I’ve been reading a lot recently. Not just because I’m in the process of setting up a press; a sentence which when I say it or hear it sounds ludicrous.
A dream I’ve had for much of my adult life.
No, not that. Not a dream. That’s a thing that might feel achievable.
Something that might feel like you should aim your goals towards making it come true.
No, think smaller, even more ephemeral than that.
A fleeting thought I’d had now and then. An ‘it would be interesting’, an ‘it would be cool.’
A thing to be contemplated only with sufficient intoxicant or enough levity to know it could never happen.
But here I am on the precipice of making it a reality. The bizarre intersection of the many choices I’ve made over the past few years as I try and undo the years of neglect on my social and emotional life making it possible. Not that those things were there to… remedy? No, that implies to big of a thing, and my beloved has nurtured me and cared for me and held me and helped me. It’s not that I’ve not had the delight, the joy, the hunger to make more of this opportunity of a second life that’s been afforded me; but it’s that I was so comfortable, it was so easy; I didn’t use the space afforded by that care and love as I could have. I failed in those years to look and see the weights that my past had attached to me.
That I was dragging along a body, a self, a being that had been forged in harm and in a bleak place.
That didn’t really trust that you could connect with people – that I had found that spark of connection with one phenomenal person and didn’t dare trust the opportunities placed in front of me to let connection flare anywhere else.
Because that way lay risk; rejection; mockery. And eventual isolation and crushing pain, again.
That way was a path to the kinds of pain I’d had as a kid. To the kinds of pain I’d had as an adult when I admitted to someone that I was trans and they cut me off. Something that only happened once, but happened after she and I had confided in each other things that I’d never dared tell anyone else. And then there where we’d had a friendship burning bright was suddenly nothing. Not embers. Just ash.
And the world’s become harsher and darker in the interim. The hatred Nazi’s have for queers, and specifically for trans femme people (whose very existence tears at the heart and fabric of the nasty, ugly lies that are the thread of fascism and patriarchy), it’s become an inescapable part of the daily fabric of life here, and indeed in the UK. It slices across my friends lives.
Tries to make their lives darker and smaller.
And it cuts into me too.
Burning joy from me. Excising my compassion. Turning me from someone I like; someone I have slowly come to even love at times; into some blunt thing that bleakly enjoys the knowledge that those stoking the fires of this hatred will soon also be burned by its flames. That watches the leopard eat the faces of its enablers with ever darkening enjoyment.
I could choose to let that consume me.
I’ve been reading a lot. Nothing really deep – I just can’t right now. I can’t find it in myself to read the things that would probably help me understand this fucking evil better. I don’t know that I want to understand it better. Since those that claim to understand it seem as ineffectual fighting it as those of us clawing at it, one fucking nail after another. Exhaustion washing over us, but standing again each fucking day to say I will not let you destroy what I fought for. Knowing that fascism is weak because it is founded on lies that will not stand; knowing that eventually we will bring it back down and send its adherents back to the dark corners of society where they belong. But also knowing that in the fight to do so there will be losses. Losses that will cut us all. That will seem unendurable, but that in the end will form just another scar on our already battered existences.
Time won’t heal, but it will distance.
But ironically, instead I’ve found that thanks to the last few years what I have done instead is built things I care about. Built more life, more light, more joy, more connection. And as someone who’s so deeply cynical, whose very existence originated in a love that was abhorrent to many in British society, born to a woman that those charged with her safety literally attempted to kill, to a woman who devoted much of her life to saving the lives of those who repeatedly tried to exclude her and continue to do so, it seems bizarre to stand at this moment and know that I have chosen a path even more hidden from me than the one I’d been on. The safe path which said “Be a nurse, suck up the exhaustion and the moral abjection that is the US healthcare system, just earn money and get on with your life outside of these hours.” The easier path.
And instead I’ve chosen one which matters to me. Which matters to people like me. Which allows me to plant the bones of that girl who was beaten, spat on, kicked, excluded – and which allows me to say “Fuck you all, something good will grow from this.“
There’s a lot in vampire mythology that speaks to the excluded, the minority, the people that society says we should not be. And reading Bury Your Bones in the Midnight Soil, I couldn’t help but feel parallels to how I’ve been feeling lately. And while the current government is setting the world alight (and here I could refer to either of my home countries; both of which have adopted fascism with the kind of glee of a child loose in a sweetshop; only in this case all the sweets they’re stuffing in the mouths of the public are laced with poison), I am making an active choice to do something to try and make the world better.
Granted that’s what I’ve done for years. It’s why I’ve been working in climate/transportation journalism. I said to my therapist “I have an overdeveloped sense of justice.” And I do. And it’s exhausting. But perhaps this thing that I’m doing has the potential to refill my cup a little. Like the last gig I went to did; and I wish I could find that enthusiasm again right now, but it’s elusive, having had some bigot ask me to sign the anti-trans ballot measure yesterday, then have the gall to pretend like me being salty was unreasonable after he ruined my day.
And apparently today.
And so here I stand on the precipice.
I will do things I’m proud of. That I can stand behind. And I’ll do so as long as I can.
