When I first arrived in LA, I felt terrified and alive. The fear and sadness I carried after getting divorced and leaving my life behind to start over acted as a sort of fuel reserve, at least in the beginning. My new room was empty; just some boxes, clothes, blankets, and a queen size air mattress in the corner. It was a depressing sight, but it also felt like freedom: a blank slate from which to build a new world for myself. I would get up early in the morning and walk down the block to get coffee, and then I’d take a nice long bath, breathing and moving with intention. I’d light different colored candles to manifest various energies and would spend my time creating little shrines in my bathroom and bedroom. I was curating a life. I started writing again after a long period of creative silence; poems, essays, short stories, they all just poured out of me. For the first time in a long time I felt like a living voice, the articulation of my spirit a light at the center of me. I was invited to lots of readings, and it was exciting to share new work and meet other writers. Behind the scenes, my writing “career” was on an upward trajectory. My book was nominated for a major prize, its third one since publication. I felt like I belonged to the world. The sheen of glass between me and everyone else grew thinner. I went on dates with men and got to briefly experience the illusion of being adored and cared for. I took up dog sitting as a way to make money on the side while I waited for my adjunct teaching position to transition to full time. I got to see different parts of the city, stay in people’s houses, and learn about the worlds of others. I felt my chest expanding with every breath. I went to yoga classes and meditated and met my ancestors. I became connected to a source beyond me that fed me wisdom. An increasingly less dim sense of hope surrounded the bright energy I was cultivating within myself. Everything felt like love and connection. All the while, my drinking was getting worse.

In this state of growth and potential, I forced myself to examine my problematic relationship with alcohol. I began to take it seriously for the first time in my life. I started writing essays about the ways drinking had complicated my journey. My desire to get sober and my inability to do so stood as proof that I was not as strong as I felt. I was simultaneously proud of myself for making it to LA and worried my lack of self-control would cause me to slip. I was spiraling upward creatively, professionally, and socially while spiraling downward in my personal life. By February, I could already feel the tension between these forces. I was being pulled both ways at the same time, stretched to my limits. I traveled to NYC for a reading and met up with an old friend who used to have a drinking problem that had manifested similarly to mine. I opened up to him about what I was dealing with. Even though I had written about it already, this was the first time I spoke aloud the words, “I can’t stop drinking.” We stood on a dark street corner next to the Hudson river, our breath visible in the air, my confession transformed into physical matter. The words held in front of my mouth for a moment, and then I sighed them away. My friend put his arm around me and told me to hang in there. He was living proof there was a way out of this. I walked back to the place I was staying, shivering the whole way. Cigarette in mouth, I passed a cemetery surrounded by wrought iron and covered in snow. There was a prolonged freeze in the city; the snow I was looking at was there before I arrived and would remain after I departed.

The year went on; due to “technical difficulties” with my onboarding at work, I did not get paid for nearly three months while actively on the job. Meanwhile, the small amount of savings I had from my last job dwindled. I began to limit my food intake, and I’m not someone who eats very much to begin with. “Whatever,” I thought. “At least I’ll be skinny.” But, it got to the point that I was having trouble thinking, processing, and articulating myself. My clothes stopped fitting. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for anything. Each day was a cliff I stood at the edge of, waiting to fall. I’d wake up the next day to find new ground in front of me, miraculously, and I’d take this as a sign that everything would be alright. I didn’t understand that I was being gifted these rare, undeserved chances to turn things around, to stop drinking, to take my health and my life seriously for once. Every day was a loan extension on existential stability. I was running out of grace from the universe, and I knew this, but chose to silence the wise voice within. More alcohol, more wasted time, sure go ahead and text him back, who cares…I forgot that having true, secure ground beneath your feet comes from consistent practice.

It’s always been so easy for me to slip away, to leave any room without saying goodbye.

I went on a walk with M the other week. “I’m depressed,” I admitted, “and I want to quit drinking but don’t know how.” Without judgement, M listened and gave me advice based on her own experiences with both of those things. When she asked me why I think I drink, I responded immediately without taking time to process the question: “I am punishing myself on purpose. I am doing it to be mean to myself.” I was surprised to hear these words leaving my mouth. All my overthinking and pontification around my drinking issue had been shattered in an instant by the cruel truth: this was nothing more than simple self-harm. I am no stranger to hurting myself for comfort. In my early twenties, I went through a phase where I would burn my arms with cigarettes. I still have scars, concave, round spots of weathered, brown skin that look like giant freckles or reverse moles. I often forget they are there; of all the times for these scars to come to my attention, it is usually in intimate settings. Someone I am dating or about to fuck or whatever will be touching my arm and they’ll comment on the scars, usually saying something kind, sometimes kissing each one. Eventually, any romantic, manic-pixie style notion they have about my broken brain dissipates once they realize I’m actually an unqualified mess of a person. Do other people want to heal you because they actually care or do they just want you to not be fucked up in front of them? Most of my experiences have taught me it’s the latter. Occasionally, like on my walk with M, I get a sense of genuine care, but I don’t know what I’m looking at and struggle to receive it.

Drinking continued to get worse, and so did my life circumstances. As life grew harder, I drank more, and the cycle kept going. Almost all of me was moving downward. I had one fingernail stuck into the hard surface of the slide, trying to pull me back up, but between the gravity of my bad decisions and my perpetual sense of indecision, it was all too much. There was a snap, and I tumbled down with an explosion of released potential energy that had built up over the past year. All the strength I’d used to try to keep myself from slipping further down had become the fuel for my fall. I gave up. I was exhausted and couldn’t think of anything to do but keep drinking.

It’s not funny or cute anymore. It never was. I’ve been using my addiction as writing material. I told myself I was doing this to explore my inner world and make sense of my behavior, but that was just a form of denial. In truth, it became an excuse to keep drinking and acting like an idiot.

The past month or so has been nothing but a continuous fall. I haven’t been doing much to try to stop it. I can’t find the strength to care. All I can do is curl up in the corner and curse myself for being so stupid.

I am painting a picture around this current downward spiral, contextualizing it, showing you what it is by what isn’t shown. There isn’t anything left to say. I’ve been wasting my days hiding away and treating myself like a piece of trash, and there’s nothing artistic or beautiful about it. I refuse to aestheticize it.

That is not to say this year’s writing has been a total waste of time. It ended up forcing me to confront and share pain I had been running from my whole life. It helped me narrativize and begin to integrate all the strange and contradictory lives I’ve lived. I am proud of the piece I wrote about being abused as a child, and how I am finally beginning to come to terms with the effects it has had on me. Most of all, it felt good to have this space where I felt inspired to continue to push deeper into my mind while also challenging myself creatively. As someone who has primarily written and published poetry, Diaries of a Reluctant Addict has been a bit like a non-fiction workshop. Getting to take in all your responses, dear readers, has been a gift. Thank you.

I’ve seen beautiful things this year. I’ve had moments of pure euphoria and wordless understanding. I’ve been awed by my own capacity to feel infinite love at moments of infinite pain. Even as I slip further into the depths of depression and personal ruin, I recall the markers I’ve left for myself along the upward path. The experiences and emotions I’ve documented will remain in place to guide me. If and when I am ready to finally get my life together, I will know where to go and what to look for. I won’t be lost.

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Los Angeles, August 2026

I’ve been home for the past few days when suddenly I am hit with a realization: this is the longest fixed period of time I’ve slept in my own bed since the end of June, nearly a month and a half ago. As an inherently scattered, messy person, I rely on those few elements of stability that exist in my life in order to feel somewhat sane. This includes my bedroom, my books, the art on my walls, my bed—their familiarity engenders a sense of safety in my body. I wonder how I have changed, who I have become in their absence.

I’ve never had a home that lasted; my narrative has arrived in chapters written out of order, different lives that don’t really match sewn at the seams in sloppy binding that barely holds the pages together. I left my family, I changed my name and began to inject estrogen, I became a writer and made somewhat of a name for myself, but I’m not proud of any of it. I hate that I can’t find it in me to forgive the people who raised me. I resent belonging to a political minority who is used by one side as a pawn and by the other as a target. I am annoyed at the fact that the only thing I am seemingly capable of contributing to the world is a sublimation of my pain into the written word. I don’t want any of this. I want to be a blade of grass in the field of life, to move in the cool breeze along with everyone else. I am bored of this need to differentiate myself and explain the details of my existence artfully just so I can finally feel like a person.

Lately, I’ve noticed my writing verging into more of a diaristic and conversational mode. I accept a metaphor or two into the fold of these passages, but can’t seem to cohere them into anything transcendent or meaningful. I say things as directly and honestly as I can. I no longer care about a beautiful sentence; a single line changes nothing. Transformation is an accumulative process, and it’s never pretty. All you can do is start in one place, dig as deep as possible, and pray you emerge somewhere else.

The Road Trip, June-July 2026

As July creeps closer, I am making plans to drive from Los Angeles to New York with my friend Hanna. This will be my very first cross-country excursion! I am so excited. Hanna has just finished grad school here in southern California and is now moving to the east coast. So, we load up her Prius with as many of her things as we can fit, and her dog (a sweet, well-behaved, beautiful white Husky named Tilly), and then we hit the road.

Our first stop: Arizona, near the Grand Canyon. We arrive at our hotel close to 2am, despite our best efforts to get there in earlier in the evening. This becomes a running theme for the rest of the trip. Turns out driving 10+ hours a day requires more than a few stops—to stretch, to pee, and for me, to engage in my favorite vice: a roadside cigarette. In Arizona, summer night air is cool and dry. I smoke a cig outside the hotel and stare at a power line across the street. I can tell there is beauty in the distance stretching beyond, the dark shadow of a mountain looming in the distance, but I won’t be able to really see it until the morning.

The next day, we wake up and get ready to leave. Hanna notices the townspeople’s constant staring, apparently transvestigating me, before I even see it. This is, like, so validating; normally, my friends and loved ones respond to the tranny-stares I get with an overly assertive, “Nooooo, babe, you totalllllly pass, you are sooooo fish,” and, I’m like, yeah, maybe in LA….So, it’s nice to be seen (by Hanna, not by the MAGA Arizonians).

We get out of there as quickly as we can and drive to the Grand Canyon for a quick stop. We are meant to arrive in Albuquerque that night, but we can’t pass up the opportunity. Neither of us have been here before, and it is an emotional moment. I am overwhelmed by the sight of the canyon, its immensity, the way my eyes and brain struggle to process size and distance…I begin to cry, and pull down my sunglasses so as not to make a scene.

We watch as the inexplicable beauty of this place forces tourists to acknowledge and interact with one another. On the path to the rim, people stick to their groups, keep their faces buried in their phones, it’s 2020’s late-capitalist individualism as usual—but when they arrive at the edge of the canyon, suddenly they begin to mix, everyone looks at each other like, “Can you fucking believe this???” and the social walls come down. People take photos of strangers for them, there is laughing, smiling, everyone caught up together in an elevated state. A Japanese couple asks Hanna if they can take a photo with Tilly and a shoot commences. The feeling is communal in a very real way. Like, people in LA are always going on and on about “community”, but this experience is showing me that it can’t be forced; this is just physics. We can’t help but be together at this moment. We’re like ants standing at the edge of a crack in the road of the world. I feel God surrounding us all.

We leave and drive past a large wildfire whose smoke turns the sun a bloody shade of red. The sight is shocking and darkly beautiful. We stop at a gas station in Arizona as we approach the New Mexico border and Hanna scouts out the bathroom sitch for me. Before we’d left, I’d looked up all the various bathroom laws, knowing we’d be traveling through some deep red states. But, as we actually traverse the country, I am surprised to find it’s more of a vibes-based thing. More on this later, but for now I will say: the southwest is a hell of a lot more hostile to the idea of my transsexual ass than the south proper. My theory is that Arizona has more of a proximity to “progressive” areas, and many of its residents are old right wingers who, just like my grandfather, moved here to get away from minorities and taxes and trannies. So, there is a certain sense of embitterment here, culturally speaking. I’m fortunate to be traveling with someone who takes these things seriously, even more so than I do. I’m used to laughing it off, pretending like it’s no big deal so as not to annoy anyone or center myself or be a hysterical identity politics stereotype.

We arrive in Albuquerque around 2am and settle into our hotel room. I go out to smoke and, in an adjacent lot, there is some kind of automated security system set up. It is apparently too sensitive to movement, because any time I flick my cig while sitting on the bench outside the hotel, an alarm goes off and a robo-voice repeats, “Please depart the premises” over and over. I’m nowhere near the “premises”—I’m on the other side of a chainlink fence, on hotel property. It’s clearly all for show, though, because no security guards or police arrive. I just smoke my cigarette while a robot yells at me. Then, I go to bed. I realize I haven’t had any alcohol in several days and I feel proud of myself, but also like I desperately need a drink.

The next day, we drive through north Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle. This is the first time I’ve been someplace where, no matter what direction I look in, the horizon is flat. I’ve lived in or near mountains my entire life. Fields of green give way to brownish plains as we enter Oklahoma. We drive through a storm that makes the sky purple, orange, brown, and green all at the same time. We stop at a store called “Cigarette Outlet” and make friends with the nice ladies working there.

We drive into Kansas and witness giant clouds of dust blowing in the wind across farmland. This seems fitting. It’s July 3rd, the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. At sunset, we stop at a Family Dollar to use the bathroom. A group of adults and children are setting off fireworks behind the building. The fireworks rise, explode, and then drift with parachutes attached while people chase the dead, smoking shells down. They run across the parking lot and into the highway to collect the leftovers. Everything is caught in a dim, reddish glow. We leave and arrive at our hotel late, between 2 and 3am. We are in a heatwave, and our room has no air conditioning. I down a disgusting $1 gas station tallboy, sleep in a humid, feverish haze, and have strange dreams during the 5 hours of rest we take before getting ready to leave again in the morning.

We get coffee and drive to Hanna’s father’s house for his birthday party. We are in a cute, gated neighborhood in suburban Kansas. I meet Hanna’s family and am taken by the experience of being in a house with generations of relatives who’ve gathered to spend time together. I don’t have a family, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to be a part of something like this. Hanna keeps apologizing for the social expectation, but I am here for it. She plays chess with her ten year old cousin and randomly tells him, “You know, Jennifer is a very talented poet.” She’s always hyping me up like that. I am embarrassed but grateful. “Write a poem right now,” her cousin says to me. “What do you want it to be about?” I ask, not skipping a beat. “The wild,” he says. I spend the next ninety seconds (the time limit I’ve been given) composing a poem in my notes app and then I read it aloud. “I want to write a poem,” he says, and I feel like crying.

We leave and make our way toward Nashville. We stop at a gas station in Kentucky super late and I go to use the bathroom and am nervous. A man holds the door of the gas station open for me, I say thank you, and he, in a perfect, deep southern drawl, replies, “My pleasure, ma’am.” People are so nice in the south!

We get to Nashville and go to sleep immediately. We wake up and try to find a place to eat downtown, but the streets are blocked off and crawling with 20-somethings looking to party. We go to a park instead and then walk to a small, nearby restaurant that serves Cajun-Asian fusion. I order a cold brew with ube foam and a crawfish hand pie; they are two of the best things I’ve ever tasted in my life. We make friends with the waitress and after we tell her we drove in from LA I briefly mention my year spent living in West Virginia (she’s from one of the Carolinas), hoping to earn some cred with her, but she is ultimately unimpressed.

I feel somewhat strange being in Nashville, where, when I was 12, my mom had briefly moved to be with a man. I’d begged her not to leave, and she’d left. She’d returned a few weeks later when things with the man fell apart, just as I was beginning to process the heartbreak of losing her and being left with my abusive father. “Emotional whiplash” doesn’t begin to describe it. This was simply one more experience that taught me not to trust anything, to never get used to a single feeling.

We drive to Asheville from there and fortunately arrive early, around 8 or so. We crash with Hanna’s friends, a couple who have recently welcomed a baby into the family. They cook a delicious dinner, one of our few real meals during the trip, and we drink around a fire in their backyard, fireflies lighting the air in tiny, brief embers around us.

As I get ready for bed, I look at my phone and see a notification that makes my heart contract. My first wife, who I have not spoken to in years, has sent me a DM. It’s about the dog we raised together, Frankie—her health is starting to fail, and Em, my ex, wants to know if I would like to see her while there is still time. They have an appointment at the vet tomorrow and she doesn’t know how it’s going to go. I immediately begin to cry. However badly things might have ended with us, and as much as I hated myself for choosing distance and therefore abandoning my sweet Frankie who’d I’d helped raise for six years, I have been praying for a chance at reconciliation. I can’t believe this is happening right now while I’m two thousand miles away. I reply to Em’s message and we make amends. I tell her about the trip I am on, and that I won’t be in California for a couple days. I beg God to not let tomorrow be Frankie’s last day. I open a beer and drink/cry myself to sleep.

The next day, as we drive from Asheville to Hanna’s mother’s house in Pennsylvania, I think about Frankie. I wonder about her appointment and prepare myself for the worst. I don’t know if there will be time for me to see her again, to say goodbye. As we approach Hanna’s mother’s house, Em messages me and lets me know all is stable for now; I can spend time with Frankie when I return. This happens as we are driving through West Virginia, passing by a Chinese Buffet I used to go to with my second ex-wife and her mother. Disparate memories pile upon one another, and I am overwhelmed. Hanna and I arrive at her mom’s place and get three hours of sleep and then we wake up and she drives me into New York and drops me off at JFK. I give her a piece of quartz for good luck with her new life in NYC, and we say an emotional goodbye.

The Return

I fly into LA. The end of the grueling cross-country trip is marked by a long, desperate day of travel. Upon landing, I immediately have to call my sister Bri to ask to borrow money so I can take the shuttle to Union Station and then take the metro home. I’ve been broke for this entire trip, and shave no idea how I’ve made it so far on so little.

After 3 hours of sleep, a 5 hour flight, an hour on the shuttle, and then 20 minutes on the train, I am finally a few blocks from my apartment. I lug my bags down Sunset, barely awake, barely alive, and I get home, but only for a brief moment. I take a bath and drive to the Hollywood Hills to meet a couple whose dog I will be watching for the next two weeks. I get the rundown from them, and then I drive 2 hours to Newport Beach to see my ex-wife and our dog for the first time in 4 years. I get there around 8pm and walk right into the house where I’d once lived a life.

Em and I had spent most of the last few years of our relationship staying in this place with her parents. Her father was dying of early onset Alzheimer’s, and we were often there to assist her mother in caring for him. When he passed, we all leaned on one another and the three of us became a tight-knit unit. I’ve written about her mother before, Theresa, my mother-in-law, an amazing woman who showed me what it was like to have family, to have a mom in a real way. She loved me, and I loved her so much. She died of a rare form of cancer in 2020 right here in the living room where I now stood. The last time I was here, Em and I were recently divorced and I was holding her mother’s cold, lifeless hand as she lay on a medical bed next to the open sliding balcony doors, the ocean breeze moving in through the silent room.

During this time, the road trip and the reunion with Em and Frankie, I feel my entire life moving through me. I have long struggled with piecing together the narrative of my various experiences. My memory has existed as a disconnected series of vignettes; part of the reason I started writing these essays was to thread these stories together, to be able to hold something cohesive in my hands. This trip pulls the thread tight, locking the binding into place, forcing me to stand in front of the totality of it all.

Viewing a life in all its fullness feels like being in front of the Grand Canyon; it’s too much to comprehend, and yet there it is: depth, texture, ancient, wind-worn rock, shrubbery, trees, sky, clouds, varying stretches of distance all converging on the singularity of a witnessing, conscious mind.

Over the next few weeks, I continue to visit Em and Frankie in between various dog and housesitting gigs. I’m never home for more than a day at a time. Frankie holds on, and it is equally nice to see her as it is to catch up with Em, to share stories with one another and to continue processing all of the loss and death we’ve been part of as a pair. One night, I go to the movies with Eileen, my second ex-wife (I know, I know, I’m such a lesbian stereotype), and we see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX. I am stoned out of my mind and it is a wild experience.

3,000 year old spoiler alert: near the end, when Odysseus finally returns home, he sees his dog Argos, who has waited patiently for him during his 20 years of absence. The dog is old, sick, and barely alive. He makes eye contact with Odysseus, wags his tail, and dies.

I go home after the movie and the next day I get a call from Em—today is the day.

I rush out to Newport Beach, just like I did right after her mother died. That time, I had been racing the coroner in order to spend time with Theresa’s body before it was to be removed. Now, I am driving as fast as I can to see Frankie before she passes. I want to be there when it happens. Fortunately, I arrive in time and we take Frankie to the vet together. Our poor dog is shaking, terrified, like she knows what is happening. Her breath is strange and stale, a side effect of advanced kidney failure. Em and I hold and comfort her, trying to keep ourselves together for her sake. The vet is kind, he leads us into a room and gives us time to say goodbye. They let us feed her chocolate since it doesn’t matter anymore, and Frankie devours it happily; she can’t believe her luck. Her fear subsides and she lies there in Em’s lap as the vet prepares the medicine. She falls asleep peacefully while we pet her and tell her how much we love her. A few moments later, it’s over.

I think back to seeing The Odyssey the night before—the synchronicity and specificity of returning after a long journey just in time to say goodbye. My brain uses this apparent coincidence in order to create a sense of coherence within my own narrative. I am always hoping the stories I tell will act as a sort of binding agent between the scattered, chaotic pieces of my own life. I write because I feel compelled to, because I don’t know what else to do. I have no “goal” other than moving sensations through my body and getting them out as best as I can. “Meaning” comes from whatever happens next, and I don’t have control over that. All I can do is hope for the tiny embers of clarity that sometimes arise from living, noticing, documenting, and releasing the feeling of what it was like to pass through these moments.

I desire a life worth living; human connection; beauty; love; a feeling of harmony amidst the chaos. How can I make a song from all the noise? If I listen closely, I can force my mind to hallucinate a tune. It’s not there, but I am humming it to myself nonetheless.

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i don’t ever want to love again. that’s how i feel right now. i love love but i am too exhausted for it. i thought i was ready, but maybe i will never be. i wrote a whole essay for you just the other week about how i was ready for love and now i feel opposed to it in every way. first i went and deceived myself, and then i lied to you, my dear reader. no, not “dear;” no, not “my.” you don’t belong to me at all and i carry no romantic notions of what we might mean to one another. you’re here because you decided on a whim to follow me through a door and now you’re too polite to turn around and back away from this room i have been filling with abstract images, sad lyrical ramblings scrawled upon the walls, taxidermic memories uncannily preserved via emotional details whose truths glint like light off a glass eye stuffed into the hollow head of a wall-mounted deer, dead stories from a dead life that continues to confound me……

you’re here because an algorithm brought you here. i’m here because an algorithm brought me here. our destiny is built on nature’s ultimate conspiracy: to create order against the will of the physical universe, to make pockets of meaning in an ever-decaying system. nothing matters; everything matters; you can choose to believe either or both or neither. everything is true but also no it isn’t. truth exists but you’ll never know it or tell it. beauty exists but you’ll never see it or be it. these are ideals, and they are reality’s way of making war against its own nature. i want to die and i am going to die so i fight to stay alive. i read sad quantum theories about how death isn’t real, how we experience the deaths of others but our own personal consciousness lives on by slipping into an alternate universe the moment others experience our own death, so, for each of us, we are immortal and everyone else is already dead. seems kinda dumb to believe that the universe, on a fundamental level, would even recognize an individual consciousness, let alone allow it to slip between other realities. you created the self in order to hide from the truth of reality and as a side effect of the creation of the self you have come to fear death, so you prioritize the supposedly inherent individuality of the self in order to subvert death when death only matters if you believe in said individual self. instead of nesting all these transparently pathetic theories within theories with theories—thereby treating the symptom while ignoring the root of the problem—why don’t you just let go of the self? death ceases to matter the moment you do this. there is no self, there is no death. only order, decay, transformation, transcendence. the soul is the cosmos, and you, a speck. you are not God. you are with God. you have always been and always will be. God is truth and beauty and love, and death will reveal all of these things to you, only you won’t be a “you”, and this is exactly what will allow truth and beauty and love to finally exist.

(don’t die, though. not yet. you haven’t earned the right to experience these things. your time has not come. wait…i beg you, please…don’t go.)

i watch a sweet little dog with a heart condition napping on his side next to the couch i am poorly positioned on. as i write, he snores with labored breaths and kicks his tiny paws outward. i hold myself askew, one foot tucked under a leg folded up on the couch. one arm is pressed into a cushion, the other tunnels its elbow through my hip. my neck strains with every word. i am in pain for no reason other than my refusal to sit like a normal person. no matter how i sit, walk, move through the world, i don’t feel normal. some days i go out into the world and think “i am love, i am light, i am vibrating with every person, every bird, every leaf on every tree,” and i am convinced each stranger i encounter feels a sense of joy and wonder radiating off of me and that we love each other even in a glance, or a bit of small talk, oh how beautiful it is to be here with you…other days, i feel a shroud of confusion and self-disgust and i leave the house and nothing makes sense and the wind hurts my skin and the sounds the birds make scare me and i avoid eye contact and am convinced everyone is appalled by my presence, the grocery store clerk hates me and wants me dead, stop trying to smile at these people and be nice, it makes them even more disgusted, just grab your shit and move on before you make their day worse……

my body is a leaking world. maybe we really are responsible for making our own meaning, but only to a certain degree; perhaps we are limited in what we, as selves, can create. agency and autonomy are human concepts developed from a state of insecurity: “what if i don’t have a say.” we attempt to imbue all these other things with autonomy, like a computer or a car or a phone, and then we freak the fuck out about it. what if they get to have what we never will? deep down we understand we don’t really have a choice, not at the core of it all. we are products of our nature, our design. what if these disembodied things, through their disembodiment, are able to transcend whatever it is about the self that prevents us humans from being fully autonomous? we create these ideal forms of ourselves and recoil in terror. i write these words without stopping to think, they just come out of me, they leak all over the page, and i have not made them so. i have not created an argument in my mind and archived it here, not at all. this is a document of a body full of history that is sitting funny and moving its fingers against letters on a screen and seeing what comes out. i am not autonomous. i am not a self. i am a world of invisible conspiracies. i am meeting you in a parking garage and whispering them all to you. take notes. don’t forget what i say. this is the speech of infinite, indivisible moments experienced by an ever-shifting landscape of cellular turnover, growth, decay, growth, decay…this is the unconscious universe manifesting itself, however poorly, however confusing, contradictory, overwrought, sentimental, ironic, ugly, annoying, true, false…..

“i” “wanted” to “write” an “essay” about “grief” but this is what emerged instead. i was planning to use the occasion of the most recent loss i endured—the death of a dog i raised with my first ex-wife for six years, then did not see for four years, until my ex and i reconnected last month, which allowed me to be present for the passing of said dog—to explore and articulate all the strange and difficult to describe circumstances of death i’ve experienced in my life. it was going to be full of pithy lines like “there is no elevator pitch for my grief”, and i was going to use a threaded, woven narrative style to capture the story of my adult life, my first marriage, getting to finally have a family, losing it all, reconnecting with my ex just as our dog’s health began to fail, all of it. i was going to make sense of the senselessness that is life. and, listen, i’m still definitely fucking doing that. the essay will happen…but, before that, before the meaning-making, i needed to do something else. i needed to write without thinking, without organizing, without editing, without trying to create order within the chaos. i needed to decay like a radioactive body and allow the particles to land and spell something out. i needed to let my pain speak for itself without my intervention. so that’s what this was. that is who is writing right now. hello? yes? this is jennifer’s pain speaking. may i ask who’s calling?

He checks his online dating profile and sees that he has five new messages.

One woman says, “hi”.

A man says, “Hello. I just wanted to say that you are very attractive and it looks like we may have some things in common. Msg me back if you want :)”

Another man says, “hey wat does ur unsername mean??”

Another woman says, “Hey, I’m Sara. I see that you’re into filmmaking? I’m a film major actually, and I’m working on my final project right now. You have really good taste in movies, by the way. Music as well. You seem really cool. I’d love to hang out some time and talk about film and stuff, if you’d like. Anyway, I hope you’re having a nice day! :)”

The third man says, “Hey u hook up?”

He messages the man back, “Yeah”

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Libidinally speaking, the past year or so has been chaotic. After my second marriage ended last September, I promised myself I would be celibate for one calendar year. This was a fairly easy task during the three month post-divorce period in which I was crashing with friends in the northern Californian redwood forest. I downloaded a couple dating apps just to see what was out there, but was too afraid to actually match with anyone and also was not too inspired by the selection; as I’ve mentioned before, Sonoma county was just not the vibe for me, socially speaking. I visited LA in October to start looking for a place to live, and I met a few men who also did not impress me, to say the least. I opened up to someone at a party and he gave me a funny drink and fortunately I had the wherewithal to leave and go back to my friend Hanna’s apartment, where I spent the rest of night dizzy, the room swirling around my shaking body. I still can’t say for sure if I was drugged, but I know that I continued to feel off-balance for the next several days, and on Halloween I ended up falling on my face right outside Ye Rustic. I returned to northern California with my head hung in shame. I bought gas station sunglasses and tried to ignore the stares from strangers who all looked concerned at the sight of my battered and bruised visage. My personal damage had become fully externalized, and the rest of me went inward. I wondered if I would be permanently disfigured and therefore unattractive. I was also aware of how rapidly I was beginning to age. Maybe romance would never happen again for me. Maybe I earned this.

My face healed over the next couple months, but my heart remained shriveled and locked away in a room I had no access to. I’d buried the key in the middle of a field of flowers and made myself forget exactly where it was. I moved to LA a couple days before Christmas, hopped back on the dating apps, and was having sex again before the beginning of the new year. It was nice to feel beautiful and desired, but my soul was in a permanent state of hesitation. I wasn’t ready to commit to anything, but my body still retained its lifelong pattern of instant attachment to anyone who treated me like an object of desire. I couldn’t shake this. I found myself telling people I went out with that I wasn’t ready for anything serious while simultaneously being like, “Come to my reading, meet my friends…” and so on. I was a walking mixed signal, and I allowed this to crush my heart even more, compacting it into a tiny lump of decaying flesh at the center of me.

Meanwhile, I began taking stock of my entire life. I started writing a series of essays ostensibly covering my relationship with alcohol, which had grown worse after the divorce and continued to spiral once I moved to LA. I was drinking all the time to shut out the pain of my past, and to keep my heart weak and uninspired when it came to romance or a real connection with another. As I wrote deeper into my life, I found myself finally dealing with some huge scars, ones I had tried for years to confront. Whenever I faced them before, their size floored me. It was like staring into the Grand Canyon or traveling around the dark side of the moon, totally surreal and evoking a sense of the sublime. My mind couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at. Writing about these things allowed me to examine myself piece by piece, and while it has not been easy by any means, I have finally drawn a rough sketch of myself. I see who I am, why I am, and I am finally learning what I want and need out of life.

Throughout this process, I have begun to forgive myself. I have reconciled with both of my ex-spouses, and have sought a pathway to be on good terms with anyone from the past who is willing to meet in the middle. Unfortunately, this does not include most of my family of origin who continue to paint me as a crazy liar. I cannot force another person to do the same work I have been doing, and I am no longer naive enough to believe my individual sense of self-accountability and grace toward others is enough to build a functional or sustainable bridge.

I have come to terms with the differences between that which can be healed and that which I will forever retain as scar tissue. “Healing” as a concept has become twisted in the contemporary western world, especially as big tech and pharma have conspired to create a culture obsessed with optimization. I feel this is not only a lost cause, but one that creates a pathway to even greater suffering for all of us as we are socially and medically coerced into believing we are inherently flawed and broken in our humanness. I am learning to become proud of my flaws. I don’t necessarily flaunt them, but I carry them as signs that I am alive, that I have lived a life. You can’t remove the rings from the inside of a tree and call it perfection. The idea of the optimized and perfected human is uncanny and terrifying. Wounds can be cleansed and closed, and there are things we can do to make our path through life less cluttered and painful, but things will never be perfect and they shouldn’t be. We are our scars. I reject the idea that I am meant to spend my entire life attempting to heal from the events of my life. Where does living occur in this scenario? I want to live.

I semi-jokingly posted the other day “when will my libidinal desire return from war…” I was frustrated because my head felt ready to give love another chance, but my heart still felt dead. I was annoyed with myself for hiding the key to it. So I went inside and sat down in the middle of the field of flowers where I had buried it. I reflected on the past few weeks—between going on a cross-country road trip, one that seemed to bookend all the work I’ve been doing to confront and make sense of my life, and returning to back-to-back longterm housesitting gigs, I have not slept in my own bed for the entire month of July. As someone who relies on stability, on having my own personal, energetically sound space to decompress in, I have been feeling a bit shaken. The beautiful thing about feeling homesick is the way it affirms the fact that you have a home. Similarly, I now have a stable sense of self, and even when I feel emotionally or psychically adrift, I know there is somewhere for me to return. This is new to me. I know who I am. I am learning to love her.

I have been feeling a sense of romantic desire returning to my body. I’ve even been having vivid erotic dreams that differ from the typical notion of a “sex dream” in that they’ve been deeply passionate and romantic, and are more about desire and connection instead of simply getting off. I wake up feeling more aligned with my inner lover girl than ever before. I am hopeful. I may have lost the key to my heart, but I’ve been witnessing the walls around it crumble away. I can see into the room, and there my heart is. What was once shriveled and dry is bursting with flowers. Out of so much loss, death, and pain, something new is emerging.

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I was desperate so I texted this guy I used to see earlier in the year. He was a fish man, had several tanks in his apartment, was wealthy and classy and, like, knew things. I figured he could help me find out what was going on here. I’d never wanted these fish to begin with. A friend who was moving had offloaded them onto me. I was kind of against the idea of keeping fish, it seemed cruel to have so many of them in such a small space together. To me it looked like a boring and sad life. I loved my friend, though, and figured I could help her out and also have something to remember her by. I didn’t have any other friends, really. Since moving to the city I mostly wrote and smoked and drank, not necessarily in that order. This morning, I’d started off with half a beer leftover from last night, one I’d passed out with in bed. I needed to write today, needed to get work done for my remote bullshit job that barely covered my rent, needed to call the bank to explain that I would be able to pay my car payment next month when things got a little better…but, before I could do any of that, the fish had gone insane. I had been feeding them the proper amount of food, doing everything right, at least what I could afford to get right. Friendless and broke and terrified I was going to get all these little fish killed, I texted the guy I’d promised myself I’d never speak to or see again.

We’d gone on a few dates when I first moved here, and he was nice enough, if not misanthropic. He was cynical toward others and frankly kind of rude with the waitstaff at the nice restaurants he’d take me to. But he made me feel special because, according to him, I was different from all these boring, phony, normies. He, like me, had no friends. He was easy for me to talk to and I guess I was for him too. He made it out like he and I had some kind of special connection, an understanding of how the world really worked, and that we were not just apart from, but better than other people. I didn’t believe this; all I’d ever wanted was to feel like I was part of things despite my social weirdness and off-putting aura. Also, he was a hardcore atheist, and I was deeply invested in spiritual truth and beauty and transcendence. I despised his crude philosophy that we, as humans, were “all just animals”, that life was short, brutal, undignified. Maybe we were animals, but that shouldn’t make us think of ourselves as lower; it should make us think of animals, insects, plants, everything, as higher in esteem. All life was precious and beautiful, I would tell myself. This was how I would keep myself from throwing myself off the rooftop of my apartment building whenever I was broke and hungry and hungover and smoking my last cigarette.

Anyway, the guy and I were an off and on thing for a time. He was handsome, older, cultured, and despite our philosophical differences, I liked talking to him. He made me feel smart and beautiful. He was obsessed with my body and mind equally. The sex was good, he knew what he wanted and what he was doing. He would sometimes send me money at random, which made me feel weird, but I was too poor to refuse it. “Go treat yourself at a salon,” he’d say, and I would buy groceries instead because I hadn’t eaten in two days. I was charmed by the fact that he thought my poor girl problems amounted to beauty concerns, and not starvation. I hadn’t wanted him to know quite how bad it was. I’d kept reminding him I wasn’t into him for his money and that it was important to me that I take care of myself. Still, when he told me money was no object for him and to let him know if I ever needed help with rent, etc, something in me relaxed and felt safe for the first time since moving here. Unfortunately, everything crashed down immediately after this. I ended up needing help with my rent after all, and he was super rude when I asked him about it. “I can’t do this all the time,” he sighed, looking down at me with contempt as I got dressed on the floor next to his bed. He pulled out a giant wad of hundred dollar bills held together by a silver clip from the inside of his drawer and set it on the edge of the bed. Is he giving me my rent in fucking cash? I wondered for a moment. He looked at me again, contempt turning to barely-hidden disgust, and then stuffed the probably thousands of dollars of cash into his work bag. As I sat in the Uber on the way back to my apartment, crying softly with my face against the window, last night’s makeup smeared, my hair all over the place, the driver doing his best not to openly judge the messy slut in his backseat, I got a notification on my phone. The guy had Venmoed me the rent with a kiss emoji next to it. I knew he would just use this as confirmation that I was indeed the trash he thought I was, but I decided after this I would never talk to him again.

The situation with the fish had changed everything. There was no one else to ask for help. I had no choice but to break my silence with the guy. He texted back right away and said he’d come over for a minute, but was busy that day so it would have to be quick. When he showed up I had just hopped out of the shower and was dressed in a long white t-shirt that went halfway down to my knees, a pair of blue underwear, and nothing else. I let him in and he barely glanced at me. He walked over to the tank and examined the frenzied fish. “I think it must be the acid levels in the water,” he said. He turned to look at me. “The ongoing maintenance for this might be out of your price range,” he said. “I can take these fish off your hands if you’d like.”

“Great,” I said. I sighed into my hands. “I never really wanted them to begin with.”

I helped him carry the tank downstairs. His car was a long, white thing, some brand new type I’d never seen before. “It’s entirely autonomous,” he explained. We got inside. It was shaped like a sedan, but had three long rows of seats, kind of limo-esque. He had me sit in the front passenger seat, kept the fish tank on the floor in the middle row, and he sat in the very back, disinterestedly reading a financial magazine.

“We need to make a couple stops, then I’ll have you help me set this up at my place.”

The car drove us on the freeway toward the campus of a college I’d taught at as a visiting professor years ago, long before I’d moved here. I’d been living a two hour’s drive away out in the valley, and would commute twice a week to teach undergraduate creative writing.

“Why are we here?” I asked as the car rolled into campus. It was built into a hillside. The interior roads really took you through the heart of the university to the degree that you could literally stop in front of the entrance to multiple classrooms. This was unlike many California campuses, where the closest you could get was a parking lot on the other side of a freeway. As we rolled past students walking to class, I became aware that I was still practically naked. I was glad the t-shirt was long enough to basically function as a dress, but still felt strange there in my underwear, my wet hair, no makeup. I had once been a professor here!

The guy finally answered, “I have to drop a book off for my daughter. For one of her classes.”

What the fuck, I thought. Daughter??? On our first date he mentioned he’d been divorced for a while, but claimed he was childless!

As though reading my mind, he went on. “I just found out about her. It was not long after you and I met. I didn’t want to say anything until the DNA test confirmed things. Women, they love to take advantage when you’re in my financial position, you know?” I winced and rubbed my finger where the blue fish had stung me earlier. “I had to be sure,” he said.

I was shocked into silence. I found myself reevaluating everything about my time with this man through this new, previously withheld information. The car stopped next to a white building, one I’d recognized. We were parked parallel to a door that led into a room inside of which I had once taught a class. I felt like I was losing my mind. I shrunk down into the seat and curled myself up into a ball.

“Who is that?” I heard a vocally-fried voice say, and I tried not to look out the window.

“No one,” the guy’s voice cut in. “Just a friend I’m helping out with something. Here’s your book. See you in a few days?”

“Whatever.”

The car next drove us a couple miles away to a strip mall with some restaurants and a laundromat and other random LA shit.

“I want to get some food from this place that just opened,” he said. “Get out, join me.”

I didn’t recognize the neighborhood. I wanted to look it up on my phone, but it had died while I was nervously scrolling in the car. The strip mall looked like every strip mall in town, just slightly remodeled. It was three stories high and painted white. The paint job was hasty, you could still see the gray beneath it. We were definitely somewhere on the eastside, there were hills and nature around, but I was still orienting myself within this sprawling excuse for a city. We could’ve been anywhere. People stared as I followed the guy to a food truck parked in the lot where a mixture of working class and bougie-looking people were enjoying what appeared to be some kind of pop up restaurant. The center of the lot held round plastic tables where some people ate from small bowls and others scanned QR codes and others clutched their phones expectantly. No one was working the truck. I heard a phone next to me buzz, and this woman walked up and pointed her device at a little slot built into the side of the truck. It opened up on its own and there was her order.

“Okay,” I said, turning to where the guy had been a moment before, “So this is like a fully automated-” He was gone. I scanned the crowd, there were several white men with gray hair dressed semi-nicely who could’ve been him, but weren’t. I tried not to panic. I was half naked and wet and bare faced, people had already been staring since I got out of the car, I didn’t want to cause a scene. I went up to a woman who seemed nice and asked her if she had seen a man and described how the guy had been dressed. “Honey, I think he ditched you.” I looked around wildly and started to feel dizzy. “He gave you a Florida divorce,” she said, holding back a cackle that came out in a few sharp breaths.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, making my way back to where the car had been parked. It was gone. Like it had never been there.

My phone was dead and I didn’t know how I was going to get back home. I looked too crazy to ask anyone for help, or even for a phone charger. There was no one to call anyway, and I didn’t have Uber money. I was stuck there in the strip mall. I was hungry. It was getting hot out. I walked around the back of the building and thought Fuck it, I’ve never dumpster-dived before, but now is as good a time as any to start. The street I had turned down was narrow and led up into some hills. There were trees everywhere and the road dead-ended a hundred feet ahead, just dirt and grass beyond it. As I made my way to the alley behind the strip mall, I heard a sound. It was like horse hoofs beating into dirt, but softer, and there were a lot of them. Up near where the street ended, I saw them. A giant pack of dogs. Golden retrievers, huskies, German shepherds, a variety of large canines, all running at top speed. They tore down the street toward me, one or two stopped to say hi, and then they kept going until they reached the strip mall parking lot. I followed them and stood just around the corner, watching. The crowd of people there scattered, some laughing and some screaming. The dogs, of which there were at least a dozen, had knocked over tables and chairs, and were grabbing food out of people’s hands. Little bowls of sushi and veggies and whatever else, all reclaimed. I stood there and watched until every human was gone. A friendly German shepherd trotted over to me. I was just outside the lot leaning against the side of the building. She was carrying an intact bowl filled with yellowtail, edamame, and rice. The dog set it down in front of me, looked up at me with sweet, watery eyes, and ran back to join the others. The sun shone through the trees lining the street. There was a slight breeze rustling the leaves, causing light to dance in a brilliant flurry against the white building, my white t-shirt, and me. I picked up the bowl from the sidewalk and ate the contents of it with my fingers.

Many people move through their days with a heavy weight tied to them, one they often don’t even realize is there because it’s been normal for them for most of their lives. You see it in their eyes; unlike the exceptionally cruel who eat pain, whose eyes seem to widen like hungry mouths in the face of your humiliation, most people’s brows furrow and narrow, the corners of their eyes crease and strain, the jaw muscles tighten as they demean you or demand from you, and all you can think is, “I am so sorry for whatever happened to make you this way.” You can tell they don’t even want to be doing what they are doing, but are compelled by some force both inside and apart from them.

The imposition of pain is a truth of this reality. We are, from day one, tasked with holding experiences and feelings that seem antithetical to love, kindness, and grace. And, yet, those three things are just as real and true as the pain itself. They are equally part of the fabric of the energetic realm from which all life emerges. Just like pain, these are not inventions or constructs, but fields of potential we ripple through. We are manifestations of them, and not the other way around. Therefore, it is always possible to choose love; to vibrate with and through it.

You have to forgive yourself. There isn’t a choice in the matter. If you don’t forgive yourself, the resentment you carry will always find its way outward, sending toxic fumes into the faces of everyone you encounter. Like cigarette smoke, secondhand shame is even worse for those around you than it is for you. If you need permission to forgive yourself, let this be the impetus: your self-imposed shame is hurting the people you love. Stop it. You deserve better and so does everyone around you.

I am not speaking from an idealistic or utopian mindset. The world is harsh, violent, and destructive, and much of human history is marked by open savagery and unapologetic evil. Human sacrifice; wholesale slaughter; tribalism and ethnic cleansing…all this time and energy devoted to exploiting the human capacity for creative thinking in order to come up with new and novel ways to torture and murder others for entertainment, money, power. We continue to do most of these things to this day, albeit under the sanitized, narrativized, and censored auspices of neoliberal ideology and modernity. I am not naive about any of this. At the same time, I still believe love and grace are equally as real and essential to life as hatred and violence. It’s just that the latter seem easier to access to us, because once the cycle starts, it becomes normal and is passed down through generations. It is easy to forget that the past is an unbroken chain, and that we are all products of history. Throughout time, though, people keep rediscovering the power of love, and sometimes those people are celebrated, sometimes murdered, sometimes both. Some are remembered for centuries, and some die forgotten, leaving only small traces of the grace they inhabited in their lifespans.

My understanding of the nature of reality comes from a bizarre mixture of competing philosophies, traditions, and spiritual and religious beliefs. One reason I love Jesus Christ and his teachings is because he was a man of great contradictions who spoke in the language of his time. He implored his followers to love one another, to turn the other cheek and humble oneself in the face of violence, and he exemplified this by allowing himself to be captured, tortured, and murdered in a truly grueling and undignified manner. At the same time, this was a man who promised war and destruction toward the powers that be in the name of bringing a new order to the world. He crashed the fuck out at the temple, overturned tables, drove away the moneylenders. He encouraged violence against the oppressors and the unholy. Finally, at the end of his life, as he hung there on the cross, bleeding out from the wound in his side, he did two things; he forgave his enemies, and he cried out to God asking why he had been forsaken. He was full of complexities up to the very end. Evangelicals and other false Christians who are more interested in using Christ as a means to an end for their political and cultural purposes try to explain things away, to reconcile the opposing ideals of their lord and savior, but this is a foolish task. The whole point of Christ was the contradiction; the idea of holding two opposing concepts at the same time. Christ’s philosophy wasn’t radical because he told people to love one another during a pre-humanist era in which notions of forgiveness and grace and human dignity were novel and unheard of. And, despite what some contemporary historicist accounts of his life have suggested, neither was he merely a bloodthirsty religious revolutionary. The radical element of his presence lies exactly within his contradictions. He showed us that life is violent, disgusting, beautiful, and full of love all at the same time. Nothing is the opposite of anything. It is all there, and we have the choice to utilize those elements however we wish.

Contemporary right-wing Christians increasingly reject the tenets of their own religion. They see the compassionate elements of Christ’s message as “weak”, “toxic empathy”, and “slave morality”. They use misreadings of Nietzsche to craft a new religion, one that retains the cultural conservatism of evangelical Christianity alongside a tough-guy logic they falsely label as “master”. They are enslaved by their own weaknesses and insecurities and don’t even realize it. True weakness is abandoning one extreme for the other. Likewise, the attempt to resolve the contradiction by picking and choosing what to hold from opposing ideologies is an act of insecurity. True strength lies in acknowledging and carrying all extremes at the same time.

On the other side of things, progressive Christians paint Jesus as a meek, soft-spoken man of peace who just wants us all to, like, get along, man…. Ironically, both the right and left ignore the contradictions inherent to Christ’s message in order to utilize him for their own foolhardy plans of social conditioning. Both the right and left unwittingly tie themselves down to intellectual short cuts, becoming prisoners of ideology, while Christ himself represented the death of such ways of thinking.

All of this is a preamble to my own philosophy, which is that Everyone is Good. I speak of Christ’s place as an ideological figure in this world in order to preempt any notion that my beliefs emerge from a state of naivety. When I say Everyone is Good, this is not a heuristic or a hand-waving notion meant to erase the complex nature of humanity and reality. This is a hard-fought and complicated position. It forces me to hold truths that seem at odds with one another. Every day I am confronted with experiences that would seem to reject my beliefs, and I take those experiences and tie them behind my back along with everything else. The more I see that tells me everyone is not good, the more I believe Everyone is Good. Not just capable of good, but actually, inherently, essentially Good. Some would call this delusion, but when I look around at the results of ideological and philosophical purity, I am buoyed by my faith in contradiction.

Everyone is Good has allowed me to emerge from states of pain and degradation that have threatened to end my life. Everyone is Good allows me to get out of bed and exist in the face of a world I am not supposed to exist within. Everyone is Good allows me to go outside and smile and be kind to people who consider people like me an abomination at worst, or an irritant at best. Everyone is Good allows me to see the pain and goodness in them, in myself. Believing in Everyone is Good creates more goodness within my heart, and this extends outward in the way I carry myself and treat others. Everyone is Good does not mean ignoring the reality of pain and oppression in the world. However, imagine this: if we all could even just pretend for one day that Everyone is Good, while also continuing to acknowledge the whole reason for having to do this—the lack of apparent goodness in the world—we could carry the contradiction while bathing in an energetic ocean of love. It would be an utter shock to the senses. We could teach ourselves something new and maybe change reality by simply embracing the “delusion” of love at the same time as we refuse to disregard the “truth” of pain.

Purity of belief is stubborn and only leads to more violence, conflict, and pain. Why keep taking the same actions over and over if they don’t actually transform the world? Why not fuck around and embrace the impossible, believing in the truth of all things at the same time?

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*The title of this essay comes from one of my favorite songs, “Everyone Is Good” by The Roches. I first heard it while staying in New York City in 2017 for a reading I was a part of at KGB. After the event, I was met by a woman in the audience who exuded spiritual energy in a way I had never witnessed before and haven’t since. She was the most interesting and wonderful stranger I’ve ever encountered. When I asked her if she wanted to exchange social media accounts, she waved her hands around and said, “I live here.” I have never been able to forget this. Afterward, I went back to my airbnb and the algorithm brought me to this Roches track. It begins as a call to reject hatred of people who are different than you; not necessarily a new or novel message in the late 80s. It would be easy to pin the lyrics down as cheesy and cliche. But, at a certain point in the song, during the third verse, an unexpected moment appears: “And wouldn’t it be something to be loving and kind? / Forgive yourself for everything, having once been blind”. This took me aback. It would’ve been easy for The Roches to write a scolding song decrying those who hate their neighbor, but they instead turn grace and love back onto the hypothetical hater, embodying perfectly the message of the song’s title. They implore the hater in all of us to forgive ourselves for our transgressions against others, ultimately reassuring us that we have all been born into a certain ignorance, one that can only be overcome with grace and forgiveness. So beautiful. <3

“CALL ME PLEASE,” my girlfriend texts me. For most of 2007 I haven’t had a single spare moment to myself. Anytime I’m not in class, not at work, not driving my sister to school or home from school, I’m on the phone with R. She knows my exact schedule, and if I don’t call her the moment I’m free and stay on the line with her until I’m not, there’s trouble. I text her back, “just got bad news about my dad. will call in a few.” My flip phone immediately begins to vibrate. I scroll my finger against the little wheel on the front of my iPod, which is currently docked in the center of a small, semi-cylindrical speaker, and I turn the volume low. I answer the phone.

“Hi.”

“Where are you?”

“Bedroom.”

“Who did you see today.”

“Just people at school. Then my sister. My dad just got home.”

“Okay so what’s the issue.”

“He just had some kind of body scan done. It was through his work; the school district offered a free check-up to employees, or whatever. Anyway, he was in this machine that could see everything, and it showed that the hole in his heart had grown. He might have to have surgery soon. They said it could just burst whenever.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, so I’m kind of stressed out. He’s already so high strung. He drinks like three Monster energy drinks a day and barely ever eats food. He’s crazy.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, I know he and I don’t really get along, but I’m kind of worried. I have a bad feeling.”

“You’re talking about the same guy who screamed at you because you couldn’t fix the TV for him the other week. And then you weren’t allowed to take the car and spend the weekend with me! I swear to God, J, you’re always fucking up.”

“Anyway, I’m worried about him.”

“Okay. Can we stop talking about your dad now.” R laughs bitterly. “This is so boring.”

I pause. How badly, for the past several months, I have wanted to end things with R. How afraid of her wrath I was. For some reason, I feel the fear slip away. I no longer care. An emptiness fills my chest. I clear my throat.

“Um…I don’t know why, but that’s it, for me. I’m done. With us.”

“WHAT.”

“I can’t do this anymore. You and I are over.”

She starts crying and babbling incoherently and acting like she doesn’t understand even though she does. It’s been two months since she hit me in the face over and over and over for daring to smoke a joint with her friends at the party she brought me to. It’s been three months since she hit me in the face over and over and over for refusing to give her my Myspace password so she could read my messages. It’s been four months since she forced me to have sex with her in that hotel room in San Diego even though we just had seen the torn-apart body of a woman on I-5 who’d thrown herself in front of a truck.

“Bye,” I say and hang up.

*

Three days later, it’s a normal Monday. I feel like a ghost. I’m driving to my sister Bri’s high school, which is an hour away in traffic. I’m two blocks from campus when I get the phone call. My dad’s administrative assistant. My dad is a middle school principal in the worst part of town and he fancies himself as some kind of Dangerous Minds-style street interventionist. The pay is relatively shit, but he makes up for it in being recognized and ass-kissed every time we go out in public. Mr. Espinoza. So good to see you. About my kid’s grades….

“Hi…so, well. It’s your father. He, well, his chest started hurting really bad when he was in his office, and…”

“Is he alive?”

“I really can’t say. They took him to Loma Linda. He was awake when the ambulance came. You should get down there right away.”

I hang up. I have plans this evening with a high school friend. It’s been a little over a year since I graduated, and I want to maintain relations with the few people I actually liked. Is this serious? I thought. I’m just being dramatic. It’s probably fine. As I pull into the parking lot of my sister’s high school, I text my friend: “I think my dad just had a heart attack. Can’t make it tonight. I’ll get in touch later.”

Bri gets into the car.

“Hey, so…”

“His secretary just called me.”

We drive another 45 minutes to Loma Linda, which fortunately holds a prestigious medical center, one that people travel from all over the U.S. for. This seems hopeful. Still, we have no idea what is going on, if our dad is even alive.

On the drive there, we call the rest of our family, our relatives, and everyone hits the road. My dad’s twin brother who lives in Washington books a plane ticket immediately. My mom, who is divorced from my dad, calls her friend E who works in Oncology at Loma Linda. E is the first person we see upon entering. She had been a fixture for most of our lives, an honorary aunt of sorts. Her and my mom had both given birth in adjacent hospital rooms on December 17th, so E’s first daughter and I shared a birthday. One of my favorite pre-transition life memories was spending the night at E’s apartment with my sister and E’s daughters, back when we were all preteens. We watched Clueless on the living room floor and then danced to Ricky Martin songs all night. I got to be just one of the girls. It was heavenly.

E greets my sister and I, and I see various grandparents, aunts, and uncles a few feet away over in the E.R.

“How bad is it really,” I ask.

“It sounds like he had an aortic aneurysm. I have to be honest with you–this is really serious. Pray for him, but be prepared for the worst. I’m so sorry.”

I can’t feel my hands. Nothing is real. I become a machine made to process logical facts only. I go tell my family what my mom’s friend said. Everyone is a vague mixture of jovial and deeply concerned. I can’t tell what I am supposed to be feeling and have no one to look to who can guide me.

*

A week later, we’re all preparing for the big day. He’s having open-heart surgery. They’re going to crack his ribcage apart and attempt to repair the tear in his aorta. The surgeon is straightforward with us: “I’d say, maybe about 20/80, generously speaking, but probably more like 10/90,” he says in a rush. 10 being the chances he would survive the procedure.

So, my dad was about to die. That is what I believed. We Espinozas never had the best luck, even when the odds were in our favor. Our bloodline is cursed. We must have done some bad shit in the past to earn this. Some conquistador shit. My father did research once and swore we were related to Spanish royalty. He would also claim we had Arab and Jewish ancestry, due to Spain’s long history of occupation and intermixing. But who the fuck really knows or cares.

My whole family is in the waiting room. My mom even shows up with Starbucks for everyone, and my dad’s side of the family is nice to her, for once, albeit in a forced way. We’re all together, physics has dictated this. I have my headphones in and I’m trying to be as far away from everything as possible.

My dad’s close male friend from work shows up. His name is M. He’s a very tall, very thin man who looks serious all the time, even when he’s joking. The automatic doors breeze open and he rushes in. Famously, he hates hospitals, usually refusing to enter one under any circumstances. Without stopping, he walks over to us, asks us all to stand in a circle holding hands, and he begins a prayer, more like a chant, imploring God to save my dad. I leave my body and swirl around the prayer circle, moving with each word my dad’s friend utters. The man ends the prayer, his body still vibrating, and he blinks for a long moment; then he’s gone, like he was never there.

It’s a grueling, 11-hour surgery. We have no idea what is happening. In the evening, someone comes down and tells us: he’s survived. The surgery was successful. I don’t know what I feel. I’d spent all day processing my dad’s inevitable death, but it never came. They send me in to see him. His skin is orange. He is still and flat on the table. I touch his shoulder; it feels cold. He looks dead to me. I go back out into the waiting room, and for the first time in over a year, I begin to cry. It comes out in long, protracted sobs, which then turn to wailing. I sound like an old-world Italian widow.

“It’s okay,” one of my uncles says, placing his hand on my back. “He’s okay. This is good news.” None of my family can understand. I keep crying, I’m inconsolable and they all seem uncomfortable with my emotional display.

“He’s alive,” my grandma offers. She looks annoyed.

After ten minutes, I am calm. I sit there in the corner, my headphones still in (“Guernica” by Brand New on repeat) and I’m thinking about how every problem in my life leads back to my father. Why am I so upset? Am I disappointed he survived? Earlier in the day, while trying to accept that I might never see him again, I’d arrived at one horrible thought: Good.

I will finally be free. I won’t have to live in fear of the sound of the garage opening at the end of the day. No one will be around to tell me what a piece of shit failure I am. No one will police my gender expression 24/7, forcing me to be a “man”. I shall be released.

With my father coming home in his current condition, not only am I not free; I have become the de facto man of the house.

*

My dad’s mother and his aunt move in with us for a while. I’m going to school full time, working, and waking up at 5am every morning to drive my sister two towns away to her high school. I end each day in hours of traffic taking her home. Now, on top of everything else, I also have to care for my father’s broken body.

When I’m not running the household, I am tending to him. At home, I spend each night massaging his shoulders and back. His body is in agony. I run ointment on him and my hands are perpetually hot and cold and stinging, and I always smell of menthol. He sleeps in my bed because I have the more comfortable mattress, so I sleep in his room, the master bedroom. Man of the house, my grandma keeps repeating with pride. I’m getting like two hours of sleep per night because my dad constantly wakes up during the night and screams for me to come rub his back or just sit with him. From 3am to 5am, for three months straight, I get what rest I can; otherwise, I’m taking care of business. My body begins to show signs of breakdown, burnout, but I ignore it and chug down my dad’s supply of energy drinks, of which he is no longer allowed to imbibe.

I help him shower and change his bandages. The first time we do this, I get to see the scar in the center of his chest; it is red, jagged and raised. While he’s drying off, I kiss the palm of my hand and place it over his heart. He looks so small sitting in his shower chair. He’s the lion with a thorn in his paw, and I am the mouse. He looks up at me, his eyes wide and watery, and says, “You’re my angel.”

It’s the first time he’s ever thanked me for anything. The first time in 19 years he’s acquiesced. The first time he’s ever been kind. I feel happy and sick at the same time.

Maybe he’s changed, I think to myself. Maybe this was what he needed all along.

He and my grandma and great aunt keep fighting over small things. The ladies can’t stand it anymore. Mid-November, they leave. It’s just me and my sister and my dad. I still haven’t spoken to R and social media isn’t really a thing yet, so she has no idea what’s happening. One morning, I wake up and she’s standing in my doorway.

“I took a cab here,” she says. She doesn’t drive and lives over an hour away.

I tell her what happened, and she is shocked but unappreciative of the irony, the fact that we broke up over my dad’s heart mere days before it burst open.

I spend the day with R and she holds my hand and smokes cigarettes with me. I drive her home and go down on her in her bedroom. I am filled with shame. I drive home like an automaton and have dinner with my dad and sister.

As we prepare to eat, my dad implores us to pray over our meal, something he’s always done. My sister looks over and shoots me an innocent glance, but my dad reads into it.

“What was that?” he shouts. “Don’t be sarcastic. Grab your brother’s hand, NOW. Close your eyes.”

She does so silently. Our dad begins to pray.

“Thank you, heavenly father, for this meal. Please don’t allow Bri’s nasty attitude to ruin this dinner you’ve blessed us with. Grant her the humility to know her place and become a decent servant to you and to our family. Forgive her. Make her an honorable young woman despite herself. Amen.”

While he’s distracted, Bri and I share another look. We have twin powers, we communicate without words. This conversation goes something like, “Well, that’s it. It’s been nice, but he’s back to his old self now.”

*

He gets worse after this, worse than he ever was before. His cruelty expands alongside the pride he now feels for being chosen by God. The miracle of his recovery is proof to him that he is special. When I try to massage his back when he’s in a bad mood, he jerks away, “Don’t treat me like a child.” I’m no longer his angel.

He’s back to work now. His car has recently died, and he’s using mine, which is nice because I no longer have to drive Bri to and back from school, but I’m relying on friends to drive me home after class and/or work. One day, after a theater course I’ve been taking in which we spend all semester learning lines from The Laramie Project, a friend offers to drive me back to her apartment to hang out. She knows what’s been going on at home and is sympathetic. I briefly wonder if there is a vibe between us—but when we get to her place, I am met by her townie, stoner boyfriend. He smokes me out with a giant bong and we all watch The Brave Little Toaster. I get too high and find myself staring at a piece of art hanging on the other side of the dining room table–it’s the dogs playing poker painting. Seriously. I feel myself falling into it, becoming part of the green felt. Just one of the dawgs. This is my first time being stoned since junior year of high school. I haven’t been sleeping or eating. I feel my heart pounding so hard. I think about my dad’s fragile heart. What if I inherited the same thing? I’m too young and dumb to realize you can’t overdose on weed, and I’m convinced I’m dying. It doesn’t help that the two people I’m with have noticed, and one of them whispers to the other, “should we call 911?” My body starts shaking uncontrollably, so my friend drives me home. I apologize the whole time, my left leg bouncing up and down. I’m dead, I think.

I get home and tell my dad I have a migraine. I go to my room and dock my iPod in my speaker. I play Explosions in the Sky and fall asleep to “It’s Natural To Be Afraid”. I am convinced I will not wake again, so I tell myself this is the music I will surely die to. But I do wake up the next morning, still feeling high and afraid. I’ve had panic attacks before, but didn’t know there was a name for it. I start having them daily after this. I develop panic disorder and spend the next ten years of my life battling it. It shrinks my world and keeps me from doing anything. I always think I’m about to die. Music becomes my only balm.

For the first few months of the panic era I listen to the same Explosions in the Sky song while walking around campus, and it keeps me somewhat grounded. Then I get addicted to Xanax. Then I quit cold turkey, sleep for three days, and miss my 17th century English Lit final—apologies to John Donne. Then I turn 21, and at midnight I drive to the gas station down the street and purchase a $2 bottle of pink wine. I get drunk in the garage. I keep drinking for the next year. I drink and drive and try my best to die. I start cutting and burning myself. I drop out of school and stop working. I end up in two different psych wards in one month. I am sexually assaulted by another patient and blamed for it. I am never the same again.

*

A few years later, I am living with my mother’s parents. I’m not working and I take a few community college classes each semester that I always stop going to partway through. I am bedrotting in my mother’s childhood room, listening to my uncle’s old Smiths, Beatles, and R.E.M. records while writing poetry and trying to get tumblr famous.

My dad comes by one day to take me to lunch. We go to a local P.F. Chang’s.

He asks me pointedly: “Why are you like this? Is it my fault?” He says it sincerely, like he really wants to know. I hesitate.

“No…I mean, the divorce was hard and all..” He hears me and nods his head like this was exactly what he was hoping to hear. “...but you’re not to blame for anything. This is all me.” He looks satisfied.

“I’m keeping you in my prayers, son,” he says. He goes to the bathroom. “Hand In My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette begins playing. I have a transcendent moment. When it gets to the line, “I’m brave, but I’m chickenshit,” I start crying into my orange chicken. My dad comes back, I wipe my eyes, and he takes me home. It’s the last time we see each other, just the two of us.

*

8 years after my father’s near-death experience, I write him a letter. I tell him I am transitioning, and that this is the only way for me to be okay. I am careful not to leverage the threat of suicide or anything like that. It’s more that I can’t fully live. He’s seen me at my lowest points—he’d come to the psych ward and had given me a book about the “poetry of colors” or something like that. It was a children’s picture book. It was thoughtful in the sense that if I put myself in his head I knew it was a big deal for him to come up with a gift like that. He was trying. He saw how bad I was doing, so in my letter I explained that becoming a woman was the only way for me to stop being so fucked up.

He already knew. I’d been growing my hair out and was living full time as a woman for the past year or so. I’d “boymode” it at family gatherings, badly. He was not surprised when I came out to him; he’d spent over two decades trying to murder this part of me.

He never spoke to me directly about my confession. He told my mom that he thought I needed to pray it away. For the next year, all the way up until the 2016 election, he’d referred to me when speaking to others as “J”, according to my sister. He would text every now and then, saying he was praying for me. A few months before the election, when the Pulse shooting happened, I foolishly thought he might text and say something kind, but nothing came. The election happened. My dad felt elated and empowered like never before. We never spoke again.

* I am five years away from being as old as my dad was when his heart exploded. I think about it all the time. I wonder how long he’ll last. Originally, they’d patched up his aorta with pig flesh. Ten years later, they went back in and replaced that with some kind of synthetic material. No one openly speaks of this, but it seems like the surgery was life-extending, not a cure. Every day I wait for the call from my sister. I know when this happens I will be broken beyond anything I can imagine. The man who spent over twenty years emotionally and physically tormenting me will die, and I won’t know what to do with it.

I have spent the past six months writing around the hurt he has caused. I inherited alcoholism from his bloodline, which is bad enough, but even worse are the unspeakable ways he violated my autonomy and sense of self, starting from as early as I can remember. I haven’t been able to write directly about all of this because, the truth is, I am still afraid of him. I have no proof, either—even my mother, another one of his victims, remains unwilling to admit what really went down in our house.

I don’t want him to die. I really don’t. The day he does, I suppose I will be ready to tell you the entire truth. Until then, I will keep praying for his heart.

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Transitions are nothing. You can make anything connect to anything. Here’s what you do: open the mouth inside your soul and let whatever comes out come out and put it here on the page or the screen or into the open air. You have to give weightlessness to the heaviest things you are carrying. Don’t worry about making sense, not yet. You’re in a garage full of cobwebs. Nothing makes sense. Look through the gaps in the blinds and out the window. See the tree across the street, so tall, swaying gently in the breeze. Pay attention to the way the light hitting the leaves moves as the tree moves. Watch the way a glow seamlessly transfers across space and time.

I’m sorry; I can’t show you beauty. I can only try to tell you how to get there.

SIX WAYS TO BE VULNERABLE IN YOUR WRITING PRACTICE:

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Aliso Viejo, California, 2003

“We’ve heard some news about your home life that may affect your work and attendance in the coming days.”

I’m so tired. I can’t believe I’m in the principal’s office right now. I’m not in trouble, but it feels like I am. I’ve been awake all night. The morning light, half-shadowed by a large hill standing in front of the prestigious Blue Ribbon high school, feels painful to my eyes. The perfect, 75 degree, slightly humid air is nauseating. Couldn’t they give me one day off before I had to go in and explain why I was at the hospital until sunrise—that there was nothing wrong with me, but with someone I loved, someone who had in a moment of conflict, made a terrible decision?

I’d been sworn to secrecy, regardless. But I guess someone had called the school to let them know, because right as I had started to fall asleep at my desk during first period study hall, I was summoned to see the principal. Now I’m sitting here, numb out of my mind, a faint buzzing moving through my arms. The little hairs lining my skin are standing on end, as if the air were electrified. I stare at the grey wall behind the principal and also the school counselor, who is sitting to her left.

“We’ve informed your teachers of the situation, and rest assured, everyone is going to give you a break. Would you like to talk about it? Anything you say will be kept private—with a couple exceptions, of course, which Bren-I mean, Mrs. Wilson will explain to you. I’ll leave the room and let you two talk.”

The counselor asks me questions that I shrug in response to until she lets me leave. I wonder what they told my teachers.

Later on, in Chemistry class, Mrs. B pulls me aside. She says something about taking all the time I need and I say thank you but I just want it all to be normal and could we act like nothing happened please. She looks at me like she wants to cry. I guess they told her everything.

I’d shared a little bit of the story with my friends before school started that day, despite what I’d been instructed at home. How this person I cared about got mad at me for no good reason, and how I’d taken off and gone to the movies to see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, only to return home to the most awful scene imaginable, something far more upsetting than the fictional horrors I’d just witnessed.

These friends are mostly upper middle class punk boys, half of whom listen to bad ska music and annoying Oi! Oi! Oi! shit I can never tell is racist or not; the other half are pretentious Leftist agitator types who listen to Propagandhi and Aus-Rotten and organize shows in their parents’ poolhouses with texts by Chairman Mao on sale next to anarcho-crust punk demo CDs. I don’t particularly like these people, but that’s who I ended up settling with on my first day of school during lunch. It was similar to the beginning of my freshman year, back in my hometown of San Bernardino. Except, the San Bernardino burnouts were actually burnouts and that was charming to me. These Orange County kids don’t understand real struggle, I thought. Have fun protesting outside the Taco Bell later, boys. Grab me a burrito.

They don’t really like me, either. They’ve nicknamed me “Pale”, short for “Pale Ale”, because I am, believe it or not, pale. I didn’t grow up hanging out at the beach every weekend, never even held a surfboard, and didn’t really leave my room much at all. I’m literally Mexican, I want to tell these spoiled white boys. In my head I refer to them derogatorily as “the sunshine punks”.

They also don’t care much for my music taste, which has lately shifted toward the emo side of things. They all called me a pussy when I wore my Bright Eyes t-shirt (comically oversized on my small frame, despite it being a small) to school one day. Mike smirked at me when he saw it and said, “Did you wear that to impress your English teacher or something?”

One kid, Eric, is different though. Ironically, I’d hated him more than any of the others, at least at first. He was crass, racist, a total bully, but clearly in an insane amount of pain. I could see it in his eyes. The way they both narrowed and trembled at the same time while he’d spew some disgusting monologue about women, immigrants, gays, whatever. It was obvious he had no actual belief system, he was just angry. He, like me, was an “apartment kid”. He lived with an aunt or uncle or something, came from a broken home, wore the same two outfits cycled throughout the week, and was always hitting up his friends for lunch money. I recognized our surface-level similarities, and this made his presence irritate me even more.

He would clown on me hard whenever he had the chance. I realized he must’ve been at the bottom of the pecking order before I’d arrived as the new kid in town—which happened to be just a couple months after The O.C. premiered. It was kind of a funny coincidence. As a poor kid from a broken family moving from the Inland Empire to Orange County, I’d rolled up to school that fall like an awkward, unattractive, gender-confused version of Ryan Atwood.

The thrill Eric must have felt upon seeing my nervous, small, pale self walking through campus, wide-eyed with long, Joey Ramone hair draped over and around my face, knowing there was now someone even less cool than him around….

I’d dyed it black that summer, which only made my pale complexion stand out even more. All the clothes I wear are way too big on me; my late-onset puberty has slowly started to kick in midway through my sixteenth year, and I find myself doing everything I can to hide my masculinizing face and body from the world and from myself. Looking in the mirror is torturous.

I run into Eric as I’m leaving AP Chem. He’s coming out of another classroom, one I’ve never seen before. Unlike the freshly renovated, technologically updated, university campus-style classrooms I am used to, this one is stuffed in an obscure corner, the door covered in chipped, blue paint. As Eric exits, I catch a glance of the inside of the room. The desks are old, broken-looking, and a faint smell of mildew wafts out of the door as it shuts behind him. I keep my head down and try to avoid Eric’s gaze, but he sees me.

“Pale! Hey, Pale!”

I keep walking.

“What the fuck? Where are you going, faggot?”

I stop and breathe out hard, still facing away from him.

“What do you want,” I say, my voice flat and disengaged.

“What’s wrong with you?”

I turn to face him.

“You look like you’re gonna cry.”

I hate the way he holds his teeth when he speaks. His words hiss out in a spray of spittle, and his narrow, nervous gaze along with the shape his mouth makes him seem perpetually crazed, always on the verge of snapping. I am afraid of him because he will often lose it over nothing, with little to no warning.

“Fuck you, Eric,” I say.

I don’t care anymore. I want him to hit me, to throw me to the ground and start kicking me the ways the boys in middle school would when I talked back. Instead, his face softens. His eyes grow wide, and his mouth drops open a bit.

“Are you, like, okay, dude?”

“You are the last person I want to see now or ever,” I say, and begin to walk away, tripping over one of my own feet.

Eric stifles a laugh and grabs my arm to keep me from falling.

“Dude, wait, come on. I can tell something’s up. Mike told me that you came home last night and found-”

“I really don’t want to talk to you about this. No offense,” I say, my anger dissipating a bit.

“Well, listen, maybe this will help,” he says, and without skipping a beat he pulls a plastic water bottle filled with what looks like water out of his backpack and hands it to me.

“This is pure rum,” he says. “Don’t let anyone see you with it. I didn’t give this to you.” He winks and jets off to his next class.

At first I think, what if it isn’t rum. What if he’s trying to trick me, poison me somehow. What if he fucked with it. I go to the bathroom, twist off the plastic lid, and take a whiff. Okay. That’s rum alright. Just like the kind I’d mix with mom’s diet coke, at her request. I am comforted by the familiarity of the scent, the stinging fumes rising into my nostrils and eyes. I take a swig and head to AP History, where I surreptitiously take small sips every few minutes; not enough to get me drunk, but it’s still nice. It burns the inside of my mouth and throat, and this tastes like relief.

After school ends, I go home with the mostly full bottle. I trek up the hill in front of the school and begin the mile-long walk down the newly paved, tree lined, Aliso Creek Rd. I pass the sparkling town center with the bookstore, the giant movie theater, restaurants of every type, the grocery store where my mom worked, all the businesses and services you’d ever need—but, if you were like my family, could rarely ever afford. All tucked into the hills of beautiful south Orange County, the ocean just on the other side.

I think about stopping at the bookstore. This girl I have a crush on works there, but I have never spoken to her, wouldn’t dare to, I just sit in the poetry section and read Bukowski collections from front to back.

Today, I decide to go straight home and drink the bottle Eric gave me. I am already so tired from no sleep and a long school day. When I get back to the apartment near the freeway, no one is home and I know they won’t be for a while. I turn on the television and A Clockwork Orange is just starting.

I’d never seen it—Mike had lent me the book earlier in the school year, and I’d read it over the course of a week, going back and starting it over halfway through, once the invented dialect (droogs, devotchkas, etc) had actually started to click. I’d finished the book one evening while sitting outside the apartment. I’d forgotten my key, and my mom and her husband often did not come home until after I was asleep. I’d tried calling their cells, but they both went straight to voicemail all night. So, I sat there from 4pm until they got home around 10, calling and calling and calling the whole time, reading the book by myself on the front steps.

I am curious about the movie because one of my fixations right now is basically any controversial or banned media. I read voraciously about the history and context of movies I’ve never seen and don’t have access to. I am interested in the lengths people will go to hide the truth from others and from themselves.

So I watch A Clockwork Orange and drink the sickly, slightly fruity liquid down as fast as I can. I find the movie crass and off-putting, just like I do my friends. I feel it lacks a sense of gravitas held in the novel, and am annoyed at the gleeful tone of the rape and murder scenes. This is pointless, I think as I begin to lose consciousness and slip away. The last image I see before passing out is the view of a nude woman shot from below, the POV of the camera looking directly into the underside of her breasts.

I wake up; it’s nighttime. No one is home. Friday the Thirteenth: Part whatever is playing. I shut the TV off and carry myself to my bedroom. I sleep cold, with just a thin sheet—my comforter is ruined ever since my mom and her husband, both part of an online swinger community, had allowed their friends to stay over when I was away one weekend. I was too embarrassed to tell them that their “friends” had left a truly absurd amount of crusted, white stains all over my blue blanket. It was so gross I couldn’t even stomach carrying it to the laundry room to wash it myself. So I’d thrown it in the corner of my room and went to bed shivering every night. Whatever. I’ve been exposed to a lot worse than this through their lifestyle choices.

I lie there and stare at the ceiling. I try to finish the bottle of rum and almost make it to the bottom.

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Aliso Viejo, California, 2004

It is Eric’s last day at school. He’s been caught shoplifting again, and this time he’s going to juvie. Most of our friends act like it’s no big deal—except for Henry. Henry, in comparison to the others, is a really nice guy. We’d gotten a little closer over the school year, and when it was just the two of us hanging out, he was downright fun, chill, and treated me like an actual friend instead of a punching bag. He’d even confided in me a few times, which was no surprise; every boy I got close to eventually opened up to me, usually in ways that made me feel a little weird. Not with Henry, though. He looked out for me, was a couple years older, and had a sense of emotional maturity the other guys could only dream of.

At lunch that day, Henry pulls me and Eric aside.

“Hey fellas, wanna get the fuck out of here or what?”

We get into Henry’s truck and he drives us to Starbucks. He buys mine and Eric’s frappuccinos and we all sit out on the patio and split a single cig Henry had stolen from one of his parents. It makes me gag, and I expect them to give me a hard time, but they don’t. I pretend to puff on it after my first inhale as we pass it back and forth like a joint. We don’t speak about anything, we don’t lament what is about to happen. Eric is acting like he doesn’t care, but he can’t stop tapping his left leg. His knee bounces against the underside of the metal table, clang clang clang clang clang. Henry is trying to be strong too, but his big eyes, always expressive, wide, seem heavy today.

We drop Eric off at his aunt or whatever’s apartment.

“Hold up,” he says. He runs inside, and comes back out, holding an airsoft rifle. “Will you guys shoot at that tree over there with me?” he says, pleadingly. He sounds like a little kid and it makes my chest hurt.

I decline because I’m afraid of guns, but neither of them call me a pussy or anything like that. I watch from ten feet back as they each take a single, solemn shot at a tree off to the side of the lot.

POP. POP.

The sound of birds scattering from the brush. A police siren in the distance.

That’s it. I don’t even remember saying goodbye to Eric. The next thing I know, I’m in Henry’s car and he is distraught.

“This sucks, man,” he whines in a desperate tone. “What is he going to do after this? He fucked his whole life.”

“It’ll be okay,” I try to assure him. “Maybe he’ll get out and stop acting like this.”

“No,” Henry says, shaking his head back and forth as we speed down Aliso Creek Rd. “He’ll be worse.”

We stop at the movie theater. I haven’t been back since Texas Chainsaw, since that awful night last fall.

“There’s still a couple hours of school left,” Henry says, turning to me as he puts the truck in park. He smiles weakly. “Wanna see a movie? My treat.”

We go in and he gets us two tickets for Taking Lives, the new Angelina Jolie/Ethan Hawke thriller. When the movie ends, he has us sneak into the Dawn of the Dead remake, and we’ve only missed the first act or so; everyone in the world is either dead or at the mall. When it ends, Henry drives me back to my apartment even though it’s basically right across the street.

“Is everything okay?” he asks as we sit in his idling truck. “Like, at home and stuff?”

The dreaded parked car—this is where my guy friends are always trying to unload their woes onto me. Now, I’m the one being asked to do it; only, the thought of opening up makes me feel queasy.

“No,” I say. “It’s really not. But it’s whatever.”

He looks at me with concern and pity.

“Hey. Thanks for today, man,” he says, tapping his hand lightly upon my shoulder. “I needed that.”

I can tell he wants us to talk about this in more depth, but I clam up. I just stare at the garage door in front of us.

“It’s okay. Go on in. I’ll see you tomorrow, Pale.”

I go inside. I am surprised to find I am not alone. I wish I were.

“We got a call from the school today. Did you skip class?”

I don’t answer. I go into my room and shut the door.

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Seven years ago, I attended a cousin’s wedding. It was the first family event I’d been invited to since I’d started openly identifying as a transsexual. While my cousin and her immediate family were kind and supportive, there were others who were not so happy about my presence. One uncle I’d looked up to as a kid, who’d had a huge influence on my taste in music and film, literally ignored me while I stood not two feet away. I didn’t let it get to me; I was thrilled for my cousin, and grateful to be there. I got to spend meaningful time with family members I hadn’t seen in years. I danced all night, even as my grandfather glared with his drink from a nearby table.

During this trip, I would experience a long, invasive, humiliation ritual: the TSA tranny pat-down. I wish it had been the typical, sanitized, security state molestation routine, which I’d grown accustomed to by then — but they went much further that day, dumping all my shit out in front of the other passengers, groping me multiple times with increasing intensity as I tried my best to hold it together. I waited til I was in the bathroom, right after, to feel it. I didn’t let anyone see me cry. Ten minutes later, I wrote “Airport Ritual”, the first poem in my most recent book, I Don’t Want To Be Understood. I ended up shaping the narrative of the entire collection around this trip, most of the poems taking place in the speaker’s memory as she floats above America waiting to see her family.

I’m thinking about that book again because of the myriad ways it orbits around and avoids the awful truth I shared in my last essay. When I was writing I Don’t Want To Be Understood, I’d wanted to say what had happened to me through the poems, but couldn’t quite get myself there. I wrote a few pieces that explicitly addressed the sexual abuse I’d experienced as a child, but I was too scared to include them. The book ends with an unreadable poem, rendered illegible through endless layering. I was afraid of being vulnerable. I was concerned about having my work and my body defined and labeled even more than it already had been. After a decade plus of being a transsexual in public, I had grown to resent the concept of identity itself. Already saddled with the trans baggage and having to navigate all this meant artistically, I didn’t want to add another “marginalized” identity to the mix.

So I encoded the emotions and the physical anguish of what had happened to my body into the poems and the overarching narrative of the book. I gestured vaguely, in ways only I would understand. Maybe a few others who knew what this was like would be tugged at by some thread beyond the language on the page, and then they’d get it too. I Don’t Want To Be Understood, but also, yes I do.

A memoir with a giant void in its center seems fitting enough. I suppose, to some degree, these essays are my attempt to fill this void. Usually, poems are where I turn to express the abstract with a new sense of clarity, to make images into truth; however, I think I needed something slightly more direct for this story. Poetry allowed lots of voices to chime in. There were too many pathways to travel. These essays have acted like rails guiding me in a train car toward a destination I’d been aware of all along. I watched from my window and described the passing landscape to the best of my abilities. Then, I arrived at this thing I’d been running from my whole life, and I had to describe it too.

*

On Mother’s Day, I met my sister, Bri, for brunch. I picked her up from her place in Sherman Oaks, and we went to the nearest IHOP, a family favorite. With Bri, there is never a need to explain a thing. We both grew up under shocking and absurd conditions, and we’ve had to work hard to make functional lives for ourselves as adults. We are two years apart in age, but we have the psychic abilities of twins. We don’t even have to finish one another’s sentences; we can communicate a novel’s worth of information in a glance.

A few years back, I’d told her what had happened to me. It would be just after our time together this Mother’s Day that I realized I had to finally write about it. It couldn’t be just me, her, and a few close friends carrying this weight — I had to release it.

*

A couple days after posting the essay, I met up with Hanna, and we went on a hike with a group of people under the light of the moon. Hanna had been there when I fell and fucked up my face outside Ye Rustic last Halloween. She sat with me in the hospital room and didn’t let me feel embarrassed. My marriage had ended weeks prior, and I was visiting LA, where I’d hoped to move once I quit my job up in the bay. Hanna let me stay at her place for the week, and I was such a fucking mess, oh my God…she has the patience of a saint.

Rax tells me I seem happier and lighter since my confession. We’re walking on Sunset, traffic flying past, the 5pm sun casting a soft, orange glow onto the Kaiser Permanente complex across the street, a kaleidoscope of lights, people, cars, buses, animals, all the noise and commotion of the city. Its rhythm pulses through me, helping my body move with ease. Rax always gets me out of our apartment exactly when I need it, he just knows. The pain in my shoulder I’ve had all month has finally begun to subside a bit. So annoying. All the stretching, breathing, yoga, everything I’d been trying, and all it took was being honest. I hate that.

I’m getting lunch with Sara at Kitchen Mouse in Highland Park, and she asks me how this project is going. It’s jarring; I sometimes forget that people in my life can see the things I’m sharing. I have created a wall between my day to day self and my writer self to the degree that I often feel like two different people inside the same body. Everything I share publicly is filtered through a persona who is not me. A voice takes hold of my story and tells it for me. I tell you things I can hardly admit to myself, but you still don’t really see me. The walls I’ve built around myself have held strong throughout my life. I’ve found ways to live around and through them, operating my life from somewhere within the shrouds. I am at once emotionally insightful and also capable of overlooking a lot of obvious things. As strange as it feels to be me, I wonder how fucked up it must be to experience me; to know me.

Still, talking about this work with a friend helps me feel less insecure about the whole thing. Sara promises to keep checking in. She always does, especially when I begin to disappear from the world on purpose.

Life is not easy right now, but I happen to know some great people, and, through all of this mess, they have been there for me.

*

The pop spirituality Youtube influencer says money is just a form of energy, it’s not even real, and it’s your fault you don’t have any. The trust fund Marxist podcaster says money is a “commodity” but refuses to explain any further, and also secretly believes it’s your fault you don’t have any.

“You’re making just enough to pay the rent,” I tell myself. “You’ll figure out the rest.” But then, I don’t.

I need a second job. I’d tried to make dog sitting into a side hustle, but this hasn’t exactly been a money maker. I keep worrying, thinking, This is it; I’ve failed. I can pay rent so I won’t lose my housing, but I have nothing else and I’m behind on bills and I reallllllly hate being poor, so basically I’m sitting here beating my head against my air mattress and crying out to God for mercy so that I don’t have to tuck my tail between my legs and look myself in the eye and admit that I did this all wrong and that I let myself down and now there’s no going back or changing a thing; this is it.

All of this is familiar. Growing up, there were routine evictions, power outages for lack of payment, no food, bad food, long, empty stretches of hungry boredom days, and me sitting there watching the people who were supposed to take care of things making all the wrong choices and blaming it on everyone else. Here I am, the same age my parents were when I was in high school — I am my own child and I am failing at taking care of myself. I’m smoking cigarettes and making excuses, just like my mother did. I’m speaking with a seething contempt toward myself at all times, the same way my father spoke to me.

I have back to back appointments, one with a new psychiatrist and the other with a new therapist. Maybe medication will help. Maybe having someone to talk to will be nice. They’re both men, which is great for me. Male doctors and therapists act either gravely concerned for my wellbeing in a way that registers in my fucked up mind as paternal, or they treat me kind of dismissively, which is also nice and familiar for my dad-addled brain. The best is when they do both. Ugh. I love an older man who is gently condescending to me. Like, yes…please do explain the difference between a thought and a feeling to me. I love when a man begins his sentence with a pointed, “Well, actually….” I find an elegance in this carefully wielded, masculine sense of certainty — mostly because I am too insane to understand a thing.

I probably just need to get laid, but I’ve sworn off sex recently, and I’ve only broken fuck sobriety a few times since. Whatever. The good news is, I no longer feel as though something is missing if I’m not getting railed within an inch of my life. No longer seeking validation through my willingness to give all of myself away, I desperately want to gatekeep my body; to be my own bouncer. I want to be admired from afar. I feel protective and maternal toward the child, the teen, the twentysomething in me, for whom I have been writing these essays. If anything good has come out of my recent experiences, it’s this: my inner mother bear finally emerging. She says I’m not allowed to have sex right now. Sorry.

*

After blowing up my life and quitting my job and moving to LA, I started writing about how I got here, my fractured path, my healing journey, etc, etc. I addressed addiction and depression and poverty and desperation. I carefully made my way around something at the center of all of this pain, documenting sensations and moments whose totality of meaning I couldn’t yet grasp, but could feel. Finally, I realized what I’d been running from. I wrote about it, and it was scary, and I felt sick and relieved and alive and dead all at the same time.

Okay…now what? I suppose I have to keep writing. While the last essay went some ways toward helping me free myself from the past, there’s still the issue of my drinking, which has not remotely subsided. It feels insane to be so self-aware in certain ways while being such a stupid fucking idiot when it comes to the most basic aspects of being alive. Why can’t I take care of myself? What in me continues to desire nonexistence? It’s so frustrating, I want to scream.

For the past six years, I have been painstakingly therapizing myself into personhood. I am not currently functional, but I am certainly more functional than I used to be. I know it looks bad now, but you should’ve seen me back then, is my favorite motto/excuse.

I did shadow work. I incorporated somatic therapies into my daily life. There was CBT, DBT, IFS, EMDR, every acronym you could dream of. I journaled, asked myself questions, and got painfully honest. I argued and fought with myself. I let myself collapse and be messy. I started opening up to trusted friends about what I had gone through and the work I was doing about it. It wasn’t enough.

These were all positive choices. My every waking moment is no longer painted in some shade of agony; a marked improvement. But, in order to get here, I had to go down deep inside, so deep I got lost. I spent years living a life of complete interiority. No matter what else I was doing, there was some kind of conversation happening in my head. I was evaluating, with language, every moment of my existence. It was like a program running 24/7 with no rest. I’d built yet another window to separate me from things. There was the metaphorical glass between my body and the world, and now there was this inner window behind which all these younger versions of me stood, trying to understand reality while totally removed from it.

The problem is, once you unearth the shadow, you have to learn how to walk alongside it. Shadows aren’t interested in discussing the pros and cons of quitting alcohol or being a better friend. Shadows will not debate or be reasoned with. The shadow will not be moved by your latest personal essay. That’s because the shadow is you! It’s a void of light in the shape of your soul! So how do you speak to a shadow? You do it with movement. With action. With getting shit done. You do it with curiosity and passion! Your life has to take place outside of you.

I went down into myself to heal. I came back up carrying something I found, and I thought I had finished the task. Not even close.

*

Bliss: waking up into the nothingness of 3:30am; lying there, unmoving, breathing through my body under the dull, rust-glow of the city sky; hours later, the morning sun; the first cigarette on the rooftop; a cup of instant Bustelo mixed with a generous portion of half-and-half, so it almost tastes like the $7 latte from the café down the street; the songbirds on the wire outside my window; the hummingbird who shows up most days and hovers right at the edge of the window screen; the murder of crows who watch me throughout my cigarette breaks; the brown hawk who soars overhead every day and play-fights with the other neighborhood birds; music, right now specifically late 70s/early 80s soft rock, power pop, synth pop, jangle, anything both easy and ecstatic; the first sip of the first drink of the evening; the stillness of my recently rearranged bedroom; the floor rug from Rax; the desk Hanna gave me; the bedside table I found on the sidewalk that still smells kind of funny despite extensive cleaning; various scraps of paper holding amateur visual art I make from mostly found materials whenever my brain stops working and I don’t know what else to do; the sounds of the city coming in through my window, all that frothing, chaotic life; falling asleep too early; knowing with certainty I will wake again long before dawn’s break.

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articulation/revelation
(May 2015)

Can I ask you something? Were you sexually abused as a child?

After several months of living with some frankly embarrassing and confusing bodily symptoms, I’d decided to make an appointment with a doctor. I was worried I might’ve been dying. That afternoon, I found myself in a large examination space. Unlike the typical, standard medical rooms, with their enclosed walls and weird info-diagrams about diseases you were now convinced you had, this one looked kind of like a high school chemistry lab. It was on the fifth story, surrounded on all sides by tinted, floor-to-ceiling windows. The sun shone bright outside. In here, it refracted through the darkened glass, casting everything in a strange sort of twilight.

The nurse, an older woman with kind energy, had paused her exam. She was standing inches from me. I was seated on a table in a gown with my legs spread apart, feet dangling over the linoleum floor. I was crying; well, more like weeping. The tears had started flowing the instant she’d touched me. She had a look of concern on her face. It wasn’t like the usual worried look people tended to give me, one tinged with a faint essence of something like, Oh my God girl can you please stop now. Instead, she stared at me with recognition. Her voice was so soft and it made me want to cry even harder.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. “Were you sexually abused as a child?”

“Yes,” I blurted out, barely any space between the end of her question and my response.

I had answered without even thinking — it just flew out of me automatically, as though from beyond my conscious mind. In a moment of terror, my usual defenses were rendered useless. It was as though the truth had been sealed inside a vacuum, and the nurse’s question, delivered while I was at an apex of physical and emotional vulnerability, broke the seal.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” she said.

I fell face first into her arms. I cried for several minutes while she held me, and then we finished the examination.

I sat in the car in the parking lot afterward and kept having to remind myself where I was, when I was, who I was. Everything — the medical building, the sidewalk, the trees, the inside of the car, it was all cast in too-bright yellow light. My head baked in the sun, hardening on the outside as the inside swirled with feelings and memories desperate to rise and connect and take on some sense of form.

It was the first time I had ever said aloud what had happened to me. I’d finally given it language. Even though it was just a single word response to someone else’s question, this had been enough to inscribe it onto my conscious mind. Now, it couldn’t be erased. I had always known the truth of my childhood, but I had become so skilled at avoiding it that even the simplest articulation made it feel shocking and new. The complexity of this feeling was uncanny. It was difficult to understand. I hated it.

This is true; how can this be true?

I looked at the clock; 3pm. I started the car and went home and opened a beer and tried not to think about it anymore.

visions/voids
(January 2021)

I spent most of last year caught up in a spiritual sort of silence. Until December of 2020, I’d lived alone in the house I’d once shared with my ex-wife. After covid hit, I spent a lot of time sitting around wondering if this might be the end of society. Nobody knew what was going on, nobody could say, and the chaos of the outer world seemed to reflect within my inner space; so much emptiness and uncertainty.

Before the pandemic, things had been good. I was finally becoming, like, a real person. I’d been going out regularly, maintaining friendships, and keeping myself busy. I went to gay karaoke every Monday. I went to parties. I had random, beautiful, drunken conversations with strangers and friends alike. For the first time in my life, I thought to myself, I can do this. Then everything shut down.

I was at home by myself for days on end. Sometimes, in the afternoon, after sitting on the couch in silence for hours, I would be gripped by a sudden, primal terror. A voice would emerge from my throat, whimpering and crying things like, no, please, stop. It scared me. I was worried I was losing my mind. I googled “Tourette Syndrome” and a bunch of other things just to make sure there wasn’t another cause for my involuntary outbursts. If I was being honest, though, I knew what it actually was.

I didn’t know what was worse; the physical flashbacks that would jolt through my body in sickening, prickly waves, or the visual memories, which began to present themselves not long after. Pretty quickly, I caught on to what was happening. I’d read a bunch of stuff about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; according to that model, it was simple: basically, I was experiencing manifestations of structural dissociation emerging from states of emotion that were fractured by some kind of ongoing violation long before I would have had the chance to integrate, differentiate, and form a cohesive self through the process of individuation.

A more straightforward way of putting it would be that I was totally, irreparably fucked.

All that annoying clinical language and psychoanalytical nonsense was great; it helped keep me from actually having to touch the core of the pain. Sometimes a girl’s just gotta intellectualize her trauma until she’s ready to meet it, you know?

So, for most of 2020, I was able to simply get by with these little outbursts. Apart from those terrifying afternoons, I was doing fine! It wasn’t a big deal. I was only drinking in social contexts. I didn’t fall down or embarrass myself for a whole year. I was okay!

Then, a few weeks ago, much to my annoyance, I became suicidally depressed. I found myself considering the advantages of nonexistence on New Year’s day. The symptoms were getting worse and I just couldn’t keep it together. There was too much pain. It overtook me; it made me think there was nothing left of me but it. I felt like I was dead and rotting from the inside out.

Out of nowhere, something arrived and saved me: a crow swooped down and landed on a palm tree just outside my window. I made eye contact with the regal, black bird. I thought of Theresa, how several crows showed up on my doorstep and wouldn’t leave for days after she died last May. She’d been one of a few “chosen” parental figures who were there for me back when I had nothing; I would never get over losing her. I waved hello to the crow. It flew off. I decided to stay.

Just yesterday, I was in an Airbnb in the desert near Joshua Tree reading Donika Kelly’s Bestiary. It is a truly miraculous collection. The poems detailed a path of healing from early experiences of severe trauma; they said so many things I had been feeling for so long, and they said them truthfully and beautifully.

I finished the book and put it down, feeling changed. I was sitting on the couch, staring through the sliding glass door into the wide desert when, suddenly, I was overtaken with a vision; my eyes rolled back, and I “saw” myself transported into the middle of the national park, nothing around but rocks and Joshua Trees. I was lifted into the air. A gold diamond the size of a boulder spun rapidly in the sky. A sliver of crescent moon hung just above the peak of a distant mountain. Beams of white light shot from the desert floor, the moon, and the diamond, converging on my body. I felt truth enter me. Languageless, beyond the need for understanding, just pure physical truth. My eyes returned and I was back on the couch, shaking, knowing I had to find a way to live.

*

Without naming names, I will say this: for much of my childhood, starting as early as I can remember, I was subjected to routine sexual, physical, and emotional abuse from multiple trusted adults in my life. I was too young to understand what was happening or why. There was nowhere to turn. So I went inward.

*

I sent an email to someone who was supposed to protect me. Someone who had instead allowed others to hurt me without intervening.

I was terrified, but prayed the confrontation would lead to something positive; maybe it would even bring this person and I closer together. For much of my life, this person had narrativized their relationship to me as one of sacrifice, their presence a protective force.

Only, it wasn’t true. In fact, emotionally speaking, I’d often end up caring for this person back when I was just a kid. I would listen to them share horrific stories of pain and trauma from their own life. They would tell me everything. There were no boundaries. And, if I wasn’t available to be a shoulder, I would be cast back into child mode and punished. There was no winning. I’d been given the responsibilities of an intimate adult peer while remaining constricted within the confines of childhood.

This person did not agree with my assessment of things. They didn’t accuse me of lying, but instead claimed to not remember anything from that period of time; they denied looking the other way. All I’d wanted was for someone who was there to tell me I wasn’t crazy. Instead, the things I’d shared had been met with excuses, with doubt.

*

But it did happen.

*

When I wrote about that one moment from Magnolia, I was trying to say so much of this without saying it. What I meant: I wanted someone to care. I wanted someone to be like Rose in the scene above; to drop everything, to rush to me and hold me and tell me it was all going to be okay.

It was wishful thinking. Deep down, I knew I was alone.

*

Another vision: I was in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight, no clouds, not even waves, just listless water rolling from side to side, surrounded by pale blue sky. The sun was in the center directly above me, white hot and blinding. I looked around in a panic. There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing. With no one left, no connection, no lifeline, I was nowhere. I was nothing.

forgiveness
(May 2026)

I still struggle, but I no longer feel the need to fight with all my strength to avoid the truth of my childhood. I’m not as often sent into spirals of panic by random, unpredictable triggers. It doesn’t continuously reach out and crush me from the background of my life. I can tell myself the truth and get out of bed and make coffee. I still carry these things, and they hurt, but they don’t define my days anymore.

Except — recently, it’s been getting bad again. It starts with a twinge in my back, between my left shoulder blade and spine. Then, the sensation of a knife being sliced up and down along the path of the twinge, from neck to hip. It reminds me of childhood; the men who would angrily grip me in the spot between my shoulder and neck and drag me wherever they wanted me. It doesn’t stop. Every movement is agony; even putting on my shoes or opening a drawer. This lasts for days. My body learns to compensate for the pain and tension on the left side, and I become misshapen and wracked with soreness. I forget how to sit, stand, and perform basic movements. I stop leaving my room, I don’t text back, I can hardly think. I become a pain body. Meds, breathwork, yoga, they sort of help at the moment; but the only thing that seems to offer consistent, meaningful relief is writing; putting this all into words.

Even so, I find myself terrified of the consequences of sharing what happened to me. Why am I doing this? My hope was, through this confession, this articulation of repressed truth, something might be released. I’ve tried everything else. I don’t know how to get this feeling out of my body! I am not brave!! I am desperate!!!! And I am sick. My body is literally inflamed with what happened to me. I fall ill for no reason and with no warning, and I forget how to function, how to see beyond the static sheen of pain surrounding me. It is the loneliest place. I am tired of feeling lonely.

*

I think I am doing this because I want to be someone who forgives.

I never wanted to have to write about what happened to me. I don’t want to hurt anybody, even the ones who have hurt me in rather extreme ways. I don’t want to bring shame to anyone. I have no interest in ruining anyone’s life. Most of all, I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want my identity to be tied to this. I don’t want to be seen as this. I don’t want to see myself as this.

I want to be cleansed of it. I want to be free of it.

I want it to have never happened.

No, actually, you know what, fuck that. Fuck forgiveness. Fuck regret. Fuck wanting it to never have happened. It did happen. And there are people out there who are responsible. They should be the ones figuring all this shit out. Where’s their hastily edited weekly essay series about the most awful things they’ve experienced and done? Why aren’t they out here risking embarrassment and shame in order to heal? They should have to suffer, not me!

Why am I still protecting these people? Am I weak for wanting to forgive them? Is this just a copout, another way of avoiding pain?

I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

I think the impossibly tangled nature of these sorts of conflicting desires is why I am trying to chose forgiveness. I believe this is the only thing that will clear the air and offer freedom from this constellation of pain and shame and fear and the forever cycling repetition of it all.

Forgiveness, as in, I have grown bored of all this tortured, stupid agony.

Forgiveness, as in, if I carry this any longer, it will destroy me.

Maybe forgiveness is just another form of synthesis; reconciliation of that which is unreconcilable; the unstoppable force finally meeting the immovable object.

Maybe forgiveness is a positive form of delusion, like faking it ‘til you make it.

If I pretend to forgive, maybe someday it will come true.

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The Garage Years

I dropped out of college and moved in with my grandparents. For three years, I lived in my mother’s childhood bedroom. Every morning, the sun would rise and hit the wall behind my head. The poorly insulated plasterboard warmed up in gradual intervals, like the surface of a stove, heating my pillow and frying the top of my skull. When the heat became unbearable, I’d scoot further down and stay there in bed as late into the day as I could, forcing my body to remain still.

When I’d wake up, I’d slink through the hallway, into the computer room, through the bathroom that stood between the computer room and my grandparents’ room, and into the garage. Most of the space was filled with cardboard and plastic boxes scrawled with phrases like “Kids toy’s 1971”, “Magazine’s”, etc. There was a washer and dryer at the back, a fridge near the door leading into the house, and on the other side of the fridge, a table in front of a pair of windows looking out into the yard. The view of the street was obscured by gnarled, old trees which covered all the windows at the front of the house and acted as a sort of canopy as you walked up to the front door. I would sit there, behind trees, behind glass, chain smoking cigarettes at the table. I would write poems, make memes, spend too much time on Tumblr, listen to music, nurse myself through panic attacks.

In the evenings I’d scrounge together whatever change I could and drive to the grocery store to buy a bottle of the cheapest red wine they sold. I would sneak it back into my room and hope there would be a chance for me to grab the corkscrew from the kitchen and return it without being seen. Once, I had to use a pen to open a bottle; one of my prouder moments. Or it was, until I accidentally pushed the cork all the way into the bottle and red liquid exploded everywhere, coating my bed, table, tv, walls, and curtains with wine. I’ll clean it up tomorrow, I thought. I took a swig from the bottle while the cork bobbed inside, just beneath the neck.

January 2012

2011 was insane. They had me on all these zombie meds, antipsychotics, 1000mg of Depakote a day, can you fucking believe?!! I couldn’t even get out of bed, every night I would hallucinate figures climbing around and on me, sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was awake or dreaming…so I said fuck it and stopped taking the pills last fall. They weren’t helping anyway. During the summer, they even had me taking three clonazepams a day on top of all that other stuff. When would it end??? The panic attacks weren’t going away. Nothing was helping.

I stopped taking my meds. Everything felt far away, like I was a bird circling high above my own life, unable to land. I lost the ability to swallow food. I tried to eat soup, yogurt, stuff like that, but could barely keep it down. My body rejected everything. All my clothes stopped fitting. I looked gaunt, dirty, as removed from my ideal self as I had ever been. I couldn’t think; I could barely speak. I just sat on the couch and watched movies. My vision started growing blurry. I was having trouble reading. I had been staying with my ex/friend/ill-defined lover at her aunt’s place in cowboy country for a few weeks. They had horses out back. I would sit on the back steps at night, there in the blue-green lamplight, watching dust rise in the air, taking in all the smells of hay, manure, dirt, grass, and humid sky…I felt so unreal.

I became convinced I was dying. I believed I had some kind of disease that was causing me to waste away. I grew paranoid and decided that my family had been informed of my condition by my doctor, and that they had all conspired to keep the truth of my certain impending death from me as a final act of mercy. Sometimes I even wondered if I was already dead and existing in a purgatorial state. Eventually, the delusion settled into a more fixed place: I began to suspect my life was secretly being filmed for an audience, like in The Truman Show. I didn’t believe this necessarily made me special or unique; in my version of the delusion, I was one of many unwitting contestants among an underclass of sorts, people whose lives were turned into entertainment for the elites.

Fortunately, this crazy shit only lasted a couple weeks. As I watched my body grow thinner and thinner, skin stretching taut around knobby bones, some kind of instinct kicked in. I didn’t want to die. They say, and by “they” I mean people who have survived suicide attempts, they say you instantly regret it the moment it’s too late. I had been experiencing a drawn out, slow-motion version of this. After years of trying to gradually kill myself, I fell into a moment of a grace. I remember being in the car, my face against the window, the sun beating down, mountains in the distance covered in dark clouds literally lined in silver; and then this one song came on, and I just started crying, crying so hard the passenger window shook with my head, and I kept crying, and back at the house I packed my things and called my mom to pick me up, and she drove me back to my grandparents’ where I went into her childhood bedroom and spent the next several weeks desperately searching for any song, movie, book, or poem that would make me cry, make me live.

***

I sat there and watched the trees across the street through the open garage door. A breeze pushed the leaves around, and there they danced among themselves, catching sunlight at different angles with each of their movements, glowing and green and alive. I wrote odes to the light on the leaves; so many prayers in which I begged life to let me be a part of it. I wanted to be light. I wanted to be wind. I wanted to be the tree.

I’d recently joined a local mental health support group I’d found after googling “local mental health support groups” and clicking on the first result. Weekly meetings were held at a synagogue in a nearby town. Here, I was introduced to a woman who called herself “the world’s first Jewish nun,” and who had blended together her own spiritual practice from all her experiences, readings, and beliefs. I was in awe of her. Another woman who attended the meetings was there because she wanted to cope with being terminally ill. I barely spoke to her, but she was one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. I didn’t say much during the meetings, but I looked up to the women in the group. Their determination to find peace in the face of the impossible inspired me.

The program itself, I came to find, was only slightly culty. It was all based on one man’s teachings. They asked for money sometimes, it was always optional though. They had conferences they encouraged you to attend. It was a whole thing. At the end of the day, if you remained at the surface of it all, the program offered basic cognitive behavioral therapy skills. These were totally new to me, and they helped with my panic attacks. Soon I was able to drive on the freeway without freezing up and feeling like I was going to pass out and crash and die. I took my skills with me and stopped attending the program and started writing poetry again after what had been six months of a total creative block.

I was eating. Showering regularly. I experimented with my personal style, began femme-ing things up a bit. I walked over to an old box in the garage in my head labeled “Severe lifelong gender dysphoria” and I dug my fingernails under the edge of the multiple layers of packing tape holding it shut. I pulled and tugged until something gave.

September 2012

It was dusk and I was driving back to my grandparents’ house. Window rolled down, cigarette in one hand, I watched a freight train cross the tracks while I waited on the industrial end of town. The sky was blue and rusty. Crows scattered above. Endless repetitive storage units lined the road on either side in vast swaths of beige, cubic stucco. The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” played through the speaker of my grandpa’s old Toyota.

Candy says, I’ve come to hate my body / And all that it requires in this world

By now I’d learned to cry in a softer, less obvious way. I listened and let my eyes water slightly.

I’m gonna watch the bluebirds fly / Over my shoulder / I’m gonna watch them pass me by

I thought about everyone I’d ever known. All my old friends who now had real, adult lives, who were married, starting families, careers…and then there was me. A barely-there thing.

Maybe when I’m older / What do you think I’d see / If I could walk away from me?

Suddenly I wasn’t crying so softly anymore. A silver string of desperate energy tugged from my throat into my stomach. I knew a truth so big I couldn’t say it. I wanted something impossible. I had to make it happen.

Fall 2013

Whenever I wasn’t at my grandparents’ house, I was a girl. For most of this year I had been sneaking away to dress up and do my makeup and take selfies and see myself in a way I could live with. The other day, I was informed by my old university that my application for readmittance was approved. I was going back to school. I had to make a decision: would I return in boy mode or would I be myself? Who even was I?

It had been a pretty decent year. I was getting some attention for my poetry in various internet corners. I released a digital chapbook of poems called “If You Don’t Think Crying is Poetry You Can Go Fuck Yourself.” I was finding my voice. I was spending time in public with people. I was making friends, going out to gay bars, and being as femme and faggy as I wanted to. I was finding myself.

The color of the year for me was gold. The sun had risen on my new life and it was now early afternoon, the next phase of my comeback. All felt possible, but just out of reach. I was learning to take things in steps. Whenever a panic attack would arrive, I would find a song to play, anything to make me cry. As soon as the tears would flow, the attack would end. I would be sitting there, all cold and hot at the same time, shivering, clammy, and feeling as though I had just transcended an old reality and emerged into another. It was sublime.

I wrote poems about being dysphoric and insane. I took pictures of the ephemera of my life and saved random images I found online. I added words to the images, mixing my pain into the pictures. I experimented wildly and felt free. Voices tumbled out of me; I hardly understood what they were saying or why, I just let anything that made me cry remain there on the page, and that was how the poems came. They told me things about myself, my life, my history, why I was the way I was. They showed me more than they showed anyone else. I lived in their mystery and grew addicted to the wash of unspeakable feeling, wordless sensations soaking my body with no concern for meaning.

I loved my undesignated feelings. I turned them into images made of words and fell in love with abstraction’s charm. I distilled humor from pain. I plumbed the depths of sincerity and irony and made them sing in harmony alongside one another. Meanwhile, somewhere inside me, there were these other voices gathering together. They had real things of consequence to tell me, and once I’d become comfortable enough with every buried sensation, good and bad, they would be ready to share their truth.

December 2019

It was my second year of grad school and it had been six months or so since my first marriage ended. The same week the split had happened, Ari Aster’s Midsommar premiered. How fitting, I thought. I’d taken myself to see it, knowing nothing other than the fact that the story had been inspired by a bad breakup. Sitting there, I watched Florence Pugh’s character go through what to me felt like both a literal and figurative encapsulation of what my old relationship had been like. To be clear, neither person in the relationship I speak of was the “villain” — the way I saw it, the two of us, with all of our shared and individual pain and grief, were like Florence Pugh’s character; neither of us could stand hold one another’s hurt any longer, and ultimately we needed to part in order to heal. Anyway, I was entranced by the movie; I had entered some kind of altered state as I watched the relationship die on screen, burned away forever with actual fire. As everything went up in flames at the end of the movie, I felt something in me collapse, die. I walked out of the theater and was a new person.

After a whirlwind summer romance and many days of freedom and sunshine, I had to return to normalcy and begin to pick up the pieces of my failed former life. I felt awake for the first time in ten years. I was back in school, had published two books of poetry, gone on tours, been awarded prizes, and better than all of those things combined: I had friends. I hung out with people from the MFA, went to parties, and learned how to socialize as an adult woman. As long as I was in class or with my friends or drinking, I wasn’t thinking. For once in my life, I wasn’t just sitting there ruminating and imagining I could change my life through the power of obsessive thought. The only problem: I had gone too far in the other direction. Anytime I slowed down or stopped, the feelings rushed through the room like walls of water and pummeled me.

Mostly, what was coming up were images and feelings from childhood. Things I didn’t want to remember. Things I had always known but never wanted to know. Things that used to only come up when I was wasted out of my mind, crying and barely understanding why. Worse, the images and feelings were starting to gain language. They had washed up against me long enough that they’d begun to learn to articulate themselves with words they’d picked up along the way. Occasionally, it got so bad my body would twitch and I’d find myself shouting, “No! Stop!” seemingly beyond my own control. I wondered if I was finally losing it for good, if all my hard work and accomplishments had led to the final mental breakdown from which I might never recover.

Finally, I was forced to slow all the way down. Sometime near the beginning of December, I fell ill with an extra bad cold. I was so tired all the time. My symptoms were lasting forever. I couldn’t go out or drink or see friends. It was already almost the new year, and I still wasn’t back to normal. I felt myself slipping away again.

Despite everything I had gone through since the garage years, there I was, back in that same old state of mind: feeling like I was going crazy, convinced I was dying.

***

In just a few months, the world will change. Any chance of distracting myself from the reality of my past will have vanished. There will be no more “going out” for a while. I will be stuck here, living alone in the house I’d once shared with the person I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with, digging through the mess of my past. I will attend and teach classes online; otherwise, I’ll see no one and do nothing. In the absence of life, I will be forced to face reality. The walls of water that used to emerge only in silent moments will become an ocean covering my entire being. All moments will be silent. Then, one day, everything will rush forward to me; all my little voices. Eventually, they will tell me the truth of my story. It will break me. I will become convinced I might die from it. But I won’t.

***

Note: all images featured in this essay were created and/or edited by me and posted to my Tumblr at some point during the events depicted herein; paid subscribers will get to see some more goodies from my archives in the future :)

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1.

I keep thinking about how there is no such thing as self-destruction. No matter the lengths you may go to reign in the damage, that dense, incalculable, ambient energy will always make its way onto those around you. Silent suffering creates a vacuum in the space between you and the other. All the pain you spend your limited resources trying to hide seeps into that space and touches whoever comes close. Around your skin grows another skin made of cactus. Spines surround you and you become sealed off from everything, collecting water in the middle of a desert you dreamed up.

I remember my various hideouts over the years: the hillside overlooking the city where donkeys and coyotes wandered. The small town in West Virginia where I said hello to the same ten people every day. The redwood forest where I went inward to find all of my shadows. And now, Los Angeles, one of the biggest cities in the world.

Here, I hide in my apartment and venture to the rooftop where I can watch things from a close distance. I tell my secrets to the birds. The sadder and heavier my heart, the more they surround me. This morning they wait outside my window, singing. I drift in and out of sleep and dream of a crow beating the edge of one frenzied wing against the screen, trying desperately to get in. It sounds like a saw buzzing through wet tree bark. I want to push the screen out and allow it to enter, let the chaos ensue. I reach up and my bedroom dissolves back into my bedroom.

Later, a Youtube video autoplays, a random gift from the algorithm: it’s an examination of prophets and figures from the Bible, who, at one point or another, were forced into exile in the wilderness. Sometimes they were gone for days, sometimes for decades. Some immediately received miracles, care, nourishment from angels; others waited lifetimes in the empty, stale air of God’s silence, wondering what it all was for.

I feel as though a part of me has been living in a forest somewhere inside myself my entire life. She is sleeping under tree trunks, foraging for berries, looking up at the dome of the sky above, the theater screen of my inner world. Upon it, she witnesses various scenes projected; a livestream of the world my body inhabits and moves through. This feral girl is in pain, hungry, tired, and lonely. She can barely speak. Her sentence of solitude has become a chosen one; her only true act of agency.

I sit with this part of me while the video describes the time Jesus went into the desert to face temptation. The devil offered three bargains to the starving, tired prophet. Use your powers to turn these stones into bread, he commanded. Jesus said no way, man. So, the devil took him to the top of a mountain and said, okay, well this world is yours if you would just worship me. Jesus refused. Finally, they flew to the roof of a temple a hundred feet above the ground, and the devil told Jesus to jump and let his fall be caught by the angels. Jesus was like, I’m good, thank you!

Contained within this parable, specifically within the details of the three temptations, is a narrative we are all familiar with: starting out with nothing (stones), turning nothing into a resource (bread), gaining power and prestige, and then finally, falling from the great, big height you have reached in your pride. A tale as old as time. Jesus refuted every aspect of this narrative and was fed by angels.

I am not anything like him. I even wrote a haiku today about how unlike Jesus I am:

BREAD OF STONE

The visitor offered me food
in exchange for my magic.
Starving, I let him in.

I feel like I would do almost anything to survive at this point, except for being a normal person.

In my early 20s, after a year of daily panic attacks, I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. One night, while I was knocked out on sleep meds, another patient climbed into my bed. The nurses came in and woke me up and promptly told me I was being removed from the facility. I was groggy, dizzy, and didn’t understand what was going on; I started crying and having a panic attack. The only words I could get out, which I repeated over and over, were, “You said you would help me please help me.” Despite this, the nurses called the police and told them I was threatening to harm myself; a convenient way to make me someone else’s problem. I was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car at 1am, cold metal around my wrists, the rough plastic seat pushing into my bony body, contorting me into a strange, slumped shape. I’ll never forget what the cop said to me as he started the engine; he half-turned his head, looking slightly past me, and in a shockingly casual tone, remarked, “Why don’t you just get a normal job and be a normal person.”

I’d like to think I’m not this petty, but I have to admit: when I heard this, a voice in my head whispered something like, “Over my dead body.”

Seventeen years later I am still alive and have never, ever, once been normal.

There is a cost to my inability to function like other people. Rooms I cannot enter. Conversations I’ll never be a part of. I watch much of the world through glass.

Sometimes people feel drawn to my strange ways, like maybe through me they could find permission to let go of the game and live life out here on the tightrope where precariousness alchemizes into art. But then they eventually realize I really am just crazy. This isn’t a persona or an art piece. The persona is who I am at readings and public events. The art lies in the shapes I create from experience, these words that speak for the chaos but can never actually be it or contain it.

Meanwhile, the truth of me is out in the woods dreaming of silence.

2.

People don’t really want you to explain yourself. Think of your parents. When you were a kid they would ask, “Why did you do that?” and when you’d go to answer they’d say, “No excuses, just sorries!” People don’t care about reasons, or even about “accountability;” in truth; they just want satisfaction, which is another way of describing an extraction of energy. They want you to feel shame and then perform it for their pleasure. We eat one another’s pain and call it “justice.”

I want to increase the amount of grace I have for others and for myself. It’s a struggle; the more grace I show myself, the more irate I grow toward the lack of grace others give. The more grace I show others, the more I excuse the lack of grace I am receiving. So I give extra grace to myself and the cycle begins anew.

I feel far removed from the ocean of social relations. I don’t trust people. I am afraid of them. I want to give everything to them. I need them.

When I was a young child of about eight or nine, I had this book of “brain teasers”; it mainly consisted of lateral-thinking puzzles based on some kind of mysterious or uncanny occurrence; a man lies dead in a locked, windowless room with only a pool of water nearby; someone tries the albatross at a restaurant and then runs into traffic; etc. The most memorable puzzle for me was not as bizarrely violent as these ones, however. It simply asked the reader, “What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?” I remember obsessing over this question, trying to imagine in my mind some kind of beautiful shining comet whirling through space and coming upon a stark, glistening black wall of jagged stone stretching upward and downward into infinity; what would happen when they collided? Would it create an impossibly enormous black hole? Would the universe fold in on itself and turn inside out?

When I read the solution, “disappointed” didn’t remotely begin to describe the feeling. “There is no such thing as a universe in which an unstoppable force and an immovable object can both exist,” the answer drolly read. “They are, by definition, exclusive of one another. For, if a force can be described as ‘unstoppable’ this precludes a reality in which something ‘immovable’ can exist.”

Fucking semantics!…oh, how I hated that stuff. Just overeducated middle class nerds playing self-congratulatory word games, making shapes from the shadows in the cave for their own amusement, unwilling to explore what might be outside…no imagination at all!

I am full of unstoppable forces and immovable objects. All of us are. This is why we rage at ourselves, at each other, this is why we consume pain. We know there are truths beyond those performances of truth we register as the columns of our constructed reality. We sense something more, something that might resolve the contradiction. But the more we speak of it and think of it and attempt to contain and define it, the further away from us it seems. So we drink. We abuse substances. We make the wrong decisions on purpose. We are forced to live as these individual, singular, consistent selves while we spill over with contradictions that preclude the possibility of the existence of a single self.

The truth is, the unstoppable force and the immovable object don’t contradict one another at all; in fact, arguably, one could not exist without the other. What I mean by this: the very concept of unstoppability would not matter enough to name if the unstoppable object has always been unstoppable. Unstoppability only matters enough to name because of the concept of immovability, and vice versa. So, if something is to be unstoppable or immovable, it can only be labeled so in relation to the other. As one meaning contradicts the possibility of its opposite, it simultaneously enshrines it. The answer to the question of what happens when these impossible forces meet has already been answered: they named one another.

There is no such thing as “the universe.” It is not one thing. The rules that govern the world we see contradict the rules that govern the world we don’t. Religion, science, philosophy, art, these all gesture toward an understanding of this impossible truth through the means by which they seek to reconcile it.

“Reality” is not a cohesive body, like an ocean. It is full of rivers, tributaries, deltas, dams, floodplains, meandering, various structures and interventions both natural and constructed. You can’t map it, because it changes as you move through it. It changes you as you change it. Everything is always in flux with itself.

I keep fighting the current, clawing my way to the shore so I can rest, but there is no shore, only more rivers, and sometimes they lead underground and I am lost for weeks on end. The people who care about me wonder where I am and they grow worried. I am not eating their pain, I am not even aware I am capable of causing it, but it’s there.

3.

I read about various categorizations of my particular constellation of mental, emotional, and physical symptoms. I learn about learned helplessness. I research the differences between Complex post traumatic stress disorder and “covert narcissism” because I’m worried the way my pain presents itself might make me a terrible person to others. I read about the differences between Complex post traumatic stress disorder and Borderline personality disorder, and I wonder, is “borderline” just a word for women with particularly bad CPTSD? Is any of this even real? What the fuck am I? Am I one of the good traumatized people or one of the bad traumatized people? Am I unfixable? Unlovable? Evil? Do I have a true disease of the mind, or am I just a hysterical woman in need of a good talking to? What the fuck is actually going on here?

I am not averse to taking responsibility for the things I do, but, try as I might, I just don’t know how to change who I am at my core: damaged goods. Maybe this is what I have in common with the narcissist; I am stubbornly set in my self-destructive ways. Functionally, this means I might not be a good person to be around. I question every failed relationship…was it me? Am I the problem?

I don’t know how to be good to myself and this hurts the people who love me. The solution is extremely obvious: start being good to myself! But, I don’t have faith I can do it, so I stave off the inevitable collapse with alcohol and empty days. I lock myself in my room like a werewolf in order to limit the radius of my pain’s fallout. I don’t want to hurt anyone with all my craziness! I couldn’t stand the thought of it. So I just hurt them with my absence instead.

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1.

I worry friends and strangers with what I write about my life.

I think to myself, if they really knew everything, more than just these layers of dust I am blowing off of the surface with every word, more than just the surface; if they could see into the beyond space of my unnarrativized, uncharacterizable self…and then I remember I can’t see that deep into me. I can’t even make out the surface. This is why I am writing! It is enough to drive anyone insane, this endless cycle, it’s a good thing I already am pretty crazy.

LA is a great place to be poor. I want to die in the sunshine watching a crow swoop down from a palm tree, croaking and swirling in cylindrical loops around a brown, spotted hawk. Life at play. I can be as still as I want with this movement around me. I can lie in bed all morning and let the beams of bright light melt through the blades of my blinds and soak my white, floral-patterned sheets in long, warm stripes. I can curl up in the middle of the bed and let the warmth fall upon my spine. I can stand on the roof, four stories up, hungry as hell, smoking my last cigarette to stave off the pangs, staring at the buildings of downtown in the near distance, Griffith Observatory standing tall behind me; a panoramic view of this slice of the city feeding me, reminding me You are here. You made it.

How can I explain the way I experience the most terrifying and painful thoughts one minute, and pure beauty and love and connection to all things the next? How can I make sense of myself when I take in the world this way? Why can’t I just be normal? I tried to do the 9-5 office thing, living in the suburbs, etc, and I missed being in the world and writing poems and making things and talking to people and being a person. Why this tension between stability and passion? But then I realized: that whole ordinary life bit was not stable at all because I was unhappy! Unfulfilled! I was making more money than I’d ever earned in my life and I had health insurance and I didn’t really want to be alive anymore.

Sometimes I claim that I am incapable of lying to myself and accepting conditions that are spiritually unaligned. Because of the fact that I had to spend the first twenty-something years of my life pretending to be something else, I’ve used up my allotted supply of self-delusion. Nope. Turns out it’s an infinite resource. Every day, as I struggle to grow to understand myself and become a semi-functional human being, I am hit with new realizations about how fucking stupid I am. So unaware.

I feel half-initiated into reality. In truth, I am always standing halfway outside of myself; one foot in the door, one foot out.

When I watch myself from a distance, I can see what I am doing. I am both a character in a movie and an audience of one who gets to equally wince at and secretly enjoy seeing the character act out in messier and messier ways. Okay, I think. Go ahead. Spend the last of your money on beer. Text him back. Who cares. I have to let myself see the consequences. Every day I feel like baby-brained Emma Stone in Poor Things just trying to make sense of a ridiculous world everyone has agreed to go along with because there’s no other choice. Just letting myself get fucked every which way. Doing whatever to survive. Crying at all the hurt I can’t help. Ugh. I hate myself.

No, I don’t hate myself; if I did I would be trying much harder to destroy myself.

I’ve been engaging in this controlled descent as a way to live inside the mess of myself and be a part of things for the first time in my life. In the past, I used those self-destructive tendencies to run away. I am still hurting myself, it’s a habit I’m trying my best to shake, but in the meantime I want to redirect the path of the damage away from the forests and fields of flowers and toward the mountains full of sealed caves and hidden worlds: the place from which pain and fear emerge. I want to know what it is so I can love myself better.

My life is what my life is and as long as I have a brain capable of translating impulses and sensations and experiences into words, I am going to write about it. I don’t care about confession or “radical vulnerability”. I no longer feel the need to atone for having had a crazy fucking life. I’m not here for it.

I write toward revelation, which is a joyous, curtain-tearing occasion. It is rupture and light.

2.

I tried to watch Frances Ha today and felt like throwing up. Too close to home. Except, I reminded myself, I was ten years older than Frances, a woman characterized by her inability to make money or take care of herself or read a room; as she puts it, “I’m not a real person yet.” Which is, like, fine when you’re in your twenties? When I was that age, I was a college dropout with no job, doing much worse than any character in that movie. As annoying and disheartening and upsetting and lowkey gutwrenching as it was to relate to this character at nearly 40 years old, I told myself it wasn’t a true comparison, because I started from a much lower place. I didn’t have a nice, middle class family in Sacramento who could bail me out. I had me and only me.

I couldn’t watch the movie while I was feeling so hungry and weak, so I turned it off. Earlier, I’d watched Je Tu Il Elle for the first time, and despite Chantal Akerman’s even starker vision of a depressed woman living off less than the bare minimum, it didn’t make me feel as bad. Maybe something about the stillness of the images, the silences between voiceover and dialogue…I felt held by those moments of seeming nothingness. They seemed to describe this feeling more viscerally than any words could. Nothing against Frances Ha, it was still a favorite, but its depiction of a woman trying to make it work felt too unserious to me in such a dire personal moment. Frances’ poverty was existential…her money woes were a construct, a sign she was failing at some kind of game, and when the game was over she had the option of swallowing her pride and leaving New York and going back to boring Sacramento with her boring nice family.

For some of us, the lack was both existential and material, and carried real consequences.

3.

Nothing is profound in itself. Profundity comes from an arrangement of experiences, objects, timing, mood, history, everything. For an event to be profound, there must be a perfect dance of competing factors that all seem to magically fall in line with one another’s movements, as though each discrete part were equally influenced by the others, until something like harmony emerges.

I am somewhat of a film snob — not in the sense that I judge anyone else’s taste or necessarily place value judgment upon middle and lowbrow art — there’s a place for everything — but I have spent the majority of my life studying the medium on an unofficial basis. Even more so than literature, film has captivated me for a long time, and as a result I have explored different corners of cinema and am usually drawn to movies that play with form and seem to come from a place of passion.

That said, my most profound moviegoing experience: seeing Frozen at Downtown Disney with much of my extended family in attendance, during what I knew would be the last holiday season I would spend with them.

I had made up my mind; I had to transition. I’d tried everything else, anything. I tried to therapize, spiritualize, intellectualize it out of me, but there was no use. I was nonfunctional and only getting worse. My panic attacks had ceased to become individual units of experience and had coalesced into the foreground of my daily reality. I held out for the brief hours in which my body was not ceasing up and convincing me you can’t breathe, you’re dying, you’re going to die. I couldn’t get out from behind it. Normal life faded into the background and I interacted with things from behind glass. I was frozen in place, locked within a world of repression and pain.

So, I was openly crying about five minutes into the movie. I had gone into it being like, Ugh, I can’t believe I have to watch a baby movie with my cousins, I’m in my twenties, this sucks but I’ll try to make the best of it I guess. By the time “Let It Go” ended, I was transformed. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing, that this cartoon was articulating something I had been fighting a losing battle with for most of my life. The absurdity of having such a reaction to a Disney movie as a self-described film snob only drove the emotional intensity and the feeling of profundity imbued in the moment. Trying not to draw my cousins’ eyes my way, I sat there crying to myself for most of the runtime. I felt myself clearing a path in front of me in order to finally do what was necessary.

After the movie, one of my older cousins saw me wipe an eye and shot me a vaguely inquisitive look. “Uh…I sometimes get panic attacks?” I said, “and I thought the movie did a good job of like, talking about mental health stuff. Ya know?”

A year later, it was Christmas morning and one of my aunts, who was hosting our family’s Christmas gathering, had just left me a voicemail. In it, she said she understood I had made some decisions about my lifestyle choices. She was only asking that when I come over that morning, I dress and act like a man and don’t say anything to my cousins, wouldn’t want to give them any ideas, etc. I didn’t call back or show up. That was that.

When you don’t have a family, certain normal things seem extra profound. A dad lifting his child out of the stroller just to give them a gentle hug in the middle of a walk through the neighborhood. Your roommate’s mom coming over to help redecorate the apartment. No one is normal and no family is normal but some families kind of are normal and I both love and resent them. That they were willing to fight through all the bullshit that comes with being related to someone. That they made it work. I suppose I could’ve made it work with my family if I wanted life to be one long panic attack. I’m not interested in martyrdom, though. Things like sacrifice and compromise and forgiveness and grace, they go both ways. You can’t become an endless vessel for those energies to everyone. Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s utterly egotistical to suppose that you can individually make peace with everyone. It implies that you are waiting upon some higher ground for the other to rise up and meet you.

The truth is, we’re all fucked in different ways, vacillating between spaces above and below one another. It all depends on what lens you use to view it. I’m not better than my asshole family members and they’re not better than me. When it comes down to it, we just have a fundamental disagreement about what love is.

For me, love is refusing to give a broken version of myself to others. I fail at this every day, but it’s my goal. And, I cannot reconcile with anyone for whom reconciliation would require me becoming or performing a broken version of myself. While “come over dressed as your biological sex so you don’t groom my children with your existence” might sound like a valid request to someone with more traditional views, for me it represented a reversion to a state of being that was impossible for me to exist within. Now that I am no longer living behind glass, the idea of going back there, of becoming frozen again, is inconceivable.

A few years back I wrote a poem called “Death Before Detransition” and it pissed a few people off. Some right wingers accused me of weaponizing suicide or threatening terrorism. Some people on the left claimed it was promoting doomerism. Whatever. People like to act stupid on purpose about art. The actual point of the poem, and I can’t believe I’m doing this please literally kill me if I ever again explain or justify one of my poems, but the point of it was that “detransition” is not an actual possibility. I will always be the person who cried watching Frozen surrounded by my family. I will always be the person who chose the hard path in order to avoid the cliff’s edge. I will always be the person who sacrificed having a family for having a life. No matter what laws are passed, no matter what is taken away personally, socially, medically, politically, nothing will change the fact that I transitioned from a nonperson who wanted to die into a person who stays alive and finds beauty in everything.

This is. It just is. There is no erasing it.

Thank you for reading. Please subscribe to keep up with this ongoing series<3

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Read last week’s entry here:

Open banking app. Swipe down; refresh. It’s still the same. Hard close app. Wait ten seconds. Breathe. Open banking app. Swipe down; refresh. It’s still the same. -$18.92. Swipe down; refresh. Count to ten. Breathe. It’s 2:11pm. Is that an unlucky number? Two plus eleven….oh God. Breathe breathe breathe. 4-7-8. In through nose, out through mouth. Close banking app. Restart phone. Open banking app. Swipe down; refresh. Breathe. Visualize the breath. Picture it as energy. Money is an energy. That is all it is. An energy. You are energy. Breathe in breath. Breathe in energy. Breathe in money. Create space in your field to receive money. Become the kind of person who receives money. Receive money.

***

She searches her bedroom for cash and loose change. She has three five dollar bills on her bedside table, held in place beneath a heavy, heart sized, bronze elephant. 555. Don’t spend it, she tells herself. This is an altar; a promise. She finds five one dollar bills at the bottom of an old purse, one that is also shaped like an elephant, but made of stiff plastic. She cracks the elephant open along the top of its spine and pulls out the cash. She walks over to the other elephant, careful to step over the brown paper grocery bags full of empty beer cans, and the piles of laundry, and little rat’s nests of long, brown hair gathered on the hardwood floor. She lifts the heavy, bronze creature and stuffs the three fives beneath it into her pocket. She finds a ten dollar bill and a quarter in a plastic container full of things she hasn’t looked at since moving here three months ago. Thirty dollars and twenty five cents. She walks down to the corner market where she has gone nearly every day she has lived here. A family runs it. She usually says hi to them and smiles and they say hi and smile back. She doesn’t know their names and they don’t know hers. She wants to be more neighborly, but part of her decides to keep a distance. She wonders how they feel about the smiling tranny who walks into their store every day to buy beer and cigarettes. She feels ashamed of herself and all she represents in the face of their seeming wholesomeness. Once, at night, she went in to find the family and a collection of random customers and passersby who’d all stopped what they were doing to watch the end of a baseball game on the tv in the market. She, knowing nothing about who was playing or anything about baseball in general, stood there and watched with them. She felt connected to other humans at that moment. A rare instance. When she gets there today, no game, just a nice grandpa running the register, in her mind she calls him abuelito, she has no family of her own, she knows it’s weird but she looks for them everywhere. Swipe down; refresh.

She does her usual routine; pretend to scan the dairy section of the refrigerator, look at/past the beans and salsas in the middle aisle for ten seconds, then walk to the back and buy a six pack of the highest ABV beer they have. Walk to the register. One yellow pack of American Spirits, please!

She holds her breath while he calculates the total. Sigh of relief: $30.25.

She hands over exact change and leaves.

***

It’s early, not even 3pm yet, but she is depressed, hopeless, hungry, beside herself…so, she starts drinking. Whatever. Swipe down; refresh. The drink goes down too easily. The money still isn’t there. It would almost be easier if she wasn’t working, then this poverty would make sense. It would be easier if she could blame herself for being lazy and stupid. But, she’s earned this money. The joys of working under contract; they will really just pay you whenever. So, now her car insurance is late and she might lose it. She’s late on rent, her car payment. She’s been living off of rice and eggs. Yogurt, when she can afford it.

Her friends have offered to help, but she always declines, she’s too proud. Last month, one morning, she asked a man for help while getting dressed at his place and she immediately felt disgusted with herself, and even though he did help, she promised herself she would never ask for anything like that ever again. Nothing was worth the way it made her see herself.

The other week, she felt like a queen; each night, she ate a can of tuna in extra virgin olive oil alongside a small bowl of cherry tomatoes (upon which she drizzled the excess oil), fresh garlic, pickled beets, baby carrots sprinkled with pepper and drizzled with honey, a few crackers, and a little mini wheel of cheese in wax. This was luxury. Today, the food has dwindled. Obviously, she could have spent the thirty bucks on groceries, but these days, that was, what? Enough for a few meals? Some grocery stores in LA, they charge you that much just to enter. Anyway, she’d rather starve than live off rice and beans. Beer is calories, she tells herself, same as when she’d add whole milk to her morning coffee and not make breakfast. Cigarettes kill hunger, she reminds herself. It’s all good, she says. I have a system.

***

Two beers in and company arrives. Her roommate and his friends are pregaming it before the queer dance party at a nearby bar. They are singing karaoke, so she joins. She loves singing karaoke at home. She can’t get herself to stick to yoga or regular meditation, but she swears couch karaoke is just as good. It’s an embodied practice, she says, half-joking. Everyone goes around singing and it is a lot of fun. Maybe this is all I needed, she thinks. Some human connection. Some fun.

So, when they invite her to the dance party, she says why not. She chugs the rest of her beer, eats a spoonful of peanut butter, and hops in an uber with the crew, and by the time she’s taken the first sip from her first drink at the bar, she knows she’s done for. Hold my drink, I’m going to smoke, she says, and then she goes out front to the sidewalk and has a cigarette, her eyes wavering across the lights and smoke and bodies, unable to focus. Swipe down; refresh. As she puts out her cigarette, she realizes she has lost the ability to walk without stumbling and falling over. She carefully balances herself, slowly makes it back into the bar. Do you want me to call you an uber, her roommate asks. Yes, she says, her eyes closed as she stands there leaning against the table. He waits with her outside and tells her it’s going to be okay. Why can’t I take care of myself, she says, weeping. She gets home and falls asleep. It is 9:30pm.

***

She woke up at 3am. She sat with her thoughts for a while. She read. When she started to see daylight, she went to the rooftop for a cigarette. It was raining. She stayed outside for ten minutes and then went back to bed. She listened to ambient music and watched clouds moving and mixing outside her window while the American flag at the top of the giant Scientology center across the street danced, undulating in the wet wind. She was very still. She tried to feel her way back into herself after a week of intense pain and disconnection. She sat with her body. She felt everything settle. She fell asleep between the clouds, rain, piano, and the sound of her breath finally moving by itself. She woke up at 9:30am, gathered all the empty cans in her room and took out the trash, then made a cup of coffee. She thought about forgiveness. She thought about God. She wondered if it was possible to ever understand a thing.

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Read part five of this series here:

I hate the ego; I want it dead. When I am celebrated for my accomplishments, when I’m on stage reading my work to an audience, when people come up to me and tell me my writing changed something for them, I feel a moment of joy followed by a deep sense of disgust with myself. Who do you think you are, a voice in my head says to me.

I wanted to be a famous writer. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be loved in order to connect with others without facing the same risk of rejection I’d experienced for most of my life. I wanted to make myself worthy of them. I wanted a foolproof system for the human experience. I wanted people to want to be around me. I wanted to stop feeling like an alien. I wanted to stop being lonely.

In 2018 I was approached several times in public by people who followed me on social media. I got recognized at the airport. I went to concerts and people would come up to me to introduce themselves and talk about my tweets and/or poems. When I’d leave the mid-size city in which I enjoyed anonymity to visit LA, I would see eyes staring at me in spaces populated by vaguely artistic/hipstery people of my age group. Is it because I’m tall? Is it the tranny thing? Or did you just see one of my tweets and think Oh my God that’s that crazy girl who gets attention for being fucking insane online?

Back then, I treated posting like a full time job. I was on the come up. I began to gain, what to me, felt like an excessive amount of social media followers (it was really quite minor compared to actual famous accounts). When I hit 30k on twitter, it was the week of a concert I went to where more and more strangers were coming up to me. I remember getting home after the show and having a massive panic attack. The same thing happened the day my first book was published. These were not average panic attacks. They lasted 12+ hours and represented something like a terrifying psychedelic trip, minus any real insight. It was like a bad form of transcendence.

After the concert and the panic attack, I decided to stop trying to be famous.

Around that time, liberal values around free speech were rapidly changing. I don’t want to get into all that here, plenty of people have already written thoughtfully and with nuance about the excesses of late 2010s activism and how it backfired horribly, but I think what it really came down to, for me, was that it was an environment in which conscientious people who wanted to be good felt scared and guilty all the time, and everyone else either played along or got radicalized in the opposite direction.

As one of the conscientious (I’m actually not, I’m just full of shame at all times), I kind of lost the desire to speak publicly for several years. Every time I went to hit “post” on something, I felt fully aware that my words were going out to 30,000 human beings, and it was too much. It made my throat close up and it caused my mind to stop producing ideas and thoughts. Anything I wanted to share, I’d imagine all the ways it could be twisted, taken in bad faith. Most of this was in my head. Once, I’d posted a tweet playing off the lyrics from Des’ree’s classic 1994 hit single “You Gotta Be”. I assumed everybody would get it, would understand that the humor of the post was derived from a familiarity with the song. Instead I got a lot of replies accusing me of exploiting the labor of marginalized bodies because I didn’t explicitly name the track and artist in my post. So I replied to the original tweet with a link to the song. Whatever! Not a big deal. But, the shame part of me was like why fucking bother trying if this is how people are going to take it. Just shut up and don’t say anything. If you really think about it, all language, culture, references, any idea you could imagine, it was built on theft and exploitation. I shouldn’t even exist.

Behind all this was my original fear of ego, of vulnerability, of being judged. No matter what the social environment was, I would have always found reasons to self-sabotage. The shape progressive activism took ten years ago is not responsible for this tension within me. It was merely the thing that happened to be there to fuel it.

I think to be ideological; that is, to identify yourself within some framework about how the world works and how it should work, from which there is no escape (other than painful psychic deconstruction); is often a reaction to fear and pain. I am at my most ideological when my chronic muscle aches flare up. I am at my most ideological when I have no money in my bank account and rent is due. I am at my most ideological when I am lonely and no one is around to see me. I am at my most ideological when being subjected to shame from other ideologues.

Ideology is pain management. I want more. I want to heal.

I’m not so afraid to speak my mind anymore. I have a sense of confidence in my own understanding of reality. It is ever-shifting, alchemical in nature; not fixed, in the way ideology demands. I believe in love. I believe in God, beauty, truth, and the ability of human beings as a collective to grow and be better to one another. I believe everyone deserves access to the infinite, divine love that suffuses our reality.

Except for me.

I still struggle to give myself the same grace I try to show others. I drink too much and judge myself for drinking; a two-for-one self-harm special. I don’t follow through with my writing schedule for this series you are currently reading, and then I judge myself for that too. It is very easy to be hard on me, I crave it. Punishment and shame give me the drive to transcend punishment and shame through my writing. The same fears that hold me back also push me forward. This is an exhausting and foolish way to live.

I’ve been in a great deal of pain this week. My left leg and hips are screaming white hot, I feel vacuum-sealed inside my own body, I can hardly think. My resting face is stone. I feel like a sculpture dedicated to the concept of agony. I read Revelations of Divine Love. Easter came, and I imagined the pain of the crucifixion, how my pain is so small in comparison. I thought of the sour wine-soaked sponge Christ drank from, did it help with his pain? How can one body go through so much? Why? What does pain mean? What is this about, really?

The Youtube energy guide I watch religiously posted a new video the other day. Normally, her messages are nice and positive; You got this, girl. Don’t worry about trying too hard; let it come to you. This time, she looked into the camera and said, You need to lock in right now. I heard this and felt scared. I’ll fuck it up. I won’t be able to do it. Don’t try. Be humble. This life is enough for you.

My life is beautiful and also a total joke. I am still sleeping on an air mattress. My walls are bare. I have not stopped drinking. I live day to day, I make money however I can, I beg listless employers to pay me on time, they don’t, I have bills, it’s stressful and I live through it with all the faith I can muster. Part of me wonders, what if I didn’t spend so much time humbling myself. I could’ve been a real famous writer by now with a six-figure book deal, not a micro-famous shitposting poet. There is a grace to this, however. There is a freedom in not feeling tied to the culture of the moment, a culture that can shift violently without warning. Instead, I write what I want and don’t worry about the rest. Humility isn’t all bad, and striving can get in the way of the beauty and transcendence I ultimately seek.

I realized recently that I don’t actually want to be famous. I want to be great. I want to live and succeed on my own terms.

It all comes back to the loneliness, the void at the center of me. Lately, I have been trying to befriend parts of myself I have spent time running away from. I went to a meeting for love addiction and realized the rich fantasies I develop about strangers and unattainable people are heavily linked to my drinking. I take a second look at a playlist I recently made, and suddenly notice that all the songs are about either drinking or yearning. They are functionally the same thing; both grant me permission to avoid me.

Last month, my most recent book of poetry was selected as a finalist for a major poetry prize. Had I won, I would have received a sum of $100,000. The day of the announcement, I was asked to wait for a phone call during a certain two hour window. If I got the call, the prize was mine. I tried not to be nervous, tried not to hope too hard for it, fearing I would energetically repel it away from me if I did. The day of the potential phone call, I logged off and spent time with myself, thinking about all the things that led me here. I imagined explaining my life and my art and my journey to a younger version of me, one who wanted all of this but could scarcely imagine dreaming of it. I used to be an unemployed, college dropout, gender dysphoric nightmare who wrote tumblr poems and smoked cigarettes in my grandparents garage until something happened. I imagine meeting with and informing this past version of myself about the present moment; that I lived a life. Despite the pain, the roadblocks (both self and world-imposed), all my off path wandering, my addictions, ugly forms of love I received and gave, panic attacks, hospitals, starving myself, going mad sometimes for weeks on end; despite all of it, I really did give myself a life.

If I had bothered to check my email that day, I would have seen the message letting me know I did not receive the prize and gone on with my life. I laughed for like ten minutes straight that night when I finally did check, once the two hour phone call window had passed. At first I was like, Jennifer you idiot. But, immediately, I self-corrected. Because of this brief, little offline time, I got to spend the entire day sitting with my mistakes in one hand and my accomplishments in the other. I was finally able to see the totality of my life as a path, as a narrative, and not a series of disconnected fragments and vignettes that only vaguely gestured toward cohesion. Sitting there with the weight of everything, I brought it together. The mistakes and the accomplishments were never separate from one another. So I mixed the energies together. I held my own hand. I said, I am proud of you.

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-First note: there is no way I am going to be able to stick to my original schedule of posting these every Friday, so it’s just gonna be kind of random from now on!

-Second note: Thank you to everyone who’s been following along and sharing your thoughts and reactions with me. I pray that the things I am seeking through this writing will be just as helpful for others as they’ve been for me.

-Third note: I love you all!!! <3

Read part four of this series here:

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I spend two weeks in the valley and lose my mind.

“This is Paul Thomas Anderson country,” I mutter to myself as I fill up my Subaru at a Shell station on Magnolia Boulevard.

Months earlier, I had driven on this same road after a visit with my sister and, while stopped at a red light, realized I was at the intersection where, in the PTA film named after this very street, William H. Macy’s character falls from the side of a building and lands on his face while frogs mysteriously rain down all around. It is my favorite movie. I got excited and took a picture of the location and then briefly felt like a nerd. The very next night, I tripped and smashed my face on the sidewalk right outside of Ye Rustic in Los Feliz. It was Halloween night. I was drunk, of course.

“I manifested this,” I said to myself as an annoyed nurse finished bandaging my nose so she could move on to the next drunken girlie sitting in the urgent care waiting room crying in her costume.

***

I’ve felt connected to something deeper most of my life. Since early childhood, my days have been filled with inexplicable experiences, sensations, emotions, and moments of deep intuitive conversation with something beyond me, something that grants me wisdom I struggle to channel into the world and embody in my life. For a long time, I thought I was crazy, that all this woo-woo was absurd at best, and actively harmful at worst.

I was raised to believe in a 20th century God, the ironic kind of God born out of a postmodern condition you could only find in Southern California. The church my family belonged to identified as non-denominational, but was essentially a post-Christian cult presenting itself as a “back to basics” evangelical community. It was founded by former hippies, surfers, and biker-types. The church prided itself on its no-nonsense, working class environment. Parents were encouraged to be vicious to their children, and women were told to obey their husbands. I knew kids who almost died because their parents refused to take them to the hospital when they were sick.

This was the 90s, and I was there in the midst of this evangelical cultural project of dissociating from the world and taking on the identity of oppressed victim in the face of a godless society. Their teachings were all about training us to act as cultural guerrilla fighters in a war against modernity itself. When I entered the fifth grade Sunday school class, we spent an entire year on the book of Revelation. We were told that the world was ending in our lifetimes, and that we must be ready to fight and die for our faith. The “meaning” of scripture did not even really matter. It was all just fodder for sociopolitical power games. During one class, we were shown footage of a comet hitting earth from the movie Deep Impact. Theologically sound, this church was not. It was Christianity as cultural identity. Abuse of women and children was a ritualized spell against political correctness.

So, when I’d tell my dad about these encounters I’d have with otherworldly spirits, and my strange waking visions, dreams that would predict future events, he would say it was the devil. God was order, control, and obedience, and anything outside of this was evil. Still, he couldn’t fight his own mystical nature, one that seemed to live in our blood – on both sides of my family, numerous relatives constantly reported similar experiences – and it showed in his way of moving through the world. He would treat prayer like a literal spell, would devise strange rituals around sunrise involving deep meditative prayer, and sometimes in the middle of the night he would wander the halls of the house speaking in a heightened sort of gibberish, nonsense whose meaning remained opaque yet full of feeling. “Yes, I speak in tongues sometimes,” he told me after I’d felt brave enough to ask him about it one night.

***

After my first divorce, I stopped drinking. There were a couple years where I rarely drank, and if I did, it was, like, half a glass of wine with dinner. I had begun to accept my spiritual connection and was actively investigating what it meant and how to live with it. I found as I took this connection seriously and actively engaged with it, my life would improve. Not just how I felt, but the literal circumstances too. When I would occasionally have a drink, I would feel my connection waver, and sometimes negative energies would arise. Because I trusted the process I was undergoing, I decided drinking would only get in the way, and this was enough incentive for me to stop. Meanwhile, I had arrived at a place where I was starting to be able to read people’s auras, could move and process energy through breathwork and visualization, and was beginning to take myself seriously as some kind of mystic or witch or whatever.

I moved to West Virginia in 2023 and everything changed. The stress of living a low-income life in Appalachia as a transsexual was worse than I could have imagined. My medication was extremely difficult to obtain each month, and there were periods of time during that year where I lost access completely and had to witness my body and soul deteriorate in real time. I started drinking again. I took up smoking cigarettes after a decade-long break. I also found God.

The queer-affirming Presbyterian church down the street, the one I’d walk past with a cigarette in hand on the way to the post office, the one whose pride flag I would cynically scoff at, ended up saving my life. I began attending around Easter and by the time I left the state at the end of that year, I had been baptized into the church and was regularly teaching Sunday school classes. I had some of the most intense spiritual experiences in that building. I could literally see fields of energy in the air moving like water and static every Sunday morning.

That summer, I experienced an extended bout of suicidal depression upon losing access to my medication. I leaned heavily into faith during this time. I even got myself caught up in a classic social media discourse argument with some queer/trans folks who were happy to assure me that I was a “fascist” for being trans and religious. I’ll admit, I went a little nuts when this happened. It sort of negatively polarized into fully embracing Christianity for a period of time, despite my actual spirituality being a little too weird and complicated to fit neatly into that particular tradition. While I no longer identify or affiliate with any mainline religious sects, I know I am alive today because of this small church in West Virginia. I will always cherish my time there.

I practice mysticism now. I don’t really know what that means; it’s a filler word for something beyond me, something that moves through me, something I am trying to learn more about. I have rituals, altars, prayers, and spells. I have a verse of the day widget on my phone from a bible app. I have breathing, visualization, movement, and meditation. I have cobbled together a practice based on an understanding received through curiosity and attention. My spirituality is a found art piece I add little bits to every day.

I recently realized I want to be something like a healer; I would like to work with energy and keep myself balanced and teach others how to do the same. I am aware this cannot be a realistic possibility until I stop drinking.

***

So, I spend two weeks in the valley taking care of a dog, one I fall in love with during our daily walks through the neighborhood. I am depressed and dissociated most of the time, but my desire to take good care of my new friend keeps me relatively grounded. To pass the time, I rewatch a bunch of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, including Magnolia.

Released at the end of 1999 (on my 12th birthday!!!), the film takes place in the San Fernando valley (a PTA staple) and follows a large cast of characters who struggle to process their pain and who continuously make terrible, foolish decisions until, one day, something breaks. It is a single story containing about ten different plots that weave and intersect through one another – some of the characters are directly related to other characters, and some of the connections are less obvious. This is not a typical, ensemble-cast narrative; Magnolia follows a single thematic, emotional-tonal arc through multiple, separate points of view, and the effect is uncanny. The energetic momentum of the film flares like waves through its characters; we watch them rise and fall in unison. They are different people having very different experiences on the same day, and yet it somehow feels like the emotional equivalent of watching a single story about one person. I could talk about Magnolia forever (and often do, to which anyone who has met me in person will surely attest).

For now, I will focus on the character of Claudia. When we meet Claudia, she is spending her days unemployed and doing a lot of cocaine in her apartment while listening to music. She goes to a bar and meets an older man and takes him home and has listless sex with him while her father’s face flashes on the television screen. Her father, a famous game show host named Jimmy Gator, shows up at the front door the next morning, and Claudia’s one-night stand answers, letting him inside. To the absolute horror of Claudia, who is still in bed, Jimmy appears in the doorway. Upon seeing her father, she begins screaming, telling him to leave. He informs her he is dying and she gets even more angry at him. He leaves. Claudia is back to being alone in her apartment. She does a bunch of coke and plays her music too loud, bringing another member of the ensemble into her life in the process when Jim, a cop, comes by due to a noise complaint. He makes her make him a cup of coffee. He immediately begins hitting on her and patronizingly explains why it is a bad thing to play music too loudly. He then asks her if she is experiencing domestic abuse. She says no. He asks her out on a date. She says yes. Later, while doing more cocaine, she begins singing along to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” as it plays in the background. The film then cuts between each of the characters as they sing the entire song at the same time in different locations and in various states of emotional distress. It is an insane and stunning sequence. Later, Claudia and Jim go on a date and open up to one another about their insecurities and self-doubts. They kiss.

At the exact same moment, Claudia’s mother, Rose, is confronting Jimmy about why Claudia still wants nothing to do with him even though she knows he is dying. He half-confesses to molesting Claudia as a child, using his alcoholism as a convenient shield, claiming to not know if he actually did it. Rose, heartbroken and infuriated, leaves the house and drives away. Frogs begin to fall from the sky. They come out of nowhere and show up in a violent, sustained pummeling, causing accident and injury alike. At the peak of each of their individual disasters, every character we’ve been following is suddenly thrust into the shared experience of a storm that makes zero fucking sense. We watch as Rose crashes her car in a panic and runs through frog rain into Claudia’s apartment complex. In a moment that makes me sob and convulse every time I see it, Rose scurries up a flight of stairs and pounds on her daughter’s door. Claudia is inside, crying and confused about the frogs, about everything, and has reverted to a childlike state on the floor. She manages to crawl to get the door open and her mother falls to the floor and wraps her in an embrace. They huddle in the corner as frogs continue to rain down in an all-consuming roar, and Rose comforts and reassures her daughter. The camera rapidly pushes in on a piece of art that is hanging in Claudia’s apartment, something she made. In it, a sickly-looking woman sits hunched in the foreground while a group of four brighter and happier women linger at a distance. As the camera makes its way to the lower corner of the piece we witness a lens-swap occur on screen, a subtle metacinematic move that seems to signal a breakage in the film’s sense of its own reality, a transcendental rupture, one whose clarity allows us to access the truth through a phrase found in small, bold lettering at the bottom of the painting: but it did happen.

I am writing about Magnolia right now so that I don’t have to say anything else about my father, and about why I am the way I am. I am avoiding a confrontation with the circumstances of my childhood. It’s another way to run, to hide, and also to process and archive at the same time. This is my version of Claudia’s art practice. This is proof that something happened, that I survived it, and regardless of my lonely and sickly soul, I am here. I am alive.

This movie means so fucking much to me. It is “about” a lot of things, including the myriad ways children are exploited and abused and how this creates dysfunctional adults who continue to seek out the same destructive patterns. And, how, even as they are aware of this fact, they don’t quite know how to stop themselves.

Addiction; loneliness; strange and inexplicable connections and happenings.

It’s about what happens when you get in your own way and decide to remain there.

***

I say goodbye to my new canine friend and leave the valley. On the drive out, I fill up once again at the Shell on Magnolia Boulevard.

“It’s not going to stop until you wise up, chica,” I mutter to myself.

I go home and keep drinking and avoiding and writing. I make a plan to taper down my alcohol usage. I create a weekly drinking schedule, with the ultimate goal of total abstinence. I light a candle and say a prayer.

***

There are promises I’ve made to myself that turned out to be false, and promises I’ve been able to follow through on. I have managed to make a few of my dreams come true; I have also built artificial walls to keep myself locked away in a place where I cannot fully enjoy what I have achieved. My capacity to both love and hurt myself is extraordinarily immense.

I know the answer. I know what to do. I have to learn to get out of my own way. I have to wise up.

***

Read part three here:

Part five coming next weekend. Subscribe to keep up as I post weekly entries in this ongoing series. Thank you<3

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This week, I don’t feel like posting.

In order to really get real about my drinking, I have to consider my father. I have to address the dad-shaped elephant in the room, my childhood, all that he did but will seemingly never own up to…the thing is, I don’t want to do it. It’s so much easier to let the feeling of him arrive in my nightly dreams – a house in disarray, a vague, inexplicable feeling of fear, an all-encompassing “ickiness”, endless tasks handed down disguised as “duty”, a secret passage in the coat closet of my childhood home consisting of a dark blue hallway leading down into a child’s understanding of what hell might be.

I’d rather be haunted by my father than face him in the real world.

The thing is, if I start getting into the details of my history with my dad, I’ll have to talk about his dad and his dad and his dad and all the tyrannical masculine figures whose lives have cut down through the thread of my bloodline like razor blades, severing the women and children from ourselves. I know my family’s history when it comes to drinking and male violence. It’s nothing new or special. I don’t even want to think about these men anymore; I only want to think about the survivors. Still, both energies live in me. I spend my days battering myself into submission, standing up to myself, going back and forth, abuse and self-defense and pain and relief looping around themselves. I have subsumed my family’s violence into a fully inward space, a hollow theatre screen over which their history is projected in vivid, impressionistic flashes of agonized faces – both perpetrator and victim enmeshed in a dance of brutality, each reduced to pure sensation and reaction.

*

Since starting this project, my drinking has not improved. The routine of it has settled in, and I feel lost and scattered inside myself. I don’t know what to write this week, and I have been frustrated with myself – both for setting strict weekly deadlines for a series that involves peeling back the layers of myself publicly, and for not being able to live up to the task.

I have two people inside me: one who wants to do and be everything, and one who wants to do and be nothing. My task is to love them both and give in fully to neither.

Maybe by making an assignment out of writing about drinking (and therefore drinking itself), I am trying to align these two sides of myself. I can feed the part of me that wants oblivion with a substance that offers just that; at the same time, by fixing the drinking and the writing to a routine, I nourish the doer in me. Each beer is a box to be checked.

This is progress, I tell myself as I slowly wear down my body, mind, and soul.

So, I don’t have any stories about my life this time around. This week, I am drinking, meditating, sleeping in late, walking long distances, ordering fast food, cooking nice meals for myself, pushing myself to my limit, and giving myself a break. I am embracing the contradictions and dissolving the psychic structures that hold various concepts at odds with one another. I am “letting it be”.

*

I listen to “Let It Be” and think about Theresa. She is not blood family, but is the closest thing I’ve had to a true parental figure in this life. She was the mother of my first wife; I spent most of my twenties as part of their family. Theresa and I grew close as we all came together to care for her dying husband, who had developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Her and I would stand in the kitchen and listen to old music and talk about life over a glass of chardonnay. (Butter was her brand.) After her daughter and I broke up, Theresa and I remained close. We would get together, just the two of us. She always made sure to check in on me. Always told me she was proud. I remember going to lunch with her one day and thinking, “Is this what it’s like to have a mom?” She came down with a rare form of cancer and died in May 2020. I still talk to her every day. I have a sweater of hers that I take everywhere but never wear. I hold it close and I listen to “Let It Be” and “Take It Easy” and “Ventura Highway” and I spend time with her. I want to live a life that she would be proud of. I want to make her proud.

*

When I feel like I don’t have anyone to turn to, I engage with music, poetry, or alcohol. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to have a problem or to encounter desperation knowing you have parents you can call. I tell myself I drink because I don’t have parents. This IPA is my dad. Etc.

This is the only life I know. It is not possible to build a thing out of “could have beens”. There is no mechanism through which to bring a hypothetical past to fruition and, if there were, it would be nightmarish. If I could change my past, I wouldn’t be me, I wouldn’t be sitting here struggling to write this, I wouldn’t feel hopeless and exhausted and excited and broken and beautiful and full of desire to rise up into every moment, to hold my breath through the end of storm and be carried to the next thing. Because of all that has happened, I love this life. I am in love with how even the greatest forms of pain contain so much mystery, beauty, and truth.

Every struggle is a hallway leading to someplace else. I am trying to bash my body against the walls; I am trying to let myself be carried.

*
Read part two below. Part three coming next Friday (3/13). Subscribe to keep up as I post weekly entries in this ongoing series. Thank you<3