Describing my experience entering into Olympia: If I knew then, what I know now, it is unlikely I would be sitting here trying to answer this question. It’s hard to encapsulate an experience in such a way that it can be retold with accuracy. That is due in part to a shifting of ideals, or a shifting of experience, maybe even an accumulation of experience, because though experiences fall away sometimes, or are witnessed, logged and dismissed, one can never truly separate from their past. But I think there is a point where, upon resting, or taking space to exist in a pile, one can begin to catch up with that ongoing log and process. Processing used to be so vital for me in my work. Even now, in attempting to sit here and channel some of my specific thoughts, I feel disconnected from this “process” and feel reluctant to let the words pour out of me. I feel self-estranged. I do not want to say estranged from myself as in feel alienated from myself, but rather, I, the self that I possess, has taken measures keep myself at a distance from my self?
I think that it’s important to clarify the kind of alienation I feel. I feel alienated from opportunity and option. I feel alienated in my surroundings; in my household, at school sometimes, but most specifically – in this town – good ol’ Olympia, Washington, USA. In thinking about this idea of community – especially post PACE conversation this week – I realize that aside from my partner and the world we maintain together, my community is kaput. I feel like my options are to placate a silence amidst my heterosexual comrades, pretending that the culture they exist in is the same one I, as a gender non-conforming masculine white-presenting Latina, am afforded. I have to sit and listen to my partner get misgendered sometimes and in these moments I tune out. I don’t even remember why I let people get into these intimate spaces with me in the first place. A schoolmate and I were in the smoking pit one day (facet of life on The Evergreen State College campus), and they said to the air around us, “I don’t want to be equal with them [heterosexuals], I want to be better than them.” My face made a smile spread from ear to ear, because let’s face it, sometimes it’s hard for all of us to be humanists about this and wish for all of us to elevate to the same level. It’s hard to wish those things for all of the people when all of the people don’t give a shit about me, or us. Or my art. Or my partners pronouns. Or the fact that I feel uncomfortable around males who, unknowingly or unashamedly flaunt their privilege around, shirtless in the summer.
That is one of the worst things about Olympia. Is all the white male flesh exposed as the summer temperature increases. I am confronted with nudity that I did not consent to witness. Scrawny men, scrawny boys who, even if they don’t understand or believe it, their participation is continuing the dominion of the male/female binary dichotomy THAT’STHEWAYITISALWAYSWILLBE, because, for bodies that have gravity pulling those breasts toward the core of this planet, it is impossible to expose them.
I know that hating the gender binary is wrong. I know that hating the gender binary and its pollution of the human psyche cannot change the systems that our world ascribes too. But it’s what is happening for me. I just want to denounce everything that is “normal” around me. It is how every body is judged and measured. So when the option for erasure of my person is inclusion in a binary that I actively resist, I resist it further, and hole up alone, trying to write theory to understand this dynamic or maybe to start a discussion. Or maybe it is my self, trying to undo the estrangement in order to accept the order of the world and move on?
I never thought that getting established here would be as complex as it has been. My partner and I moved the last of our things over the Thurston County line at about 4 AM in Fall of 2014. And I woke up to begin my program a few hours later that day. As I walked around the side of the house earlier that day, with the first armload of boxes, I saw a dead bird. It had been dead a while, had been dead and discarded and unacknowledged for a while, I really couldn’t tell you how many days had passed and it remained. I asked out loud if it was a bad omen and Jo scooped it into a box as we continued loading boxes into the room we had just rented. Looking back it was a bad omen entirely. I can wish and wish we never moved here, but ultimately that would get me nowhere. Just like remaining silent in front of heterosexual-presenting/identifying people. This will get me nowhere. I feel entrenched in a space where I have yet to identify an action that will propel me or move me forward away from discriminations bounds. I have learned all the ways to cope and ignore myself in a bad situation here. I have learned this things, mostly with my partner, but even more than that, alone.
I have burned more bridges in this town than I have built. First it was dis-enrolling from the Fall 2014 program. A white homosexual male began to unload on me within weeks of becoming a Teacher’s Assistant in that program. I listened to all of the injustices he faced, and the oppression and language poured out of his mouth like a fountain. I couldn’t even ask a question because in co-opting the assistant role, I unknowingly traded in my position as a student. I left this program halfway through the quarter. I stopped attending for a few days while trying to figure out what to do, or whom to talk with. I made attempts to talk with the co-facilitator, but she too, seemed to have lost the pupil in me, either in my masculine demeanor, or my calm quiet, that I maintain inside that emits like a gaseous cloud onto the outside, readying environments for me. I wanted to walk out then, and I did.
Those past times really dented my psyche. I earned the paperwork and permission that would allow me to attend services in my bed, communing with the deadened landscape outside or the endless flow of coffee and dust in my house. It took the fresh space of spring to illustrate how thick the depression had gotten. I realized that I hadn’t really moved myself anywhere in those winter months, except to and from different slurs I had created, or rather, now I have a scapegoat, the slurs that depression crafted, which I adopted and utilized against myself. Things got ugly, then. I produced more and more artwork and retreated into a space where my ability to speak dwindled. I rarely spoke up and I rarely spoke out in my other class program about the things that get inscribed onto our bodies through language. I absorbed, though. I began to see the microaggressions that engulfed me here. I began to notice the stopped bodies in the supermarket, as I suddenly became a hot ticket item. I have always kept my mother’s words in my head that, people stared because I am so beautiful and they could not behold me. But I think I keep those words for me as an anchor, something that comes from mother that built my foundation and will hold me through the decades until my life has ended. Here though, in this town, I know that I am not the fifteenth faggot to walk through the doors that day, and that it’s not about the way I carry this weight or how good my hair looks under that old wool cap I inherited in Seattle, in a passed portion of my life. But no, instead the stopped bodies stop and cannot stop me because I won’t stand still long enough to let the microaggressions fully penetrate me. I think there is a kind of knowing that queer folx have, it is a kind of knowing that we are being admired or loathed and I know the former is acceptable, often permissible without my statement, but the latter, is dangerous and if my skin weren’t so white, I would probably be more concerned than I am.
Ultimately I could pass as male here, and like many folx before me, I’d do it for survival because sometimes assimilation is savior and defiance is condemnation. Other super powers include being mistaken for Caucasian. In the realm of absolutes Latina’s are only dark skinned, are only darker skinned. But sometimes people forget that race is not hard and fast. You know there are interracial experiences and people of color adopted into white spaces claiming a transracial identity.
You’re thinking, “so what you get looked at, you should be lucky you get looked at looking like that.” I think that it’s really easy to build and narrate negative voices in my head because I’ve had so much practice, both internally and externally. I’d like to think there’s good reason to be looked at in public, I do some looking myself, but I really don’t have one. I do not feel okay with that, and I am learning, that that’s okay, you know in part because my magnificence is unavoidable. At least there isn’t a good or justifiable reason to be targeted in my opinion. It’s strange here. I felt like I could do well here, be successful here and make invaluable connections here. But so far, this space has sharpened my anger and acutely informed my political stances.
In the absence of community is when we build our own spaces, but that building is not sustainable without the camaraderie of companionship and sharing within certain spaces and platforms intended for the deconstruction of our life in systems. I have done a lot of things but have not been able to play well with these others here. I worked at a non-profit for a while, that carved out space for queer youth. But that alienation was strongest in this epicenter of community. I worked with no supervision. I asked questions and never got any answers and then, when a mentor-youth relationship rocked the organization, I decided to leave that position. My own supervisor made no effort to get in touch with me. Or talk things over with me, or work to create spaces for change to occur. What I saw in my boss there was the working queer’s of this movement who are, ill-supported, exhausted, and have no community either. I see us all trying to make a difference with our limited resources and at that point in time, I decided that adulthood was a myth. I decided that self-care was indeed an act of self-preservation and walking away from that space was the best choice I ever made. It still stings sometimes. I still think so fondly of the youth there and my heart breaks thinking that I will never sit cozy with them again. I think it’s safe to say queer folx can expect a lot of detachments to occur as they blossom. Not everyone can handle the area beyond the duality of male/female roles. These practices are not only wrong, but they are dangerous.
None of this has killed me, and indeed it has made me stronger. But the more time passes here the more I feel like it is time to get away. I feel like its time to get out of here. I am up against a kind of clock that is counting down to the final completion of my undergraduate years. All of the years of coming out, finding processes and learning different techniques to get out what I am trying to say, it feels like it’s too soon. I feel like I cannot properly communicate what I am trying to say. I paint abstract pieces, I make distorted bodies and I write poetry that is vulgar and encompassing of the ugliness that has belittled me at times. I think that getting it under my belt or under my fingernails will create a kind of resilience and ability that I do not yet possess. But, again I could say it’s the depression talking. I could say that it’s impossible to say these things. No. I could not do that disservice to myself. I intend to say everything and at the end of this life if they can put the fragments together and find some intention behind it all I could rest forever knowing that I did my best and showed my pain and denounced the socially ingrained hatred that has held me back for all these years. Every time I speak now, every time I share something or don’t dismiss and throw it away, make garbage of the sentiments I am sharing, I know that I get stronger and I know that I am with purpose and that is to be here, with us, in intellect before it’s over.
I think that there is a methodology to accepting what has come. I know that reframing is an integral component of living; of survival, or even a necessity to exist in a world that is weighed down by capitalism and the freedoms we have that come at such a great cost to us all. I think that reframing keeps it new. I think that that is how I can wake up every day and fathom looking out the same window for a time, and seeing the same make up of a tree that is living now, only to die in dormancy in some months only to peek out again, after the cold and latch on to life and the movement of the particles within and around us all. Living here has not made me lose an edge; it’s sharpened me and trims the ignorance from me. It has made me aware, it has made me less able to exist in silence. So sometimes I may not want to leave the house or sometimes I may not want to look my male roommate in the eyes as he walks around the house, shirtless on a hot summer day asserting the privilege that binds bodies and holds some of us back. It’s a lot to take on, this knowing this desire for change and facing the injustices that swirl around the air we breathe. I understand that not everyone can hold it. I do not believe those who can, would be able to hold it forever, but if I don’t say that now, then there will be nothing to adapt and change as the opinion fluctuates in bounds.
