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.

Gender and Me: A (Kind of Sad) Love Story

Let’s start with Amy. She has approved this message and knows every detail of this conversation with myself. I know I’m not winning any wife of the year awards here. Suffice it to say, she has her own charms. I’m pretty sure this story doesn’t end in divorce. I’m so very grateful to her for giving me the space to work this whole thing through.

One of my resolutions this month is “Be less lonely,” which is so bewildering that it might as well be a Zen question, but I know I have to take apart the things that have caused me to isolate myself. Mindy Nettifee says “There are some things you can’t write yourself out of,” but I don’t know any other way. I feel like I’ve written parts of this story a million times. Readers of my good ol’ friends-locked LJ posts, feel free to sing along, you know some of the words.

The story starts, as they all do, with a cute guy. Moseph came into my life exactly when I needed him. I was drowning in self-hate (blah blah, homophobic workplace, blah blah, white-lady issues, etc.) and here was this rockabilly angel who worked at the bookstore, (I probably shouldn’t call people angels.) FTM guy one minute, butch girl the next, letting everyone choose their own pronouns for him. He put his number in my phone and we started texting all the time about how we get crushes—a recipe for trouble if there ever was one. I used to fantasize about him walking me home from work- a modest wish that didn’t come true.

Something in the way he looked at me made me feel recognized, beautiful, like being wanted by a man might not be so impossible after all. Like I could be myself.

The last time we spent time together,last July, his band was playing at my apartment. As a surprise, he’d added Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi to the band’s repertoire. He wore a wig decorated with cupcakes, a shiny leotard, and gold Spanx. Singing along to that song was a serotonin factory in and of itself and after that I was absolutely devastated with desire for him. Somehow, we never hung out after that. Probably because depression made me really, really not awesome at being a new friend.

Moseph’s cross-cross dressing was a dream within a dream, the Inception of crushes, sending all of my rigid structures about gender crumbling into the sea. As I’m writing this, I realizing that “bisexual” is not quite accurate for me, that maybe polyamorous can be an identity as well as a logistical decision. It takes me a while to figure things out sometimes.

I have him to thank for awakening my particular attraction to trans guys, which takes me a good distance toward being comfortable in my own skin. (On a good day it seems like that. On a bad day it seems like just more guy friends to scare off with over-flirting.

He also made me realize that I like gender.

Marriage can have an isolating effect when it comes to progress, even in the most progressive of households. I feel like I’ve spent my whole adult life avoiding gender. In the Nineties, it was very popular for a bi person to say, “It doesn’t matter what gender someone is, I fall in love with souls.” Looking at that statement now, it seems like a way of neutering myself, of trying to be more acceptable to the straight world. It also reminds me of the way I try to make myself safer to be around by spiritualizing attractions into “Muse” relationships.

So here it is: I like the feeling of being a woman in relation to a man. I like the game of gender, the tropes. (Well, not all of them.) I have an impossible time giving up control but I would really love to meet the guy who could get me there. But safely. Because I am terrified.

Amy asked me why identifying as femme (I mean, duh, right?) isn’t the same as saying “I feel straight right now.” And that made me realize that at no point do I ever feel straight. My whole self is always there.

Underneath it all is the fear that there is something about me that makes me undesirable, unlovable to men. If there’s no man in the world for me, I can’t change that, but I’d like to find a way to be kinder to myself about it. I don’t want it to be a joke anymore. I want to find a way to honor the part of me, to LOVE the things about myself I’ve been fighting and hating for so long, to admit that, yes, I want him to see me, and know me, and love me. That’s all.

Dr. Qiyamah Rahman: The Ties That Bind Us

I couldn't find video of her speaking at USG, but this is the sermon that had me sniffling through the rest of the service. Toward the "Be Less Lonely" resolution...

And here's one of my favorite Radiolab Episodes, with the same whale story: Animal Blessings.