Untethered: You Need Help
“You need help.”
It’s an insult sometimes, right? It’s a controversial phrase, one that implies judgment. In true Autostraddle fashion, we have a whole column named after it. Usually “you need help” is uttered in response to someone’s perceived mental health issues, but I also think it says So Much about the ways we look at the idea of “help” and who needs it. If you “need help” you’re failing in some way, whether that’s with being the “right amount” of sane, or more often, when it comes to conforming to whatever niceness and politeness and respectability look like.
Asking for help, the kind that requires another person to set aside time for me, to exert themselves physically, feels as easy as touching a hot stove.
If I had done everything right, I wouldn’t be in the position of needing help, would I?
AND YET, I know we’re sick of how So Many People (and often people who have some kind of inheritance or family money) talk about “bootstrapping.” We know “girlbossing” and “leaning in” are things that can actually only be supported by the labor of others in some way and by a certain level of money and class privilege — the ability to buy prepared meals, to pay someone to do housework. Still, the mythology of self-sufficiency gets recycled and fed to us again and again from different angles, whether that’s the idea of having some off-grid cottage in the woods or of being able to find some sort of balance, some semblance of being well when everything is on fire. It’s too much of a challenge not to internalize it, to escape the lingering sense that everything should be Absolutely Fine when my ex only moved out in September and I’ve been working and working and working to burnout for who knows how long — and guilt when it’s not and I’m not somehow magically productive every waking hour and able to accomplish everything I wanted to just because I put it on a to do list.
Part of the rewiring I’ve had to undergo while embarking on this project of being a person without an infrastructural relationship (for the first time, really, in so many years) has involved the getting of help. I’ve been happy to make time when someone else has needed to rearrange a garage or move something heavy. But even with offers from other people, it’s been a difficult process sussing out just exactly how I want to approach getting help from the people in my life — how much I can ask for, from whom, and what I can do in exchange.
With one person, it’s been easy. We’re both working on our houses. I help him hang some drywall one day. He brings his truck and loads out some of my debris and takes it to the dump another day. This makes sense to me and is pretty easy. If I need a ride when my car’s in the shop, or if I’m sick and need food, I have a different friend I know I can ask, and I’ve done the same for her. I found out from yet another friend that if I had just texted them when I was alone on Christmas, that they would have been happy to hang. I just should have asked. As counterintuitive as it’s been to remap these pathways of care in my personal life, it’s also been a huge part of healing. It’s made me so much more resilient, too, I feel. In the past — and especially with the pandemic — I slid into the trap of relying too much on one single relationship. Breaking out of that isn’t so much a breaking as it is months of building connections.
It’s not like I’ve built up these friendships with this end goal in mind, of being able to ask for and give help in a multitude of ways with a small network of people, but because the process is a pleasure. Still, reflecting on it makes me feel like this is some solid measure of how far I’ve come since I began this column. I know that talking about networks of care is nothing new, especially among queer people, but it’s really something else to find myself there in a deeper way.
But, dear reader, why am I reflecting on this right at this moment? It’s because my dad and sister have come down to my place as a special Birthday Treat. Their treat? They’re helping me clear out old junk and home reno debris so that I have a fresh start to continue forward from. Everyone I’ve told about this has been blown away by how actually helpful this gesture is. And it has been! It’s also been strange, and hard. Until my dad and I repaired our relationship in a big way several years ago, I didn’t have much to do with my family in terms of actually helping each other out like this. It’s weird to have him and my sister digging through my things, and letting go of how odd that feels is a whole internal process in and of itself. Like, sure, go through my old art projects and my photos and my keepsakes from times in my life when we barely spoke and comment on it. This is fine. Everything is fine.
At the very least, there’s something cathartic about hearing your dad grumbling about the mess your ex-girlfriend’s left behind. It makes me feel like getting some help with it all isn’t so unreasonable.
Untethered: A Great Lady
I’ve been eulogizing, just to myself, in the moments between other moments that are claimed by tasks or thoughts of the present or literally anything else. But in the minute or so before the kettle boils, after the bag and honey are in the cup, I’ll stretch my mind back to the days when staircases were mountainous and I was still learning the names of birds.
My grandmother cared for me a lot when I was young, in those pre-Kindergarten years. My grandpa was alive then, but in his final years, so spent most of his time either at the kitchen table with his oxygen tank or on the living room couch with the same. So, that left my grandma to amuse me — and to our delight, we made excellent companions.
I had a hunger for exploration and, even at that age, would happily walk for long periods (for a child of three or four). This meant we spent countless hours just walking places, including around the quarter mile path in Buffalo’s Delaware park where I’d balance on the old cobblestone curb that bordered the grass, playing an endless game of not getting eaten by crocodiles. I’d accompany her on errands, to the cobbler or to the deli. On special occasions, she’d take me to a museum or to the zoo, where I turned to her as the holder of All World Knowledge and asked about everything from why there were so many naked ladies in the art museum to why the “Lucy” skeleton of an early human in the natural history museum was my-sized if she was an adult.
On the most special occasions, we’d go to the cemetery where we’d look at the graves and feed the ducks. At one point, on one of these cemetery visits, my grandma had picked up what might have been a guide pamphlet at the main office, and read to me aloud the story behind a particular mausoleum featuring a sculpture of a young man in repose with an angel above him. He lay with one hand on a Bible on his chest and his legs crossed in a number four shape. The angel, apparently, had been a maid, Katherine, he’d been in love with whom his parents forbade him from marrying and who they fired after sending him to Europe. When he died after a lingering sickness he contracted upon his return, clutching the Bible Katherine left behind, she supposedly became the inspiration for the angel above him, perpetually welcoming him into heaven. Did his rich parents ever do right by the maid they fired who became the model for an angel in their son’s grave? Probably not. I know what I did do, though, which was decide, in my childish superstition, that the best way not to die in my sleep was to sleep Exactly Like This Man. When we returned, my grandpa joked with me that a ghost had come by looking for me.
And why did I have such an intense dread of dying in my sleep? Well, because when I would kneel with my grandma during those days, at the edge of her bed to say our evening prayers before we crawled in and slept next to each other (my grandpa slept downstairs), we’d recite:
As I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
When I asked her about it, she explained exactly what it meant: that we were asking for safe passage to Heaven if we died in our sleep. This, naturally, presented me with the concept of Dying In My Sleep, which would plague me for most of my early years in one way or another. I slept like that man from the mausoleum for years to ward it off. For years!
I always knew my grandma was intensely aware of her mortality, of my grandpa’s, of mine, of everyone’s. It threaded itself through our conversations and our days together. Thanks to her, I learned early on what a DNR was, that she did not want to ever be kept alive by artificial means past the point of having agency. She was born during the Great Depression, lost a brother as an infant, lived without indoor plumbing in the Polish neighborhood in Buffalo, practiced Air Raid drills in World War II, and lost countless people — in all kinds of ways — along the way. My grandpa was also in the process of dying at the time and would pass by the time I was in the 1st grade. It had to have been heavy on her mind.
Last week, I drove through a wintery mix in my old Subaru up to Buffalo to see her for what might very well be the last time. As I approached my grandma’s bedside and my uncle woke her up, I had a feeling — despite the many “she probably won’t recognize you” warnings I’d received from my mom — that she would know me. Her eyes opened. I said, “Hi, Grandma.”
“What are you doing here?” She looked at my face and held my gaze. The question was bewildered — I didn’t live there! But it wasn’t unkind, and it was steeped with recognition. I told her I’d come to visit her, that I loved her. It’s hard to remember what I said, trying to have a moment in a room that’d become crowded with my uncles, my mom, my sister. My mom had put out a blast that I was coming up, so all of my grandma’s children were present to see me see her.
But here’s the thing. I think, on some level, I do really see her. When I was 13, I lived with her during the week for most of a school year. My dad was deployed, and my mom had decided it would be easier on her because of my after school running practice and such if I just stayed with my grandma who could drive me around or whatever. I’d pack up my bag and stay in a little spare bedroom where the entire wall next to the bed was a bookcase, stuffed with my grandma’s reading material. For most of her life, she was a voracious reader, and she certainly read the classics. A hardcover copy of Crime and Punishment sat in her living room at all times. But she liked the pulpy stuff, too. I distinctly remember her reading the entirety of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest series, as an example. I’d pick through her books, read them, know the things she had read, devouring some of the more scandalous books in secret. She didn’t speak down to me even when I was younger, just addressed me with a matter-of-fact tone that complimented my early grasp of language and child’s curiosity. As a kid, I was considered odd, except, looking back, I fit the mold of “The Little Professor” quite well, which would have suited her, someone who I suspect was and is also autistic.
When I lived with her as a teen, I noticed some things that stood out. She kept to a breakfast schedule, for one. Each day of the week had a specific breakfast she would prepare and eat on that day. She repeated this infinitely but still had it written on a leaf of paper she kept square to the edge of her kitchen counter for reference. She was particular about her routines, and I remember her quitting her book club because no one read the whole book and they “just wanted to chit chat,” which, valid.
Our connection, and the reason I pissed off my uncles for years by occupying the status of favorite grandchild over their kids, was one of neurodivergents who just kind of “got” each other, whether or not I grew up to be a gender-nonconforming tattooed bisexual. And in a lot of ways, I have my grandma to thank for the ways she showed me how to navigate the world, and this meant — often — with a kind of quiet disobedience, a distinct and singular approach to claiming the right to plan her own journey, even with whatever limits her life placed around her. She mythologized this part of herself, too, telling me stories about being a trendsetter; “When I started smoking, everyone[referring to her sisters and mother] decided it must be okay [for women to smoke], and they started smoking, too,” and “When I started wearing Tampax, everyone started wearing Tampax” are just two small tales from her vault.
When she found out the local state college was free (at the time), she decided she was simply going to attend because why not? She wanted to and that was always a good enough justification for her to do something. I still have the typewriter that her father bought for her off a fellow barfly while bragging about his daughter who was the first in the family to go to college at his usual nighttime haunt. She was conversational in Polish and told me stories from the neighborhood, like about how every man who came into the card shop she worked at with my grandpa’s parents got two gifts on Valentine’s Day, one for the wife and one “for the sweetheart.” She seemed unperturbed by this reality. It just was. She told me about the first time she painted her nails red and walked, head held high, through Buffalo’s Polish neighborhood while older women hissed at her and said “Devil, Devil!” when they saw her crimson-tipped fingers. And though she dropped out of college the first time, she returned, much to my mom’s dismay, at the same time she went, and to the same school where she fought with an advisor who told her women didn’t study history. She won that fight.
She also had a temper, was inconsistent in many of her narratives, and, ultimately, needed my grandpa’s help getting a job because she was so notoriously tactless that she couldn’t do so on her own. She would scoff at sappiness, unless it was directed at her. She could be hurtful without meaning it, through her bluntness. I remember being nine or ten or so, having drawn a self portrait that was on display at some school art show situation, and her remarking, “Hm. That doesn’t look like you.” Which, sure, 10-year-old me wasn’t going to be Michelangelo, and I am sure, factually, it was not an accurate representation of my face, but is that what you say to a kid? But even this, her just existing and saying the wrong thing and going on living, was a lesson.
Her approach to taking up space as herself, to finding her own company agreeable, to not needing to bend to other peoples’ will had my uncles, when I visited, calling her A Great Lady. It was an odd homecoming, reminiscing about her by her bedside while she lay there dying of a combination of a long battle with dementia and a recent fall. It’s been years since I’ve seen these uncles, for various reasons. I watched them be humans, grieving — whether that meant trying to hold a normal conversation through tears, insisting that my grandmother should still take her vitamins (for what?), or kind of dissociating and ignoring the Great Lady in the room to chat with me.
One thing I heard over and over again was that before the fall, one of the things she had still loved to talk about were the early days with me, our trips to the park, our walks and the fun that was just between us. I remembered that from when she could still do phone calls. I knew her memory was going, pre-pandemic, and so when I called her to say hello sometimes while walking to work in the morning, I’d just talk with her about the past. It kept her more engaged than the present, was more hard-wired in.
As I drove my sister back to her place where I was staying, we agreed without hesitation that our grandma probably hates this current state she’s in, that if she’d had a proper say, she would’ve chosen euthanasia. “She always said to pull the plug!” We talked about family dynamics, about how hard it was on our youngest uncle, clearly.
I visited her again on my own the next day, with only an aid, a family friend and a nurse out on worker’s comp, present (so no circle of uncles this time). I helped the aid get my grandma up and to the toilet, as well as into her wheelchair so she could go sit in the living room and have an egg and some Boost at the table. I sat talking to her for a while, and she recognized me again, this time saying nothing, but glancing around my face with her eyes. The aid gave me some time alone with her, and I said a real goodbye, told her how much I loved her, reminded her of our times again, knowing she could still hear me, even if she didn’t respond.
While my grandma was asleep, the aid told me she hoped my grandma passed soon. We’d built up a rapport that afternoon, and she told me why, that my grandma talked in her sleep when the aid was there, and that recently she’d just said, plain as day, “I just want to die.”
I said I knew that, talked about how she always talked about her DNR. She was clear, but there was nothing we could do. I said I hoped she felt like she could let go soon, now that all the family had come through.
And I drove home, back to Pittsburgh, thinking about her and the influence she had on me, on the ways she encouraged some of my more antisocial tendencies, for better or for worse. I still smile, when I think of her rocking me back and forth in a hammock one summer night, when she said, as we complained together about being annoyed by other people out in the world, “A wise man once said, ‘Hell is other people.'”
Untethered: Mercury Retrogayde
USPS has been sending my mail to my ex.
This is not her fault. To be clear. She did a normal thing, which was to forward her mail to her new address. However, the mail carriers have decided there is no way that two separate people could have lived at one address, and that then, one could move out while the other remained.
How did I notice this? I wasn’t getting my Christmas cards. There weren’t that many cards on their way, but the few I was supposed to get never appeared. When I realized the cards hadn’t come, I opened my front door, leaned to the side, stuck my hand into the little black mailbox, and slid my fingers around the inside, like there was somehow going to be mail hiding in the corner of a box that wasn’t six inches wide.
This went on for a little too long before I decided the mail wasn’t just slow, it was missing. I had no idea why my mail was MIA, did not at all suspect it was all being sent to my ex. And aside from catching one of the — at least three — mail carriers, I had no idea how I was supposed to deal with a situation like this. If most of the mail was missing, then surely something bigger was going on. I resorted to leaving a Post It Note on the mailbox saying I wasn’t receiving my mail, leaving my name and number, but after a day, the embarrassment overcame me. Was it me?
It wasn’t me. After calling USPS customer service, I had a case number and instructions to be sure to answer my phone when the investigator called.
“It says there’s a forward on your address. Did you move?”
I know where this is going.
“Nope. I’ve lived here for five years. Haven’t moved. Am calling you from my mailing address right now…But I did have an ex move out.”
In the course of talking about my ex, there was that pivotal moment when engaging with phone-based customer service where it can either go fine or — as happened once when I mentioned my ex-girlfriend while on the line with our car insurance — get you hung up on. This went fine, good even. The agent promised to let the carriers know to keep delivering my mail, and also, advised me to in fact leave a note on my mailbox.
So, then, there I was, putting all my business on a series of Post It Notes for the mail carriers to see. I still haven’t gotten certain cards, and they haven’t been returned to the senders. I’m assuming they’re just lost at this point.
The fact that I was facing down a communication mishap that was somehow ALSO linked to an ex is so very Classic Mercury Retrograde became impossible to ignore.
She didn’t quite recognize me, and the event was a memorial event on the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, so it really wasn’t the place to get into my past workplace drama. But seeing her again — as a person existing on her own, outside of the connections she’d had to an institution and people who had immensely fucked me up — gave me a chance to get reacquainted with her on her own terms, on my own terms.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had more than enough opportunities to contemplate the ramifications of basing your opinion on someone because of what you’ve heard about them. It was a delight to mentally slough off the bullshit that really belonged to other people that I’d somehow associated with this person and to let them be them.
When I later told the person who asked me to the memorial that I did in fact know how this person and I had met, before I could get another word out, they said, “I hope it was through fisting!” followed by a series of cute emojis.
I had to say, no, it was not through fisting, and also had to ask why it might have been through fisting. The answer was really obvious when I got it, but still. Conclusions were jumped to! I had to laugh at my phone and at the whole situation. I’m looking forward to being able to talk one on one the next time I run into her.
To soothe myself, as one does, I put on The Taking of Deborah Logan in the background. I hadn’t seen it before, and it always comes up as being a rather good horror movie, so without thinking too much about the content of the piece, I let it play.
About halfway through the movie and my work, the texts from my mom started. First of all, my sister wasn’t able to go to our dad’s gathering because she was sick. But I didn’t expect my mom to send the following:
“[Redacted] is sick. So looks like we all spend Christmas alone. Weird huh.”
Now, mind you. Yes. If you, like my mom, fight with all your fellow traumatized siblings so that you can’t have holidays together, and then you also go super rightwing and alienate your queer child, you might find yourself hanging out alone for Christmas. But, knowing her, she was probably happy to be able to send me this text and rub it in my face.
She’s also assuredly in a weird place, which tends to lead to an escalation in this kind of behavior. As The Taking of Deborah Logan progressed and followed Deborah’s descent into a possession that originally manifested as Alzheimer’s (I know. I spoiled it.), my mom texted me again. My grandma’s not doing well, she told me, which I knew. She’s dying and has been for a while as the dementia progresses. She also recently had a fall, which I know from having other people pass is usually the beginning of the end. The last time I visited her, I praised her for eating some fruit and told her it was good she’d done that. Her face lit up, childlike, at the reassurance. She might not have fully understood who I was. I know it can’t be easy to tell someone your mother is dying. I imagine this led, in part, to my mom wanting to point out she knew I was spending Christmas alone, just like her, just like my sister. But there has to be a better way to phrase things than “I know that means an abrupt change of plans for you,” as though a loved one’s death ever comes on some kind of schedule.
Everything feels like it’s on a loop. The person I’m fighting with over text has someone dying, too. We’re all just shooting electronic barbs at each other.
It took a call from my incarcerated penpal, actually, to pull me back out the pit I’d sunk into. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. My 60-something-year-old gay incarcerated friend cheered me up and asked me if I wanted to get on a video call. By the time we were done chatting, I felt a bit lifted. I hope I did right by him, too.
On the day after Christmas, a friend came by my house with cookies from her and her partner’s families. She and I sat on the porch and talked about the things that were making us depressed, and also New Year’s Plans. I looked at my cheetah print pajama pants and at her rather smart butch work clothes and breathed in the smell of the rain bouncing off my aluminum awning. It was a sweet moment.
By the time she left, I had a text on my phone from a friend I thought had ghosted, had perhaps wanted to end our friendship in the spring of this year. But no, they had…tried to send me a letter that was never delivered. It meant the world to me that they weren’t gone, that I could pull their memory back out of the pile of people and things that I’d lost this year and that they wouldn’t have to be a memory anymore, but instead, a friend.
But, also, this text was not about the fact that I hadn’t yet received the letter (thanks USPS), but about the fact that my friend had accidentally sent a letter intended for me inside of an envelope sent to a different friend. They knew this because this friend had texted to say they’d clearly gotten my letter. Who knows what it could say. “Dear Nico, fuck you,” etc. is where my mind goes immediately, even if I know this friend would never bother if that was the case. If I got the envelope addressed to me, it would likely contain the letter for the other friend. I said I would keep an eye out for it and that I would probably have to call USPS soon, anyway.
There’s something here about perception and about intention and about, as much as we talk about communication around here, about how our words just sometimes come out wrong, or not enough, or messy. And about how dealing with the aftermath of mistakes is a part of communication, too. Now my whimsical ass is thinking I should send a letter to someone, I think, just to see where it goes. And if I can take a lesson from this series of mishaps, it’s that this coming year, I hope to give as many second chances, or more, as I’ve been given.
Untethered: Ghosts of Friendships Past
“Wait…are you going to be around for Christmas?”
My ears perk up when my friend who lives up the street says this. We’re drinking peppermint hot cocoa in my kitchen after a volunteer meeting.
“Yeah, I am!” Does she want to do something?
“Can you watch the kitties?”
“Of course! I’d love to.” I don’t miss a beat. That would’ve been embarrassing.
There’s something that stings, that tastes a little metallic, about going through a grocery checkout line with a 12-pack of Diet Faygo Cola and a single microwave meal while contemplating the fact that the woman who once fired you along with an entire theater staff — for doing insubordinate-y things like pushing back against white supremacy culture internally — has a show premiering in January. While I text the aforementioned friend about wondering whether I should show up to the green room party like some kind of off-brand Maleficent, I also tell her about the crushing weight a recent friend hang left lodged in my stomach.
“I found a pack of cigarettes from last winter in my coat when I put it back on the other day. I never check my pockets before retiring a coat for the winter. I’m not sure many people do. The discovery sent me back through time like a stone off a slingshot.
It was a different time, a different brand, a moment where I was distinctly miserable. Still, I had a ring on my finger, and I had someone to spend my winter nights with. It feels like I have an infestation of shadows, now, like they’re spreading around the house like mold.”
It’s funny, the kind of symbolic weight someone can hold in the course of events in our lives without ever knowing it. F (and the little dog) were the last two people my ex and I saw together as a couple. In fact, it was the fight after leaving F’s place that ultimately led to the breakup, to my finally calling it. Seeing F again was a kind of closing of the loop, and also, a way of moving past her feeling so defined in my mind by that moment in time.
So, it naturally came up pretty early on in the conversation that we hadn’t seen each other since the breakup. Without much prompting, she shared, with emphasis, she had heard “allll about the breakup.”
“All about it?” I was a wee bit taken aback. I think I looked it, too. She went on to explain, again, that she wasn’t taking sides, that she valued her friendship with me, that she knew breakups were hard on both ends, including the end of the person who initiated the split. She also went on to explain all of the ways my ex had been a good friend to her, which I was aware of. If I’m interpreting what she meant by that, it was to note for me why she’d been willing to listen, maybe also to signal to me that she understood perfectly well that there are two sides to everything.
Deep down, I knew my ex probably wouldn’t hold back when it came to sharing whatever she wanted to with mutual friends. Having confirmation of this suspicion was something completely different. Of course, I expected her to talk to her close friends, the ones she’d known for years who’d been her friends since before I knew her, to her therapist — I was talking to my sister and my therapist, after all — but to hear F had been the recipient of enough detail that she would hold her hands up and shake her head, that was a knife finding its way into the meat between my ribs. Like scurvy, it reopened old wounds I thought were scarred over. Since that hang, I’ve had the sensation of being a doll whose limbs are becoming unsewn, a dissociation from my body, from my sense of self.
The hang was good, honest, fun, deep, but the revelation hung over me the whole time. I confessed to F that she was the only mutual friend who’d been “more” of a friend of my ex who’d maintained any kind of contact with me, that it meant a lot. She asked me outright if I’d been feeling isolated. I cried at the table, over our winter spiced beers, but then recovered as best I could. The little dog sat in my lap.
And then, to my absolute horror, I listened to the door open and shut, complete with bells jangling. My jacket stayed on. I grabbed a weapon and looked around the corner. Nothing looked amiss. I checked the door. It was locked. I checked the rest of the house. No one was there.
With my heart beating in my throat, I texted a friend. Play “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” for Bill, the Boomer man ghost who lives with me, they said. I did, and the doowop playlist that ensued made for some slapstick music to be haunted to.
We both loved horror, and we both were talking about, discussing horror from a queer perspective in the early 2010s when every new movie we unearthed and absorbed into our intra-relationship discourse felt like the revelation that it was. I received House of Psychotic Women as a gift and appeared in an interview in the written portion of my ex’s MFA thesis. The holidays were no exception. One year, while living in the Bay Area, I took us to go see The Winchester House, but on Christmas Eve, lit up with Victorian-style Christmas trees. At one point, the electric system got overloaded, and the tour was plunged into darkness. Someone screamed.
I got called a twonk recently (complimentary). It reminded me of two twonks who were once couple friends of my ex and I. One of them was obsessed with Black Christmas, the 1974 version where the lesbian stuff is subtext. But that was what we had! We had subtext, and we watched it to mark the season. When this pair of couple friends with the same name, we’ll call them C&C, didn’t speak to me ever again, not once, after the breakup despite being friends for seven years, despite my being friends with C1 prior to my being in the relationship I was in, I was devastated. But I should have anticipated it. My ex had laid a lot of groundwork prior to our breakup, talking about me in so many ways I didn’t realize — because what kind of person in a relationship would badmouth their partner to mutual friends? I also shouldn’t have been that surprised because C1 and I did once have a temporary friendship breakup that was precipitated by a heated disagreement over our interpretations of The Bad Seed. I should have probably seen it coming, but it still hurt, nonetheless.
C1 hailed Black Christmas as the first American slasher, but there’s actually one before it, and it’s a made for TV movie starring Jessica Walter.
I watched Home for the Holidays (1972) for the first time last year after hearing about it on a podcast. You can currently find it on YouTube. It’s the right amount of twisty and contains very little actual gore, but is also the kind of deep, sonorous voices that actresses carried in a certain era. Four women, sisters, return home to their ailing father who’s convinced his much younger (new-ish) wife is poisoning him. Everyone is catty, dad included. And then, instead of being some kind of murder mystery, we just…get all slasher-y! It’s a missing link in the chain, a precursor to both Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and also a little reminder for me that we really don’t ever know the whole story of something, of what was actually “first,” or of what led to something happening, not usually. It’s also a reminder, if we’re on our Being Grumpy About Old Enemies Shit, that sometimes shitty people, like C1, are wrong and stubborn and more interested in validating whatever they’re interested in preserving in their worldview than any kind of truth. And then there are people like F who know that things are always complicated, and that you can value people as individuals, even if their relationship doesn’t work out.
I’ve got plans tonight to watch either Black Christmas or Home for the Holidays with a friend. It’s a toss up. But, either way, it’ll be a new little memory, something that I hope eases the soreness a little bit.
Untethered: I Have To Stop Getting Engayged or Married on Holidays
Listen. On this road trip of life/death, sometimes you gotta share the AUX cord with a ghost. Readers of The A+ Insider know I recently recovered my bluetooth speaker only by promising the ghost in my house I’d throw him some “Freebird” and other similar tunes once in a while because it’s true that as a roommate who probably does not share my taste in music, he’s putting up with a lot.
And speaking of ghosts, the Yule/Holigay/Christmas season sure is a time for them. Famous guy-who-attempted-to-get-his-wife-committed-so-he-could-have-guilt-free-time-with-his-younger-mistress Charles Dickens re-popularized the Christian holiday with a ghost story, after all. Then, there’s the fact that the time between Christmas and The Epiphany (Three Kings Day) is also the most haunted time of year according to European tradition, something I love to remind everyone of when they start to lament that Halloween has passed. Things are just getting started!
So, what better thing to be haunted by with the turning of the seasons and the marking of special days on the calendar than the ghosts of relationships past? A lot of things. There are a lot of things that would be better than this.
My ex and I mutually proposed to each other on Christmas last year. This year, it’s the anniversary of a broken engagement. Last Christmas held the promise of an entirely different future cradled in the plastic boughs of the tiny, artificial potted pine tree we displayed in the center of our living room. There’s a sense you should maybe be collecting ornaments, marking the years of your relationship, the milestones crossed together, the places you’ve visited. I still have a Sasquatch ornament from a visit to the Pacific Northwest with my ex. That’s the only one we accrued.
There have been other ornaments, other trees. When I left my marriage before that engagement, I did not take any of the ornaments we’d carefully collected and curated. Some of them were my ex-husband’s family heirlooms, which of course should stay in the family I was no longer part of. I remember some of them, the way his grandmother had crocheted doily-esque covers for glass ornaments in snowflake patterns, a beautifully old-fashioned touch. Others were gifts we bought each other, or multi-packs of things we thought were cute, and all of them were tainted.
My dad warned me about getting married on Halloween. He seems to think Halloween weddings are actually cursed, set up to fail because of the choice of day. He’d gone to one when I was a kid, wearing a pirate costume that then made its way into the dress up box my mom kept for me. It was a plastic tub she’d put old Halloween costumes and discarded yet interesting pieces of clothing into (from an old prom dress of hers to outdated hand-me-downs like flowery Polish lady headscarves). At some point, each of us wore the pirate costume. It got a lot of use. Our family loved Halloween when I was young. It was all fake cobwebs and plastic spider and skull rings and the special treat that was dry ice. My mom hosted Halloween parties for kids my age a couple years in a row, sweetly peeling grapes and cooling cooked spaghetti so we could stick our hands into shoe boxes she’d cut holes into so we could feel the “eyeballs” and the “guts.” Sometimes, my parents really did things right. It would have been impossible not to notice I adored horror and the supernatural. I asked my mom to check out the entire nonfiction section on monsters and ghosts from the library when I was only three, and it just never stopped. They leaned into my special interest by making sure we went all out for the holiday in the kind of DIY way they could afford. The Halloween marriage, though, that hadn’t worked out. My dad would only shake his head and say “it went wrong” when I tried to press him about what exactly had occurred with the couple, which was very Stephen King Character of him.
So it happened. On Halloween of 2017, I was standing in my living room in a vintage red prom dress because I was going as Lydia from the wedding scene in Beetlejuice to our small Halloween party that was the actual, real, official wedding. There’d already been a wedding ceremony and party, all in the same location and relatively secular, all for our extended families, coworkers and friends, but we hadn’t gotten around to signing the papers, yet. It was almost certainly a portent that we were both, perhaps, dragging our feet, that things would not work out. We’d invited our close friends to our house and had prepared the marriage license, a self-officiating type available in Pennsylvania due to the legacy of Quakers’ leader-less ceremonies. We scrawled our names on the paper just before midnight, and two friends signed as witnesses. We celebrated. My ex kept his fox mask on the whole time which was, in retrospect, creepy.
And then the marriage? It went wrong.
What had started as a queer partnership full of bisexuality and gender fuckery descended toward a place where my ex became increasingly aligned with cis-heteronormativity, and I was continuing to make my bisexuality known and let myself slip back into a gender fluidity I’d ignored for a long time. During one of my more masc moments, he yelled at me, “You LOOK like a boy!” I yelled back “So? You FUCK BOYS!” To which he had no answer. As the gaslighting came to a head, to the point I wasn’t sure whether I’d made up entire conversations, agreements, scenarios, events in my head, to where I’d actively started contemplating suicide, I found a way out with the help of a few friends, and stumbled into the sunlight just shy of six months after Halloween.
The first Halloween that came around after this, I don’t think I dressed up. I don’t remember what I did. I think it wasn’t anything. It was a reminder that my best friends of a decade who’d signed the marriage license stopped talking to me when I asked for a divorce, that I was rebuilding, that I was tired. But over time, it got easier, and I kind of forgot that Halloween ever would have been my wedding anniversary. This year, when I was tits out as The Slutty Grim Reaper at the punk bar, I certainly didn’t recall, or if I did, it pinged and flew away again, like a fly in the room, a little nuisance but nothing interesting, nothing I’d remember. Time’s like that.
But I have to say, it really does ruin a holiday if you go and make it a special day for a relationship that ends painfully. Why, why, why did I do it twice after doing what I did to my beloved Halloween?! I’m also a Yule Gay! I love this season and all its gingery, nutmeg-laced, Krampus-whippin’ goodness. What have I done??
I feel like the answer is twofold. On the one hand, I can really be romantic about holidays! I’m a seasons person, someone who wants to mark the turning of the year. Smells — fallen leaves and rain and the first snow and wood smoke and cinnamon — unlock memories and I get this urge to smush all of the comfort and delight I’ve always wanted holidays to hold together with people I love. On the other hand, sometimes, romantic gestures are a last-ditch effort, and the trappings of a holiday are perfect for disguising the cracks. On Halloween, you can wear a mask and hide in the candlelight, and in December, you can warm everything up with glowing lights, smooth over difficulties with the sheen of wrapping paper.
I hope I don’t do this again. I really have to quit. On the other hand, it would be delectably cursed to go with any of the holidays I have left. A St. Patrick’s Day engagement? A Leap Day Las Vegas wedding? ANYTHING on The Fourth of July or Thanksgiving — ugh. What if I just keep getting engaged/married/divorced and I decide to keep picking holidays to do it on in order to punish myself but also because I think it’s kind of funny? I do appreciate that I have a lot of potential ahead of me in this life, including the potential to continue to make some truly messy decisions. But I also hope I don’t!
And as for this year? This tree? This Yule? I got myself a Mothman ornament recently when I visited the (very caked up) Mothman statue and museum in West Virginia on a solo trip. I’ve got a friend with a truck who’s agreed to take me to a tree farm, and I have a tree stand I joyously thrifted. I think it’s time to get a small, evergreen tree, to decorate it with dried orange slices and lights I got from the flea market and exactly two cryptid ornaments, and to say that, of all my decisions, I’m happy that I’ve slowed my roll.
Worth it? Worth it.
Untethered: Into the Woods
The woods are Escape. They have always held my personal ideal of “freedom” cradled in their branches.
As soon as I was more or less conscious of being a being with some kind of relation to the world, four or five or so, I began to look off into the woods. This was easy to accomplish, because I grew up in the country. Our little house sat on a little bit of land that abutted a long stretch of field, full of high, natural grasses. It was also full of yellow jackets and so was impassable as far as I was concerned. The closest I could get was the short willow tree, really more of a bush, at the edge where the short green grass met its tall yellow counterpart, and where there was also a curious boulder, in which you could see the fossils left from marine life. Sometimes, rocks in our region were just placed there by ancient glaciers, torn up from somewhere else and long ago. And just beyond the young willow and the old rock was the field, and beyond the field was The Woods.
I would stare at them and feel my little heart beat, making plans for the day I would take off into them. There was always, always something unsatisfactory about the life I was presented with, and the woods in their lush greenery or their white icey webs or their fall glamor seemed like the best answer. All of my favorite characters went into the woods. Sure, the woods were ultimately, usually, dangerous. But the woods were also where it was at.
So, then, it was not surprising that when I was old enough and my best friend was old enough, we were allowed to go by ourselves into the woods behind her house, past the farm land that grew strawberries and corn in the summer and pumpkins in the fall, and play among the trees. We clambered past rusting farm trash and down a long ravine to where the 18-mile creek wound its way over smooth, flat rocks. For hours, we’d walk and talk and make believe, two avid readers obsessed with the same stories, the fantasy and the magic and the darkness of the woods. We made plans to run away into the woods. We tried to see how far we could make it, coming back just as the sun was setting, into the yellow glow of my friend’s mother’s kitchen where we would wash our hands under the faucet that pulled water up from a well so it was always so, so cold at first.
And as I write this to you, from a tiny cabin in the woods where I’m at a writing residency, I am sitting at the intersection of the personal symbol of a thing and the realization of that thing. I am in the woods and I am escaping and I am returning because I have escaped here before.
Last night, the sun set while I drove through the mountains just past Roanoke, where white settlers famously disappeared (as in: were gonna die but instead joined local Native American tribes or, yeah, died), on my way down to Tennessee. All the while, I was admiring the fall foliage, grateful to see reds so bright they were practically fuschia lining the edges of gray cliffs, to see rolling leaves of gold and orange and burgundy and brown and evergreen that I would never have seen if I’d spent this whole month in the city. I knew the whole time how far I still had to go and how that would mean over three hours of driving in the dark. I’d wanted to start earlier, but my ADHD had other ideas. Once I got on the road, I knew I was relatively fucked, but there was nothing for it but to do it. More often than not, when trying to go anywhere involving a multi-hour drive, I wind up in the “now you’re completely fucked” category. It’s not not a disability! This really sucks, to be honest, and always has, and also it’s embarrassing on top of it all.
I could see the sky, but I could only see the absence where the trees and the mountains were. They stood on either side of the highway, obsidian. The thing about this escape is that it’s full of life, but you can’t see it.
After about two hours of exhausting twists in the dark with semi trucks barrelling up behind me, blinding me with their lights before passing me, I pulled into a combo Dunkin Donuts and gas station situation. After the only other car parked at the moment in the parking lot stopped and a dude got out, he stood for a moment by the pumps, inhaling the last of his cigarette, staring me down. I am good at keeping my face neutral, so I did. He stared. I pumped gas. He went inside to get whatever. After my tank filled, I pulled right in front of the Dunkin Donuts and went in to find a couple queers and maybe a token straight dude goofing off. I got some old donut holes and a hot coffee and told them I legit did not care that they were in back doing nothing while I looked at the donuts for a few minutes. I wanted to ask them where I was, but I didn’t. They were distracted, making the most of their shift.
Back in the car, I encountered the fact that I have good friends. Not one, but two people had checked up on me on my drive. Platonic buds. People who value our connection and who knew I had a long, solo drive south. Where once, where often, where always, I had a partner in these adult activities, I had other people showing me with their actions that it can in fact work other ways, that friends can be a bulwark against the dark. The stares from unfriendly straights were, as always or perhaps moreso, present on this drive, but so was my knife — and the queers in my phone.
And as I write this, the sun is setting again. There is an inevitability once you’re out there, in the woods, in the dark. The queers reading this who spend endless time in the woods are laughing at me and know. Like anything, it gets easier with experience. I only have a couple more hours of daylight, and then I’ll be asked whether I am so brave, whether I really want to be alone, whether I want this “escape” when All The Lights Are Out and there is scratching outside.
Not all nights are dark. Not all woods at night are pitch.
Just a couple weeks ago, I was camping with a lover on the side of a mountain in central Pennsylvania in anticipation of a long hike the next day. It was also a full moon. I left the tent to pee in the middle of the night and was pleasantly surprised, because I have spent too much time away from opportunities to see this happen recently, to not need a flashlight. Everything was gorgeous and visible, if without much color. My pale ass hands showed up perfectly fine in front of me, and I easily found a spot away from the tent to pop a squat and stare up at those milky leaves.
Whenever I’m reminded the moon can shine bright enough that most humans can see well enough to complete basic tasks in the middle of the night, I’m reminded of the reason a harvest moon is called such (because it allowed for late work on harvest nights), and, yes, I am reminded of the alienation we feel under Capitalism and in a Colonialist state, a part of a fascistic project that urges us toward abandoning the simple, free, impossibly ancient utility of the light of the full moon in the woods on the side of a mountain.
Everything is silver, and you can see.
Amazon has a camera you can affix to your front door to monitor yourself and your neighbors. It can also see at night.
Stay off of social media because the horrors will upset you. A social media blackout can be more obscure than a dark night.
Maybe the woods are not so scary.
The other residents and I talked, one of our first conversations, about how weird it was to arrive at our scheduled residency, in our part of the world, while a genocide was taking place.
The scratching outside right now is for sure just rodents. I just saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I was looking right at a mouse, and it looked at me. I’m going to have to move my oatmeal off the floor.
Or if the scratching is some man who wants to do me harm, it wouldn’t be the first time.
But the woods can burn. GPS location can pinpoint you. Drones can fly overhead. There is no real seclusion in 2023. It’s an illusion, and it’s afforded until it isn’t. The natural world, any semblance of freedom of movement, our lives, are here until they aren’t.
And then there’s the fact that it’s largely white people saying things like this, that they could run from a society and out of it into nature, as if that’s even possible while still existing within the same ever-more-fascistic state. Because it’s a colonialist idea that there is a “nature” separate from us and from human society, that there is a presumed access for white settlers to the land we’re on, the “nature,” the woods in North America and at the sites of other colonial projects that is not presumed for the land’s Indigenous peoples.
The woods are soaked in a bloody history of genocide, a word pulsing through my mind and body this week. The National Parks and State Forests and signs with Smokey the Bear that inform us what the fire risk is for the day are all reminders of wrongs yet to be righted. I feel like, in recent years, I’ve seen an uptick in knowledge and awareness around Land Back movements, and even some good news coming out of these movements. Part of learning and unlearning around Land Back, too, is trying to burn away the colonizer inside my own head, letting controlled brush fires destroy ideas that aren’t serving us, trusting that there have to be other, better things that can grow in their place.
The woods are not neutral, are not virginal, are not something that exist outside of the influence of human interaction and touch. Indigenous peoples in North America have cultivated food forests for thousands of years, contributing to the biodiversity of forests, and also, resulting in the sense from Europeans who entered these forests hundreds of years ago for the first time that they were somehow abundant of their own accord, Eden-like, as though the trees had just up and assembled themselves into orchards that grew alongside medicinal and culinary herbs and berry bushes. Now, the traces of these food forests could be used by Indigenous tribes as part of land back claims, demonstrating that these forest areas, that the woods surrounding villages were actively cultivated, tended, inhabited before colonizers forcibly removed or murdered native populations. The sense that the woods are “untouched” by humans is a relatively recent development; it feels like it’s part of the same colonial-capitalist project to keep us unmoored from our surroundings, to leave the management of these woods to corporations, to governments, not to the people who have known what they’re doing, to mentally, passively sign onto theft. When I pass brambleberries in the woods, which have no poisonous look alikes in North America by the way, I wonder if someone played a part in putting them there, if those are the descendents of berries that were intentionally cultivated in a patch for convenient picking, or if they’re here now because birds carried the seeds from a food forest that is still winding its roots into the ground even as the uncultivated woods around it bleed into its edges. In cities, our local governments have planted mostly male flowering trees, so that we can have the aesthetics of these trees, but none of the fruit, so that the trees can’t feed people. Because that’s not allowed.
When I was a kid and I wanted to run from what I could sense around me, from a town that hated queers and parents that imposed religion and schools that restricted thought, I longed for the woods. I didn’t see cities in my mind, didn’t imagine cities as a point of liberation, not when I was a kid. I imagined solitude or a few friends and leaves and roots and roaming. Now, on Google maps, I can see how the woods are sandwiched neatly between highways. When I walk into the forest, I can often still get a couple bars on my phone.
When I was on the side of that mountain and my lover and I were sitting by our fire, we heard something that, at first, sounded like human voices, talking in the distance. We sat, tense. We didn’t see any lights. This carried on for some time. Then, it coalesced into what could have been wolves, could have been coyotes, more likely, based on the fewer voices we were hearing. But then, it got closer and closer until it sounded like a single owl.
We opted to hike the remains of our food out of our camping spot and back to the car to the dark. On the way, I looked into the woods. I saw figures, tall and with faces unlike anything I’ve really ever seen before, just looking at me, standing in among the trees. While I felt pins and needles, I didn’t panic. They were just looking. I was just looking. I said nothing to them or about them until we were out of those woods, remembering what everyone says about the Appalachian mountains.
A particularly relevant part of my project here, my pursuit of myself after continued and mostly cohabiting partnership, has been to be okay with defining and holding my own beliefs. It can be hard to parse out what is yours and what is a partner’s when you live together, spend so many moments together. So, now, I just have to ask myself if what I saw in the woods was real. And regardless of what you think, I will tell you that mostly, when I think of them, I just feel a mourning.
It’s not an escape, it’s just something different.
When I first came up here, in April, I was monogamously partnered. The experience was, in the writing I was working on (a forthcoming project!) and in my personal life, hand-in-hand with facing some long standing fears. Staying in this little cabin then was terrifying. I was sleep-deprived. Every sound set me on edge. I powered through and played it off in the daylight, only to return to a place of panic when the sun set. Similarly, any time I was left home alone in the house we used to share, every stray sound elevated my anxiety to near-panic-attack levels.
And now, I think, because there is no alternative, suddenly, it’s easier. I wasn’t expecting that.
I wasn’t expecting it to be so easy to listen to the house creak at night. And now, it seems like such a silly thing to have worried about. It makes me wonder what else is keeping me constrained in ways I am not even seeing. What else is restricting my better self out of fear?
Sometimes a symbol is just a symbol. It’s helpful for understanding ourselves and our place and our capabilities. But once we know more, it’s time to figure out what to do past the purely symbolic. TikTok ideas of escapism are futile and honestly counterproductive. My childhood ideas were beautiful and important and also childish. I’m still unpacking why I always felt so anxious while partnered when I was alone at night but feel less so now. I am not sure I like the answers. And I know ‘little me’ wants something even better, something more right than just running away.
This is Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
This piece was written while I was in residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts. Thank you to Sundress Publications and their staff for their work and support of writers.
Untethered: On Living Alone, Reimagining Family
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
It’s not like I don’t have role models for people in my family living alone. I do, in fact — and they’re, specifically, women. My parents divorced when I was 15, and my mom never remarried. I spent my high school years living with my single mom and little sister, and because of my dad’s deployment, it felt like that had been the case for years before then, anyway. My grandma never remarried after my grandpa died when I was six. For most of my life, she lived alone, alleging that she was content with her own company, getting help from her three sons and her daughter (my mom). My sister lives alone and likes it. Now, I live alone. Now, my mom takes turns with my uncles and various aides to go to my grandma’s house and cartake. Her dementia’s advanced to where she doesn’t recognize her kids anymore. I said hi to her over the phone the other day, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know who I was either. My mom’s fallen deeper and deeper into a mix of alt right conspiracy theories and white lady appropriative hodge podge mysticism. By the time this publishes, she’ll have probably gone through with her plans to flee to a park during the national security alert test because it’s supposed to activate a microchip we all got injected in us when we got the COVID vaccine. You’ve been warned. I don’t know what I’m warning you about. Zombies, probably.
I’ve been dredging through the remains of my life since my ex and I started living in this house four years ago. It feels like shoveling shit from one pile to another. It’s hard work putting this right, cleaning up debris from home reno and just the inertia that can occur when two people with ADHD cohabitate. I have garbage bags on my garbage bags. And because cleaning is distinctly not a preferred activity for me, I spend a lot of time screaming and yelling at the trash while I throw it away, bringing all the drama and elaborate sighs to my little all-by-myself huffy fits, and trying to find things to listen to while hauling boxes and garbage bags around. It might sound like the house is very, very messy, and while it is by my standards, it’s also that I can only piece together an hour here, a couple hours there. Life is hauling me forward. There’s work, of course, and that is many hours a week. Sleeping, working out, cooking, friends and dates and sex and writing all take up time. And then there’s the way that cleaning gives my mind space to think. When I’ve strung together a few evenings in the house, alone, cleaning and cleaning and sorting and throwing things away, I have ample opportunity to start to process past traumas, to really think things through and see how they’re popping up again for me, to watch the cycles winding and unwinding themselves through my current timeline. This may have resulted in my gladly accepting an invitation for drinks at a punk bar only to burst into tears at the counter in front of everyone about something that had bothered me for…decades? You think you’re going to settle into finally living alone with a cup of tea, to gaze out of the window into the middle distance, but instead it turns out your inner child is waiting in the closet, and they’re dual wielding hammers.
Is that one of the reasons so many people would rather stay in a relationship than face being alone? Because if you’re by yourself, there’s no one to take up the space, so then it’s up to you to fill the room with chatter and thoughts, and the thoughts can twist into all the things you were pushing deep down into your basement. There’s that, and the fact that being alone feels dangerous in a hyper-literal sense. I’ve gotten used to the creaks and moans of the house, the occasional ghost seen walking behind me in the room in the reflection of the kitchen window, the way my leaning against something can cause the wood to sound like footsteps. But I’ve also become more and more aware of my position in my neighborhood, where the houses neighboring me are vacant, and the best I have are neighbors a few blocks down. I know them, but my part of the block is eerie in its quiet, dark and unlived-in. Next to me, a vacant house’s front yard has grown thick with thistles. The sun is setting earlier each day, and the time we’ll be spending in the dark is getting longer and longer. One night, while I walked up the 20+ stairs to my front door, past the scraggly and sharp and deep thistle patch, a pair of yellow eyes flashed at me. It was just a city deer, one of the several that flit in and out of my yard with regularity, but it made me want to jump out of my combat boots for a second. I tuck little weapons into pockets, look around a lot, check spaces I feel a less paranoid person would ignore, and wear shoes I can run in. With this, I think about what I said in my conversation with Stef Rubino about strength training about the way I want to move through the world, how I want to be physically stronger because of how I live my life, because I’m “visibly queer” (whatever that may mean), because I don’t orient my life around cis men or their “protection” and also because I’m by myself a lot and I value my solitude, not just in a way where I’m doing my own thing in well-populated areas, but alone in a only-person-I-can-see-around-me-for-blocks-and-blocks kind of way. I don’t know, maybe you think I’m silly. How do you deal with it?
Haunting me, still, though, and making me think of my grandma’s fate, my mom’s future, my sister’s, my own, is something someone said to me recently, in conversation. I’ve been thinking about my age, and regardless of however I may feel about it on a gender level, my uterus, and the potential that hollow little organ holds for having a kid. I brought up the fact that I was considering having a kid in this conversation, and my friend said, “Do it. You should.” They went on to tell me about an elder lesbian they’ve been helping to care for. I’m unclear on the details of how this got started, but apparently her wife died and my friend’s been helping her clear her yard. More sudden alone-ness. More clearing and cleaning of debris. But this lesbian, according to my friend, drinks a 12-pack of beer or more a day, is having trouble recovering from her surgery, and acts out in frustration and rage at times. According to my friend, she pulled a gun on them at one point during a heated altercation where the lesbian raged at my friend for leaving for the day, telling them she knew they were abandoning her. My friend tells me to have a kid because she’s seen too many old dykes with no one. It’s a reason. A single reason to consider it, but also, not the best reason to have at the top of the list when thinking about bringing a whole child into the world.
And then I think forward to how I might want my life to look when I’m 50, 60. Do I want younger family members? With mindful choices and a lot of luck, having a kid could mean having a good relationship with said kid for years and years, for the rest of my life, even. With my ex gone, so is, too, the fact that she never wanted to have a baby, and that I didn’t want to either at the time. I’m still not sure about it, but I’m making myself sit with the possibility, as a choice a person can make for themselves, outside of monogamous relationships or marriage or cohabitation, outside of cishet or capitalist expectations, but just as a thing to consider on its own merits. When I think about throwing wrenches into the gears of the relationship escalator, I also think about what it might mean to grab hold of one of the cycles my family’s in and to see if I can crack it, break myself free — and what it might mean to do that not through completely rejecting a part of life as though it’s bad in and of itself, but by considering what I can do differently.
One of the reasons my grandma might be in such steep cognitive decline is her isolation. Family lore says that she was cruel to her kids. I’ve also witnessed it to a certain extent. She also was stubborn and wouldn’t socialize much. She kept to herself like an anchoress, walled up, doing less and less each day. Her kids have mixed feelings about her, or my mom certainly does. To my knowledge, they made little to no effort to seek out memory care, to do any research, to do more than maintain her physical body. Then, my mom, too, makes little effort to bridge the gap with her brothers, with her kids. She’d rather be right, be vindicated, be a bigot than have closer family ties, than maintain friendships. To consider trying to make family is to consider reimagining family from the ground up, to summon into being a healthier approach I’ve never really lived in, only seen from the outside. It would take a ton of effort and faith and queer magic and sacrifice and who knows what else. And the clock is moving steadily forward, always, while I think about not just the possibilities I saw when I first entered onto this journey — moving my body and making new friends and reveling in the heat of a slutty summer — but also the ones that have come knocking, ghostly knuckles on a pane of glass in the back of my mind, with the turn of the seasons into fall.
Untethered: In Pursuit of Abject Sluttiness
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I committed to stepping off the relationship escalator, but I didn’t commit to being celibate, okay? I faced facts and said to myself, look, I’m not going to go through my mid-thirties without having sex just because I’ve gone and had a breakup. That’s absurd. Or, it’s absurd when I think about what I value. It can be a valid choice, but it’s not one I’m making.
Putting yourself out into the world can lead to getting hurt. Most of the time, when we’re talking about “getting hurt” while dating and hooking up, we’re talking about emotional wounds (or, like, very serious threats — the kind that make you send the address you’re going to in a text to a trusted friend). But in the pursuit of what I’ll term abject sluttiness, I’ve been running into scrapes and cuts, drama and ego-bruising, unresolved trauma, exhaustion, and a UTI…to name a few things.
My right leg now has a light scar from scraping myself on the ruins of an old stone hearth while making out with someone on a hike. Since then, I’ve developed a love of antimicrobial spray, which also comes in handy when someone pulls my still-healing nose piercing. After a particularly liberating fingering on a crusty rooftop while I was also on my period, I developed a UTI. I know I know, this is not a surprise at all considering the convergence of factors here, but I still woke up and sobbed because it hurt so much. And it did mean a depressing march on foot to go pick up antibiotics and those handy little pills that turn all your fluids orange and numb the pain. I rewarded myself with a matcha latte and sent a photo of me drinking it while holding up a peace sign to the person I’d had sex with to tell them I had gotten a UTI from the interaction, as you do.
I lost my wallet after queer country night drama — or after, rather, someone tried to make a threesome happen by letting their other partner inadvertently crash our date. The other partner had no idea and said she felt bad, but overall, when I marched out of that apartment at 3 a.m. to catch a Lyft home, I lit up one of my going out cigarettes (we don’t officially smoke anymore) and explained that I did not appreciate not being thought of. Instead of sleeping over, I was now catching a Lyft home in the early hours of the morning. Over the next day or so, I turned my therapist begging me to stick up for myself over and over in my mind until I tapped out the kind of text message people make fun of, long and blue and multi-paragraph, and sent it. I received a sincere apology and the opening to a conversation about making the situation right. Something inside of me clicked back into place then, like a tiny dislocated joint. I didn’t have to put up with feeling mistreated. I could just say something about it, and the worst that would happen would be that I’d end the fling. But also, someone might just respond with sincerity and things would be fine.
Last conversation I had with my therapist, we talked about my boundaries while dating, and he did the thing we all wish therapists would do — he told me I was getting an A+ in therapy. Bless. I had just made a joke about how a lot of people online will talk about wanting to get a good grade in therapy, to win therapy, but his response was so sincere. “You’re actually trying. Good job. Keep going.” While I’ve been cautioned about (and am avoiding) some kind of jumping into an ever-escalating monogamous relationship, dating and dating poly or intentionally single people has allowed me to look to myself as the authority on how my days are spend, on what my boundaries look like, and what I’m willing to put up with, where I bend, where I hold myself firm. As a chronic people pleaser, this is obscenely difficult because at once, I want to throw myself out of the window and leave a perfect shadow standing where I was, someone intensely likable. And on the other hand, I sometimes find myself meeting unexpected calls for emotional intimacy — but especially emotional labor — with repulsion that makes me want to defenestrate the entire connection with the other person, to boot it, to burn it all down and become a hermit solely so no one will ask me to hold their hand through something hard, which is, also, unsustainable. I’m still working on that balance.
The other night, when I was faced with a frustrating situation that left me splashing around in a pool of rejection and irritability, I pulled out my phone to find someone to vent to, texted my sister briefly, and then just went up to bed and watched a movie, grumping alone by myself in an effort to self-soothe. I woke up feeling perfectly moored, steady, like the fact that I’d trusted myself so deeply to handle these feelings on my own had brought me back to shore overnight.
While visiting the LGBTQ clinic for periodic STD tests and answering the questions they ask in a very bisexual manner, a doctor came in to talk to me about PrEP. I now take a chalky white pill every morning. PrEP: It’s not just for cis gay men, it can be for slutty nonbinary dudes, too. During my PrEP checkup, they also asked me if I wanted a MonkeyPox shot. As someone who was planning to go to a party in a gay bathhouse that night, I was like, you know what, stick it in. I’d also always wanted to get the smallpox vaccine, and apparently this is related, so it was fun for my nerd brain to receive, even if it left a bruise lasting for weeks. When I take my PrEP with breakfast every morning, or look over my calendar and see my every-three-months clinic checkup coming up, it stirs up a lot. Over coffee, I feel, at once, medicalized, a part of a population where we’re trying to control things like MonkeyPox, and also, so, so myself.
And then there’s the healing nature of having a bunch of people think you’re hot. This cannot be underestimated! It’s been glorious, and it gets easier every time to tell someone you think they’re hot or cute or pretty or whatever they are. It’s good to know that years and years ago when my ex husband screamed “You look like a boy!” and I screamed back at him “You fuck boys!” that his assessment of me would actually be a bonus in others’ eyes. There is a lot that treating yourself with kindness can do, but there is also learning to accept kindness from people who have good intentions and all the sweetness that comes with it.
Lastly, I keep dating people who regularly take shrooms and who share them with me. While I can’t say that body doubling and working on creative projects together while micro-dosing or seeing a psychological horror movie while tripping are the stereotypical kind of deep, spiritual experience one might seek on shrooms, these periodic forays into psychedelics have served as a kind of medicine, too. When you have to face reality getting a little wobbly, where you have to trust fall with another person while colors grow bright.
There’s a theory around healing trauma where you have to heal at the site of the wound. If a lot of my wounds have come from relationships in the past, then those can only be healed by relating to other people. If my wounds come from a sense of rejection, then I have to face the potential for that rejection. And, apparently, get a little injured by ruins and needles and everyone’s various piercings, too.
Untethered: On Miss Havisham-Style Decision-Making
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I’ve been sleeping in my office, right next to the shelves where I keep Autostraddle Plus perks and shipping supplies, since mid-June. The first night I rolled out my camping mat onto the old pine floor, I tried to self-soothe by watching more of The Ultimatum (the queer one). This is, in fact, not comfort TV. My ex and I worked out a separation agreement over the course of those months and signed it in August. Just this past Saturday, she moved out, and I slept in my bed again for the first time in almost three months.
She left whatever she didn’t want, discards from our life together and from her life before we knew each other. There’s a motorcycle helmet in a box. We’ve never ridden a motorcycle together — that’s a different ex. I have to go through each room, throw away and donate things, take debris from our interrupted home reno to the dump, re-sort and rearrange whatever’s left. I need more lamps.
At least this room has an overhead light, I think to myself while turning a light on to take a look. The fixture sparks, and the light goes out with a plink. This room also has no outlets. Now I don’t know how long it will be dark in there. Until I can get to it, I guess. What I really need is an electrician.
Deciding to stay in the house I’ve lived in since 2019 came from a series of factors: a chance encounter with someone at a gathering who said she had hoped to buy a house here but now can’t afford it, knowing people who are only able to buy houses because they’re getting foreclosures and gutting them themselves, living in shells they painstakingly re-build. My house is, while relatively affordable and in need of work, not a gut job. Then there was this column, and the challenges I set for myself, to put myself out there, to go to events, to make new friends and try new activities. (Like, guys, update: I think I might really like kickboxing?) As my therapist said, “Pittsburgh is really autistic and queer.” And Pittsburgh is so full of cool people trying their best that, in spite of its hellish infrastructure and systemic problems, it’s also my home of eight years. In unusual-to-Pittsburgh circumstances, both of my longest-term exes have also left the city and the state, so even though I might see mutual friends or acquaintances, I’ll never run into them. When I’m crossing a steel bridge or re-reading familiar graffiti in a bathroom, it’s comforting to know when out and about, in terms of my exes, at most, I’m only going to encounter ghosts.
And now the house is quiet, except for its ghosts. I woke up this morning to the bells I have hung on the front door jangling. No one was at the door, nor could anyone have walked through. Correction: I woke up from an hour nap I managed to squeeze in after breakfast and before work because, for the past two nights, I’ve only been able to sleep for about three hours.
A lot of what I’m remembering is Mya, my dog, who died just over a year ago in July 2022, in my arms, on the kitchen floor. It was 7 a.m., and she had given me one last wag, one last faint flick of her paws before she went. I held her while she got stiff and cold, and then my ex and I got her cleaned up and brushed, lit a candle in her dog bowl, and held space for her. I could not call the vet until 9 a.m. When I called, the vet told us they could cremate her, but that we would need to bring her in. We would have to bring an 80 pound [dead] dog down over 20 front steps and load her in the back of my old Subaru. My ex and I wrapped Mya in a blanket. I tucked one of her favorite stuffed toys (which she was gentle with and so kept forever) in between her paws. Then, we carried her down the front steps, concealed in the blanket.
It looked, friends, like two queers were disposing of an 80 pound body. I know this because someone waiting at the bus stop saw us come down the stairs with a body wrapped in a blanket, promptly turned on her heel, looked the other way, and minded her business with her back completely away from us, tucked as far around the corner as she could go without missing her bus. I still laugh about that.
I’m not used to staying in one living space for this long. I know it’s something people do, that they walk past — in some cases — a space where someone died or a cabinet that got chipped when two kids who are now grown were wrestling or their grandmother’s favorite sitting spot for decades after these events. It’s not a practice I’ve had to keep. Now, it seems like it might be. Right now, it feels like I’ve chosen to shroud myself in all of my recent past, to wear the scraps of my past relationship around me like Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress.
I know the worst of this initial wave will pass. These thoughts have only seeped in through the cracks because the newness of the quiet let them in. The hum of the refrigerator and the squeak of the breaks of the city bus on its route are not enough to keep them out right now, but in time, I think I’ll fill the space with more of the current, living, breathing me.
Part of this unease is rooted in the fact that I’ve never lived alone. I’ve always had roommates or a partner, people to please and consider and work around. But I made this choice because I knew I needed the space. I have old patterns of letting myself get smaller in a living space, of trying to please other people and then wondering why I don’t feel comfortable even hanging a picture up.
Now, no one can hear me talk to myself (except Bill the Actual Ghost, I guess), and no one cares if I want to pace around endlessly. The other day, after an informal kickboxing lesson in a friend’s garage, I cleared the kitchen floor so I could practice. No one needed the kitchen for anything else. Once in a while, I remember to relax my shoulders. I can work from different rooms, now, and I don’t wake up in the same room I work in. It doesn’t matter if I need to turn the light on at 3 am. and read. I’m not bothering anyone but myself. If I get a shred of a minute, I think I’m going to start putting together a pinterest page so that I can think about slowly decorating the place, over time. Right now, it’s all books on the floor and upturned boxes and empty echoing walls with outlets that don’t work and studs that need to be crow-barred off and cracks that need to be patched, but I’m dreaming of dark themes and whimsical touches, maybe finding some furniture on garbage days and at estate sales, and figuring out how I want to organize my bookshelves. I’ll also have to find a spot for this painting of Mya (by Riese’s girlfriend Gretchen).
Painting by Gretchen
Untethered: The Gelatinous Descent
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
This is a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve lived through recently:
- Falling through a log I was trying to use to get myself down a small cliff, but the log was actually so rotten it crumbled like chocolate cake underneath my boots and absorbed me into its sticky sickly sweet cakey maw. Reader, I yelled.
- Getting the cops called to my house by a truly very annoying straight woman.
- Having to explain to my ex-girlfriend why the cops are at the door.
- Seeing landscaping goats and their protector donkey at the park! We love Goats With Jobs!
- Sleeping on a camping mat on the floor of my office…like I have been for the past two months. Then, subsequently, realizing my back has not felt this good in a while.
- Being forced to consider whether “Western” (a problematic term) style beds are…a conspiracy? Are they (beds with a mattress, a frame, etc.) bad for us (humans)? I’m not being unserious. I feel like this is a legitimate point of inquiry.
- Getting so stressed that I stayed up until 4 a.m. making chocolate chip cookie dough. Then having to reckon with the fact that I was trying to comfort myself by making cookies for everyone I cared about because sometimes showing affection is hard.
- Being touched when everyone received said cookies with grace. Well, except for my one friend who screamed “I NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA SAY TO ME” when I told them I made four batches of cookie dough while stressed and then just handed them cookies as I got in their car.
- Sleeping with an Epi pen next to me because the house was filled with yellowjackets, displaced because city raccoons or city coyotes ate the nest near my front door I’d called exterminators about and now the yellowjackets were unhoused and in my house and throwing themselves with a very loud buzz — and yeah “stingers up” — at the windows but also at anyone (me) who got too close.
- Watching a PowerPoint presentation under a bridge with cigarette smoke wafting around me and a happy new haul of zines crinkling in my backpack.
- Listening to a certain audiobook, describing it to a trusted friend, and having that friend yell in the cutest frustration possible about how right the audiobook is.
- Finally, finally perfecting my vegan sparkling wine aspic recipe, but only under the utmost pressure.
So, yes, let’s dive in there. Will you descend with me into what someone described as disturbing air quotes around the word “gelatin”? (Because it’s agar agar.) I do think this is a much more comfortable descent than the submersion into a rotting log, for what it’s worth. Take my hand?
I arrived with the aspic still stuck in the bundt pan, confident that a party full of cooks and restaurant workers could probably extract it more artfully than I ever could. Together, we worked to get it out with a hot water bath, lots of communal whacking, and a knife. The aspic emerged like Venus out of the sea, glorious and bouncy as one of those really low-quality dildos — all in one piece, too! The group retired to the rooftop, carrying all the dishes and drinks we’d assembled. We gathered around on blankets and ate. Someone reacted with a “perfect!” when the aspic held its shape during slicing. It tasted really good, too, a cold dessert on a hot day. We opened cans of tinned fish, ate mystery dip, and discussed Barbie and being talked over by cis men. I listened to restaurant gossip and connected with a couple really cool people.
One of these cool people served as a stark reminder of my face blindness. Several days after the rooftop potluck, as you might have guessed, I attended Spaghetti Disco and ran into a woman I’d met at said potluck.
“NICOO!!!”
This person is delighted to see me and I canNOT place her because — again — context is number one here, and she has appeared so wildly out of context. I mimic her excitement, because obviously I know her, I just temporarily have no idea where the fuck I know her from. She’s wearing a hat that is also, somehow, a disco ball, so I compliment it and do small talk while desperately staring at her face until it clicks — hard — like I’m in a cartoon and someone just dropped a piano on me.
I had talked with this person for like A FUCKING HOUR on the roof. We looked at the moon together and shared tinned clams! I really wish people in real life came with the kinds of labels they do on the internet, or in Slack. Whenever a coworker’s name pops up in our office, I’m never like “oh who is that” because it SAYS WHO IT IS.
Once I recognize her, my shoulders sink down and I can ask her how her week’s been. She goes to dance, and I slink out to the patio with the smokers for a while to contemplate why my brain is the way it is.
This is the book my friend said hit too hard, too close, with too much realness. They’re right. This is a difficult read. Are you prepared to face patterns in your childhood, your family life, your friendships and romantic relationships, your relationships to school and work, your everything in a way that is maybe just as, if not more, cutting than your relationship to your sexual orientation and gender? How many mind fucks is one person supposed to take?
So, I’m at the autism assessment, at the ADHD assessment, at the combination autism and ADHD assessment, and these questions are scathing. I’m super comfortable with the assessor, though, despite the questions. He appears to be a queer man who tells me he’s autistic and has ADHD himself. When he asks about things that might be special interests, I rattle a few things off and then make myself admit to the one that makes him laugh.
“The history of ceramic heating devices,” I mutter, and he is like, “We can move onto the next question.”
He asks something about how I do the dishes, and I am like “of course I do the dishes. You have to do the dishes.” And he asks me how easy it is. Then I have to tell him that I wash one to two dishes, walk away, look at something else, and then make myself go back to the sink where I repeat the process. More scribbling on his end. He pulls up my pre-assessment paperwork, nods his head, and says “nonbinary.” To which I am like, yes, that’s what I put down.
Mr. Assessor then cheerfully informs me that research he’s aware of estimates that 25% of trans and nonbinary people are autistic / have ADHD and that he feels the percentage is likely larger than that due to the manner in which autism and ADHD are undiagnosed in many (non-cis/het/AMAB/white) demographics. I knew there was a correlation. After all, I work here. I work with y’all. I’m also on Tumblr. (LOL) But, listen, this diagnostician read me for filth. It was comment after comment like this.
This man even told me that apparently going dancing all the time is, in part, a common way for people to access a societally appropriate form of stimming, and I’m mad at him forever for saying that. Don’t call me out like that, bro!
On top of it all, one of the most difficult things about the diagnosis has been the reflection. Mostly, I’ve been looking back at the times — many of them very recent — where I’ve been treated like a cold-hearted bitch for not interacting with people in a way they expected. Frankly, in a way they expected that I suspect is rooted in an expectation that I adhere to some kind of traditionally feminine, emotionally giving (and sacrificing) role.
I think this is as much tied up in my sometimes femme-ness as it is in my all-the-time autistic-ness. If I put on lipstick, if my face is shaped the way it is, if my voice is high-ish pitched and I really lack the skill (your dude also can’t sing) or the time to alter it, there’s a certain amount of tenderness or enthusiasm or bubbliness expected — but I’m not necessarily going to deliver on that in the ways people might expect. Throughout my work and school life, this has always meant being docked for my inability to provide the kind of emotional labor that cis men, especially, expect of me. It’s not even necessarily a deliberate protest (though, sometimes it is). It’s more often an oversight. Like, “Oh, I didn’t see that heterosexual expectation there. Sorry I tripped over it. Y’all should really clean that up or put one of those orange cones out or something because this is both unnecessary and slippery.”
I will never forget seeing my ex-boss from a past non-Autostraddle job break into tears when I pushed back on feedback her cishet white male colleague gave me in a performance review insisting I was too brash and harsh and cold. (He’s also an asshole, and so I’m not sure why he was surprised about this treatment.) I said I’d gotten that feedback since I was five years old and that I honestly didn’t know what to do about it but that also I didn’t think it’d be as much of an issue if I was a man. She started crying, and I could see her processing the information. He looked admonished. I followed it up with my performance stats, which were impeccable. Like, I’d gotten them — a small to midsize theater — a literal million dollars in grant money in the year I’d worked for them — couldn’t we lead with that? My ex-boss is still my friend — she’s the one who you might in fact remember being the one who hooked me up with the D&D group — so you know she’s ride or die.
It’s always been with me. That could be its own essay, its own book. But I will say that looking back at a five-year relationship, an engagement that was called off, through the lens of the neurodivergence that affected it — it’s a heady experience.
It’s a lot, buds — Redwallers, Romans, friends.
Untethered: In Pittsburgh Everyone Knows Everyone and I’m Sure I Do Too
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
I hold the puppy in my arms while strangers mill around outside of a taco truck. I’d run into my friend at a gallery crawl / art walk type of thing that takes place every first Friday of the month. This 2.5 lb creature, who is only supposed to grow to be five lbs and is covered in silky black fur, snuggles in my arms and sniffs me with his teeny nose. His mom had handed him to me as soon as I told her about the breakup.
“Here, you need to hold him,” she told me.
He rests his head on my forearm for a time before fidgeting for a return to his mom’s arms. The puppy’s mom is another of the many mutual friends of my ex and me. Pittsburgh is often called “The Biggest Small Town” because it is actually a difficult task to meet someone you aren’t connected to in some way via just a few hop skips or jumps. You are almost always going to run into more people than you think you will when going out to any event. So, naturally, I’ve been running into connection after tenuous connection that is difficult to navigate.
Then, there’s the fact that I almost didn’t recognize my friend because she’d donned a long straight-haired wig over her usual curls, completely changing her profile. To make it even more difficult, she was wearing a new pair of glasses with a Completely Different Shape. Friends, I have to tell you, I am mostly recognizing you via a combination of context, hair, gait, voice and style. The part of my brain that clicks and tells me who someone is just by seeing them has always hovered at around 25% or so of what would be optimum functionality. It’s called face blindness. And yes, this has led to a bevy, a list I could write but won’t, of embarrassing incidents and unintended social faux pas. It makes it so that every social situation has the potential to devolve into a bizarre puzzle game where the cost of losing is potentially hurting someone else’s feelings. Still, I do my best out here, as we all must.
Before I held the puppy in my arms, I’d actually come from the gallery my ex-husband-who-is-not-my-most-recent-breakup-but-here-we-are-mentioning-him used to manage. He’s long since left town, and it has a new manager who I don’t know. But who did I run into, but a person who I fully believe was my ex husband’s old boss! But I’m still not sure that’s who it was! This is someone who went to our wedding, who I’d attended fundraisers with, who I had met on multiple occasions. And still, I was standing there like: “according to context this person is surely X and he definitely has his head shaved like X always did but like, I don’t remember this middle aged white man having this face”!! If I had to draw him, I would have drawn a completely different looking person! I left hoping it was who I thought it was. I didn’t call him by name because, well, you never know.
Back to the Taco Truck with the adorable puppy and company! I feel the need to explain to you that this couple is kind of split, that my ex knows the puppy’s dad, the musician of the pair, and I’ve helped the arts leader (puppy mom) of the pair and her team with fundraising over the years. They’re older, parental figures to us. We’ve eaten with them on countless occasions, attended each others’ events, and know a network of the same people. I helped her write the letter she posted on social media that eventually helped her get a new kidney. Unlike some people who were squarely friends with one or the other of us, I felt like, here, I could at least claim that we all had our own relationships to each other. I can see in my friend’s wide eyes that she’s shocked by the news of the breakup. We were the kind of stable-seeming couple that people thought would be together forever. I mean, I thought that at one point. Now, I’m navigating each of these social connections, testing the waters, seeing who might still want to be a part of my life and have me in theirs. “Seriously. Don’t be a stranger,” she tells me, her eyes locking right on mine, for emphasis. I believe she means it, and I start to wrap my head around a world where at least some of our mutual friends may still want to know me.
Oddly, then, maybe emboldened, maybe just somehow intoxicated by a couple of tacos, I move onto a gallery owned and run by a mutual friend. I approached and, at first, in the dark, and I think — especially — as I was alone and not in what he would have recognized as my paired form, the owner doesn’t know it’s me right away. Relatable.
He starts to give a spiel, “This is an adults-only exhibit — oh…” he catches who I am while I’m smiling at him, laughing a little, because, of course, he knows I’m game for whatever indie video game art he’s curated. He smiles huge, and I’m highly amused to watch someone else go through the same steps of recognition I always have to. I step aside while he shouts the full extent of his exhibit’s forewarning at newcomers behind me. We catch up for a moment, and I can’t tell if he’s heard the news. This time, though, I don’t share. If it’s already spread through all my ex’s friends, then he’ll know either now or later.
I go in. And friend, listen, I like weird art, gross art, confrontational art, and I am beyond fucking delighted by the first thing I see — a video game done up in what I can only describe as the hyper-realistic, “gritty” skin of so many contemporary video games, usually ones that involve fighting and shooting. One gallery goer is manning the controls while a group of people watch the display projected on the gallery wall and shout and cackle whenever something new happens. It looks to me like this game takes place entirely in a rather crusty men’s restroom. When I came in, the POV player was peeing in a urinal, just a stream of yellow splashing down that went on for way too long. It was more urine than any person can actually produce at one time, a fact which has the people collectively gathered in the gallery ABSOLUTELY CACKLING. The player moves on to explore the restroom and then a character, a man in a white collared shirt and beige slacks with big clear glasses and a thin mustache enters the restroom and stands at the urinal. The player approaches and the man unzips his pants to reveal a gun. What follows is an incomprehensible mini game where the player has to disarm the gun by licking it up and down. The tongue that appears on screen is heinous and red. I think I clapped. I definitely took a video of it and proceeded to show it to anyone who wanted to see it for, like, my entire weekend.
After a quick goodbye to my friend, I head back to my car. But along the way, I come across a lemonade stand run by SWOP Pittsburgh (mutual aid situation for sex workers if you’re interested). The sign reads “Lemonade, $4. Spit, $2.” I donate to get a lemonade and am, if we’re being completely honest, incredibly tempted to ask for spit in it. As I’m mulling over my options here, one of the tablers asks if they know me from somewhere. I look at their face, panic because I’m already hyper aware I am batting…I don’t understand baseball, but something really bad…with recognizing people tonight and say “Maybe! I’m definitely around? Maybe a dance night???” I try because this person looks queer, and maybe I saw them at Jellyfest. I also have to always wonder if, though it rarely happens, whoever is asking this is an Autostraddle reader, but I never lead with that because saying Autostraddle out loud is a thing in and of itself. I then wonder…could it be? A man walks up and disrupts the chat and my awkward descent into a cavern of anxiety, so I thank them, tell the man the lemonade is indeed good and worth buying because I want him to give them money, and then head out. I ponder this as I drive to what is, yes, another dance night. (I really like dancing, okay?) While I tap my fingers on the ol’ Subaru’s steering wheel, I acknowledge the feeling that I might actually know this person, but then — despite Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh — I say something to myself like “what’re the chances?”
The next morning, I woke up to a text asking me if I was at the gallery crawl the night before. It’s a queer person I met online and have been talking to, but barely. This was the exact same person I’d bought lemonade from. I make some coffee before I text back, hand on my forehead, dying inside, that I thought it might be them but clearly just psyched myself out of saying anything because I didn’t think it was likely. They absolutely do not care, a thing which is incredibly refreshing, and we agree to get coffee on Thursday so we can talk about nerdy shit.
I’ve been doing a lot of coffee-should-we-be-queer-buds meets. These are cool! Meet someone, connect somehow, see if they wanna grab a matcha or something. At one such meet with someone who happened to have grown up in Pittsburgh and never left, I mention I seemed to be (KNOCK ON WOOD) having good luck with making new friends. I did say this before my dizzying and harrowing Friday night of Not Recognizing Anyone. And this is, of course, entirely contingent on continuing to put myself out there. People in Pittsburgh, especially those who grew up here, tend to be cliquey. And to be honest, this was maybe the only person I have met in recent times who was from-from Pittsburgh. Usually, I’m meeting and making friends with other transplants. The other person laughs. I laugh, too. We talk about how I don’t want to come across as full of myself, but like, as with anything, effort can in fact produce results.
And because this is now the third installment of writing this column and it’s been six weeks since I was dry-heaving with anxiety when I was trying to go out dancing, I thought I’d list some progress I’ve made in terms of battling social anxiety and living life as a single person trying to build and participate in community:
- I’ve gotten used to the ritual of pulling out Instagram after having a fun conversation with someone so we don’t lose touch. My Instagram DMs are just as active as my text messages.
- I’ve stopped being afraid of texting people to see if they want to hang. As it turns out, it might be a nice thing to receive a text from someone who wants to sit around and write together or grab a coffee or go for a hike.
- I have indeed realized that if you keep going to the same places you will see the same people and your connections with those people will deepen. You’ll notice I keep going back to the same dance nights! I’m not like some kind of Italo-Disco fiend (although not gonna lie, it is great to dance to), but the fact of the matter is that I run into people I know at these things. Fun people who I like! Then we catch up, throw down some moves together, and say we really need to hang out as we leave but, like, in a sincere way, not in a “let’s do lunch sometime way.”
- There is something nebulous here about the fact that I do believe tapping into a scene of queer people in their thirties and forties with a decent amount of extroverts, especially ones who will organize an event and invite people, who will smash their friends together like dolls and insist they get to know each other, is of immense value. I feel like we do a lot of introvert appreciation on this site, but did you know that if you’re quiet or an introvert or highly anxious that you can find extroverts and via some kind of Outgoing Person Magic, it’s like you kind of pick up some of their social superpowers by being in their orbit? Hot tip from me to you!
- I haven’t dry-heaved with anxiety lately! Goals!
I guess that, sometimes, working on yourself can feel like playing whack-a-mole. If I’m not dry-heaving alone in my car and have moved onto not wanting to lock myself in a tight dark closet when faced with the prospect of meeting new people, then what pops up but the old chestnut of not recognizing human faces — a thing no one expects and which comes with vast and varied opportunities for offending new friends and potential friends and further offending enemies, even! But if I hadn’t started trying to make new friends, I wouldn’t have had to deal with this. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of the Self-Work Whack-a-Mole!
And for the folks following along for Redwall Summer, stay tuned for updates in the next volume.
Untethered: Turning Dancing, D&D, and Body Piercings Into Friendships
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
Did the berries ripen earlier this year? So many plump raspberries rotted on the vine, sour burgundy juice streaming down over black slimy mold. Newly invasive spotted lanternfly nymphs crawled and hopped all over the brambles. I would photograph them, to preserve this particular moment in ecological collapse, while I picked raspberry after raspberry, wrapped in a thorn blanket of brambles that could not touch me in my overalls and thick buttondown.
Still, when the days are too hot, when acidic sweat is dripping down your face and your lungs are catching on themselves because they’re clogged with wildfire soot — you have to admit that no amount of stability will save you. No, it’s the community bonds that we form, or in much less fancy language — it’s the friendships that hold us up and see us through.
But one of the things about not having spent significant time being single is that my friends have often been tangled up with partners. When the partnership dissolves, even if they don’t “pick sides,” people usually still choose one person to hang out with. So, now, I’m looking at the small lineup of friends who are still in my world, and the much larger cadre of people I might only ever see in passing.
Over the past month, I’ve realized if I want more friendship in my life, I’m going to have to be almost aggressive about a) following up with people I’m friends with to see if they want to hang, b) finding new people to be friends with and c) being open to experiencing the magic and the beauty of other peoples’ chaos.
Then, my friend cracked my head open with a real shocker. She’d been thinking about me since I’d expressed to her that I felt like I was losing my community for a number of reasons. So, this straight woman had remembered I have wanted to try playing D&D for forever and when this group of queer theater adults wrapped up a two-year D&D campaign and were looking to engage in a series of one-shots and board game nights for the summer, she asked them if I could join.
I asked her “Did you set me up with a polycule, J?”
“Pretty much!”
A few texts later, and I was scheduled for my first ever D&D one-shot campaign where, of the group, I knew one person decently. I arrived, brought my vegan chickpea salad to add to the food my friend’s fiance was making for everyone, and made friends with the cat while a bunch of delightful queers popped into the cozy living room in ones and twos. A cloud of pot smoke and tacos which some people — but not me, gawd — had with THC laced hot sauce (???) later, and we were sitting around picking an animal to play as from a series of choices. We wound up with an owl, a loon, a kitten, a fawn, a lizard. Yours truly was a pony. Between the party posing as Applebees characters, getting a room full of monsters drunk on beverages made of thousand island dressing + broken glass + vodka, and trying to punch a magic bubble repeatedly — all via theater kids really laying into their voices, I had so much fun I transcended to a higher plane. I also learned what happens when you roll a 20, about some of the mechanics of the game and what a “one-shot” is in D&D. For anything I didn’t understand, the table was happy and eager and patient when it came to explaining. Every time someone pointed out which die was the correct one, and each time the other players welcomed my voice into the melee, my heart grew like, I don’t even know, three sizes (with advantage). My therapist is probably right: I need more people who don’t actively resent me in my life. And given the chance, I might see I am not the worst person on earth if I give new people the chance to get to know me.
It was another night of going out dancing solo, with the hope of seeing people, but this time, progress! I didn’t almost dry heave. Yay! I felt like I had the hang of things, in fact, until I spotted a couple friends of my ex, who I’d hung out with on more than one occasion, whose homes I’d been in, who we’d planned to go camping with. I went up and said hello and then, immediately, that I wasn’t sure I should have. What followed were their hands on their chests and a lot of reassurances that it was fine, followed by “how are yous” and “it’s so hards.” They were not wrong, but it was also clear the conversation couldn’t progress beyond that. These were now former friends. After I complimented the home-crafted silver snake C had around their neck, I waved goodbye and avoided them for the rest of the night — but not resentfully, just because that’s how it is.
After I got caught in the middle of a drag show for like 20 minutes, I finally found my friends. Though locating people in a crowd filled me with dread (I’m relatively face-blind LOL), I managed.
There was one friend I was certain was there but who I wouldn’t see for at least an hour. Someone had wanted a cigarette, and we all needed air. My friend, S — the one who bills herself as an excellent distraction — caught me scrambling up a dirt pile to sit on a concrete wall outside. S called out to me “Nico! I knew that was you! It would only be you climbing something like that in practical shoes!” I’m not sure what that says, but from that point on, there was an ever-expanding and contracting group of dancing bodies that found each other and lost each other and found each other again. And, inevitably, at one point, a Barbie Girl remix played across the speakers while the queers who’d come decked out in tight pink dresses and delightfully hairy armpits truly had their moment.
For the purposes of this, I’ll just refer to the queer chef I found on an app looking for platonic friends as Chef, because that’s fun and we all liked The Bear, didn’t we?
So, Chef and I are talking, trying to see if we’re friend material. He’s poly-saturated and looking for platonic connections. I’m, well, you know my circumstances — in need of friends who don’t know my ex. We get on the topic of dangly earrings, and then of piercings. He’s wanted his bridge pierced for some time. I share that I’ve wanted my nostril pierced for years.
He declares, then: “Let’s put holes in ourselves!” which is, in itself, iconic and something that says “friendship” to me. We make a plan to simultaneously meet and get pierced together at a place where he thinks he can get a discount. We book it, and then we wait.
Then, he’s late (due to work), I’m on time, and the piercers are so sweet and nice about waiting for Chef to get there before piercing him. They take me back first, and I try to, as I must always with strangers, explain to the piercer what an ‘Autostraddle’ is. He presses me for an example of something I’ve written while he gets the needle ready, and I quickly explain about Gandalf Big Naturals, as one does.
Afterward, we go to grab some beers and cheers to each other. “Happy Hole Day!” I shout while we clink glasses and affirm each others’ piercings look awesome. We talk about work. He tells me about his woes at a restaurant where the owner won’t hire a dishwasher, but, I kid you not, has hired a magician that visits tables on Thursdays and Fridays.
After a while, we part ways but make plans for the last of the raspberries I managed to salvage and freeze. He wants to make them into a raspberry liqueur. Naturally, this completely activated my childhood Redwall Brain. This is now the fate of the frozen raspberries. No question. So, I’ll finish this by sharing this meme with you before I follow up with my chef friend.
Did you know Brian Jacques, author of Redwall, dropped out of school and ‘took to the sea’ at 14?
In the midst of climate change and being single and building everything back up from absolute scratch, I have to ask, is it now…hot and sweet and friendship-stuffed “Redwall Summer?” Is it? Maybe? Please?
Untethered: After a Breakup, Spinning Out of Control (Literally)
Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!
For the first few days of the breakup, I was in shock. I hadn’t expected it, had watched myself from outside myself. Still, it was done.
As the shock seeped down through the strata of my body and my mind and settled into something like the first few stages of grief, I was filled with the urge to move my body. This urge did not manifest in craving the ways I ordinarily moved, but in a longing for new, faster, (more furious?) modes.
So, being one to give into what are surely harmless impulses, I immediately engaged in the following, in chronological order:
Roller-Skating at a Rink for the First Time Since I Was a Child
The weekend following the breakup, I got in my Subaru and drove up to Western New York, sometimes crying ON THE HIGHWAY while going 70 mph. Sure, those Fast and the Furious guys can Tokyo Drift, but have they ever attempted to drive while crying so hard they can’t see? I imagine, actually, maybe, tenderly, yes. Still, it’s not shown. I stopped at my favorite queer-friendly Hot Dog joint in Erie, PA (Lucky Louie’s, if you’re ever in town — also this commercial starring a drag queen is tops), and arrived at my sister’s where she let me crash on her couch. The very next day, the two of us were seized with a desire to do something, anything, and we settled on roller skating.
We wanted old-fashioned, four wheels-per-foot roller-skating, with blacklight and disco balls and Day-Glo murals. We found a rink and cemented our plans. On the way, we stopped at our dad’s, and while we sat out back with his wife, he recounted a story from his high school days. He went to a roller rink with a date, got in a fight with another boy, and had his date come to his defense, yelling “Leave him alone! He can’t even skate!” as he struggled to get up off the floor.
My sister and I drove out of town to the rink, in an area made up of old housing stock and a dive bar. When looking around for someone to rent skates from, we caught sight of several teens with staff shirts doing tricks in the center of the rink. Eventually, one of them noticed us, zoomed over, and provided us with skates in our size. We sat down in a plastic booth and pulled the worn leather weighed down by heavy wheels onto our feet. And I guess I really am my father’s son, because as soon as the skates were strapped on, my sister and I locked eyes, only in that moment understanding the true extent to which we were screwed.
It was a wall-clinging, hand-holding, grimacing time getting acclimated to the fact that we had strapped wheels to our feet. We soon realized we’d paid to humiliate ourselves for the evening, but then comforted ourselves with the fact that we weren’t the only ones struggling, or the only adults struggling for that matter. It was a no-judgment zone, except for the occasional eight-year-old asking us if there was anything they could do to help. We both only fell once, my sister on her butt, and myself into a vogue-style split situation that only bruised my ass a little.
Still, when I got the rhythm together and was zooming around the rink, even making turns, all while a bunch of teens skirted the edge of death on one leg or jumped every time they passed my sister, it scratched that itch I had, the one that said I needed to physically feel like I was flying. And hey, someone complimented my Gay Chaos socks, which do indeed glow under blacklight. I left sore but satisfied — and with a plan to return to the same roller rink with my sister next time I was in town, which I will be by the time you’re reading this.
Spinning and Sliding and Falling and Chafing on a Slippery Pole for Some Reason
So, it had never occurred to me that this might be the case, but you know how sliding down a metal slide in shorts can hurt the heck out of your legs? That’s what a pole-dancing pole felt like on my legs whenever I tried to grip it with some very sensitive patches of skin!
For some impulsive reason, I paid about $12 to go to a pole-dancing class. It looked fun! Instead of the wheels on a skate spinning, you are the thing spinning! My brain had been screaming at me to GO FAST, and it refused to be silenced by the reality that I am in my thirties and not always that capable of going that fast — or of picking up new physical skills right away!
It was harrowing. Even though my spins were SNAIL-PACED and executed with the grace of a fish out of water, it still felt, to me, like I was careening out of control. I thudded to the ground more times than I can count. Still, the more experienced dancers in the class were warm, supportive, encouraging. There was a culture of clapping for someone when they nailed a trick that caught me off guard for just a moment before it utterly charmed me. When I managed an elbow stand and to grab the pole with my ankles, and the class applauded me, for that singular upside-down moment, everything became warm and fuzzy, no matter how anxious spinning around made me. I’ll probably be back, if only because I’m stubborn and enjoy cheering on people who’re trying to do a hard thing.
Normal Dancing but With a Queer DJ Playing Italo-Disco and Also Spaghetti
I love going dancing. This is a fact. Imagine my surprise when I almost dry-heaved with nerves while I parked my car up the block from the venue. I considered turning around, giving up, not going in. But I’d already promised a friend I’d meet her, and I didn’t want to flake. So, I made my way past the boys smoking outside and into the venue. Wearing a mask still makes me feel like an outsider, but I made it work, enjoying the dichotomy of a crop top + an N-95. I found my friends, found a can of something, and found the dance floor where another friend and queer, awesome-as-all-get-out DJ was spinning Italo-disco for a small but ever-growing crowd of people dancing; some solo, some in couples or groups, and each with a range of enthusiasm from rocking side to side to full on throwing themselves around like they’d just invented some kind of disco-mosh.
When I managed to communicate “break up” over the roar of disco by miming breaking something with my hands to my friend, she assured me with her voice that somehow carried: Breakups happen for a reason. She proceeded to note that people have told her she’s a great friend to be distracted with while flipping her blonde curls back and batting her eyes in a way that communicated she fully embraced her party-girl status. I laugh because it’s true, but also not a bad thing. It’s a neutral thing, and maybe even a good thing when you need it.
The whole dance situation is called Spaghetti Disco because at midnight, the kitchen staff brings out trays of free spaghetti. When the spaghetti happened (the spaghetti-ing?), I was trapped off to the side of the stage by a series of ultra-passionate dancers but became aware of the spaghetti when people brought it onto the dance floor to drop forkfuls of pasta into their open mouths while swaying their hips and spinning. Despite being marinated in a combination of sweat and the smell of marinara, I left the disco feeling cleansed.
Maybe next time, I’ll try the spaghetti.