“Surpassing Certainty” by Janet Mock
On the cover of Redefining Realness, Janet Mock bares her presence with what looks like a blurred city far beyond her. The ambiguity of what place she’s in front of parallels with her heavy history that she once left behind out of circumstance, driven by heavier ambitions as a young person with multiplicities. She reveals that the cities of her past are Honolulu, Oakland, and Dallas. On the surface of the memoir, she stands at a far enough distance from the background to convey clear separation from what is behind her, yet also stands at close enough distance from the reader’s eyes for her to be detailed, but still untouchable. I can see her curls, free, vivacious, and parted to the side. I can see her silhouette clearly in the tight, short sleeve, V-neck, midi dress in her favorite color, coral, in which she said on Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton’s podcast, Another Round, “It’s a color that I keep returning to […] It’s a color that keeps following me […] but it also just looks good!” Her literal position between her background and the reader’s eyes reflects deeply on the ways in which her experiences are familiar, yet distant. She acknowledged this on Oprah Winfrey Network’s SuperSoul Sessions, by tearfully saying, “Just because I clicked my heels and I made it out of Oz, doesn’t mean everyone can.” In the space of otherness, you can still feel othered.
On the cover of Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me, there is no background—only a black backdrop of what looks like the photograph was taken in a studio, indoors and more intimate. Janet is up close and personal, and that shows in the stories throughout the book. Her first memoir, like the cover itself, was expansive and full of depth. This time, the sole focus is Janet, in every multitude of who she is. I love that she wears a long sleeve, crew neck dress—it’s more concealing. Ironic that although she is significantly closer in the picture, she is less revealing. It spoke to me as the power of choosing when to camouflage and when to uncover yourself. She introduces the book with a one-night stand story, where in the midst of her physical nakedness with a stranger, she wore an armor that shielded her from undressing her truth—the complex relationship between privacy and intimacy, and how they are not always as mutually exclusive as we might think. In the picture, her curls are more defined and gentle, parted in the middle. She still wears her favorite color, but this time, on her cheeks, where the coral blush is placed just right to ignite her immaculate cheekbones. Intentional beauty is a kind of beauty I knew all too well—a beauty that has been redefined and refined in order to be granted access to opportunities. There is a relationship between the comfort of hegemonic identities and the ways marginalized folks strategically convey beauty to satisfy those comforts. This is evident in how you wear your hair to an interview (policing of hair textures), how “right” your skin tone is (colorism), and how well your beauty can chameleon itself for whiteness. These experiences Janet speaks of in Surpassing Certainty are beyond her transness. What makes trans women of color’s stories different from “popular” and well-listened-to trans narratives is that their race is involved. In this book, she touches on the roles of her race, disclosure of transness, womanhood, and how they intersect.
ESSENCE’s Cori Murray and Charli Penn from the podcast Yes, Girl! sat down with Janet, where they asked her, “Do you ever grapple with being an advocate?” She responded with: “It’s part of the work that I do. Though I center myself and my experiences […] I can’t forget that so many people don’t know about all these other women who have not been given the same privileges and access that I have been given to be able to live, to survive, and ultimately to thrive and live my dreams.”
My 20th birthday was pivotal in that it marked the end of my teenage years, years that I never knew I was able to give closure to or move on from. Especially the year of being nineteen, which was my expedition of disclosure, sex, intimacy, and its relationships with each other. I—someone who recently begun her twenties whose experiences were also of being a mixed trans girl from the islands, navigating transness in the context of stealth and intentional suppression— never expected to have a kind of resource like Surpassing Certainty, which covered the years from before Janet was even twenty, up until her thirtieth birthday.
I thought Redefining Realness spoke to me in ways nobody ever has. Reading it three times, I felt recognized, cared for, and prioritized. But in telling her own story in Surpassing Certainty, Janet allowed me to see myself. By the end of the book, I had an awakening that in the midst of relationships, job opportunities, heartbreak, spaces, it was beyond crucial that I choose myself over all of these. Always. Oftentimes I catch myself in this tug-of-war of “Who would stand beside you—in public—and call you theirs?” (37) and “But you can’t escape your truth. It follows you. No matter how far you travel, how good you feel with it at a distance, it lingers and sticks to you” (33), and I resort to myself. Janet described the comfort of lonesome in a way I have not been able to articulate— “Perhaps no one would ever know me quite as well” (124).
Choosing myself is healing; resorting to myself by default is lonesome. As a person who grapples with emotional unavailability, I submitted to men who knew I’m trans by only fucking them, and romantically getting involved with men whom I did not disclose my transness to. Spaces in between came with an expensive price of emotional labor, and I couldn’t afford that. My twenties is about being stingy and holding people on a higher level of accountability. When Phoebe Robinson of Sooo Many White Guys interviewed Janet, she asked “Out of all the important experiences that happened in your twenties, what’s one piece of advice that you would give to someone?” Janet responded with: “Not everyone is deserving of you, of your body, of your story, of your time […] Don’t spend it. Budget that shit!”
I started to refuse crumbs to satisfy my hunger for desire. When James texted to see me at midnight, I knew the choreography by heart. I’d see him, he’d be inebriated beyond control. He’d make small talk bullshit before giving me a taste of his night’s bar tab. We’d slip out of our clothes and into my bed, and he’d slip into my body before slipping his way out of my room. I was exhausted of this kind of pleasure, the one-way-narrow-road kind of pleasure, so I texted him back, “No can do, tonight.”
He texted me back with, “Ugh.”
He didn’t even fight for it. He never had to, so why start?
It felt good to know he was upset. It was also so foreign. He could fuck anyone, I thought, and he chose you. Who do you think you are? Why would you turn down a guy who will taste the secrecies of your skin when no one else will?
…Because I’m everything, and he does not deserve even the most sun-kissed parts of my flesh.
A few weeks later, I met a 22 year old guy named Sam at a late night party event in a vintage boutique that hosted his band’s album debut. He sang the harmonies with one hand patting a cajón he sat on, wearing a white Manchester United jersey that looked like it was his favorite shirt to wear—stained and rugged. With cheap red wine and a few ice cubes in my red cup, I unapologetically let his eye contact mutualize mine while I stood in the crowd, which led us to introducing ourselves to each other afterwards. He told me about a rooftop party he attended in Chelsea for his job at an entertainment company, where well-known actors like Lucy Liu and Zoey Deutch surrounded him, boosting his ego. I went home, tired, and swiped on Tinder. His profile was the first to show up, and I swiped right. Instant match.
“Tell Lucy Liu I say hello, will ya?” I teased.
Within the next day, we progressed onto texting.
“Come visit me in the city,” he said. I remembered then that this game of let’s see how long I can pull men into my life before I push them away to avoid disclosure, and possibly, rejection, couldn’t keep on going. That night, I told him about my transness.
Taken aback and curious, he responded respectfully, and proceeded to thank me for being forthcoming. When I shared my relief of his reaction, he messaged me back with an answer that caught me off guard, revealing that he had much more to learn than what I initially thought he already knew.
“Hahaha. You didn’t tell me you were the guy that killed my father. Just told me you’re a guy, that’s all.”
“Mmmm, not quite. I’m not a guy, but you have Google to figure it out yourself. Also, your dad isn’t even dead.”
This was my point of exhaustion and refusal to be anybody’s source of research—especially people whom I catch myself looking for validation in.
Just like Janet in Surpassing Certainty, I was stuck in the pattern of not allowing myself to deserve the best; “I embraced the sweet delusion that ignited all affairs: This time, it will be different” (77). But it never was. It was the same shit every single time; men who prioritize their confusions over my own personhood, men who want me in the darkest of the unseen, men who do not know how to love and respect me.
It is in friendships that I find myself the most powerful, and Janet and Lela’s is one I truly admired. Lela’s reaction to Janet telling her truth was the ideal reaction I never knew I wanted.
“I felt lucky you told me”, Lela said. “But no one should ever feel obligated to know, you know? It’s your story to tell.” (148)
I am so in awe of Janet’s generosity, willingness to give, and ultimately, welcome us into her story. So many of my parallel experiences with hers I dealt with alone, pushing me to a space of singularity. But for her to share them bare, and for me to even see just a spec of a dust of myself in that story, I was pulled out of that deepness. I especially found commanding power in the way Janet and Troy’s argument in the car (while she waited for her train to come) ended.
There is a potential pronoun antecedent slip here, and I ruminate over what Janet meant by “Me, too.” In a quick glance, I figured that was her way of saying “I love you, too,” but after rereading that part, deep down I wonder if this was a turning point of Janet’s priorities that allowed herself to say “I love me, too.”
Janet’s work makes me dig a little deeper, allowing me to heal numbed wounds I’ve forgotten were even there. Desire, hunger, and persistence are universal experiences that aren’t exclusive to trans women of color in their twenties. But the roots in which trans women of color’s desires, hunger, and persistence are grounded in are different, with respect to race, gender, time, histories, and traumas. Even in our shared communities, our layered experiences still have room for divergence—and that’s the importance of trans narratives; they aren’t monolithic. My chapter one looks different from Janet’s chapter one, and that is a truth to be untouched and unquestioned. Alike of the women in Club Nu, “We were marked by life, decisions, and mistakes” (29). We still are.
I have so much love for trans women of color, even if our community is dying more than I want to admit. I believe in the strength of heart and the selflessness of sisterhood. Janet, you have given us oceans in a time of drought. I’ve surpassed certainty that I will always love you for that.
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
