The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)

Today is Long Covid Awareness Day. It’s also the three-year anniversary of the beginning of my own Long Covid journey, which still continues. This article was originally published in August 2020. 

I was already in a hospital the first time I realized I needed a wheelchair. A sprawling full city-block of a hospital in midtown Manhattan with a lobby that looks strikingly similar to the cavernous Ministry of Magic atrium. My neurosurgeon had sent me in for an emergency MRI three months after I’d been diagnosed with COVID-19. Death or a two-week flu were the only options for people who contracted COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and I wasn’t dead so surely lingering coronavirus wasn’t the thing that was causing my body to go so berserk. Racing heart, palpitations, stroke-high blood pressure, chest pain, weak legs, fatigue that felt like my body was made of lead, nausea, loss of appetite, extreme weight loss, shortness of breath, brain fog that caused me to forget how to form sentences, bladder dysfunction, and creeping numbness and tingling in my feet and legs.

It was those last things that caused my neurosurgeon’s alarm. I have what’s called “remarkable” cervical stenosis. When my neurosurgeon first showed me my CT scan and diagnosed me last fall, I thought he meant it in a good way. Exceptional. Impressive. Miraculous. He did not. Remarkable, he explained, in the sense that I have the spine of a person who is 300 years old. And with such a spine, when you can’t remember the word “carrot” or how to turn on the oven, and your legs are tingling all the way up to your knees, there’s a chance your vertebrae are crushing your spinal cord en route to paralysis. It could happen over time, or it could happen right now.

As I stood swaying in the hospital lobby while the nurses and security guards debated what to do with me, I realized I should have taken my neurosurgeon up on his offer to send an ambulance to my house to get me. But I’d already racked up one ambulance ride when my feet initially lost their feeling. An Uber was faster and, frankly, less expensive.

The problem was I didn’t have a positive COVID test or a negative COVID test, because when I’d gotten sick over 90 days before, no testing was available in New York City, unless you were admitted to the hospital, and the telemedicine doctor told me not to go to the hospital unless I couldn’t finish my sentences or my lips were turning blue. But also I still had COVID symptoms. But also I wasn’t there to be treated for COVID symptoms. I was there because my neurosurgeon told me to meet him there. Did I belong in the COVID triage tent? Did I belong in the regular emergency room? Was I a danger to everyone in the lobby? Were they a danger to me? Who did I think I was, anyway, walking in off the street demanding an MRI in the middle of a global pandemic?

“I’m sorry, I hate to be dramatic,” I said, as I waited to see if they were going to let me into the hospital to find out if my spine was squashing the feeling out of my legs permanently, “but is there anywhere I could possibly maybe please sit down?”

There was not. The visitor chairs had been removed for social distancing. I glanced over at the security guard’s stool. “Don’t,” he said.

I decided my only hope was utilizing my gift for defusing tense situations with humor, so I decided to do a Ministry of Magic gag. “Broom Regulatory Control, level six” is what I meant to say, but I couldn’t remember the word “broom.” I started my joke; “broom” fell out of my head; I made the motion of sweeping, then stepping over the handle of a broom, then lifting up off the ground and whooshing around. I heard myself make a vrooooooom sound, like when an airplane spoon is heading toward a child’s mouth.

“Ma’am,” the security guard said, even more apprehensive than he had been, “Have you been drinking?”

I called my neurosurgeon and he sent an intern down to get me.

My COVID onset was pretty normal, in terms of what’s considered normal for a novel coronavirus that shuts down the entire world. I started displaying symptoms a week after New York City went into lockdown in March. Slight chills and a mild sore throat that progressed to chest congestion and tightness, a cough, and shortness of breath. I was really tired and I didn’t have much of an appetite. I got winded just walking down the hallway to the bathroom. Hot showers left me hacky-coughing for hours. It was terrifying — hospitals were overflowing; the only sound outside my bedroom window was the constant scream of ambulance sirens; the death toll skyrocketed every day; the Empire State Building was programmed to flash red like a beating heart as a showcase of solidarity with healthcare workers, but it looked like some kind of apocalyptic lighthouse — but after two weeks, my body started feeling better. Slowly, the band around my chest seemed to loosen, my cough eased up, my breath came back and I could walk down the stairs again.

I thought, “I survived! It really was, for me, just a bad flu!”

But I never got all the way better. At some point, I started to feel like I was relapsing — and then: new symptoms. The heart stuff and lung stuff and fatigue stuff that had me woozy-wobbling that night in the hospital waiting for my MRI, and a whole new kind of panic attack where the adrenaline that flooded my body was so extreme it caused tremors in my legs and arms that lasted for hours.

My startle reflex started operating in overdrive. If a loud noise woke me up in the middle of the night, I’d immediately burst into a panic attack. Nothing I did could get them under control. Not meditation, not medication, and exercise was out of the question — the only way I could get down the stairs at that point was to basically fling myself forward from the top and hope for the best.

The weakness seemed to settle into my bones.

I lay in bed, day after day, week after week, too tired to sit up for more than a few minutes. Stacy made my meals and brought them to me. Each time, I ate a few bites and had to lie back down to gather up enough energy to sit up and eat a few more. I tried to work, but couldn’t make it through a full day, and then couldn’t make it through a full morning. I asked for an extended leave of absence. I moved all of my toiletries from the bathroom to my nightstand. I could hardly manage a two-minute shower.

The telemedicine doctors all told me I’d be fine; of course the virus would knock me out for a couple of weeks, but I’d bounce back in no time. I explained it had actually been quite a lot longer than “no time” and they smiled and thanked me for calling. My primary care physician said it was anxiety. My psychiatrist said it was depression. New York City’s newly opened Longterm COVID Care Center told me I didn’t have antibodies so I hadn’t had COVID. And anyway, my bloodwork was excellent.

“Is it possible,” I asked the doctor, “that this antibody test might not be a foolproof way to determine who actually had COVID? And that you might not have all the answers for this brand new global pandemic-causing virus we find out something new about every day?”

“No,” she said. “Not possible.”

I needed a wheelchair to leave the Longterm COVID Care Center, but I was scared to ask for one. The doctor seemed to think I was overreacting about having a simple flu. I paused and leaned against walls to steady my legs and catch my breath instead. It took me 20 minutes to finally make it out of the building, and as I waited for my Uber, I sat down on the sticky summer sidewalk right in the middle of Union Square.

My neurosurgeon is renowned. In the good way; not in the way that “remarkable” means “yikes” in spinal vernacular. When his team arrived in the emergency room to handle my emergency MRI, everyone stopped treating me like a woman who’d stumbled in and mimed flying a magical broom around in the lobby and started treating me like a quadruple sapphire iridium medallion frequent flyer. Harried nurses who’d been grumbling about demanding doctors behind their backs for an hour were happy to volunteer when my neurosurgeon’s intern announced that he needed someone to help him check my anal tone. Doctors suddenly had time to come by and offer me a kind word. Nurses kept bringing me juice.

It was the most attention I’d had from medical professionals in months, despite having spoken to dozens of doctors about my COVID symptoms by then. I asked every nurse and doctor who came to look in on me if they knew anything about people suffering from COVID long term, about unusual symptoms, about the antibody tests. What I found out over the course of my night in the ER is that doctors and nurses still had no idea what COVID was about, but they all agreed it was weird and getting infected in mid-March at the onset of the outbreak meant that I was one of the first people in the U.S. to be dealing with LongCovid symptoms; I was the science.

My neurosurgeon likes me, as a person; I can tell because in my after-visit notes from the first time I saw him, he wrote that I was “bright and amiable” and transcribed what I told him when he asked if my neck cracked when I moved it: “like an undead lich rising from an ancient throne in his tomb in the empire of necromancers.” I’d been in bad shape on my initial visit for a pinched nerve; I’d lost 70% of the strength in my left arm, shoulder, and hand. He’d told me I could try physical therapy but that surgery was probably inevitable. I went so hard at PT that the next time I saw him and he gave me the strength test, I sent his wheely chair whizzing across the room and smashed him into the wall. I said, “Now, that’s remarkable!”

The emergency MRI showed that my spine was a little worse than last time, not by much. Surgery was not urgent. But my neurosurgeon was still worried about me. He said I seemed heavy, faint, deeply exhausted, muted. And there was still the matter of words slipping out of my brain, pins and needles in my jelly legs, a wildly overactive bladder. He had the ER doctors run a battery of other tests; all of them were clear.

I said, “Do you think all this could be COVID?”

He leaned back in his chair, pinched his eyebrow and said, “I don’t know. But you’re not yourself. So maybe.” He studied me for a long minute and decided: “Yes.”

I knew exactly who I was before I got COVID: a woman disposed to rise to every occasion. A bitch who gets stuff done. The person everyone relies on to do the thing no one else has the heart or guts or fortitude to do. A soft butch holding my family and friends and my whole little world together with nothing but love and tenacity.

I had huge plans when lockdown started. I was going to finish my book, remake our outdoor furniture, grow fruits and vegetables in my container garden, learn to cook Stacy’s favorite pie (strawberry-rhubarb), run a delivery service for my neighbors for prescriptions and groceries, and connect (and re-connect) with my dearest family and friends.

I didn’t get a chance to do any of those things.

Stacy took over doing all the laundry and dishes and vacuuming and toilet cleaning and shopping and cat feeding and grooming — my jobs, the things I love to do, the homemaking projects I’d longed to be in charge of my entire life, the caretaking tasks made my days feel full and valuable — while working day and night from her makeshift editing suite in the living room. The only thing I saw beyond my bedroom walls was the sky outside my window: grey then blue then purple and gold and cinnamon and orange then black then grey again.

Before COVID, my friends and I spent glorious weekends gathered around a table in my living room, sharing meals and wine and stories from our weeks and hours and hours playing Dungeons & Dragons. The real world so often tried to rob us of our power, but inside our D&D campaign we were unstoppable heroes. We saved towns. We slayed beasts. We made an entire queer universe of inside jokes. We moved our game online during lockdown and I told my friends maybe next week I could play, and maybe next week I would feel better, and maybe next week I’d be back to my old self. When I finally told them they should start a new Dungeons & Dragons game without me, that I wasn’t really getting better and I didn’t know when I would feel okay again, I laid in Stacy’s lap and sobbed with such fierce and broken hoarseness I didn’t even recognize the sounds as my own. I told my therapist, over Zoom, in my bed in my pajamas, that I’d only ever heard people cry like that at funerals before.

“I’m losing everything,” I told Stacy. “I’m losing me.”

My neurosurgeon called me on a Saturday, out of the blue, two weeks after my MRI and said, almost giddily, that he’d asked all of his colleagues and finally found something he thought explained what was going on with me: dysautonomia. That same day, during a Q&A with my LongCovid support group, a different neurologist made the same guess. And so I made an appointment with a cardiologist who specializes in dysautonomia and dragged myself back into Manhattan to be disbelieved by another doctor. I dressed nicely. I had all my paperwork in order in a crisp manila folder. I typed out the main words that kept falling out of my head in the Notes app on my phone, just in case. I’d taken a series of videos on my phone of my heart rate and blood pressure using five different devices total, over the course of two weeks.

I started listing off my symptoms as soon as I sat down in the cardiologist’s office, and within 30 seconds, she held up her hand to stop me. Here we go, I thought. She wants a positive COVID swab or a positive antibody test or this is just anxiety or what happens after a cold and buck up and take a nap and you’ll be fine.

Instead, she said, “I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”

I blinked at her, stunned into total silence.

“You have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. POTS.”

POTS is, in fact, a form of dysautonomia. A person’s autonomic nervous system controls all the things we don’t think about, like heart rate, blood pressure, circulation, digestion, body temperature. When people with POTS sit up or stand up, our autonomic nervous systems can’t properly control our circulation, so all the blood rushes out of our heads and down our bodies, ultimately pooling in our feet. This, of course, makes us very dizzy, to the point of passing out, and also causes our hearts to start beating like mad and our blood pressure to go berserk to try to get our blood back up into our brains. It also causes big time spikes in adrenaline, because our fight or flight systems are almost always activated. Our hearts are often in the cardio zone all day long, and so of course we’re exhausted.

POTS can be caused by many things, one of which is a viral infection. I was this specialist’s first post-COVID case; she said maybe I was the first diagnosed post-COVID POTS case in the entire city of New York.

I jumped up when she diagnosed me; nearly passed out; sat back down, hard; and started to cry so hard my tears soaked through my face mask.

“It’s called an ‘invisible illness,” the cardiologist explained, “because you look fine and your tests and lab work also look completely normal. But it affects every single system in your body. And you feel absolutely miserable. Doctors almost always write it off as depression or anxiety.”

Every morning now when I wake up, I sit up slowly in bed and lean back against my headboard. I drink a full liter of water, eat some salted almonds, put on my compression socks for the day, and take a beta blocker for my heart and an SNRI to keep my adrenaline more in check. After 30 minutes, when my body has adjusted to sitting up, I can stand.

Downstairs, I make the first of three Liquid IV drinks of my day and eat a small breakfast. I drink four liters of water, total, and take more SNRIs and beta blockers as the day progresses. I sit on a stool when I take a shower. I sit down at a little portable table to do all the vegetable chopping and potato peeling for our meals. I wrap an ice scarf around me and sit down near the oven to cook. I use my office chair to wheel around the kitchen when I’m putting away groceries or dishes. I use a cane when I leave the house, which I only do for doctors appointments; it folds out into a stool so I don’t have to sit on the ground.

My cardiologist asked me on my second visit how I was adjusting, emotionally, to having a disability.

I said, “Do I have a disability?”

She said, “Well, yes. I thought you knew.”

Before I left for my most recent trip to the hospital, Stacy checked my backpack to make sure I had everything I needed. She tucked my facemask straps behind my ears, and kissed me on the forehead. “If they don’t have your wheelchair ready when you get there, ask for it,” she said. “Okay?”

I said, “I will, I promise,” and smiled with my eyes so she could see it.

Stacy is scared to be overbearing, because I’ve always hated being told what to do. She’s scared to be underbearing, because my brain fog has made my cognitive functioning less sharp, especially in the morning and at night. She’s scared I’ll do too much, because I’ve always done too much my entire life, that I won’t listen to my body, that I don’t even know how to listen to my body. She’s scared I’ll begin to feel angry at her for what she can do that I can no longer do, that becoming a caretaker to me when I’ve always been a caretaker to everyone else will create an emotional wound that will grow and fester.

She watches me open my pillbox first thing in the morning and slowly work out what I need to take right then and what I need to save for later; she asks if I need a hand; she pretends not to notice that I clench my jaw against her offer and the knowledge that, actually, yes, I could use some help. She leaves my bike, my most prized possession and my lifetime beloved hobby, untouched in the living room on its stand, because maybe one day I’ll be able to ride it again.

I’m scared too. Overachieving isn’t something I do; it’s always been who I am. Now that my sympathetic nervous system is misfiring in a way that makes simply getting through the day out of bed an achievement, there’s no energy left to overdo anything.

What will happen to my career now that I can’t show up early and stay late to help our community survive? What will happen to mine and Stacy’s lease now that I can’t keep my landlord extra happy by doing all the yard work and fixing all the leaky, crumbly, broken things in our house? What will happen to my friendships if I never have the energy or brainpower to sit at a table for five hours and roleplay zombie battles and villager rescues again? What will happen to my relationships with my family when talking on the phone wears me out, and I don’t know how to answer the question about if I’m feeling better? How is it possible that Stacy won’t grow to resent me when I can’t even walk two blocks to pick up my own prescriptions, when my newly diagnosed illness is already eating into our savings, when I can’t stand in the hot kitchen long enough to make our favorite soup, when I can’t even really carry on a conversation at night because my brain and body are so spent?

What if I’m not disabled enough to use the word “disabled?” I’m a person with a huge platform; what if I talk about disability in the wrong way, or miss the mark on my advocacy because it’s (shamefully, mostly) new to me? What if I hurt people who are already hurting with my naïveté, or accidentally dishonor the work of the queer disabled activists who came before me, some of whom I love and cherish as dear friends? What if I can’t find the balance between hope and acceptance? What if I become one of the 30% of POTS patients who are too disabled to work at all?

Is a soft butch a soft butch if she can barely hold even herself together? Is a soft butch a soft butch without her swagger?

Yesterday, I called Stacy on a banana-phone; walked from the kitchen into the living room where her office is set up and ring-ring, ring-ring-ed. She looked up from her computer monitor and saw me holding a banana to my ear and quirked her eyebrow. “Hi yes,” I said, “This is the last banana and I was wondering if you were planning to go to the store for more bananas in the next few days and so I can go ahead and use this in my smoothie or should I save it for a banana emergency?” She wanted to be annoyed with me because I was interrupting her workday and she was on a deadline. She wanted to be miffed because I’d pulled her out of her creative flow. But her mouth twitched into a smile because I was asking her for something I needed and could not do for myself, and I was being ridiculous, and it’d been so long since I’d been ridiculous. She said she’d run out to the grocery store tomorrow. I thanked her for her time, hung up the banana-phone, and turned it into a microphone to interview our cat Socks about the rumors that he’s a marshmallow head.

I’m scared, but I’m alive.

I’m scared, but I’m not broken.

In LongCovid support groups, we say our name and where we’re from and how long we’ve been sick. I’m Heather Hogan from New York City. Week 19/Day 133.

Week 156/Day 1,095 Update: You can buy a copy of The Long Covid Survival Guide, which I contributed to, if you’re looking for a good resource to help yourself or a friend/family member suffering with Long Covid. It might also make you happy to know that while I am still fighting Long Covid, I was finally able to get back on my bike! 

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I Don’t Want To Write Beautiful Things

My earliest memories from childhood are of watching my mother work. Snapshots of life in different uniforms: Her behind the counter during the night shift at CVS, her wrangling neighborhood kids as she ran her own daycare, her working full days teaching reading at the elementary school and coming home to take online classes to put herself through a bachelor’s degree program.

She was a woman on a mission, machine-like, in her efforts to keep our heads above water. She did not take vacations. She did not get manicures. She worked because we were working people, the working poor, and that was what we did.

It wasn’t resignation that told me to expect that same level of tirelessness from my own adulthood, it was a dogged determination. It was simply thought, if never simply executed: If you want your people to survive, you will do everything in your power to provide for them, for yourself. There would be no fallback plan, no wealthy grandparents to call for help, no property to one day inherit, no passing go and collecting $200. If I failed, it would cost me everything.

So, I did what Good Daughters are supposed to do. I was going to achieve my way, our way out of poverty. I went to college and majored in journalism, which, if not a lucrative career, seemed at least a practical use of my skills. I applied for every scholarship, took the right internships, studied under the best people. I often did not love the work I was doing, but I understood that I was not a person who had the luxury of always loving their work.

It wasn’t the job of a career to make you happy all of the time, its duty was to get you paid. To give you healthcare benefits and keep a roof over your head and pay you adequately so should the day come when an emergency befell your parents or siblings, you’d have enough money to send home to them.

This is not to say that my mother didn’t encourage me to follow my dreams. She did. At every turn, it was her voice in my ear saying, “You can achieve anything you want to. It’s different for you. The whole world is at your fingertips.”

But the knowing and the knowing are two different things. What would make me happy, I decided, was being comfortable. One day I would make enough money to travel and go out to eat every night if I wanted to and buy my parents elaborate Christmas gifts. And no matter what I did professionally, if that were the case, I could rest easy at night.

To have what we needed would, of course, be sufficient. But to have what we wanted — the small, unnecessary luxuries of a life without lack? That would be enough.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I set out to write an essay about love stories, a task at which I would consider myself something of an expert. And I have some notes about that if you’re interested in hearing them.

This is the truth: Writing about first love for a living is a magical gift. Being sixteen and confused and passionate is one of the most devastating and exciting things in the world. I remember it vividly.

Brushed hands across a lunch table. Secret, flirtatious texts on a phone your parents still pay for. The heart-skip between I like you and Do you like me back? I weave these sense memories between A plots and B plots, between guns on the mantle in the first act and guns going off in the third. I fashion queer teen love out of a combination of retroactive wish-fulfillment and mapmaking. I make work that I hope undoes the damage of a world which tells queer folks, queer people of color especially, that we aren’t worthy of love or tenderness or longevity.

Through a particular lens, my writing career is a love story of sorts in and of itself. It happened before I believed it would, was almost fairytale-like until it wasn’t. And at one point, it felt like it was over, felt like I should give up on it entirely, as I have often felt about love. I would be more specific about the details, but they are decidedly unromantic, and I’m trying to get at something here, so forgive me. What matters is that I pivoted, rediscovered myself, and came out the other side a Professional Writer.

A career like the one I’ve had so far is not the standard. I have been very lucky. There’s no denying that.

But I want you to understand this: There are days when I find it difficult to write tenderly. There are days when these fictions feel inadequate. There are days when I’m sure I won’t ever be able to get another character from a meet cute to a cinematic final chapter kiss. Not because of imposter syndrome or writers’ block. But because it is hard to be tender when I feel half full of exhaustion.

And it is near-impossible to gently usher my characters from chapter to chapter on days when I resent the very act of writing.

Because this, too, is the truth: For as much as I love my work, and as grateful as I am to be able to do it — this is still my job. I am now and will forever be a child of poverty, clinging to every dime I make like it’s my last. Every word I write, every manuscript I complete, and every proposal my agent sells is another stone in the fortress I am building to protect myself from slipping back into the type of life I wanted so badly to escape once upon a time. Writing, working, does and has always felt like life or death to me.

And that’s not a love story. It’s just a fact.

When I was a student, I would often call my mom during breaks between classes or running from one work-study gig to the next. When she wouldn’t answer, I would pout, as children often do, about not being able to reach her for guidance the moment a small crisis appeared — fully aware of the fact that she was busy during business hours but hoping, always, to catch her in her own in-between moments. When she’d call me back after she’d left work, her refrain was always the same: “I was working, Leah. Some of us have to work.”

It’s a running joke between us now. In my adulthood, the perceived urgency of my younger self is laughable. That I thought my mom — who still, years later, works more hours than any woman her age has any business working — could drop everything and come tend to me on a whim. The sheer absurdity of the belief that people like her — like me up until fairly recently — have the luxury of convenience in the ways we do our jobs.

When every day, every paycheck means the difference between lights or not, food or not, cell phone or not, there is no such thing as a “break.” I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now. Now that there are sabbaticals, and extended deadlines when I’m spread too thin, and scenic mountainside retreats when I need to “unplug.”

Now that there is an option for rest, for refueling, and I still do not allow myself to take it, I understand it better than I ever have.

You need to be working, Leah. Some of us will always have to work.

When I talk to my friend, V, about this essay, and my vulnerability about sharing what is, in part, one of my greatest shames — how fragile I feel about the act and intensity of my writing — she points me in the direction of a newsletter that tapped a Phillip Roth quote, which has stuck with me since. He said that writing is a nightmare, but it isn’t necessarily hard.

Perhaps this work isn’t as hard as I’ve often purported it to be. I mean, it certainly, as Roth also said, isn’t coal mining. Barely more than a generation ago, my family was composed of sharecroppers, and even now, blue-collar factory employees and schoolteachers and custodial workers. Meanwhile, I sit at a desk with a thousand-dollar laptop and play pretend for a living. To complain about my work feels trivial at best, and, at worst, a slap in the face to the people who got me here.

But poverty, I’ve learned, especially that which we experience in childhood, is psychological. Being poor, therefore, isn’t something you outgrow. It shapes you. It seeps into your marrow. You can neither achieve nor logic your way out of trauma.

There is no threshold of success that, for me, is going to alleviate the gnawing sensation of This is not enough. Of: But what if it disappears? Of: Okay but what next? I am constantly waiting for the repo man to bring out the truck and haul away my life. When it comes to money, everything is fleeting. They don’t teach you this in the MFA, how the image of the starving artist is idealistic until you know what it’s really like to go hungry.

Money, or capitalism at large, I suppose, has created an unavoidable tension between myself and my work. As I write this, I am procrastinating drafting a novel that I have already been paid a great deal of money to write. In some ways, this essay saves me from the ordeal of having to look at my imagination straight on — this reckless beast of a thing which has willed joy out of thin air time and time again — and find it wanting. Find it inadequate. Find it depleted.

In other ways, this essay is just another in a string of works that take my gift and turn it to fuel for a future. I am aware that it is uncouth to talk about money in polite company, about how much it means to me and how much I would — and have — sacrificed in order to have it. I am both pleased with myself for what I’ve achieved and ashamed of not having done more, constantly oscillating between pride and fear and so much wanting.

I live comfortably. I have money saved for emergencies and spontaneous travel. I just bought a house. I’ve pulled myself up by my bootstraps. This is the American Dream.

And yet.

I’d planned to write about the craft of writing love stories, yet here I am. Forgive me.

It’s just, there is no way for me to address one of these things without the other. That is the truth, and I am in the business of writing honestly, especially about the things that hurt — heartbreak, disappointment, shame, poverty. My work — all those swoony kisses and witty banter-y conversations and idealistic first dates — is tied together with my desperation, with my deep desire to create the type of financial stability that a number of my contemporaries simply have, either due to nepotism or spousal support or just good old-fashioned luck.

I don’t know everything. The older I get, the more convinced I am, in fact, that I don’t know very much at all. But I believe this about love stories: Once you flip past the last page and close the book, your knowledge becomes incomplete. If the writer has done what they should, you will imagine a life for the characters past what you’ve been given access to, but you will never know for sure. The last page is merely a suggestion.

So fellow writers, please hear me when I say this: I want you to know that every book doesn’t have to be the book of your heart. Every essay doesn’t have to excavate the darkest depths of your most secret parts. It is okay to be motivated by money, and perhaps it’s okay, too, to be resentful of the fact that you are motivated by money. I want you to know that I’m exhausted too. That today I woke up and I didn’t want to write, that I crafted scenes I’m not yet proud of, but will revise and revise until I am. Because that is the work.

I want you to know that we are here and we are doing the best we can with what we have and it’s not always okay but it is a life. It is your life. It is my life.

In the tradition of love stories, this last paragraph is merely a suggestion. It is a stopping point for now, but if I’ve done my job, you will imagine a life past what I’ve given you access to. Mine, sure, but yours too. Perhaps in that imagining, we work less, we are secure in what we’ve achieved and have divorced ourselves from the idea that every word we write is the brick wall that stands between us and failure. Us and ruin. Us and and and and —

There is still love here, in the work.

I choose to imagine that we find it.

On Gender Fabrication and Femme Embodiment

Femme. Whispered. Purred. Growled. Madonna’s “Express Yourself” may play on small, overly trebly speakers as we apply our makeup. Like… a lot of makeup. Immaculate and preciously, precisely placed flecks of glitter. Swath of eyeshadow gradient. And then dance the applied adornment into a whole new iteration of a look… eyeliner smeared in careless touches and mascara moving in drips down cheeks being pulled towards my throat on tracks of sweat. I am long, painted nails twisting up nervous coiled phone cords or tapping rhythmically on pale pink porcelain. I live in the folds of full-skirted 80’s prom dresses. I am made of heels so sharp they could cut glass. I am a great many necklaces worn all at once.

But these are constructs. The structure and shape of my iridescent ankle boot with six inch heels is only feminine because of cultural placement. Bury my shoeboxes in the earth for a few centuries and whoever uncovers them, the enduring synthetic materials, may not even know the meaning of the term “women’s wear.” With any hope their understanding of gender will have transformed into something liberatory and expansive and bear not even a vestige of our binary and bioessentialist categorizations. I imagine a variant of Ariel in her cave of treasures — such a material “girl” — projecting associations on found objects and combing her hair with a fork.

Yet even my Little Mermaid reference point is telling of some refraction of my gender identity, in how I’ve assembled the correlative hope for shared reality. I believe that some part of me and my femmeness is inherent to my corporeal biological form and my spiritual existence; however so much of how we construct and understand our gender(s) is informed by cultural placement. What occurs so often then when we try to anchor or define the inherent and or internal quality of our gender with external elements is this ouroboros (mine looks like an elongated tube of lipstick, melted/melting) where the evidences we find or bring forth are cultural in origin and therefore have no inherent quality to define or codify our gender(s). We are just chasing our tails. Infinite regress. For this reason the distinction between authentic and performative gender is difficult to demonstrate or articulate. This is true for people of all genders including cisgender bodies.

There are so many things I may reach for to explain how I know I am a femme or an intersex non-binary woman but these words and concepts themselves are devised and constructed. My intersex body demonstrates itself physiologically and externally, even outside of any cultural placement. My transness may be more or less visually obvious depending on your perception. Recent endocrinological studies have demonstrated evidence that seem to indicate trans specific brain chemistry, inherent physiological and chemical demonstrations of transness that have discernible corollaries to our genders, but even then these evidences are mostly approached from a binary framework and one of a specific cultural construction. And most of this evidential framing of trans and non-binary existence, the desire for some biological “proof” of our actuality, is fodder for transphobes and all too often devised from a US/Eurocentric scientific/medical origin which has hxstorically been used to transphobic ends. This is also a system that constructed and employed eugenics as a dominant practice. We do not need to justify our existence, in ANY capacity, and certainly not within a system that has been used to harm us. There is widespread evidence of transness and non-binary existence across a great many human cultures and many of them have vast hxstorical depth.

This essay is mostly about how I come to know and define myself as a “femme” and how I practice embodiment of it within my culture. Although femininity has some relationship with the constructs of woman and girl, through frequency of use and cultural assignment, they are not synonymous or directly connected by any means. There are many feminine men and many femmes that are not girls or women. But undeniably these connections do exist as does the proximity of femme to the construct of femininity. If femme as a chosen gender identity, is connected to femininity, as we define it more broadly in mainstream culture, then where do I anchor femmeness and how do I understand it? There are so many aspects of what seem to have an innate feminine quality that I relate to and identify with but of course this too is frequently an illusion and a machination of patriarchal, Eurocentric, white supremacy.

Pink can serve as an excellent example of this concept. Pink, a shade as much as a color, is something with such seemingly chasmic gendered associations in the US with “girls” and “girly” qualities and yet it only came to have such an association just prior to World War I. And the use of pastel pink and blue color assignment for babies arrived here in the mid-19th century (Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 1997). Both supremely fresh in the spectrum of recorded human record. And yet it at times seems as if this has been the way for all of time. So is the terrible and destructive power of normalization processes, rendered invisible to so many eyes, so that they exist as the immutably “natural order” and portrayed to have always been so. But as far as this seemingly ubiquitous gendered color scheme for some time prior to World War I there existed an opposite gender color assignment/association where pink was used predominantly for “boys” and blue was used for “girls.” And this is a US/European culturally specific coding at that. I offer this to convey, at least for myself, so many components I employ to relate to my inherent gender qualities utilize external elements that often are cultural constructs with no innate qualities of positioning — and rather new cultural constructs at that.

Gender in its infinite and expansive nature, is still tied to some cultural placement. Words themselves are a construct of flawed human manufacture. And when we are trying to extricate something that exists predominantly in the internal, we will always fall short of a perfect extraction and correlation, to some degree, when we speak or write them out because these tools are so limited in relating something that feels so magically ethereal and intangible inside of me. Just as there is so much arrogance in the microscope… that when we gaze through it’s optics we believe we are moving closer to objective truth.

There are times I find solace in my feminine constructions. Maybe less and less as I deepen my understanding of the gender binary but they remain. There is an affirmation that transcends the oppressive walls of category. My early kitten memories are strikingly retained of sitting in front of a TV and staring, starry eyed, at JEM. I’m not sure where I fell in the run of Jem and Holograms from 1985-1988 but wherever I fell in that timeline for the show, I fell in love. So much so that here we are decades later and I’m still modeling aspects of my identity on Jem, Jerrica, and Kimber. Fronting a pop band, albeit with our own politics, I will clad myself in pink plastic and lavender glittered skirts, shimmering neon stripes painted across my face and enough blush to read from the back of any room. Jem was a guiding star for my young femme spirit. Pink hair, eccentric makeup, and THE OUTFITS. She was powerful, intelligent, and resourceful. And she literally transmutated at least once an episode. And she was me. Or some idealized representation we look to in trying to form ourselves. Mirror neurons and cathode rays. It wasn’t until recently I unpacked my subconsciously projected trans narrative of the show in the capacity of Jerrica to literally transform herself at will and experience recurring transitions/makeovers/metamorphoses in each episode, but that is a theoretical distillation for another time. I was very little and that show left a very big mark.

Make-up is another interesting notion as it pertains to gender expression. Make-up has so many varied associations to different gender identities in a cross cultural framework and only some of them have associations to “femininity.” For many other cultures, make-up has strong associations to the construct of being a “man” and “masculinity.” Just as “pink” is the modern Eurocentric association of the feminine, make-up is more of a modern development. There are large periods of time when it was normalized for cis men to wear makeup, and it wasn’t until the mid 1800s that this shifted to the other binary position.

My own experience with makeup is as a potion, and only a small sliver of how I come to frame myself as a “femme,” employing praxis from a queer perspective existing outside of the cis male gaze. I put on makeup often for my own enjoyment and connection, playing with colors and shapes and luminosity. At times it makes me feel beautiful. But my conception of beauty is so deeply ingrained and informed by culture that no doubt, even in moments of doing it for myself, the reasons for it eliciting joy cannot be completely extracted from those same oppressive beauty standards. And there are times I do end up wearing makeup for others. There are times I need to use it as armor to defend myself through assimilation and “passing.” To avoid misgendering and a whole range of harm and violence directed at transfeminine bodies and our existence. There are days I really don’t want to put on makeup and feel like I have to in order to reduce the chance of harm. In those days I am doing it for men. To increase my chances of safety in a transphobic culture of their dominion.

In tracing my own hxstory I find some comfort in knowing I just wanted to play dress up and make-believe in tiny plastic pastel kitchens. I was not even an adolescent, obsessively drawn to these celebrity feminine entities and games designed for “little girls” — perhaps prior or at the very least contemporaneous with my developing understanding of gender. This makes me believe it wasn’t in some radical, rebellious opposition to an assigned gender role I was at times being pressed into but rather an inherent attraction. These early and pervasive adorations lead me to believe that the little, pink, glittered Cyndi Lauper loving grrrl was in there from the moment of self-identity actualization. The moment I could conceive of myself with terms like “I” … I wanted a pink satin bow tied around my neck. This is a feminized cat reference in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.

As to what the naming or framing of what my gender might be if we existed in a world without our current classification of it, I know not. Without the words or even a concept of gender as we have fashioned it I certainly wouldn’t presume to claim knowledge of how I would act or construct a similar facet of identity. I believe we all have innate qualities that demonstrate as thoughts and behaviors and reactions, endocrinological and biologically informed, but if we didn’t create the idea of “femme” or the idea of “girl” then I have no idea how I would exist outside of the vacuum. In the same way I wonder if I would experience dysphoria if we had never constructed cisheteronormative society. My assumption is that this is a symptom of a culture that demonizes, erases, denigrates, and murders trans people.

Part of where my comfort is derived from in reflecting on personal femme centered hxstory is how I can explain the self-awareness of knowing I was trans, without having the language for it. It is the closest experience I have to what described earlier, this conceptual world predating gender and or existing beyond the binary. No person is more authentic or more valid in their transness or non-binary existence because they were able to identify it at an early age. But when so much of this world moves to extinguish trans existence and invalidate our lives, I do sometimes find solace in this self-awareness that predates having a word or concept to describe it. It is an understanding without words or articulated concepts. It feels magical. And profound.

It is important to acknowledge though, when I look at these external points with which I discovered how to express and articulate my gender in an affirming way, beyond the sacred internal, the indescribable knowing, with an amount of critical inspection I often find these external mapping points informed by the violent and harmful gender binary we exist in. And it definitely sours the sweetness. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is an incredible song but the concept of “girl” is a racist illusion and one that does a great deal of harm in its boundaries and their violent enforcement.

To my trans girl, trans woman, trans femme, and non-binary femme siblings… I wish you all of an abundance of gender joy. I wish you all the affirmations you can find. May they be in pop songs and in eye shadow palettes. May they be in thick beards and chest hair. May they be in reflection and seeing oneself in the parts of others. May they already be inside of you. I wish and make plans for all of us to transform and transmute this world into something far more expansive and liberatory. Dancing until the makeup is running down our faces. In a world where make-up is for whoever the fuck wants it.

Photographer and Art Director: Janelle Pietrzak // @janellepietrzakphoto
Makeup Artist: Kendall Bennewitz // @Kendall.Bennewitz
Hair: Stephanie Craig // @stephaniecraig_hair
Top: Jessica Owen // @jessicaowenarts
Skirt: Zzyzx Couture // @zzyzx_Coutur
Special thanks to Sevi Giovanni Xcetera for advance edits

Dispatches From My First Few Weeks in Florida

In July 2020, I finally, officially, fully moved in with my girlfriend. Our plans changed about a million times, but now we’re finally here, making a home together in Florida. We spent the first couple months in Orlando, packing up her former house and preparing to move down south to Miami, a city new to both of us.

The following are a series of completely true updates from my first several weeks in the sunshine state. The bold parts are excerpts of tweets, journal entries, and texts from July to November 2020.

Florida Update: Just experienced my first Florida thunderstorm, and I would just like to say…no ❤️️

My girlfriend tried to prepare me for Florida thunderstorms due to the fact that I established early on in our relationship that I react to thunder the same way a small dog does. Well joke’s on fucking ME because my girlfriend’s little French bulldog doesn’t care AT ALL about thunderstorms here, which are approximately 50% more thunderstormy than thunderstorms anywhere else. The dog simply watched while I cried a lil and the WHOLE HOUSE shook. ;(

Florida Update: I bought white linen pants. And then I bought a second pair of linen pants.

The no white after Labor Day fashion rule doth not apply here!!!!!!!!

Florida Update: Bikini tops are shirts. DON’T change my mind.

I think I’m turning into a Beach Wine Mom. As in, I keep drinking pinot grigio on the beach and wearing bikini tops in my own kitchen while, like, steaming shellfish.

Florida Update: A lizard jumped on my foot :(

This is mostly upsetting because my girlfriend once said to me that lizards “want nothing to do with you” and I was like ok cool so lizards in Florida are like the hot mean girls in middle school. But THEN a lizard absolutely jumped on my foot. And in both the lizard’s and my girlfriend’s defense, it was almost certainly attempting to get away from me and accidentally hopped upon my sandaled foot. But I still did not care for it!!!!!!! I promptly tweeted about my myriad experiences with Florida lizards (see below), and Laneia dared to ask if a palmetto bug had flown down my shirt yet, and while that particular horror has not happened yet, I will never stop thinking about the possibility of it.

Florida Update: I’ve seen so many lizards fucking!

I knew there would be lots of lizards and various cold blooded creatures here, but I did not know how HORNY they would be. The first time I saw lizards fucking I was like ok weird; the second time I was like damn; the third through fiftieth time I was like CAN YA’LL GET A ROOM????

Florida Update: Tonight, three Floridians sat in my backyard and told me all the animals, insects, and plants that could kill me here.

I’m still processing this one.

Florida Update: Every day I learn a new bird.

The anhinga aka snakebird is probably my favorite. Those bitches are spooky AND beautiful.

Florida Update: There are very large birds that fly very close to our condo every day, and every time I think one is going to accidentally fly into my head but this of course never happens but I also keep forgetting to look up what kind of birds they are. If I had to guess, they are the size of a school bus.

Need a Bird Gay to weigh in on this one.

Florida Update: MY HAIR LOOKS AMAZING!!!!!!

Yes, I do have to use a prolific amount of this anti-frizz spray that makes me smell like a piña colada, but in general, the humidity has been great for my hair and face.

Florida Update: Saw some fins scurry-swim past me while I was standing in the ocean and asked my girlfriend what it was and she said in a sing-songy voice “oh, just a sharky.”

Like she really thought she could fool me into thinking it was a cute lil ocean pal by calling it a SHARKY. I have never once in my life seen a shark, and I have swam in many bodies of saltwater. But just one week in Florida, and one basically brushes against my ankle.

Florida Update: My girlfriend beckoned me to the kitchen to show me a “ Florida surprise” which I thought was maybe a little glass of orange juice but was actually a snake slithering in the sun just outside our kitchen window.

I’m just surprised she didn’t call it a “snakey.”

Florida Update: We went on a night walk and saw a bright green light fly across the sky, paused to make sure the other had seen it, and then just kept walking like nothing happened.

I still have no idea what we saw. It looked sort of like a shooting star but also way too close and VERY GREEN. It’s extremely possible that we witnessed some sort of cosmic event or the beginning of an Annihilation-like situation, but neither of us were particularly fazed because sometimes surreal things just happen here.

Florida Update: Every season is tomato season here.

I keep saying I’m going to make tomato jam and have yet to make tomato jam, so please check in in about a month to see if I have made tomato jam yet.

Florida Update: Everything about Disney World sounds made up.

I still have not been to any of the parks due to the global pandemic, but every once in a while my girlfriend will say something about Disney, and I just have to believe her even though what she’s saying sounds like a lie. I thought Disney World was just kinda of overpriced cheeseburgers, women in princess costumes, and rollercoasters but it’s apparently essentially its own planet with its own laws of physics. I think I’ve been told there’s a rollercoaster where you go to hell? I mean, sounds neat.

Florida Update: How many mosquito bites is TOO many mosquito bites?

Now that we’re on the 20th floor in a Miami condo, I don’t have to contend with nature’s vampires anymore, but in our first couple months up in Orlando, we sat in our Airbnb’s backyard almost every day which 1. Was incredible, especially coming from Vegas where we couldn’t be outside for too long without feeling like we’d been hardboiled and 2. Meant I received approximately 75 bug bites a day. SOMETIMES ON MY ASS. Spray and citronella helped a little bit but not entirely. Apparently, sticking Bounce dryer sheets in your pockets also helps. I’m learning so much about science.

Florida Update: Floridian meteorologists are paid to lie.

You must have to be very brave and confident to become a weatherperson in Florida, because you basically just have to be wrong all the time. Despite being told by my sister many times that the weather app that comes with iPhones is a piece of shit, I never saw myself as someone who would PAY REAL AMERICAN DOLLARS for an app that merely tells me the weather, but I did indeed spend $3.99 on an app that merely tells me the weather. It is still often wrong.

Florida Update: Every time I get close to the ocean, I stick my tongue out to taste the salty air.

I have always wanted to live close to the beach. Technically, I “have” before. But that was in Los Angeles, where despite being close-ish to the coast, if you live anywhere other than the west side, you’re looking at a 1 hour+ journey and also no one really seems to want to go with you? And then in Chicago, and yes lake beaches are real beaches (everyone in Florida would probably disagree even though there are so many lakes here), but they’re also cold 88% of the time. And then I was in Brooklyn where the long subway ride TO the beach can sometimes be fun and exciting but the ride home is always…a low-stakes nightmare. All of this is to say that now I can !!!WALK!!! ten minutes to a beach.

Florida Update: Do I miss the fall? Yes. Do I miss being cold? No.

We keep buying candles that smell like campfires and spiced cookies and wet leaves, which helps a bit with the autumnal FOMO.

Florida Update: Oh no I get cold at 75 degrees now.

TBT the polar vortexes I lived through in the Midwest. Now I have to wear a light sweater if it’s cloudy and below 80. Sometimes, there’ll be a windy day and I’m like damn where’s the hot cocoa.

Florida Update: Everyone keeps telling me the correct way to outrun an alligator, but I keep forgetting.

I think you’re supposed to run in a zig-zag???? In any case, I haven’t actually seen an alligator anywhere other than in the very far distance along the highway while driving from Miami to St. Petersburg. They were basking in the sun which is also one of my favorite Florida activities. Gators! They’re just like us!

Florida Update: Every sunset here is perfect and one-of-a-kind.

Pretty sure I’ve seen every color imaginable in the Miami sky, and if I think about it for too long I’ll start crying. Nature is terrifying and beautiful, and Florida reminds me of that every goddamn day.

I Spent the Summer Screaming in My Car, What About You?

I was driving north on the I-5 last week when it happened again.

A country song was playing loudly through the speakers of my Subaru. The sky was miraculously blue after a week of wildfire smoke keeping it a shade of apocalyptic dusty orange. My brain was feeling okay. And then I rounded a corner and something shifted. It was nothing tangible: the song, still loud, the sky, still blue, my brain… well okay, my brain was no longer feeling okay. It’s because my thoughts had shifted ever so slightly. I remembered that I wanted to take my dad camping when I moved from the East Coast to Oregon and became an outdoorsy person. I remembered the way my dad had seemed delighted but nervous, the exact way his voice pitched when he said, “But how can we go camping? We don’t know how.” I remembered how proud I felt when I explained to him that I did know how, that my friends had taught me, that I could teach him. I remembered that I never took my dad camping. I remembered that my dad is now dead.

I gripped the steering wheel tight, kept my eyes on the road, opened my mouth wide, and started screaming at the top of my lungs.

I’ve spent the summer screaming in my car.

My dad died on January 1. That is the fact that defines this year for me. It’s 2021 and everything is wrong: the pandemic, climate crisis, white supremacy, evictions, trauma, death, grief… It feels like the world is ending, I know this is true for so many people in so many personal and global ways, but I also feel as though I am on my own planet entirely. On my planet my dad is dead. On my planet everything else is in addition to this main fact. On my planet I am entirely alone. I have never felt so lonely.

A car is a good place to be alone. You can be parked, in front of your house or in an empty parking lot or next to a hiking trail or on a street you’ve never driven down before. You can be in motion, racing up or down the freeway, stopping and starting at neighborhood traffic lights. You can listen to music or you can be entirely absorbed in your thoughts or you can call a friend and yell into the speakerphone across state lines. You can eat a meal in a car, or a snack, or you can let yourself stay hungry and thirsty for hours so you never need to stop to use the restroom. Of course you could put a passenger inside your car. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being alone in your car, about being alone when you already feel so lonely.

I’m trying to tell you why I’ve been screaming in my car all summer long.

The first scream — well, to be honest, I don’t remember the first scream.

Maybe I just got off the phone with my best friend in Minneapolis, maybe she let me sob for a full hour while I was parked outside my house, maybe it didn’t make sense to go inside because I have housemates and even though they love me and understand I am grieving, I just don’t feel good shrieking at the top of my lungs at 10pm on a work night in a house with other humans.

Maybe it was the six month anniversary of his death, witnessing my baby brother celebrate his 30th birthday without our dad, forcing myself to keep a smile on my face for the entire party so I didn’t ruin his night, sneaking into the garage near the end of it so I could scream alone, wondering what my dad would’ve thought of the three different cakes I made my brother, per his request, because I would do anything for him now, because the one thing he really wants is unattainable.

Maybe it’s after I fight with a loved one, when I feel abandoned and alone, when I can’t figure out who the fuck I am anymore, because this is not me, but also, I guess this is me. “I am not myself,” I will have said earlier, before I am in the car, “I am just not myself right now,” but later, in the car, alone, screaming, I will be forced to wonder, well okay, maybe I am myself right now, maybe I will never be my old self ever again, and I will scream so loud because it is so fucking unfair that trauma shapes us and we are all experiencing traumatic events every single day and changing so fast because of it and maybe none of us are ourselves anymore and maybe that’s why I’m so lonely. I will scream and I will wonder if everyone is quite so lonely.

Screaming is different from crying because it feels like an action instead of a reaction.

My tears come often, unbidden. I’m crying while I write this essay. It is often an inopportune time to cry. I have taken to telling myself sternly, we do not have time for this right now. We cannot do this today. Get it together. Stop crying.

When the sound of a scream leaves my throat, it is a choice. I am never accidentally screaming. I scream in the car and it is on purpose.

I scream and scream and scream and scream because my dad is dead and nothing I can say explains anything, but when I scream, alone in my car, over and over, somehow I feel like maybe I am saying something that needs to be said. Somehow it makes me feel a little bit better. I guess we call that a coping strategy.

This is what I know: My dad has been dead for almost eight months. Everyone I know is suffering. I do not mean that as a euphemism, as a cutesy way to end this essay — I mean we are all living through actual hell on earth, I mean everyone I know is filled to the brim with sadness, with loss. But I don’t know how to connect right now. My usual strategies have failed me. Screaming in my car is a new strategy. Do I feel better after I scream? Honestly, I don’t know. That’s not really the point. It’s just a thing to do in the moment, a way to remind myself that I am still here, whoever I am. I guess it’s me telling myself that I’m allowed to be angry as well as sad.

I guess I wanted to tell you that, too.

Here’s What I Learned By Choosing to Step Away from Productivity For a Whole Day

“KaeLyn does everything fast.”

That’s what my mom said about me when I was a little kid. For literally as long as I can remember, I’ve been on the go-go-go. Having two teachers as parents meant high standards and lots of support for constant learning. Paired with my natural tendency to hold myself to ridiculously high standards and to commit to slightly more things than I can actually accomplish because of the annoying limitations of being a non-super human, I’m well… I’m always doing everything fast.

I had the enormous blessing of having a week off from my day job this week. We closed the whole virtual office so everyone on staff could get some time away from the grind. We all needed it, for sure. I felt like I was doing a decent job of taking time off. After getting Remi to summer camp on Monday and Tuesday, I had actual alone time during daylight hours! I took most of Monday afternoon to go on a shopping trip semi-date with Waffle. I went to the gym every day. I enjoyed a slow coffee every morning. However, two days in, Waffle looked at me and said, “So are you going to work every day of your vacation?”

I was behind the deadline on submitting my course reader for a new course I’m applying to teach in the fall. Because I’d taken Monday to spend time with Waffle, I had stayed up late the night before working on it and was still working on it on Tuesday. Waffle asked me what I had planned for the rest of the week and I rattled off a laundry list of tasks and chores. I had some writing deadlines. I planned to read and submit feedback about a book chapter for a former colleague. I had to outline work course plans for two summer writing workshops that I’m teaching or co-teaching in the next month. I had scheduled a couple of phone meetings for speaking gigs. I had some work to do and meetings to schedule for the nonprofit board I recently stepped into leadership on as chair. I wanted to finally get the fridge fixed, get artwork framed and hung, and some other things.

As I reflected on it, I realized I had scheduled a bunch of things during my “week off” because I saw it as a great opportunity to catch up on my various commitments and jobs outside of my capital “j” Job. Because I, like a lot of people and especially my fellow Capricorns, am addicted to productivity. In other words, Waffle wasn’t wrong. I was kind of working every day of my vacation. I decided I needed to do something big to disrupt and stop the productivity train. I needed to do less.

Between being a parent in the pandemic with a kid at home for pretty much the past four years, always working a full-time job and several side jobs, and just being the person I naturally am, I wasn’t sure that I even knew how to stop trying to “produce.” Capitalism is bullshit and it also absolutely encourages and rewards my ridiculous personal ambition. Capitalism culture (which is also white supremacy culture) demands that we keep working to prove our value–the more we produce, the more we’re worth.

What an interesting idea, I thought, to actually do nothing at all. I had one day on my calendar for the week during which I had no meetings or appointments scheduled – Wednesday – and I decided I was going to commit to a “do nothing productive day.”

I made some basic rules: no running errands, no phone calls, no email, no volunteer or paid work, no cleaning the house, no anything for any purpose other than survival or feeling good. Whew. OK. I shared on social media both to force myself to hold myself accountable and to share the idea in case it spoke to anyone else who was also feeling swept up in the nonstop productivity grind.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRA4C-wBr2J/

Doing nothing as a form of self-care or mindfulness is not a new concept. On some level, I was surely subconsciously informed by the general wellness discourse that exists around mindfulness and self-care. It was also just a personal challenge which, unlike most of my pursuits, wouldn’t be rewarded by achieving anything immediately tangible. It was a challenge and I love a challenge!

I did some prep work to set myself up for success. I had one writing deadline on Wednesday, so I finished that piece and submitted it the night before. I did the dishes in the sink and did a basic picking up of the living room and dining room. I downloaded the never-stop feed of reminders and information from my brain into a long to-do list which I then saved and put away until Thursday, to try to clear the noise from my head. Then, finally, I went to bed fully committed to my “do nothing productive” day.

Wednesday, I woke up, turned off my alarm, and without thinking, opened my email on my phone. Oops! I realized what I was doing and quickly shut it down. Soon after, I heard my toddler pulling herself up onto my bed. This morning, she sat down next to me and said, “Mom? Can I sit with you? My pants are dry.” This woke me right up. Why… why would the pants not be dry? Long story short, Remi had a small accident on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but put her wet pants back on and went back to bed instead of waking me up to help her. She loves doing things all by herself. Like parent, like child!

So I started the day by cleaning Remi up and stripping her bed. As I went to get myself dressed – we still needed to get out the door to drop her off at summer camp – I stepped directly in cold cat puke. Fun. By the time I dropped off Remi, I was not feeling particularly mindful and I definitely wasn’t feeling grounded. Oh, and I unexpectedly got my period a week early in the middle of all of this. What a day to try to do nothing and practice mindfulness!

I decided to do some retail therapy on the way home, something I rarely get to do by myself and haven’t done since pre-pandemic. I love shopping alone, taking my time thumbing through clearance racks. While buying consumer goods doesn’t exactly improve my relationship to Capitalism, it’s what I needed at the moment and helped me get back to a place of focusing on myself. I bought a bunch of new shirts on sale and some K-beauty products that were on clearance with the intention of doing some masking at some point in the day. I didn’t end up using them, so I stick to my opinion that self-care is not, in fact, magically achieved through face masks. (I am doing the gold face mask right now, though.)

Face masks do not self-care make, but I’m definitely looking forward to using them eventually!

The real test was going to be “doing nothing productive” at home. I’m pretty good at switching off my work-brain when I’m out of the house and doing something else actively, like when I’m on vacation or at an event or doing anything outside of my normal routine. Escaping to a different place is my favorite instant self-care move. (See: my morning shopping adventure.) However, you can’t escape when you’re in your home. I work in my home. I live in my home. I co-parent Remi and am responsible for keeping our home semi-functional. There’s no getting away from the messy piles or incomplete chores or my constant running to-do list in my own home.

Literally, as soon as I was back in my house, I started thinking in terms of things I could get done with my free time. I could put those clean clothes away that have been strewn across the bed for weeks. I could throw a load of laundry in. I could finally pick up my desk. I could pick up Remi’s toys. These thoughts kept coming to the surface as I tried to relax. I’d actively swat them away but it seemed impossible to turn my brain inward.

Instead, I sat with the urge to pick up my house and reflected on what it means for self-care. Having a clean space improves mental health and reduces stress, so should I use this time to pick up because it helps with self-care later? I definitely get a little dopamine hit from accomplishing a chore I’ve been putting off. Ultimately, I decided that I would stick to my “no cleaning” rule and stepped away from the clothing and toy piles. But I think, had I not been doing this experiment, I would probably have benefitted from having time to do some picking up at a leisurely pace. That said, I took a hot, pampering shower instead.

I had one other plan for the day outside of the house, which was to go to the gym. This felt like an appropriate part of my day because I was going to do it with Waffle, something I can’t usually do during the workweek, and because I exercise purely for my own wellness, not to achieve anything in particular besides movement and health. That said, I had to decide if I wanted to put my gym clothes on after my shower or not, which brought up another existential crisis about doing nothing.

Should I wear what was practical, my gym clothes, or put on something more comfortable for the couple of hours of lounging I had before the gym? The pragmatic choice was the gym clothes. I asked myself this question: What feels good? What does my body and mind want? The easy answer was that my body wanted to wear my supersoft, breathable, roomy loungewear jumpsuit without a bra. So that’s what I put on.

Finally, I was on my couch, doing nothing in particular. I had a hard cider and a stack of fresh books on a table next to me. I turned on some music. I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Normally, I’d reach for my phone and play a game or check my email. This kicked off what was probably the most interesting part of my day.

I decided to just lay back on the couch, my slicked-back hair wet from the shower, my arms and legs floppy falling wherever they fell, and focus on feeling my body and my mind. I closed my eyes. I started by focusing attention on any parts of my body that weren’t comfortable or weren’t relaxed. I worked on relaxing and repositioning until I was as comfortable as I could be. Our cat sensed an opportunity and climbed atop me, laying down across my chest like a tiny weighted blanket. I could smell his warm, sweet fur. I focused on that, too. And I just laid there with my eyes closed.

This pic is not from the actual day because I decided it went against the rules to document the day instead of being present in the day, but you get the idea of this big ol’ fluffy cat and his weighted blanket-ness qualities.

My mind began to wonder. I discovered something weird. I don’t usually have an inner monologue – I experience my own thoughts as bursts of pictures or feelings or ideas. However, apparently, when I’m in a quiet mental space, I have an inner voice. I heard myself start to think about myself in full sentences, in the third person. I visualized pulling those words back into my head and rephrasing them as “I” statements. My mind kept going to external things and I kept having to pull direction back to myself and the moment I was experiencing right then.

As I practiced this, I began to feel really quiet and really still. I eventually shifted my body to lay down on the couch with my head on a pillow, my eyes still closed, and stayed like that until I heard my phone go off. Over an hour passed in that time and I didn’t fall asleep, I just stayed in my own mind and body. Truly, I didn’t know I could do this. Is this meditation?! I don’t know, but my hour of nothingness was the high point of my day and it totally got me in the headspace to stick with the “do nothing productive” experiment for the rest of the day.

Ultimately, I had to shift back into thinking about needs beyond my own when I picked Remi up from camp. However, I learned a few things about myself and about the art of doing nothing.

1. Doing Nothing Is Not Always Self-Care

Doing this the way I chose to, as an experiment with clear parameters, actually kind of made it a productivity thing and thus made some parts of the day somewhat stressful. I had to answer questions about whether it made more sense to stick with the experiment or do what feels good. I actually get a lot of satisfaction from cleaning my space when I have the luxury of time to do so, which is not often enough. I think if I wasn’t doing the “do nothing day,” I would definitely have put my clothes away and felt so much better having a picked-up room that it would have cleared my mind a bit. That said, giving yourself permission to not do the chores is a whole other thing. I’m glad I let go of any guilt I might have felt about not doing any chores or cleaning. That part was definitely self-care.

That said, doing nothing is also not always self-care because I often do nothing without any intention. When I’m exhausted or overwhelmed, those are the moments I’ll find myself up late at night watching nonsense TV. But that mindset is more about burnout and my body reacting in survival mode to stress. Underneath all of that is a whole lot of guilt about whatever I either can’t or am choosing not to do. The difference in this experiment was that I did nothing with a lot of intention. I even prepared ahead of time to help myself let go of guilt and worry. And the result was a much better experience.

2. Doing Nothing as a Self-Care Philosophy Is Still Rooted in Capitalism

I couldn’t have done a whole day of doing nothing without quite a few privileges and supports. Everyone deserves to achieve mindfulness and the reality is that you need to have a lot of security in your life to really do so. I have no worries about food, housing, or job security. I had childcare all day which created space for me to be alone. I had paid time off from work. The very concept of leisure time has always been predicated on class, wealth, gender, and race. So “doing nothing” is not pure from Capitalism after all. You have to have some accumulated wealth in order to have the luxury of not producing and be praised for it. If you don’t have wealth and spend a day doing nothing productive, you’ll be called lazy and useless, not leisurely. All people deserve rest and leisure. I feel even more passionate about defending the right to leisure and trying to promote the kind of supports people need and deserve to experience rest, especially those most pushed to the margins.

3. Doing Nothing Well Is Really, Very, Extremely Hard

This wasn’t a surprise to me, but I have to fess up that it was a real challenge. I’m not sure that I can function on a daily basis in “do nothing productive” mode. I did learn some techniques to relax my mind and get to a more introspective place and I want to bring that practice into my daily life more often. I think I’ll always be a person who wants to achieve bigger things, take on new challenges, and do more and more. That said, I’m also a person who gets overwhelmed and engages in spontaneous, desperate escape–impromptu trips and vacations, binge-watching TV until 4 AM, playing games for hours before bed. I want to be more mindful in moments like that and be able to be focused on the present even in my usual space. I’m thinking I may want to build more skills in meditation and visualization to put in my mindfulness toolbox when I need to take a break and get the urge to escape.

4. Doing Nothing Is Only Successful If It’s Guilt-Free

The success of the experiment hinged on keeping the rules flexible, preparing ahead of time for the day of rest, and absolving myself of the guilt I usually carry when I try to do less. Frankly, doing less is something I can do and actually do fairly regularly. I don’t overwork myself at this point in my career. Instead, I have a huge to-do list trailing behind me at all times, but I just put it aside at break time and triage it every morning. That said, I’m always aware of what I still need to do and that to-do list runs in my head 24/7. Turning off that part of my brain was extremely difficult and I really only achieved it by doing some intentional brain training during my amazing hour of nothingness. Letting go of guilt by making doing nothing the goal of the day both fed my desire for productivity (must achieve the goal!) and helped me let go of all the things I wasn’t going to do. I don’t know if I’ll ever plan a whole day this way in the future, but I definitely think scheduling time to do nothing is the key to keeping it shame and guilt-free so I can actually recharge my batteries.

5. Doing Nothing Is Best Done Alone

I derive a lot of pleasure from doing activities with others. However, when I’m with others, I’m always thinking about others. As soon as Waffle got home from work and even more so once Remi was back home, too, I was thinking about them and their needs and including them in my decision-making process. I don’t think I can “do nothing productive” with someone else. Maybe other people can hold those two things at the same time. For me, though, this is only a state of mind I can achieve when I’m alone. I’ve always liked to work out alone, shop and complete errands alone, drive alone, spend time alone. I thought I was an extrovert for a long time because I love and get high on great conversations with people, I’m open to change, and I’m very, very, very talkative. I think I really am an ambivert, though, partially because my mind needs time to recover from so much external stimulation. I haven’t always been good at setting boundaries to carve that introvert space out for myself and I think I really need it to thrive.

Ultimately, I don’t think I could “do nothing productive” for more than a day, nor do I think it’d be right for me, but I definitely learned more than I expected about myself. My go-to coping methods, escapism and indulgence, are things I really love and hold dear. I don’t want to totally replace them with a mindfulness practice because that doesn’t seem realistic (or fun) to me. That said, I’m going to try to add mindfulness to my self-care toolbox. (I haven’t done a lot of reading or work on mindfulness, so if you have recommendations, I’d love to hear them in the comments!) At the end of the “do nothing productive” day, I felt ready to jump back in on my to-do list on Thursday, grateful for the time to rest and grateful for the work I love to do.

How and Why I Wrote Bang!: A Masturbation Sex-Ed Book for Everyone

I grew up in a household where I never learned the Chinese word for sex. During family movie nights, we averted our eyes when animated characters kissed on screen. At the time, it just felt like how things were.

High school sex-ed prepared me for college with two lasting images: One, my sex-ed teacher squeezing a banana into a condom until it burst into the lubricated latex, and two, a medical photo gallery of STI’s that included a particularly severe case of chlamydia captioned as “cauliflower-like growths.” Neither of these memories were particularly helpful for navigating the messy emotional complexities of sex.

Every night, in isolated rooms across my college campus, there were only two young people, sometimes drunk, armed with only the personas we had been trained to cling to, the language we had inherited from our past, and heaps of bravado and insecurity. Alone and in the dark, we were tasked with using these meager materials to cobble together a pleasurable, consensual sexual experience that wouldn’t traumatize either party. We were set up to fail.

My senior year, I sat in a row of uncomfortable, gray-maroon conference chairs lining a hallway of the student health center, waiting for a nurse to call my name. The wall in front of me was tiled with a billboard of 50 plastic brochure holders. Each shiny pocket cheerily presented pamphlets for handling all of life’s sexual challenges. 90s WordArt proclaimed “So you have syphilis…” and “You’re gay! How do you tell your parents?”, and of course, a pamphlet simply titled “Sexual Assault and Rape.”

I made Bang! Masturbation for People of All Genders and Abilities because it profoundly made sense to me, because there was a gaping hole in that plastic wall where there should have been some acknowledgement of pleasure, consent, or the emotions of sex. Bang! was designed to fill this gap with emotionally-aware, positive sex-ed. While we had been taught about the vas deferens and fallopian tubes, we had never been taught how to even talk about sex with a partner. I made Bang! because I thought it needed to exist.

It was only years later that I realized I was also furious. I was angry in a way that was incomprehensible within the polite university language that wrapped around me. Inside of those stone walls, it was socially acceptable, even tacitly expected, for people to have their consent violated. Pleasure during sex had never been guaranteed.

I recognize now that within the profound logic of Bang! was a bullet train of cold rage, pain, and indignation that coursed unceasingly through my veins when I learned that you cannot trust the systems that be to take care of you or those you love. I made Bang because of my unmovable conviction that we all deserve love and care, especially when we are naked and alone.

Before Bang! became a book, it began as a zine about masturbation for everyone, no matter your gender or body. It was designed to accompany people as they explore their bodies, beginning in a safe space with just themselves. The words and illustrations were made to support people emotionally in all the private, intimate corners of who they are. People shouldn’t feel alone in their moments of vulnerability, shame, and self-doubt. They should have the tools and support that I didn’t have when I began my own journey.

I realized I had never learned about how this journey feels if you are trans or disabled. For that matter, I had never learned much about the textured details of cis man sexuality either. I pulled in many people, including Rebecca Bedell, Lafayette Matthews, A. Andrews, and Andrew Gurza to encapsulate the intimate experiences of masturbation with different bodies or genders than mine. It struck me then, and still strikes me today, how deeply the similarities in our sexual journeys resonate across bodies.

When I started designing and editing Bang!, conversations that began with “What are you working on?” became an uncomfortable exploration of the facets of sexual stigma still within the people I knew. When I asked a design colleague for his thoughts on a draft of Bang!, his sole feedback was “Don’t most people know how to masturbate already?” There were many acquaintances that reacted to mentions of the book with strained cheeriness and gratuitous innuendos. Years after our conversation on sexual consent and masturbation empowerment, my friend said, “I thought your point was to get guys to masturbate more so they would rape less people on campus.”

Those hours of small talk made it clear that the stigma of sex extended far beyond college dorms and followed us into our adult lives. The stigma rotted away our ability to acknowledge or inhabit the connection between our bodies and our lives. Stigma organized our lives into boxes, and anything that fit into the box labeled MASTURBATION was to be hidden under the bed, perhaps referenced in jokes, but never engaged intellectually or emotionally. We were still trapped.

I hadn’t prepared myself for how my rigid parents would evolve in reaction to Bang!. While we still avert our eyes from movie sex scenes, my 56-year-old Chinese finance professor of a father bought 10 copies, donated to the “Socially Distanced Orgy” tier of our Kickstarter campaign, and emailed his university’s student health center about the importance of masturbation sex-ed. My mother, who once anxiously whispered to me in a Target aisle that tampons were for married women, now floods our family text conversations with applause and party emojis to celebrate Bang!’s milestones. I couldn’t be prouder.

Bang! is part of a conversation to examine and rebuild our learned attitudes toward our sexual bodies. This conversation is shaped by writers and thinkers like Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, and Sonya Renee Taylor; sex workers and educators working around the censorship walls of social media; and independent publishers and bookstores carrying sex-ed books that mainstream publishers are scared to. The movement centers on our ability to build a new and different relationship with our bodies, a relationship built on radical love, acceptance, knowledge, and joy rather than shame or fear.

The makers of Bang! are people of color, white, trans, cis, nonbinary, disabled, non-disabled, straight, queer, men, and women. In Bang!, words like penis, clitoris, vulva, nipple, and pleasure feel easy to say. All 128 pages of full color illustrations are designed to be irreverent, loving, and stubbornly full of radical, bodily joy. And every page is written and designed with love and support for the moments when you feel the most vulnerable and alone. My only regret is not having more Black and Brown voices.

There is so much power in illustrating the sexuality and joy of marginalized bodies. There is power in the celebration of all of our bodies together. It is the declaration that no matter who you are or what your body is like, you deserve to feel good in it. We are all messy, difficult, and different, and we all share an inherent capacity for pleasure. It is our right and imperative to discover it—and we don’t have to do it alone.

The Right to Breathe

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I’m struggling. More so than usual. What over a year of grieving through a pandemic has given me: the courage to let go of the stories I told myself as coping mechanisms.

I am not okay. Most of my life, I thought I would be okay if I got pretty enough, successful enough, had enough friends. If I looked like I had myself put together, maybe it’d be real somehow. But I’m not okay. I am scared. And many days, I think happiness is impossible.

The average person, at rest, breathes 12 to 16 times a minute.

A few weeks ago, a Vietnamese man in Indiana offered two men a ride home. He was then killed and dismembered in his own car.

“Did you hear what happened to Shane Nguyễn, Ba?” I ask my dad. “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t let anyone near your car. Don’t go outside alone.” He’s the type to be generous to strangers. There are many people who want to see my father dead more than anything else. I tell him I’ll be ordering self-defense keychains for the family.

Babies cry when they’re born in order to expand their lungs and eliminate fluid blocking their airways. They cry to breathe. “Your baby will cry as long as he needs to in order to start breathing normally,” pediatrician Ana Machado told Romper.

I cry at least once a day, sometimes wailing. I think of the moment I was born, how I must not have cared at all how loud I screamed. I needed to breathe. I needed everyone to know I was here. At times, I wash my face before bed and the sight of my face, so exposed like I’m seeing myself for the first time, brings me to tears.

It’s been six months since I decided to download a dating app. After being in a relationship for two years, I forgot how bleak romance is for trans women. I am distorted, bent into different shapes by the whims and fantasies of men. Some men find trans women repulsive. Some just want to know if I have a dick. Some want to experiment to see if they’d like what they see. I am a sex toy expected to have endless customizations. And all I want is someone to hold me. All I want is to know what someone out there will hold me. I admit to myself, wholeheartedly for the first time, that I want a storybook romance.

At the moment, there are over 100 bills restricting access to public life and healthcare for trans youth in U.S. state legislatures. They don’t even want us to have healthcare, let alone experience love.

I walk home, my thumb on the trigger of the pepper spray. I stroll past a family playing music on the sidewalk, the children’s giggles making the air lighter. Then, two bikers speed along my left, the rush of air from their bodies brushing across my cheek.

I turn the dark corner, and here is my light-strewn block. My relief ends quickly when a man also turns the corner. I look back at him and he says, “Hey, baby.” My breath quickens.

I start to walk a little faster. Sarah Everard‘s name crosses my mind. In March, she was walking home from a friend’s house in London. She was last seen on a main road at 9:30pm before she was reported missing and later found dead. I pull out my phone: 9:42pm.

His voice feels close, “You’re so beautiful. Come talk to me.” He says other things I can’t make out. I pretend to be observing something to my left and try to catch how far he is from me with my peripheral vision. I’m only about 20 feet away from my building. I observe how far a bystander might be. There’s someone on the next block who’d hear me if I screamed.

“Let me get your number, beautiful,” he continues, even though I have yet to say a word in response.

I turn into the entryway of my building and sprint, scrambling to get the key fob to scan. I’m frantic now, I can hear my heavy breathing. I look back to make sure he hasn’t caught up. The door buzzes and I crack it open just enough to slip inside quickly, so it can close and lock.

It’s been shown in studies that marine mammals, like bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales, synchronize breathing to reduce tension and stress. The synchronicity increases in highly social situations where many whales are present.

In humans, strong bonds produce what scientists call “interpersonal synchronicity.” Couples sitting together would unconsciously align their breathing rates and heartbeats. Dr. Pavel Goldstein’s study with the University of Colorado, Boulder found that when one partner experiences pain, it interrupts the synchronicity. But when the couple is allowed to hold hands, physical touch reduces the pain and allows them again to fall into sync.

“Aloha is not just a greeting,” my sister explains. “It means we’re exchanging breath, or what we call hā. Our breaths are connected.”

Derek Chauvin was a rare case: police officers are rarely convicted of the murders they commit. In his last moments, George Floyd said “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. The final words he uttered were: “They’ll kill me.”

Mhelody Bruno was a Filipina trans woman who died of what the court called “erotic asphyxiation” in 2019. Her boyfriend at the time, a corporal in the Royal Australian Air Force, pleaded guilty to killing her by choking.

Five years earlier, in October of 2014, another Filipina trans woman named Jennifer Laude was killed by asphyxiation at the hands of a U.S. Marine. She was found slumped lifeless over a toilet.

Three months prior, in July of 2014, Eric Garner‘s last words, too, were “I can’t breathe.” Like George Floyd, Eric Garner was a Black father. The police officer who killed him with a chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted.

In November of 2020, my dad caught COVID-19. Luckily, I was home for the holidays. His condition worsened quickly. He spent all day in his bed, reading and eating the little bit that he could. We delivered food to his door and he’d hobble over to retrieve it. We started placing the tray of food on a high chair when it was clear he couldn’t bend down.

I bought a pulse oximeter to measure his blood oxygen levels. “Ba, can you breathe?” I asked him every morning, afternoon, and evening.

He didn’t have the air to speak. So he started texting me. “Oxygen level up and down today,” he’d write. My childhood nebulizer, a hulking machine that felt like a hospital’s version of hookah, was placed in his room. He spent 15 minutes inhaling vaporized medicine every night before bed. I remembered all the times he was the one preparing the medication for me, when my asthma was a daily pain.

The roles were reversed.

I wrote him letters every day. It felt urgent to tell him everything I wanted him to hear: I love you. I’m proud of you. I want you to forgive yourself.

There’s a Little India in South Africa

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Five years ago in Colaba, Mumbai, my jaw dropped as I surveyed the artwork in a Maharashtra gallery depicting Hindu deities with dark skin. In a state of bewilderment, I complained, “Back home in South Africa, in all the years that I snuck into my grandparents’ prayer room, I’d never seen anything like this. They were always depicted as light skinned or blue!” A Mumbai based artist herself, my friend Priyanka nodded her head and explained the whitewashing and colorism in Indian art history and society. It didn’t surprise me, given the frequency with which I had personally experienced this from Indian family members growing up.

“Tell me something I don’t know!” I said, and she explained how Raja Ravi Varma’s artwork circulated India and the Indian diasporas. Born in 1848, Varma gained acclaim and criticism for his work depicting his interpretations of Hindu mythology into the European realist historicist painting style. Amongst his extensive collection, works like Shri Rama Vanquishing the Sea offered viewers an opportunity to put an image to moments in mythology as Varma interpreted the stories of Hindu deities and characters in the epics and Puranas. In 1894, he set up a lithographic press, allowing his work to be reproduced en masse at a low rate. The innovations in technology created an affordability for ordinary people and his work began to circulate homes of people on every continent. While some write him off as a “calendar artist,” his work has had a significant impact on Indian popular art, influencing Indian religious art for generations after his death.

Raja Ravi Varma, Saraswati

“So white Krishna is like white Jesus, then?” I asked. She laughed, explaining that although Varma’s work was far more contemporary than the depictions we’ve come to know in Christianity, it could lead to the same type of white-washed depictions that have no grounding in scripture.

We left the gallery and walked around Apollo Bandar until we reached the gateway of India, which arches over the Indian Ocean, creating what feels like a portal. Inscriptions on the wall read, “Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their Imperial Majesties King George V and Queen Mary on the Second of December MCMXI.” I sighed, heavy-hearted, wondering what secrets those waters held.

On the Southernmost tip of Africa, the East Coast is met by the Indian Ocean. Salty and humid winds pass through the hills of greenery, which seem luscious and never ending. Whenever I land in Durban, South Africa, there’s no feeling as sweet as home nor a drive so bitter, as we pass through sugarcane plantations for miles on end. Outside of India, Durban has the largest population of Indians in the world. The population is heterogeneous, with each family line arriving at different times and under different circumstances, ranging from people who were enslaved during the Dutch colonial era, to “indentured laborers” who worked on the sugarcane plantations, to “free Indians” who immigrated at their own expense.

Apartheid-era laws had segregated the population into racially homogeneous areas. Due to the notorious Group Areas Act, Indian communities quickly formed their own worlds within South Africa, almost completely separated from the experiences of other populations and cultures within the country. To create further division amongst people of color, the Apartheid government insidiously established a racial hierarchy which placed black and indigenous people at the bottom of the rank, enforcing superiority complexes and anti-black stereotypes. To suffocate less under the Apartheid regime, one had to try their best to gain a closer proximity to whiteness through assimilation.

The caste system within Indian culture adds fuel to the fire of white assimilation in South Africa. While the caste system is specifically related to a hierarchical system of social organization within Indian culture, colorism becomes intertwined as privilege and esteem is often assigned to lighter skinned Indians. Although skin color diversity exists within each caste, historical biases towards dark skinned people remains prevalent to this day.

South African Indians have also creolized the rhetoric around the subcultures within Indian culture. People are identified amongst the group through their surnames and family histories to name a few factors. For instance, Tamil people became known as Porridge O’s (Porridge people) for their involvement in prayers known as Marie Amman Poojay. While the experiences and history of Tamil people in South Africa is not homogeneous, colorism and caste bias arise within the Indian community through anti-dark skinned slurs which are used to stereotype and demean Tamil people by associating them with the embodiment of evil from the Ramayana. And, While Roti-O’s (Roti people) are broadly defined as Hindu people, there is a distinction between religion, culture and caste as Hindu Tamil people are not considered as a part of the group. Roti-O’s are often stereotyped as lighter skinned, more affluent and while the group is not homogeneous, there is a potential for a more privileged historical introduction to South Africa due to their higher social status within the caste system in India.

When I was born, my grandmother tried to squeeze the blackness out of my nose. She was horrified at the size and shapes of my features, scanning my infant body to find evidence of “non-Indianness” as quickly as possible, while I was still malleable. My mother walked into the room one day in protest, to which my grandmother responded, “There’s no bridgebone! You must pinch it like this everyday while the baby is still small, and it will form!” Astounded yet unsurprised, my mother pulled me away and yelled, “You’re suffocating the child!”

As the years went by, I slowly grew into my skin with a sense of pride. At school, kids bullied me for my features. “Hey Phuthu lips.” (A staple in black communities in South Africa, Phuthu is a dish made from ground maize meal.) When I told my mother about my nickname at school, she laughed, “Tell them it’s called Hollywood lips,” and although I never did, I watched closely as she affirmed everything she was criticized for, wearing it like a crown.

My high school had an Indian majority population, with students from different castes and historical backgrounds. As people aged and entered the dating scene, an underground market for skin whitening creams emerged at school. The “boys” bleached their hair blonde and secretly sold whitening creams out of their backpacks, in an attempt to win the attention of “girls,” with their Jonas Brothers inspired aesthetics.

While I witnessed high school cisheteronormativity and colorism dominate the scene, I was met with an array of people across the color and gender spectrums who stood proudly in themselves amidst the noise. From owning their sexualities in a homophobic climate, to acknowledging the beauty in being dark skinned, the process wasn’t neat, with negative self talk recurring in the process of affirmation. Regardless of the tumultuous nature of the cycle between affirmation and negative self-talk, it’s impressive to imagine the generational cycles that high school children were beginning to break with their shifting perceptions of self.

Deep within queer confusion and grey asexuality, I found myself in pockets of LGBTQ+ community, avoiding the dating scene and the school culture altogether. As I recluded into myself, I connected with a Hindu non-binary femme, who told me of her acceptance within the temples of Durban. Growing up, I’d quiver to imagine Muslims or Hindus in my family responding positively towards my transness. She explained, “I’m not just accepted, I’m celebrated. I’m in charge of all of the food preparation, and I’m part of the rituals for certain prayers like Kavadi.” She explained her process of praying and fasting as she prepared to embody the goddess Kali and carry chariots during the festival.

I began to notice the gaps between the transantagonism I experienced in daily life and scripture as I learned about the existence of trans people within Indian and African societies throughout time. There is a pattern in the way colonization has distanced people from affirming the diversity within their own cultures. On one hand, colonial influence had led to a progressive cultural whitewashing, and on the other hand, it buried the layers of gender diversity that was accepted in ancient culture and religion.

Transness, though often stereotyped as a Western innovation, has existed on the African and Asian continents for as long as humans existed. The more I spoke about LGBTQ+ elders amongst friends and studied the history through articles and photographic archives, I saw the way my ancestors looked down on me with love, instead of shame. In a similar way that my jaw dropped when witnessing dark skinned deities represented in Mumbai, I find myself enamored at the richness in gender and sexual diversity, which has been buried under years of colonial influence across cultures.

The streets of Coloba, Mumbai are lined with Banyan trees that hold offerings in their trunks. Garlands of flowers are hung in ceremony as sages and ordinary people pass them by. Priyanka had said that it’s a holy tree that sages sit beneath in prayer. In Durban, there is a Banyan tree in my mother’s backyard. It had been there for years before we moved there, and in all the time that passed us by, we never guessed it’s origin until Priyanka had explained its significance in India. Somewhere down the line, someone from India tried to carry a piece of home with them to South Africa for familiarity and possibly, a place to pray under.

The Birth and Death of a Name

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I.

This is the story of the birth and death of my name, which means that it is a story about transition, which means that it is necessarily a story about the border between two places and the force with which one rends it. Which means that if you must trace this story to the very beginning, back across three languages, two continents, and countless bodies of water, you will find that this is the story of a boat.

The first boat left a hundred and ten years ago. It left alone, and at night, from a few boards nailed into the dirt with the audacity to call itself a port. Those who stepped on it would never return. All the songs that remain from that time are lamentations. The destination of the boat was not west, but south, toward the equator, where seasons were rumored to have disappeared and even the rain fell warm onto the ground.

If you were the Dutch men in the port awaiting the boat, here is how you would describe what you saw: a small sea of bobbing black heads within a larger sea. Shallow mud in shallow mud. Fair skin, cheekbones that melted into their faces, taut little mouths that crowed even from afar. They were different from the natives of the land you were colonizing, and so they posed a different kind of threat. You had plans for them.

The boat swelled with men and then spat them onto the land. These men tumbled out, dragging their wives off the boat by their wrists and into the land where the ground steamed with heat and seeds sprouted from it unbidden.

They birthed their children and tied red string around their wrists. They did their best to fill their mouths with the language they brought with them. They built churches. They built schools. It all worked: though they never returned home, the language persisted. Among the children of these people were my grandparents.

Illustration by Joyce Chau

I call it the first boat, but this boat was not first in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not the Mayflower, though the people came for the same reasons. It was small and cramped and almost certainly very smelly. Shit wedged its way between the floorboards. Phlegm dried into the railings. The ledger is long gone. So there are no records of this story I can show you, no proof it occurred.

Nevertheless, my grandfather is here, and I am here, and this is what he told me when I asked. And so, at least in this story, this is how it happened. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

Indonesia was dark and warm. The streets were lined with palm trees and cracked dirt. You could buy fruit that sliced into stars, build yourself a thatched room with a dirt floor, find a body of water anywhere you looked. Nevertheless, Indonesia was not a paradise for the Chinese. Tiffany Tsao, a Chinese-Indonesian scholar, translator and writer, notes that common perceptions of the Chinese in Indonesia were as “money-minded, shrewd, and hoarders of wealth.”

Though people of Chinese descent have migrated to the 17,000 islands that comprise what we now call Indonesia since the thirteenth century, systemic national discrimination only began in earnest with Dutch colonization of a place they named the Dutch East Indies. It was an undignified name for a country, derived from the capitalist and colonial enterprise that was the Dutch East India Company. Like many other colonized places, it could not even name itself.

Tsao notes that when the Chinese immigrated during the early twentieth century, the “Dutch administrators segregated Chinese areas from the native population” and deployed “Chinese traders as merchant middlemen” to reify the reputation that they’d invented. This is how the Chinese came to be perceived as a wealthy, penurious, grasping people, a belief that still continues in Indonesia to this day, long after the Dutch have left.

The Chinese found ways to keep their dignity, as people always have, and perhaps even more in more dire circumstances. One of these was through their names. In China, neither women nor men changed their names, even upon marriage; this tradition continued in Indonesia. So though my grandparents were born in Jakarta, they were given Chinese names, and each could well expect to keep their name for the rest of their lives.

Amidst the loathing, the discrimination, the humiliation and ignominy of having a Chinese face, a name was that inviolate thing that would reverse the motion of the boat, slow the inexorable crush of history. Nothing — not migration, adulthood, family, privation, or even death — could take it away from you. In an environment with so little record-keeping to tie one to their past, the name was a way to remember.

In the parts of China I came from, all the members of a family’s generation would share the same first syllable of their given name. So with little else than a name and patience, you could approximate a person’s age, reconstruct what village and province they belonged to. More than being the contents of an archive, the name was a small, complete archive unto itself.

This changed in 1965, when Suharto, the general of the Indonesian army, wrested power over the Indonesian government in a military coup. Scholarly retrospectives of his 32-year reign would call him the most corrupt political leader in modern history, as well as the orchestrator of wholesale cultural genocide of Chinese-Indonesians. Suharto did not delay in fashioning such a reputation: in 1966, the Indonesian government passed Cabinet Presidium Decision 127, a law that commanded all Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent to change their names to Indonesian ones.

Theoretically, there was no consequence to disobeying this law. Yet the staggering majority of people still changed their names, that thing that had once been sacrosanct. There are many forms of consequence that do not require penal intervention, and to not change one’s name came with a steep social price that could lose a person their job, get them rejected from university, turn them into a social pariah.

The stakes were too high for most to keep their names. There was, however, some form of preservation, however meager. The Chinese snuck their old names into their new surnames, often by concatenating the old surname with an Indonesian-sounding prefix or suffix. The name “Wong” might become “Widjaja;” “Lim” could turn into “Halim.” In this way, people tried to remember themselves, even if through a poor rendition of what they once had. The name itself would become that marker of a distinct Chinese-Indonesian identity, separate from both a native Indonesian and a mainland Chinese one.

At the ages of 26 and 30, shortly after the birth of their first child, both of my grandparents sent in their name change papers. My grandfather tucked his old surname into the first syllable of his new first name. Other than that, however, every other syllable was new. It sounded strange in his mouth. It still does.

Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore.

Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore. One night, I called my grandfather to ask him if he would have given my mother a Chinese name if the 1966 law were not passed. He laughed when I asked this, as if it were obvious.

In fact, he had prepared for her a Chinese name, when my mother was still gathering herself in her mother’s womb. He did not consult the elders in the village as to what the generational syllable of her given name would be. That particular ability of a name to tie a person to a set of similar people was already gone, the process of assimilation well underway even without Suharto’s intervention. Nevertheless, it was a Chinese name, and perhaps even a good one.

But my mother was born in 1966, the year that Cabinet Presidium Decision 127 was passed. So when it came time to write her name down for the birth certificate, they followed the government’s orders. They made something else up. My mother was the first person in her family to have an Indonesian name. The Chinese name lives nowhere now. It exists on no document, on the heading of no school paper, on no birth or marriage certificate. My own mother does not know it.

I asked my grandfather if he still remembered what it was. He told me the name, and I wrote it down. He said it was the first time that anyone had ever done so.

II.

The word “slur” comes from the Middle English “sloor,” meaning “thin or fluid mud.” The mud, and the dirtiness that mud entails, led to the word’s modern, prevailing definition of “an insult or slight.” And the fluid nature of the mud, conferred that other definition: that of a set of notes or words to be played legato, without the cruel interjection of silence. Drunkards slur; so do violins. A slur is a crucial element of music, and not just any music, but the most beautiful kind, where notes gather together to form the raw material of hymns and lullabies.

It is a difficult form to perfect, the slur. Much constrains it. It demands brevity: one, two syllables at most. You must be able to spit it, also whisper it under your breath. It must stand as a complete sentence unto itself.

In the United States, there are all sorts of slurs for East Asian people. Few stretch the imagination; few have that fulminant energy that really reveals the dual nature of the word, explodes an insult into song. But still: the English slur has always demanded at least a minimal form of creativity.

Not so much in Indonesia. Over there, it’s sufficient to use the name of the thing itself. Specifically: Cina, spelled just like that, with a hard “ch”, untempered and uncompressed by the “ai” the way people say it in English. “Chee-nah”: the inflection is all it takes to move it from innocuous descriptor to a mouthful of splinters. It is propulsive — say it enough times, and it will send you back to where you came from. Sometimes, it will even send you forward.

After the 1966 Decision, an identifiably Chinese name would itself become a slur. To keep such a name immediately outed a person not only as ethnically Chinese, but also a law-breaker, a person actively opposed to assimilation and the new government under Suharto. It was only right that as the name itself was the evidence of the crime, the name would become the thing spat at its owner.

With all that regulation, there wasn’t much room left for dignity. Our names were gone. We were still targets for extortion. Our schools were shuttered, our churches razed. Dignity was not given to those who were vilified by their colonizers, loathed by the colonized, respected by no one. Dignity could not be traded, sold, hoarded, packed away in vaults. No, it was no longer economically viable to traffic in dignity.

We trafficked in vulgarity. Hands shoved into pockets, skin that withered in the sun, mouths in a constant state of rudeness. We went into business, exactly what they had accused us of doing. The myth was building itself.

First, the Dutch had helped. Now, Suharto’s government was helping. Tiffany Tsao notes that during this period, the Indonesian dictator “cherry-picked a small handful of ethnic Chinese businessmen to build the nation’s economy, utilizing their capital, networks, and expertise.” In return for the prosperity of a few, Suharto used them as examples to prove malignant stereotypes of Chinese people.

My father tells me what people said to him when he was growing up in Jakarta. Or rather, he tells me what he would have said back to them, if he had the nerve. Instead he only ever says it to me. When he says it he looks so far away.

You call me Cina, Cina, tapi saya yang punya uang; kamu enga punya uang, he gloats.¹ He does not say it in Chinese. No one in my family speaks Chinese anymore.

There is both glee and intense bitterness in his voice. It almost emits a smell. His shirt is full of holes where the sleeve meets the armpit. He has worn this shirt thousands of times. I was the one who benefited from it. He used that money on me.

I find him both very desperate and very brave. But I wish he would behave better.

Here is how the Dutch would have written his story.

There is a Chinese man. And Chinese men crave money. This one is no exception.

He has no money. All he does is think about money and how far away it can take him. He applies to the university. There is a quota for people like him, but he is bright and shrewd, all the weakness wrenched and natural-selected out of him. So he makes the quota. He studies; he studies so much he stops having dreams. He graduates. He becomes a businessman. Of course he becomes a businessman.

Whenever he visits us in America, he buys used textbooks online, back when books were one of the few things you could buy online. He tapes them back up in tattered cardboard boxes, wraps the whole box in tape, leaves not a single inch of cardboard exposed. He ferries them back to Indonesia, sells each book, piece by piece. He hoards the money. He devises a long, patient, multigenerational plan to protect his children from ever being called <em>Cina</em> again.

We permanently moved to America shortly after I was born, sixteen months before the 1998 riots that marked the end of Suharto’s regime. Or, rather, my mother and I moved. My father stayed in Indonesia. He had a business to run.

But he gave me a white name to take with me. It was a prosaic name, a common name, a cautious name, and he gave me no other one. The sort of timeless name listed on the top 200 girls names in the United States for a hundred consecutive years. The sort of name that could be worn like armor.

It worked. I learned the reason for the name’s enduring popularity firsthand; it was practically unweaponizable. I received no slurs. The smell of my Asian lunch offended no one. In America, my parents had found one of those sufficiently affluent neighborhoods for me to grow up in, full of enough well-to-do immigrants, that rendered such concerns as overt racism, at least toward Asian-Americans, obsolete. Even in those early days, we were poor but not vulnerable. And then, time passed, and we weren’t poor anymore.

I have never been called a chink until I moved into a city well into my twenties. I have only been spat on once. I frequently walk alone at night. To say I fear for my safety would be disingenuous.

I have a young, able body that answers to me, and I know the terms of this game. I know not to open my mouth and reveal the ugly surprise of my voice. And so, for the most part, when I follow these rules I do not feel fear.

III.

Life, however, always finds a way to introduce new kinds of shame. The first was the shame of a girl. The second was the shame of a disobedient girl, the kind who wielded a razor on her hair both too little and too much. The last was the shame of a girl who stopped being a girl at all.

I don’t want to justify myself. But my mom laughs whenever she sees me. She tells her friends her daughter looks like a boy and every time it feels like rubbing sand into my skin, turning myself into liquid by the sheer force of it. But I stay quiet. I keep cutting my hair. Sometimes I think of doing more.

After I had meditated on the idea of my transness for a sufficiently long time, I thought that I should change my name. It felt like the trans thing to do. For many trans people, it is the right thing to do. These are the people for whom transition feels like “coming home.” For these people, changing a name can prevent a person from getting misgendered. It can assure a person’s safety. I’ve been told that it feels a lot like walking from shade into a hot square of light.

But what does it mean to change your name when your home does not want you? And what does it mean to change your name when you know nothing of your home? To change a name also feels so violent, hurts so much. It feels like not remembering, when all that I want to do is remember.

To change a name in the service of one’s transness is that act of transforming one’s birth name into a slur. The “birth name” becomes a “dead name”, and to call a person by such a name is unconscionable. It can destroy a relationship. It can end a family. It could end my family. And, however much white people say it, it is not true that I owe my family nothing.

So is this what I want — to end a family?

I don’t consider myself to be transitioning anymore. I’ve stopped trying to go home; I get things all mixed up. It physically tires me to read Indonesian. I use a translator whenever I have to read anything with a word longer than two finger-spans length.

Cina, jorok, berisik: these are the sorts of small words I know; I use them to become someone else. I was not taught them, but I heard them anyway. I know how to be furious in this language. I know how to call a man an idiot four different ways, and the exact degree of nuance to each of those words. I know the words for foam and dirt and spit and water. Also pain. It is so easy to be angry in this language with the few words I remember.

I have a friend, a trans man. A trans elder, really, one of those people who transitioned long before any of our modern day trans influencers came into being. When he transitioned, he sloughed off the name that his parents gave him. But not the first one; the one they gave him when they moved from China to the United States.

He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.

He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.

I am jealous of him. I wish that I had an Indonesian name, or a Chinese name, or a true birth name, and not this white thing, all sanded edges, all watered-down mud. I want a name that burns the back of a throat. I want to dismember a man using only my blade of a name. I wish I had something more true to come home to.

The story of the birth and death of my name ends here.

In it, I have a name that has sewn me to a history of migration — one of those ageless tales of power and violation. It is not a particularly superlative story, but it is mine.

All of the family photos are gone. My grandfather threw them away this year when my grandparents moved in with their daughter, my aunt, to live the quiet years of their life. It was too late to stop him, but in the end it didn’t matter. He did not weep at their absence. He did not mourn those incinerated paper faces. He forgot about them. His memory was loosening its grip. And the documents — well, those were long gone, lost to time and the wastebasket. There was so much to remember, and so little to hold onto.

So here it is: the remembering, the last archive of what I have left. It’s small enough to fit in your mouth. Hold it there — this name that contains an entire girlhood, and my grandmother’s disappeared name, and the last name my dead violin teacher would know me by, which makes me cry every time I think of it, and her. A name that holds the whiteness thrust upon me, and all the hope of my family — to move us forward, also to stay the same.

My first name, my given name, my birth name, that small poor shriveled unwanted thing — I want to cup it in my hands and tell it: Do not be afraid. Do not rend yourself. Do not falter. I’m here. I will stay with you, just a little longer. And so I answer to it, and so I will answer to it for as long as my body allows. This is the name with which I tell my mother I love her. This is the name by which my mother summons me. Whenever she does, she slurs the words, spits a little. Every time, it sounds like singing.

¹ “But I’m the one who has money; you don’t have money.”

I’m Coming Out as an Anti-Zionist Jew

Earlier this week, I opened my phone to a text from my cousin warning me that my family had seen the photo of me at the anti-Zionist protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on May 15.

I panicked and replied, “This feels worse than coming out as queer.”

“Yeah, this is the worst thing ever, I can’t even sugar coat it.” And then: “My mom said she would kill me if I did that.”

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Going viral holding a sign that reads “My grandpa didn’t survive Auschwitz to bomb Gaza,” is not how I planned to start a conversation with my family condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people. In fact, I truthfully had no plans to ever have that discussion. Like many disillusioned Jews, I learned long ago not to utter a word of negativity against Israel, for fear of how other Jewish people — particularly, my family — would respond. Out of this place of fear, I long refused to be associated with, to speak about, or to even show any interest in Israel and its politics. Instead, I self-silenced — folding up into myself, almost convinced that if I didn’t speak of it, Israel’s atrocities couldn’t be true. But with this most recent round of bombings and evictions, I’m done being silent and looking away while Israel enacts violence allegedly for my protection and supposedly in memory of people like my grandfather.

The parallels between coming out to my parents as queer and telling them I’m no longer a Zionist are eerie and almost comical: the curation of my online presence to avoid suspicion, the swallowing of defensive words during related conversations, and the anxiety of being outed all hark back to when I was terrified they’d find out I like girls. But like my cousin acknowledged, somehow this feels much worse. For a family as conservative as mine, admitting you don’t have an unconditional, acritical love for Israel feels like telling your family you don’t love them or that you hate an integral part of them. But I do love my family, and I love being Jewish. My values, scholarship, and activism are grounded in my Judaism, specifically in the teachings of Tikkun Olam — Hebrew for “world repair.” It is because of my Jewishness, then, and because of my love for and kinship with other Jewish people, that I yearn for a world where Palestine is free. I am not certain what a repaired Israel and a free Palestine look like, but I know apartheid policies and defensive airstrikes on families do not fit in this vision.

Most Jews are taught to love Israel from the moment of birth, and some probably even while in utero. We learn that Zionism is inextricable from a Jewish identity, that Israel is an idyllic oasis should we ever feel unsafe, should we ever need to flee like our grandparents did. For those who, like me, grew up in a place where the Jewish community doesn’t quite fit into the broader culture, these emotional ties to Israel are even stronger. Being a Jew from Mexico City, my identity feels akin to a wandering Jew in a Chagall painting, weightless, transient, and forever suspended in air. I’ve never felt quite Jewish nor Mexican “enough,” since my identity doesn’t fit neatly into one box. This feeling of being a permanent outsider in your own home, combined with inherited intergenerational Holocaust trauma leads to clutching on to Zionism like a lifeboat. You learn of what generations before you went through, which in my case was narrowly avoiding pogroms, working as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and frantically boarding ships toward a continent where you don’t even speak the language. After hearing these horrible stories your entire life, it’s scary to realize your symbolic freedom is rooted in violence, that your allegorical refuge hinges upon the violent displacement of a people. Accepting the inaccuracy of the idea of Israel I was taught as a child — full of beautiful metaphors of flowing milk and honey, of doors pushed wide open to give Holocaust survivors a safe refuge — felt like learning a family member I dearly love has been an abuser all along. But ultimately, I’m tired of families and homes being destroyed in my name, and I’m ready to stand fully and openly in solidarity with my Palestinian siblings while firmly honoring my Jewishness.

In addition to learning to unquestioningly love Israel, growing up, Jews learn that any critique of Israel is rooted in antisemitism, in an ancient, universal desire to wipe us off the map. Of course, antisemitism is real — and antisemitic hate crimes have been on the rise in recent years. And certainly, a number of Israel’s critics are antisemitic or slip into antisemitic rhetoric. I will not try to negate these basic facts. However, the Jewish community has placed rhetorical landmines throughout Israel-Palestine discourse, granting Jews the opportunity to defensively shut down any otherwise productive conversation at the first peep of criticism. When we unwaveringly fear we are in existential danger, we develop tunnel vision, unable to hear any valuable voices or see the oppression being committed in our names. Because of these learnings, many of us think anti-Zionist movements are unsafe for us. Personally, I thought if I stepped foot at an anti-Zionist rally there’d be antisemitism everywhere, that people would hate me and want me to leave. It doesn’t help that when fringe antisemites choose to take to the streets and spew violent words against Jews while brandishing a Palestinian flag — such as the horrifying video out of London this past weekend — those videos and images quickly circulate within Jewish circles. These images create an indelible mark on the brain, psychically connecting Palestinian liberation with virulent hatred for Jewish people. In reality, the protest was like any other march I’ve attended: people are happy to be together with their people and to have solidarity from others. It isn’t about hating Jews, it’s about yearning for a better world. It’s a call for Tikkun Olam, world repair, from Jewish and non-Jewish voices alike.

It wasn’t easy for me to go to my first anti-Zionist rally and it’s not easy for me to write these words. It was also not easy nor comfortable to tell my mother to her face that I date women. But after that initial discomfort comes freedom, and I am hopeful that coming out as critical of Israel will follow a similar trajectory. In mere days since the circulation of that photo, I’ve already been accused by my family of treason, of tarnishing the memory of my grandfather and all Holocaust survivors, and I’ve been asked how I could do this to my brother who lives in Israel. But I am hopeful that they’ll soon realize that I can yearn for Palestinian liberation while still loving my family and caring about my brother’s safety, that my desire for change does not negate the wonderful times I have had with them in Tel Aviv and that my anti-Zionist stance does not mean I reject my Jewishness.

I’m calling for other diaspora Jews to join me in starting these difficult conversations and in adding their voices toward the call to end the displacement and the violence against Palestinians. It won’t happen overnight, but our input and solidarity as Jews is critical in creating the space to reimagine an Israel that is not tied to human rights violations cloaked beneath the veneer of “a right to self defense.” If we do this, if we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people who want to live in peace, I truly believe we as Jews will likewise be safer as our identity would no longer be associated with oppression. I’m not the only Jewish person who has long chosen to self-silence rather than stand with my values, but it’s not too late for other Jewish people to join me. The moment for Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is now.

MISSED CONNECTION: Gay Brunch Apology

You: The two women from my past who I judged too quickly during a chance brunch encounter

Me: The dyke who apparently projected her own hangups about middle school onto you

It’s 2017, and I’m picking up a to-go order from the neighborhood Mexican spot for my girlfriend and I. Our usual order: a chicken milanesa torta to split. On the short walk back home, I’ll also pick up two iced lattes. At home, I’ll fry an egg for our sandwich. We’ll eat on the couch she’ll soon win in the breakup. Things haven’t erupted between us yet, but there are cracks in the foundation quietly spreading, and it’s making me cling a little obsessively to routines like a torta and iced lattes and eggs sputtering in oil. By which I mean, things aren’t always what they seem.

Here I go, rambling about myself, which really was the whole problem with this chance encounter. My self-absorption. So back to you two. As I wait at the host stand for my order, I see you sitting at a high top having brunch. Two smiling, lanky blondes with instantly familiar faces from my middle school years. We’re 348 miles from that middle school, and you both look exactly the same as then, and perhaps it’s the collision of those two truths that briefly knocks me out of time and space. I feel dizzy. I feel like something is wrong.

It’s all so dramatic and stupid, this way I’m so suddenly affected by seeing you both again. We weren’t even exceptionally close throughout middle school, though one of you was in my brief but intensely bonded sixth grade girl gang made exclusively of girls with K names. You also came to my birthday sleepover that year when I made everyone watch Singin’ In The Rain. It’s you who looks at me, and I hold your gaze for a moment. I feel like you don’t recognize me at all. Eventually, I won’t be able to trust any of my perception of this interaction, which let’s be real, isn’t even an interaction at all, because I never approach you. I never give either of you a chance to be known or to know me.

I convince myself you don’t recognize me in that split second we lock eyes. I think about all the ways I’ve changed. I look different. I feel different. I am different. This is what I’ll say to my mother when she admonishes me for being rude by not saying hello, though it isn’t much of an explanation for my behavior. A friend will also ask why I didn’t say hi given the small worldness of our encounter, and I will think I’ve arrived at some wise truth when I explain to her I don’t know how to interact with people who knew me before I came out. I will explain I have a bizarre compulsion to scream I’M GAY NOW when I do.

I take my food, sign the receipt, and step back out onto a sunny and bustling Saturday sidewalk. It would have been so easy to walk up to you both, to point to myself and say, it’s me, Kayla, remember me? To awkwardly reminisce. To talk about what brought us to right here right now. It could have smoothed over the time ripple that made me so disoriented. It could have made me actually see you instead of just spying on you and then bolting.

But because I didn’t stop to say hi, remember me?, I become lost in my own brain spiral. I feel unhinged when I try to explain the encounter to others. No, you don’t get it, I insist, it was so weird because they looked exactly the same, they were exactly the same. They’re still best friends—isn’t that weird?

None of this was fair to you. Why was I so freaked out by your sustained best friendship? There shouldn’t be anything wrong with lifelong friendship, with staying close to the people you grow up with, but I was judgemental. I foolishly conflated it with a lack of growth, of expansion. I’m not the same person I was when you knew me. Seeing you together after all these years, I assumed you were unchanged.

Worse, my middle school baggage burst to the surface when I saw you. You two suddenly became a representation of every blonde white girl who made me feel like an other in those years, even though most of the specific examples I can recall weren’t things either of you did or said but merely things done and said by girls in your orbits. Conflating them with you, making you complicit in something in my mind, all of it has everything to do with me and my issues and nothing to do with you. I’m sorry.

Maybe it would have been annoying for me to interrupt your brunch by saying hello, but I do regret it. I regret not approaching you, and I even regret not making my big awkward I’M GAY NOW declaration. Because it turns out I was wrong about so many things about you two. Almost everything actually. Because thanks to another chance encounter, this time on social media, I eventually found out you’re not best friends anymore. You’re girlfriends. In all my tunnel vision, I saw your intimate body language over brunch and assumed friendship when really you had fully been dating for years by that point. Not only did I misjudge—I misjudged FELLOW GAYS.

Me. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. The person who famously thinks everyone is gay and has to often be reminded that heterosexuals do indeed exist. I’m the one who foisted this assumption upon you. I’m mortified by it. Who knows how things would have panned out if I hadn’t been such a hypocrite? Maybe we could have bonded over being closeted and queer at our Virginia public middle school where conformity was the law of the land. Maybe we had crushes on the same teachers. Maybe we could have formed an entirely new friendship that had nothing to do with the past. Or maybe I’m yet again offloading too much on you with these fantasies. Maybe it would have still been as simple as a brief and chance encounter, a little nod to the past, and then we all moved on.

Who knows what might have happened? But the fact that I didn’t allow for any of those possibilities was a mistake. I was so busy protecting myself from being known that I assumed I knew you, which couldn’t have been less true. The past doesn’t wholly define me, and it doesn’t wholly define you. I’m not the main fucking character of life, and I shouldn’t have acted like it.

I hope you two are happy. I hope you two sincerely don’t give a fuck what some selfish and short-sighted asshole you went to middle school thinks about anything. We all deserve to be at the helm of our own narratives, and I’m sorry I attempted to usurp yours.

Read more missed connections on Autostraddle

Mourning the Loss of Indigenous Queer Identities

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I recently came out as gender-fluid, straddling the Western gender binary like it’s about to give me the ride of my life. I grew up hearing that I looked more like a boy than a girl, all while being told how I’m too feminine to be a boy. For a while, I thought that was me just being bisexual, though I could never settle into that identity. It was somewhat right but ultimately wrong because labeling my sexuality didn’t feel like enough. I tried pansexual, and after that, I was just queer for a while. Nothing settled. I thought I could find myself somewhere in this rainbow of colors, but something just always felt off.

That bizarre feeling is something that’s a staple in my American life. I say this because there’s still a degree of separation there, like the dash between Asian and American. It’s a zealous reminder that I am somehow incomplete, that the words I’ve chosen to describe myself are not enough. In each moniker, be it bisexual or pansexual or queer, I searched for some ounce of truth to who I am. And as I grow older, I find it more difficult to truly accept myself because I don’t feel like I have the right words to describe myself. It’s taken me years to realize that I likely never will.

I am part of the Filipino diaspora, though my identity is entirely defined by a strictly Western perspective. I am an immigrant, my English is so good, and the words I’ve used to describe my gender and sexuality are words I learned from Americans. There are parts of myself, however, that cannot fit within the confines of Western language. Words have a history and language has connotations that go beyond definitions. English is a colonizer’s tool, so it does not always have the right expression for who I am. As an immigrant, I thought perhaps that looking back into the history of my people would give me a better way to express my identity.

Growing up in the Philippines, words that meant “gay” and “weird” were always synonymous with each other, and bakla was used to describe the sinners who couldn’t be nailed down by “gay.” My mother and her mother, my Lola, were both devout Catholics. They taught me that Jesus hates The Gays and Probably the Baklas Too in tired monologues ripped straight from our local priest’s mouth.

Someone wrote about the word bakla in The Guardian and how maybe Western members of the LGBTQIA+ community could learn a thing or two from Filipinos. Bakla is our third option, they claim, but even then, it’s not a label: it’s a standalone concept, kind of a catch-all for anyone who isn’t strictly man or woman, gay or queer, and one that Western minds should embrace. And I might agree to that if I wasn’t still so incensed by the fact that we ourselves don’t have a better understanding of the term bakla at all. There is no need for the Western gaze to embrace that fact now because they never did in the first place. Why offer up more of ourselves when the rest of the world has already taken so much from us?

Illustration by Leanne Gan

The Philippines is a beautiful country, but it is a world where nothing, not even our language, was nailed down or set in place because our people are so deeply traumatized from centuries of imperialist brutality. We spoke Tagalog with English and Spanish mixed in. Some of us knew other languages, such as my Lola’s Ilocano, though these languages were not widely taught. I was only told that Ilocano was an old language and that nobody except my Lola could speak it in our family. I learned about how wonderful the U.S. was for saving the Philippines from the Japanese during World War II. At the same time, I constantly heard about how unhappy we were that Americans continued to meddle in our government.

Our collective consciousness mirrors our country’s muddled history. The Philippines I knew was a mashup of the charming East and a forceful West. Lola would occasionally tell me stories about her father, about how the Spaniards were terrified of our people, about how I was one of the last of the Ibaloi Igorots. Our people, according to her, were simple farmers and warriors. We used every part of the animal, always prayed to the land and gave the Earth our respects. Apparently, when outsiders first came to our shores, we welcomed them with open arms.

But we were uncivilized. Lola would cite that marriages were not “sacred” to our people before the Spanish came. Our people were wayward. Our warriors were never strictly men, as they should have been. Women may have laid with other women in “unnatural” ways and so did men. There were probably even people “in between,” though that concept went beyond What God Intended. And though the Spanish tried to “correct” this through the word of their god on their muskets, we would kill them too easily when we felt threatened, which Lola would say was “unfair.”

Though we had taken them in, they always called us savages once they got back to their homelands. We were easy pickings since we were so naive not to see the value in our fertile lands the way that the Europeans did. Our soil was perfect for sugar and tobacco. They did not understand how we had so much gold in our mountains but did so little with it. They thought our mangoes and purple yams were the perfect exotic treats, served up on the backs of the few of our tribesmen they took back to their countries in chains. And the location of our islands were perfect for taking on the East Indies spice trade by storm.

The Spanish were the first to take over. The Dutch sent missionaries on Spanish naval vessels, aiding in the efforts to civilize us. Americans took part in their imperial games and proceeded to “steal” us away. By the second World War, we were finally called a “nation” by the Japanese and Americans who pillaged our homes. But by then, we were broken. Entire cultures that had coexisted for ages were wiped out within a century of constant war. Most were murdered in their homes. Some were dragged abroad in chains and cages to be shown off like animals at carnival exhibits. The Catholic God replaced all of our deities, especially the genderless and intersex gods. Buried alongside countless slaughtered natives were languages that no one cared enough to understand or preserve. The word bakla became an umbrella slur with a history no one can remember.

No one wrote down what happened to the people before my Lola. She didn’t have a birth-certificate because that’s how turbulent things were in her childhood. No one knows who my ancestors were, if they believed in genders, or what their sexuality was. Now my Lola is long gone. I can’t ask her.

But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process.

But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process. Many miles north of where my Lola and I said goodbye for the last time, tourists drive up the mountains to meet Whang-Od Oggay. She is the last of the Kalinga mambabatok, a tattoo artist within her old tribe, and the tattoos she puts on these tourists were meant for the Butbut warriors who fought to defend our people. Those warriors are long gone, but these travelers will go back to their home countries to complain about the smell of our food. They will return West, where they scoff about immigrants stealing their jobs. Those tattoos are just reminders of an adventure that never happened and a people they will soon forget. History is not kind to the losers, but modernity is worse.

This is the legacy of colonization. It is far more painful than knowing just how many millions were murdered because they weren’t good enough for others to accept. It is the mass extinction of identities and languages that can no longer exist because someone else said they were bad.

We only vaguely remember our ancestors being warriors and forget that they died in horrific ways. Their efforts to save their countrymen or fight for their freedom will be watered down to tactical studies for soldiers and myths of bogeymen hungry for blood. No one will bother to spell their names correctly, if at all, let alone remind the world that many among our ancestors were people who were beyond “queer.”

Children are born into their people’s slow and steady massacre and are given “better” names. They are told they are either boys or girls and that’s all there is to it. Schools teach them that their ancestors were barbarians. The society cobbled up around them tells them that their desires must adhere to the rules of their colonizer’s beliefs. They learn that their nation is in ruins, and that it’s better to live somewhere else. When they do live elsewhere, they stop speaking their language. Ilocano is ugly, after all, and so is Tagalog, so it’s better to speak English.

Our identities are built on the graves of perspectives that would have better embraced who we truly are. We gladly spit on them when we leave, but look back with sorrow only if we realize just how much we’ve lost and continue to lose.

I was taken away from my homeland so my mother could find “better opportunities” for us in the States when I was seven years old. In elementary school, white classmates would pick on my “smelly food” and spread vicious rumors that I ate the neighborhood cats. The Philippines was mentioned once in only one of my history classes my junior year of high school. If I ask my friends now what they know about my home country, they ask me how to say “Duterte.” My spouse will tell me about how his mother has traced their family’s name back centuries. And if I google my name, the Brazilian singer I was named after pops up. At home, we only occasionally eat Filipino food because some dishes are almost impossible to make without an hour-long trip to the nearest Filipino store. If my elders speak to me in Tagalog, the best I can do is shake my head and enunciate that I can’t speak it anymore.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve become less Filipino. I am part of a diaspora. This is supposed to be “normal.” Immigrants are bound to naturalize themselves in their new countries. We work on our accents by speaking our colonizer’s languages more than using the tongues we were born to speak. We form better relationships with the “natural” citizens of our foreign homes. We move forward, we continue to forget, and we cannibalize ourselves even more to fit into molds that were never intended for us.

In the Philippines, a large part of our identities are defined by the gender binary of the West. Many in my home country, just like my Lola or my mother, believe we were “saved” by their civilization. It took me years to realize that salvation was just slaughter. The right words for who I am died along with our people, our cultures and who we could have been. We were whittled down to little more than a passing mention in a history book. I’ve already lost so much before I was even born, so there should be comfort in the cold logic of assimilation and taking part in the agonizing death of a people.

I am non-binary. I am queer. I am one of thousands of Filipinos who have left the Philippines. When labeling my sexuality, I still write “queer” because I don’t know what else to say and bakla feels like a slur. I suppose I have the vague luxury of separating my gender and sexual identity from my race if I don’t think about it too much.

This is the best that the West has to offer me after all this devastation. For this identity and language, I am not content. I never will be.

When Love Is A Matter Of Desperation

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a fissure running straight through my life, dividing it into a before and an after. Before we dated; after we broke up. Before I challenged the assumptions I had been making about myself; after I laid the truth bare. Before, when I didn’t think that love could exist for me; after, when I still don’t believe it — the same on both sides and yet so completely different.

In between is the time we were together. What do I even call it? — more than a few months, less than a year. It feels so distant now, like vague memories of a faraway land I visited once. I had been searching for love my whole life, but now I can’t even find my way back to it.

Instead, I’m watching from the peripheries, again. Watching as the people around me build their lives, deepen their own relationships and still, somehow, manage to leave a little space for me. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

There’s a hole inside me — it’s been there from the start — that will never be filled. I know this. And yet the only thing I’ve ever wanted is to close it before that emptiness fully consumes me.

I was raised with no understanding of love, which is to say, I was raised with a hunger that only grew as each year passed by.

I have one memory — exactly one memory — of my mother kissing me on the cheek. A surprising brush of her lips on my skin before the door opened onto a starlit sky, and she rushed off after my father to a work social event. When she returned some hours later, she asked me about the dull red stain on my face, and then, remembering her sudden, uncharacteristic token of affection, she rubbed at it and remarked, “It’s lipstick.” I must have been eight or nine at the time and didn’t know what to make of the whole thing.

My sister was devastated when I told her. I knew our mother only ever had harshness for her: she had never gotten a caress, in fact the opposite. My sister recounted the time she had kissed our mother on the cheek years earlier, a mere child herself, imitating the loving gestures of her classmates after a school presentation for parents. Our mother jerked her face away and said, sharply, a word in Hindi that holds a multitude of meanings: dirty, contaminated, impure.

She never did it again, my sister. Our mother never did, either. Love was like a shame in my family, and I carried that message for years to come.

When we were much older, my sister observed that I have always been our mother’s favorite child. I hadn’t realized it because the small fragments of anything remotely resembling fondness that our mother doled out came at the steep price of obedience, so the daughter she favored was a child I wasn’t.

But favor is relative, after all, and something, no matter how small, isn’t nothing, and that something was just enough to make me crave more.

Do you remember — when we were together, you came and wrapped your arms around me from behind?

I didn’t expect it. I had just finished cooking us a meal I had never made before. The sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window in my apartment, I found myself taken back two decades and more. A staple growing up, my mother only cooked kidney beans on the weekends because, even in a pressure cooker, they take so long to soften.

“It makes me really happy when you share things from your childhood,” you said. And I, also, softened.

I revealed it bit by bit, that childhood, as I found myself feeling safer and safer in the intimacy we had. The childhood I had buried deep inside myself, first, in an attempt to assimilate to the white world around me and, later, in an attempt to escape that painful past. The childhood I had stamped down so thoroughly, all I’m left with is the feelings and a smattering of memories that hardly begin to capture the actual experience.

In middle school, I made myself obsessed with the only boy on the bus who spoke to me without ridicule. Having so little for so long, I had learned to wring the least bit of affection out of the smallest measure of attention. His friends picked on me mercilessly, but he never explicitly took part in their cruelty; he even talked to me on occasion. That had to mean something, and something could mean anything, and anything included the possibility that someone could give me what I never got if I just clung to them a little harder. Desperation gave rise to obsession which I read as attraction, as I buried my actual feelings ever deeper. The possibility never came to fruition, but how many times I repeated that pattern in the years to come.

In college, an older student who I generally liked showed real interest in me, and, in retrospect, I was laughably oblivious. Inviting me to sit close, to share a seat. “Walking me home” across the parking lot of the apartment complex. Video calling me shirtless. My utter indifference to it all was a tell I couldn’t possibly recognize. Because I was a woman, which meant I had to set my hopes on a man. Because at that point I only knew four queer women, and they were all white, and they were much older and oh so certain in their love. And so, I told myself, I was unmoved because he already had a girlfriend and surely he was just playing around.

Unable to imagine anything else for my life, I resigned myself to the heterosexual world I knew I had no real place in.

Do you remember — when we were together, that time you brought me camping with your friends? I was quiet and shy and tense the whole time, but I found myself growing more and more at ease by the strength of your attraction, the sincerity of your care for me.

In the early morning, listening to the rain pattering overtop the two of us in your tent, the comforting weight of your body overtop mine, I said, “I’ve never felt so at peace in my life.”

“Then, we can’t let you leave,” you replied, your voice full of smiles I didn’t have to look to see.

I didn’t say it, but the more time we spent together, the more I felt that maybe, just maybe, I could have a home in this world after all, one where I truly belonged. Not the pleasant residences of my sisters or my friends, where I would visit and we would laugh and I might rest and — invariably — I would leave. But a place I could stay, brimming with companionship and love.

As I followed the motions of a heterosexuality I couldn’t make sense of, I fell in love with the wrong people, without even realizing it. Some of my closest friends, and all I understood at the time was that I simply needed to know these women better, I needed to be in their lives and to have them in mine.

What is the line between friendship and love? Was it love that drew me closer and closer to D. over the course of seventh and eighth grade, that led me to call her week after week, even when we went to different high schools? Or the earliest sparks of love — attraction — when A. asked me “my type” during a break in high school gym class, and I told her that I didn’t have a type but sometimes I thought people were pretty, like, for instance, her? Or how about the time in college when M. invited me to stay over her place and I told her that I think everyone’s at least a little bi and she asked me why was I bringing this up now and I told her no reason and never, ever mentioned it again?

It was years after the fact that I realized it was love that led me to constantly seek out the comfort of J.’s companionship, one of my dearest friends who I met shortly after graduating college. I’ll never forget that lazy Saturday afternoon in September — the burning heat of summer past, the coolness of fall not quite set in, lying on my couch, listening to Tchaikovsky’s final tribute to despair, the Pathetique Symphony — when the pieces finally fell into place. Lying, listening, reflecting on a recent visit from J., I was consumed by nostalgia for the closeness we had and the heartbreak from when we had moved apart some years before, a heartbreak I had never acknowledged. “Ah,” I had thought, “I wish we could be together forever.” And I heard myself, really heard myself, for the first time.

“Ah,” I had thought, “I wish we could be together forever.” And I heard myself, really heard myself, for the first time.

What is the line between friendship and love? Truly, I can’t say, but I know there is one. Because one by one, my friends and I, all of us, prioritized other parts of our lives over the friendships we cherished. And every time, I felt a little something crack inside, and every time, I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way, and every time, I thought that perhaps I was too soft, and so every time, I steeled my heart a little more for the end that was inevitable.

Do you remember — when we were together, that time you lay next to me on my bed, and I said that, in that moment, gender was utterly meaningless?

You felt ambivalent about that statement, and I understood why. I hadn’t expressed myself clearly at all. Much later, I realized what I had wanted to say was that, with you beside me, I finally found myself. My relationship to gender, in terms of sexuality and identity — there was nothing left to hesitate about, no more questions to leave open, no uncertainty I could hide behind.

It’s hard, when you’ve kept your feelings locked away from yourself for so long, to not let moments like those and the relationships attached to them define you. It’s hard, even though you know you can’t, you know you shouldn’t. It’s hard because when those moments pass, when those relationships end, you’re left to find yourself anew among the shattered pieces of your heart.

I had thought that we were close friends, but she told me, for her it was more, and so, I couldn’t avoid facing myself any longer. And I thought, here at my doorstep is what I’ve been yearning for, for so long. So I took that leap, knowing nothing could ever be the same again.

I tried to live in those moments, without worrying what it might mean for the future. But you can’t love with half a heart. The longer we were together, the harder it became not to invest in the idea of “us,” quietly starting to trust that perhaps I, too, could have what had always been just beyond my reach.

But in the end, a love born out of friendship followed the same path as all my loves born out of friendship, as she, also, prioritized other parts of her future and did not see fit to build me in it. We were just travelers in each other’s lives, but I didn’t know until it was too late.

I used to say that the pursuit of happiness made me miserable. That perhaps I had no claims to happiness in my life, and so I should just stop chasing it, wishing for it, believing in it. But when we were together, I had finally found an emotion within me I could recognize in that word.

When we were together, I no longer felt trapped in the emptiness of my past. I saw a future open up before me, one I actually had a place in, where my deepest desire might finally be fulfilled.

When we were together, hope landed in my heart like a nightingale, freed from its cage made of less and less and less.

I read a story about a nightingale once.

It died because it gave too much of itself.

It died because the humans around it were selfish and uncaring creatures, as all humans are.

It died because it was a fool who believed in the lie called love.

It died.

I don’t know what happened to my little nightingale. I wish it a beautiful, dark woodland to fly in freedom, far, far away from the cynical utility of human life.

Heartbreak is, perhaps, a more universal experience than love itself. But I can’t seem to make my way to hope afterwards. People talk about being strong enough to bear it. But what about when your heart was broken at the very beginning?

When you grow up with so little, you grasp at anything you manage to get your hands on and hold it tight, try to make it last for as long as you can, for a dream of ever after. But that’s no way to love, and that’s no way to live. I know that much, even if I don’t know any other way.

I spent a year trying to make sense of the world again, and then the second year everyone’s lives shrank because it’s just safer to be alone. Each day that goes by, I’m bound tighter and tighter by my fears: break something enough times and you’ll never be able to piece it back together again, will you? So, I gingerly hide the shards I’m left holding, afraid to show them, afraid to share them, all the while desperate for love, starved for touch, staring down a future that looks as devoid of both as the past.

Some days I can’t imagine anything beyond the solitude that has defined so much of my life. Loneliness is an old bedfellow of mine; despair, my oldest friend. If I can come to embrace those parts of myself I’ve always tried to push away — perhaps, that is the only lifelong love I can count on.

When Restorative Justice Language, Instead of Action, Perpetuates Sexual Abuse

Hours before my ex-partnership changed forever, we watched on a Ted Talk a couch long-dented from use. The Ted Talk elevated the storytelling of a formerly incarcerated man. As a Black man, his punishment for one night of actions, even once released from prison, felt unending. His main lesson for his audience was “People are more than the worst things they do.” I agreed with this, and I still do. I believed prisons were obsolete for true reform of spirit and society, and I still do. My ex-partner felt the same way, and our shared belief in restorative justice was one of the many reasons we were so compatible holding hands through this very Ted Talk.

After the talk came to an end, we closed the computer and ended up in the white plush sheets of my bedroom. What happened that night I immediately labeled as “they went inside of me without asking.” I didn’t want to say Rape because Rape is punishable by law. I didn’t want to use the the word Rape because it meant that something was broken into, far harsher language than trespassing. I took years to call this night for what it was because I could see this loved one’s immediate regret. They reeled themselves in and cried, “I’m afraid of my hands.” Weeks later, they sent me an apology song. Weeks later, they sent me a handwritten apology letter, all with a promise of continued remorse, reflection, and moving forward. I thought at the time I couldn’t shift the terms of our relationship based on this incident because that would constitute punishment for something they promised would never happen again.

All this to say, I punished myself instead and stayed in a sexual relationship with this person. I didn’t name their actions or consequences that would have benefited me because we had so fondly referred to our relationship as a cooperative. I stayed because I told myself a true teammate-style power couple could “work through anything,” and we had potential to be one. I stayed because when they came out as transgender months later, I knew trans feminine folks are too often framed in a binary as Perfect or Evil – to allow them to exist somewhere in between is a place of humanization. There were enough good things, like laughter and lake walks and switching outfits, to know this person was more than that horrible moment.

Whenever I told a friend over the phone what happened, I framed what happened as an accident, a slip in entitlement to my body and my time. I wish someone had told me that an apology isn’t good enough in this case, but, then again, maybe I wouldn’t have listened to an individual’s voice when my ex-partner and I had promised each other community.

But, then there were more sexual assaults over the course of years. None were as obvious as the first, but they piled on alongside my anger towards them. My body grew impatient for basic dignity and touch without fear or dissociation. They often said to me, “I feel like you’re still punishing me” whenever I spoke about it, which always bought me back to the memory of the night where this all began. Sometimes, as continued self defense, they would reference a bell hooks book about change. I felt guilty for my emotions not being true to my politics. Maybe they felt the same about themselves.

But, the fact that they were always “right” based on co-opting restorative justice language nearly broke me. In this brand of leftist politics, saying the right words and maintaining a tick-box of various identities is often enough to be “good” without consequence. This, combined with my experiences of childhood sexual abuse, was enough to make me feel like whether I stayed or whether I left, rape or continued assault was inevitable within this community or any community. This feeling is both why I stayed for as long as I did and why I took the risk to ask them to leave.

However, when we eventually ended our relationship, I immediately feared that I or the books they read didn’t teach them well enough to not assault again. There was a part of me that told myself that I failed as an activist and I failed as a trans person loving another trans person. As justice, I took over the lease – I didn’t have to be the one to move. This upset them of course because it was the first time I gave them consequences for their repetitive actions that formed a pattern.

I’m sharing this with you because survivors, even abolitionists and activists, will tell themselves a million different things to stay in a harmful or abusive situation or to take the heat for it. In this case, I didn’t want to call what was happening abuse, so I called it harm because harm I told myself I could handle.

I regret, for lack of a better word, that we attempted to lead our own practice of restorative justice without long-term outside support that could have guided me to my most truthful language. Placing the work of a community or society on each other made it so I couldn’t leave the toxic sexuality of our relationship.

Since then, I have found some of the resources I had previously been looking for. Both groups center communities and fellow survivors directly impacted by childhood sexual abuse. These groups include Generation Five and Hidden Water; the latter, for example, provides four separate meeting circles: Green Circle for those who were harmed as a child or young person; Purple for those who have caused harm and are ready to take responsibility; Blue for people who have relationships with someone who has been harmed or caused harm; Orange for non-offending caregivers of this who were or caused harm. Both groups mentioned break the binary of survivor and abuser being the only parties to remember, feel impact, or take responsibility for abusive events.

What’s still missing are resources and education for people who have caused sexual harm before it transforms into abuse of bodies or power. It’s a place that is not prison. It’s a place where a survivor’s forced forgiveness is not the goal. It’s a place that releases the survivors from the thought or burden of what I have done, which is turn myself into a physical lesson plan. I numerously asked my ex-partner to seek out such a group, a workshop, a tangible resource of any kind and they always came back empty handed. Even in my own experiences of co-facilitating and attending “How To Support A Survivor” workshops at colleges, nearly everyone in the room identified as a survivor, nearly everyone in the room was a cis woman – meaning, we never got to conversations of prevention or the tangle of ways different people of different identities experience violence.

Practicing an idea of restorative justice without outside involvement or generative tools became self-defense for the both me and my ex-partner – as opposed to offering each other time, resources, and space to appropriately process or heal. As a survivor, I ultimately put society’s healing before my own, and I’ve learned this is not how it works. Instituting personal boundaries isn’t punishment. The loss of boundaries is not restoration. The restoration is in healthy mentorship; tools accessible for folks at different stages in their own mourning; the restoration is in being held by others who share your own experience; the restoration is in defining your own terms of accountability, which includes distance and perhaps disappearance from my life, but not a dumping by the state.

After all, a relationship is not a site of activism, a community is.

This Is an Essay About Penises

When I was a toddler I would push on the head of my penis until it disappeared inside itself. I would watch in fascination as it slowly unraveled into its usual form and again in fascination how easily I could make it disappear. I thought it looked like a rose blossoming and — more miraculously — unblossoming.

This is the kind of story I grasped onto and shared when I was first accepting my identity as a trans woman. It seemed to confirm that I was different and had always been different. I told myself this memory proved my transness and therefore proved my womanhood. Of course, I could just have easily been a curious little boy exploring his body.

Last week during the Senate hearing on the Equality Act, Senator Kennedy began by saying that he believes gender dysphoria is real. He then directed a series of questions to the witness, renowned transphobe Abigail Shrier. “Would this bill require schools to open up a junior high school women’s locker room to a boy who identifies as a girl?” he asked. “Would this bill prohibit the boy with gender dysphoria from exposing his penis to the girls?”

If you’re a cis woman reading this in good faith, your response to these questions is likely disgust. You think of yourself as trans-inclusive; you have trans friends, you date trans people. Maybe you’re my friend, maybe you’re dating me. You recognize and protest against this obvious transphobia. But conflating genitalia and gender is not exclusive to the Senate — nor is it exclusive to intentional, obviously malicious transphobia. It’s ingrained in you. It’s ingrained in me. It’s why I felt like I needed proof of bottom dysphoria to be a woman. It’s why you carelessly say things that make the dysphoria I have so much worse.

I spent years not thinking about my penis — or, at least, thinking about it as little as possible. I did not share the dick obsessions of the other boys my age. I didn’t partake in the measuring contests or the group masturbation sessions or any of the other super gay things supposedly straight boys do with their hormones. When I did start masturbating, I always watched cis lesbian porn — or more esoteric penis-free content like the opening moments of Barbarella. I came directly into the toilet desperate to reduce the length of the experience — and the clean-up. My sex dreams never involved genitalia. One moment my body was pressed against another body and the next I was waking up covered in shame.

When I started having sex, my penis maintained this same level of importance. My first girlfriend and I mostly had what straight people call foreplay and I’d call one-sided lesbian sex. We’d make out and grind against each other and then I’d go down on her until she came. The end was mere obligation — I’d put my penis inside her to quickly release my desire while dissociating away from the moment itself.

The specifics changed slightly, but this is pretty much how I had sex until I came out. I wanted the intimacy and the release and to do a good job. But I didn’t care about my own pleasure beyond a drive to appear normal. I continued to masturbate directly into the toilet.

After I transitioned, my penis became the most important part of my body — at least, to other people. The disinterest I’d felt all my life disappeared with my self-ignorance. Suddenly, my detachment turned into active disdain. This increased dysphoria was made worse by the watchful eyes and invasive questions of those around me. I wanted to shove my difference in people’s faces with a punk defiance, but sometimes I just felt like hiding. I’d wear tight pants that showed off my bulge all the while oscillating between feeling rebellious and feeling insecure. In the four years I’ve lived openly as a trans woman I’ve struggled between proudly declaring myself a chick with a dick — even saying the phrase “chick with a dick” — and wanting to pivot my life choices so I could get rid of that identity as soon as possible. There is a difference between one’s politics and one’s feelings.

The fraught nature of my body increased once I was single. Dating as a trans woman in the lesbian community is challenging. But it would be more accurate to say that I have dated adjacent to the lesbian community. I don’t date lesbians. Or, rather, they don’t date me. I’ve had sex with one lesbian and our pants stayed on — if you call that sex. Of course, that doesn’t mean cis lesbians aren’t interested in me. But if cis men are likely to fuck a trans woman in secret, the cis lesbian counterpart is drawn out emotional affairs with no follow through. There’s just… something… missing. Wonder what that could be.

This is not exclusive to cis lesbians. Plenty of other cis queer women and AFAB non-binary people are perplexed by my body. Some avoid me, others fetishize me. And while the obvious answer is to just date other trans women, there’s no guarantee with those experiences either. The most fetishized I’ve ever felt was with another trans woman. We’ve all been raised with the same transphobia.

To quote the prophet Mitski: I don’t want your pity. I’ve also had a lot of great experiences — relationships, flings, one-night stands — that have allowed me to uncover new parts of myself while connecting with others. I feel totally confident in my ability to find love and sex and chaos and anything else I seek. But this essay isn’t about any of that. This essay is about penises.

The most frequent microaggressions I experience involve AFAB people talking about how they don’t like dicks. Or how they don’t like men and expressing that by referencing dicks. Or talking about how they do like dicks but immediately associating those dicks with cis men. Everyone may be obsessed with the genitalia of trans people, but AFAB queers are obsessed with the genitalia of cis men. I get it. It’s easier to talk about “dicks” than it is to talk about patriarchy. It’s easier to lament a body part than confront the trauma of compulsory heterosexuality or the trauma of sexual assault. It’s easier to say you “miss dick” than to admit that as a bisexual person you are still drawn to cis men despite the harm other cis men have caused you. But as cathartic as it may be to blame penises for abuse and desire, these feelings are misguided. They allow cis men to evade responsibility for their actions, blaming innate biology for their harm. And they imply that trans women are not only men, but men to be feared.

You can learn people’s pronouns and post things on Trans Visibility Day and tweet all about how Trans Women Are Women, but if you are still associating genitalia with gender then you have done a whole lot of surface work and changed none of your core beliefs. And so, when I hear these comments, it’s unsurprising when you don’t want to date me. And so, when I hear these comments, it concerns me when you do.

It’s exhausting to spend so much time defending a part of my body I don’t even want. People stifle their feelings for me because of my penis without realizing they might never even see it. The only dick I’m fucking you with is my strap-on. And if I do eventually trust you enough to let you interact with my penis it certainly won’t be the same as whatever experiences you’ve had with cis men.

But this would never be my rebuttal, because my loyalties do not lie with some cis woman and my desire to get laid. I will always care more about trans women who will never have access to surgery. I will always care more about trans women who don’t even want surgery. I will always care more about trans women who do want their dicks sucked. Because discomfort with one part of your body does not make you trans and does not make you a woman. The same way a cis man is still a man if he doesn’t like getting head. The same way a cis woman’s gender is not changed by wanting someone to deep throat her realistic strap-on. Trans and cis, our bodies vary, our relationships to our bodies vary. Sex is about discovering and connecting across those variations. Good sex anyway.

The fact is I don’t think any of the discrimination and fetishization I experience is really about my penis. No body part is that powerful. My penis is simply a representation of my transness, of my difference. Some people feel it invalidates their queer identity. Other people feel it validates their queer identity too much. And most frequently it just makes people uncomfortable when attached to someone with such good tits because that goes against the cis white heteropatriarchal worldview that was forced upon us all.

I am tired of educating people on this history. I am tired of educating people on the most basic principles of biology. I am tired of first dates turning into gender studies classes. I am tired of not knowing why things didn’t work out with someone and then finding evidence in their microaggressions months later. I am tired.

As the transphobia in media loses its subtlety and an unprecedented number of bills targeting trans people — especially trans youth — arise across the country, I feel more certain than ever that visibility and mere acceptance are not enough. The only way to fight transphobia in a way that’s substantial, effective, and permanent, is for our culture to shift its very notion of gender. That is not going to start with transphobes. That’s going to start with people who consider themselves trans-inclusive, but have so much internal work left to do. That’s going to start with a queer woman who respects my pronouns, but is still uncomfortable at the thought of my penis.

I’m not asking for perfection. But I am asking for effort. Not for my sex life — I wouldn’t date most of you anyway — but for my humanity, for the humanity of so many. Don’t repeat platitudes. Really unlearn your binary connections between genitalia and gender. Really unlearn the associations you bring to bodies you’ve yet known. Really unlearn these things and start seeing trans people as individuals, as people. Unlearn these things because if you don’t trans lives will continue to be debated in the Senate and I will not fuck you.

Those things are not of equal importance but I know at least some of you care about both.

Love Is Not a Lie: In Sickness and in Health

I have a scar on my right hand that starts at my pinky joint, winds down to my wrist, and wraps around to my palm — a casualty of an oil splashing incident involving zucchinis. It intersects with a different scar on my palm, from a cast iron skillet and some cornbread. The scars weren’t there six months ago, and neither were the scrapes across my knuckles from where I tripped and landed on clenched fists. They’re not my fault, the scrapes and scars, in the sense that it’s not my fault I got Covid last March and developed long term health issues from it. But they are my fault, in the sense that I now know I shouldn’t be cooking or even really walking around when I have brain fog, and I almost always have brain fog in the evening.

Either way, the wounds exist, and Stacy’s eyes flicked down to them as we entered round four of an argument that’d been going on all day. I wanted to do another load of laundry; she thought I shouldn’t be making so many trips up and down the stairs. I wanted to take out the recycling while she finished up work; she thought I should wait for her help because there were lots of bags and all that bending over was going to make me even dizzier than usual. I wanted to order and install a new showerhead; she thought I should listen to my dysautonomia doctor’s advice and not hold my hands up over my head unless I absolutely had to because my heart can’t make my blood beat up that high anymore. I wanted to carry a heavy appliance to a different place in the house; she thought the heavy appliance was fine just where it was.

“You keep second-guessing me!” I said. “It makes me feel like a stupid kid!”

Her eyes reflexively touched the new scars. I — not a stupid kid — shoved my hands into my pockets.

“I wouldn’t have to keep telling you to stop doing too much if you’d just stop doing too much!” Stacy protested.

I — again, not a stupid kid — stomped my foot. “You need to let me figure out how much is too much by myself!”

“You have!” Stacy said, tears gathering in her eyes. “You have figured it out!”

A few days earlier, I’d forgotten to put on my compression socks, and my Liquid IV shipment was late so I was using substandard electrolyte therapy, and I’d tried to watch MSNBC while I was working to keep up with the relentless cycle of bad news, which completely overloaded my sensory processing and fried my brain — and by the afternoon I was curled up under a pile of blankets, sweating and shivering and too fatigued to lift my head, wheezing for breath, muscles in knots, a migraine stabbing behind my left eye. Stacy brought me dinner in bed, kissed my sweaty forehead, said we’d order my favorite juice from the juice place as soon as it opened up in the morning.

I hadn’t figured it out. Not really.

Stacy and I decided to get married the same way we’ve decided every other major thing in our relationship: like it was the continuation of a conversation we’d always been having. It was one of those spring Sundays in New York City that makes everyone fall in love with each other and the city all over again. Cherry blossoms and dogwood trees and honeysuckles somehow; glowing cornflower skies; warm sun, cool breeze. Before I got sick. Before we’d ever even heard of Covid. Before the word “pandemic” was anything more than the setup for a zombie video game. Years ago, really. A lifetime.

For brunch, I’d ordered something savory and she’d ordered something sweet, and we’d split it, which has always been our way. We were talking about — oh, I don’t know: work or books or the Miami Dolphins or some other brunch we’d had at some other time and place or that vacation when the bakery owner in Maine told her she had expensive taste because she ordered two pastries and she never got over it. She was wearing a blue and black plaid shirt and a bright yellow snapback — because she hates being “too matchy-matchy” — and her nose was pink because there was still a chill in the air, but she was drinking some coffee thing with whisky in it and her insides seemed toasty. I thought, “How can she make my heart feel like bursting even after all this time?” I thought, “How are her opinions still so fascinating to me?” I thought, “But only those lovers who didn’t choose at all, but were, as it were, chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful…”

I blurted out, “We should get married.” She stopped talking and grinned and said, “Well, yes, obviously.”

And that was that.

The night before our first blizzard this year, Stacy and I realized I wouldn’t be able to shovel snow anymore. I’ve always shoveled our snow because I like chores and exercise and sore muscles and I’m a Georgia girl, so the entire concept of snow remains a novel miracle to me. Stacy said she’d handle the shoveling, so I decided, vehemently, that my job would be putting out the ice melter. I could just shuffle behind her at my own pace with one little scoop at a time and spread it out and feel useful — no, be useful. And so it baffled me when, the night before the second blizzard, Stacy asked me not once, not twice, but three times what I was doing as I prepared a new bucket of ice melter for use.

Why was I tromping out into the backyard in the snow at 9:00 pm?

Why was I rummaging around in my toolbox at 9:15 pm?

Why in the WORLD was I lugging a 50-pound tub of ice melter through the living room at 9:30 pm?

The answers were: Shoveling out an unopened bucket of ice melter, looking for my pliers to open the bucket, putting the bucket in the stairwell so it’d be ready for me to do my job in the morning. But it was after 9:00 p.m., which is the time when words start falling out of my head in earnest, because of the brain fog and inflammation and who even knows what else, so I just kind of grunted at every question she asked.

When I finished, she was sitting on the couch scowling.

“You know I can’t articulate what I’m doing when I’m doing it anymore! It’s too hard for me! My brain can’t handle it!,” I snapped.

She said, “Then can you please stop and say that, instead of getting stompier and stompier when I express my valid worry about you pushing yourself too hard and too far.”

“I can’t do it,” I said. “I can’t do two things at once!”

She stood up. “That’s not what I’m asking for!”

“You are!” I could feel my hands clenching at my side. “You’re not respecting my… my… limitations!”

It was probably the most unfair thing I’ve ever said to her, to anyone, in my life. In the whole time I’d been sick, almost an entire year by then, she’d never — not once — questioned how I felt or what I was unable to do.

When Long Covid didn’t even have a name, when we’d never heard of Dysautonomia or POTs or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome or Pernicious Anemia, when every doctor I spoke to told me I just had anxiety, when the spouses and siblings and bosses and parents of people in the online Long Covid support groups I’m in didn’t believe a word of what their family and employees were telling them, when I couldn’t get out of bed, when I literally couldn’t lift my head to eat, when my nighttime adrenaline surges were so bad I would wake up crying out in terror with my legs in trembling motion like my body was trying to run away from a bear, when the doctors who might be able to help me were all out of pocket, when I couldn’t talk, when I couldn’t walk, when I couldn’t remember the most basic words for the foods I could stomach, when she was juggling the expectations of huge clients for work while taking care of our four cats and everything in our house while making every meal I needed and washing my clothes and sitting up with me at night to literally shake off the adrenaline spikes — she never, ever, ever stopped respecting or tending to my every need.

Her face was stricken when she said, “Please don’t yell at me.”

I yelled, “I’m not yelling!”

She said, “You’re so angry.”

I said, “Of course I’m angry!”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly. “Of course you’re angry. You have every right in the world to be full of anger and pain and outrage — but I mean with me.”

I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at the world, at all the people who could have warned us to wear masks when they knew we should be wearing masks, at all the people who came to New York City from places that were in Covid crises just because they weren’t experiencing symptoms, at the government that gaslit us, at the doctors who ignored me and wrote me off, at the people who were — even now — expressing callous disregard for the health and safety of other people, at my body, at my brain, at myself. Why. Why couldn’t I just remove the lid from a bucket of ice melter while simply explaining that I was removing the lid from a bucket of ice melter? “I need pliers to take off this lid so I can use it in the morning.” How hard was that? Why was everything so confusing and impossible?

“You don’t snap at me,” she said. “You’ve never snapped at me. You don’t raise your voice at me. You’ve never raised your voice at me. This new you is—”

I felt my jaw drop like a cartoon character, and whatever she saw in my face and my posture made her stop talking.

“You think I’m a different person now.”

“No!” she stepped toward me. “No, not a different person. Just this one thing. Your anger being so close to the surface.”

“You said ‘new you.'”

She stepped even closer. “Heather. Just this one thing. You are still you. Heather, listen to me. Look at me. You are still you.”

I never had any plans or dreams or visions of getting married. When I was a kid and my friends played house, I pretended my husband had been lost at sea. When we played wedding, I played “drunk Aunt Anne.” I never imagined the dress, the church, the flowers, the bridesmaids, and I certainly never imagined the groom. And neither did Stacy. Long before we decided we should get married, we already felt married. And when we did decide to get married, it basically just seemed like endless paperwork and an expensive party that would inevitably stress the heck out of both of us and leave at least two-thirds of the people we knew in tears, one way or another. If any other weddings I’d ever been a part of were any indication, at least.

Being married to Stacy seemed like the greatest thing. Calling her my “wife,” wearing a wedding band, not having to explain that I wasn’t actually single every time I checked off the emergency contact information at a new doctor. But having a wedding was impossibly daunting.

About a month into New York City’s Covid lockdown, Stacy and I caught a segment on NY1 where Governor Cuomo explained a new executive order called Project Cupid that would allow couples to get married over Zoom. Just you and your fiance on one end, your officiant and family and friends all in different places on the other end, and — boom! — you’d be married. For really real married. We turned to each other at the exact same time with the exact same look on our face. She said, “Are we gonna do it?” I said, “We are gonna do it!”

All those years of not planning our wedding, but before the night was over, we ordered wedding rings, a matching bow tie and regular tie, a new suit for me. We browsed delivery cakes for hours. I wrote my vows. We told our family and close friends. “Get ready,” we said, “It’s finally happening.” Wife, we kept saying. Wife, wife, wife.

And then my Long Covid kicked in.

I knew I was a new person nearly a year into Long Covid. My body didn’t work the same. My brain didn’t work the same. My relationships with most of my family and friends had all shifted dramatically, as had my work, and my relationship to my work, and my relationship with everything my body used to be able to do. I couldn’t play Dungeons and Dragons with my closest friends, I couldn’t ride my bike, I couldn’t even really leave my house to walk farther than a block. I got even worse at returning texts and emails and sometimes I’d forget I’d even interacted with someone I loved half an hour after it happened.

But there were other things too. At some point, I’d completely let go of the idea that I had anything to prove to anyone about my writing; and I wrote some of the best pieces of my career. I started finding immense, almost childlike joy in the smallest things: the softness of my sheets against my legs, my one cup of steamy frothy coffee a week, the weight of a purring cat on my shoulder or in my lap, the brush of Stacy’s fingertips against my neck as she scooted past my desk during the day, and the gentle caress of her kiss on my cheek and temple and forehead and chin and nose at night. Sitting together on the couch, snuggled under the same blanket, watching movies and TV, night after night, like we’d never done in ten years of our relationship because I’d stopped go-go-going. Wholly abandoning anyone else’s ideas for what I should be doing in any area of my life. I was, inexplicably, and in ways I’d never experienced content and deeply happy.

I felt like if I kept moving when I could, kept writing when I could, kept connecting with people I love when I could, kept finding ways to be grateful, kept chasing answers with specialists, kept trying new treatments, I could outrun the despair that was chasing me. When Stacy said there was a new me, I knew she was right, which meant there was also an old me — and I hadn’t even begun to grieve her.

I’d only cried two times since getting sick with Covid — once after I’d had to quit my D&D game, and once when I called my sister because I was getting scared of how sad I was when I couldn’t get out of the bed — but that night, the tears started in the corner of my eyes, trickled down my face, and when I tasted them on my lips, the dam of my despair broke open and I cried like I had never cried in my life. Choking, sloppy, desperate, wailing, hyperventilating tears that seemed to be coming from a deep place inside me I’d never even accessed before. My entire body shook uncontrollably. And I finally said the things I never said before: I wish I hadn’t gotten sick. Why did I get sick? Why me? Why did I not get better? Why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to me?

Stacy’s hand was on my back, my cheek, my thigh, my arm, my hand. “I love you,” she said, over and over. “I love you.”

Our wedding plans went on hold when I found myself unable to get out of bed. Weeks and months upon end, no answers from doctors, every day a new terrifying manifestation of Long Covid in my body. My wedding suit and tie hung on our bedroom door, but it eventually became apparent that it was just taking up space and needed to go into the closet. When I finally started getting diagnoses and working out treatments for the various syndromes that were making up my prolonged Covid experience, I didn’t bring up our wedding. I told myself it was because I didn’t know, from day to day, what my body was going to do. There was no way to plan to have a Zoom on a certain day at a certain time because there was no way to know whether or not I’d even be mobile on that day.

And that was true — but the other truth was that I didn’t want Stacy to feel forced to marry me when there was a very real chance I would never be fully well again. I wanted her to have an out, even if the out was just me never bringing it up again. I wasn’t the same as when we met, when we decided to get married, when we bought those matching ties.

I put my wedding ring on the day FedEx delivered it, and maybe that was enough.

One night, after a very hard day of pain and brain fog and being unable to breathe, Stacy said, into the dark of our bedroom, “I have always wanted to marry you. That hasn’t changed, you know. It will never change.”

We got married sitting down because I can only stand for a few minutes at a time. A Zoom ceremony with our family and officiant on one end, and us in our living room. I had intended to wear the regular tie, and Stacy had intended to wear the bow tie, but I got so tuckered out tying the bow tie on me so I could tie it on her that I had to keep it on and she ended up in the regular tie.

Stacy started crying the second she started saying her vows, and so I started crying too. “I promise I will always love and support you and celebrate you and be here for you, for whatever you may need in our lives,” she said. “I hope to prove to you again and again that I will do anything for you. Any thing, any time, for any reason — or no reason at all.”

I said, “I promise to respect and celebrate all the things that make you you, apart from me and you: Your creative passions and artistic ambitions, every quirk that has become so dear to me, your career drive and your ethos of endless generosity, your commitment to what’s good and just, your ferocity of spirit, your tender heart.”

Our officiant walked us through more traditional vows when we were exchanging rings. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. Stacy squeezed my hand and looked from my ring finger into my eyes. In sickness and in health.

I kissed her ring finger and repeated it back. In sickness and in health.

While our family watched, our officiant pronounced us married. I wore a suit and Stacy wore a suit. We were girlfriends for ten years, brides for ten minutes, and then we were wives. One string of Christmas lights draped over the bookshelf and my childhood teddy bear as decoration; our cats watching on; the only wedding either of us had ever imagined.

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Making Amends with Valentine’s Day

Sometime in between potty training and the prom, I learned I was unworthy of the love that brought roses, candy grams, and absurdly large bears on Valentine’s Day. I haven’t liked roses since middle school, I learned to buy my own candy, and I have come to terms with the idea that I was born an absurdly large bear – brown, cuddly, and thick in all the best ways. I’m not a Valentine’s Day hipster. I won’t harangue about how roses and overpriced chocolates fuel capitalism. Love is love is love and Valentine’s Day is a day that many in this world shower their chosen ones with the love they deserve. Buy that boi his roses. Buy your girl her chocolates. Buy yourself that new vibrator, baby. You deserve it. I believe in love the way that queer folks believe in astrology – without reservation and probably more than I should.

In our house, music was how we said “I love you” in the deepest way possible. My parents swung us around in our family room dancing to their favorite songs. Years later, I would visit their graves playing those same songs while tears streamed down my face.

I was a fat nerd in high school (we are the best type). While the cool kids spent lunch eating pizza and playing hacky sack on the lawn, I spent mine taking extra band classes. After school, I sat in front of my computer surrounded by cassettes, blank CDs and sharpies, illegally downloading songs and making mixtapes for my crushes. I hid behind instruments, computers, Whitney’s voice, Prince’s guitar and awkwardly whispered “I love you more than I know how to explain and I’m scared so here’s a tape I made you.”

Fifteen years later, I no longer whisper; I shout it. Life is too damn short not to tell your people you love all pieces of them: I LOVE YOU and I MADE YOU THIS PLAYLIST.

This playlist honors the messiness of our journeys. It welcomes you with Syd’s “Drown In It” and ends with Corinne Bailey Rae’s “High,” a tribute to love that makes you want to keep it all to yourself (and also to my beautiful partner, Jane). Between the start and finish, you’ll find songs about family, new crushes, old lovers, heartbreak, and the most radical self-love we can muster. Some songs have words, others just provide a backing track for your own thoughts.

Like the best sex, I’ve decided to give it to you slow and deep in some parts and fast and rough in others. This playlist is verse and in it for the long haul. Play it top to bottom, bottom to top, on shuffle, repeat, softly while you soak in the tub, loudly when you first wake up on Sunday morning. It is ours.

I believe in making playlists like I love — with fierceness, exuberance, and intentionality. There are more than two hours of love songs for your ears and soul. In lieu of roses, candy, and a large bear, I offer you 40 tracks and an “I love you” that stretches into eternity.

On some of my favorites…

For Our Family (Chosen, Blood, and Imagined) — Mereba’s “Kinfolk”

It’s been almost a year now without family holidays, birthday parties, visiting grandparents, and reunions. Much of the world has mourned these as they come, trying to replicate the moments virtually — zoom meetings, packages, letters, and drive-by celebrations. Nothing feels the same and you find yourself missing your most-loathed relative, longing to have your cheeks squeezed by aunts, feigning a smile when you’re asked about potential kids, spouses, and career shifts again. There is no doubt that the isolative rotation around the sun has left many of us wishing for connection with those we hold closest. For some of us, this is a familiar feeling. We have been mourning the loss of those connections, events, hugs, obligatory intrusive questions for longer than we would like to admit. Maybe it happened when we came out, when we began to perform our queerness just a little too loudly when we brought our “friend” home for the last time. We queers know something about losing, about mourning, about searching to fill what once was. We also know a lot about finding our people and creating kinship. We know about loving deeply and staying.

I am learning to master grief and loss in ways that so many are around the world. In practical terms, I’m an orphan. My mama died six years ago this month, my dad just only last month. These days, family is a patchwork quilt of blood relatives, longtime friends, and people I have never met in real life. A haunting ballad and love song to the ones who matter, Mereba’s “Kinfolk” is a tribute to us. In her chorus, she reminds us that “we got what no money could measure” and while we could all use some more money right now, her voice brings a warm, loving serenade.

For more family love, facetime your family and dance to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston or “Before I Let Go” by Maze and Frankie Beverly.

Tell That Crush You Love Them Today – Brittany Howard’s “Georgia”

If you close your eyes real tight, perhaps you might imagine yourself like me in high school: an apprehensive teenager walking home from the bus stop, jean jacket, shabby converse, walkman on your ears, and listening to “Georgia” on repeat while you think about the day you’ll muster up the courage to tell your crush how you really feel: “Is it cool? I wanna tell ya that I love you.” This track is for the cute queers who need some courage to jump into the unknown. Just do it already. Love is waiting.

Further listening: “U Should” by CHIKA and King Princess’ “1950,” and “Make Me Feel” by Janelle Monae for more courage.

In Honor of Loving Ourselves Enough to Reckon with Our Shit — “By You” by Oompa (Featuring Anjimile)

Oompa’s Cleo was one of my favorite albums to drop in 2019. Her lyrics are raw and honest in ways that make you reckon with yourself, too. On “By You,” Oompa pairs brilliant lines like “I’m just here because my girl said I can’t blow up / And therapy is how I tell her that I am grown up” with the gorgeous vocals of Anjimile and gives us a heart-wrenching ballad about facing your demons and unpacking your shit in order to love and be loved.

We ain’t always ready to be in relationships. This is a song for us working on us. Those who love/hate our therapist. And those of us who are learning to love our truth (no matter how ugly it looks). After a year in isolation, I think all of us just “wanna be loved” right now.

Take care of yourself some more while listening to Jamila Woods’ “Holy.“

For Those of Us Who Chose Ourselves — Wafia’s “Pick Me”

For a long time, I was a hardcore giver. I gave up my dreams and ideas to make those around me feel comfortable. As a fat, Black, queer person, I learned to shrink, to be quiet, to take up as little space as possible. For some of us, giving to others (and up on ourselves) is easier than picking ourselves.

Wafia’s “Pick Me” is a battle cry of self-love, confidence, and preservation. Over an acoustic guitar, she is fierce in her proclamation, she picks herself, “every day, every night, every single week.” No matter where you are in your journey of self-love, you deserve to dream, exist, and be affirmed in all your ways. You deserve to be prioritized, held tightly, and picked first. It’s okay to pick yourself. Ain’t nobody gon’ love you like you love you.

Need more encouragement: Play Lizzo’s “Scuse Me” on repeat and belt it out.

Because They Never Deserved You No Way — “Tights on My Boat” by the Chicks

The guitar that backs Natalie Maines’ voice on this spellbound “fuck you” track sounds like a hard slap on the cheek of the ex who left your heart in pieces. . The Chicks’ music has always given us permission to stay mad, wish our haters the worst, and sit in our emotions; this track is no different. Each second of “Tights on My Boat” is soaked in controlled rage and disdain From the first line until the last, Maines sings a drag for the ages: “I hope you die peacefully in your sleep (just kidding), I hope it hurts like you hurt me; I hope when you think of me, you can’t breathe.” At the 22nd second of the track, Maines lets out an exhale that tells us we’re gonna be alright despite the heartbreak. At its core, Tights on My Boat is an anthem for those who’ve loved hard and gotten our hearts broken, burned, and tossed to the wind. Listen to this song on repeat and drink your favorite drink. Toast to your freedom. They didn’t deserve you, boo. Keep your head up and keep loving, baby.

See Also: “the 1″ by Taylor Swift and “GodSpeed” by Frank Ocean

You May Not Have a Date, but Do You Have Cleaning Supplies? — “W.A.P.” by Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion

Meg spits “if he fuck me and ask, ‘Whose is it?’ / When I ride the dick, I’ma spell my name.” Let’s be honest. Some of us have been spelling our own names for eleven months (or longer). COVID-19 has made in-person dating, hookups, and relationships difficult for a lot of us. Eating your crush out is virtually impossible through an N-95 mask and many aren’t willing to risk our lives for it – no matter how good it is. When this anthem dropped in the summer, it set off the conservatives and male hip hop heads alike – how dare these hot women talk about their pussy and its power? It’s 2021 fam. How dare they not? Although the song has twinges of cishet normativity, Cardi and Meg never gender WAP. They open the box and the drip is real.

A solo Valentine’s Day prescription: Grab a bucket, mop, your favorite toy and play this on repeat at least 9 times before bed. With partner(s)? Also see: “Lavish” by TT the Artist and “Naked” by Siena Liggins

For the Socially Distanced New Lovers in 2021 — “A Long Walk” by Jill Scott

I’ve had a crush on Jill Scott since this song came out in 2000. I didn’t know what it meant to be queer yet, but I knew I loved Jill Scott and I would walk with her wherever she wanted to go. Her voice is one in a million, wrapping us with all of the warmth we’re missing in isolation this winter. Last year, Jill gave us one of the greatest displays of love. Her Verzuz battle with the incomparable goddess Erykah Badu was a breath of fresh air; hours of affirmation, joy, and music that tasted like your mama’s cooking and sounded like your most sensual lover. Dating is hard in a pandemic so I’m dedicating Ms. Scott’s 2001 classic, “A Long Walk” to the new socially-distanced lovers who are masking up, going for walks in the winter, and getting COVID-19 tests to get laid or find love. May your walk bring your soul the elevation you seek.

For Post-Walk Activities, see: “Cyber Sex” by Doja Cat and “Lying Together” by FKJ

For the Lovers of Justice — Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”

Donald Trump’s presidency exposed a long-standing undercurrent of disgusting racism and white supremacy in our country. It also brought Tracy Chapman back to late-night television to perform her evergreen classic anthem, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” Last summer, Pride was canceled and despite a raging pandemic, we flooded the streets to protest police brutality. We screamed names of folks we didn’t know but loved enough in memoriam to risk our lives in the name of justice. In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “the moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” We’ve been choosing love. We’ve been moving toward freedom. Despite the obstacles in their way, organizers, educators, and leaders haven’t given up on revolution – on the possibility of a liberated world. Last month’s inauguration brought a glimmer of hope. It feels like “finally the tables are starting to turn.”

Also see: “Rise Up” (Andra Day)

To Our Pasts (Who Deserve Love Too) — Joy Oladokun’s “Younger Days”

Isolation brings introspection, introspection brings growth. We’ve all done a lot of growing up since our last Valentine’s Day. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my past as a younger queerdo – late nights at my favorite bar in DC, bad hookups, broken promises, and lost connections. “I wish I was at the club tonight,” I said back in August. I haven’t been to a club in three years. Just the idea of being up until last call makes me sleepy. It’s easy to be hard on ourselves when we reflect on what should have, could have, and would have been. In “Younger Days,” Joy Oladokun tells us to cut our past selves some slack. Send the past you a love note this Valentine’s Day.

An Ode to the Ultimate Love — Prince’s “Call My Name”

Whether you’ve been with your partner(s) for two weeks or twenty years, Prince’s “Call My Name” is the soundtrack for the “can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, World Series kind of” love (shout out to the Olsen twins circa 1995).

The world hasn’t been the same without the presence of Prince Rogers Nelson. Listening to his music still takes me to a higher plane where love is always queer, Blackness is always abundant, and being our truest selves is the holiest prayer we can offer the universe. In “Call My Name,” Prince belts his heart out for a real love that changes his world. All-consuming, Prince “just can’t stop writing songs” about his love.

This ballad is made for a good two-step with your favorite dance partner. Like the truest love, Prince’s voice lifts you off your feet. Don’t be scared though. The drums and bass cradle you for three minutes. This is that good shit – That Prince Rogers Nelson kind of art. We might not have Prince’s songwriting talent, but we still have the ability to show the people dearest to us that they are seen, affirmed, and loved. When’s the last time you called your lover by their name? When’s the last time you held their name on your tongue and offered it to them as a gift of admiration? Speak your love into existence. Name it and tell them how you feel.

The entire playlist is on Spotify and on Apple music.

Follow Prince’s example and take your time – with this playlist, love, and your growth.

I love you in all your forms.

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I Can Masturbate, No Hands: On Innovative Masturbation and the Power of Friendship

essay by Bella Dally-Steele; illustrations by Maddy Rea

One of my first memories is of hide and seek. I was five, maybe six years old and had stashed myself behind my parents’ bed to wait out the hunt – and to indulge in a certain tingly pleasure. Alas, although I hastened my business as the footsteps of an unsuspecting family member plodded closer, I cut it too close. I remember him opening the door, only to slowly and suspiciously close it after glimpsing me belly-down on the bedroom floor, legs tightly clasped together.

Although I soon learned to indulge only behind locked doors, leg squeezing remained my self-pleasure method of choice throughout the remainder of my childhood and adolescence. Through frank conversations with cross country mates and cheeky hints in coming-of-age films, I learned that masturbation is something people do to their vaginas with fingers, shower heads and (though I often doubted it) hairbrush handles. I intrinsically knew that what happened when I pressed my thighs together and held my breath was masturbation, too, but as my Encyclopedia of Wank expanded with no reflection of my own methods, it became clear that I was missing a fundamental element of jerking off.

Of course, what I was missing was some Booksmart-grade representation, not a guarded secret to self-pleasure.

“Research suggests that most people with clitorises masturbate with their legs in a semi closed or closed position, even when they’re using another manipulator,” Sheila Addison, a life, marriage and family therapist, told me in a phone interview this August. “I’m not sure if it’s a norm, but it’s a large minority, if not.”

According to the landmark yet woefully outdated Hite Report, at least 3 percent of the women interviewed for the 1976 study reported masturbating by pressing their legs together. That’s at least one other girl on my obscenely large high school cross country team who nodded along in confusion when our teammates mentioned “flicking the bean.”

But 3 percent starts to look deceptively conservative when you take into account that thigh clenching is the most common way that children with clitorises discover masturbation. Physiologically, it makes sense, said marriage, family and sex therapist Courtney Watson. The frequency with which you lay or sit with your thighs pressed together makes it exponentially more likely that you will discover pleasure in this position as compared to, say, with a hand spontaneously rubbing on your clit.

It is, as physician and eugenicist Havelock Ellis observed in 1927, a masturbation technique that is often acquired innocently at a young age – with the added bonus that it involves “no indecorum.”

Surprisingly, Ellis hit the nail on the head (while, perhaps far less surprisingly, pathologizing gay and racialized people while he was at it). Some people masturbate this way because, like me, they simply never branched out; others, because of its discretion and decorum.

Such was the case for fellow leg-squeezer Maddy Rea. While I was furiously reading unhelpful advice columns on my deviant masturbation technique, she was convincing herself that if she wasn’t touching the clit with her fingers, it didn’t count.

Maddy, now 24, had discovered self-pleasure in a similarly compromising circumstance – nestled under blankets on her babysitter’s couch. Like me, all she needed was a suspicious inquiry as to “what she was doing under there” to nudge her practices into the all-too-common realm of shame. By the time she hit puberty in an abstinence-only high school, she had rewritten the definition of masturbation in her mind. What she did in her bedroom – with bunched up blankets, the spindle of her bedpost or her hand clenched between her thighs – had long since ceased to be the “masturbation” her teachers denounced.

When she started having partnered sexual experiences, Maddy rewrote the definition of “orgasm,” too. She could climax within 20 seconds of clenching her legs together while laying on her stomach or sitting with her legs crossed (a skill I deeply envy), but direct fingering or oral sex always plateaued into painful overstimulation. After one self-conscious attempt at replicating her technique on a high school beau’s hand, Maddy abandoned hope of incorporating a partner into the only method that could get her off. Orgasms would from then on out stay between her and her thighs alone.

“It’s kind of symbolic of closing yourself off from experiencing [pleasure] with someone else,” Maddy explained to me in one of numerous Zoom calls from her Ottawa apartment. “Almost like it’s only for you.”

There’s a host of factors that train people to masturbate through leg clenching, most of which have gone unresearched due to a lack of academic interest or incentive in studying clitorises, Addison said.

To begin with, it feels good. While no studies have investigated the mechanics of it, thigh squeezing likely stimulates the internal and external structures of the clitoris, Addison told me.

In addition to the thighs, most people who use this technique also contract muscles throughout the pelvic floor, which are in turn connected to the internal structures of the clitoris (like the bulbs of the vestibule, crura and shaft of the clitoris). Contracting pelvic muscles likely alternates pressure on these internal structures, thus stimulating them, Addison said.

For people with a larger glans of clitoris (the external, hooded mound that most people associate with the word), thigh rubbing might actually “sandwich” the clit between their legs, stimulating it externally as well. Those with smaller glans likely apply pressure by rhythmically squeezing the legs and labia around it.

Perhaps the most evident motivation to continue masturbating through clenched thighs, rather than progressing to other methods, is shame. It’s an easy practice to hide from housemates and, for those raised to see wanking as dirty, from yourself. There’s no telltale rustling under the covers or – if you train yourself to regulate your breathing like Maddy and I – even labored gasps. Let it never be said that the technique, which is sometimes judiciously branded as “hands-free” masturbation, is without advantages, albeit sex negative ones.

Shame is not always the primary factor in making thigh squeezing an individual’s masturbation technique of choice – but it just so happens that this was the case for Maddy and me.

“It can blossom into much more for people who hone in on this technique,” Watson said when I asked her about how this method could affect the partnered sex lives of its users. “I think if it’s shame based, the shame would have a negative impact… You set the stage.”

Naturally, I asked this because the technique – or, as she corrected me, the shame I have associated with it – has negatively impacted my partnered sex life.

In the months before my college graduation, I finally set out to “train” myself into more partner-friendly masturbation habits, per the advice columns I had read years earlier. My efforts were fruitless, often ending in tears of frustration and a cursing of my mutinous genitals.

After crunching the numbers, I came to the conclusion that I needed a toy that could mimic the indirect stimulation I was used to, while allowing me to workshop new, open-legged wanking positions.

For those trying to widen their horizons, Addison recommended following directed masturbation techniques that focus on incrementally opening up one’s legs. In partnered penetrative sex, she suggested experimenting with rear or side penetration, which allows the receiver’s legs to remain closed.

It took me nearly five months to finally cum through alternative methods – in my case, with a vibrator that shoots waves of air at the glans of the clitoris. From there, I’ve managed to transition to using fingers.

It’s significant that I spent the first three of those five months in a mental block. After a first explosive crack at my shiny new vibrator, I simply refused to touch the thing. It wasn’t until I moved across the country, shucked a relationship and found myself with ample free evenings in an empty apartment that I finally dedicated myself to renegotiating pleasure with my body.

By the time I met, and began oversharing with, Maddy the following fall, I had managed to expand my horizons and had even cum for the first time ever in a partnered scenario, with the help of my vibrator and a particularly disarming woman. My chapter of self-pleasure woes was ostensibly behind me.

Maddy and I were still getting to know each other on a hastily-planned trip to Bucharest when a throw-away conversation about hookup culture turned intimate. One of us – I’m not sure who, at this point – mentioned that we masturbated with our legs. All it took was a glint of recognition to spark the conversation we’d both been waiting to have for years.

That night, I scribbled a hurried journal entry:

“We found out we both struggle to orgasm b/c we masturbate in the same leg squeezing way – she’s the first person I’ve ever met who does this too! I gave her some tips on what to do – buy a [suction/air pressure toy], work from there to hand stuff, etc.”

Since that hours-long conversation a year ago, Maddy has come out as bisexual, introduced a similar vibrator into her sex life and, like me, discovered a new way to get off. But she has yet to introduce any of her masturbation practices into partnered sex. And I’ve yet to cum with another partner.

When I started reporting this essay, I asked Watson if she had any advice for readers looking to transition to more partner-friendly masturbation. You might correctly suspect that this question was self-serving. Indeed, Maddy and I had penned it days before, breathless in anticipation of finally learning how to “fix” our masturbation styles and overhaul our partnered sex lives.

I think Watson picked up on my alternative motives, too, because her advice was pointedly not to transition to other practices.

“I love the idea of getting all dressed up in lingerie, and having your partner sit across from you, watching you masturbate [through clenched thighs] … as a way to incorporate this into your sex life,” she told me. “It’s all about creativity, and a willingness to be vulnerable.”

I’m glad she was on the other end of a phone call and not a Zoom, because I visibly cringed. When I relayed her advice to Maddy later that night, she cringed too.

That’s how I know Watson is spot on.

Maddy and I cringed because neither of us can imagine letting a partner see us in our most natural, vulnerable state of pleasure. We may have picked up a new masturbation skill, but a more daunting hurdle remains. And it’s going to take more than five months and a $100 vibrator to confront it.

Hold Us in the Light

Content warning: pregnancy & pregnancy loss.

The first Jewish holiday that my wife and I spent together was Passover of 2018. We weren’t wives yet, we were still dating long distance Portland to Oakland, but like good lesbians we had fallen for each other quickly and wanted to spend as much time together as possible. At that point in my life I hardly practiced my religion anymore aside from the occasional major holiday. But no matter how far I veered in practice, my Judaism was always a huge part of me. Introducing Jamie to the traditions I was raised in and the community that shares that with me felt like sharing a slice of my childhood, of what grew me as a human.

We were having a small but mighty group of queers over, some Jewish and some not. Jamie and I both love hosting friends, and we’ve been known to go to great lengths to make things feel special. Jamie worked her flower arranging and table-setting magic. I sewed a quirky afikomen cover and set out the seder plate. We prepared a proper Passover feast — I made brisket and homemade gefilte fish like my mom always did. Jamie made a very delicious first batch of matzoh ball soup, an initiation in its own rite. When our friends arrived we all cozied up around the table, shoulder to shoulder. We lit the candles and read from our homemade feminist haggadah zine, and said many prayers over many glasses of wine. Our dog Isaac hung out loyally around the table, cleaning up crumbs of matzoh as they fell. When it was time to look for the hidden afikomen, people began searching excitedly under couch cushions and in random drawers, filling that big old room with belly laughs. Later, when everyone had left and the dishes were mostly done, Jamie and I curled up in each other under the covers, exhausted but enjoying that buzz of a really great night. The kind that leaves your cheeks sore from smiling.

When the pandemic first came around, when we began our quarantine thinking it would be two weeks, then two months, then finally realized it would actually be indefinite, something odd began to happen in our house. I started regularly craving something I hadn’t really craved in a long time. I wanted to be surrounded by ritual, specifically Jewish ritual, after many years of moving away from those very same traditions. It wasn’t just Shabbat dinner every week with my wife, though we clung to that one immediately. It was listening to Hebrew songs, to different shuls across the country doing Shabbat services over FaceTime to empty congregation halls. It was Zoom Passover with friends and Zoom Rosh Hashanah with my family. Those days were marked by a particular anxiety that held a tight grip on me, and the comforting lulls of the prayers somehow gave me some room to breathe.

For us, the hardest part of the pandemic was postponing our journey towards parenthood. We had worked extra hard — as all queer conceiving people do — just to get to the point of trying. I would be turning 40 in July and we had already waited longer than we felt comfortable with. There were blood tests, period tracking, ovulation tracking, having to wait another cycle to get this test or that test, coordinating with the sperm bank and our doctor. And of course we needed to have the money to allow us to try. After all of that, when we were just on the brink, Covid brought our plans to an immediate halt. Every month that went by had us feeling farther away from our dreams of becoming parents.

Meanwhile, the restaurant where I was a chef had all but shut down, and the entire season of weddings Jamie was scheduled to photograph were canceling one by one. So we stayed home, which we were lucky enough to do, diving hard into nesting as two Cancers are already prone to do. By summer Jamie and I had fallen into a sweet rhythm, making breakfast together in the mornings and spending our days coworking in our tiny cottage in North Portland. The dog and cat grew so used to having us home that they showed genuine disappointment when we would leave to grab groceries. On warm afternoons we worked in the garden, dirt-stained and sore from all the bending over, then made elaborate meals with our harvests. Jamie tackled the art of fresh pasta, and I perfected my homemade pizza dough.

photo by Jamie Thrower

Quietly accompanying us throughout all of that was the dull, persistent pain of missing the baby we wanted so badly. Jamie and I are both born parents. We are the aunties who spoil our niblings as much as possible, the two moms who threw our dog Isaac a Bark Mitzvah on his 13th birthday. Over the years we’ve looked on longingly as our friends grew their families, hoping our time would come soon. I’ve watched as my wife — the baby whisperer — has calmed those crying babies, and envisioned her calming and comforting our own child, knowing how safe they’d feel in her arms.

As my 40th birthday approached, our longing shifted to determination. Who knows how long this pandemic will last, we thought. We can’t put our life and dreams on hold forever. We thought about how many babies had been made accidentally this year by people who didn’t have to rely on science, didn’t have to buy sperm from the internet. We were reminded of the resiliency of birthing people and babies — how babies had forever been made during the most stressful and scariest of times, during war and famine and pandemics too. So we decided to try.

Queer baby making is as much magic as it is math and science. The math is everywhere, since everything has to be so planned out. The magic you have to remember to sprinkle in throughout the process. The evening we went in for our IUI, our box of frozen sperm sat waiting in the car for us to take to the doctor, while inside, we lit several candles on an altar my wife had put together. We closed our eyes and held hands and I sang the shehecheyanu, the blessing we say to give thanks before doing something new for the very first time.

We fell in love with our baby the minute we knew she was growing inside of me. We aren’t the type of people who can stay unattached to anything for too long. In Judaism there are superstitions surrounding unborn babies — we don’t buy things for them ahead of time, we don’t even say the usual mazal tov when someone is pregnant, we say b’shaha tova, “in a good hour,” until the baby is alive and well in the world. Because I had subscribed to these superstitions for so long, I thought I would be more quiet about our pregnancy. But I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, we were so ecstatic. We shared the news early with our loved ones because we needed their joy as much as they needed ours. We daydreamed about taking our baby to the coast and all the other beautiful places that are so important to us. We had names picked out, and in the evenings we scoured the internet for nursery furniture. Our world became centered around “when the baby’s here,” because we’re Jamie and Risa and that’s just how we are. We were already deeply in love with our newest family member. We called her Birdie.

photo by Jamie Thrower

And now, everything is broken. Three weeks ago we found out that our baby, who would have been 17 weeks gestation, had quietly died inside of me — and I had no idea.

The thing about miscarriage is that the word itself does no justice to the great tragedy that it is. It is often told in such a clean and tidy story that there is not even a mention of blood. But I am here to tell you that there is nothing clean and tidy about miscarriage. Miscarriage is more blood than you can ever imagine, for so long that I wondered many times if I was dying. It is laboring and having contractions for hours knowing that at the end we would not be walking away with our baby. It’s my wife staring at me in the ER, taking in every gory scene with palpable fear in her eyes that she might lose me too. At midnight on November 26, as we were fumbling to grab our things and get to the ER, I saw a glimpse of Jamie through the open bathroom door as I breathed through a contraction which ended with something bigger passing through me. I had just birthed our dead baby while squatting on our toilet, surrounded by blood and fear.

photo by Jamie Thrower

I knew that miscarriage was common, but I had no idea that 1 in 4 pregnancies ended in one. That made me feel slightly less alone, until I learned how incredibly uncommon it is to miscarry in the second trimester like we did. Only about 2% of miscarriages happen that far along, which made me feel even more alone. I didn’t know how consuming the grief would be, or that for weeks after I would have such strong phantom pains in my vagina from all the bleeding and passing of tissues that I would be scared to use the bathroom. Miscarriage is an invisible reminder of all the dreams that will never come to fruition, and sometimes simply breathing under the weight of it is the most I can manage.

In a brief moment of respite throughout that long night in the ER, Jamie was able to leave the hospital quickly to cover the blood-stained seat in our Subaru, and clean the bathroom in our home. She wiped the blood from the toilet and floor, and threw away the stained bath mat and towels, the physical reminders of what had taken place there. In the dark, early hours of the morning, while I lay in the hospital stable and preparing for surgery, she gently wrapped our baby Birdie in her hands and held her to her heart. This part breaks me most of all. The grace my wife showed me by sparing me having to come home to that scene. And the tender love she gave to our daughter, from both of us, showing her how deeply missed she already was, saying hello and goodbye to her at the same time.

Judaism is not a religion that shies away from darkness. The stories of our most horrifying and challenging times are retold over and over again, year after year. We are constantly reminded of all that we’ve overcome, of our resiliency. Maybe that’s part of why I feel so pulled to tell my story: the generational prayer that with every telling I will feel a renewed layer of strength or hope or trust — or any number of the things I lost in the aftermath of losing Birdie. That we will forever be reminded of how brave we were just to make it through these days.

There are very few things I know anymore, but I do know this: Birdie will always be a part of our Hanukkah story. We will think of her with each candle we light on our Hanukkiah, not just this year but for always, and we will hold her in our hearts as the flames grow brighter each night. I know that I will sing the prayers and be comforted by the familiar cadences and words, and that I will close my eyes, letting them wash over me, cleansing me in the way that I so desperately need. I know that I will dive into cooking and will make huge batches of latkes that will stain the house with the smell of fried potatoes. I know that I will make little packages of Hanukkah treats to deliver to my friends who we miss so much during this holiday, because caring for my community brings me such joy (and it’s not Hanukkah without latkes and the applesauce versus sour cream debate). My wife and I are even giving presents for the first time this year, because we want to spoil the shit out of each other in the wake of the hell we are currently surviving. I told Jamie that I’ll be making sufganiyot — the jelly-filled doughnuts so special to Hanukkah — even if it’s just for the two of us. I want to be bathed in all the familiar tastes and sounds and smells. I want it to bring us moments of solace even if they are met with moments of sadness.

Hanukkah is taught to us as the Festival of Lights. It emerges in the darkest, shortest days of the year providing a reprieve with its celebration of miracles. Growing up, we would always turn off all the lights before lighting the Hanukkiah, so we could see the flames more clearly against the dark of winter around us. And now my family is moving through a darkness like none we have ever experienced. As we mourn, so many friends and loved ones have told us that they are holding us in the light. I had never heard this expression before, but I feel it so viscerally now. I feel the warmth and the ease that it brings about. I feel it as we lean in harder to Hanukkah this year, not because Hanukkah is the most important or holy of Jewish holidays, but because we need every ounce of comfort we can find. Every parcel of light we can manage to hold alongside this deep darkness. Not that it will cure any of the pain, because nothing can do that. But because it will bring some temporary comfort so we can somehow, eventually, make our way through.

photo by Jamie Thrower