Decrying Gravity

So, as of... now, I'm twenty-four.  It's not terribly noteworthy; I've been referring to myself as 24 for two months now, and I have no plans and don't feel bad about it in the slightest.  But I suppose it's as good a point as any for reflection upon where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going.

I took the opportunity to look over some past entries around my birthday over the past 6 or so years that I've kept a blog.  I considered linking to them, but they're honestly rather embarrassing.  My 18th birthday post is so very indicative of the tension I negotiated for most of my newly adult years: irreverent, distracting humor and hints of hurt begging to be seen, felt, and touched.  My 20th birthday post is a direct reference to this tension, with a more mature articulation of the dynamics involved and signs of my increasing wariness with keeping up a veneer that was so very evasive as to be fruitless to all involved.

I say I'm embarrassed because the writing seems distinctly different.  It is not real, not honest, not the relentlessly exposing force I've turned it into.  I struggled with authentically engaging my emotions for years, and I suppose I still do.  But then, even as I felt miserable, I danced around them, hated them, tried desperately to intellectualize them and fight them instead of just acknowledging them as real regardless of what I thought they should be.  I was intensely aware that I was being read, and even as I strove for more authenticity, there were still fears of an audience that may or may not have existed.  There were still fears of admitting to myself the depth and truth of what, exactly, was going on inside of me.

I read the madcap attempts at humor on my 18th, attempts informed by puns and randomness, and I cringe.  It's a type of ridiculous, absurd humor that rather leaves me cold, today.  I read the poem with its stilted rhyme and all-too-blunt messaging, and I cannot help but shake my head.

The entry for the 20th, two years later, already shows more realness.  At that point, I still felt an intense desire to create something that would truly express myself, something that would give my life some meaning by the value it had to others.  I am not as brash, I am not as manic, I am not as.. young as my younger self's post makes me seem.  But I also feel old, feel desperate, feel that time is wasting.  At that point, Meredith was an increasingly distant memory and Elise was a raw and fresh pain, a reminder of my continued ineptness in lieu of any kind of validation.  I was still grappling with purpose and personality, identity by any other name.

But in that process, I was also becoming more artistic in my language.  It's rather pleasant to read something your past self wrote that you rather like.  In this case, it's the imagery evoked by humor.  "But humor cuts.  Humor stabs, humor gores, and its targets bleed laughter."  Its targets bleed laughter...  I really do like metaphor.

And I say this to say that I honestly feel I have grown, have matured over the past six years.  I am so thankful that I am who I am today instead of those people then.  I feel as if I have a handle on who I am and who I want to be.  My worries are decidedly terrestrial, at the moment.  And I know that's a phase. [I will relish the time when I will have solved my relationship with my self to a sufficient degree so I can focus more completely on how I relate to others].  But, aside from fits, I do not have existential dilemmas.  I do not feel that I am underachieving; unfulfilled in the challenges presented to me, perhaps, but I am not doomed to a mediocrity beneath my potential, traveling upon my present course.  I do not feel intense desperation over love, for I had one that was valid, and I now have one that may, perhaps, be sound.

I am becoming my own.  "Juliet" sounds so queer to my ear; it hurts the same way it hurt to hear the wonderful things my students described me as at governor's school that wonderful/terrible final night.  As if I don't deserve it.  As if it's not me, no matter how badly I want it to be.   But I am increasingly looking in the mirror and seeing her staring back.  I recorded my voice today, and I liked the way it sounded.  I can run my hand along my face and appreciate the new smoothness after the lazers have done their sci-fi magic.  I can cup my nascent breasts, stand topless, side-to-the-mirror, and see femininity sprouting.  I can fantasize about love and sex and not feel as if I am in an unnatural role with unnatural expectations.  I am not there, by any stretch.  But where I once felt primarily fear with small hope, I now feel so much hope with small fears.

What has changed me?  "Age," in and of itself, is unlikely to be the culprit.  Certainly, cognitive growth may have some minor role.  But in the years since I was 18, I have taken hundreds of hours of college courses.  I have become a feminist and immersed myself in its culture and philosophy.  I have written over half-a-hundred short essays for my peers to read.  I watched "The Wire" and defined my political philosophy.  I've begun to embrace the process of making Love a religion.  I loved and been loved for the larger part of two and a half years.  I've awakened my sexuality and grown into it.  I've come to terms with my gender dysphoria and begun transitioning to a self that expresses me authentically.  I've endured terror and finely-honed anxiety on a daily basis for a school-year and survived.  I've changed a not-insignificant number of lives for the better.  I've made better friends than I ever expected; friends who keep in touch no matter how far they are; friends who have not left when it's convenient.  I've been thoroughly humbled by being poor at something I tried to do.  I've been thoroughly encouraged by being good at something I wanted and enjoyed doing.  I've found someone who mirrors my strengths and insecurities with an uncanniness that defies reason.  I've begrudgingly embraced intuition, appreciating a knowing that operates outside of pure logic.  I've failed.  I've survived failure.  I've come to appreciate many of my strengths, come to acknowledge many of my weaknesses.

So even though I am unemployed, skeptical about my future plans, lacking in backups, at a perilous place in my expression of my identity, even though I am so much uncertainty in a place I never expected to be, I have grown and I am glad for it.  I think of the seventeen year olds I know (and there are an eerie number; it's senior year of high school all over again), and I wonder how much they'll change in the same time frame.  Hell, I think of myself, six years from now.  I will likely have been Juliet as an adult just as long as I was Dylan.  And, outside of that, who knows what will have happened and where I'll be or what I'll be doing.  If I've learned anything, it's definitely that personal prognostication is a fool's errand.  But I've learned that change is possible.  That hope is not illfounded.  That terrible, heart-wrenching things can happen, that depression, anxiety and stress can reign supreme, that failure can manifest its ugly head daily, and that, despite all this, I can survive and come out on the other side a better person for it.

And yes, this is a passing mood.  Just yesterday, I was self-doubting, terrified, bruised and raw.  But, at the moment, I'm thankful.  And I'm glad for the growth.  And I so look forward to a lifetime more.  Happy birthday, indeed.

And so another phase is complete, and the long cocooning begins.  Til now, I've had cause to leave my bed each morning, some exigent reason prompting me to rise in my normal hurried pace to pay for a few minutes ill-gotten sleep with more stress and rush is due.  I've had cause to don the vestments of my genetic predisposition, to cast myself as the unnatural in natural, put the lie to the world's apathetic gaze.  My days have been full, my nights akin to wonder, and although it is not the ideal, it was at least something more than the upcoming oblivion.

For now that my final class is done, my superfluous degree as good as inevitable, I have to turn to the more abstract tasks, the ones sans structure, sans rules, sans anything but a distant deadline that I only wish would speed this way.  When teaching, I learned of the desire for structure; individuals desperately wish to know what to do and how to do it; creativity and self-control are the bane of easy action.  And although I resented this pull then, I can see it now.  I can see it in my inability to rise from bed, in my days of ensuing isolation, in my gross uncertainty that cakes the resolutions of my new triad of narratives.  And what are these three arcs that I am hoping to complete before a year has passed?

1.  Transition.  Go "full time" and pass in public.  Establish a wardrobe that can maintain me through weeks and seasons.  Establish a speaking voice that shall not reveal the incongruity I so seek to hide.  Establish an internal and writing voice that forces out the gravelly reverberations of the male and leaves me authentic in my thoughts and words.  Change my name, socially and legally.  Change my pronouns internally and externally.  Own my femininity.  Be female.  Be it in my mind, in the minds of others.  Assume it from the moment I rise to the moment I sleep, and let no one be the wiser that I am the butt of a cosmic joke.  In short, maintain congruence with the internal self and external expression of that self.  And then take the damn thing out for a spin.

2.  Graduate school.  The GRE has been vanquished, leaving me with the less definite tasks to go.  Establish a list of schools with professors, deadlines, requirements, and everything in between.  Research professors' areas of study and, in so doing, determine my own preferences; then match.  Construct a resume that belies my lack of any employment paying over minimum wage.  Write a personal statement that at least compels admissions to move me to the interview stage.  Solicit letters of recommendation and then thank ever so profusely.  Assemble all the required materials and submit by the beginning of December (or other suitable deadlines).  Wait and worry and hope.  Hopefully get invited to interviews.  Hopefully do as well as I have in the past interviews.  Hopefully get accepted.  Hopefully find assistantships to pay for the damned thing.  Then go for six years!

3.  Love.  Yet again, by what I hope is coincidence and not some proclivity towards the depraved, I find myself in a relationship that defies convention.  I suppose, to an extent, that all of my relationships will take on this quality as a result of my transition, but I think even I'm overachieving on this one.  If it didn't have the trappings of the divine, the sheer illogicality and improbability of it (not to mention the rather tenuous ethicality) would force me to deny whatever sundry desires manifest and resign myself back to isolation.  But if I am taking to heart this rejection of absolute logic, this embrace of the intuitively, narratively felt in complementation to the previously unchallenged primacy of "reason," then I owe it to us both to see this through.  I have never felt so drawn, never felt so implicitly understood, never felt a desire to be so close, to so share in such intensity each aspect of life in a way that is thoroughly and wholeheartedly reciprocated.  If my metric is concrete, such abstractions are the ravings of a rationalizing madperson.  But I am in a different plane, a place of intuition and self-direction, a place that explores and tries instead of fears and stays safe in the petty superficiality of expectation.  Part of me still wants to label this insanity.  But the rest is completely enamored, magnetized and electrified.  She makes me feel scintillatingly alive, a conflagration instead of a candle in the dark.  So, this year, I'll love her, write her, talk to her each night in an ocean of more.  And again I find myself waiting, a year instead of weekly.  But I'll love, in all the ways I can, throughout this year.  Then I'll see where my love and our damned inexplicable dynamic lead.

So, three disparate goals, distinct in their implementations and results but common in their discoveries and elaboration.  On the path to those, there are a variety of intermediate goals:  Learning how to be properly domestic (cooking and cleaning) not because it's feminine but because I need to know how to do it damnit; reading everything I said I'd read when I got the chance; establishing an exercise routine and somehow acquiring a non-flabby stomach; getting through some of the hordes of video games I've purchased during Steam Sales but never played; writing at least one letter a week; etc.  I'll probably develop those as I go along.  August's goals:  Figure out insurance and don't sleep more than 8 hours a night.  I think that's manageable.

That's where I'm at, in all its banality.  I can feel the depression and the guilt looming, and I imagine it'll only get worse as we move towards winter.  But I'm also coming to terms with my hiatus.  And, thanks to goal 3, I really feel... ok.  Like I'll still be important and matter and be loved even if I fail.  And it helps to be loved.  It truly does.

With my sister leaving tomorrow and my class ending in a week and a half, it's increasingly becoming apparent that I have nothing left to hide from: I have to start physically/socially/emotionally transitioning.  Up to this point, I have flirted with it, acting coy by making eyes and playing footsie underneath the table.  But now I have to start getting serious.  I have to make resolutions of presentation, dedicate significant amounts of time to voice work, and, then, I have to start coming out to all the people I don't want to come out to.

I still can't stop crying.  I'd been wanting to for weeks and then, finally, around 3am, I started and I haven't been able to stop.  Stop in the sense that the ache won't go away, the incredible sense of loss and fear and love.  There is so much, so much.  I don't even know where to begin, if I even should, because deconstructing anything now seems almost sacrilegious, but I want to hold on so badly.  I have never felt so loved, so connected, so competent, so engaged, so known, so loving.  I have never.  And what, exactly, led to this whirl of circumstance I don't even know.  How a group of high school students could make me feel so goddamn good after a group the same age made me feel so so terrible is almost mystifying.  And the cruel, cruel irony of having to leave them so so soon, so so so soon after I finally find them hurts so much.

But I tell myself the hurt just means I care, and the care just means I had something worth caring so much.  And whether that is loving one, loving two, loving four, loving twenty, loving half a hundred, loving this pseudo-utopia, I don't know.  I have always wanted to stay at Governor's School, always wanted for it to never end, and yet this year has been so much more than the rest and now, for what seems like the first time in my life, I'm crying crying crying over simply saying good-bye.

They were so beautiful, sitting around me in the dead of night as I transformed into a monstrous thing to test them.  They were so beautiful, tears running down all five faces, as you looked at me and told me, again, how much you cared, again, how much I meant, again, how much it hurt that I couldn't trust.  Saying that I was so afraid of having someone run from me if they knew what was inside, while wondering aloud how they could ever do that since they would only find so much love beneath.  Saying how I gave them so much daily joy.  Saying how I understood better than anyone else ever had.  Saying that they knew I cared, knew I loved, knew I was so full of such love.  Saying I was brave in a way I almost believed.  Exposing how I wasn't, but staying nonetheless.  Saying that I was so, so important.  So, so, so loved.  So loved.  So loved.  They hurt me as they said so so much, the familiar hurt of fear and terror.  And I broke down.  I've lived more than a 1/3 of lifetime more than they have, and they broke me and they stayed with me as I collapsed.

I cried again as the sun rose, when it hit that it was over.  When there was no more denying time its due.  Tears streamed and I couldn't bare to face the end.  And so I fled to our familiar place, and wept at the loss and the love I never wanted to let go.  And they sat beside me.  Sat before me.  Held and would not let go.  You wouldn't let go.  I have always feared that letting go, and you wouldn't let go.  My rainbow paladin, my poet, my strong silent stalwart, my love-as-I-should-love-myself stayed until they had to leave, with tears in their eyes.

And they're gone, gone, gone.  Gone back to prisons, internal and out.  Gone back to the traps they set for themselves.  Gone back to unacceptance, gone back to disapproval, gone back to constant struggle.  And I'm going back, too.  Back to dependence.  Back to transgression.  Back to so much loneliness.  I never been so understood, so touched, so intimate, so connected, so loved, so loving, so so so until now, and they're gone.

You asked me if it was worth the pain, and I said, without a doubt, yes.  I knew there was a price for this love, for all love.  I knew it.  And it's so heavy to pay now.  But I would pay it a hundred times over because of so so so.  You asked me if I'd come for you, and I did, without a doubt.  I knew I would not answer, but I was so glad to go.  You asked me if I would remember you, and I said, with so much doubt, yes.  For forever lasts too long for promises.  But how could I forget this hole you've left behind?  How could I forget my haven, my baptism, my pilgrimage?  How could I forget?

I love you all.  I love you all so so much.  So so so much.  And I only hope, desperately hope, that I can spend my life in loving and being loved as, today, I had no doubt I was.  And I was.  I was.  So so so much.

"This got me thinking more about identifying as a rape victim in public. One of the reasons I told my boss I didn’t mind everybody knowing was because I want everybody to think about rape when they see me. This is what a rape victim looks like. I want them to know that. I am a complex individual full of talents and abilities, and I want them to know that rape victims file papers, speak to judges, wear bad shoes, refill the coffee pot, call the repair people, eat their lunches. I want them to think about how many other victims they’re surrounded with and they don’t know. I want to be the antidote to the only depiction of rape victims most of us are going to get, which is either the secret hidden porno in the middle of a movie, or the horrifying image of a woman’s crying, contorted face on a rape “prevention” poster. Rape victims get up and walk around and look like everybody else. They fucking have to. They are there when you talk about Polanski. They are there when you make rape jokes. They are there when you use rape as a euphemism for “did a good job.” I don’t get to forget that, and I don’t think anybody else has the right to forget it, either." -HJ, @ Fugitivus

Two things:
1.  HJ's really turned me into an anti-rape advocate.  I think she's done it single-handedly.  I've read some other things, on the feminist blogs I frequent, but HJ's both humanizes and explicitly explains what it's like being a rape victim and coping with that to a remarkably vivid degree.  It's still surprising to me, though, that when I think of my counseling interests: domestic abuse, depression, gender identity/LGBT issues, self-esteem, and rape counseling, rape counseling is the only one I don't have immediate personal experience with.  It may be because my father was a rape victim, and I largely consider the miseries of his (and, consequently, my family's) life to be related to that.  But it's also so vividly sexist, so vividly hurtful, so vividly crushing that I can't help but feel compelled.  I'm not certain of many things, but supporting gay rights, destigmatizing mental illness, and bringing down rape culture are things I'll defend to pieces.

2.  I want to do what HJ describes above, but for trans people.  Of course, I think it's only something I could do if I was really comfortable with myself/my body/my presentation and identity, and I don't know if that'll happen.  But if it does, I want to be out and open.  I want to normalize transness, just as many homosexual folk have increasingly normalized gayness.  My counselor, a lesbian, once said someone told her that her very existence would cause others "cognitive dissonance."   The fact that she existed, in other words, was enough to fundamentally challenge the worldview of others.  And I want to do that.  In fact, I want to be a cognitive dissident (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?).  Not in a "SO ANGRY ALL THE TIME TRANSMASH" kinda way, but with an assertiveness about my identity that causes people not only to question the gendered way our society is structured but for people to question their own gender presentations.  That's my kind of activism: actively existing as a political statement.  And I think that's what HJ advocates in the quotation above.