Hello dear ones,
I missed writing to y’all last week — but I’ve been finding it hard to write recently. Which is the saddest thing for a writer. The stress of moving at the end of the year, and then preparing to leave for LA left me so exhausted. All I could do was binge-watch Grey’s Anatomy (I’m on my second rewatch and have made it now to season 16). As each day goes by, I’m finding myself re-energized by the California sun, and have been spending time outside everyday with a book in hand. It’s been so glorious. And as I immerse myself once again into the world of books, writing has felt a little bit easier. All of this to say, sometimes we need to rest. And in that rest, we prepare ourselves for the next season of creativity to come.
Some reminders/FYIs:
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“It’s so frustrating,” I tell my therapist. “I’m ready. I’ve done so much work. I know what I want. Why can’t I find the person who’s truly ready to meet me where I’m at, no matter how scared they might be?”
This isn’t the first time I’ve asked myself – or my therapist – this question, but it’s been playing on loop in my brain for many months now. In therapy, I’ve been working with my fear that I won’t ever find my human, and the grief of having come so close so many times in the past. I’m familiar with this narrative – it’s one that I’ve felt, in some way, throughout my life: that I’m destined to be alone.
I look to my astrology chart for answers. “My Venus is in Gemini in my 7th house of relationships, conjunct Chiron,” I tell my therapist (grateful that we share the same love of the stars). For those not familiar with astrology, Venus is the planet that rules love, and Chiron is the planet of the wounded healer, destined to heal others’ wounds but never their own. Geminis are known for being fickle and indecisive, and as an astrologer pal of mine once joked, “they’re hella disorganized in their attachment.” (For the record, I love Geminis for so many reasons, and they definitely get the brunt of the hate in the astrology world.)
“So basically I’ll always find myself drawn to people who flip the switch, who go from ‘I want you I want you I want you,’ to fleeing the scene.” I told my therapist. “How do I break this pattern?” “What if we reframed this?” she asked me. “What if it’s not that you’ll never find your person. But each of these past relationships has helped you get closer to those that can meet you where you’re at, who are willing to move through the fear that intimacy brings to the surface?”
I grumble, as I do when she offers me a reframe that speaks to my adult self but irritates the parts of me that depend upon this mythology of the-forever-alone that I’ve created for myself as a survival strategy, a way to feel like I have some control. If I accept my fate, then I won’t be disappointed anymore, the trauma logic goes.
This past summer, I thought I’d come so close to finding my match. This person sought me out, romanced me, and put in way more effort than anyone I’d ever dated before. They’d been in therapy for most of their life, had participated in my intimacy peer support group for folks living with trauma, and had told me again and again that they were really great with boundaries. We shared passions for transformative justice, education, community building; we had so many of the same books on our shelves. When I told my best friends about this new human, they were so stoked for me. It was clear that this was the most compatible human I’d dated in a really long time.
After talking for five weeks, I flew to meet them in their home city in the midwest, and we spent the week going on cute dates, watching reality tv, and having some of the most amazing Trans4Trans Switch4Switch sex ever. There were a few bumpy moments, but that was to be expected when you’re spending a week living with a person you’ve never been in the same room with. At the end of our time together, we chose dates for my next visit, seven weeks later. After we said goodbye, I bought my plane tickets.
Less than a week later, they broke up with me via email, citing irreconcilable differences that, to me, weren’t all that irreconcilable. No dialogue. No questions asked. They said they hoped we could be friends one day – and signed off with “best.”
I’d spend the next three months holding my bruised heart, trying to understand what had happened. How did we go from “I want you I want you I want you” to “this isn’t going to work”? The best I can do is speculate. At the end of the day, I may never know. They weren’t interested in doing any repair – and we haven’t spoken since.
Four months after their email, I found myself, for the first time, lurking their IG. The night before, I had a dream that we had reconnected after running into each other in LA, where we’ll both be staying this winter. Before I knew it, we were back in romance land but we hadn’t talked about what happened between us, the harm I experienced from how they ended things. As I was sharing this dream with my therapist, I realized I was experiencing grief.
“Yes,” she responded, when I told her my revelation. “I get the sense that you’re not just grieving that relationship. You’re grieving the not yet here.”
I heard her words and immediately thought of the late José Estaban Muñoz’s proclamation. “Queerness is not yet here.” In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes that
“Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain.”
Of course, we are queer – and, because we live in a world of homophobia, we’re not yet queer because it’s not safe for us to be queer. The not-yet-here is a site of potentiality, imagination, possibility. And it is also a site of grief, longing, and absence. When I think about the not-yet-here in the context of my past relationships, what I see is a yearning for the forms of intimacy that we have yet to experience but believe must be possible. We want vulnerability. We want to be able to talk about our feelings. We want to be seen, heard, and understood. But wanting has a different affect than getting. In our wanting, these relationships are filled with hope. In the getting, we must confront how deeply terrifying it is to get the very things we’ve always longed for – the fear that they’ll be taken away.
Getting what we want brings up a different kind of grief. We must grieve that it’s taken this long for us to experience the love and connection we’ve always deserved. We must grieve that we did not receive this from our caregivers. We must grieve all of the times our hearts were broken, all of the times we broke hearts, because trauma took over, because we got scared, because we didn’t have the skills we needed to foster supportive and secure attachment. Intimacy and grief. We can’t have one without the other.
I feel the specter of the not-yet-here each time I enter into a new romantic connection. Could this be it? I wonder, my heart filled with excitement, while the possibility of this not being it lurks in the background. I’m so familiar with grief: the grief of loved ones lost; the grief of growing up in an abusive home; the grief of poverty. But the grief of the not-yet-here is one that I’m still learning to sit with. I feel this grief on a personal and on a collective level.
Every day, I watch my Instagram stories and see another human I know, out at a bar, a concert, a nail salon, unmasked and unconcerned. We’re three years into a global pandemic, and people are lessening their precautions, believing that the vaccines and boosters will protect them – and not thinking about our collective obligation to protect one another, especially those at the greatest risk from dying from COVID-19.
The start of the pandemic was a terrifying time, and it was also a hopeful one for me. I saw more and more people embracing disability justice, supporting mutual aid and community care, and ensuring that everyone was kept safe. Able-bodied people began to understand why having the ability to work from home was so important; they became aware of the ways in which the government is not going to save us; non-disabled people – particularly those on the left, who’re notorious for saying that they believe in social justice while doing nothing to ensure that disabled folks can access their social justice events – began to take disability justice seriously.
It pains me to see how so many have gone back to “normal.” Their decision to not mask means that I cannot safely enter public spaces. Not just out of fear that I’ll get COVID. I cannot be in these spaces because of the collective gaslighting – it’s just too triggering for me. As I stare at a sea of unmasked humans, my trauma gets triggered. Why don’t they care about me? About all of us? How do they not see that this isn’t safe? my trauma brain asks me. Does this mean that we are safe? Am I just overreacting?
The inability to discern between safety and danger is one of the hallmark symptoms of disorganized attachment and complex trauma. When we’re growing up, we turn to our caregivers when our nervous system gets activated. Unfortunately, many of us grew up with caregivers who were unsafe – who were, in fact, the very danger we needed protection from. This creates confusion within our nervous system and causes disorganized attachment. We simultaneously want to move towards and away from those who’re supposed to love us.
I feel something similar happening for me throughout this pandemic. I want to see my friends. I’m a single human who lives alone, an extrovert, and someone who loves being in community. But I cannot see those I love unless everyone can follow my COVID protocols: we can hang out unmasked and indoors only if you haven’t been in public spaces unmasked for the past three days, and so long as everyone in your bubble has done the same. Otherwise, we can hang out wearing masks. Which, truly, no one loves. Often, those in my life cannot meet those protocols, and so we hang out masked. And while I’m grateful for the contact, I too would like to experience some semblance of normalcy.
I am grieving the not-year-here of a disabled future, a world in which disabled people will thrive because we will be cared for as much as our able-bodied friends. Like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, I too believe that in the future, the majority will be disabled. In The Future is Disabled, Piepzna-Samarasinha explains: “The climate crisis, pandemics, and the ongoing ecocide of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism are already creating the conditions for more people to get sick and disabled from viruses, heat waves, and wildfire smoke.”
We now know that COVID is impacting our T-cells, the cells in our body that recognize illness and remember how to fight it. More and more people are becoming autoimmune. Not to mention the fact that this pandemic has been traumatic. Loss of control, loss of life, loss of access to intimacy and connection – these are traumas, and without treatment, traumatic events become complex post traumatic stress. We are all living through a “global disablement” to borrow Piepzna-Samarasinha’s words.
Like the word disabled, I don’t want the grief of not-yet-here to be something we’re afraid of. We grieve because we love, and hope, and dream. What if acknowledging our grief enabled us to “feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” to return to Muñoz’s words. I don’t want to give up hope that I’ll find my person(s). I cannot give up hope that we’ll one day care about the disabled community. Without hope, I’d collapse. And so, I must learn how to grieve the not-yet-here, knowing that that grief propels me towards the relationships and world that I know are possible. Let us keep grieving and dreaming until we get there.
It’s been so nice to re-immerse myself in the world of books once again. Here’s what I’ve been reading in January and some of the thoughts these words have sparked.
An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World by Patrisse Cullors. I read this for my monthly book club and was BLOWN AWAY. I love a book that can translate theory into practice. In each chapter, Cullors, one of the founds of Black Lives Matter, outlines one of the 12 steps she proposes, from having courageous conversations, feeling your feelings, and responding rather than reacting to practicing accountability, actively (rather than passively) forgiving, and fighting the state. Here’s one of my fav quotes: “Deeply personal choices can create a pattern of abolition … We can’t get where we need to go if we aren’t willing to be vulnerable, make mistakes, to recognize inside of ourselves the capacity to misstep, to act in anger and reaction, to lose touch with our good intentions. And then—and this is the important part— to turn and face those missteps with humility and curiosity, allowing those difficult moments to become the skeletal structure for our integrity and dignity, our political clarity.”
Pretty Baby: a memoir by Chris Belcher. This has to be one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a while. Belcher grew up queer in small-town Appalachia before escaping to grad school in Los Angeles, where she paid her way through her PhD as a professional dominatrix. This is a risky book to write as someone in the world of academia (as a fellow queer weirdo academic who writes about my sex life, I relate). But Belcher refuses to let shame silence her: “Shame moves us simultaneously in two directions: revulsion and empathy. I am nothing like that. Look at me, there I am. Look at me, there I am.” Through her work as a pro-domme, Belcher is able to hold space for revulsion and empathy to live side-by-side without shame. I also appreciated Belcher’s decision to represent the ways in which queers can and do wound each other without judgment. Will be recommending this book to everyone and anyone for quite some time.
Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning by Carrie Jenkins. Full disclosure: I haven’t finished reading this book yet — but I’ve been enjoying it enough to recommend here. Jenkins thesis is that the myth of happy ever after is one that we must let go of. In its place, Jenkins proposes sad love or what they’ll call eudaimonic love: “the eudaimonic conception of love ditches the focus on pleasure (or ‘happiness’) and orients instead towards meaningful, creative co-operation and collaboration.” For Jenkins, being sad doesn’t have to pose a threat to love. With eudaimonic love, we have space to feel all of the emotions — positive or negative — and this is what enables us to move towards flourishing. I’ve found a lot of resonance between Jenkins’ book and my essay “Queer Romance,” which you can find in my zine Chaotic Love: and Other Essays on Intimacy.
Gathering with folks in my book club yesterday was so nourishing and filled me with so much hope. Knowing that there are other folks out there who want to heal themselves and the world they live in inspires me to continue to do this work.
Are there people in your life that you can start a book club with? Or, if you want, you can come and join the softcore trauma book club! We meet once a month, on the last Sunday from 1-3pm MST, to discuss a book at the intersections of healing and social justice. You can join by becoming a patreon at $5/month. Here’s our book list! Feel free to copy it if you make your own!
february 26th: love after the end: an anthology of two-spirit and indigiqueer speculative fiction, joshua whitehead (editor)
march 26th: healing justice lineages: dreaming at the crossroads of liberation, collective care, and safety, cara page and erica woodland
april 30: group decides
may 28: the future is disabled: prophecies, love notes, mourning songs, leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha
june 25: rust belt femme, raechel anne jolie
july 30: pet, akwaeke emezi
august 27: falling back in love with being human, kai cheng thom
september 24: group decides
october 29: fables and spells, adrienne maree brown
november 26: TBD
Jas is a healer and one of eight people who received an invitation for an exclusive, collective learning, 2-year Healers training program. This training would transform how Jas practices as a healer. They cannot afford the program cost, and are raising funds.
Relatable, beautiful and heartbreaking.