Instead of killing myself, I applied to a masters program. It has seemed so silly this week, the idea of giving myself more work, in a time where I could barely eat and get out of bed. I called family hoping someone would come or send something to save me. But I was told this was life. This is California. This is your twenties. This is how it is.

I have been in my relationship for four years. One and a half I supposed was done in secret, but four years none the less. My girlfriends brother is getting married in October. I didn’t expect to be invited. Her parents still won’t speak to me. But my hopes and expectations aren’t always compatible. I hoped there would at least be a mention, a conversation. I hoped I was worth that. But there’s been nothing.

I have, largely, been treated by her family and our old church like I don’t exist. It is a cunning punishment, for stealing their prize, I will give them that. It’s cunning because it’s worked. I do feel worthless Southlands Church! I feel meaningless Joel! Oh wise and lofty Elders! You have done it! This young girl does not wish to be alive anymore, you have won! This battle against the sin of homosexual love, you have won.

I have come to accept this half life. I see myself worse now than I ever have before. It’s horrid and embarrassing, but I don’t really remember who she was before all of this. When I speak to people, it is like an exhausting and bitter play. And when I’m finally alone off stage I weep and ask google things that make it tell me to call a hotline. It’s gotten very confusing to keep fighting for someone… I’m not even sure she’s still here.

When I have meltdowns, because I am autistic and I’m tired of censoring that when it is one of the main reasons I have been so perpetually in conflict with people- when I have meltdowns I hear a voice that is not my own and it says that I’m already gone.

And I hate when people say that this is my fault. That I should be stronger or leave Sophie. Sophie is the best thing I have ever loved or touched or known. How does it make sense that the solution would be to leave her.

I feel like I am being killed slowly by homophobia, but it is my fault, my weakness, when I say that I cannot take anymore of being nothing. If I take my pain into my own hands, make something of it- then I have done some unforgivable thing.

I do no know how much longer I can go. It has been so long. And so many people have watched my dying and done nothing. I feel terrified by this. I feel terrified for Bree. She was so small and tender. She loved horses and the color orange. She liked the way pavement felt on my bare feet in summer. And most of all- she was filled to the brim, teaming with love for a girl she met at work- she loved her like nothing else.

I wish we could have just had a normal love. I wish I was allowed to come over to family barbecues and play with Milo and smoke cigars and get invited to weddings.

That is where I would go. Somewhere I am just a person and sophie is just a person and we don’t need to be punished. Where there won’t be so much silence and I can exist loudly again.

There’s a sensation me and several of my black friends have discussed over the years. For a friend in college it was the limited series When They See Us. For another it was the Breonna Taylor case and the discourse that surrounded it. For me, it’s been many things, but the latest is the Karmelo Anthony verdict, especially in light of the recent murder of Cyrus Carmack-Belton.

The sensation is akin to depression. It feels sad and heavy. It feels apathetic, but somehow still pained. I feel avoidant. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to engage passionately and fight the fight that we keep fighting and keep losing.

I really do think it goes without saying, that violence is evil and destructive no matter who is committing it. People who are getting stuck in the weeds, about “well he did stab somebody”, are going to miss entirely what black people are trying to say.

We are angry because the world continues to communicate two things:

1. Black violence is more violent and deserves more severe punishment

2. Non-black violence against black people is less violent and does not often warrant punishment or correction

There are so many frustrating elements to this case. Start with the fact that ALL black jurors were dismissed, under the premise that they were educators and might sympathize for the defendant. While the white educator was left on as a juror.

Then we have the fact that we’re watching this unfold all while, stuffed into our back pocket, are examples of case after case where cops, aggressors, mass shooters have been allowed to walk free, if they bear the right skin.

And lastly, it’s this idea that Karmelo could not have been defending himself. He didn’t take the stand, so we’ll never know what he felt, if he was feeling scared, what had driven him to such an angry response. But watching the discourse that unfolds in comment sections online, that assumes that black boys are inherently violent and act out of this instead of considering that something might have caused such a harmful reaction, has been pretty horrifying to watch.

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There is a sympathy that exists among black folk, a shared understanding of this things many of us will probably never beat. And I find it hard to condemn Karmelo, if I’m honest, even if I don’t condone his violent act. I find it hard because even if he’s in the wrong, as he was ruled to be, I can still understand him.

Living in a black body, in our society, is traumatic. It has always been and continues to be a sentence to unwarranted, uncontrollable abuse and violence. And then people are shocked when some black bodies break and are violent back. I guess, for me, I’m just not that shocked. People can only withstand abuse for so long. Trauma changes people- but of course you would have to believe that black people are in fact equal people to empathize and understand this.

With my older black therapist, I’ve been slowly working through the moments of anti blackness in my own life and the lingering affects that I’ve been struggling with. In the past five years I’ve been bullied in three different environments, each having ties to my blackness and potentially my neurodivergence as well.

In session recently, I told her about an acai shop I worked in where I was bullied consistently for a year an a half. I never really knew why. It often felt like there was something inherent about me she didn’t like- like they say “Folks don’t like nobody being too proud, or too free.” All the while, also making comments which stripped me of my blackness like “oh yeah, you act like a black girl with a white mom”. She wanted to shame, and tame, and get me in line… And I don’t really think anyone owes anyone that kind of blind submission.

Often I cried, screamed, went mad on the drive home. Once, the break down was so intense, I nearly crashed into the divider. I remember I couldn’t see very well, but I couldn’t stop crying. I also remember not caring very much if I did crash and die. Eventually I pulled off, so I did not harm someone else on the road. Fairly quickly, I moved to self harming, suicidal ideation, rage- not just because of the abuse, but because of the bystanders.

It’s the moments where other coworkers accredited what was happening to “beef” or a shared dislike between the abuser and myself- those moments replay in my mind and make it hard for me to heal. I desperately tried to get help, to communicate that I did not hate this person (who I had every right to hate) but that I just didn’t know what to do or how to make it stop. As the only black person on staff, I often wondered if, had the victim been someone else, it would have warranted more outrage from the others. But it went on, for years, until I finally was able to land a job elsewhere and escape.

In my life, it’s the bystanders who confirm that violence perpetuated on my body does not require protection. It’s not as alarming, it’s not as concerning, it’s not as violent. I would dream of being in a small framed, white, “innocent” body, so people would stop assuming I am strong and resilient and “will be alright”. Being groped by a man in a club, is not the same as when my non black friend is groped. The jokes I make are more cutting, more mean than if a non black person makes the same jokes. I don’t need protection- in fact, people need protection from me.

Psychologically it can convince the black person that they are actually meaner, more aggressive, more rude, more sexual, more deserving of abuse and violence. Humans are driven by survival and community. The brain starts to accept the pattern- if everyone is saying that I am these things, that these things are okay, then I guess they are.

But we are not. And the rage that comes with that quiet knowing will either reveal itself internally, violence against the self (as in my case) or externally, violence against another.

And if you’re thinking, well how do we know that the bullying was about your race- then you’re right on track. I live in a biracial fair skinned body, so it’s never assumed that the harm I experience could be because of an underlying bias about me. I am privileged with a proximity to whiteness that makes people forget sometimes- until I remind them by going “off script” as my therapist calls it. And even if I was darker skinned, I’ve watched black friends of all skin tones be micro and macro aggressed, and then quickly gas lit by others who say “Oh god not everything is about race”.

With the help of my therapist I’m learning to trust my inner voice. I know what I experienced, how it felt, how I was treated and how others were not treated under the same circumstances. I refuse to play into my whiteness because its safer for me when I do. I had dinner with a black friend recently who safely reminded me of this need to be honest. I had been recounting the events of some micro aggressions, mincing my words to not sound too aggressive or critical of the person and she said “It’s racist, Bree. We can say that here, you don’t gotta lie. We don’t gotta do that here.”

Black, to me, is the most beautiful and abundant thing in the world. Black spaces are sacred ground. I must make it so that within me is sacred ground as well. I am only sorry to the black soul that lives inside me which was made to feel like it was better to die than go on being itself.

Anti-blackness is pervasive. And it’s always assumed that the perpetrators are white, but many in the black community know the perpetrator is anyone who has not done the inner work of undoing the anti-blackness in themselves.

I sometimes have a hard time saying POC, and prefer to use terms like non-black people instead. Some of the most challenging moments of racism that I’ve either experienced first hand or watched family members endure, have been interactions with other “model” minorities.

Sharing this experience is not meant to divide, but to inform. Being in a marginalized community, whether that is queer folk, Asian American, Latinx people, or whatever group it may be- it does not eradicate you ability to be anti-black and it definitely does not automatically set you on the path towards being pro-black.

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Anti-blackness is at the root of a lot of the evil we face today. Fat-phobia, sexism and mysogyny, classism, patriarchy and many others have roots tied directly to the idea that black people are less human. Even studying the physical and psychological emasculation of black men during slavery and Jim Crow, can give new insights to the homophobia perpetuated against gay men and the fear of what will happen to you if you move- by choice or by force- away from the “ideal male”. If we are to make any head way towards equity and reconciliation, I believe, a lot of that will start with confronting how we feel about blackness. So this is an invitation to people of all races, to understand something that affects all of us deeply.

Pro-black can be best defined as an intentional mindset and movement focused on the physical, spiritual, financial, and social development of black people. Restoring not only a sense of safety to black bodies, but a sense of power. Pro-black does not mean anti-anything else. But it understands that the roots of nearly all oppression has ties to the oppression of black bodies. So we will never defeat anything if we don’t confront this.

Being pro-black is often practical. It’s internal and external. Examining your preconceived ideas surrounding black people. What are your expectations for your black friends versus non black friends. Who would you be willing to step into discomfort for and who do you assume can “handle it on their own”. Who’s voices do you trust, and why do you feel the need to push back or fact check on certain ones? What characteristics do you assign “aggression” to. What kinds of bodies to you assign “aggression” to.

These are just a few sentences to get you started, there’s lots of places you could go. I enjoy this article on on pro-blackness if you’re looking for a more general overview. And I enjoy this more creative article which touches on a few of the things I’ve written about here.

And lastly I’ll say this. If you’ve never sat down and thought about, what ways am I anti-black and how to I live a life that is pro-black, then you probably need to. Unfortunately our own moral compasses are not so strong that they can withstand years of propaganda and social conditioning. So put the fear of being racist down, accept that statistically you have things within you that need confronting, and get to work. Even black folks have to do their own inner work with colorism, self hate, and internalized racism- so it’s never above you. The work of becoming pro-black is for EVERYONE.

The best thing you can do for your black friends and the black community is look honestly and yourself and move forward with intention every day.

Guys, it’s gonna be a controversial take I can feel it. I often only write pieces about personal experience to avoid unnecessary divisiveness that comes when you have opinions about other people’s behavior.

But I do have some opinions about the behavior of (obviously some and not all) bisexual white women, when on the first day of pride I saw more posts affirming their experience, their “right” to be at pride, their “right” to see themselves as queer than I saw talking about the bravery of Marsha P. Johnson.

Let’s get this out there- bisexual people can and should absolutely go to pride and you certainly don’t need me to tell you so. These days pride exists as many different things. A parade, a party, a celebration of queerness and sexuality and gender expression. So, if you identify as someone who’s sexuality is going against the grain, if you’re looking for a soft place to land, somewhere to go to feel that sense of safety and belonging, Pride could be great for you.

However, the history of Pride is important to this conversation. Yes, you’ve all heard it, Pride started as a riot. No one knows for certain who threw the first brick at Stonewall, but it’s often accredited to Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman. Other important voices of the day included, Stormé DeLarverie, a mixed-race butch lesbian, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman. Are we noticing a trend?

The first Pride parade took place a year after, to commemorate the previous years violence. And in the years following, these parades could become similarly violent. Police brutality, backlash from mobs or opposing anti-gay riots. This was not a fun party to get drunk at. We have to understand, this is 1970. Homosexuality was not decriminalized on a federal scale until 2003. In the 1990s, about half of American states had decriminalized it. In 1970 they were only just beginning to look at “repealing and updating laws against sodomy”.

Perhaps you can see then, why sometimes the pushback of “leave your boyfriend at home” felt a bit trivial in light of what Pride actual is and was. Is the phrase “leave your little boyfriend at home” exclusionary? Absolutely yes. And a lot of the comments in the discourse that arose argued that pride should be an inclusive space for everyone. Bisexual people should be able to bring whoever they feel comfortable around.

And I think this could be true in theory. But it does center the self over the group. Whoever makes your body feel safe can now enter the space where other bodies are who may not feel as safe.

And think that the root of the fighting lives here. People who had uttered this phrase, largely did so, I think, as a protection of what they felt was a sacred space. Bringing “Chad”, who may never have been around a trans woman before, even if he does his best to dance and drink and not look nervously around at all the many shades of queer expression, does affect other people. You may not even know how it affects them. You may not feel the tightness in their chest, as he accidentally looks at them in a way that makes them feel judged- judged like they already are every other day of the year.

Most people feel like Pride should be a space that caters to queer people first and foremost. That means we must value the group, over the self, just for this one day. People should absolutely love who they love, and I hope you love someone who is able to embrace and participate in queerness fully. But maybe we need to be more brutally honest about if Chad, is ready for this yet. And it doesn’t make you any less queer if he’s not.

I have to think about this a lot as someone in a interracial relationship. I love my white partner, we talk often about race and have, what I feel is, a safe open dialogue. Even still, I know in my head, there are spaces I would not bring her. Some spaces are about the group, about blackness and only that, about not having to code switch or perform. Do I think my white partner would do anything to make people feel uncomfortable? No. But do I know for a fact that her presence wouldn’t have that affect for someone? Also no. And it’s because of that inability to know, that discernment leads me to sometimes choose the group over the self. I do not feel so entitled, that my personal choices must always affect the whole group.

I always wonder if it is coincidental, that a lot of bisexual women who are most frustrated with this sensation of being kept out, or their boyfriends being kept out, are white. I don’t think this is exhaustively true, I’m sure there are bisexual black and brown people who have also thrown their hat in the ring concerning this issue. I can only speak from what I have seen and experienced in my life and try to make sense of it the best I can. And what I been seeing is a lot of posts from white women.

For us to really understand what’s going on here, we have to do two things: define queerness and explore whiteness and how it functions today.

Queerness, inherently, is an uprooting of systems. That’s why in the 19th century it shifted from a word used to describe something odd, peculiar or different, to a derogatory term used to describe homosexual and gender non-conforming people. True lesbianism, uproots the need for a man who provides and protects and asserts that love provides and protects in all forms. Gayness uproots traditional understanding of masculinity and power- it challenges so much and leaves straight people uncomfortable. Trans and non binary folks reject the gender binary entirely, saying “I do not have to stay in your assigned categories, in fact I might not even be in a category at all!”

Queerness is not and can not be heteronormative, traditional, or standard. It is the word we use to describe relationships and identities that challenge those things. It’s not my business to tell you if you’re in a “queer relationship” or not. But historically speaking, and even now, there is usually a costs to queerness. Because it’s flipping systems on it’s head, and the systems don’t always love that. So, if your relationship upholds heteronormativity, uproots no systems, and therefore costs you very little, then perhaps you are gay, lesbian, pan, bi- but that does not necessarily mean you are queer. And that is ok.

Moving right along to whiteness. When we think white supremacy, our minds go straight to colonialism, chattel slavery, Jim Crow. And so if you’re not buying black bodies off the auction block on Tuesdays- then you’re good right? Wrong.

White supremacy is alive and well, friends. Black readers, I don’t have to tell you that. Of course there are violent, vile, racist people committing crimes against black bodies today. But some white people would be shocked to know, at the center of a lot of their most uncomfortable moments, lies a root tying back to their ancestors. And it’s a racist root. And it doesn’t look like calling people slurs- it looks like not understanding every space isn’t gonna be for you.

I’ll give you five pillars that uphold white supremacy today just to get you started:

1. Paternalism

2. Entitlement

3. Right to comfort

4. Defensiveness

5. Fear (and avoidance) of conflict

These characteristics are of course available to humans of all colors and phenotypes. So what makes white people different when they do it? Power.

In her book “White Tears/Brown Scars”, Lebanese-Syrian author Ruby Hamad writes about the difference between Iranian travel writers and European writers. Even while the Iranian writers “represented European women through a similarly distorted and highly sexualized lens”, it did not have the same affect as the sexualization of black and brown women by European men. “The key difference between them is power. The West had the power and resources to keep producing reductive representations and pseudo-knowledges of the ‘mysterious’ East until those representations came to seem more real than the real” (Hamad, 35). Scribbled in the margins of the book in blue pen is my own summary, “All men do it… but only some have the power to turn projections into reality”.

In the same way, only some have the power, or the “privilege” as we often label it, to have their seemingly harmless characteristics inflict some real harm in the world. And I would argue, again this comes from my own life experiences and events, but entitlement or the assumption of a right to comfort have been at the root of almost every. single. one. of my fallouts with white people. And they often disengage quickly once I’ve voiced a concern with their behavior, and avoid the conflict entirely. I simply have not known the same entitlement in my black relationships, even in conflict.

I think it’s important to investigate our resistance to things. Is there real injustice happening? Or is there perhaps an entitlement to comfort, resources, or spaces hidden deep in our subconscious as white people. For bisexual white women, did you feel truly unsafe or harmed when you were asked to choose the group over your self- or were you not used to the sensation. Not getting something you felt you had the right to? I can’t answer that question for you.

I think the question that is ultimately begged by all the discourse is: who has a right to Pride?

My answer, maybe not a lot of us.

Pride is not about bisexual girls and their boyfriends, nor is it about me and my lesbian partner having a good time and wearing our gay little outfits. It is sacred ground for remembering black and brown queer people. The violence they endured in an attempt to get out from under the boot of oppression. As I have reflected writing this piece, it feels now, quite heavy to attend. A weightiness and a duty, especially during these days as trans people are so viciously under attack. A frustration bubbles within me and screams “Girl! It’s not about us! Get in or don’t, but where we’re going, we’re throwing bricks”

And I think that’s what is it, simply put. Pride is protest. Pride costs something. Pride is a protected space. Pride is for brick throwers.

If something horrid happens and it all falls through- at least this essay exists as proof I let myself hope. And that is good.

I decided to try and move to London because I really liked my new headphones. I’d never had noise cancelling headphones before.

I’d never taken that part of myself seriously. I’d never been honest about the way loud sounds feel in my body. Or bright lights or when people use words incorrectly or the textures of foods or how I talk a lot in groups because if I offer up my own conversation I won’t have to mask nearly as much as when I’m being carried away in someone else’s.

I’ve wanted to die most of 2026. Probably since March of 2024, but I wasn’t really allowed to say that then. Everything that has transpired, in many people’s eyes, has been my fault. I shouldn’t have been gay, or I shouldn’t have kept it a secret for so long. Then, I shouldn’t have been so bitter or spoken so honestly about what was done and who did it. I shouldn’t have had high standards for the few friendships I had left, should not have expected people to apologize, to show up, to care for me so viciously.

I’ve been warned off of escapism by wellness gurus and by my own mind. I will exist wherever I go. The ways I’ve been hurt will follow me. The ways I have hurt others will follow even closer behind. So what is the point of going anywhere at all? Even if you hate where you are and the jobs you work and how the days pass by nauseatingly.

But then I bought these headphones. And the world was quiet. Before the headphones, there were other acts. Acts of self honoring. Boundaries and unmasked stimming in coffee shops. Firm paragraphs sent to cruel people- lines held which resulted in public panic attacks, but god, at least I was honest. Acts of resistance, they were. I am here. I deserve. I am fine to be. I am fine as I am.

I wrote a Substack at my favorite shop, with my favorite drink, in my favorite seat, on my favorite kind of day with clouds and gentle wind and the sun hidden from my eyes. This beautiful ritual was complete in every way possible. And I thought, you know, if I had these headphones with me, I think I could probably do anything.

I don’t know why it was that simple. Perhaps, in the quiet, I just felt brave enough to interact with the fact I will not be alive forever and I’d like to not be miserable for any more days than I have already. Perhaps, it was just the realization that I could not accept the life I had. I must die or change.

And do not really want to die. Truly I don’t want to die ever at all. I want to live forever amongst the trees and the wind and all the parts of the earth that have never been wretched a moment in their life.

I don’t even want to die really when I can’t bear the body I’ve been given. The boyish soul that’s suffocated inside a girl’s body abused before it was 10. I don’t want to die when my people are distant and careless, or when I am written as something that I’m not. I did not want to die on the weekend my church discarded me. Or the next weekend, when my parents did the same without meaning too.

I did not want to die when the boy hit me, or the second time he did. I did not want to die when that coach touched me, or when my teammate did. I did not want to die in the years I was captive to my childhood home, the trapped lectures at the dining room table, the nails dug in my skin, the branding words left ringing in my ears.

I did not want to die. I wanted to rest. I wanted whole parts of myself laid to rest, to be told you do not have to endure anymore. And when you cannot find this rest- a rest provided through the protected of your caretakers, the accountability of others for the harm they’ve perpetuated- you are left to want to put the whole vessel to death, instead of just that part. The part can quickly overtake the whole, at the age of 26, when no one is showing up and you’ve been waiting to feel safe since you were 9.

I was born just as everyone is born- wanting to be loved. Achingly so. As I should.

But how should I go now? Spit on the valiance of a brave young person. Ah, I can see them! They have curly hair and blue eyes and think differently about things than any other person I’ve known. They hide in their room and write songs at a pace that is quite unusual. And they are one of those rare kinds of people whose love is stronger than their pride. They survived. So I survive. Bright and brilliant and beaming with color. I have forgotten for a long time what I am. Somehow, with these stupid headphones on, I have begun to remember.

It is, to be, or not to be. That is the only question for people like me. Are you going to be alive, or not? Is it preferable to live or to die? I never even understood this soliloquy until this year. Which is concerning, I suppose, but somehow, only now as I live it, I am gutted by it. And if you choose to be- then you must truly be. Or else you have conceded to the latter all the same.

I have much healing to pursue. People I must meet and gritty lessons I must begrudgingly learn. A home to carve out for myself and books to write. Friends to make and invite to sit on the couch in my living room. Children to wean and raise and fill with love until they burst… But I feel perhaps it can be done. With these silly headphones on- oh surely it can be done.

It is a boring, unremarkable revelation, but then, it does not exist to impress you. It exists for me.

To be.

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I laid in bed all day yesterday. Like, genuinely all day. I have never done this before. I felt wretched. New Girl played quietly, half watched, from 11am till I took a shot of Nyquil at 9pm.

Granted, I was very sick. A cold forced upon me by my very own weary body, begging me to slow down. God, better yet, stop doing things altogether.

I was supposed to work Wednesday. Only a half day at a school near by. Should have been easy enough. But when the time neared to go, it felt unfathomable. My girlfriend told me to call off. I listened after several minutes of push back. The woman on the phone was nice enough, wishing me a quick recovery.

The call ended with a click and an immediate flooding of despair.

The calculations hit me suddenly- how little money I’d be making for the week. How little hours I’d be working, how much down time I’d have. To do what? To lounge and cough and be lazy and produce nothing and therefore be nothing?

I am capitalism’s most disapproving critic, and yet clearly still one of it’s biggest participants. Three days off and couldn’t produce a good feeling about myself.

It’s no profound thought that a lot of our value is tied to our productivity. What always startles me, and then feels quite profound, is my awareness of this fixed mindset around work- my awareness and my disagreement do not affect my involvement.

I suppose I always expect that I will be able to think myself out of things. Think myself out of worry and anger. As I child I tried to think myself out of sadness and even trauma. The fancy word some therapists use for it is intellectualizing, and I must be honest, it worked for me for a time. But this silly little thing happens when you use that tactic for years and years- it all just moves somewhere else. Into knots in your back, into pits in your stomach, into tension between your eyes. All those things I pushed off, sitting dormant, scattered across my body.

And you can ignore it, the immobility of your arms due to the stiffness of your shoulders. You can go to bed tight and achey. Eventually your body will say enough and find a way to keep you down. It’s going to get what it needs one way of another .

And then, when you’re rendered useless, rotting away in your bed, you are forced to deal with all the unhealthy philosophies you’ve built over the years.

And really what it is, is shame. Vicious, overwhelming shame. My blanket could not cover me from it, my partner’s words could not encourage me out of it. I am ashamed of myself when I cannot produce work. I feel so guilty when I do no capitalize.

Swirling in my head were the numbers of how much money lost, how much time wasted, how much I’d need to work next week to earn it back, on and on and on until I’m just crying in a bed eating cheez-its, ashamed.

And then there is the shame for feeling ashamed. For not being able to reflect my way out of this sensation I don’t even morally agree with. I believe, in my soul, that things have value simply because they are. Not because of what the produce or who they know or how they look. It’s the only way I can see a society function without harm, inherent value one does not have to earn.

So there’s shame, piled on shame, piled on the shame of how I’m eating since I cannot stomach anything beyond toddler food when I’m anxious, piled on the shame of how I look with this puffy face and red nose. And now shame is all I am. All because I got a common cold.

Am I so fragile that the very core of who I am can be dismantled by catching a cold?

I guess so. And I don’t believe that I am the only one.

The only way through, that I can see, is letting yourself be ashamed. Letting yourself sit in that space and move through it. By not bending to it’s will. And submitting instead, to your body’s will.

I think, to a certain extent, we cannot changed the way our minds were groomed to think. We cannot escape this guilt of not capitalizing. But we do choose if we submit to it. We do choose if we go to work or stay home. We do choose if we add our own insults on top of the cruel voices in our mind or if we speak softly to the thing within us that is begging to rest.

We do have some choice. And in that sliver of space where we do- I hope we choose rest, I hope we choose gentleness, and hope we choose let some days slip by wastefully. And someday, maybe we will realize, the things days we thought we wasted were not a waste at all- our bodies are worth the cost.

I said something very boring yesterday. But the simplicity of it, felt more honest and profound than I had intended to be.

“I just want to be loved. That’s all I want to do. I think if I could just be loved and loved for a long time, then I’d probably get better.”

There’s no shying away from the fact that I’m extremely sick right now. My suicidal ideation, which has been with me my whole life, has moved from a monthly or weekly occurrence to daily. Especially at night, my brain becomes an incredible bully to itself and I fall asleep as I whisper some of the cruelest things I’ve ever heard to myself.

I got in a horrid fight with my partner last night, so now I sit, hiding in a cafe, writing this own so I can have something to show for the day. I hope she will wake and come to find me. I wish this all the time. That I will disappear and be missed and tracked down and held close again.

I’m worried that all of this, the obsession with myself to the point of destroying myself, is rooted in narcissism. Which I am terrified of being. Narcissists have, on more than one occasion, altered the health and flourishing of my life so severely that I cannot stand the thought of being one of them.

I think about myself constantly though, in the worst ways. But nonetheless, that still must be vanity. Sometimes it feels like if I don’t, I might simply float away and never return.

My sense of self has always been incredibly strong, very rooted. For the first time in my life, I feel so stripped of who I am, I could not tell you what I love, what I hate, what I want to do, what I want to eat for dinner. Every choice feels ground shattering and if I get it wrong- well I must not get it wrong.

I tried to explain this to my partner sitting in the car, stalling and dreading the transition into the noisy coffee shop. And I stumbled upon this confession.

The only thing I know of myself now is that I want so badly to be loved.

And it feels so simple, and trivial and obvious. I say it as if I am speaking of a chore or errand I must complete. Yet I don’t know if I’ve ever in my life just sat for awhile with that desire. It feels very youthful, very pure. Something a child can communicate very clearly, but not an adult.

I have fantasies of people watching me sleep. Stroking my head as I drift off somewhere. It’s weird, I suppose, but I remember the moments that built the fantasy.

Sometimes, on my mother’s vilest days, she would scream at us so violently that she would have to come and apologize. She would always do it at night, when I was nearly asleep. She would come in softly, perching herself on the edge of the bed, pressing against my small body. And suddenly, the thing that had terrorized me all day was the pressure against my body, calming me. Then she’d whisper something of how sorry she was and stroke the bridge of my nose. Run her hand over my head.

And I would feel so beautiful. So small and good. I could get drunk off this feeling- of being treated me gently.

It does not seem to happen very often. And since becoming more honest about who I am turning out to be- disabled, a complex trauma survivor, queer, black, most likely autistic- I have been increasingly less loved. This array of intersecting points all seem to invite harshness.

There is not a person I’ve shown myself to that has seemed to love me even more after. All that I have brought to my relationship is intensity and complexity and destruction. She’ll never have her family as long as I am around and that’s something I carry around with me every day. I can feel the resentment that my demand for authenticity stirs in her. I don’t know another way to be, but I wish I could be it all for her. To my friendships, I think I bring much of the same. And intensity that is off putting and overwhelming.

I am an exhausting thing to love, I think. I see it in faces often. Or in distance created. I saw it in my partners eyes last night. I thought we would get married, but now I have altered into this horrid thing. I wonder if she feels more trapped, than with me by choice.

But maybe it is an impossibility to be loved, truly as you are. Maybe I’ve romanticized it too much. Maybe I made up an unconditional loving God as child and expected other people to measure up to this even after I put him to death.

But I cannot expect people to love someone, I do not love myself. I find little in myself now to be admired. There used to be strength and resilience and creativity, but now it’s all burned away leaving an anxious, skeletal thing in it’s wake.

And all that skeletal thing wants is to be looked on as they sleep, the bridge of their nose stroked gently, as they’re told how good they are.

I do not feel creative these days. I feel burnt out, like the candles I buy from Trader Joes.

When the wick runs out, there is always more wax at the bottom. And I yell at the candle, how dare you burn out before your time!

So I am the world and the world is me. And yet I am the also candle and the candle is also me. The world yells that I have flickered and died before I ought to. I should have more to give. I should be able to draw from this puddle of wax and go on a little longer.

I owe it to them. I owe it to them? Who do I owe it to again? I don’t remember.

I am worried that I will never find a job I can do. Which is strange because I used to work all the time.

When I think back on the rigid schedule I followed from 5th grade until I graduated high school, I want to vomit. It genuinely sounds impossible. I think I would claw and scream and rip my hair out if I had to wake up at 5:30am, train with my father, jazz choir, drive to the local community college, sit in cold classrooms with grey lighting and adults and scowling professors, finish classes, go to work, work for five hours, leave, go to basketball or theater or whatever practice, finally go home, do homework, sleep, die, wake up at 5:30am.

I guess a good way to describe it is- it feels as if my body is begging to rest from the moment I get up to the moment I lay down at night. I hardly listen. If I do I will still hate myself. There is no freedom in rest, not here in this country, not here in my mind.

The only days that feels guiltless to rest are the weekend- yet even there I feel as though I should be ought, getting drunk, being young, living alive.

I constantly want to do nothing. Sometimes a surge of motivation comes and pushes me along, but often I sit and do things mindlessly because of some gnawing feeling that I should.

I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should, I should.

There are so many things I should do at all times. I should work out and get should. I should get back into basketball if I miss it so much. I should get 10,000 steps a day because the gurus tell me its good. I should not eat out so much, oh but I should treat myself and not fall back into an eating disorder. I should be kind to my partner, she is so lovely. Oh, but I should break up with her, maybe we’re not that compatible. I should write, oh how I should write. I have nothing to say but I should write. I should start doing music again, why have a gift if you don’t use it. I should find a job for the summer. I should travel somewhere else, you’re young and you’re wasting time!

I do not know any other way to calm myself other than getting high. Only a recent thing I’ve begun doing, and it does help, but it makes me groggy and I cannot write when I’m high so it’s often counterintuitive.

I wish I could take a pill that made me calm and steady and understanding of all things. I wish I was more than a three dollar candle whose wick burnt out before the wax was gone.

There’s a phrase I utter to Sophie a lot when I’m most destroyed. It always feels fleeting and futile, as if it is the most honest thing I could say, and yet it seems to make no difference at all.

“I thought people would come.”

When everything happened, and even now. I always thought if I could just endure the pain long enough, people would see and be dismayed. People would come to our rescue. We would be held or covered or plucked and placed somewhere else. Somewhere gentler.

It’s been two years now, I find that I’m still waiting. Most of me wants to blame myself for this, the way I was taught to. At my mothers command I was raised up to scan myself for the virus that made people harm me. It has to be something on my end.

Perhaps if no ones coming you have not been open enough, honest enough, about how much you are struggling. How much you need people around you. Or perhaps you ask for something that is too much? Maybe you have not given enough to others yet, and when you have served long enough, then they will come. Perhaps, you are too big, not approachable. When you are softer and easier they will come.

At the beginning of this year, I started losing the ability to do this. It was around the time that me and Sophie broke up for a month. We had been chaotic, spiraling, hurting each other in the process for awhile. Finally, we called it off. It was my request. I felt numb.

And I thought people would come. After a month and a half I realized no one really was. Somedays I would stare at unanswered texts, attempts to see people and feel some sort of connection and cry. We ended up getting back together, only when she had to let my brother know I was making plans to end my life.

I think I must have miscalculated my importance.

I’ve done it my whole life. I’ve done it a lot this past year. Because I feel as though I’ve been encouraged to. Everywhere I look, movies, media, books, opinions of the people next to me at the coffee shop- the assumption is that once people know, their actions will change.

And so, my assumption was, once my people knew how poorly I was doing, they would ask to come over more. Invite me to dinner with their families, check in regularly. I thought they would protect me.

A year ago, I thought once I told my boss and coworkers that I was being bullied by the supervisor, it would stop. I thought people would protect me.

I thought once I told Sophie of just how psychologically damaged I am from two years of being actively excluded from her family- treated as if I do not exist- I thought she would stand up for me finally. I thought she would protect me.

I thought once I told my father that I would suicidal, he would realize that his homophobia was killing his daughter. I thought my brother would drive out to see me. Or at least call weekly. But my dad told me to simply not kill myself. And my brother hopes I will put my head down and keep going.

And now I have said all the scary things you could say. The stuff you are not supposed to say. And my room is still quiet every night. So I know that I could disappear quietly and no one would know for a very long time.

I thought most of all that if I keep loving and loving and giving and gifting and protecting and hosting and trying and trying and trying… that someday it would finally pay off.

I think I learned this young. Through years of being told I was too much by my older sister, and mother and father. I will have to earn these things that I need. They will not be given freely. You already claim too much just by existing.

But if I could do enough, I thought the love I gave would come back to me. That’s what they teach you, you know.

But it hasn’t, and I don’t think it is. And I worry that it’s probably too late now, even if it did. Sophie wants me to go to therapy. But I already feel about myself, as the world around me does. Apathetic. On many days, I am not sure that I am even here. How would I know? No one is talking to me.

My head is muck. Night and day it whispers things to me. Memories of girls speaking cruelly about me in a back room as my friends listened quietly to keep the peace. Memories of starting a book club, only to be bullied there again. Memories of Sophie’s father, her mother running out of a shop just to get away from my own body. Memories of Sophie leaving to that house again and again. I am alone in this house where people hate me and I am kept from a house where people hate me and I grew up in a house where people hated me.

You are too big. You are too broken. You ask for too much. You are whiny and rigid and hard to manage. See how they go weeks without speaking to you? See how you always have to initiate? They do not want you around. You could disappear. No one would know! You should then. If it doesn’t matter anyway. You should. Nothing will change for anyone.

Once they get over their grief or guilt, nothing will really change for anyone. It’s not like they saw you that much anyways.

And when I try to raise evidence against him, I have only my own voice, small and 10 years old. I was just trying to be good.

I was an autistic child and every sign that should have led my parents to a doctor, was instead punish and twisted up inside of me. I recount the things I have been my whole life. Rude and head strong and too sensitive, bad at small talk, bad at looking at people. Bad at physical touch. Bad with authority. Intense. Expects too much from others. Obsessed with fairness and justice- self righteous. Perfectionist.

I suppose they could have been good things. I was excellent, I think, in many ways. Brilliant with stories and brilliant at caring for people. An extraordinary protector. Creative and colorful- I know what I was.

But it has been so long since I have felt loved. It’s been so long since someone came, running and screaming for me.

A lack of protection has killed me. This big strong body. Yes, they thought I was the strong friend, empathetic friend, dependable friend. She can take one more hit. One more. You can always take one more, that is what father taught me at 5 am when we trained before school. You can always go one more. Even if I screamed at them I am not strong enough! I don’t how to escape the label that I am resilient without an end.

Even strong friends will end.

And so, I find that I finally agree. I do not think I want myself around that much either.

I have stumbled upon a harrowing litmus test in the past couple weeks. I’m sure it came to me in one of those moments of clarity where I realize my phone is a poison and I’d be wise to throw it into the ocean and let it rot.

“But then I wouldn’t have any friends”

Horrific, that this was my first thought. More horrific that it’s essentially true.

I don’t mean to sound ornery and boomer- but it really was different back in my day. Sure, I wasn’t running around at all hours with the kids from the neighborhood. For the most part, I didn’t really like the kids in my neighborhood. But I saw people at school. And after school there was basketball or theater. And after all that, I still had to fight with my siblings over who would get to shower first.

Now, a day filled with that much human contact and connection sounds unattainable.

Most of my current relationships depend on my phone. And not all the blame can rest on me or my friends for this. A lot of this is by design. A world that is filled with individuals, connected by pieces of technology that a small group of people supply to them and control- that’s a very easy world to run.

What’s hard to run is a fourth grade classroom- with a vast web of not only individuals, but partners and groups and communities. Hundreds of different conversations, fights, crushes, connections being made constantly, in one room, together.

For as depressed as I thought I was as a highschooler, I would have been mortified to find out it would would be far worse at 26. Largely due to this fact, that if I threw my phone away- if I even just got off social media, I wouldn’t have any true friends.

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When we were children we were surrounded by people at all times. Thrust into activities against our will, dragged to playdates with people we didn’t really enjoy. In college, we lived in tiny, glorious, walkable cities. Our campus a play ground to eat, and study, and party and become ourselves.

And then we became adults. A lot of us, shoved into cubicles or into jobs where we work alone. Perhaps we talk to someone in the break room or on our way to the bathroom, like passing ships in the night. If we’re lucky enough to have a partner, we see them for about 4-5 hours at night. And our friends? We simply have a once a month catch up and instagram reels to send back and forth while we wait for actual connection.

And I could continue blaming the system, but I feel at some point we have to hold ourselves accountable for our participation in the system as well. There is a level of consent we give to it when we habitually practice this rhythm laid out for us.

So many of our friendships live out their most meaningful moments in the cloud. Our care for each other is typed out in iMessage, instead of a pop by their house to check in. Advice is given via voice memos instead of face to face over spontaneous coffee. We are not present in our friendships, because there is so little real presence in them. They are digital, often transactional, and built around our own convenience- and then we wonder why we are lonely.

I am not only here to shit on myself and everyone, I come with solutions too. But they will require action and you won’t be able to use your phone for any of them… Sorry :)

The “get the fuck off your phone and hang out with your friends” idea list:

1. Set up a weekly rhythm. This can be a movie night, a book club, a workout, dinner if you have money like that. The important part is that there is a repeated routine and that involved parties are committed to showing up regularly. Remember that it’s actually not normal to only see your friends once a month…

2. Invite your friends on your errands. Meet up at your central Trader Joes and lock in. Share your favorite new snacks with them, tell which items have been recalled and to steer clear from.

3. Host an in home study hall on Thursday nights. Get together and crank out some extra work from the week so that your Friday is smooth sailing!

4. Make a list of 5 new coffee shops you want to try and race to check them off by the end of the month. Gamifying things can be a good way to keep both neurodivergent and neurotypical people engaged in a goal. So if your goal is to see your friends more, there’s nothing wrong with making a little game out of it! See how present you can be with your community this month!

5. Ask your friends if they have any projects they need help with. I know I often put off tasks when I feel alone in them. Sometimes we just don’t have to bandwidth to try hard things by ourselves. Maybe your friend needs to clean their room, do their taxes, go turn in their medical paperwork. Offer to help, and when you’re done, ask them for help on a project you’ve been putting off!

The point is, if you realize that throwing your phone away would take away a lot of the substance in your relationships- maybe it’s time to throw that damn phone away.
Digital connection is pseudo connection.

So get out the cloud and go hang out in the real world!

I recently sat in on some classes at CSLB, a university near me that my friend attends. I was with her to hear a guest speaker present in her environmentalism class, but ended up attending the class before it as well. I felt a little silly when I preferred that lecture to the one I was actually there for.

But I did. For many reasons, like enjoying simply playing the part of a student again. But also, I was amused by the class itself. I found myself wrapped up in the world of feminism, black feminism, being taught in a way that even the boldest of professors wouldn’t have dared to at my alma mater (the conservative Christian, sexist, racist, Biola University). I felt simultaneously jealous and overwhelmingly at peace, as they tossed around phrases casually that were banned in the rooms I used to be taught in.

Consciousness, further, the unending consciousness of every existing power structure in every room you enter. That is what they discussed, after finishing reading a piece by poet June Jordan. The heaviness of noticing, of balancing, of awareness. At a certain point my head began to hurt. It had been minutes and still not an answer that felt like “Ahh yes, that it is, the final form”. Every hand raised was just another idea, a musing, never an attempt at a concrete answer- because what is concrete about consciousness? Or the shifting of power between classes and races and sexes? The truest answer is, probably nothing.

And as I looked up to the ceiling I suddenly realized I seemed to have lost it. Or perhaps it disappeared of its own accord. Instead of pale tiles to offer me some sanctuary, some boundary, I only found space and time. Only pondering daydreaming and wondering and never knowing for sure. My chest became tight. If there is no answer, then I cannot be right. I cannot be right and thus I cannot be smart and thus I cannot be good and thus I cannot be loved!

Those sorts of things, those tight feelings, those exclamations of a brain in disarray- they are remnants of an older time. A time that is long gone, and yet present with me, clearly, every day.

I used to have a ceiling, an understanding of my world and the world of the people who were “like me”. I even had an understanding (and a pity) for people who were not like me. I knew God, as my parents had taught me too. I knew the theology, I knew the language, I knew the responses to give, I new the edgier responses to give when I wanted to be set apart. I knew how to sing and look moved by the Spirit. I knew how it actually felt to be moved by such a Spirit. I knew who to talk to when things went to shit. I knew which type of man to look for, I knew the kind of friends to recruit. I knew what activities I ought to do with these men and recruited friends. Everything, I knew, and they all existing under my beautiful, simple ceiling.

Now I know nothing. I have no answers to anything at all. Of course I have my convictions, my opinions that harm is bad and oppression is evil. I still have my desire for humans to flourish and love fully. But what that means, how that shows up in life? Which paths to take when I want to pursue it, how to achieve it, what it will feel like?It seem to be ever changing. What is right and what is wrong and who is evil and who is righteous. So the answers become muddied and fickle in this new world without ceilings.

My parents fear this world. I suppose most people do. I think even I do, here as I stand within it. But God, at least I am within it.

When I look at my parents, at my partners parents, at the people who kicked us out and never thought twice about the damage that might do to a person (and that perhaps the trauma they inflicted on us was in fact a neurological assault which would take us years to heal from)… I still see them. I still see them in this small village. And it’s very beautiful there. The water is clean and there’s plenty of food and they’re not very generous with each other but it’s okay mostly because they have a lot of stuff. From where I am outside of it, I am able to fly over, to observe, to study, even to understand! I just cannot go back inside the village walls.

But they cannot see me. And that is the thing that has plagued me these past few weeks. They cannot leave the village, so they can only know what is inside the village. They cannot study philosophy, or consciousness, or indigenous people’s spiritual practices. They cannot give an ear to nihilism, or look at the history of the earth. They cannot pursue, with their whole heart, anything at all beyond their God. And some will say they do, but us who live outside know that isn’t really true. If they do learn or study, it must always be done in accordance with the village, a biased sort of research. Which is no research at all really. It must always be funneled back into the village and sifted through a lens that is approved by the elders.

I returned from that class at CSLB overwhelmed, that my dad would have gained nothing from the lecture whilst I gained so much. And his love of philosophy will die in that village, guarded by walls and while my love is unbounded.

The opportunity of my life seems to be infinite! Ah, but I can hear the preachers now- I still remember how they pick these things apart in the village.

They will say that life if meant to be lived, restricted and devoted to God, through gritted teeth and long suffering. When the ceiling begins to open, you use that fear to close it right back up! It is not a good thing, they will say, to have freedom. It is much better to have control and order.

The question that plagues me- why is it that my world still includes you and in your world I have ceased to exist? Does that not suffocate you? That you have to disappear people in order to continue you on as you are? Is it not concerning the sheer amount of things and people your village asks you to ignore and discard? Is it not scary that it was pertinent Sophie and I cease to exist so that you could go on living without pressing guilt? That the story must be: they were lost to the world, consumed by our filthy desires and then - vanished. Is it is strange to you that her parents have not spoken a word to me in two years? Where is your great command to pursue reconciliation with your brothers? Ah but I am no brother to you anymore, right? I am nothing now, outside the village.

I became very morbid the other night and I wrote something about it in my journal.

[My father] may agree that there is an enemy among us, come to steal, kill, and destroy. But does he know that the enemy has become him?

Like a leach, it has clasped on to his words and it tremors in his voice. The enemy is the silence that extends after I say her name. It in in the chapters of the books he reads, which convince him that I am indeed vile- while other books, which might indeed save my very life, build up dust on the shelf. The enemy is the misunderstanding- in his commitment to it. The enemy is in his lofty monologues, his promise to do anything for child he does not truly wish to know.

You would lay down your life for me? Okay. Then lay it down. Love my lover as your own daughter. Regard me as your first born son. Speak to me with the dignity that I am owed as something alive. Speak now, without fear and hiding. Expand your mind so that there is room again for me to live within it!

I contain multitudes of multitudes and your mind, as it stands now, is an open empty plain of barley. Where I am, you find nothing. No concept of me, no context. But you ask to know my pain! When I tell you of it? Barley! There is nothing in the place I point to. So I am nothing. There is nothing to explain myself in your mind, only barley.

Now I have written the title of this essay to catch your eye because that is a title’s job. But also because of it accuracy and ambiguity.

We don’t follow Truman after he leaves. Films and stories about freedom seldom follow their characters after they are freed. When they are rebuilding and lonely and plagued by the trauma of what has happened to them.

After he makes his great bow, I imagine Truman struggled to get a job, had anxiety when making friends, had no savings, no concept of the real world. The movie ends for us, as a new horror begins for him.

A new horror has begun for me and Sophie. As great as it is to have the opportunity to know my own mind, which cannot be done under the Christian Regime, there is a great tax in the knowing. I feel as Truman did, tossed into life at an older age than most, forced to figure things out whilst everyone else is already in motion.

This is not meant to be a pick me up piece. None of mine really are. It’s meant to serve as a time stamp. For myself, for others- since I know I am not the only one who has escaped something late in life and had nothing to escape to.

I do hope Truman found peace. Perhaps a wife or husband or friend. A nice apartment that allows for pets in some big city where he is not a star, just a piece of a very large, open world. I hope the same for us all.

I wrote a poem in an English class the other day. I’ve decided now, as I sit in another room, with other children, during another shift to turn it into a full piece, since I’ve found I have lots more to say on this.

I watch them incessantly, which of course they do not realize. They are consumed by themselves, and I cannot argue that I am any different. Which is why I have come to enjoy them so much.

I wish, on most shifts, I did not have to be so stern. I wish I did not have as many rules to follow and enforce. They think it is my choice, and they are right of course, but they do not realize that, sooner than they’d like- it will be their choice too. And they will do as I do.

Every child at some point must join the machine of order. We all become a cog, most of us at least, or we are gotten rid of… or we go mad. Sometimes we are a cog for awhile and then we go mad. But regardless, it comes for us all.

Soon they will be older and surrounded by things that are younger and they will have to tell them to hush and pay attention and stay on task and be calm and be quiet. And they won’t really know why.

But for now they are children. And things which have been punished out of me, are vital to them. So there is this imbalance between us, which we both think is easy to overcome by the other. We are both wrong, of course. It is not simple for them to do as I ask, to quietly bridle their impulse and spirit. It is no easier for me to unlearn years of training in a moment.

Teachers yell at children quite often. I do not blame or judge them for this. That would be judging an experience I do not fully understand, and I doubt that I ever will. The teachers serve the same orderly force I do, and even more. I blame the system for making them have to be harsh, but I do not blame them for their harshness. Because lack of support, lack of funding, lack or care, lack in general is harsh- and harsh generally begets harsh.

Children get yelled at, primarily I have noticed, for their bids for attention. These bids, which are really bids for connection, are creative- at least I find them to be. In order to get eyes on themselves, they will do just about anything. Stomp their feet, scream, make fun of others, make fun of themself, break things, disrupt. They are committed, more than me, to disruption as a reminder to others that they are here. I think that is a beautiful thing. A sort of holy and necessary resistance.

I try, on good days, to think of them through this lens. Disruption as communication, disruption as the illumination of a need. A need that would go otherwise unnoticed.

For example, I am subbing in a music class today. We are watching a documentary on the relationship between music and the brain. How music therapy can be healing for Dementia patients. I’ll watch it seven times across the different periods, so you’d think I’d grow sick of it. But I find it to be moving.

Some students, however, use this moving documentary as a way to communicate. They do not know that these are their intentions of course. They do not understand that when they laugh at the old man, it communicates a discomfort, a fear of aging, which is really a fear of death. They think, or hope, that their laughter creates a separation between them and this place they do not want to go.

When the narrator says “Music has a way of making us feel. Of moving us to tears,” a young boy objects. “Not me” and scoffs.

It’s an interesting admission. Maybe it is true and maybe it isn’t. From what I noticed of the boy, he sits near other boys, but there is distance between them, as if signifying he is not truly with them. On his arm is a glucose monitor, I can only assume for type 1 diabetes and a health concern of that nature. When he speaks, his inflammatory comments are not answered by the other students. When he leaves class, he does so alone. So perhaps he feels outcasted, or he has felt it so much that now he cannot forget it. He cannot function out of any other energy besides it.

Of course I am assuming so much from bits and pieces I observe from these kids. So you will forgive me if I miss and diagnose. I plan do nothing with it beyond think and write and ponder and write some more.

A girl sleeps in the corner. A boy sneaks his notebook and begins studying notes. He foots fidgets anxiously, propped up on his knee. The impulse to wake the girl and tell her to watch and care arises in me. Then, the impulse to tell the boy to put his book away and focus on the film. But why? Why is this documentary more important than her rest or anxiety over some test. Why must we do what we are told? And why is it when we deem which children are the “best” students, it is simply the ones that produce the least disruption.

I think there is a time for work. I think music is important and influential and life saving. I think English must be learned and papers must be constructed and math to some degree must be understood.

But it is the direness with which everything is treated that bothers me. Why is it so dire?! If she sleeps in the class I can only assume there is a good reason that her tiredness has overcome her. If he studies, I can only assume there is some looming exam that plagues him. (I asked him after the bell, he plague was indeed and math test next period)

When children communicate, I want to listen. I want listen most closely to their need. I do not want to demand obedience for the sake of obedience. There are rules to be followed, harm to ourselves and others should be avoided. But I can tend to the harm children do to others much easier from a posture of belief and then one that assumes they intended the harm.

I am resolved to give them what they bid for, by whatever means I can.

TW: mention of suicide and self harm, please don’t read if it will be harmful to you

It is not meant to be inflammatory, but honest. If cannot be honest, I feel as though I am dead already.

I’ve resolved, that since two years have passed and I have not been asked to attend a single of Sophie’s family events, much less spoken too, I must bully my way into their lives by means of gifts. At Christmas I bought her entire family gifts. I did want to. I never don’t want to, that is not what I am here to say.

Valentines has just passed. We left her mother flowers in the mailbox, because of course I cannot enter the home to transfer them from my hands to her own. And again I did want to. I’ve always liked gifts- a material, undeniable showing of love. Love in tangible form. Or thought in tangible form, perhaps. I was somewhere, you were there too, in my mind, and I’ve bought this as a signifier. For you. I do not regret the gifts I give even when I feel the aching hollowed out feeling after they’ve been given. I know how I felt when I prepared them, ribbon slipping through my fingers as I tie and re tie. I do not regret.

Of course, I still have not been well. I’ve been quite suicidal actually, for months, quietly, as we near two years since being kicked out and there is little change. You are not supposed to talk about wanting to end your life while you are still in the wanting. People want a hopeful memoir in your 70s, concise and contentious, once you have found a way to overcome. They love an overcomer. They are not as keen to watch you thrashing in the water, trying to grasp at any reason to stay one more moment.

I feel a shame about writing honestly, but I feel a shame about everything these days, so I don’t see how this should become the one shame I obey. And I do suppose, I want people to know that there was a cost to their actions- and me and Sophia have paid every bill in full. I paid for Priscilla’s silence with my own muteness, I paid for Becki’s carelessness with insomnia, and for Joel’s betrayal with vomit. Sophie paid for her father’s resounding voice with the loss of her own mind, the ability to hear her own thoughts without his thundering over them. Our bodies have internalized every single moment- the firing, the ex lesbian preacher to convince the congregation it was okay what had been done to us, Sophie’s forced houselessness, her mother running out the cafe after seeing us, the ride her Father’s tesla, Bree is too angry (bree is an angry black woman who needs to learn her place and learn her silence), Sophie is not a man I pray for you to find a man, find a man you two! find a man, find a man, who says that I am not a man, a man, a man, find a man or go to hell, go to hell, you’re sick go to hell, go to hell

and I worry now that there is no way to make a body forget.

Our bodies have made it evident, mine in it’s gaining of weight, driven by scarcity and fear and desire for just an ounce of comfort or kindness. Sophie’s body in the loss of weight, becoming small and weak as she has been made to feel. She told me she is finally so small that her father is no longer celebrating in her thinness. It made me laugh. I have been worried for a year, it is good of him to join me. Her disassociation, so severe, she does not even remember most days that food and sustenance and strength are things to be pursued.

I remind her. And she reminds me. And perhaps that is why I hate them most. They have ruined what we were to each other- what we could have been. I am a reminder- a beacon- of trauma, as she is to me. And also a savior. Also a mother. Also a brother. Anything the other needs, we must find a way to become because we want each other alive.

Sophie keeps me alive these days and it is a cruel role to play. At best it bores her, at worst, it consumes her. If she goes the whole day away from me worrying if I will be alright when she returns, she collapses in tears in my arms. If she doesn’t worry, if she thinks of coffee, and pottery, and new songs, and friends as she ought to- then she is shamed. Guilt overwhelms her. And I cannot rest because I know all this takes place inside her and I am powerless to stop it. Because I need her. And I hate myself for the needing. So I tumble through self hatred and dependency as she tumbles through her own waves.

Tonight I will not get to be with Sophie, and I am so burdened by this. Though I do not know why I care. We never do anything all that exciting together anymore. I miss when to be with her was rich enough- oh how we used to talk! Until morning, and morning and morning again! I loved to discover her. It has been so long since that feeling- I feel now that there are traps and black holes littered all around our conversations. She avoids speaking, to avoid triggering, to avoid fighting. But we never part. Each time we try I fall back into her for a fear of not being able to live in the kind of world where she is a stranger to me instead of the entire world. So we stay together in a ragged state, for love or dependency, I do not know. I think it is both. I feel that we love each other more now than ever before, and yet not at all.

She will go to be with her family tonight- her brother’s birthday. Which is good and makes sense. I only wish that I could go. I had a dream I broke into her older brother’s fiancé’s room to clean it for her. What a strange dream. But it feels like that’s what I do in life as well. I must sneak, because I am never invited in. I must force myself into their lives via flowers in the mail. And once I am in, it is never to steal, kill, or destroy. But always to clean, or work, or bring gifts. After all I have suffered at their hands, they remain an extension of Sophie, this soul I cannot find a way to unlove. And so I cannot find a way to unlove them.

I think a lot about the racial elements to my situation. I feel my blackness heavily, my otherness. I feel this white family gather and I am left to grovel and beg to be let in to their sacred space. I will spend money and time and tears to do so. Oh please, please! My sweet, holy oppressors- Won’t you let me in?! Let me sit at your fire and drink your wine and be one of you!

All so that I might have someplace to go on Saturday night. All so that I can feel that things are steady, the mountains are climbed, only rest remains. All so that I do not have to stay this yucky, angry, broken black thing who stands at their door and knocks.

All so that I might be able to know Sophie again. How I miss my love! How I miss the ease with which she used to look on me. Hunger and desire and gentleness and kindness and childlike curiosity. All of it fell upon me under her gaze and I felt that I was surely alive for the first time in my life. I weep for those girls that we were- I am something else now. Something more wretched and guarded. What have they done, to destroy something like that? What have you done? It is some kind of evil I do not know- and would rather die than let that sort of evil get its way will us.

I cannot think of anything less like Christ, than whatever has forced me out of community and made me think death is better than the lonely days of my life.

I didn’t cry over Renee Good. Which feels, admittedly, odd. But if I’m honest, I did not realize my lack of response until this morning, when I sat, open mouthed, weeping over the death of a man from the same city. Alex Pretti, I learned his name maybe 30 minutes ago, which came three hours after my awareness of his public execution.

The videos of Good’s death, that I was offered countless times on every platform, I quickly swiped past. I could not escape Pretti’s. It was the first thing I saw when I woke this morning, room still dark, and it been nearly every post after that.

I feel an urge to cry and stop breathing all at once. Like my body cannot decipher which one will help. And then there is my poor weak heart, and my quivering bottom lip, shaking as I write. There is my watery eyes, there are my stupid thoughts that don’t change anything, but keep barking at me like hounds. I teem with emotion, overflowing rage and care and despair, and yet I know it does little to stop anything.

Good’s death felt horrific. To the point that I think, I could not properly engage with it all. She felt too close to me, a queer woman with a masculine partner, made an example for daring to even stop to check in our her neighbors. But now it seems, the horror is here again in a different way. Pretti’s death feels taunting. Like violence is here and it’s unbudging. Horror upon horror upon horror has been my life for the last decade. And horror has come like clockwork to my line of people since we were dragged here in chains. And it is all too much for me today and tomorrow and always. I wish it would simply burn.

On my way to a cafe, I pass by poppy fields, I drive over hills. I think what it would look like if war came here. And I realize that yes, maybe for a short time, there would be destruction, but the land will come back. It will reshape and regrow and regenerate.

Without us, if we tear ourselves to shreds over money and wealth and power, the earth will still be here. Because the earth knows how to share, how to give and take, how to intersect, how to protect and defend. Even our very bodies that we commit these vile acts with- are only able to do so with blood circulating through out veins, with oxygen dispersing to the community of cells which is our being.

Sharing. Sharing and giving is all around us, but hardly happens through us. Stunning examples of how to live and how to live well are shown in every leaf, every tree, every small colony of pesky ants. And we never learn. Every new generation carries over the same patterns of greed and individualism and apathy for their fellow man.

And so I must mourn! I must mourn and share my mourning. I must go to the cafe and cry in public. I must continue to be a living, feeling being while I still have the time. I must share what I have while I still have time. I must grip the ones I love and tell them I love them, I give to them, I take from them, I am part of them, I need them.

I am to viscerally heartbroken that life was taken from a man today. The fragility of it all seems to be carving me out from the inside. Life is precious, life is spirit, and it is only given once. And I wonder on days like these, why it feels like only a few understand and revere that very sacred fact.

I find it hard to believe in god. But I hope there is a creator. I hope they swoop up all the spirits and lay them somewhere gentle- somewhere far better than it is down here. And then maybe the violence that took Renee Good and Alex Pretti and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery and Tamir Rice will not have the last word. I cannot stand it if violence has the last word. I hope it is the love that mourns them, the love that follows them, and the love they are laid in.

My birthday is tomorrow. I am writing listening to “Existential Crisis Time”, a Spotify playlist. Spotify is evil now- perhaps it always has been. So soon I will have to let go of it, no matter how much I loved it. That is how I feel about everything these days.

My hot chocolate is bad, which is a hard drink to mess up, but somehow it was accomplished here today for me. It is my last day of being twenty five and I have a bad hot chocolate and the largest mosquito bite ever known to man that I somehow acquired over night. Everything, everything is against me.

I want to complain. I do not want to be pacified. I hate to be pacified. It feels dishonest. I do not want to make the most of the day or the dinner we will have tonight in my honor. I want to be only negative and you will let me because you have no power here. At least not right now. You could judge me for being ungrateful and negative but people have always said that about me, my whole life. So that would not be nearly as upsetting to me as this bad hot chocolate sitting to my right on the table.

I must complain in the first half so I can overcome in the second half and you will all be proud of me and go about your days and tell yourself, see? She’s okay! She’s gonna be okay!

She will not be okay, but I know you need to say that I will triumph in my life so you can maintain the energy to triumph in your own. I don’t think it’s normal to be as rigidly honest as my brain always needs to be. So I don’t fault anyone. But I do hate everyone at moments.

I was supposed to go to concert for my birthday and my girlfriend passed out on the way, so we went to the hospital instead and I sat in the waiting room for 2.5 hours alone because the nurse was homophobic and wouldn’t let me in. I just sat in the cold and watched all the straight couples, the families, the friends go in and in and in and in.

Whatever Sophie had planned for tomorrow has been cancelled due to the rain so I guess that plan is gone now too. Wasted money and wasted time and wasted plans. I hate changing plans. I hate wasting even more so. I’m very time anxious these days. More than I was in my youth. Maybe time always becomes more real when you age. Because you realize you don’t have this endless surplus of days. You’re barreling towards death. All your youth is behind you and your back is slowly decaying, as well as your knees and your will to believe you’ll be something great.

I do feel I should have been something great by now. If you offered me a conversation with my 20 year old self I would have to decline it. I would not want to face her and tell her I am nothing remarkable. I am nothing at all. Of course I have done good things. I have loved and loved well. I have hosted and cleaned forgiven and created warm spaces for people out of nothing so they can come and have tea and be still. I have remembered and planned and fought and done what I can with the little I have.

But I’d be ashamed to tell her that there are not many warm houses that I am called into to have tea. It has been hard to find people who will fight and scrape for me. That is what I would not want to tell her. Because I know her. I’ve known her my whole life. And I know that of course she wants to be something good… But even more she wants to be surrounded by good.

I sometimes wish that I could just be doused in people who would live and breathe and die for me. I think that would somehow set everything right again. Or perhaps a consecutive string of things working out magically in my favor- better than I could have planned them.

Maybe I am just living proof that neglected and abused children never outgrow the trauma from it. I can’t seem to get away, it just comes back again and again like a wave I can’t get out from under. I look for my needs in the people around me, but am so wounded by everything little disappointment. I ruin perfectly decent friendships because my needs are so great that they’re never met. But I also believe it’s not really everyone’s job to meet them- it’s not their fault that I’m fucked up and it’s not their job to fix it. I know this. But the needs stay there like moles, making themselves a part of who I am. So the best I can do I disappear. It’s never gone well when I vocalized my disappointment.

I embarrassed that I am older than many of my friends because I know how desperately I need to be mothered. I need someone who will sit by my bed side and stroke my hair until I fall asleep. I need someone who calls and comes to me when my partner is in the ER. I need someone who drives to my home when I get those poor ideas of cutting my life short. I need someone to grab me by the face and tell me to stay and that they will take some of my load. And then I actually need someone to take some of the load.

When I have meltdowns, which are often these days, “I need help” and “I need a mom” are the screams that always come. The phrases repeat and repeat, no one but my 2008 Hondra Accord to hear. I bang my head and my hands and weep and am amazed at the amount of pain that lives inside me. The amount of exhaustion.

I am exhausted of being my own mother. I am tired of being a mother to others. I feel this intense bitterness at a role I never wanted and a role no one is willing to play for me.

And I know it’s no one’s job and no one wants to do it because I don’t even want to do it. But I wish someone would accept the job anyway because I think it’s killing me being this motherless child. And what business does a motherless child have getting older.

I am at an age I never thought about as kid. I thought about being 20 and 23 and 25 and I dreaded 30. But 26 feels aimless and empty. A wasteland of pressure and confusion and bills.

The only thing I thought I’d be at 26 was happy. And I’m not. I thought I would be surrounded by family and friends and my partners family and their friends and music and life and love abundant! And maybe a cat too.

But it is just me and Sophie on so many days and so many nights. We slowly begin to look at each other with contempt because of this creeping knowledge that we cannot be all and everything for the other.

But we do love, desperately love, one another. I love Sophie in a way many people never get to love. And I have so little support in my life that I never have energy enough to show her truly how gripped my soul is by her.

I am supposed to have a party tonight. Well, I am having a party tonight. But it feels odd to celebrate my life. In truth, just last Wednesday, I had a day which I did think was going to be my last. I have struggled with suicidal ideation by whole life, but after getting kicked out of our church it’s gotten much more intense. It’s usually family you turn to to get help for these things. I just have Sophie. And Sophie is just a girl without family as well.

So on Friday, the stress of worrying if she’d one day come home to find me no longer there got to her and she collapsed. And so I cared for her until Sunday, when the stress of her collapsing broke me down again, and so she cared for me, until that wore her out and she developed a cold, and I cared for her, until that wore me out and I returned home Tuesday in a rage and a panic and said that we must cancel the party, it’s bad, it’s not a life worth celebrating. That is our dance. That is our life. Rage and exhaustion and motherlessness.

Perhaps these things are too raw to share. But I hold more raw things still, that I keep hidden in my mind. These which I share, are things I want written down. So I will know how the turning of 26 felt. And that Sophie was your only rainbow in the sky.

I guess at the core of it… I don’t want to turn 26 without having family. I have felt a dread as the day approaches. It feels like, oh god I can’t possibly do another year of this. No place to be at Thanksgiving or Christmas. No family dinners on a porch in summer.

It’s sometimes shocking to me, as someone who wants to have and hold and love and raise children… the idea that had I not survived last Wednesday, my parents would have received a call from someone telling them that their daughter was dead. And they would have wasted so much precious time, years, not speaking anything of any worth to me, all because I am gay.

That is what sits in my mind, fermenting, as life becomes more fragile and fleeting. That there are so many things being done to me and around me- that time feels much too much to precious to me to ever do. We really are not promised a single second beyond the one we are existing in. And I will never serve a God that makes me not know my children in their fullness. I do not even know them yet, but I call them my name in my mind.

Regardless, I will have to do another year. Yes, I will do another year. Under the comforting idea that age is more of a construct and life is sort of fluid and aimless just like me, I will do another year. Maybe I’m not really 26, maybe I always was. Maybe I am all the stages of myself colliding and clashing.

Maybe tomorrow is just a day, a rainy, quiet day and I will be with my love, my rainbow in the sky, my hope, my tenderness. A day with Sophie, as is all my days- and what glorious days.

I will give you your hopeful ending, here it is. For all the suffering I have lived through and will continue to there has never been a moment where I thought to myself that it wasn’t worth it. That Sophie was something I could have done with giving up.

It is hard to find us, with all that we have turned into to survive. But if I sit long enough and think soft enough and breathe deep enough- I find two kids in a field, one is loud and dirty and chaotic and the other is pensive and sensitive and soft. And they protect each other. And they love each other. And they laugh loud and hardly cry, only if they’re overcome by how great it is to be alive and with one another. I hide us in that field, where her parents and mine will never find us.

So if I turn 26 tomorrow, because who really knows for sure, at least I live another year, fight another year, hold onto, for another year, my hidden place. They have not killed me yet then.

I feel a pretty devastating amount of grief over the holidays this year.

I feel a pressure to not talk about it in most spaces. Or cover it in quips and bits and comedic tones that serve everyone else but me. So I’ll place the truth here. And I’ll cry while writing it. Or else, I think it will eat me alive, just as it does to Sophie.

People encourage us and I know they mean well. “Host your own thanksgiving!” “Have your own little Christmas, just the two of you”. It always feel like being punched in the stomach, but I indulge them. I smile and nod and say “You’re right”. Sophie ignores them. She has told me many times that she’s set on it being a bad holiday season. I understand her, though I don’t agree. But then, I have always been the fighter between us too.

The encouragements always come from people who will never understand our situation. They watch it from the outside, hoping we’ll make the best of it so it won’t be as bad as it actually is. They don’t know how bad it feels for Sophie as she sits across from her brother’s girlfriend at Christmas dinner, while I am not allowed to come. They don’t know how bad it is to drive back home from Arizona at 12:30pm on Christmas day because my parents go silent anytime I mention Sophie’s name.

But it is bad. For the record, it is bad. I feel bad. I feel bad all the time. It is as bad as you think and worse on weekdays.

Other do not encourage, instead they invite. Which is kind and only the bitterest parts of me find reasons to hate this too. Like a child throwing a tantrum, my insides scream “But I want MY family”. I want my birthright and I cannot have it. And I do not long to have a small slice of someone else’s. I can appreciate the offer and recognize it’s beauty- its still foreign to me.

And the holidays, in many ways, are about things not feeling so foreign, at least for a month. We fill the weeks with tradition and ritual, familiarity, nostalgia. It’s a perfect time for some neurodivergents, things coming as they always come. Dependable and rigid. That’s what I loved about it at least.

Now nothing is the same. In the very month I look forward to all year for some marker of safety and routine, everything is unsafe, nothing is routine. And everything requires work. Work from me.

Work to set up dates, host parties, shop for decorations, pay for decorations, put up the decorations. Suggest secret santas and white elephants, coordinate the details. No one else needs to, because everyone else has family. Anything they do with me, as much as they love it and have fun- it’s still extra. Christmas will come to them regardless, and I don’t believe it will be perfect or even good for some, but at least it will come. I feel like I have to bring Christmas to me. I am fairly sure if I refused to work for it, carried on as usual, I could let Christmas slip by almost undetected.

I don’t think our friends, who are young and busy and have their own lives and families to think of… I don’t think they always understand how much care it would take for me and Sophie to be able to breathe again. Or how it’s a most devastating loneliness to be told to “do something just the two of you!” by people who will spend the day surrounded by family. I wonder sometimes if anyone ever considers truly, sat on the floor staring at the ceiling fan, what it would be like to be us. And then perhaps maybe consider what they would need to feel okay again.

Every day of my life is just the two of us. Me and Sophie. There used to be more romance in that fact at the beginning. It used to fuel me, made me strong and spiteful. Now I just despair. Try to be as large for her as I can so she does not get tired or sad or bored. She does the same for me, but it’s never enough. We always fail each other, and we ought to. We’re supposed to have more than us.

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For all their evil, we come from glorious families. I loved my Christmas’ growing up. Sophie loved hers. We used to argue about who’s was better, which I now find to be ironic. Both of our parents did extensive scavenger hunts and held big parties where there were friends and cousins to play with and far too much food. My father would write letters to us from Santa, signed with this illustrious, swirling signature. The presents from Santa would always be displayed in front of the tree’s warm light. A glowing back drop to these mysterious, unwrapped gifts.

My mother, who recently apologized for allowing us to engage in the Santa myth, saying it was not “right in the eyes of God” to do so- she does not understand that that was one of the joys of my life. I did not believe truly ever, I was too smart and logical a child. But I loved the theatrics of it all. I love the idea of my father signing and signing and signing until he got the perfect, swooping “S”. I loved the dedication to whimsy and magic. I loved that we were all, the whole family, at play together for this one special day.

I miss the softness of Sophie’s house at Christmas. Her mother would put the tree right by the window. Decorate with burnt oranges and dark blues. I felt steady in her house at Christmas, even whilst keeping this horrid secret from them. The secret was really that I loved them and loved their daughter and I wanted to marry her and come to Christmas every year. I wanted to help set up the tree and help Rynelle cook and talk her when everyone else ignored her. Clean up the kitchen when the men left to watch TV. Buy gifts for the whole family. I wanted all of that. I never wanted to blow up the family. I never wanted Sophie for only me, myself.

Somewhere in her heart Sophie would say she feels the same about my family. She has so much in common with my dad and I’m sure he would enjoy her immensely if she was a boy. I can see it very clearly, her and my brothers teaming up on me until I consent to playing ONE board game and one only. She would talk with Lenae in a scattered way, as only their ADHD brains can. And perhaps we’d all take late night walks through the neighborhood together, discussing the awkward moments and silly moments and lovely moments of the day.

Because we have had to be so dedicated to each other, I think often we find ourselves very dedicated to each others families. More than our straight siblings partners will ever have to be. And I think it’s so sad, that I would be the first to live and breathe and die for her parents because they are extensions and reflections of her- and I love her like breathing.

All this sorrow, I think it is a unique, queer sorrow. That no one else will ever truly understand, as much as they try.

I just wanted to be able to be honest, I suppose. That I have little interest in “building new traditions” and entertaining “family isn’t always blood” comments. I understand them, I might even agree somedays. But today I am simply devastated. I miss our family. I don’t understand why a simply thing like love has cost us our family.

Words have been coming, but only for songs, where I can be cryptic and elusive. So I can share with you some poems that I have been coming and coming. To prove to you and me that I can still write, even if not in a long form, honest and open sort of way…

About a Door Frame-

On a six string, in the fall
Take your Taylor off the wall
I can feel you getting small
When he tells you to get off the call

And I’m wiser, cause I’m aged
I got one foot hoverin the grave
And the threat is in my mouth
Cause I just don’t know how to pipe down

Killed off your Gods so you might smile
But you’ll be his daughter all your life
And just getting taller makes you cry
Put your back on the door frame, I’ll draw the line

Untitled-

You need a bed so I open my home
Hiding my aches in a pen and some prose
I am so far from those letters I wrote
You know I never wanted to know

Now I get high cause that’s just how I cope
You hoard the guilt, like you force me to smoke
Told Angel, I’d trade in this life for a joke
Cause I never wanted to know

What ripping and tearing and caring feels like
When you tell me to fuck off, it’s somehow seems kind
A release from the grip that you’re too scared to hold
You know, I never wanted to know

Untitled-

I’m staying home tonight
You think it’s to punish
But words are just flowing forth
And so is my anguish

Okay, thats all.

A cloud comes over me as I write this piece. I feel more spiritual than I have in months. I am Jonah under my palm, covered by some will of God. But then, who am I to discern the will of God. Maybe it is just a cloud. It is no less a blessing to me if it is.

My mother has apologized to me about Santa Claus. This morning she texted. “It was wrong of me. I know it was a wrong thing I did against God. It was wrong that I brought that into our family. I’m sorry”

I know it seems trivial, but it has somehow upset something deep within me. At first I couldn’t figure out why. I spun it around in my mind, looking at from all angles, talking to my girlfriend who laid half asleep beside me.

I’m confused, I told her. I don’t know what the angle is. Is she trying to prop herself up as one who can recognize what is and isn’t against God. One who can apologize and recon with their mistakes. Is she hoping this strange text will somehow turn me from my homosexual lifestyle? This display of curated righteousness will cure me of my filth?

My filth, now rising to engage and console me, offers her ear and a puzzled expression. This calms me a little. I’m not alone. I try another angle.

She believes to know the will of God, but in truth, we know she just feels it. And more honestly, she fears it. She fears punishment, for leading her children astray. She fears she is to blame for me and my sisters queerness, for my brothers secular ways, for our collective indifference towards practicing religion the way she sees fit. She scrapes for reasons- whether that be Santa, or PBS programming, watching Danny Phantom, or attending a public highschool.

And in a way, perhaps I can find a lens to view it as a sad attempt at kindness. She sees my gayness as a fault, yes, but hers. Something she allowed me to see or engage in has ruined me. We’re damned, and she should receive the blame and punishment for. Twisted, kind, maybe selfish. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Another angle is less forgiving. That this stab at humility, this unnecessary apology, distracts from the true harm that she has perpetuated in her life. She sits alone in a dark house where her children seldom visit and her and her husband don’t often speak. And she scrambles for reasons why this could be the case.

But she never finds what I find when I look for reasons not to go home for Christmas. Where I find exclusionary behavior, emotional abuse, an inability to be my true self, a lack of consideration… she finds Santa Claus.

I never received an apology from my parents over their behavior when I came out to them. I don’t believe they’ll ever think that’s something I’m owed. But I know it. Perhaps when you believe homophobia is necessary to be Godly, you do not care about the harm you commit. If it’s in the name of righteousness, then the pain is worth it.

I don’t know if it would matter to my parents if I told them their words that night moved me to the desire to take my own life. And if my filth hadn’t been there, holding my shaking hands, driving me somewhere safe, rocking me to sleep- then they might not have a second born daughter today.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have changed anything. If I had gone that night, maybe my sister would have gotten a different text this morning, instead of the copy and pasted one about Santa. Maybe she would have got an apology about how they treated her when she told them about her trans boyfriend who she loved. How she was ostracized for years. How she’s only accepted now because she’s dating a cis man instead.

We’ll never know though because I am here. Here, alive, with parents who do not consider the pain they actually put into the world. Instead they ruminate about Santa, while I deal with real issues. Real memories. Real trauma.

Christians seem to weaponize this sort of selective accountability. They think they come off as humble and reflective, but to me, it is more cowardly to shift attention to minor things, knowing it will distract from the things which need real healing.

When me and my filth were first kicked out of her parents church, he told their elders and wives in an emergency meeting. He offered to step down from head pastor, saying if he couldn’t even lead his own family, how could he lead a church…

It’s a distraction, another play for the perception of humility. True humility would have sat down with the two young girls and been curious about their experience he knew little of. Humility would have found a way to make fellowship works, despite different beliefs. Self degradation in from of church elders, as if the love between two people is some fault of yours so you must insert yourself into their story.. this is not humble in the slightest. And mean while, two young girls go home to an empty room and no family. He goes home with a stoked ego.

So maybe this is why I have little patience for distractions like my mothers this morning. I simply do not have the time or energy. Not when I am left to do the healing on my own. My childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have been filled with trauma at the hands of others. And sorry, but Santa is not one of them.

We all do it. Currently, right now, in this very moment you probably are in ways that you don’t realize. I am too. I’m denying myself a bagel to attend my matcha because I want to look a certain way in my birthday pictures. I’m denying myself a comfier shirt to write in because I didn’t want to ask anyone to watch my laptop as I went back to my car to change. I’m denying myself a better matcha, mine is milky and poorly made, because I don’t want anyone to be mad at me when I go back to ask for a new one.

What about you?

Some of you are already saying to yourself, denial of the self can’t always be bad. You’re probably right. I’m not sure really, I’m not an authority. But I assume there are times when it’s okay.

I was raised Evangelical, so denial was next to godliness. I was essentially taught to believe that when I wanted something, it was most likely not what God wanted for me. Me and God were opposites. I was evil, He was good. He desired this denial, this long suffering, this self-abnegation. And I desired… well, desire.

I remember the first time in my conservative white Christian K-8 school that I was warned off of passion. When I raised my hand and listed it as a good thing to be, they taught that it wasn’t necessarily a fruit of the holy spirit. Passion is all I have ever been. But I can see now, as I look outside at the entity that is Evangelicalism, passion is a hard thing to contain. So it is a better thing to kill. Even if it takes the eight year old girl child with it.

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Me and my girlfriend both have homophobic parents. Non accepting is what I was going to write, but I’m working hard to call thing what they actually are. Because the truth is, they are accepting. They’re accepting of our siblings partners who are of the opposite gender- whether or not they’re having big bad “sex outside of marriage”. They’re accepting of my aunt who is divorced and recoupled and lives with her new partner. They’re accepting of quite a few behaviors that plenty of verses object to.

And my advocation is not that I’d see those others ostracized and turned away the way we have been. I would never wish on anyone what has happened to us. I wouldn’t even wish it on those who are doing it to us. It is lonely and evil and I believe it has no place in this world.

And I feel melodramatic when I write stuff like that. I feel a need to prove and explain how hard it’s been. I wonder if people, in this age where queerness is more visible, always understand the devastation that homophobia continues to cause.

Because the ask of homophobia is always to deny oneself. It’s the ask of every oppressor, that the oppressed will forget who they are and move on quietly in this new, half self.

I was left really wrestling with this yesterday, as I sobbed gutturally on the I-5 coming home from work. I have been texting with my parents again, despite there being no repair or reconciliation between us post my coming out. They never mention it. There is just silence between us. Just elephants looming in every corner of the rooms we share. And only I care to see them.

Their desire is, the fierce pull I feel is- to put down this thing that is causing all this trouble and engage with them peacefully. For me it is queerness and love and truth. For you it may be something else. The promise of having family and tribe, lulling us into pretending even if it’s just for a phone call, a Christmas, a dinner- that we are what they wish we were.

I called my love, crying out to her that I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can pretend, I said, it leaves me with no dignity. I don’t know why I don’t deserve dignity. I can’t do it.

My parents go silent when I mention Sophie’s name on a call in a hopes I will do the same. It’s as if I have somehow offended them be forcing them to think about the fact that I am not something “good”. It feels like a small death each time. Sophie has grown to be the closest, truest, loveliest thing about me and it ceases to exist each time I speak to my parents. I have nightmares each night after a call. And this is not an exaggeration.

Her parents talk poorly about me (the sin of gossip, I believe?) while she’s trapped in the car with them and then ask her to defend their honor when I critique them. So to Alan, if you have spies reading this, just know that if you’d like people to speak kindly about you, then you must be kind. I have never needed to lie when if comes to my story, I have simply retold the facts of our excommunication. We were forced out, and in that tender place in your mind where you don’t like to go- you know this. Because you told your daughter she could either leave me or leave the church. That is not an option. That is an ultimatum at best, an abuse of power at worst. If the stories sound ugly, perhaps it’s because your actions and the actions of Southlands Church in Brea were ugly.

The repeating theme is that they are always hoping, asking, demanding, intimidating a silence. A passivity. A going along with what they want to say.

My experience with this kind of denial of the self has been pure evil. It has grown a shame, an inability to be present in ones body, pervasive suicidal ideation, extreme loneliness.

Queerness does not grow this. Queerness has been light and life to me. It has been openness and dialogue and believing people at their word. I do not have to seek out a hidden meaning, they tell me and I trust. I tell them and they trust. This kind of living is not what produces shame.

Homophobia grows shame. Sexism grows shame. Racism grows shame. Ablism grows shame. Oppression grows shame. Ostracism grows shame.

And I became overwhelmed with this last night because I am simply helpless against it. One day my father and mother will die, and unless they learn and change, they will die not knowing me. Because they will have spent their whole life avoiding the truth of me. And that thought makes me weep most nights.

So the question posed is, do you deny yourself dignity to keep your tribe? And on one hand, I think there will always be that pull to be with the community you feel was promised to you at birth. Perhaps that it, that it feels like a birthright, being ripped away by those who boasted unconditional love for you.

But I always come back to love. I never seem to find it in these tribes. Because love never asks me to hide, the tribe does. Love never asks me to shrink myself, the tribe does. Love never asks for me to omit Sophie’s name. Love is enthusiastic that I have found someone who makes me feel voracious for life. Tribe never seems to care much if I want to be alive or not.

So I guess it’s just that simple. Do you want love or a tribe? And it’s actually not an easy answer because most of us want both. And sometimes there is both- we watch, seething with envy, as some people receive their birthright and get both.

Why couldn’t I get both? Why do I have to fight so hard to be myself and be loved for it? Why do I have to wake up every morning and refuse to deny myself while everyone asks me to? Some people are never asked! Why couldn’t that be me?

I see you, friend. I feel your tragedy in my bones. I live that tragedy in my life. So, we find, we not alone. We are tribe. And if to love is to know and understand… then I’m sure we love each other very deeply. See? We might not have our birthright, we we can have both too.

I feel like all people tell me these days, as I wander through my twenties, is that this ever evolving state I find myself in- well it’s gonna last forever.

Someone once described it to me as “turning over”, constantly turning over into new versions, new people, new dreams, new lines of thinking, new ways of existing in the world.

It sounds exhausting, but I’ve experienced it to be true. So many people in my circle discuss this idea of getting back to our “childhood selves”. And while I smile along to the sentiment of this, I privately always feel like this is probably unattainable.

I have a fondness for the child I once was, but I know that I’ll never be her again. With life has come change and adventure and grief, countless grief. C.S. Lewis writes that “grief is amputation”. So in many ways, growing up, with it’s inevitable grief, is also amputation. And sure, we find new ways of standing and moving. We locate new centers of gravity, but we’re not the same. And we never will be.

And so, with all of that said, with all of that being true… I find it to be a hauntingly miraculous feat to love and keep on loving.

I have been drawn to many a boy, a girl, a movie, or city only to find as years drag on, as I turn over and become new people, the draw almost always fades. It fades until it is nearly unrecognizable… and I suddenly cannot remember for the life of me, what I was so drawn to in the first place. And when we realize this, that we’re capable of slipping so unconsciously away from things we once loved- there is just more grief. And then that grief changes us again.

But there are things we love forever. Unforgettable things. They often get a bad wrap. People and places and dreams that we can’t escape no matter how many new people we become or how much time passes.

And yet what a gift to love forever! To love always. A near impossible feat, and yet some of us are so lucky to have something to adore in every single phase of our life.

I think about music as I write this piece. I think about the songs I wrote at 16. As I finished them, basking in their greatness, I thought I would never love any piece of writing as much as I did that song. And here I am, 25, writing truer, better songs still. Because I am different now. So “greatness” must be different.

But there are songs that I have never forgotten. There are songs which will always be true and great. Timeless, they represent me in every state, in every age. And I will love them til I die. No matter who I become.

I have loved few people in this way. But the partner I am with now, the only true partner I have ever been with, is one I will love for all ages. For all of our fights and her flaws and my flaws and oh how she enrages me-

I don’t think there will be a version of me that doesn’t want to sleep beside her. To tell her the horrid events of my day, or the miracles. I want to turn over and turn over and turn over and find her every time.

And I call it a feat to love something forever because it is. It’s hard work and I don’t believe it always comes naturally. Some loves live in us without trying or asking, but other loves we must grab by the teeth and never let go.

So whatever kind of love you find, the kind that passes with age, the kind that lodges, unmovable, in your soul, or the kind you must wake up and choose… adore them for what they are. For the purpose they serve.

And if you do receive the gift of loving something or someone forever… just know that you have done the near impossible.

I was never a happy child. In fact, I remember being very young when I first wrestled with and accepted that I was never going to be a very happy child, or teenager, or adult.

Before birthdays or awaited events, when people would ask me if I was excited, I would politely and calmly respond, “I don’t really feel that.”

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And it’s true. I don’t feel excitement or “gid” or happiness too often. When it comes it’s like a rushing wave, crashing over me. And I thrash around trying to stay under it. But it always passes.

Now, with the knowledge of how it comes and leaves in the blink of an eye, before I ever have times to really revel in it… well the wave also brings a sense of anxiety. Worse, sometimes it brings despair. So happiness, for me and I think maybe others too, is a muddled thing that’s rarely ever there and leaves us worse than when it found us.

This past week I was watching a tik tok, because I am nothing if not Gen Z and that’s where we post and consume our think pieces. It was a therapist who rattled off the three main things she tells to her intensive care clients each day. Her very first point grabbed my attention and held it for days.

“Your brain has never and will never exist to be happy,” said this user going by the name of @miss.mad.hatter .

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6TXWqTh/

She went on to explain that our brain really only monitors and sends us signals based on two specific things: safe and unsafe. Those are the categories. That’s it. Are we safe or are we not?

And from there, obviously, we take it and run with it. We’ve got a thousand names for the feeing of safety, in all of it’s variations. Grateful, ecstatic, grounded, in love, excited, giddy, joyful. Happy. And we give names to it’s opposite as well. Thousands more names to describe the sinking, jarring, scaring feeling of not being safe.

Miss Mad Hatter seems to think that it is relatively useless chasing “happiness”. I grew up feeling it was pointless too, but in a more cynical way than her. Because I had nothing to chase after in it’s stead. All I knew is I didn’t feel any of the thousands of words we use for “safe” hardly ever at all.

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I think that’s why hearing it framed this way was life changing. Because I know what safety is. I know what it feels like. And I also know I haven’t been very safe my entire life.

My childhood certainly wasn’t safe, nor was my adolescence, nor my college experience at a racist Christian university, nor were the jobs following my graduation, nor is my current work environment. So it would be shocking, odd really, if I had been feeling great.

Suddenly I didn’t have a broken brain that never felt happy, I had a precious little brain that never felt safe.

I think when people say things like '“just be happy” it can be upsetting. Because it’s framed like a choice that we could wake up and simply make.

But in this life you don’t always get to choose if you’re safe. Palestine, Congo, and Sudan are gutting reminders of that right now. And even if you are lucky enough to be able to choose, you didn’t get to choose as a child, trapped in that screaming, shaming house. Now you just live with the effects.

For all the good our brains do, they do have trouble letting go. So I think the best thing you can do is understand that

1. You’re not broken. Not even close.

2. Even when happiness feels unattainable, safety is! You can work towards it. Pick your friends based off it. Move to cities that make you feel it. Quit jobs that make you not feel it. Even kindness to the self is a small step towards being safer. Telling yourself you look nice in the morning. It’s corny and it’s also safe.

So here’s to claiming the safety that is within our control. Here’s to fostering it and working to grow it. Here’s to never getting happy, and instead, getting safe.