing about maureen’s condition these two years: that’s partially the working class irish-catholic stoicism, as denise and i were discussing, sitting by a wall of windows in the hospice hallway, and that’s partially my family, my elders, being disconnected because of their dysfunction. and that’s partially maureen just not wanting people to know, not wanting to burden people, not wanting help, and also what denise called “vanity.” and so i don’t begrudge anyone for the ways they chose to deal, not deal, talk, not talk about what was happening. i am mature enough in these times now to not judge, to not have hard feelings. tho i do have regrets, and i expressed them honestly to denise. i wish i had seen her before now, have an actual conversation, see her laugh again, hear her speak, ask her things. denise said i shouldn’t. she loves me, she always has had a very special place in her heart where i live, that she wanted and expected me to be off, on my own, finding myself, spreading my wings. that it was no one’s fault that we weren’t as close. that we all do what we can.

that was the thing about maureen and denise and my grandmother and donna that were different: we talked about shit honestly, we didn’t hold back the hard stuff. the emotional experiences of these tragedies we lived within. so i told denise that i felt heartbroken, to tell her how much i value how encouraging and supportive maureen always was of my creativity, my sensitivity. how both of them really saved me through those times. how even before those deaths they were a respite for me. and she explained the last two years to me, and “you know how she is! she’s stubborn. she’s strong, she’s a tough cookie, she’s set in her ways.” the attendants call her queen maureen. exalted, the name card on the window by her bed in her hospice room says.

i didn’t know i was going there to say goodbye. we didn’t know. everything’s accelerated so fast since wednesday apparently. she was in rehab, the thought was she was going to get stronger and be alright, but then, a turn for the worse. of course when we were headed to hospice we knew that meant soon, but not like, any day. denise said one night all of a sudden maureen started saying, “mom, mom! mom, no i’m not ready. i need a jacket, i need my jacket.” and denise  said, “nana, no, wait, i need a few days.” end of life care, comfort care.

 we got out of the car in front of the hospital, linda and i, linda holding her portable oxygen tank, out of breath from just getting out of the car, waiting for tommy to park and enter together. as we stood there, we saw michelle, maureen’s youngest daughter, approaching. she looked at us and didn’t recognize us at first. then said, “oh my god,” hugged us. said to linda, “i didn’t recognize you. i saw you and was like why is this lady looking at me, wait she looks familiar. how are you feeling? like shit?” linda shrugged. tommy arrived. there was no preparing us. we got up to the hospice floor, i went to the bathroom. i took a deep breath and walked down the hall to maureen’s room.

there really was no preparing. she is so small. she is all bones, loose skin in places, taut skin in places, pale. i can’t quite remember what she looked like, which makes me sad, but i guess is a protective mechanism; she wouldn’t want me to remember her that way anyway. walking in to her was shocking. i tensed up, i felt sick, i felt frightened. it makes me feel sick to say that she, at first, terrified me. but it was the kinda fear that comes with knowledge of how much suffering she was going through, how much pain, how this was the last time i would ever see her. and this was a way i knew she didn’t want to be seen and her seeing me might make her feel more sadness and pain. i sat at the end of her bed on a chair next to lauren, her granddaughter, two years older than me and recently married in spring. maureen almost didn’t make it to her wedding because of her health problems, but, fierce miracle queen that she is, she did. and i remember the pictures from it on facebook, how just three months ago she looked so different, still like herself, tho much smaller and frailer and thinner and more tired.  

so delirious through the morphine, out of it, so barely there, in body and spirit. and, yet, it was her and she was alert. glimpses: her hands, her eyes, those moran eyes as everyone always said of my grandmother’s side and their uniform eyes. she looked right into my eyes, my face—recognition and surprise and her own grief, i wanted to know how she was feeling, i didn’t know how to ask, i didn’t know what to say. i felt stupid and like a child who didn’t know what to do, my love felt confused, because i didn’t want to hurt her more, physically or spiritually. i didn’t know what was right. looking in her eyes and denise’s eyes both were like looking into my grandmother’s eyes. she could barely, barely speak. but she said “i haven’t seen you in so long,” and all i could say was i know. it broke my heart, but i know it wasn’t a judgment. i gently rubbed her back, i touched her shoulder. she was trying, straining to speak to me. i can’t even explain what it was like. what she looked like, what she sounded like, how few words were spoken, and yet it felt like a whole conversation. i can’t, i have no reference points. it was so unreal. she wanted to speak, but she couldn’t, she said some things and i understood. mostly i could understand her pain, swimming and restless inside it, the cage of her torturous body. and yet, it was her, and she was beautiful. her hands still gesturing against the bed in the ways i remembered. i sat down and i was drowning in memories of her, drowning in the sound of her laugh. catching up with the moment, that it was almost over and this wasn’t what i thought i was walking into today. loss and regret and confusion. deep deep wells of sorrow.

it is what it is. this is a motto in our lives. the lives in which we lived, for generations, of white poor poverty, surrounded by death, too-early-death, addiction, mental health problems, violence. it is what it is. and the blessing, the silver lining, as we discussed, that maureen is 77. that she outlived so many. in a life of hers peppered by early deaths and loss, people dying in their 30s, 40s, 50s. children dying. losing her dad so young when she was 9, losing her husband so young, losing her sister so young. losing michael and donna, her cousin-nephew, cousin-niece, my uncle and aunt, so young. the silver lining of, yes, all of this she’s experienced now in the last two years has been extreme—complications as a result of a radical treatment for uterine cancer 40 years ago. scar tissue from that radiation is all wrapped and twisted up around her intestines. apparently, since two years ago, it’s just been one problem, one complication, one thing worse than the other. she’s barely been able to eat in two years. she’s had tubes in her. the cancer came back, plus all the other problems. the silver lining being, tho the ill-advised-yet-of-its-time treatment caused excessive and catastrophic damage now, it allowed her to live out a life. to see her children grow up, to have grandchildren, to grow old.

but to see her in such suffering and pain, unfair. i wanted to stay with her forever, i wanted to sit with her, hold her and never let go. but i was also responsible to the people around me, her children, denise, bobby, sharon, michelle, my aunt linda and uncle tommy, and her best friend for 70 years, diane, who i had to move away from maureen so she could sit at her side, holding her hand, stroking her shoulder, whispering, crying.

i decided to leave the house. i started crying as i walked out the door, started walking to sunset park, turned around, to head to greenwood. on my way, i passed DENISE written on the ground, followed by a hopscotch board that only went to 8, the numerological path number of this year for me. like in january when i passed the hopscotch board to 8 in prospect park. i was crying with my black sunglasses covering it all, and then i laughed. denise had told me yesterday that her dad’s side, the madden’s side, had a grave in greenwood right by the entrance to the tunnel. i found it. i found a grave nearby that said GIVEN GRACE.

while i was getting dressed today, black short-shorts and black tank top, i realized i shucked the NYC-always-wear-black-thing my whole life because we were always in mourning in my childhood and i associated it with that. i was tired of death. wakes and funerals and hung heads. i am more grounded and peaceful sitting under the big curving tree that sheltered me from the summer shower a couple weeks ago. i’m sitting close to the edge of the pond. little turtle heads poke up from the surface from time to time. i wrote and i wrote and i cried. i called my best friend of 23 years, i told them everything: the school plan thoughts, how my mother is, the whole story of the day with maureen. i was crying and it was hard. but i wasn’t alone. i’ve known r. since we were five. i thought of maureen and diane, friends since 6 years old.

all day yesterday, from early afternoon to 11:30pm as we were at hospice,  i thought about coming home to write through it all. to hold it all, to keep it all, why i don’t know. how i did this in the days immediately after my grandmother’s death, and donna’s. 15 pages, i think, single-spaced, paragraphless stream in lucida handwriting (god why). how, walking the 2 and a half blocks home from school that day, oct 30 2001, with natalia and esther, i felt off, distant, dread. how when we hit the corner of 83rd and 34th, i could see maureen standing in front of grandma’s house and my stomach fell to the floor. i knew. i said, no, i felt myself swirling, sick, drowning. i didn’t wanna cross the street, cross over into whatever was next, as if i could avoid what was already happening, what already happened.

i don’t remember the rest exactly, or i remember things that may have been dramatizations or reenactments, because i have exact visions of scenes i wasn’t there for, my aunt, donna, reclined on the couch sick before they took her to the hospital, monsignor mcguirl upstairs with my grandmother, blessing her. i wasn’t there for these things, they happened in the morning while i was at school. i can’t find what i wrote about it, years later, after the fray of eviction, moving, stuff going missing, etc. i remember i kept the chronicle in a plastic green folder and i would carry it around and re-read it often before it got lost. i guess in order for it all to stay real? like yesterday was unreal. or in order to grieve with myself. that was the thing—the writing of it gave me a place to grieve alone, to not bother anyone, it gave me a place to say everything. and maureen and denise were the ones who held me through grandma’s death, through donna’s, three weeks to the day later on november 20th. my immediate family couldn’t hold me. i was lost with them, i was a ghost. i was their equal. i was alone. i wasn’t alone. everyone, no one. there was me. there was maureen and denise.

when maureen said, as i held her, as i looked at her, “i was surprised to see renée,” as she searched my face and was moving her chapped mouth around, maybe looking for her voice, for something to say, maybe just grimacing or reacting to pain, kinda lightly moaning and humming, her gums and lips kinda pink with dried blood, so chapped. i just held her and asked why she was surprised and she said, “i don’t know. because i haven’t seen you in so long,” and at the time it made me feel so sad, such regret. i could only say “i know, i know.” i held her hand. we held hands, both of them. denise said later when i told her she held my hands that it was really special because it’s hard for her to even gather the strength to do that. it was meaningful. i stroked her back so lightly, would just place my hand on her shoulder, feeling her breathing, feeling her heart. “you’re so good with her,” denise said. i just shrugged, “i love her.” she got restless and said, “i don’t like…” “i need…” and i think she wanted me to move her. so i asked her how, where. her legs. i was honored she trusted me to help her. i asked for denise, but denise said i could do it. we did it together, lifted up her leg, bones, placed pillows between them. i told her i love her so much. i told her i was in red hook the night before, on conover st, “oh you were,” she said. i started telling her about sunny’s bar, but she interrupted me to say who was it just said they were in red hook, she was getting upset that she couldn’t remember, so i asked denise. john and esther, john and esther, i kept saying, trying to assure her because she seemed upset, maybe like she was losing everything.

then i had to move to let diane in, told her i would be back and she said, it’s ok. but i didn’t want to let go of her hands. the glimpses. my name out of her mouth like she always said my name. her beautiful voice.

when i first arrived and first saw her and saw linda touching her and crying, my lips started shaking and i had to walk out, briskly down the hall to the bathroom. tears welling up, but not falling and i felt like i was drowning and i couldn’t breathe and i was pacing around the small cube of the bathroom, and i hit my head against the wall and i slumped down it with my arms over my head, sliding down the wall, helpless. i was dry sobbing and swirling and i looked in the mirror—my lips red and purple and trembling, my chin quivering and that wall of water over my red eyes that wouldn’t break, or only slightly, a few tears. and i remembered all the times in the bathroom at grandma’s as a kid, looking into the mirror and crying, thinking my eyes looked so much more beautiful when i cried, all the hazel variations coming out at once, illuminated. and thinking i looked beautiful now, my eyes and my mouth. i wondered where everyone else was when i was in the bathroom crying alone then, a child.

anyway, maureen dying brings up everyone dying. because we were all there together, she was there and she was so beautifully present and supportive through it all, for everyone, but especially for me. michael, grandma, donna. of course mae, my grandma’s sister, and grandpa, tho i was a toddler. but i remember mae dying. i was her little nurse, i would bring her her pills in the blue pill case and water and i would tuck her in. i always wanted to heal everyone. i had a dream about her the night after she died that i thought was real. i was 3, but i can’t forget it. she came to me. i thought it was a memory, but my mother said it wasn’t, it was a dream. there was an empty gurney in the bedroom, dorothy’s bedroom, that they were caring for her in. there was the sense that she had been in it. but the wind just blew the white sheet around and she wasn’t there, she was released. i saw her in the hallway or i felt her in the hallway, touched by her presence, and i knew she was okay, i could smell her. and i was happy.

and beyond all that got dredged up, all denise and i spoke of about those deaths, what came after, about the trajectory of my specific family system, my aunts and uncles and how and why they are—new illuminations and puzzle pieces on all sides. things i already knew, but just got confirmed by denise. things denise knew, but got confirmed by me. there was all this, all the pain and all the darkness, but there was also the memories of joy and simple sweetness. there was sitting in the hospice room, maureen asleep, tommy and bobby lying back on the other hospital bed, linda and denise and i sitting against the wall, diane sitting next to maureen, all sharing memories of their childhoods and laughing. and it was the weirdest thing, i could see them all as children in those moments, i saw the youngness in their faces, in their smiles, and i was this adult, younger than them, but somehow older in that moment, somehow watching them through time. and it was beautiful and it was strange and it was sad and it was lovely. and i was grateful to be a part of it, i was grateful to know something about them before it all got so ugly and twisted, or maybe even as it was, for them, as with my life. the kernels of beauty and togetherness amidst the suffering, the hardships. and i thought of who we were before, how we were, the togetherness i so valued that was so crushing when we, when they, lost it. gave up on it or destroyed it. and how through all that, maureen and denise were always so present for me. their house was a safe haven for me, nurturing and loving, a respite. how they held me and listened and how they honored me in my fullness—my talents, my deep sensitivity, my grief. the full realities of my life and our family’s life. how it meant a lot to me when denise said in the hallway, “you didn’t get a childhood, you had to grow up too soon,” and tommy was there and he was just quiet. 

i could sense something in him wanted to challenge her on it, but he couldn’t. i also know there’s something that makes it hard for him to challenge me generally. which comes from i don’t know what, respect, or what i’m not sure. but it’s one win for my femmeness over his toxic masculinity. how later, when we were speaking without anyone around she said that even though the way they treated me as an adult, as a therapist, or straight up neglected me/fucked me up, was wrong and inappropriate, i was a gift to them. and it may be hard for me to see it that way, but i have all this material to work from and i can use it to be a gift for other people, too. that i’m a healer. and i was so affirmed in that. and felt seen. and i actually loved being myself, renée, in that space. didn’t want to be anything else, was fully me. some lipstick, some facial hair, obscured breasts, hot pants. just me. i’m not the best example of a trans person out there. i really barely give a shit about anything sometimes because there’s so much else than how i’m seen. it’s so unimportant to me sometimes.

i did think about maureen taking me to see lauren’s lil teen theatre company’s production of west side story, which started up an obsession. i would watch the movie every day and listen to the soundtrack obsessively, as my family fought or negotiated over the house in the background, as everyone unraveled and fell apart. how at the show i told maureen i had a crush on the beautiful boy who played riff. but in my head,too, i wanted to be him. he was probably 16 or 17, i was 13. she was like, “umm… i don’t think he likes girls.” haha, and he came out holding some boy’s hand. which, of course. the first of many beautiful queer boys i couldn’t get anywhere near. and i wanted to be him, but i didn’t know how.  

and maureen, the beautiful young mother, as they called her in our family. she had denise at 18. just, the way she talks, the way she would move her hands. her elegance and her grace. the way she says the word “her,” in that lovely old brooklyn way. her hair and the way she smiles and laughs. the portrait of her when she was young that used to hang in her house that i was obsessed with, wanting to be her, wanting to know her then, wanting to someday be with someone as beautiful and kind as her, but not having words for that or knowing what that meant then. not really knowing what it means now either.

[rexylafemme]

the usefulness of being still has come and gone, just like the jolt of cruel dreams before the dawn

i’m not a chill person. i can find my center & i can shift perspectives as i need in order to be safe and grounded with myself (sometimes). but i refuse delusions and the ignorance required to tell myself all of this is fine, to be at false ease. i have rage and i believe in its power; if we use it and channel it right. i have anxiety and fears, which are real and valid responses to the trash can past and present and future circumstances i’ve experienced, we’ve created, continue to create. the fruits of destructive power structures, from outward to our homes. i don’t believe in them, no faith, no allegiance to them. i refuse and i won’t compromise my beliefs and values, the other visions i’m working toward, we’re working toward. a decolonized femme-centered, black-and-brown-centered, disabled/sick/crazy-centered, nurture-centered reality. brutally soft.

i’m willing always to be open to new ideas and growing and seeing things in new ways, other experiences, if they promote liberation, a coming back to radical compassion in micro to macro ways, resistance, ends to violence and suffering. but, any kind of thinking or behavior that is wound up in any kind of BS, i am not going to protect or make excuses for. this goes for within personal relationships, in institutional settings, cultural production, etc. there’s no time for that, there’s been no time for it for too long. part of loving people and being alive has to be holding ourselves and each other accountable for the oppression and privilege that live in our psyches that we knowingly or unknowingly reinforce and act out. if we can’t disrupt or challenge these things in ourselves and through our relationships with each other, we can’t be fully functional or effective activists, organizers, artists, anti-oppression advocates, friends, lovers, workers, anything. it doesn’t feel good to face these things. but, it’s not supposed to. and growth takes time. challenging these things within our communities and families doesn’t feel good either. it puts you at odds, you have to rub up against defensiveness, and sometimes, no matter what we do, we’re ineffective. sometimes it isn’t safe to broach the process and we have to walk away, protect ourselves. we can’t force people to change.

we all run away from parts of ourselves, our pasts, our histories. i try not to feel bad about this, knowing that at least when it comes to family, blood and chosen, stuff, it was out of self-defense and preservation to run or to avoid. it wasn’t safe at specific times to dig up or approach certain wounds, to acknowledge that they even existed. also, sometimes you have to make the kinda unsound or “bad” choices to really know and be confident in your true choices. hecate: crossroads, being with your choices. eventually, you have to look at and face the painful choices, memories you made and have to move past them. you won’t forget, but there has to be some movement toward graceful acceptance of how things were/are.

being openly vulnerable and honest in a more intense way in a lot of areas in my life in the last few months to a year is bringing up a lot for me—in really great ways, in complex ways, in triggering ways. i’m coming up against everything that shaped my ideas around how i should express myself, what i should express, when, what i should care about, who i should care for, how i care. and all of the wonderful and terrible things that have influenced my caring—for myself and other people. i’m doing my best to live authentically, unapologetically—in line with my feelings and values. i’m doing my best to feel through the nasty stuff—external, internal, past, present. i’m doing my best to face myself in all my multiplicities, glories, mistakes, gifts, failures, joys, pains. i’m putting myself out there really hard, leaving shit up to fate/faith, reminding myself that honing my best self and putting that self forward, putting forth generosity, empathy, forgiveness, love, care, is everything. that it brings me closer to others who are trying their hardest, too.

areas where you need faith: justice card (wild unknown) decisions. balance. non-binaries. remember everything is everything. trust the multitudes. you are gray area. act with your highest intentions & desires & that is what you will meet externally.

i’m coming up against my defense mechanisms and walls—the hermit impulse that tells me to squirrel away, to protect my heart and spirit and body in a way that keeps me in suspicion and at a distance from others, everyone. i’m trying to not feel so scared and threatened. i’m challenging it because it doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t give people the opportunity to be good or to really know me the way i want to be known. and yet i am seen & known? emergeNYC really created a space where we were challenged over all these deep, embedded impulses toward singularity, overbearing self-protection, fear of intimacy, narrow-minded ideas of what intimacy is and between whom, lack of trust, the impacts of what we create with/between/for/against each other.

areas where you need to show commitment: III of cups. friendship. community. support. sharing and receiving care. abundance, warmth. the balm of good company. know you belong, we all can belong with each other. the importance of pleasure. the responsibilities of kinship. commit yourself to togetherness, in confluence with solitude. conjure a togetherness with yourself as well. birds don’t go at it alone, they have vast networks, open channels of communication, both parallel and interwoven flight.  

i don’t want my body, brain, heart and their impulses to be driven by fear & self-preservation always. i know i learned these responses for a reason and they’ve served me. i know it started with my family, both as life lessons given to me lovingly of how to move through this cruel-ass world and also given to me by our family’s own cruelties, inabilities to care for themselves, each other, me. i learned how to code-switch my way through any institution, how to manipulate my way from the grip of social worker hands, CCS, how to not be taken away, how to not get prescribed things, how to worm my way out of the hospital, the psych ward, how to get an abuser to stop hurting me as much tho being unable to fully emancipate from them. how to hide all of these experiences. how to talk my way outta anything. how to be a shark, how to cultivate numbness to get through and keep going. the wonders of dissociation. and then we’re supposed to feel guilty for what was done to us,what we’ve done, and the ways we had to survive. it doesn’t feel great to bear, but i think it’s okay when you’re protecting yourself?

it’s all the old stuff—blood and chosen family from the present and past. people who it feels more painful to love than not, but you can’t take the love away anyway. i don’t know how to do this. how to love through it, how to become okay with things that are not okay and that still and will always hurt, these indelible things. dredged up at any minute by the way the sky looks or a sound or a similar feeling. like having a psychometric relationship to everything in your realm of experience. feeling the resonances. i don’t know how to transform with people if they can’t transform themselves, if they actively dodge the opportunity. i don’t know how to be with them, but i can’t cut out my family. i can’t resolve anything either. but i can’t be a container for the same shit, that is actually just worse than it was before, the rocky road. i don’t want to watch, i don’t know what to do. it hurts all the time and i’m powerless. and in the city where we all began. this paradox that is a through-line in my life.

what you are distracted by: V of wands. conflict, loss, competition, separation. family. the wands aren’t going anywhere or working together, they’re sprawled about, the energy is disordered. they reach toward each other, but not to make a genuine connection. isolation in themselves. defensive and unwilling to compromise. you can’t heal it, it’s not yours. scattered at best, working at cross purposes at worst. know where to keep fighting and when to move in another direction. you can’t dwell on the past.

i biked around red hook, where i feel at home, attached to something. being there feels like a hug. i biked past the building that was once the elementary school my grandparents went to that has been low-income apartments for decades. i can handle that. the fancy-ass cocktail bar with the french windows named botanica i can’t deal with. but i let it go, i keep going. passing all the streets i remember hearing about in childhood: columbia st, van brunt st, walcott st. i walked to the end of the valentino pier and watched the sunset, thinking of my grandmother. the sun fell directly behind the statue of liberty, obscuring it in a fuzzy burst of hot orange light. liberty, that sick joke, engulfed in toxic neon flames. i thought it must’ve been hard to be there, in red hook, where no one wanted to be then, with things as they were, and look out and see that damn statue all the time. or, maybe it just became part of the landscape, look past it, let it go. maybe it was just calming, romantic, to be on the waterfront, gazing out seeing sky meet water, dreaming about who you could be, in a neighborhood set apart from everything else, brooklyn wouldn’t even claim it—with all its chaos, murders, fires, rats, mobs, riff raff. cut off and forgotten, monstrosity, an eye sore, disowned, unknown maybe, but not nonexistent, not without redemption. i’m here, so love had to come from somewhere in red hook. from a michael and a dorothy, for my mother to be born there to find a quiet, poetic bob from the bronx. love, or at least a pull toward someone else’s body and soul, whatever that’s called.

there were iridescent scales of light on the water, striking yellow, cerulean, pink, sliding their way over an infinity of tiny choppy waves. it was beautiful, it made me sad. falling into nighttime. i sat and wrote about what it might be like if there were a version of experience where my grandmother was still alive and she accepted me for who i was, a version where my trans-ness/otherness/craziness wouldn’t confuse or break her heart, as i kinda fear they would. if she would meet me as myself, but maintain a lot about herself, too. she would mean well, she would bother me mostly me about love. r. and i were watching kimmy schmidt and titus was being scouted out and appraised by a church lady for her gay nephew. it felt relatable: the sweet busy-bodiness, the gossip, the matchmaking. my grandma would be picking out candidates or asking constantly, “well what about so and so? or whatshername?” how she would be kindly pushy about marriage and kids because partly that’s her framework for understanding love and family, and also because she thinks i’m good at nurturing and building kinship bonds and knows commitment is important to me. i would meet her where she was and struggle a bit with it, trying to figure out how to explain my discomfort/critique with the institution of marriage, the heteronormative dyad of “family,” how we conceptualize relationships in general as fixed, love unconditional, desire as one thing, i would struggle to communicate my conflicts. she might struggle to understand them. we would both mean well and try. and maybe a lot would go left unsaid, maybe some of it wouldn’t need to be said.

i could see her inviting someone over to dinner, taking their hand at the table, and saying stuff like “you know, rex is a writer, he has a book coming out,” in a wink-wink way and i would be mortified and smile and fumble my words talking about it, but also partially flattered. and also i would later remind her that i am perfectly independent and comfortable and complete in myself, irreverent artemis, and she would assure me she knows, but i am a beautiful person and i shouldn’t be bitter and jaded and closed off, i don’t have to be a nun, when i could also have all of myself and more as well. i would roll my eyes because i know she’s right. she would also want me and encourage me to pursue my life and passions and gifts and not neglect them. she would say often that ignoring your gifts is a sin. often when she would be asking me to sing for her and i would get shy. as always, i would kinda want her approval in everything i do, so i would believe in it all. she wouldn’t have liked some of the stuff i got myself into, but only because it wasn’t right for me, didn’t honor the fullness and wonder of me. she would still talk me up to her other church ladies, as she always would talk up her grandkids, especially cheryl and me, the shining stars—so smart, so talented, the brilliant, going-places girls, ten years apart. i loved it tho and i always wanted the church ladies to like me, for elders to like me in general. and it was important for me to be respectful, polite. i also just appreciated their wisdom and assuredness and qnz fashion sense.

i walked to the other pier, directly off conover st, sat on the ledge over the rocks in the dark. watching the moonlight on the river. it looked like animated script writing itself out in bright silver on a moving blue-black surface. i was looking for words in the cursive, thought i saw my own name. rex renée, king reborn. but we try to make sense of the surreal all the time in our search for meaning. maybe it’s just something i made up, maybe that is enough. i’m not sure, maybe it doesn’t matter either way.

later, on my way home i was young leo, loneheart ladyboy romeo if he lived, grew up,  and got his shit together on my metallic purple bike with my purple helmet and purple shorts—color of royalty of lions. i biked past king st til i was on verona st. in front of the visitation church, where my grandmother, elder leo, attended mass, got christened in, confirmed in, married in. the church my mother, linda, donna, & michael also were christened in. where uncle eddie was just memorialized in. i was looking up at the moon and creating my meaning, writing the book in my head from the movie i’m living inside of. leo. king. verona. romeo. renée. visitation.

where miracles can occur: II cups. feeling. connection. reciprocity. mutally-exchanged beauty. a romantic approach to anything that is meaningful. an ability to experience seeing/knowing, being seen/being known. respect & honor. share your appreciation, strengthen bonds, make efforts, offer kind words. growing, blossoming.

i have to connect with these would-bes, shape her memory into a best-case-scenario parallel reality fantasy, because it empowers me to keep going, to see myself as she did, and also because she was the one figure in my life who wasn’t conflicting to me, she was a rock and a home and a safety net. and we protected each other in a way that was only gentle, and i think knowing we couldn’t do much about what surrounded us. i was never confused about her love—what it meant, if i had it, if it would disappear. she was never violent, but she did see and hold a lot of it, and i did too. she didn’t lash out, she didn’t refuse her faults. we took care of each other, and everyone else. the eldest and one of the youngest. mess. but, it’s just what happened.  

the people i love all over in my life remind me of what this kind of holding looks like. commitment to each other, patience, allowing ourselves to bask in our own similarities and truly honor our differences, to listen without having to hear our own voices, etc. to stand up for each other in healthy ways and more than just saying so.

setting/having/owning/respecting/talking about boundaries and limits. not shutting down completely or walking out on someone when we get scared or hurt. not making assumptions. trying. accountability processes, forgiveness, repair. putting tit for tat, an eye for an eye, holding shit over people’s heads, childish revenge and lashing out to bed. self-awareness and ownership. self-love over egotism. real love/kinship over possession/love addiction/codependence/narcissism. the gentleness and patience we need when our uglinesses inside rear their heads—the moments we do lash out or get controlling, jealous, driven by ego and scarcity, fear of loss or hardship or death or heartbreak. the gentleness and patience we need when we are just hurting and need support. we are transforming ourselves together.

we do always have the potential to be or become our own and each others’ worst nightmares. denying that doesn’t make it untrue. there is power in our own monstrosity when we are brave enough to look at it. it’s not about “taming” or “overcoming” it, but about infusing it with the love and understanding and care that it needs that it didn’t have. i can’t speak to sociopathy because that state of being feels too deep and far gone for me to wrap my head around any healing to. but our own pain, personal and collective, ills against us by loved ones, institutions, the state, shape the monsters and the nightmares. so there is something to looking at and listening to them, the rough whispers in the dark, the void in us, to unlock truths about us that we can integrate into our being, to be whole and full. no one is fully evil, but we are influenced and molded by the nature of our world (reality as we create it). this is why i love horror movies, exploring what monsters come from the way the world treats us. but that’s not all. which is why i haven’t been able to watch them much lately. because there is some other force, nature or divinity or whatever we try to name it, in us. a force of benevolence and a pull toward harmony, toward integration. our bodies down to the smallest unit are driven toward this, everything natural, organic and inorganic, are driven toward this. homeostasis, balance. not to be confused with status quo or stasis. but to tides—push/pull, to every action an equal and opposed reaction. it’s science, it’s alchemy. in horror, this force doesn’t win out often, human failure does. not because its not strong enough, but because we aren’t. which is, in fact, horrifying. but i really don’t think it has to be or is only this way.

do the best we can. dare to fail. and our best might sometimes be another day’s worst. we get so tenderized sometimes, we break or we fall apart or we destroy ourselves or we aim to destroy other people. but we piece ourselves back together, patched up with new swatches, we rise up, we regenerate, we renew, the maiden, the phoenix, the flower, the snake. we have to. there is no other choice. well, there is death or there is total surrender to monstrosity and horror. but, better to endure, to do the work, to feel it all, to own it all. haters be damned. white supremacy/patriarchy/colonialism/capitalism be damned. all these structures that deny what is truly essential to us be damned. it’s all so childish and sick and boring and stupid. disgusting.

instead of hating ourselves—especially for what’s meaningful and beautiful about us—not being the same, humanness, feelings, infinite possibilities for who we could be and how—but also for the shitty stuff we reproduce and learn as a result of these systems we live within--& instead of being greedy or jealous of power—we need to funnel our hatred, our rage toward power, away from each other, the ones we love. funnel our power toward each other—making huge, interlocking webs of it to throw over the big, sick, fucked up, red-faced trash baby of the toxically-masc colonial project and suffocate it til it’s dead. its ghost will haunt us, roaming about, sickly ethereal over the earth, always beckoning to be summoned back into form, and it will happen, as franchises do—II, III, IV, V, fascism’s revenge, the death rattle, but we can overcome it every time. we can be more powerful and intelligent than the temptation to allow it to materialize, to be embodied. i believe that. don’t dream it, be it!

a loving message for your heart & soul in times of doubt: IX cups. pools of calm feeling. warmth and coolness. being refreshed. the light of the moon, calm on calm ripples of water. sunsets. cycles of comfort & peace. you’ve been calling it all in. times without turbulence and of having all your ducks in a row. enjoy what makes you feel good now, in the present, life--connection, music, food, beauty, nature. mastering the balance between enjoying pleasure and over-indulgence. sink into gratitude and cherish what you have. we can generate the feelings we desire in small and large ways every day. a perspective of abundance and of having. continue to stretch ourselves, expand, to strive for more, while appreciating where we are now and what we have now. fill all your cups and share them.

[the italicized tarot responses are from a spread i made for myself around faith and fate]

[rexylafemme]

you must’ve come from the trees, fallin out of them branches, fallin all over me

sitting with the circumstances under which we live currently, how they tie into age-old processes of power/destruction/dominance: we can’t deny them, we can’t repress them. we’re being called, as always, to face them in order to transform them. which is a call to action, fighting, and an end to living under any illusions of misguided comfort in what is. there has to be some level of adjustment, tho, to the circumstances we live under, if not acceptance—we have every right to find them unacceptable. and every right to adjust begrudgingly. there is power within disapproval and criticism, power in the unacceptable. instead of sinking too far into hopelessness, into despair, it’s important to key into visions of change. what something else could be. despair brings up desire: what we want, what shit could look like, or even what we could go back to. the past, those sense memories, the things that worked and felt good, live in our bodies, too. as much as what didn’t work, what hurt. we have a lot of will inside us.

part of me feels all off. topsy turvy. it’s in the weather, the way i’m experiencing summer. i expect to feel nyc—sticky, hazy, sunstruck—and i feel bay area—rainy, breezy, chilly. i remember we have a lot of it left tho. that this mild june has been enjoyable. and i have to remind myself that mild summers aren’t completely unheard of, or only/exclusively a sign of catastrophic climate change… ugh. everything stresses me out, naturally. and the topsy-turvy feeling is just an internal felt assessment of all the burning, spiraling, awful things sprouting out structurally. feeling sick with it often, as we all grip onto ballasts, as we brace ourselves for the next catastrophic thing. fuckhole summer.

but, right now, sitting with my legs propped up in the backyard of the johnsons house where i’m catsitting, legs slathered in lavender and lemongrass to repel the bugs, air conditioners murmuring, light carving rectangles out of shadows from windows, lush green and little trees, and it’s humid but it’s cool, there’s a light breeze and leaf shadows move against a building wall in cobalt blue. i look up and i can see a star peeking between branches and leaves. the honeysuckle all tangled up in the curled hearts of the iron fence lining the stoop steps. it feels like summer, all this. and i love it and i can be alone with it and feel content, tho also tender. look to my left and see luna propping herself up with her face against the glass of the back door, looking at me, looking past me, wondering about me, wanting out, too.

sometimes my dread stems from my overactive anxiety, the fear of spiraling out of control stuff, or not spiraling, but not having control, in general. and i have to put myself in check and roll with the punches, breathe into what is. and, but, being alive is nice. it’s confusing and strange and we don’t make it too easy on ourselves or other people a lot of the time because we can be massively foolish and misuse our consciousness and complex decision-making capabilities. but we can be so beautiful, do so right sometimes. we make such magic together and we can transform our pain. and magic is essentially that—the intention and action of changing, transforming, using and guiding energies. it makes perfect sense. it’s in everything we make, in connection.

i keep telling people, often with frustration, that i’m supposed to be a bird. maybe i just am a bird. but not just a bird: a swan, a hawk, a raven, a sparrow. and not just a bird, but a snake and a doe. and a turtle and a starfish and a cat and a snail. i want to be a tree standing in time, too. what does water feel like on a leaf, is it like a raindrop on my arm? i was settled under the thick branch of a tree by a pond in greenwood earlier when the passing rain came. it started gentle and slow on the water, little pin drops poking at the surface, then it got heavy and pixelated, then the whole surface of the pond was vibrating with it, fuzzy like interference on a tv screen. i barely got wet at all. it was heavy and then it turned into a sunshower and then the sun was just radiating after it passed. everything looked and smelled more alive. there was steam rising from the flat surfaces of marble gravestones.

what would wind feel like if my arms were branches? i’m sitting in the dark and looking at this thin stalk and its leaves and i can imagine how it feels—just gently swaying. i love plants and creatures most of all. they make so much sense to me. people on the other hand… i can make sense of them, but there are some fundamental things about how we are and operate that i really don’t understand. i see things happen, i watch things play out before they do in real time in my head, patterns unravel, and i am often so powerless to influence things. i think of the tangled family we were, here, or in the bay—all the ways i’d hoped we could be different, could take the other roads. watched us play out every old thing & over & over, replayed it over & over, & the same outcomes. kept it in my head or chronicled all of it—all the ancient, all the momentary, all the premonitory things, all interspliced and threaded over and against each other.

some of our self-states are bratty, troublesome, reckless, grim—popping their gum while rolling their eyes, talking back, holding grudges, making mean jokes, thinking they can cheat death or grieving. sometimes it feels good to be cold. sometimes it feels good to be sharp. sometimes it feels good to be closed. to be reckless. sometimes we seek all this out in other people. sometimes it was alluring.

but there’s a difference between being cruel or careless and being a rizzo—tough and aloof, wise-cracking—it’s to protect a big ole soft & gooey heart, one that knows the world well enough to understand that we need our fences sometimes, need to pretend we aren’t affected by the nasty things other people say or think about us, all the judgments.

there’s a lot of power in our shadows, even in the parts of ourselves that self-hate and pick at ourselves, do bad things, control. they’re hurting and scared and wanting parts. they’re parts that are still trying to work out the modes of dominance/power/control we were told would get us where we need to go. we know they can’t. we can use those parts if we can face them and work with them, teach and learn with them. like starhawk talks about integration, not suppression. feeling all of our feelings without judgment and containing rather than stomping out or shutting down or caging. contending with our humanness—the flawed, the monstrous, the confounding. we contain a fire within a barrier of rocks, we don’t bury it completely, we don’t let it take over, either. finding our own boundaries and limits where our fires are concerned. the body is its own container, but it’s also always moving and flowing. it is dynamic, not stagnant. tho emotions and shadows can stagnate in places inside us, tied up, clumped up, building up and not moving. but we can budge stuff, push stuff, stimulate stuff, move stuff around, get stuff flowing.

everything is going to be ok, and it all won’t. it is always both. some things will always be off or will suck or hurt or not turn out exactly as we want or plan or expect them to. that’s ok, that’s life. that’s part of the adventure. there is a magical, enchanting side to this—things can turn out better than expected. or different in the loveliest, unable-to-be-anticipated way. all is never lost or doomed completely. sometimes we are at the mercy of other people’s choices—which sometimes means they have too much power and are abusing it—and sometimes it means we are just connected to each other and we care and are affected by what others do. love is so hard, i don’t know. under these conditions. sigh, but it can still be beautiful to connect. there’s always new music. there’s always new resonances to old music. feeling the things you wanted to feel, knowing it’s ok if you didn’t. the contrast of now as opposed to then. channels opening up or re-opening.

i feel for people in my guts, in the backs of my eyes, in my chest, when i breathe, when i furrow my eyebrows, when i sigh. it’s appreciation—little bubbles. it’s a desire for them to be ok—safe and have what they need and be treated with love and kindness, and to get what they want. a feeling of being closer and of knowing them well. of wanting to be closer and know more. a feeling of wanting to hold their joys and experiences and sorrows and pains—to be there, to show up, to do what i can and have them define what that means and looks like. and being ok if they don’t know or can’t say or are still figuring it out, if they aren’t there yet. and wanting all this in return. and you know when you’ve had it and when you haven’t. and i do. and mostly, too, i am building/growing/reinvigorating these things with myself and it has been a longstanding project that keeps going, but i’ve progressed, we progress, and it shows. it’s reflected in the people i keep around me, the way we are together, the give/receive, push/pull, pleasant sloshing back and forth, not sucking or grabbing. i think love for anybody—friend, lover, family, a vision, a pet—is always somewhat laden with heartbreak. a streak or a wash or a pinprick or bigger. because we want to take away or be able to prevent suffering and we live with the reality that we can’t do that. and sometimes we’re the ones who cause it. it’s painful. but we do heal, we do give each other sweet things. and working toward less pain, toward transforming it, is so possible and worth it and we are doing it all the time, even without knowing it.   

[rexylafemme]

si no me visitara tu imagen nocturna, jamas podria conocer el sabor del sueno

there's a reason i felt so differently between wednesday night and thursday night—seeing a beloved emerge friend's flamenco show with some emerge dears versus going to the emerge/laundromat project mixer on thursday. a profound difference in the ways we could meet each other in each space, a difference between connection versus networking. also, there was something about the actual spaces we were in, too, and what they alternately could allow for in terms of intimacy—a performance space in the basement of a church on the LES across from tompkins square park versus a crowded hipster-y bar on e. 8th st. there was nothing wrong with thursday, it just was a different vibe—more cerebral. it also brought out a different energy in me, more restless and unfocused.

during the flamenco show, it was like my physical and emotional responses were projecting outward from me in this invisible, kaleidoscopic, multidimensional landscape--different moments of experience and self criss-crossing over each other in various textures of time. i was physically present—taking in our friend's voice, watching her, being impressed by her ease and emotion, knowing her in such a different way personally than in this moment, holding space for that and thinking about what i’ve come to know of her through the program, watching the men in the band, being interested in the ways everyone moves—their bodies, their facial muscles when they play or sing, also very aware of the emerge folks and audience around me— seeing in my periphery their responses, the rapt faces, the upward-turning eyebrows responding to longing, love, dreams, pain through sound.

i have,  as maybe others do, this synaesthetic subconscious impulse to attach a memory of a performance to the first, most compelling scent i experience in the space, so when i recall it later, my brain initially remembers the smell, which is something i usually can't verbally describe. but i’m very aware of it throughout whatever i’m experiencing, and i connect my feelings and the way i build the memory of the event to that scent. i can close my eyes, put myself into wednesday night and smell and feel it.

keying into the all the layers of consciousness i have obvious access to, i’m thinking back to sitting at la planeta, the love & support around me, how opened up i felt, how i had internalized a feeling that this was a space i wouldn’t ordinarily find myself in, a community of people i wouldn’t ordinarily find myself around, and yet i felt comfortable, in the right place. sometimes life moves gracefully in that way, makes you feel like you’re experiencing exactly what you’re supposed to. feeling enamored by that feeling and the support around me. our workshop instructor to my left, his sweet trickster, soft paternalism very palpable to me even in his indirect connection with me as he took in the music. m. & her niece visiting from egypt who i had an extended conversation with before the show sitting in front of me—feeling newly threaded to her, l. and n. sitting out of my view to the left, having walked in late.

& then the music itself, forgetting & remembering where i was, where i’d been, re-experiencing and newly experiencing my affiliation with flamenco and spain—these quick reels cycling through my inner vision. 12 years ago when i was in an immersion program and my mom did whatever she had to do to get me there, i had a partial scholarship but when you are poor partial is not enough so god knows how she paid for it—she wouldn’t say and i didn’t ask. i recall how lucky i am for all she’s done toward my dreams though she would deny she’s done anything.

i was drawn to flamenco’s form because of its concurrent rawness and elegance, its wild attentiveness to feeling, desire—palpable & feral, also its fluidity & craftedness. when howling is formal, when stomping is a genre imperative. the expectation for contortion, your face made ugly by the sound of your feeling. sometimes adroit fury and sometimes deliberate, slow accumulation of agile tension.

just being enchanted by a talented friend and her beauty and courage. being also quelled by the way she closes her eyes when she sings because so do i and i’ve felt self-conscious lately as i prepare to start singing in public. watching the guitarist and the way his hair cascades his face. pretty, scruffy, long-haired quiet beauty. l., n., and i all determined later we had a crush on the band as a collective and we also had our stand-alone #1 crushes and he was mine. ugh, hate/love for gorgeous men who i make no sense to and maybe more importantly make no sense to me. i was telling l. that i ordinarily would never be interested in his crush, our friend’s former teacher, he’s just so not my type, but the way he sang—his face twisting carelessly with feeling and the two-toned shakiness and clarity of his voice was oddly captivating. i guess it was his emotiveness that was attractive, how immersed he was in it, how nothing beyond that mattered and it showed. how i am generally aroused by feeling, which makes me this big gushing heart walking around, touched and kinda wounded by humanness, ugh so annoying. anyway. n. was into the virtuosic pianist who our friend kept calling guapo onstage—erratic, nervous energy, hunched over his keyboard, shuffling through his music. young and pretty and it’s clear somehow to me that he knows it and doesn’t question it, which makes his beauty considerably less interesting to me. l. said to us, “well, we have no competition! we all like different ones!” ha. there’s something about flamenco that is so sensual and erotic in these ways that are hard to describe, but are totally enveloping. and this way it draws out attraction, but in this way of psychic magnetism rather than anything related to the ways we want people egotistically. it’s not about sex, necessarily, or wanting it, or even really about wanting the musicians. it’s something more complex and intriguing than all that. i think music always brings this sense out in me.

one of the heartwarming things about their performance was how thoroughly encouraging they all were with each other and how lovingly connected—no competition or ego involved. they egged each other on, improvised palmas and pitos and oh-ing and –eyyy-ing at each other’s solo moments, infectious responses which flooded the audience, too. mutualism that spread out to us. a wave of appreciation and embodiment and improvisation that we all took part in. connection and gratitude and generous virtuosity, humble genius, love, respect. it felt familial, like we were being let in to their circle, asked to share in their experience.

simultaneously within their and our element, i was inside my own. recalling cadiz, sevilla, malaga, granada. the unbearable heat of july in landlocked sevilla—53 degrees celsius—seeing the air rise in waves off the old, old pavement. dance anyway, walk anyway, long anyway and especially, in line with the agonizing heat.

recalling why i compartmentalized that time away somewhere not to be revisited, which had everything to do with the shame of being young, queer, in love with a close friend who loved me but couldn’t claim it ,was afraid of it—who broke my heart, came to hate me for her own hatred, shunned me because she couldn’t accept her/our queerness and what we were to each other—it was very secret, weird, very classic, very all over me, very pissing in a river, very youthful lovely/tragic. could i pursue a fate so twisted, could i crawl defeated and gifted? i was also embarrassingly infatuated with two of my teachers—my spanish teacher / cross country coach in nyc and one of the co-directors of the immersion program. which, looking back, was all totally normal and not shameful at all, even if silly. more normal in the scheme of my life than being in love with betty, actually. but, also the other resonant influences—family trauma, being something other than queer, too, and the way that my queerness/trans-ness was implicated in this monstrous way through my friend’s rejection of me. the first time in my life outside of the family structure that every intimate thing i’d shared would be used against me maliciously, spread around the school, tiny pariah. the awkwardness and pain of coming into myself through this, excelling anyway. but, to deny myself of that entire time period’s memories because of the shitty parts meant i also deprived myself of this other passion that was so fully my own, independent and private and separate, which i had shared with these three people, but weren’t innately connected to them. having become fluent in spanish because of the love of the language—how it moved and how it worked, the complex histories and experiences held within the language, the cultural, political, social geographies and backgrounds attached to it, the process of humbly learning about all that, coming to greater understandings and being very grateful for it. i think during the show, i started both grieving and being brought back to that lost enthusiasm. and also realizing the privilege i had in dropping off and picking up as i wished.

i remembered something that’s been constant in my life—my ability to be very comfortably singular and myself, even when tied to someone or wanting hopelessly (& kinda to my own detriment, as i was at the time and through my childhood and adolescence, being constantly infatuated with unattainable adults/mentors/teachers as i felt very disconnected from my peers and was always weirdly friends with adults/mentors/teachers, also being attached to my precociousness--something left over from growing up around adults, treated as one, and feeling detached and/or protective of other children around me). and i thought, how cruel to myself to not value how hard i go for things that spark me--my passions just because of the associations around them, to be ashamed of who i was then because of loving people and being made to feel it was wrong or crazy, to be ashamed of how i feel deeply and can appreciate many types of people while also keeping myself, being in my own world. people strive for this singularity and ardor and it’s always been central to who i am. trying to appreciate it finally and shuck off the old shame.

enamored by cadiz, small peninsular beach city, morocco straight across the water. the music of andalucia , how tied landscape was to flamenco and the language. how tied violence and erasure were, as well. gobbling up and taking everything in—the palimpsest of the landscape—violence, resilience, colonialism, appropriation, artistry, lineage, mad hope. the immersion program i was in was not about sugarcoating or denying the truth of spain’s colonial history and present—genocide, violent misogyny, extreme racism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, anti-roma/gitano sentiment and violence that the country was built on and still breathes through actively—it was palpable, hanging in the air, visible on the street socially among people, living in the bricks of buildings that generations of people were violently disappeared and displaced from. the thread of power through time of the catholic church in spain, too. fascism and franco. how when i was in granada, we were very close to the location where federico garcia lorca was murdered and thrown in an unmarked ditch, never found. the last gasps of fascism in spain currently (as of 2005-6) and our teachers (many of which were politically radical, some were not, many of which were queer—how lucky i was!) explaining the continuing, lingering influence of it in parts of society and culture, as nothing ever really goes away.

i remember going to a flamenco performance in a garden courtyard in sevilla late in the evening. the audience was arranged around the dancers and musicians. they danced through the aisles of us and there were dim blue floor lights lining the aisles and lights woven into trellises covered in ivy and vine plants. it was ethereal and beautiful and strange and sad. heart gushing with everything, silly infatuations, wanting to escape my family and nyc forever, yet loving them so thoroughly and feeling some sense of belonging still--poor/working class irish/italian catholic mess that we were, and betty, so similar so different, coming from a middle/upper-middle class east african and irish american catholic mess. us, that night: was i feeling preconceived loss or just hopelessness, or after-the-fact heartbreak, i don’t remember—all a wash now, all was happening at once anyway, as usual—the having and the losing. but, flamenco is all hormone rush, all torturous, longing agony, all hunger & confusion, all that teenage stuff. the simultaneity of past, present, future desire compounded and layered on each other—loving someone in real time, loving someone from a point of expected future loss—inevitable? loving someone before you know it, or before they know it, or when they sense it and you don’t or vice versa, loving someone though it’s over, trampled, or it would never begin or it made no sense, the foolishness, the invitation of suffering that loving anything brings to you. being human together. feigning indifference & requiring attention, walking toward and running away. the choices we make. how flamenco unapologetically announces all of these things and requires being fully expressive of the truth of your heart and your body, no judgment or time to analyze, and it feels cellular almost, as well as really huge. and you don’t have to be in love with an actual human or to ever have known “romance,” to know the feeling. and flamenco is expansive in its holding of romance, sexuality, eroticism—it can actually have nothing to do with being or wanting to be coupled. it’s mostly about living and feeling and suffering, loving whatever it is moves you to regardless of how perilous it can be to do so. but especially how natural and life-changing it is to do so even if it explodes.

that otherworldly experience and everyone feels it. men no less passionate or full of emotion than women, actually sometimes more so. men who can’t eat, who lose sleep for love, men who suffer. i didn’t know men like that. i knew hard men, stoic, belying emotion. women who wait and wait, who will accept love’s bare minimum, who do whatever they have to. i knew many women like that, was already that since childhood and was becoming that more as time elapsed. but also women who could destroy you, could destroy themselves because it was all too much—i was experiencing that and i was that. voices thrown across the courtyard in rageful anguish til they hit a wall and broke into a thousand sharp pieces everywhere. irrevocable. 

forbidden love and feelings—every love i’d ever had or dreamed of & every love i ever would, in some sense. not fitting molds, wanting to destroy any concept of what was right or pure. but the experience of withholding, love & death & falling apart, the harm of others’ addictions & intimate violences that eat at you forever and keep your eyes narrowed at intimacy. how you know love is not an escape from these truths and shouldn’t be treated as such—how you learn to not make that mistake, but you can’t control how others act. memories whose feelings came back to my body in spain 2005, 2006 and in nyc 2017—the feelings, but not the images. i don’t really know who or what hurt me first, if the beginning matters, how all of that filters into my growing experiences with relation. details are so vivid and obvious, some are just completely burned out. and origins probably aren’t the key to the truth or to the future anyway.

flamenco bringing out the fire i set in my head. the crazy femme, the lover of everything, of home—a sense i try to find everywhere. her own house, where it all started, s/he can’t stand anymore for what it means to her history, her future. burn it down, even with its first origins of joy, its mementos of togetherness. the sickness too overwhelming and too deep. needing its influence to be taken, engulfed, extinguished. natural. the noble thing about impossible loves, right, about family and anything really—to be so dedicated and loyal. setting fire to that and striking out toward something else, loyalty only if it’s earned. to learn to say no, for what you allowed for a long time to be eaten by flames, parts of other people, parts of yourself, parts of home. the things we reproduce. to approach the unknown, newness, a whole other way of being written over what you were, while still holding the innate truths of yourself, that core sense of connection you crave between yourself and everything, over everything else. faith.  

[rexylafemme]

let go let in let go let in let go let in let go let in

care. a concept a dear one from emergenyc, the arts/activist residency i’m a part of, said feels more fitting a term for what we are trying, flailing to do together and, in general, as part of the revolutionary process in a world shaped by forces completely antithetical to care. because care is tangible and maybe love is not, because love is a word we throw around and it hangs in the air and doesn’t sometimes look like action. something we say and don’t do and anyone can say they love something, but care has to be shown.

and something marlene of fulana said about who and where we are in the process of change—being in that build up, that wall of water so deep below the surface that propels the future of a wave before it happens. that to continue with anything we must accept that nothing is guaranteed. nothing is guaranteed, the grief of that truth. holding that, no guarantees, no control. but also it is an invitation to take the biggest risks, to say fuck safety because nothing has ever been safe. or it rides on the necessity of someone else’s complete lack of safety to exist. and so the excruciating determination that it takes to care.

while on the r train with j. of emerge, unraveling my insecurities and fears, knowing the kinds of backgrounds we share, that devastating attraction to broken things and hurting i think we are learning to leave behind, or we are trying. that to love someone, to care doesn’t have to mean giving up everything, doesn’t have to mean accepting that you will always be withheld from, always at the mercy of someone else’s purposeful or accidental cruelty or carelessness. at the mercy of the ways people can’t care for themselves or you, so you do it for them. and i was handing her honesties because she asked and i have been trying to be true to myself through others and the repetition for the spell i put together on the gemini new moon was LET GO LET IN LET GO LET IN. she said, “well, stick with it,” and i thought she meant love, but then, “oh, i misspoke, i meant to say stick with yourself,” and it was what i needed to hear and i said i would.

and i will, i mean, i am trying so hard. and i am trying until i am sick, and i am sick. sitting in my bed and everything hurts and i am dizzy and nauseous and i am resentful of how my emotions manifest themselves in my body as illness. i hate feeling at the mercy of things outside my control: how trauma will show up with me, in me, outside of me. how i respond to everything. how it makes me feel weak, exhausted, hopeless, powerless. and when i was speaking to ro a few weeks ago and they said does this end? and, no, it doesn’t. there is no departure or arrival, it just is. and managing through it, or not sometimes. mismanaging, maladjusted, sometimes i am so full of mistakes and they are all i can see and i wonder about my worthiness. and i think i should probably just lock myself away forever, until i am ready enough to be the best to everyone. but, the problem of never arriving there. and unrealistic goals. the desire to be perfect that being raised in chaos gave me. i want to be different, i want to be different, i want to be different. i want to be perfect, flawless, the best. i do not want to hurt anyone is what it comes down to. and not wanting to fail at that goal. realizing i have and will at times, which just is a push toward a harm-reductionist lifestyle.

and n. said to j., don’t deprive yourself of the future. saying it to her, but to all of us who were left in the performance space after our session was over, not wanting to leave each other, me in the corner next to j., hugging my knees as i do. which sometimes is a comfort and sometimes is me holding myself away from others, as i was doing. because i was listening, but what we were talking about striking a cord in my own weirdly tuned heart, a sound throwing itself back and forth into timelessness, seven generations backward, seven generations forward. and c. posed that question: what do we want to give back to those seven generations behind and ahead? and i think of the pressure: to be anyone’s greatest hope. to be my own greatest hope. again, i am trying really very hard.

the sense that, regardless of our very varying ages and stages of adulthood we are all in, in the room, but also wider than that, the people in our lives, the ones we have love and pain for, knowing we are all such small children. feeling that so much lately. my lips are trembling now, i am so trying to avoid breaking. and yet i want to burst open. and i remember learning that feeling was wrong, that desire was wrong, that having a body was wrong. anything we wanted was shameful, was too much. to ask was wrong. to need, wrong. all there is is sacrifice and that is what you dedicate yourself to, no matter what. that is what you are the vessel for. the family system.

maybe it’s resentment flapping its wings around in my chest, maybe that’s what is making it hurt in there today. maybe it’s a child’s yearning that has my stomach feeling full of holes and i am walking around my apartment feeling about to fall over, dizzy and swirling. some small abyss up there in my head, or an upsweep of spiraling wind behind my eyes. maybe i’m tired of holding and i want to be held. maybe i was always tired of holding, but i didn’t know how not to. because it was my responsibility, because i had no choice. i was too tiny for that. i grew up old and i am tired. and i just want to be well and i recognize i think of that, too, in terms of arrival. but, i am conscious of being constantly in a state of arriving, that wellness isn’t outside my reach just because i’m not always well, or just because i could be better. it could always be better. we have to figure out what we want that to look like, what it could feel like, taste like, the shapes of it. how we all talked about that at emerge: what specifically is our vision for change, care, honesty? feeling so thoroughly responsible for each other, yet also so incredibly alone, frustrated. hurt little children that we are. bratty angry teenage liliths. too much shame. too much feeling like we don’t deserve to shape our futures. raging against that with all we have.

i want so much, i think of that moment from flashdance often. alex in the confessional, voice breaking, eking out that honesty, tears. i want so much. i ache and i don’t know what for. or, i really do know. it’s fine, it’s a condition of living, totally common. i can’t hold what i’m holding anymore. i can’t hold it alone and i don’t want to anymore, tied up, bound up, some secret gift i refuse to open. all these things i was given i didn’t ask for. though some would say i did, or some would say my fault, or some would say you always get what you deserve, you always somewhat kinda want it. there’s something in you that enjoys it is the suggestion. and we were given that, taught that, we learned that, too.

femmes, sacrifice. femmes, take it. femmes holding everything. femmes, sick with it. sick of it. i focus on daydreams because i am so tired of all the nightmares. and i am so tired in general. and maybe imagination is a respite and dreams are visions to put into practice, to reach for. and i am frequently asking myself two opposing questions: am i doing too much, am i doing too little? always, i think, a little of both. or, they are probably the wrong questions. sometimes my output doesn’t meet my expectations, my requirements. like today. and so guilty to have to call out of work. feeling like maybe i do this to myself, but i have no control?

i want to be held, so i should let myself be held. i should let myself be cared for and not be so heavily dedicated to doing it all myself, for myself. it’s not realistic and it doesn’t make sense. maybe i am afraid, though. definitely. afraid of not getting what i want or need, afraid of what it all could mean, afraid of being hurt. but i’m already hurt. and as i lie here, a little trembly, some kinda water rising up, sloshing around my stomach, up my chest, up my throat, to my eyes, wavering there, wanting to fall out, wanting to be held, that question i have often: why am i always so far from those i love? which is also a question of why do i push people away, why do i push myself away, why do i hover outside of myself, why do i not allow my body and spirit what it wants and craves, why am i afraid of it, why does it hurt so much? and feeling so alone and wanting my friend-family—especially ilinca and shira and al and talya because we hold each other and cuddle and sleep curled up together, and i don’t have that in nyc, which is the biggest thing i miss from the bay. i am not physically intimate with my friends here. which has something to do with everyone being in partnerships. and something to do with me. an ad something to do with new york and how it makes my body feel or what it brings up for my body.

anyway, longing for my bay family, the biggest—ilinca, my heart. and i am thinking of them, and then they all facetimed me from a picnic! shira and ilinca and talya and al and the screen was all grainy and washed out because shira’s screen is dirty so they look kinda like ghosts in a rainy cemetery and not like they are in the sun at all, which they are. they are at mosswood park on 34th st and broadway by my old house on 39th st and i am here on 40th st in nyc, deceptively far away. they couldn’t hear anything i was saying. but mostly me just saying i wanted to be there. hold me hold me hold me, hug me! and that being impossible. but connection across distance and time is so possible, obviously. and did they sense i was thinking of them? there’s a cord between our hearts.

then ilinca calling me directly and i was starting to cry just a little. she said she could hear i was sad in my voicemail i left earlier today. i can’t really hide anything, i realize. especially from her. life partner, anne and diana or we were vita and virginia but poor, bloomsbury babes, eleven years of knowing each other. having been through so much together, sometimes having put each other through so much together. the beauty of how our relationship has grown and changed. and it is expansive and people have been confused and threatened by it, but we are family and friends. and lovers, too, still, in some sense, a very different sense than how we started as lovers. she is someone i allow to care for me. she calls me sparrow and sunbeam, beam for short. and i call her bean and wink and love. and she has always called me darling and i love the way her voice sounds when she says it.

alyssa, my therapist, says the things i criticize myself for are really beautiful things: that i feel so deeply, that i am so sensitive, that i am full of desire and love and care, that i want better, that i want to be loved, that i hope for healing for others and want to help people heal. i know i am loved and i am healing. i know feeling is a virtue, the most virtuous and natural thing we can do as these deeply flawed creatures that we are. and even as i am laying here feeling alone, disconnected, not held, or devoid of comfort, i am not any of those things. because i am existing all the time, with everyone i love all the time, regardless of where my body is at the moment, where my spirit is. and atlas has been cuddling me extra today and purring on me, he’s on my lap now, slowly closing his eyes. he looked up into my eyes and winked when i started to cry, raised his nose to my face. and he is holding me today, holding my arm right now. soft little familiar friend. atlas, i named him because i love maps and because atlas held the world on his shoulders and was the god of endurance. and i didn’t realize that the atlas star system was inside of the constellation of taurus and also pleiades, my favorite celestial body. i care, i’m cared for, atlas teaches me this and also about what it is to endure.

[rexylafemme]

infinite deaths lead to infinite transformations

i recognize lately that there's this lingering sense of failure & loss & sadness living in my body, existing just out of frame in my thoughts (meaning, i guess, i don't give real space, attentive space to), having specifically to do with [said in bratty, tongue-in-cheek, big big air quotes] "my identity," "my body." 

the other night i was on the phone with a dear kindred friend of many years, was responding to something she said and i said, "if i were you, that would make me feel really bad. i mean, if i were a human being, that would..." i stopped and then we both started cracking up. freudian slip. in the moment, i'm not quite sure what i meant, but it felt like i really meant it, really natural to say. not being a human being is a sense i have about myself, i think because humanness is defined by things that are fundamentally exclusive of my experience, how i see myself, how i think, how i move through the world, what my body is. also, trans people just ARE mythical creatures.

anyway, whatever. i don't "exist" technically, but i do exist actually. and also, we have always existed, we-- trans people [which i use as a really broad, inclusive term to include all of the figures who never are/were able to claim that term, all of the figures for whom it does/did not exist, all of the figures it is/was robbed from, all of the figures who it is/was rewritten out of] have always existed. we are not new.

anyway, whatever. this quieted, stifled, devastated feeling of loss/grief/sadness/failure. though i wrote an article about it, i've never actually grieved testosterone. grieved taking it, grieved what i would not have not taking it, the death of the possibility. that my decision to stop was motivated by a number of things we aren't really able to talk about with pride, gusto, ease. [who is we in this sentence, all my non-human, trans self-states (?)  strung together through this thread of my life, the life i didn't ask for but i have anyway and try to appreciate tho it seems widely the Reality i live in, am called Human or not-Human in, doesn't appreciate me often-- tho i have a lot of really amazing loving people in my life far and wide, and, yes, have fought to carve out space to be seen in, acknowledged in, appreciated in [not just for trans-ness] however fully or un-fully, however full of truths or lies.]   i'm fucking crazy-- i identify that way, probably ahead of any other thing i am other than being poor and white, i am crazy before i am trans, i am crazy before i am anything that defines what my body is bc who cares and who knows but me [tho i recognize the political importance of identifying my body as something, i guess, even when it is nothing, feels like it or i am outside of it mostly or effectively it is treated like nothing, by me, others, lovers, the state, etc], i am crazy before i am queer-- if even i am that, having always had an ambivalent relationship with that term given its evolution as this annoying and unfortunate category that recycles exclusion and problems of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, gatekeeping, rules for how to be, who to fuck/love/be close to and how, how to look, what to wear, what to like, builds institutions whose foundations are based in all of the above, etc. how quickly we forget how poor crazy black, brown, and white people radicalized the word queer, how it became Queer, trademarked by judith butler et al, liberal arts colleges, universities, research journals and then further used to silence, reject, consume, criticize, murder-by-complicity poor crazy black, brown, and white trans and queer people. rageful yawn! [so boring, so anger-producing, so over it]. and all of this so then jill soloway can make "the best tv series of the century"  [so says a white cis old dude w/ money named sparrow to my trans coworker who gets fed up with him after he says something like 'oh your name is different than it was a few months ago, that's so interesting. no one changes their names anymore unless they're transsexuals" and then they were like "yeah that would be me." "OHHHH TRANSPARENT IS THE BEST TV SHOW OF THE CENTURY," sparrow says in response. sparrow, who said to me, as many before him have and many after will: "YOUR name is rex? YOU? it's so WEIRD, YOUUU have that name???! wow, who would've thought!" cuz being a grown-ass white man self-named after a fucking bird isn't weird at all. transparent, yay, the tv show about US, that's not really about US. and i watch it so i guess i'm probably a hypocritical asshole, but i am starving for some representation. anyway, whatever. i'm probably crazy and poor before other things because crazy and poor provides the wash over which everything else i live is experienced. crazy, poor, grieving this synthetic steroid i experienced as poison in my body and brain. this thing i can't have that i want. this toxic thing. toxic because it erodes away my vag, toxic because it could destroy my liver, toxic because continued use over time could pose all these extreme health problems, but who knows really! cuz, why would we study that?! and when we do study it, why would we focus on the multiplicity of bodies and spectrum of people who approach HRT?! toxic because i am a crazy poor person with a lot of health problems to begin with that i don’t talk about and i probably would develop all the like, weird anomalous issues that "most people just won't ever have to worry about"! [most people is... ? ]

toxic because i lost all track of how i related to myself, how i felt, or what i even wanted while i was on it. i know what i want and what i like [about what it gave me]: more hair everywhere [yay!], androgynizing body shape [awesome!], growth in my underwear [i don't really know what to call what in-betweenness is going on there, cockette i say to myself but that feels maybe too campy for general use and not sexy however fitting and hilarious. anyway, it's cool and fun!], androgynizing voice [sometimes sultry, sometimes pubescent, sometimes girly, fran fine as a man laugh, excellent]. and the goal was always androgynizing, was always becoming something else, not one thing. tiresias, venus as a boy, dionysus, whatever.

but so i am sad because i can't move forward with those things that i like. the embodiment. and embodiment for me, as a crazy poor person, is constantly difficult. am i ever even in my body, do i have one, what is it good for, why. i moved further away from a sense of even desiring "masculinity" when i started t. that was a gift, to realize my desire wasn’t about acquisition of “maleness.” i just wanted all the things i described above: the physical changes that for whatever reason signify "maleness" or "trans-maleness" and therefore told people that's what i wanted because i wanted those physical attributes. i don't wanna be a man or a trans man. man, not something that i ever felt like. boy, dude, male, maybe, some hybrid masc/femme thing, cross-human.  i definitely didn't want the head-hair loss/thinning, which happened and put me into a neurotic, severely gender-NONCONFIRMING frenzy. i can't lose my hair i can't lose my hair. call it femme vanity, i dunno or really care, a bitch isn't gonna be bald, that's it, not ok not possible not happening so that also informed my decision to stop t, tho i didn't really admit it. i won't say i didn't/don't want the "he" pronoun, sometimes. i want them all. i'm greedy and excessive and i don’t like being limited. i want to be what i am: a mix, a shapeshifter. one angle i look like one thing, one angle another. the reason people stare at me all the time: bewildered, upset, confused, looking for clear markers. staring at my crotch or into my eyes, my face, working out their assessments. judging what i'm wearing against my facial hair against my makeup against my voice against an absence of breasts against my name against my...

anyway, whatever. i am sad because i can kinda have all of those things: more hair, more androgynized body. if i try hard enough. if i have enough time and money. because i could see a nutritionist and an herbalist specializing in trans health [they exist if you can pay to see them!]. or alternately, i could DIY it, buy all the herbs in the androgynizing herb regimen i came up with through research, and i could take them every day for... forever if i wanted, or for however long i wanted to, based solely on my desire to do it. not if i wanted, if i could. but i don't have the money. and i can't. and i could do all the exercises that would androgynize my shape. if i had the time and the energy. if i could get my shit together enough. if i weren't cycling in and out of housing insecurity since i returned to nyc and even before and through my whole life. if i weren't, some days, just able to do the bare minimum for myself, if i weren't racked with body pains somedays from a combination of: the things i do to my body that are bad for it [binding], not being able to sleep, work, running around, having a sick, sensitive body, the ways i carry stress in my body and where. if i didn't have problems prioritizing myself. if i weren't afraid of the structure of my exercise and nutrition regimen evolving into eating disorder and unhealthy obsession like they have before. if i weren't crazy.

it becomes about all the things i am always failing at that i can't do much about other than be patient and accept the material/systemic/emotional limitations that frame my life. back to poor, back to crazy: why i can't move forward at the speed that i would like to with my "transition." crazy means i can't be on t without being crazier and more sleepless and more in trauma self-states. crazy means i sometimes can't live up to my own structures and routines for my own health: body, mind, spirit. poor means i can't go to the trans nutritionist, the trans herbalist, buy the herbs and have them all the time. and i'm trying so hard to get that money, to do that. or, i'm trying so hard to be okay with not having what i want, what i need. remembering it's not my fault. there's nothing i can do about it. but that's not really a consolation so much as it is another reminder of my powerlessness to shift certain realities that affect not only me, but so many other people i care about, or people i do not know, everyone who should have everything that they want and need, regardless of who they are and what they can afford materially/socially/politically.

and i am grieving for all the knowledge we have lost and is not widely accessible. because tho i may not have the evidence or may not have done all the research, i fucking know people have been "transitioning" naturally and through magic for as long as people have existed and throughout all cultural contexts, whether trans-ness has been exalted (and it has, throughout time) or demonized/criminalized/driven underground. our mythological selves.

[rexylafemme]

day five of being alive another year and basking in the afterglow of it. embracing the preciousness of my own life, as i can so easily and readily do for others. last night, tres and i sat around a patio table in his backyard, too late too late to be awake, but running off of post-performance endorphins, fumes, relation. talking about the powerful communal bonds that exist in our lives, the sense of possibility and potential we all bring each other, that gratifying feeling of nourishment, empowerment, creativity, change. on a day like today, i’m glad we had last night. today has been one of sitting with contradictions—despair, grief, gnawing rage after what happened with healthcare today and that trash executive order, too. to walk around and see children laughing anyway. to walk around and for mundane nyc conversations to be happening anyway. holding onto those small appreciations, despite the grip of fear/anxiety/rage, that clawing. letting myself feel that, letting myself sit for a minute in the grass with the sun on my face, listen to a song and give some space to the fluttery butterfly feeling in my stomach, the feathers ruffling in my little heart.

i got off work after 11 on friday night and stopped over at tres and tanya’s. we were all so sleepy, but so happy to see each other, heart-friends. they said i was glowing, bright-seeming lately. yeah. we had one shot of whiskey at midnight and had a mariah carey sing-along. their advice for me: go all in, surrender to the feelings you have. we can never know what’s going to happen, what comes down the line, which is why we should go for what we want. to trust what we want and what feels good, enjoy it, follow it. to believe in what you’ve built and the work and intention you’ve put into getting where you are now and where you want to go.

i said go big or go home. and then i did go home. laughing on my bike, cruising down the wide dark avenue parallel to greenwood, the smell of grass and so-sweet blooming trees riding on the invisible waves of wind hitting my face. i thanked basquiat. i made it through. i was alive. a few days before, it was gray and misty all day long, but i was restless. i walked to greenwood and took tons of pictures of all the new plants and flowers and trees and bushes, graves. i decided to visit basquiat’s grave and do a ritual there. i offered him flowers i picked, i drew him, and i wrote him a letter. i was thinking a lot about my 27th year coming to a close, living with the irrational fear i would die. having at one time or another been obsessed with many in the 27 club: amy, jimi, kurt, janis, jean-michel, and jim. all the pain we shared. not wanting to be frozen in time, wanting as much of it i can get my hands on, as much time and life and love and abundance as i can get my hands on, as much i can give back and multiply. the difference between desire and avarice hinges upon giving and receiving, tending, not taking, or expecting, or entitlement. nothing i have i own. nothing i want is mine. everything shared.

so, i sat on a damp marble bench behind basquiat’s grave, white sunlight through the dense white sheet of sky cast over everything bright and green and wet and colorful; verdant and juicy and creating such a contrast against the starkness. and, yes, mistakes and, yes, death and, yes, uncertainty, and, yes, wounds, and yes, questions. but, mostly hope. mostly a will to continue, power forth and forward and thoughts on upward spirals, the ascending staircases arranged in fractals that my spirit follows. all the doorways and the windows to walk through, being up from the cellar now. or the bomb shelter, or the panic room. the safe i kept my heart locked up in. the body that was itself a cage where all the broken, feral parts were stored away. the power they had, though, motivating such a craving to escape. do whatever you can. get out. times maybe i was close to following a bad habit down the road to my own death. the week before having watched the rose with femme blood family, thinking of the thorns we’ve all been. thinking of the three little children we were inside these oversized human suits. the ones that aren’t satisfied with anything less than brilliance. the ones that have been drawn to recklessness, excess. always wanting to feel something else, wanting us to be something else. did i forget we were cut from the same cloth? did i forget we mourned the same people, same times? i have held their choices against them, i have held their lives against them, at times, while expecting them to never do that to me. so bratty, so childish. and to them i will always be young, but also the infant with ancient eyes, as they said when i was born.

how much we say without speaking. the things we tell each other underneath the stories. things like i see you, things like i know you are hurting, things like don’t be ashamed, things like i know you. things like i love you. i think we’ve spent so much time feeling heartbroken for each other. so much desire for someone to be safe and healthy and happy and whole, you don’t know what to do with it. it just sloshes around in your blood pumped out from your sore heart. our. we feel each other.

when i got home after tres and tanya’s, it was officially my birthday. tyler and i sat in the living room on the couch together. he did a reading of my solar return chart for the year. my subconscious is a huge focus and a hotbed of activity this year—in a kind of wild, creative way from influences of aries and sagitarrius, but stabilized and slowed down by taurus and venus. i’m being told to face and unleash what i repress through creativity and embodiment. that my body is an instrument in my own healing. and so is whatever i make with it. i’m being told to realize that what i create spiritually and what i express has wider influential reach to others. he said i bring out the spiritual warriors in others, especially through my work. that i’m drawn to the fight in others and in myself and i have connective power. moon and node placements move me to trust my intuition and integrate it into everything that i do. this year is a good year for learning new skills and how to keep living differently. it’s a good year for pursuing dreams and big collaborations. new ways of being. new ways of being with others. the process of growth and learning will be exciting, welcome, and transformative. i’ll grow a lot emotionally and a lot will get released. i will lose and gain myself through my work and what i create/contribute. i desire balance. i want everything, but i have to take it one step at a time and trust i will achieve my goals and get what i desire.

what this says to me, also, is to sink into the ways things feel new and different. that i shouldn’t always be waiting for the floor to fall out from under me, just because i am used to that sort of thing. i put down the floor, i built the foundations and they’re solid. feel good. trust in me. trust what feels true and real.

in the cemetery, after my ritual, i shed some tears, not nearly as many as i need to shed, but i was grateful for a little release. i saw eyes patterned on trees. i stood still and made eye contact with a groundhog. as i was leaving, i stood in the grass with about 25 of the greenwood parrots around me, in the grass, on the trees. they swooped past my face. they were boisterous and yelling at each other and moving too much, i couldn’t get a good picture. sometimes you just have to be there, be in it, take note in yourself.  

i want to go into the magic of the in bloom show, but that feels like it needs its own space. i do want to share two of the poems i read from that night, though, because they feel related to all the life/death, shadow/light, bloom talk.

gently through my shadow

sometimes i walk the streets

of my home city, beer bottle glass crunching

under feet, graves to my right, trains

to my     left    wondering   why   i am

here,    & not living

in a one-room box i built myself   in the forest

no one can reach—gridless ,     me   with just atlas, a tape deck, some lace

& paper flowers, a notebook, upside-down herbs

lining all the walls, & Stevie Nicks

in the background as i am

all Misty Day twirling in circles

with my scarves swirling around me, craving

a tribe, but knowing what we humans do, so

don’t come for me, don’t call to me,

but do   come for me, call to me?—conflicted,

sea-of-love-drowned, downcast androgynous

femme radagast, friends with all the animals

& plants, misanthropic old-soul / baby-face, speaking to creatures like st. francis, but more

prophetic, less catholic &   now   here

i go    again,   i see the crystal vision    i keep

my visions to myself—

write a poem about them instead—poet

of my heart—self, never change & don’t you ever stop—      drowning? in dreams

i remember

how to breathe underwater, sometimes i am so far from the surface, i can almost find happiness there   in my element amidst sunken ships, schools of fish, &     just me    floating— how long ago did you lose yourself— an echo travels backwards through walls of timeless ocean and asks again—how long? your scales so smooth & beautiful, years, iridescent, hexagonal pieces of you— it’s like you’ve always been this gone, this mysterious deep sea creature— is it in your skin or is it a defense mechanism, hiding— do you know? the difference, intricacies of your makeup and what it means to you when an eye casts itself upon them? & didn’t you know fins for swimming evolve into wings eventually? & haven’t you been waiting to take off? go away isn’t the initial message i transmit, not the gut influence i get, but then i did say  i was a cave-dweller & i wasn’t kidding—holy hermitage—oh mirror in the sky, is total solitude the same as bringing safety home with you?

i don’t know, i don’t know   is it

some attempt at human care services, step by step metamorphosis, getting closer to being  taken by the sky, no, but we do get ourselves there, somehow, don’t we?    always overthinking—did   she/he/they   make you cry, make you break down, shatter your illusions of love? yes, and,   but,    is it over now? do you know how to pick up the pieces & go home? all i’ve known is evil witches: lousy lovers pick their prey— Fiona Goode burned the Myrtle Snow in me at the stake for my honor, self-defense & killer fashion sense—it was all control & morbid jealousy, rulers make bad lovers    and other descendants: Madison Montgomery said she was my friend, called me a gutter rat, & then stole my beloved covering before throwing me into a coffin underground,

& when they dug me up & revived me for whatever reason, i spit up inky blood & thick mud, my own death, & said fuck this institution—feeling, competition, & who the supreme is—i won’t give a shit anymore, & i never did. in the stillness of remembering   i’m better off dancing alone, i think     like a cat in the dark and then    i am    the darkness—knee-deep

in the swamp—sewer channels of asheville, oakland, queens, or brooklyn, i am a dragon & then    i turned around and the water was closing all around me—writing poetry & communing with crocodiles, black widow spiders, wearing a live snake stole and a cape of slime & ivy wrapped around me with micah swathed on my eyelids, majesty you can call me. but…

stand back    stand back   in the middle of my room if you touch me, i’ll scream. if you touch me, i’ll tell someone. if you touch me, i’ll never be the same again,   i say it like it can only be a bad thing, & it isn’t,   but it is   the risk.   i worry about  feeling anything & coming up for air from within myself for someone to face me    while Stevie sings  have no fear, only love & i try to

listen to that advice, more than the   thunder

only happens when it’s raining, players only love you when they’re playing—but i’m stubborn, full of memories, venom,   like a scorpion: i keep to myself, & i sting when cornered, but there are humans who are healing & open, i know because i am, & i can’t be the only one.

bloom wave

the trees are blooming in greenwood  my favorite

graveyard    playground, the sun is hitting

the glitter on my eyelashes, projecting pixels

in the periphery of my vision     what a feeling,

serotonin and kinship all over  the place, at home

here in brooklyn finally   silver linings

are aware to me   and anxiety is just a state

of consciousness i  pass through on the road back toward

the center of myself, home, breathing doubt out

into fifty-three degree breezes on 40th st. walking

toward sunset park where i will sit and gaze at red hook

across the east river where my family was born

on conover st, end of the docks

on the waterfront     where brando coulda been

a contender and my grandfather watched the lionhearted

majesty of my grandmother in the sun:  a curious feeling

of wonder on a day like today, maybe

everything is kinda charmed and timeless, maybe eternity

looks on me  and smiles, maybe infinity is inside me and

my heart is some prismatic thing that reflects and refracts

light off in a million directions and it won’t ever die again

in my beautiful trash heap of a city   where people struggle

and fall in and out of love again and again with the streets they grew up and re-find themselves on   every day   years 

later  resonating   their own histories in the present moment: a new gift

given back to old ancestries   when people are sweet

to each other like peaches (but less vanilla)—

& on the corner, you can get the treats you want

from the bodega: honey buns, hershey’s kisses,

whatever suits yr preference, or down the block in all five boroughs

mr. softee transmitting his tin-tin ice cream truck music and italian ices at lemon ice king of corona in queens, all things   signaling spring and inspiring all kinds of cuteness—children laughing,

clowning   spraying each other in water fountains   and

playful whirling down the slide into the arms of

april—

feeling like a teenager, all silly riding my bike

in the afternoon up and down hills round the neighborhood,

my thoughts on expanse, abundance, and chance,

saying to myself sometimes someone

says something    really small    and it just fits

right into this empty place    in yr heart—

acting all sentimental, all poor trans adult   angela chase with my messy bottle-fire hair, attempting tiger beat jean jacket pretty dreamboat in a hand-me-down striped ralph lauren sweater, leo/juliet, romeo/claire all in one

hand in my pocket &   singing  i’m lost, but

i’m hopeful and when you have rickie, rayanne, & other-kin

like yrself     who needs anyone     unavailable, too-cool, or

mostly straight—those withholding heartthrobs  always

leaning   away from you    on brick walls blocking yr walking   away in the halls of some sludgy stress dream where you never reach

where yr going & the face you touched was just an image

from the past that disappears

as yr waking— tired and wanting, unrequited—

the jordan catalanos who hated you secretly

for feeling, or who they couldn’t be for you as they wanted you only

kinda/sorta, singing    s/he’s a place to rest my head, a suggestion  

it coulda been you, but really their red wasn’t yr hair, it was a car  

driving away to the desert—  no bye cuz guys like them just    go    &

try to call you months later from a parking lot payphone—i’m wrong

and i’m sorry,   baaaaaby? making you cry alone   in yr bedroom,

& having  you ask constantly  why   are you like this!    all distant,

dumb-founded (huh? like what?)

…like…

                 like…

                                 like…    

          how    you    are?

and the answer always a shrug   in the silence

between us.

going my own way and taking ownership of it—

so many spirits flow over

me and i love it    oh, to be so pleasantly haunted

& embraceable for being true

is the actual thing

i’d always wanted.

[rexylafemme]

i’m afraid i’ll never get to heaven

at night, i curl into the corner, squirm about sleepless in dull, orange halloween light from a string that frames my window in a partial rectangle in my bedroom. head buzzes, endless pen scribbles and labryinths—thoughts memories thoughts memories. before putting myself to bed, i was naked under my faux-silk coral robe splattered with pink lilies, taking my own taurus advice, writing and drawing and leafing through my witch books with atlas watching me as he sits by my altar. a prayer card with joan of arc from my childhood church hovers over trinkets that belonged to dead family members in the pink interior of my altar. josephine baker on the wall over my shoulder. i whisper queries out loud to my ghosts and they speak back to me in cards: queen of wands, ace of hearts, protection from heartache, vision. they tell me to listen and stop asking the same questions, dwelling in my own doubt—faulty ego logic instead of being led by my gut. in the background, maybe nat king cole sings there was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. and like when i was thirteen & tho it felt impossible, i feel the song is my story. the only thing i ever really believed in, however much it hurt: the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. after a lot of wandering very far, very far back and forth and running away to come back and a lot of the “in return” part evading me, in new york again, that nature boy embodiment feeling a little more possible, a little more real: a little shy & sad of eye & very wise,   was he?

i wonder. i think on my bitterness, my capacity for cruelty that i choose not to access, but my eyes on fire, my blood stewing with rageful electricity, the sheer depth of it all & what to do with impulse. especially when i remember older nights: manipulation, struggle, intimate violence, thievery, lies i ate from the mouths of snakes, demons, fork-tongued, full of tricks and duplicities; courting death, starving and vomiting and escaping and running and bleeding and losing and hurting. but also dancing and being other people and gorgeous debauchery. dying is an art like everything else, a long road, and i often felt more beautiful, like i made more sense walking it, in boots all summer long and shit. lines between lovers/friends/family blurring as time does in trauma/land. believing the lies others told me about myself, in my own weakness, confused about my own real experiences—who said what, what’s true, what happened? shrug. craving explanations that would make sense of snarled internal circuitries. & wanting to be rid of it all.

i remember myself blooming and brimming and swimming with love as a child. for my family—local, extended and friends and neighbors and teachers. all different kinds of people & things. musicians, actresses, music, art. i wanted to embrace it all, take it all in, take everyone in. every different angle, every feeling, every experience. and for those people and things i didn’t know, i wanted to befriend and understand. disharmony makes me sad and confused, that much i know. when what we need from each other appears so simple & suffering so easy to avoid in theory, and yet the things we do…? & i can’t fix it.

i recently went deep into researching where my liliths are in my chart. lilith: the jean grey of astrology/mythology. the underworld version of venus. before s/he was bastardized and demonized by christianity/patriarchy, lilith was worshipped as a goddess of independence, uncontainability, sexuality, fierce/raw/untameable power. s/he doesn’t submit, s/he embraces her depths, her contradictions, gives no fucks, and is really hot. s/he’s the shadow as well as the allure of it, indefinable obscurity personified. and the celestial bodies attributed to lilith are generally not visible in the sky, and the dark and black moon are rumored to not even exist (according to cis men, basically).

my asteroid lilith and my true lilith are both in scorpio, my dark moon lilith is in cancer, and my black moon lilith is in libra. aka mad / intense. a lot of opposing forces from other parts of my chart (sun in taurus, venus in taurus, leo rising, etc). the placement of sylvia plath’s dark moon and black moon are the same as mine. she and i both also have our moon in the 8th house. her sun is in scorpio. halloqueens. all sex and death and night and phantoms.

back to being thirteen, when i became obsessed with sylvia plath. to the anxiety of my mother, especially when i cried hysterically, having a crisis of faith because, i said, it wasn’t fair if she were condemned to hell for killing herself—just because she felt living was too painful. wasn’t it?

venus/lilith. heaven/underworld. sun/moon. foreground/background. but, binarism is a false dictate. an opposing force is actually a complement. lilith and venus need each other, they make the most sense when they dance. coming together to drift apart, moving independently of each other, but working off each other and always linked. no one influence overpowering the other, an exchange of perspectives, energies. love and rage.  

doing the venus/lilith dance, and by way of myself the cards say:

don’t forget who you are. don’t forget what and who you come from. don’t forget yr power, how loving you are and who loves you. don’t forget that yr strong & resilient. don’t forget yr sweetness, yr generosity. don’t forget who you love, who is there for you. don’t forget the good stuff. don’t forget you are real and alive.

remember yr courage. remember the joy you bring to others. remember who you’ve always been. remember yr capacity for growth. remember yr gifts, dreams, hopes. remember to breathe. remember to love yourself, to be yr own BFF and boo. remember to slow down. remember yr body is regenerative. remember yr part of nature & you are divine. remember you and everyone deserves love.

love the living and dead loves and influences in yr life. take in every lesson. listen to other people—their needs, their experiences, their desires, their truths. listen to yr own desires, needs, truths, experiences. listen to yr body. listen to yr spirit. listen to music! the sounds of life!

be free, be sensual, transcend. be abundant. be the biggest, best, loudest version of you. sing of yourself, sing of the beauties of others & the world. love life. be blood & skin & hair & spit & nails & face & heart & lungs & organs.

be a part of life & appreciate it. be glorious and spread it around. spread love/freedom/change/beauty. it ain’t hippie-dippie, it’s the real deal. fuck competition and putting people down, putting up walls, over-intellectualizing. sensations and feelings are the bizness, where it’s at. represent the times. turn the negative on its side. uplift. do the opposite of damage, even when it feels things are falling apart. people change. life is learning, pain, growth, healing. be vibrant, be verdant, be light. be a sun and know there are galaxies of suns out there—giving off light together.

let yourself be guided. why not live in the idea that everything is meaningful and poignant? why focus on what’s cursed, & over?

you find you know things without being told, the fortune cookie said to you and it was true and you didn’t ask for the foresight, but got it anyway. self-acceptance leads to full acceptance.

let go of blame. people cope badly because they’ve been hurt. but, don’t stay where you are if someone is hurting you there. leave. relationships are allowed to fail or not work—they usher in better things in their breaking. it’s okay to let go. it doesn’t mean you didn’t care. its ok to change yr mind or to disagree, to say no. it’s ok to be different, to celebrate yourself, to be ambitious. anyone who really loves you would want that for you. don’t give up or let anyone make you feel you should.

don’t dwell on mistakes, failures. forgive yr past. tell yr torn-up parts you love them, acknowledge them, and are gonna get to them (in due time). don’t beat yourself up, be sweet to you. trust yr process—what you’ve already accomplished and where yr headed.

purge: old stuff, memories, trinkets, connections—you don’t have to hold people, things, experiences in yr heart and life in the same way forever—yr allowed to change, to move on, to let go. there’s some fucked up thinking i’ve inherited from somewhere else around this—something about feeling like i have to remain in grief or pain over a loss with a certain kind of consistency or longevity, which is not true. that myth of unending widowhood. 

write down all the nasty stuff and burn it. break stuff (in a controlled setting and safely).

talk about it with people? or don’t. let yourself feel what yr gonna feel without judgment. let yr heart go where it wants—don’t be afraid of it (as tanya advised). don’t close yourself off and hide yourself away, love is not a weakness (as mom advised). what good is love that no one shares?  trust that you are worthy and loveable, even at yr “worst.” thought-block self-loathing.

plant yr garden, bitch! literally: buy the seeds and get to work. play with atlas. pay attention/model yourself after babies and children (simone knows all). accept compliments and be gracious.

be vanessa ives, be shirley manson, be dorian gray, be robert smith, be jean grey. be sad and broody sometimes. wear dark colors sometimes to match the parts of yr soul that feel like a swirling abyss. marry the night (open marriage tho bc you need daytime too). watch horror movies. be a vampire, a witch, a bat, a hawk, a raven, a spider, a cat, a swan. be wild & ornery. bite & chew & eat & scratch & scream. be a bitch and proud when required. don’t be mean. take walks in the rain. cry in public, wear sunglasses at night. listen to all the new wave/goth/sad music. be angela chase, but poor and trans and less annoying. be rickie and rayanne (minus the substance problem). love all the weirdos. be a freak. take no shit. have long nails. be a pink lady—rizzo (lilith) / frenchie (venus) / marty maraschino. be cute and feel sexy. don’t be afraid or ashamed of yr body & sexuality.

let go more. funnel yr intensity into yr work and art. use art, dancing, movement, singing to get out grief/anger/frustration/pain. read intense poetry and books. create structure where it feels good. don’t over-discipline yourself. exorcise catholicism’s influence. make calendars and charts and organize as you like (why be ashamed??).

ask for what you want. don’t be confined by definitions or fears. be multitudinous and deep. be really trans & queer & gay & glam & flamboyant & tomboyish & deep lez & faggy & queenie & whatever the fuck you want. claim yr born-&-raised queenz-ass self. keep being fiercely independent/grown-up latch-key kid, but also don’t isolate. let people in.

remember what’s always been true about you: that what you really value most about life is who you share it with and the magic of connection & intimacy that is possible always and in so many different ways & across time and place. remember yr pain comes from when we fail each other, limit each other, try to control each other, cause each other undue suffering.

take yr broken heart and make it into art as carrie fisher said. show yourself, don’t expect the worst. remember you are not too broken, not too damaged, not a lost cause. remember you are more than the fucked up things that have happened to you.

tell yrself that you did not deserve the pain others inflicted upon you, whether deliberately or inadvertently. forgive yourself for the ways you’ve inadvertently or deliberately hurt others. learn from these flaws. forgive yourself for the ways you’ve hurt yourself inadvertently or deliberately. keep learning.

sit with the fact that life is hard and complicated and we will all have to face losses. let yr losses transform you. TEARS DRY ON THEIR OWN, BITCH! and you survived the 27 club. 

be in water & lose yourself. look at the sky & feel small. lie on the ground and feel it rumble beneath you. listen intently and observe. look people in the eye. lovingly challenge yourself and others. only keep people around you who support, respect, and honor you. brush off haters and hate feels. require mutualism and honesty in everything you do and give it in return.

act with yr highest intentions at all times. look for signs and follow them. trust yr ability to attract what you want and need. trust yr desires and go with the flow of them.

trust yr visions and work with them to bring them to life. keep on living.

[rexylafemme]

i am just one small part of forever

i’ve been on this almost-secret trip back toward the center of myself. mostly in preparation for very large transformations to come in my life, things i’ve needed and wanted for a long time, for all my life. i’ve been motivated by the intention of seeking the actions and experiences that fit the greater patterns and cycles of my life & cycles of wider social, political, cultural shifts. what i/we need to move forward. it’s not a new trip, i’m just owning it out loud.

because there’s so much more to us and what we’re capable of than these bullshit systems, barriers, these realities we’ve created or have been complicit in maintaining. their limitations and violences are constructed. failures. there are always other options, other ways. the answer to the question of “how?” frequently feeling elusive. or change feeling hopeless, impossible. and, yet, everything changes all the time. shifts in consciousness happen all the time, sometimes even driven by a generative hopelessness. it’s about harnessing that power, being able to come together, do something with it. it feels so physical. as in, of physics. energetic. so all about bonding and force. that i feel a pull toward the destiny of revolution, collective love/rage, creation in my body, that it feels deeper than my body, deeper than psyche. that those are the essential things, the real driving forces, the real truths, the real imperatives. i can’t feel this clarity all the time. but that we’ve had it once, or we’ve had it before, i can feel it in my circuitry. or, we have it all the time in small ways, in fleeting moments. people come together all the time, people force cultural shifts, people create all the time, people learn, people fight back all the time, people build. always have & when you trace those lines through the threads of time, there’s this overwhelming rush—a feeling of empowerment and potential. a feeling to keep going. the clarified knowledge that scarcity is a lie. & if we weren’t powerful, they wouldn’t want us dead or broken. self-fulfilling prophesies aid in perceiving only what we expect to see. the world will speak to us in the language that we provide.

been thinking a lot about my contributions in relation to all of this, my responsibilities to myself, others, my communities. i’ve been reflecting on the ways my sense of vocation and obligation are totally informed by my own positionality, which of course, has everything to do with the privileges i do and don’t have. that i have a lot of work to do, a lot of learning. that i have to show up and also be shown up for. about giving and receiving support, resources. from each, to each.

thinking about how i’ve had a hard time prioritizing my own needs in the past, how i’ve been even ashamed to tend to my needs, or to ask for anything. thinking it was selfish. but that’s what i was taught to do. poor/working class/white/catholic/femininity. how i did, at times, surround myself with people who required that i sublimate myself. or who just didn’t care. how it all has everything to do with the aforementioned bullshit systems. including my family system. how scarcity and power informed it. as well as abundance, nurturing, sharing. how we pass along treasures and trash, back and forth, down the line. help!

part of the solution to meeting personal and collective needs being that practices of care  and healing are constellatory, not singular. how my own healing is its own line intersecting with all the entangled individual lines of healing that make up that massive rubberband ball of collective struggle. if spirit is manifest in individual parts that get to grow and evolve and understand independently, they render the whole infinitely greater in their reconciliation. let’s go!!!! #ready

i’ve been thinking about my talents, my skills, what i have. how to channel everything i’m good at, how to put everything to good use, how to expand on sharing and giving. all of it. that this is something i’ve always been concerned with. i’ve always been able to give outwardly. but giving to myself and receiving have always been a struggle. & that’s a big deal. getting into why is too deep, but ultimately i need to honor myself and what i have to offer; i need to be generous with myself. i think of how much i admire the people i care about, how much i wanna be the cheerleader to their lives, to support them and reflect how amazing they are back to them. and how i’m working on having that relationship with myself. how it’s so much about learning how to be your own friend. the ultimate task.

and what it means to be your own friend, to love yourself, is the same as what we should strive for with anyone else in our lives.  we need the courage to connect with ourselves—all our parts. we need to be cautious and patient with the process. to be willing to make mistakes, to be vulnerable. willing to be  understanding. willing to be radically and deeply honest. willing to look at things we don’t want to see. willing to work with aspects of ourselves we don’t like. willing to surrender, to give in. willing to be open. willing to stand up. willing to take risks. willing to receive criticism graciously. willing to part with judgment. willing to part with a lot of things. willing to accept loss & change. willing to accept joy & love & newness. all the things that come naturally to us before we learn otherwise & before we get hurt, defensive. that we must master these things with ourselves and with everyone.

time doesn’t heal wounds, we do.

it sounds cheesy, but the experience of feeling like you were made to do something can be so real. we delude ourselves into thinking that destiny is tied up with inevitability, when in reality, it’s all about choice.

in my interview at the neighborhood playhouse conservatory for acting, the executive director asked, “why do you want this?” “because i want to fall apart, i want to break myself open. i’ve wanted this so much for my whole life and i’m terrified. and that’s exactly why i need to do it. i’m dying to do it.””dying?!” she said, “that’s great!” 

i remember when i gave up on that dream, i remember when i got quiet, when i got small. listening to the wrong lessons: shrink, disappear, don’t move, don’t speak, don’t make waves, don’t love or own yourself. i turned inward and couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t’ stop writing. i was always writing. at times i couldn’t be alone enough, but i  was part of a big family in new york city where there is no such thing as alone, no such thing as privacy. so, i created a space of aloneness in public space: at school, at home, on the street. in myself. an interior world, an ongoing conversation. i was other people in that world, as i chose. characters from movies, tv shows, books. strong-willed femmes with storied pasts, flawed and reaching, or closed. madame rose and gypsy rose lee. it wasn’t escape, it was immersion. into parallel experiences of feeling: my own and those of characters i admired. this & writing saved my life. & music & drawing.

so much of my exploration of self lately is concerning itself with shame, fear, anxiety. all the ugly parts, all the broken feelings. and when i just allow myself the space to sit with what’s broken, it’s like the shards are puzzle pieces and i wind up putting shit together, tracing the feeling back in time to influences, tracing the influences to lineage. this tapestry of brokenness. and then i get overwhelmed, i get angry because the shame and fear are someone else’s, instilled in me and echoing through the tides of my life from the tides of other lives.  i find myself looking for the first moments i internalized them & realizing that’s the wrong question: when.

when i was a kid i spent my days listening to the same records, watching the same movies obsessively, gobbling guzzling and focused. learning every line, every gesture, every sigh. committing every sound to memory. & i sang & i danced wherever i went. & i dressed up, & i put on my mom and aunts’ makeup, i used to sit on the closed toilet mesmerized as i watched my uncles shave their faces. i used to also revel in the process of shaving legs. the foam and the pink razor and the pink cloth robe. and at age 5, someone let me outta their sight for 2 minutes, and i cut myself “shaving” my face, and on another occasion, i cut myself “shaving” my legs. & i did get in trouble, but also we all laughed about it. & i begged my aunts, uncles, cousins to pretend with me. & i was a freak, i was 7-years-old & obsessed with susan sarandon (from jackson heights, too!). pretending to be her character from bull durham. haha, so inappropriate and strange. i wanted to be an adult so bad & i was called old soul and wise. & my aunt, the movie buff/cinephile, would indulge me and watch all the movies with me. but i was a kid and some experiences were too much. the movies and otherwise.

but, too, i think about how my experiences, traumas even, give me a range of depth and feeling to work with when it comes to acting and art. that what was always so inspiring for me from film/theatre was that ability to create a space where people connect to each others’ feelings and experiences in this really palpable way. that invisible stuff: not just sight & sound, but another sense. that draws you into a life, or a projection of one. a friend of mine joked, “i don’t trust actors. don’t you have to be a sociopath to be one?” “no!! you need to be an empath, i think!” to genuinely engage with a character’s experiences and truthfully represent them. i think the form has so much revolutionary, transformative potential in that way. representation is powerful. to provoke people to feel is powerful. to provoke people to remember or know something they didn’t is powerful. it’s challenging, too.

and expanding on that, just… what viola davis said in her oscar acceptance speech:

there’s one place where all the people with the greatest potential are gathered and that’s the graveyard. people ask me all the time ‘ what kind of stories do you wanna tell, viola?’  and i say, ‘exhume those bodies. exhume those stories. the stories of the people who dreamed. big. and never saw those dreams to fruition. people who fell in love and lost. i became an artist, and thank god i did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.”

WATCH THE WHOLE SPEECH AND BE MOVED

and as surrounded as i’ve been in my own life by death, by loss, bullshit systems & all they reap in our constellated lives, as much time as i spend in the graveyard myself, i remember what always drew me back to creativity was that: life. wanting to hold onto it, wanting to know what it was all about, wanting to share it, to choose it, wanting to know people. being so alternately enchanted and horrified by what we were capable of— magic & havoc. the triangulation between, magic, havoc, intimacy. ugh, life. even tho we would come to lose it, life, and each other. 

i wonder what it means to want to connect to havoc, to want to represent it. but, sometimes we just want to play evil. i think that’s the fear in me. it’s what i’m afraid of, for sure: exposure, letting it out. driving the impulse to hide. but, then, the opposing desire: to be seen, to release. that impulse to show what you obscure, the snarling parts. the things you keep to yourself. your other powers.

i’ve been so attached to my shadows, i think, while not fully understanding where they were cast from. and how shadow is just a matter of perspective, what point you’re looking from. and nostalgia is a yearning for an old [sense of] home, the past, but when the sun’s ahead of you and you’re looking backward into night, all you see is shadow. blue. not that night isn’t beautiful in its way, or without its virtues. but it’s its own point of perspective, and it isn’t the only one.

[rexylafemme]

this precious time when time is new

things come full circle all the time. ruben touched down in nyc on saturday. micah and i trekked to laguardia to get him, laughing on the way about how ridiculous we all were in the bay, how we bet our lil ruben looks more grown now, seasoned, hehe. the last time micah, ruben, and i were together was for the full pisces supermoon in late summer, september 2015--the night before micah would move back to nyc, our last full night at our house all together. a month before ruben would leave, two months before i would leave. this time, ruben arrived in time for the virgo full moon, pisces’ opposite, in late winter 2017, the coldest, snowiest week we’ve had.

that last night together in september, we drove to alameda beach armed with paper, some stones, herbs & flowers, gifts & letters from ex-whatevers & poem drafts to throw to the ocean, ruben’s signature drink: fireball whiskey (ew), a blunt, some candles, a mini speaker. all the trappings for a spell for letting go, for saying goodbye. bitch better have my money on in the car ride there, our heads hanging out the window, boisterous--our anthem for that year (/always), being broke, undervalued, and continuously doing too much work for too little or free, retail and retail and food service and gigs and workshops and unofficial art modeling and freelance writing and recording and plans that kept falling through. now we were in the home stretch. we laid down our blanket, we set out our herbs, our stones, our candles. we sat in a triangle, wrote silently for awhile: what we would surrender to the bay, what we would leave there, what we couldn’t keep or hold anymore. also, what new journeys we needed new strength for.

we went around and said some words about what we’d written, said some sentimental stuff about each other. poured out some fireball, passed it around til it was gone--so sickly sugary & spicy like melted/liquefied big red gum, coating yr mouth and throat. we stuffed our losses in the bottle and walked to the shoreline. we fumbled trying to figure out a way for all three of us to hold the bottle while we threw it, haha. the moon hung to the left of our viewscape, leaving a moving trail of yellow on the water as we watched the bottle bobble away. i walked into the water alone up to my waist--feeling grateful, trying to absolve myself of this place and all its failures, looking up at the moon and asking it my questions about what next and help and please don’t let us lose this. hearing micah and ruben laugh from the sand, smiling to myself with love for them, sighing and crying a little. no turning back now, can’t hold onto everything, nothing is forever, and then it was over, the night. tomorrow everything would be different. just one more chip off an already broken heart. 

“nothing’s changed!” micah exclaimed laughing as we stood propped against the subway doors on the Q train to brooklyn. ruben and i fake-fighting, the bates motel norma and norman faux-codependence theatrical game we’d play-- we all go a little mad sometimes, there’s a cord between our hearts, etc. the three of us hugging and giggling. after almost two hours of traveling from queens to flatbush, we wound up at micah and sharmin’s for game night. i was in the middle of a two-week marathon of insomnia and ptsd nights, so i was feeling raw/cranky/crazy/depleted/negative and was waiting for my affections to catch up with the present moment. ruben! friends! games! you don’t wanna go home and write by yourself, rex, you fool. it’s saturday night! but knowing when i’m like this, at night i get all weird & doubtful & dark, but reminding myself to just be myself, relax, remember what’s good, no pressure, if you need to leave, you can. and you might even enjoy yourself. and of course i didn’t wind up going home til 2am, spent and full, as suddenly the future hit--clocks springing ahead to 3am for daylight savings.

but before that, sharmin’s friends arrived trickle by trickle until there were about ten of us.  uno, jenga, slapjack, drinks, snacks, bullshit, taboo (team names: beyonce v. solange, and ruben and i were on the solange team, the weirder, low key underdog, and we won), stories, music, nintendo, laughter, newness, familiarity. it felt so nourishing to be in a room full of working class folks, folks from queens and bk, and ruben & micah: the two down suburban qts, home people--that easiness and fluency that comes with not having to explain yourself, everyone just getting it, breathing room & shared experiences.  micah and i trying to explain all the wild connections between the people in the bay and the people out here. how i met sharmin, tanya (& tres tho only briefly), and jesse through black brunch organizing in 2014 when i was visiting home from the bay. learning sharmin and jesse both were from my qnz hood and knew my childhood bff ro through other organizing avenues. jova and reuben knew sharmin, too, and tanya and tres, jova having told me tanya and i needed to know each other way before this meeting bc of our poor white femme nyc/nj lives. later, when i moved home and jova was so right about tanya and me, and someow tres & tanya had known micah round the way (?!?!?!). and before that, when micah first moved back to nyc, he called me to talk about some amazing femme he met at the club--something that never happens for us--being so enchanted or even pursued at the club (partially bc we never even bothered to go), and as he described her, i was like, “wait, is her name sharmin???” hehehe, clearly micah can’t get enough of catty witches from queens. explaining the connections between all the ex-friends-&-lovers, too--nyc, the bay-- disenchantments & the chaos and the relief that it was all over. happy to be laughing about it now. ending stories. we have no past, we won’t reach back; keep with me forward all through the night.

origin stories. apparently, the first night ruben moved into our 668 apartment, micah and i were hosting a big party. i laughed and apologized retroactively, but it so sums up where we were at at the time. ruben said it helped him integrate tho, he felt welcomed and i remember being so thrilled to introduce him to everyone. realizing how much the three of us got each other through those two years--all the drama, all the marches, the confusion, blowouts, heartbreaks, housing scares, bad jobs, the nights, the mornings--waking up with glitter on our faces, splayed eyeliner, party carnage, or just waking up to work & life fatigue, big breakfasts, sitting in the sun on our stoop year-round. so much we shared and still a lot of room for things we couldn’t say and didn’t have to. but, how home the three of of us felt to each other then, and now, and how we extended that sense of home to others--sometimes guests sleeping over in every room of the house except the kitchen, our place a safe zone on march routes, multiple sets of people staying with us through rocky times, the big meals we’d host when i was working at  farmers’ markets & the spice shop simultaneously, pooper cat game nights, the trigger warning performance series + parties we threw out of the house. talya called our place the gay frat house (tho i have to say in defense that it was quite clean). leo sun/leo rising/leo moon trio. so familiar, so sweet, so effortless, so open. our little clubhouse, our little family. remembering is good if you don’t let it be the fear in you.

i think we felt lacking then, i think we felt we couldn’t get our footing or find somewhere where we belonged-- but looking back, we created what we didn’t have and we invited other people into it. all the adult misfits. we got burned by being open indiscriminately and it made us shrinking violets by the end, but we’re blooming again now. riding that bloom wave.

at one point the other night, i overheard sharmin say to a friend, “aren’t they so cute? they’re such teen boys over there.” as we were sitting in a corner doing our thing. and that was always true of our vibe-- our bond full of youthful, long-lost brother feels. but, soft, feminine boys, & sometimes we’re not boys at all. 668 40th st, living one up from hell, we’d joke, which maybe is what gifted us that mythical queer fountain-of-youth gene where we look 17 forever. young leos. after long days of work + grad school madness (me) or undergrad madness (ruben), in between assignments, projects, art, meetings, shifts, we were always watching movies from our childhoods, making forts, running around in our underwear, making art on the floor in the living room, doing drag, playing board games, talking shit, pushing each other around and wrestling and cuddling and teasing each other, holding hands and being protective of each other when we had to. our intimacy--so easy & necessary & good & a balm from the bad intimacies we got lost in at times. we grew together: we all taught each other things and challenged each other, especially through our differences. bb ruben had never met a trans person before and micah and i were like “well, here we are!” and both of us so different in our trans-ness. we were all so inviting & open to excavating each other so we could be better at honoring who we all were.

and in new york now, finally living here on my own terms, regardless of the obstacles: housing scares and failures, the last of the bad intimacies (i hope), and family, i am thinking of who i was before. the sense of un-belonging that’s had me leaving new york over and over, the pain of lineage that had me craving escape, craving to be someone else, craving to leave them all behind. while simultaneously always trying to make sense of the people i come from so i could make sense of myself: the grief i never let go of, the contradictions, the violence and the nourishment of us. how all of this and my own self within it--freakish, theatrical, full of shadows, so of them & yet so so other--had me always searching. the people, the others: i was always looking for and the ones i always found. there were the inexplicably lovable yet destructive ones who reified all of the patterns in me i was always trying to leave behind, and then i finally did. bye. and then all the people who were so new; whose influence, paired with my own, allowed us to make something from nothing-- magic, create beauty from old tragedies, whether we spoke of them or not. cosmic people, like ruben and micah, the pretty, sweet boys. boys who weren’t afraid to cry or to touch or to admit to love and fear and failure and wanting. and the three of us, whoever we are and will be, knowing our love was/is strong enough to withhold our leaving, being apart, and all of the transformations that would flush out of walking away, of change. that there would always be a road back. paths that cross will cross again!

and ruben is still here until saturday, so my sentimentality is running away with me. blame it on my wild heart. hehe.

[rexylafemme]

on my own, would i wander through this wonderland alone

never knowing my right foot from my left, my hat from my glove. i’m just too misty & too much in love.

venus in retrograde has me getting really reflective and weepy (without much of the weeping) of my past/present/future with love, desire, relationships of all kinds. i’m thinking very hard about what i want to carry with me into the future, what i want to let go of, what i need to manifest. i’m trying to surrender to feeling, but ptsd means i sometimes naturally hover above myself, or i’m caught in time, and i’m moving around like a hologram.

i made a list of taurus tips to help me get through this retrograde period:

-go to greenhouses more (or be outside more when it’s warm) -be open to desire/feeling (yikes) -share your home, find solace there -make yourself your home, your comfort -be in your body--breathe, move, stretch, dance, sing -hug more -show up -say hi to animal friends and plant friends -be your turtle self if needed -eat and cook delicious foods -cleanse -exfoliate and moisturize (gay) -cry if you gotta -be open to love or whatever (LOL) -be reasonable about your limits -hang out naked in your room more -wear cute stuff -wear makeup & accessories -do what feels good -make art -sleep & relax -do what you can

i know what i need to do in everything i do-- to show up as myself--the fullest version, or whatever i can muster. we try. but the point is to always be genuine and to be radically honest. i realize that every fiber of my being is and always has felt trans. beyond, between, both/and, either/or, neither/nor, everything, ever-changing. and that feels good, and i think most of the people i care about and respect actually do see me. i think i even see me. i’m so tired of shame, but it feels hard to shake. it’s hard when people remind you to feel it so frequently, too. i try to shield myself against the bullshit, but sometimes it leaks through. being tough and on guard all the time is hard, also. i am sensitive. i try to laugh shit off or just be bitchy to folks who fuck with me in public, but sometimes i’m just tired and want to be invisible. and sometimes i really am scared.

on another note, i guess for awhile i thought i needed to avoid getting close to people, especially while sifting through the muck of my own traumas and “who i am”--because it’s messy and i don’t want other people to have to see/deal with my mess. but, realizing that’s unrealistic and part of what contributes to not feeling whole or fully real. to be in hiding. no more! i’m always changing and shifting. we are all sifting through our messes & traumas, trying to figure it all out, survive, grow. solidarity is about honoring the fullness of people and being a support in the process of healing & growing & fighting. can’t really be an artist or in the struggle and not deal in feelings, complexities--can’t really hide, either.

i can’t be one thing, i refuse to, really. i’m not convinced anyone is one thing. my identity and everything i am feels wrapped up in shifting around in both beauty and monstrosity, so much love and so much pain. my gender flops around on the spectrum between love and pain, horror and joy? and i like that? we’re not supposed to embrace the feral, wild parts, or the hurt parts, but i say fuck that. i believe in being untameable. i love it and i live for it in myself and other people. we have to love our scars and integrate them into our stories. that’s my leo rising-- gregarious rage queen.  

some days i feel like river phoenix, some days fran fine. i’ve always been such a romeo, young leo poet fool, venus as a boy, hopeless romantic, always at least a little heartbroken, gushy, sad/broody, loneheart. always preferring the love songs & heartbreak songs, listening to sarah vaughan as i write this. but, i mean romantic expansively--to be like sadly in love with everything? the pain of loving the world so much, wanting love to be enough for us to get through it, to change, to do the right things. to stop creating suffering & destruction. idealistic empathic chiron in cancer, wounded healer.

i want to be less “the fool” and more “the magician” tho. as in, alchemizing rather than just stumbling around. drawing down power & channeling it out intentionally. i want to be the queen of hearts and not as much the ice queen--tho there’s a time and a place for that too. i’m stony and thorny in places because we all need our defenses sometimes. and as vanessa ives said, “we have been brutalized by loss. it has made us brutal in return.” meow.

but another side of me falls so fast and hard and with such exuberance for kindred--people, creatures, art, places, music, revolutions. standard taurus: loving to luxuriate in the beauty of nature, relationships, and the things we create. stubbornly dedicated to what and who i believe in. kinda enjoying the exquisite pain of feeling, too--lusciously deep and sorrowful pisces moon that i am.

i’ve always been one to believe in possibility with love and desire, i’ve always gone for it even when it was more likely it wouldn’t go anywhere or i would get hurt. but, you always risk hurt with love. there’s not much that can stop my heart. that’s kinda a beautiful thing, even if it gets me into trouble or i act a fool (literally, the fool tarot card, stepping off a cliff). really i should seek better options, ones that don’t hurt so much, i should watch where i’m going, and trust my intuition--all the people/situations i thought i should stay away from, i should’ve stayed away from, ha. and i’m talking about all kinds of connections. and talking about collective liberation, too. as malachi said, we need to believe in possibility and open ourselves up to everyone’s radical potentials, knowing that it takes all kinds and all strategies and skills and personalities. but, we also need to be protective and build with caution and intuition. betrayal is very real. but it isn’t everything. and if we are only distrustful and guarded, we can lose out on a lot of connections that could be really meaningful and transformative. i know a part of my heart closed itself off after and during living in the bay, but if it had stayed that way, i wouldn’t have been open to new friends like tanya, tres, tyler, the growing family bonds with lehna--and all the connections that spill from those connections. and our interconnective power is what i value and believe in most. how much we could all learn and accomplish together.

angela davis talks about it being important to remain optimistic when it comes to the fight for freedom, needing it because it allows us to envision something else, something better. needing to go for it, whether or not we win, when it feels impossible. nowhere we are now came from any kind of certainty that things would be okay, or any landscape in which anything was okay. we have to make it better. we can’t risk being closed off to each other, we can’t risk tearing each other apart as we have when we could be working together. but, brutalized by our own losses we thus brutalize each other in return. atonement is hard.

my bff from childhood and i sat across from each other eating chicken sandwiches on st. mark’s place, our old stomping ground as sad teen weirdo losers. we’ve wound up in that area again a few times since i’ve moved back home, older, still sad weirdo losers. a lot of the same questions and problems we’re always working through. marveling how much has changed around us and how much we haven’t. so funny, too, talking about the loneliness of being alone (single?), but also the loneliness of being with someone. how we, culturally, don’t talk about that part so much. and i’m like, i don’t even know what not being alone is like at this point?  but isolation is an illusion, and the clenched fist of my heart is always alternately unfurling and reaching out toward something.

also talking about how damaging this queer image of what our sexuality is supposed to be: all boisterous playground bodies and full of sexy pride and dating a 1000 people and going out... how we shouldn’t have to wear that image if we can’t wear it, and we shouldn’t have to aspire to it if it isn’t us. obviously not to shame dating however many people you want, whenever, doing whatever the fuck you want. but wanting more room for more than that, all the ways our sexualities happen and not just the performances, the other truths of sexuality-- that it’s fucking hard, that it feels like shit sometimes, that it’s full of pain, and it isn’t easy or pretty or glossy or cute or even fun. that sex can be terrible, gross, scary, annoying, over-rated, bad, compulsory. i guess i would love to smear myself in glitter and run around naked at an orgy, i dunno. the dionysus in me wants a lot of things i can’t handle in practice. sigh, ruin.

i’ve tried to be that queer image, but i’ve always felt more alone/tired wearing it--trying to be hot in public or whatever. always felt pretty scared and nervous and completely out of my element-- even when i’ve had fun, so i just leave my body-- hologram life. and then there’s been, more frequently than not, when someone else’s desire in queer spaces becomes the question of “why are you trans” which is really more a question of “why is my identity being complicated by my attraction to you when i thought i knew what i was and something in your face/body told me i was still what i am and now you being something else is challenging me.” and, yr at the club and drinking and it’s loud and not really the time or place for that exploration with some stranger. so yeah, easier to be alone than to deal with all of that. lonely to be alone, but lonelier just to grab at things that feel incomplete or that don’t honor you. but then also being attracted to all kinds of people and bodies and that being really exciting and wishing we could materialize those possibilities (and in some sort of public space) instead of being so obsessed with knowing what everything means or like so focused on what’s happening in people’s underwear in order to make sense of whether or not we should act on impulses. so much we lose out on. ugh, humans are so stupid.  

and onto the messiness of friendship, the boundarylessness of it sometimes-- how i used to be all about that and it felt safe, and now i am less about that because it wasn’t really safe. though i still value the intimacy of friendship and the radical possibilities of friendship more than any other bond, or i feel it is central to other bonds, as well. and sometimes my whole life feels like an endless love poem i’m composing to friends, kin--and that’s kinda nice.  but maybe i don’t want to feel like i would “do anything” for someone, or that i am so open to “whatever happens”-- maybe that feeds into bad patterns, not giving myself agency, it’s dangerous, it breeds codependence and acceptance of things that shouldn’t be acceptable. as my twin friend, ej, said--it’s not about losing yourself in someone, in anyone, it’s about interdependence. which is all about synecdoche, too-- a part in the whole, a whole in the part, and boundless webbing of all our experiences, differences, similarities, stories, lives, struggles--holographic as they are(!). it’s quite beautiful if we allow it to be-- if we allow ourselves to be fully ourselves and we honor that fullness in others as well--beautiful, crazy monsters that we are.

[rexylafemme]

all love/though reaching up / my loneliness evolves by the blindness that surrounds him

jan 17 / jan 24

the last few days have left me aching with love; understanding the point of living, of keeping on & giving in— to what we know we will always have to contend with: grief, rage, loss, chaos, mess, pain, oppression. & yet—going on anyway.

feeling love so full & expansive it feels like the air filling a balloon up & up, creating a shape that comes to explode, filling the air, uncontainable, no way to avoid it, it fills & touches the whole room & everything in it, everyone in it. it fills you, you breathe it in, it becomes your breath, becomes you ( a part of you) & you exhale it out as others breathe it in & out, we all exhale & share the feeling & we want to keep the moment going, can’t deal with the inevitable approach of ending, nearing & nearing, until it does end, physically. the time goes, but not the influence, the memory.

this is how this weekend has felt. celebrating jova’s birthday & simone’s birthday. being so gifted by their lives, their bond as aunt & baby (one-year-old) niece. gifted to be welcomed into their family made up of blood, others’ family, friends, & me. feeling how real & lovely, warm, also heavy, also responsibility attached. being happy to have that weight & responsibility along with the love. mutualism & altruism & meeting each other where we are & for who we are—in celebration, in difficulty, moments of peace & clarity, moments of complete confusion, disarray—the world & how it both gives you gifts & rips you to shreds.

when you look into a one-year-old’s face & know that they know everything there is to know. about wonder & beauty & goodness. when you look to them for the answers you had once, but which fell from you, slipping from your grip like liquid. knowing you had to absorb some of it, though, it can’t all have slithered away. & it hasn’t. simone teaches you that. simone octavia, who is obsessed with cats, whose first word was cat. who loves & knows me enough to want to leave jova’s lap for mine while her parents, lehna & divad open piles of gifts from friends & family. cat sweatsuits, cat shirts, cat toys, cat sippy cups, winter clothes, summer clothes, spring & fall clothes, drumsets, & keyboards & fire truck puzzle hinting to her father’s FDNY future. kids & elders & friends radiant from simone. all that invisible love filling us up. all of it propelling us forward through another year.

how could you crave a past that jova wasn’t in, that simone wasn’t in? why go back when we could move forward with them? track their growth, their presence becoming more formed, more distinct, their experiences more full, their influence  too. why go back, why stop, when you can keep going? stronger now, things more possible, more graspable because jova & simone prove they are just by existing, by being who they are. the magic that they are, that came into the room, flooding everyone they knew & would come to know, with love, on the same day 26 years & 20 minutes apart. magic.

it’s soul love & it’s also sitting contemplating & talking about how to hold david bowie in our hearts, in remembrance, but also hold his offenses, circling back to a later conversation that came after but explains it—how we are always so close to death, how inflicting pain on someone else & ourselves is always so real & tangible & possible, as real as the pain we’ve felt inflicted on us. that we live at the intersections of the abuses & traumas that govern our world, we operate with & against them. in the same way that bowie, that we, have filled others with love & a sense of being seen, the ways that we both adore & life each other, & always run the risk of tearing each other down, hating each other, abusing each other, misusing our power of influence. having to contend with what we’ve done, what’s been done to us. accountability and challenge being a part of that. & how to transform all of it into something else, how to be better, how to be human in the world in the face of it all. but, love as possible as hate, as possible & more necessary. the way it fills you up like air, you breathe it out, a gift to someone else, a part of us both now, something you can’t undo.

these kinds of moments helping to sustain me through home and family traumas i feel too private to reveal. and how funny it is how private i am even tho i am often emotional and effusive in digital-public and public-public. how guilt and shame still govern my thinking around our poverty. how we don’t have heat, how i can be over-educated and have a book coming out and writing comics and having big dreams around performance and yet still no financial security, still shame, still resentment, still desperation. realizing i’m everything i ever wanted to be, in many ways, but also the stress of poorness always on me and also living in the house where that was and is most evident. listening to the wrong ghosts at night. still wishing i could change it all, also wishing i could separate it from me, not care. so many shitty patterns unchanged. also, extreme family health issues i definitely am too private to discuss in digital-public. as well as, living with my family’s unchecked or checked mental health issues. bipolar disorder, agoraphobia, anxiety, ptsd, rage. everything so heavy on me. but, for once, being more open and honest to the right people about it all. these things help. knowing there’s not much else i can do other than show up, be there, listen, offer emotional support. which i am good at.

i love them, which is why it hurts so much to see them suffer, to see them hopeless, manic, avoidant of problems that are so obvious. i feel so limited by my own humanness, not being able to fix it all. feeling, too, that other people don’t deserve the intricate history of my life, of us, tho it’s key to understanding me, which is partially what makes me feel like not fully myself all the time. but, again, we are all always not saying everything. and i get to choose what i deliver and don’t, and when. that should feel liberating. but i guess it’s because i’m so used to hiding, private experiences of trauma, secrets, lying that i just wanna pour it all out. tho i struggle with my own desire to make, i don’t feel it’s important or relevant enough to do things i enjoy. why “self-care” has always been so hard for me. bc if i’m not doing something “productive” or for someone else, it doesn’t feel “worthy” or “important.” foolish. i don’t really listen to any of the advice i give to other people, for me.

but, how amazing it felt, last weekend, to be in a group of people who weren’t afraid to hold everything. in one moment, we celebrate the love and lives and gifts of simone and jova, in the next minute, one of jova’s best friends and i having a long heart-to-heart at 2am, realizing how kindred we are, but recognizing how different, too. what it is for a white poor trans/queer freak to grow up poor, first generation higher ed, come to a new kind of language, propel forward, feel so lost, so broken by code-switching, resentful, yet so humbled by the sacrifice that went into it. and greg, queer black poor first-generation higher ed, come to a new kind of language by it, too, feeling broken and lost by code-switching. how he went from small, weirdo schools to big, more structured. how i went from big, more structured to small weirdo schools. how to be so at odds with how everything is, yet try to be yourself, live your dreams, and fuck shit up within it all. hours earlier, sitting in a circle with a bunch of folks in their 20s and 30s, discussing saturn returns and pre-saturn-returns, all of us being really open and honest about our traumas, our crises, but also our growth. acknowledging each others’ dreams and hopes and fears, too. the hardest thing for me is accepting that i do deserve things. and that what i want isn’t stupid or unrealistic or unworthy, in the same way that i believe everyone deserves things--their dreams and love, that it isn’t unrealistic, that they aren’t unworthy. 

mostly, as ro said, the past is an asshole. mostly, for us, life feels like flashdance. that moment, crying in the confessional, breaking up, i. want. so. much. and, maybe, that’s okay.

[rexylafemme]

“choices. ha.”

what am i thinking of dec 29 after midnight

·      failure, feeling far from goodness

·      YOU GET WHAT YOU HAVE

·      feeling like you’ve seen things, messages in yr dreams & then they come true, does that make you crazy?

·      secrets + performances—how to be true?

·      reality that you cant see or prove?

·      male/macho rationality…etc

·      angels in america

·      needing ppl + not needing them

·      feeling i know myself more than ever, & yet…could i?

·      chani nicholas dec 25 wk + what i journaled + what i said to ilinca via phone text

·      unfair, cold love

·      relativity? ethics/etc.

·      my ENFJness

·      human kindness… + capitalism?

·      catholicism… god… angels….

·      i trusted that, then saw how wrong & bad it was to others, to me, but there was always something else. something unseen that felt true. & the failure was always in the institutionalization of the spiritual, as w/ everything else, which institutionalized is exactly what the WITCH (and all its other names + connotations) was + is not

·      how to believe without certainty?

·      how to not feel crazy?

·      how to not go mad + grow deeply depressed/constantly grieving for what has been done now + in past + foreseeable future?

·      how to be ok w/in that?

·      + not knowing what’s next?

·      i don’t know what’s true.

·      it’s like the world/rationalism (capital bs) is street knowledge + cosmic knowledge is….?

·      not knowing why to continue w/ the constant, necessary charade of existence yet also enjoying performance + ppl + being social?

·      not just current existential + time crisis, but always feeling this way?

·      i don’t wanna feel i’m paying for things my fam did or the world did to me, but i am?

·      i don’t want to feel real + full of clarity then at night like i’m crawling out of my skin, scared.

·      i don’t want my every choice to feel wrong, sinful.

·      tho i know that isn’t real, aside from hurting someone but we are set up always to hurt someone.

·      choices. ha.

[rexylafemme]

hello from the other side

when you look for magic, you find it everywhere, it turns out. i’m learning when you begin to forgive yourself, when you begin to finally breathe into your body like you know you have one and maybe you want to try to want to be in it, you start to remember what it’s like to be present. maybe, you start to see forgiveness everywhere. maybe forgiveness is the wrong word, i think i mean recognition, i mean acceptance. though my catholicness makes me think forgiveness as if my self is something i should be apologizing for, still. more on this later, for now, magic: another word, to me, for science, for nature. another explanation, another technique for making sense of everything. magic: asking the same question in three different ways on three separate occasions and drawing the same card. who am i? how do you see me? am i good? ace of cups! magic: finding an article that put into (official) words something you were trying to make sense of in the universe.

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/spooked-books-adam-gopnik?intcid=mod-most-popular

 the (official) words: entanglement, spooky action from a distance. magic: wandering in thought, in a familiar part of yr neighborhood, wondering if you could ever find where this one house was you remember from childhood, the house of an old italian immigrant woman my aunt used to take care of, while taking care of me. looking up, realizing yr on the block, across the street from the house you were thinking of.

new york is a lonely city, it’s always been true (for me), but this time, i’m enjoying being alone. or, it’s been useful. contemplative, regenerative. also, yes, difficult. the stress of unemployment is unbearable, the stress of literally constant job, fellowship, gig applications is unbearable, too, but for once, i’m allowing myself balance. allowing myself to take time out for long walks around my neighborhood, to read, to write, to watch a movie with my fam, crowded in the cluttered living room. i’m allowing myself acceptance, too. acceptance of my own non-super-humanness—that i can’t just exist in anxious, crisis mode in which i only do whatever is productive, only work. sleep, languor, breathing, laughter are all necessary to the process. trying to accept circumstances as they are presently, especially with fam. it’s rough, poverty is sad and scary and guilt-ridden, shame-ridden, but we are surviving. and in a weird, new way, we have each other again. it’s different & the same, it’s worse as the city has made it worse, but it’s better, kind of, in terms of how i, at least, relate to them. i’ve come back to us, come back to me inside of us. i find they’ve learned a lot, too. that they see me, too. maybe i don’t have to hide as much. tho i am hiding, still, at least in terms of TRANSGENDER REX, words they have no idea about, aside from my mom, and my aunt (a little bit, by way of mom).

 accepting that our love looks different than whatever i was measuring it up to. you know whatever that cute-sweet-monied-white-suburban-fam love looks like. the one on tv, the one higher ed classmates had where the parents are liberal and start a pflag chapter, etc. i know it’s not that easy for many bougie people, either. all class-hate aside…

 i remember something other than what felt wrong/traumatic/bad, what i kept running away from, the pain and loneliness the streets absorbed for me, the scenes they held. i remember the love we had. i remember what core things we knew of each other, what i felt about the world before trauma/shame/pain were the only things i could see. i feel less afraid to look back there now. as if i weren’t always looking back anyway, if even without wanting to, but always focusing on the hurt there. that PTSD thing where you think yr avoiding something, but it’s always present, always trapping you, even if yr not looking it directly in the face. coming to terms with the knowledge that i can’t fix it all, that a lot of it was never mine to fix in the first place, the trail of it all is long and old and not mine, tho part of me. entanglement. spooky action at a distance. whatever they all hold that i hold in my DNA, too.

 i realize i was obsessing over the dead and the living, what we were, what we are, to each other, separately. but i wasn’t looking square on, too afraid to face us. tho i needed this distance, in some way. to be apart, to find myself outside of it. to go away to come back so i could love the living (again). as we all are presently. i’m coming back to a lot of things. i needed to leave to come back. as i needed to come back here in the summer to leave oakland.

 can’t say my heart isn’t broken a little (really a lot) more from the loss. someone said oakland seemed like a painful relationship for me, one you know you need to leave to grow, tho there’s a lot of love there. it’s just not right, it doesn’t work. so, i return to the first love, the worst love. where it all started. i cried and cried like i hadn’t in a long time as the plane took off, literally watched oakland pass me by. looked at lake merritt from the plane’s height and laughed bc it really is shaped like a rabbit vibrator. cried at the memory of seeing it on a map and making that joke with camelia. cried with atlas placidly drugged and drowsy on my lap. thought about everyone and everything i was leaving. felt three years and some months pass me by all at once, as i craned my head, straining to see oakland still, but it was gone. just squiggly snaky red mountains now. didn’t care about crying on the plane bc i was quiet and had sunglasses on, the seat next to me was empty, and the guy in the aisle seat was to himself. drifted to sleep, i woke up, cried, drifted to sleep. it was the same kind of plane ride as the one to oakland, only my heart was broken over a romance, then. i was starting over and completely a wreck. and now, starting over, completely a wreck. leaving more people behind that i didn’t want to leave.

 the night before, we had our last wednesday dinner at al and carolyn’s. an on-and-off friend-family tradition. al made homemade tomato soup and grilled cheeses. there was wine and beer and snacks. mostly everyone i wanted there was there, and some others. i’d spent the day with ilinca, talya, shira, al. i had eaten a small amount of mushrooms to keep my mood up, to feel the love a little more, i guess. carolyn and i did our nails. a lot of the folks in the room hadn’t heard adele’s new song yet, or even cared who adele was, really, myself included, but hilariously al, one of the most ultimately non-poppy eugene, OR old-country-music hippie people you could meet, really loved it. so sweetheart, soft-heart felix put it on, at full volume, while we all sat in the living room, some of us on couches, some of us on the floor, some of us on chairs. al and felix sung along with gusto, and we were all dying at the scene: the two quiet trans-boy cuties belting it out with adele.

 i’m in california dreaming about who we used to be.

 sean was rolling his eyes on the floor, ever the anti-pop rock n roll spice master. ilinca burst out in tears, talya looked to me in panic, and i heard how relevant the song felt, too. but instead i laughed and made a joke of it awkwardly, soon that’ll be me: HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIDE!! I’M SORRY FOR BREAKING YOUR HEART!!! it was quite a movie moment, really.

the night was escaping me, i was losing it minute by minute, and i knew i couldn’t hold onto it, i knew it would be over soon and leave behind this weird, barren chasm. i rested my head against shira’s shoulder, and we looked at each other, and i knew she forgave me for leaving, and i knew what she said was true, that i would be okay on the other side, but they would be left to deal with it without me, and it would be more difficult for them. i tried to say that wasn’t true, but i knew it was, because i knew how i felt when the people i loved in the bay left it, and i was struggling to not see our experiences everywhere we had gone together, in our own house that now only held me, semmie, and atlas in it plus strangers, no more originals, everything different, everything terribly new, everything terribly the same. which is why i had to go, too. but can’t we just all stay and be miserable together? shira asked. we tried that, didn’t we? i thought, but didn’t say.

 when abbie and sean left, that’s when it all really hit me. i felt like i was really dying. what we had in the bay was over, all the nights at baggy’s and heart and dagger after work at the spice shop, all the bitching and moaning about the inauthentic holographic schmooze-fests in public literary spaces. sunshine on my shoooulders, that we would start singing when we would get too deep into cynical talk, too deep into the woes of the world we live in. laughter and working class family we didn’t know what to do with and smoking too many cigarettes, tomorrow will be better, tomorrow we will do better, we will be better people, tomorrow. they left and i walked into al’s room bawling with my face buried in other people’s coats. texted abbie and she said she started crying too, at home, was trying to keep it together for me.

 one by one, people were leaving, hugging me goodbye, wishing me luck. i needed it, i was scared and confused and worried. but, if i hadn’t fallen apart completely yet…

 talya and shira drove ilinca and me home. the H-H sisters, my family, my heart. midge, the neighborhood cat (whose name is actually matilda) who waits for me at my door, was waiting. she almost jumped in the car when i opened the door, started yelling at me, jumped onto the car to rub up against me. i picked her up and she was licking me everywhere, meowing meowing. she knew and i didn’t understand how. talya and ilinca turned away, as shira and i walked off, standing under the streetlight in front of my house. she thanked me, she said, really, that she didn’t even know me and i let her in right away when she was going through some of the worst shit of her life. and she couldn’t have been okay without me. i tried to protest that, but she wouldn’t let me. i didn’t realize how much i meant to her, i didn’t think of it that way, though i knew how much she meant to me. i hugged and held her and i didn’t want to let go, i didn’t want it to be over, i didn’t want to leave, but i had to, i didn’t want it to be this way. i wanted to fall into her, as i had wanted to fall into abbie when we hugged goodbye, when we stopped hugging, and then i had to hug her again. why didn’t we all hold each other more? why only that kind of intimacy when someone was leaving, when something was dying between us?

 talya was next. the truth is none of us knew what we would do without each other. the truth is that we knew it wasn’t over, but something was at the same time. our time. she joked that she was my pushy jewish mother, which, she is to everyone in a lot of ways. but more than that, too. the ever-fabulous, mouthy, flashy LADY SYNAGAGA, with no pants or sneakers to be found anywhere in her house. only skirts, dresses, cowgirl boots, and sequined things. the best first home i could’ve hoped to have in the bay area. with someone i was proud to call an honorary new yorker, for real for real. another person i didn’t wanna let go of. i held onto her in a way we rarely ever hugged before, typically engaging in the quick, over-the-shoulder hello or goodbye hug. but that wouldn’t be enough this time. she thanked me for letting her be herself, her true self, her weirdest, crazy self. we were crying, and wondering what we would do, not wanting to show the huge, grave loss that was creeping into the space between us. i thanked her for letting me be me, truly, fully, actually. and not just saying that. my fullest self, my saddest self, my glitziest self. the bay area, where we saw each other, where we loved each other anyway, even though we made mistakes, even though we hurt each other sometimes, even though we didn’t have all the answers, or know what to do, even though we couldn’t possibly say everything.

 we broke our embrace, and i watched their car go, holding midge. walked up the stairs and closed the door to my last night. the night i didn’t want to lose, but inevitably had to. ilinca and i slept on the couch, holding each other. i woke up to the last morning, semmie was awake. it didn’t feel real, it didn’t feel true. we all waited around together. the super shuttle finally came, and they helped me get my crap to the van. midge was outside, yelling at me, it all happened so fast and the driver seemed to be in a rush, i didn’t even get to hug them goodbye, i just had to push atlas and climb into the car, where an older couple were waiting, too. the door closed and i exclaimed something, like oh god. i waved and pounded on the window, but ilinca and semmie couldn’t see me. i looked out the window and felt the tears coming down from under my sunglasses while i told the older couple i was moving back to new york with my cat. they were sweet, i wanted to be alone, i wanted the bus ride to be over. i watched my neighborhood leave me, i watched oakland leave me as we approached the bay bridge into san francisco. what would become of me, i wasn’t sure. it felt like death right then, as it had for weeks leading up to the end, but, also i guess, it was what i’d been waiting for, as one by one, jova and reuben left, old friendships fell apart, old friends left, micah left, then ruben left, no loss any easier just because i had known other losses before them. my own leaving no easier just because i had left people and places so near to my heart before. love never easy, never devoid of pain or changes. the only different thing being that maybe this time i accepted it for all that it was, even if imperfect, even if it felt like i threw up a whole piece of my life and watched it lose its breath in front of me. i knew they weren’t going anywhere, we always would have each other, and i was excited to revisit them all, from the other side of things.

[rexylafemme]

what’s inside her never dies

this is a poetic personal essay in progress i wrote in response to the amy winehouse: a family portrait exhibit.

What’s Inside Her Never Dies: reflections on the Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait exhibit

I walk through the Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait exhibit alone at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, lost in my own sad obsessive fondness for a woman in my age group I couldn’t know, but felt an inexplicable kinship with: a deep sincere feeling of old-soul-sameness, working-class, pink-lady-femme sassiness. A kinship I’ve fallen into with troubled, talented, started-from-the-bottom-for-real femme pop musicians, artists, writers, and actresses my whole life (I observe, I don’t change).

On the brink of my own transitions (leaving the bay area, almost a year of hormone replacement therapy), successes achieved or looming just within reach (book publication, collaboration offers, higher ed degrees), my recognition of them never as big or as loud as what my self-hateful head says to itself in private. I stand in space contemplating a photo of wide-grin, gap-toothed (like me) Amy in private school plaid kilt rolled up above the knees and shapeless sweater, wavy hair crunchy with hair gel: awkward, young, alive, & cute. My eyes on her, but in my own mind, seeing her and thinking of myself: my own candid school photos in plaid kilt rolled up, rust cardigan with fleurs de lis insignia, bad teeth & big smile, crunchy hair, or tightly slicked to my head in terrible ponytail, typical of late 90s city girl fashion. Awkward, young, alive, & cute. Full of promise, stars in our eyes & trauma behind them. Then, to standing in front of a long line of subjective adult failures: lost lovers, friends, and all of our plans that collapsed inward when we broke, together, apart, alone. I’ve forgotten all of young love’s joy. 

As I stand there, seed of this essay in my head, I get in trouble for trying to take a picture of her uniform hanging on a mannequin’s torso. I blush to the guard, frown, and apologize profusely, channeling my own catholic-school-hood shame at authoritative intervention. I feel stupid and self-conscious, move to the left, along the circle of the room. A few steps to the left and now I’m at the end: confronted with a late photo of Amy performing, forlorn, in one of her favorite dresses, looking down and to the left, a hint of a frown on her mouth. Looking broken. I am reminded of a night I rarely stop to think about these days.

The day she died, I was at home in queens for the summer, and my girlfriend was visiting for the week. We were so in love in a way that felt so big, so endless, so youthful, and I would do anything to keep it. A love that felt important enough to undo all my young poor catholic shame (in being other: queer, trans, sexual, myself). In my memory’s version, I think that day maybe my girlfriend played Carole King she found on my computer. “You always remind me of music I’d forgotten existed,” referring to my love of blues, Motown, doowop, and rock from 1950s-80s, mostly female artists, mostly music about love and loss. “Home Again” came on and I remember only because there’s nothing like NYC with a lover unfamiliar with the city. Being with her made me feel at home in a way I usually didn’t—a new NYC I displayed just for her, minus the noise of my past life interrupting.

Anyway, Amy died that day, and I was devastated in secret, felt hopeless and upset by the frenzy of it. How she went from laughable, deplorable haggish mess in the media to tragically beautiful iconic saint, as the mainstream trajectory tends to follow. Destroy then memorialize. I felt dumb then to lament a person I didn’t know, a celebrity, when so much else is always happening, always going wrong in the world that we conveniently don’t pay attention to.

But, to me, Amy was this working class ambitious queer (yes, queer!) bitchy weirdo with problems, who I saw myself in, not just anyone. Not just a glitzy distraction from real things, but a part of how we fail people and each other in a broad sense. I felt heartbroken, but my person and I went about our day, in love in New York City, anyway. Maybe that was also the day we got catcalled by older men walking hand-in-hand down 1st ave., maybe it was the day we went to the Queens Museum, and a young girl in the women’s bathroom told me it wasn’t the boys’ room and I should leave.  Maybe I put all my feelings off for a moment.

Whatever way it went in daytime, we wound up in Brooklyn at night, hand in hand, at this small queer bar called Sugarland that doesn’t exist anymore. That week, we had gone to a lot of queer bars in Brooklyn I had never been to before. It was a Saturday, and a boys’ dance party extravaganza  was happening—with beefy glazed-chested white and brown guys in speedos dancing on the bar, drink prices through the roof in comparison from what they were on Monday, when we went for karaoke and made out in a sunken lounge area  with couches, crowded tonight with dancing-male bodies and sloppy grinding. We were dancing, and I was a lady to the public in this moment, as in many moments, though I’ve always been something else, a little bit of everything all in one human form.

We were 22 and 21, her first summer of being legally drunk in public. “Rehab” came on, and folks roared and laughed and aww’ed,  I was sick to my stomach. I yelled out, “This is fucked up!” over and over, “This is not funny, it’s wrong!” as all these dudes sang along, not hearing me. I felt alone in my challenge, alone in my own struggles that drew me to Amy and her music in the first place.

                                                          ……

The melodramas of my day(s) deliver blows, it’s true, but for once, today, now, at the exhibit, I felt comfortable in my aloneness and otherness, for the first time since teenhood. Alone in my thoughts, alone in my appreciation, alone in my sense of kindred relation to a dead otherly woman I never met; a dead woman who still serves as more of a holograph or joke to most people familiar with her, her craft, her wild traumas played out widely & crudely in unforgiving public space.

What can I say about the two of us other than we know we are no good, we both “just dress like it’s still the 50s,” we get lost in people like their love flushes through us as substance does (something else we get wrapped up in). We look back so much that it obscures what we’ve become, what we’ve done with our own resolve, despite the odds stacked against us, especially the internal, generational ones we couldn’t help but inherit. We are the same, and not. And, I am in love with a ghost, who serves as my own cautionary tale: where trauma can always take us, where public recognition can fall short in the absence of real healing. She’s me, and she’s everyone I’ve ever loved and had to give up in one way or another—to death, to walking away, to being walked away from.

 We are the same, and we are not.

 I grew up in the late 80s/90s by way of the 1950s. That’s how it works with old-fashioned, working-class Catholic New Yorkers: everything old is new again. Or, really, the nightmare of convention, shame and western bootstrap dreams projected onto my little person. An old ladyboy soul in a girl body, wrapped up tighter in the dramas of my large, poor white family than in schoolyard matters in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC. Our tight-knit crew of hard workers, some slackers, alcoholics, unwed bipolar mothers, hoarders, divorced controlling fathers, saintly grand-matriarchs, anxiety disorders, cheats, depression, secrets, fights, lies, deaths, crises. In a word: family. All this and yet,  there is no greater love. Roughing it because that’s just how it is, that’s just what you have to do. Me, the little old soul therapist, too-smart-for-my-own-good, problem-solver; me, the actress, imagining myself out of it all, as both Gypsy Rose Lee and Madame Rose, mother and daughter to myself. Me, a funny and mouthy Fanny Brice in secondhand clothes, secondhand tap shoes from my older cousin. I never get a single thing that’s new.

Like Amy, I grew up with Billie, Ella, Frank, Patsy, Nina, the Rat Pack, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra, Nat King Cole, Tony, and Peggy Lee. I sat with my grandma cutting onions to the Shirelles, the Shangri-las (from Queens!), the Chiffons, the Ronettes, Mary Wells, the Temptations, and on and on. It was the music of my elders that I would lovingly sing for them in their living rooms. My grandfather used to give me M&M’s in a small faux-gold coin purse in exchange for me singing and dancing to “Pretty Woman.” It was, to me, our music. And, though, yes, my family, who were Irish, Italian, Lithuanian poor immigrants, could relate to it, with their myriad blues, poverty, addictions, torturous love for each other, and problems given to them by structural inequalities, it wasn’t our music. And, it wasn’t Amy’s, either.

Regardless of how kindred Amy has felt to me, because of our personal experiences, our families, and our influences, there is no love without complication. You can’t truly love someone without acknowledging and speaking to their flaws, their blind spots. We have to hold everything about them, every side, every crevice, every fallibility. Though Amy most certainly acknowledged and paid homage to her influences, many of them black blues, Motown, and R&B artists, acknowledgement itself is not enough. Though Amy herself wasn’t prepared for, or arguably even interested in, the level of stardom and mainstream success she came to enjoy, it’s important to note her positionality as a white Jewish woman being marketed as a “queen of soul.” Though she always addressed her stylistic influences and deep appreciation for the genres she was integrating into her music, she was packaged as doing something no one’s ever done. Though black female and male musicians most certainly had done it before, and were doing it, though just not under the privilege and novelty of whiteness, but definitely at the mercy of white exploitation in the entertainment industry (and not just that institution, either). And, though likely not intentional (no excuse), Amy became huge by speaking to something that wasn’t hers to begin with, to a mainstream too comfortable with cultural appropriation, too mired within white supremacy to address, let alone understand why it was problematic. And, so, it’s always important to complicate our idols, to take what’s good and honor it, but also to pry, question, and politicize them in the larger scheme of things. Not just as a challenge to pop culture, but as a challenge to ourselves, so that we can see better, do better, and work to dismantle structures of exploitation and oppression of which pop culture is intricately composed of.