Decrying Gravity

It has been a long year. It wasn't quite one year, although it was close enough, that I showed her some essential part of me and she responded. When I saw fear and hope mixed in tears she'd not let flow for a lifetime. When I crumbled next to her, so close she almost touched but did not and promptly left like all do. It has been a year and a week since I first wrote her [wrote you]. And, if I'm being honest, she's all I've been writing to since.

There is little point in declaring a single moment an anniversary or, perhaps, a beginning. There are so many single points. But it's the constellation that really matters. My constellation, of the past year, has been a cocoon. Woven of three threads, I've been growing. And in a month's time [or so] I'll inch out and my life will begin anew.

Of the three threads, two have grown firm: I've more or less “completed” the more salient parts of my transition to female, and I've been accepted into graduate school for the career I've always been best suited for. The third will be more or less resolved within the next month, and while it is in no way assured and I am not optimistic, I nevertheless feel hopeful. And if it, too, grows strong, I feel I will have transformed on a fundamental level into someone alive. The butterfly spreads her wings..

I have learned, too. Lessons I already knew, lessons I will never know and will relearn and learn again.

Love heals but does not cure.

Forever and tomorrow are not real; they are intangible. All we know and feel is now. Waiting is a form of death, and I have been dead too long.

Trauma happens. Some sans cause, some sans solution. We can grow. The wounds will never close. But we can grow out, over, around, and through them.

All will end, if we do not first. Love, joys, sufferings, nows. All will end. They exist, no doubt, as we do. But they will end. And, knowing this, we must not waste them.

Words are clumsy, stumbling over what is in the dark. They may say what we want, but their meanings are not our own when we give them away. Often, they are still worth giving. But sometimes, when what they become is so disparate, we give more than we get back. And we pay the difference.

It all strikes as cliché, and it is. Axioms that are not true insomuch as they feel like the time and place of my now. I may look back upon this, in another quarter century, and know [or glimpse] a self I am no longer.

The resonance:

“Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.”

“They know my name because I told it to them/
But they don't know where and they don't know when.”

“'Farewell' is the song that Time sings.”

“I love you so much I want to die.”

“And I'm trying.
I'm trying.”

You crying.

You not letting go.

“Can I see you?”

The way you held onto me the first moment, like breath to the drowned.

“I want to tear you apart and put you back together with me inside of you.”

“That's hi-larious.”

The cold wind and looking at you in front of me so far away.

Your eyes, moment by moment, swallowing me whole.

The ripples of your back running through me.

Stop signs in January blizzards.

“You're not even saying anything very funny, but I'm still laughing.”

“i cant love anymore, it's not right
please say something to me”

silence

help, please, and silence

I decided to live, at some point. There was a definitive choice that I remember, after I frantically scrambled through the clinic searching for a way to overdose on pills locked too far from my reach. But bridges and balloons beckoned, still, and I decided to live. And I think I will be alive. If I survive long enough to find a “you” who stays, to complete the last thread.

But even if they stay, they'll leave too. Or I'll leave them. It ends, it all ends. And they'll cry for help and no matter the ink used or the ways your lips move, we'll get silence in return. It all ends.

And I will still fail and disappoint and hate and hurt. And if “life” is feeling, then life is sorrow as much as it's joy.

But almost a year ago today, I cried for hours, aching for what I'd lost. It hurt because I'd loved it, because I cared for it, because it was gone. And I may never find it again. And even if I find it, I will never keep it. And even after I've found it, I will still lose and hurt and fail and feel.

The hurt is the price I pay for being alive. And in your arms and eyes, though arms let go and eyes close, it's still a cost worth paying.

I don't know why I don't want to go back on antidepressants. My therapist has made some pretty convincing arguments for them. And even if she's not 100% accurate, they're still steps towards possible improvement of some sort.

She took down the DSM IV last week and showed me the entry for depression. I'd read it before, of course, but looking at it this time I counted 7/9 criteria that fit me. It's literally textbook. Everything feels heavy, I'm worried and stressed all the time, my concentration/focus is suffering (I've written dozens of half-written blog entires because I can't finish any of them), nothing gives me pleasure, I'm varying degrees of suicidal, and I have been for months, if not since Governor's School last year. I am depressed, and it's clear it's beyond my control. So why don't I want medication?

Two weeks ago, I decided to stop taunting myself and take some definitive steps towards suicide. I mean, what's the point in always thinking about it and never doing it? And it was Fate laughing when I walked into Party City and the very first thing in front of the door was a stack of helium cannisters just like the ones I'd researched online. I bought one. Just $38 [the ones online were $50].

It's interesting, because Exit International argues that their tools will decrease suicides since they give individuals a feeling of control. And it's honestly worked. I've rarely thought of suicide since. I'm not as tormented or afraid. I'm just... heavy.

The heaviness is strange, too. It's not so much all movement; I spend most of my day pacing and thinking, after all. But when I'm lying down, it's like my limbs and body weigh so much more. It takes so much more to lift, an act of violence to get up, a dizzying array of half-woken retreats into exhaustion to gradually rise out of bed on days when I don't have another reason to get up. It's all just so heavy.

I could go on with symptoms. And, truly, it's not an easy period. I go over and over and over the scenarios that might play out with S when/if she comes back later this summer. The roulette poem does a surprisingly good job of illustrating the more realistic ones. But even then, I think it'll be better than this constant subliminal terror.

Because, truly, I've been gutted these past seven months. I've lost much of my empathy, my patience, my compassion. I don't care as much, don't feel as much, am so wrapped up inside myself consumed by her and the energy it takes to survive the weight [so to speak]. I have poured myself into this survival, and it's a feat that will quite likely not be reciprocated. It seems clear she's been broken. That in the significantly increased stress she faced, she found us severed. And while that is not an irreparable rift, she likely doesn't have the energy or will to try to repair it. I am waiting for a corpse. And even I cannot breathe life back into something that refuses, that needs to not live.

I am so hungry for intimacy. I want to try my body out, I want to enjoy physicality, I want to finally let someone inside me and let them see and touch and feel all of the knotted anguish I've kept ensconced for years. And I can cry and hurt and ache and let their touch and eyes show me that, truly, I am not the monster I have led myself to believe.

But, right now, she's only one who could come in. The only one who knows the way, has the key, could manage, endure, or desire it. And the fact that she is dead makes tragic an already desolate narrative. I am finally ready to open myself. But all I'd really be opening myself to is more vacant suffering. I guess I'd call that ironic.

Maybe that's why I don't want to go on medication. Because I feel, finally, so close to healing. I feel so close to breaking out of this dusky malaise and finally living in the brilliance I know life must be capable of. What's another month and a half to see if I'm wrong? The darkness will still be there to “fix” and “balance” when she's gone.

"When people stop being people, violence stops being tragic and starts to become the best means to any end."

That's it. That's the problem. That's my problem. For the duration of my life, I have not considered myself human.

It's why I can't talk about my needs.

It's why I live through others.

It's why I endure so much and never genuinely consider stopping because I can handle it, I can handle anything. I don't have weakness or need. My fallibility is entirely remediable and only exists because I am not good enough.

It's why I want people to use me, to hurt me, to disregard me.

It's why I don't judge myself by the same rules I judge others.

I am not people. And therefore violence done to my person is inconsequential, is acceptable, is necessary.

So it's pretty clear: I need to figure out how to accept myself as human, and all that entails. I guess I'd better get to work.

A response to this:

I'm drawn to so much of this blog because of that premise; that people are people and that, but for the grace of God go I in any given case.

But it's also what I use to try and forgive myself. When I look at people and systems and say "this is larger than one person," when people do terrible things and we can find a way to not utterly damn them, not reject them entirely, not leave them, it gives me hope for myself.

It's also an attitude I've had to cultivate. That request by Osama resonated with me, and, unsurprisingly, I went back to my own father. When he told me I couldn't come out to his parents, that I would either need to never see them again (and have them blame me for it), live a dehumanizing lie, or face the wrath of the one person who melts me into incoherent terror, when he says "They're *my* parents and I'm going to do what's best for them" as if I'm not his child, as if I'm not anything but a threat, I see the fixation.

He can't grok the terror he invokes, can't understand how telling a six year old "No, you don't love me" makes the child believe it's their fault they're not trying hard enough. Etcetera. We were not people but burdens, responsibilities, limitations. We were threats. And that is all the justification a person needs.

I am terrified of "going cold." That coldness is what allows that destruction, what allows people to stop seeing humanity and instead see enemies, see threats, see things to be feared, tossed aside, destroyed. I see in Osama's request that same coldness that is in the celebration of his death.

When people stop being people, violence stops being tragic and starts to become the best means to any end. Even when it starts so small. "Dangerous" only begins to describe it.

It is fairly obvious than I am not a healthy individual. I am jealous, insecure, self-loathing, depressed, suicidal, apathetic, distant, [I want to say pudgy], incompetent, and acerbic. That I recognize these things does not necessarily make them easier to cope with. I can recognize, for instance, that I feel immensely hurt when you pay attention to others before me because I 1) am insecure and fear you don't truly want to pay attention to me and 2) irrationally believe that you could do things differently despite no evidence to the contrary. It is so vital to you that I trust you, and yet I often find myself asking "What if it is all a lie?"

But it still hurts to see you in pictures with your arms around others, with them writing you messages of adoration, with so.many.people.loving you. I *know* I need to believe *you* first in lieu of my own demons, but it's really not about you. It's me.

It's me seeing rolls of fat on my stomach because I've gained 5 lbs.
It's me tearing down every picture of myself because I can't stand to see my face [or have it be seen].
It's me fantasizing about digging my nails into my face until blood runs down it in thin rivers.
It's being incompetent at even simple tasks.
It's not caring enough to get better.
It's feeling dead until I feel someone else's hurt, and I can feel alive again.

It's so much more, of course. And even now, it's better than it has been before. But my need for you is desperation. You make me feel real. You draw out more smiles, more laughter, more tears, more desire, more pain, more pleasure, more joy, more sorrow than anyone ever has. That I have been thrown into such melancholic thrashing is insomuch as your absence killing me. Or returning me to the dead.

I relive you like trauma. Again and again, I see your famished and fearful eyes devouring me, lips trembling before mine, inch by inch closer, as you melted and your boiling remains washed over me. And as our scabs were torn open, our pain flowed anew and in it we were inseparable in a joy so foreign as to be miraculous.

But we do separate. Again and again, I look down again and kiss you, one last time, in the dark rain. And you leave.

I started dying, then. I inhaled your eyes, your lips, but a small part of your unknowable intensity and doing so I breathed in life. But now, my tanks are low. These petty jealousies and fickle thoughts are gasps for air, searching for you amidst the vacuum your lips last left.

I'm dying. And as I claw and atrophy, I want to stop this infinite decline and trade one asphyxiation for another. I want to die, not dying. I want to breathe so deep that I will gasp no more.

I don't, of course. For though dying, I will not die. The undead need not air; they feast upon those who are alive. Never tasting with their own tongues, never feeling with their own skin, never loving with their own hearts. They feed and stumble along, recalling life in memories and fantasies.


I have held my breath for so long, surviving on the lives others. And in these moments, when I gasp again, I wonder if it will be the last. If I will have lungs to fill, if you're ever back to fill them.

{I made this comment on a board I frequent. Reposted so I'll remember it.}

[TW: abuse, violence, sexual assault]

Something seems hollow and inauthentic about my experiences as a male. I guess because I never really believed or embraced the gender; I was just pushed into it and barely went along to avoid the consequences of nonconformance. I hated being male and generally disliked other males for reasons far beyond the various manifestations of gendered violence. So when I speak poorly of the experience, there's a hefty grain of salt that needs to go along with it. But, nevertheless:

I hated being male so much. You can't be pretty or desired. You can't break down. You can't be emotional, unless you're angry. You hide all your pain, you joke all the time, and you present or you get swallowed.

Men are disgustingly violent towards women. But they're also profoundly violent against each other. I had "friends" my entire life hit me, constrain me, pinch me, jab me, pin me, take such pleasure in my pain. Whether it's inane competitions in video games, whether it's physically dominating me, whether it's "anything you can do, I can do better." Because they're always proving themselves. They're always clawing, always jockeying.

And when they're embarrassed, when they're defeated, when they're laughed out, when they're humiliated it's stored. And just like my father and so many others do, they let it out upon those who can't or won't fight back [so so often women]. They dominate you, show they're in control, let out every negativity upon you until it's clear that at least they're better than shit like you.

Such violence is gendered, but I know women and girls act it out, too. I was always surprised at the stark contrast between my slumber parties and my sister's: In hers, her disparate friend groups would divide into camps, literally demarcating sections of the house. Some who were acceptable to other camps could cross lines, could flit around, but the politicking was as passive-aggressive as it was still violent. In my slumber parties, guys just hit each other and let out all their aggressions in plain view. There were no politics. Just assertions.

All of this is to say that masculinity needs the deconstruction and liberation significant portions of femininity gained via feminism. Because when girls can cry and boys can't, the boys find other ways to express their pain. So much of their violence was the result of other violence; cultural violence saying they needed to prove themselves, modeled violence showing no other way to be, personal violence with every hurt every person inflicts upon another.

Hurt begets hurt, violence begets violence. My father was molested and never spoke about it, perhaps the biggest hurt in a life of them. He hated himself. He found himself in a point in life where everything was misery, where he fervently believed he was unlovable, where there was simply no hope. So he dominated his family, casting a blanket of fear over us with his very presence. My sister was the one whose hurt was so angry, who hit and screamed and clawed at me, my mother. And I internalized and used the violence to hurt myself. But it all trickles down.

That's why feminism, why social justice can't just be about one group. It's all or nothing. One person's hurt becomes everyone's hurt, one way or another. And masculinity is just one place where there's so, so much work left to be done.