Mid-Year Heart Updates

1. Holy cow! The other day, my ACTUAL book came in the mail. I got overflowing with joy and brought punch and cookies and Caramel Creams and Hershey’s Hugs over to the library and had a celebration with the afterschool kids. We played a very sugared-up game of Apples to Apples. A cute grown-up friend of mine showed up to help pour the punch and sat there reading the book almost the whole time—I got to watch him laugh at the funny parts. It was truly one of the happiest days of my life, and I’m so glad that I got to share it with my beloved students.

The editing process was a joy and a breeze. I’m seriously lucky to have found a perfect match in my editor and pal Bryan Borland. I look forward to doing a book launch party or two, and a tour date here and there—it looks like there may be time after all.

2. This Friday is my last day the library. I am so very sad that it is over. When I arrived there, I was broken from my AmeriCorps service, unsure if I was fit to work with children, and the library gave me a chance to start fresh in such a nice, easygoing way. I am so proud and excited about the relationships I’ve built at the library in the past two years, both with the kids and with the library staff. The amount of art and poetry we’ve created is staggering. I could not be prouder of the way this job turned out—I will miss it very much.

3. Yesterday I was notified that this fall, my student teaching will take place at Wister Elementary, my school of choice, right down the street. It’s been my dream to work in one of my neighborhood’s public schools, and this is one step closer to that dream. I’ve been doing classroom observations at Wister since last summer, and it is, for the most part, a warm and welcoming place with kids who really need me. It’s covered with beautiful murals on the outside—I’ll be glad to see those every morning.

4. I’ve finally found a good therapist. She is on maternity leave at the moment and the interim girl is doing okay, but Dr. Alicia is kind of a miracle. She trusts me to get where I’m going—I’m sure she has an agenda for me, but her guidance is minimal and it is WORKING. As a result, I’ve made a whole bunch of progress, unloading a lot of misconceptions and thought-structures that have been holding me down over the years.

 The other day at the Trans Health Conference, one of the speakers was talking about activist work as tilling the soil—it might be difficult, it might bring up unpleasant things, but tilling is necessary if you want to plant anything. I feel like that’s what therapy is for me. I’ve still got a lot of hard-packed soil that needs tilling. Sometimes it’s frustrating and really dark, but I think if I just let the momentum I’ve created carry me forward, I’ll get to that liking-myself dream that seems so important, especially for an almost-teacher.

5. I’ve become a prolific writer of smut in the last six months. My pseudonymous blog has given me a chance to really push my writerly/bodily boundaries, and I’m so proud of that. I’m proud of how absolutely FILTHY I can be. Finding a language for sex has been part of finding out what I really want, and how to say what I really want. Now if I could only find one more person to give it to me.

6. Siiiiigh, love. As I write this, I’m in a place of deep ambivalence about relationships, even my relationship with Amy. When I wrote my year-end heart update last year, I was in a pretty good place about Amy, guys, and polyamory, but it has been a rough six months. I sent myself on a year of body adventures, and some of the experiences have been incredible (I’m talking to you, fire massage…) but they’ve also been fraught with triggers and sadness and betrayal. Lately, I am having a really hard time believing that there is a guy out in the world for me—I worry that the universe forgot to make me one. Looking back at last December’s heart updates is painful, because I felt so close to having what I wanted, and then all of a sudden, it/he was gone.

My friends, I sometimes feel like a crazy person, because I am still in love with one of the guys from last December. After six months! He was mean and scary in some ways, but in other ways he was exactly what I’d been fantasizing about all those guyless years. He pushed me past so much, he was an unstoppable force, he was one of the top three kissers I’ve known, and the chemistry between us was as irresistible as a crash. Between us, we exchanged about 250 songs.  I do my best to move on, so much has happened since then, he’s been gone for so long, but other guys just end up feeling like a ghost of him.

I know I’m just lonely, and it won’t last forever. I’m going to do my best to keep on with my adventures and hope that the invisible ribbons that tie me to him will someday soon untie and blow away.