Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Five)

            After the conversation with the pro-Franken family, I needed to get away. On the way to finding a spot on the Capitol lawn, we ran into an art project. We were asked to write our thoughts on a popsicle stick (There was some kind of pun involved there, I forget.) to be glued onto a “believe” poster. I wrote “Fuck Al Franken too.” on mine and the young woman whose poster it was frowned at my contribution before placing it on a pile of also-not-fucking-cheerful-enough rape thoughts.

            Even protest art seemed to have betrayed me. It truly felt like there was nowhere to turn, like I would never be a part of anything ever again. This is a normal thing to feel during a panic attack but this was a NATIONAL panic attack, a GLOBAL one, fueled and pushed (I can only see this in retrospect) by all of my enslaved and exploited ancestors and precursors, by ALL of the women (especially the women of color) and girls and femmes and trans people and non-binary folks, all of the non-white non-men who had fought for freedom against colonialism before me. When I’m screaming, I’m screaming for all of us.

            I can see now there were generations, millennia, of pain and fear coming out of me in racked, animal sobs. I honestly didn’t are who saw. I hoped they saw. I hoped that the people around me could hear me but I ‘knew” in the way that a panicky rape survivor knows that no one could hear me, no one could ever hear me again. No matter how disruptive, how livid, how determined, no one in the world would ever be able to hear me.

            Amy’s policy, whenever scared at a protest, is to find a friendly tree, so we did. We sat on the grass and I tried to breathe. I was still starving so she gave me her sandwich. I wondered what she would have to eat and I nagged her about it for the rest of the day.

            I sat in the grass and scream-cried. I asked her if that women from China had really said “me too” to me and Amy said yes, she had. I shriek/bellowed “WHY?” Like a poorly written movie character. WHY does she have to go through this too? WHY do they hate us so much?

            I felt so dissociated and lost that it seemed like we were done with the protest. (Spoiler alert: We were not.) I wondered if we should start making our way to the Hope Diamond, my favorite post-protest reward. Instead, I kept crying, brokenhearted, feral, bereft.

            At a certain point, though, I realized that my crying might be disrupting the MAGA hat couple, who were engaging in performatively “reasonable” conversations with protester after protester. (I try not to hate those who take the Sarah Silverman, let’s-empathize-with-racists tact, but I kind of do hate them. Talk to somebody better!) When the spite started to re-emerge in my heart, I began to feel something like okay.

            Amy and I decided to go back to the protest for fifteen minutes and then call it mischief managed, but then we saw that the whole demonstration was on the move. It was magnificent to see: Mostly women (cis and trans), mostly people of color, mostly clad in black, fists held high. They were marching together for the Capitol steps.

            As Amy and I joined the march, I had an inkling that this was going to be one of the most powerful things I would ever see. I was not wrong.

Why We Need Fat Liberation

Image Description: "Fat is Life" watercolored in pink, surrounded by orange stars, rainbow swirls, and blue sky.

While I’m well-versed in why other kinds of equality work is needed, I sometimes feel shy about activism on behalf of my fat self. With so much misery around us, with immigrant children in cages, with police being given more and more power to murder, with reproductive justice under constant attack, etc, etc, is this important enough to devote paragraphs to? Even if the topic weren’t ready to haunt me until I type it out, I would still say the answer is yes. Fat-phobia is part of how we got president Trump, both literally and figuratively.

Forty-Five has a lifetime of evil to brag about, but he first crossed my consciousness as a fat-shaming creep at the beginning of  his feud with Rosie O’Donnell.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32EapqqutM This form of othering might seem more innocuous than other Trumpish horrors, but it’s really just part of a methodical, misogynist, white supremacist (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/fat-shaming-heather-heyer-white-supremacy) abuse campaign meant to frighten and cow us into obedience, meant to undermine women’s power and at the same time, democracy itself.

But this isn’t really about the stupid, hateful MAGA-monster, it’s about, as sooooo many things in this blog are, a cute boy. Monday morning found me in tears when a new friend, who is generally not super-careful about his relationship to privilege and on whom I’d been having a big friend crush, said something casually fat-phobic after I had already mentioned it to him a couple of times. I tried woke-splaining but he said he didn’t want to be “schooled.” He said that what’s offensive is subjective, and I said no, respecting others’ bodies is not optional, especially among friends. He asked me to explain and I refused, sick of trying to convince him to treat me like an equal. It was bad enough I was worrying about what I was wearing whenever I knew I’d see him, putting aside my Lindy-West-approved tent dresses for more “flattering” things, now I was crying in front of him too?

He eventually relented and apologized, and has done much better. I know it’s all part of the process of getting to know someone, teaching people how to be kind and thoughtful in ways that might not have occurred to them before, it still hurts. The emotional labor has a cost, and I am supertired of paying it.

Part of the reason I was feeling jagged Monday morning is that among the tsunami of bad political news, there was one thing that might not have registered as bad news to most. One of my most treasured heroes had slid subtlly rightward, and on top of that I had to feel guilty for being mad about it. On the surface, it should be good news: Roxane Gay had weight-loss surgery and she had leveraged that into a piece for ESPN about how she now has hope of reclaiming her pre-sexual-assault status as an athlete.

Being angry at ROXANE GAY for how she chooses to care for her body feels disloyal in the extreme, but that’s where we are. I’m not mad at her for having surgery or for returning to activities that feel better in a more-mobile body. I am angry that she has written a piece that not only implies that athleticism is not available to fat women, but also gives the body-colonizing twin evils of diet culture and rape culture the only narrative they find acceptable for fat women.

1.      Recognize that fat is a pathology, a result of personal trauma, but that it must be fixed for the public good.

2.      Apologize for the mistake of taking up space.

3.      Put your female body through pain and deprivation so that people can approve of you and welcome you back into the straight-sized fold.

As much as I root for my lost hero to prove me wrong, to feel comfortable in her skin, to swim her lighter laps to freedom, the thing about diet/rape culture is that no amount of shrinking will ever be enough. No matter how much we try to conform to their sadistic, abusive demands, we can never please those who would objectify us. Roxane Gay may trade fat for more catcalling (not that fat women don’t get catcalled, we do and we’re supposed to feel grateful) and will be beholden to public for the size of her body. Although, the fact that I’m writing this means that I think she already is. There is really no way for anyone to win here, except that fucking weight-loss narrative.

Funnily enough, I remember having a similar (though far less verbose) reaction when the woman I’ve come to think of was Roxane Gay’s opposite, Roseanne Barr, got similar weight loss surgery. That felt like a loss too. Back then, it was extremely rare to see a fat person unapologetically in the public eye. In my pre-teen eyes, Roseanne was so beautiful, so funny, and so clearly fuck-you-if-you-don’t-approve-of-my-body that she was a comfort to me as I started the process of understanding the demands that the world would put on my young body. I didn’t understand why the woman who’d coined the phrase “domestic goddess” would go through so much trouble to be thinner. I remember reading about her new portion sizes in a magazine, feeling slightly hurt and bemused.

Of course, Roseanne turned out to be an evil MAGA-monster herself, letting down my young self more deeply than a surgery ever could, so maybe the point is moot. But surely my young self got a message of that surgery, that who I was was okay until I could afford to upgrade. I’m sure young feminists (or “bad feminists” as the case may be) are taking the same message from Roxane Gay’s new piece. Who knows what they’ll do with the message, but it surely adds to the toxic soup of self-hating nonsense that women always have to face. In my kid-brain, Roxane was here to help us, but then she left us.

It isn’t fair of me to think of Roxane Gay’s self-improvement as a betrayal. It’s not fair to colonize another woman’s body with my needs and expectations at all. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that I, as one of her fat readers, am part of what she sees as holding her back, more poundage to be lost so that she can be her shiny new hopeful self. She never said that, it’s just part of the patriarchy’s narrative, but it hurts anyway.

Though we have never met, Roxane Gay has been in my head a long time as a protector, as a big sister, a powerful thread in the tapestry of support and love and self-love that I wrap around myself to preserve my sense of worthiness amidst a culture that tells me I am a project at best and worthless at worst. There are many other threads, but this one will be missed.

If my sense of belonging and self-worth can be rocked by other people’s medical choices, I would say it needs some reinforcing. As I diverge from my hero’s bodily journey, I wonder how many ways I can be kinder to my own, how many ways I can reach out to young women and femmes, how much I can do to serve this weird fight we’re all in, the fight to be able to eat what we want, to take up space, and to no longer apologize for existing. No narrative can take me out of that fight, especially when Dietland is a show. https://www.amc.com/shows/dietland/full-episodes/season-01/episode-01/episodes-1-2

Birthday Heart Inventory: Thanks 42!

Surprisingly, 42 was one of my happiest years yet. Last year around this time, I wrote about depression as a weed killer and this year, my garden is thriving, both literally and figuratively. There’s a lot of pain in my heart and so much battle still ahead, but my goal of cultivating a life has been met and exceeded.

Mental Health: Like for a lot of women, particularly trauma survivors, the 2016 election season was wildly triggering. In my case, those triggers got me to an amazing place: Women Organized Against Rape. Not only did my (FREE!) therapist there stem the tide of sobbing and panicking to a manageable level, she has also steered me towards a calmer, warmer, more productive, and loving self—she is truly a brain artist. It’s hard work to focus on the trauma part of life every Monday, and it usually results in at least a day of catharsis hangover, but it’s 100% worth it. This year is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling truly worthy of love, especially my own.

Love: Every day I feel the gorgeous, generous, and powerful love of friends, family, and cats, but I could copy and paste the longing for romantic love that I’ve written nearly every year. Though I’ve finally attained the goal of self-containment to a level that seems magical, I dream about boyfriends nearly every night. I try to take loneliness as a sign of health, my heart telling me that it’s ready to open up again.

            This is a good place to confess that there are a couple of guys I haven’t gotten over. I still wish I could hear from them, even though I know they aren’t the right ones. I keep their nice notes and artwork in the Box of Things to Be Worked Out by Unseen Forces. They don’t read this, I don’t think, but I’ll tell them anyway:

Dear _______ and ________,

Thank you for being in my life, for loving me the best you could, for the snuggles, the music, the kindness. Thank you for your face, your kindness, your humor, your support. I’m sorry for the ways that I hurt you. You’ll always be a sparkly gem in my heart because you changed me for the better. I’ll always a little bit belong to you, and I hope that you remember the best parts.

Love, Jane

(With that, I hope I made a little room for some snuggle-able treasures to come aboard.)

Work: I love my tutoring work so, so much. Getting to work with kids one-on-one, getting to know their families, using my teaching skills organically and flexibly, I CAN’T BELIEVE I made it here from where I was three years ago. Even on my lost-est days, a tutoring session brings me back to myself, frees me to live in love and in the present.

            I have one more semester of grad school (I HATE being back in grad school!) and then my teacher certification will be permanent. I hope to build up to a full-time tutoring business—I LOVE being my own boss, and the joy of going to the bank to deposit cash has not diminished since my waitress years.

            Creative coaching is going beyond-well: Coachees tend to transform into friends who guide my creativity just as much as I cheerlead theirs.

Art: At an organizing meeting last November, I introduced myself as a “street artist” for the first time, and that title really does ring true. I love being able to share my work with the neighborhood, watching how well the paintings I staple to phone poles get curated—some of the pieces have been up for more than a year! It’s a way to give and get love every time I take a walk, and fulfills what I think are the deepest purposes of art: to give, to love, to connect. Sometimes a neighbor even thanks me, and it’s the warmest, most fulfilling, most enriching feeling.

Activism: Remember when we thought it was sometimes not an election year? Transitioning from activism being a once-once-in-a-while pursuit to being a Daily Action feels healthy and sane. I’m so inspired by those who stay engaged and also by the way that we’ve committed to self-care as part of the resistance.

Plus, it’s always a good time to remind myself that this happened:

Grief: Although the Rapist-in-Chief causes the most horror in my heart and worldwide, it’s the misogyny of the 2016 Democratic primary that has caused me the most personal day-to-day grief, including making me wonder if I can ever date a man again. I’m working on a separate post about the ongoing soul-rash that is The Bern, so I won’t spend any more of my birthday typing about him.

Family:  My family of origin seems to have forgiven me for my Thanksgiving-ruining, welcoming me back like a prodigal daughter. My poetry family is mostly not connected to me anymore, largely a casualty of the misogyny-storm of the primaries. My immediate family is my ex-wife/bff and my two cats, and that’s a really, really nice life.

Spirituality: I’m addicted to Insight Timer, going to yoga weekly, and I’m even getting monthly massages. Sometimes I think I might just float up off the earth.

It’s been, in many ways, a year of luxury, of radical self-care, and I hope I can continue that spirit through age 43 and beyond. Thank you for helping make my life so rich, complex, and loving—wishing you all of the healing and happiness.

Bye November, Hope for December

November was a month that included a panic-inducing election, a near-relationship-thing that (predictably, it seems) turned to heartbreak, and an almost-total Thanksgiving fail in my part. I hope I can get unlost in December, I'll do my best.

Songs of the Week: Two for Profile-Updating

It's the part of the getting-over-it wherein I belt out lots of songs and write a more honest OKCupid profile. There's a fair amount of moping, but I feel my inner Minaj taking care of it.

Thoughts After a Romance (Heart Inventory Continued)

When I wrote my birthday heart inventory, I happened to be in the early part of a relationship, the part where one is expected to be reticent, lighthearted, tentative, (none of those my strong suit even a little) as though one were trying to convince a woodland creature to eat from one’s hand. (Some comedian said that, it isn’t mine but it’s apt.)

So I left some things out.

I’m so glad I decided to let him in, to let myself hope. It was wonderful to think that we might actually be going someplace together. He was supposed to stay over on Saturday and then go to church with me on Sunday. I haven’t attended church with a boyfriend since the summer before eleventh grade, when I knelt beside my unbelievably sweet first boyfriend in the front pew of my Aunt Connie’s church. The idea of sharing a faith with a partner, of harboring a spiritual connection, made me so joyful that I thought I might explode. Sunday was the Water Ceremony at my church, where we were supposed to bring water from our summer and join it with everyone else’s water. I’d asked him if he would want to contribute some water from his pool, where we’d shared some perfect moments, and to my great delight, he said yes.

I keep a one-sentence journal, and Saturday’s entry reads: “I think he really likes me—our date is at 3pm and at 10 am, he’s already put the water in his car to remember to bring it for church.” This news was accompanied by a photo of his morning glories, which are purple like most of mine. Maybe he did really like me.

That morning, I felt so open and festive, like the best possible version of myself. It was, he was, a special occasion. I walked over to the co-op to get flowers to put by the door, and of course they were a rainbow. I felt playful, and loving, and generous, and there were definitely special underpants.

And it was a magical afternoon and evening, full of laughter and what I would’ve called closeness. It doesn’t matter what went wrong in the night, but I will say this: Usually I can sift though any bad match and find what I did wrong, but in this case I am wholeheartedly sure that that guy had won the person lottery, and he severely mishandled his luck.

I still went to church, cried the whole way there and was glad I remembered where they keep the stash of wedding/funeral tissues. One of my favorite friends joined me in the pew and we laughed about the patheticness of my I-had-to-spill-the-special-pool-water-down-the-sink story. She’d forgotten her water so I lent her my drinking bottle while I spilled in some ocean water from the family beach. It was an absolutely meant-to-be breakthrough morning with my friend, who also happens to be a creative coachee.

But home alone, sobbing in front of “Up in the Air,” I had to admit to such loss, such longing. Before I met him, it was mostly possible to ignore a big part of what’s missing in my life, or I’d just been enjoying a nice break from worrying about it: Though my day- to-day life is pleasant and good, I want to fall in love and have a family more deeply than it feels safe to say.

A few months ago, one of my favorite friends in the world had a baby after a long, hard struggle. I was so relieved and happy for her and saw it as proof that even the most enormous and terrifying-to-want dreams can come true. But also I was inconsolable. I cried so hard that I thought my heart would fall out. I felt so much envy and pain and grief and loneliness with each successively more adorable picture: I eventually had to just unsubscribe.

Normally one would just take that to mean, duh, I want a baby, but that honestly seems supercrazy for me to want—I’m sensitive, anxious, single, and (though I know I have  fertile genes) likely too old to try.

And yet.

The wide, vast, chasm of pain that opened up from my friends facebook and from the loss of a guy who just wasn’t right means that I do very dearly, in the most raggedly vulnerable way, want to have my own family.

The guy, while he has qualities of his own, also has two adorable sons. He once texted me a picture of them on a picnic by a pond. And I let myself imagine it—how I might someday meet them, how I might someday heap them all in love. Even without having (thank goodness) met the kids, I knew that the three of them needed me, needed the ocean of love that’s in me, and I let myself hope I could someday give it to them.

So now I’m in a position of being no longer able to ignore a thing I can’t really do anything about. I’m afraid I’ve lost my chance, not with him (he was not the chance) but with my someday family, like we’ve all missed our connection somehow. The idea that it might be to late is a heavy thing to carry around, knowing I may eventually have to just grieve the lost chance.

But the thing is, I let myself believe in the possibility of love, of letting someone in. I let myself go as far as the current of romance could take me, and that was a good and brave choice. And although it is famously lightning-strike foolish, I have to believe that my guy and my family are still out there waiting for me, or maybe the impossible will happen before it’s too late. I have so much love, so much everything to give a family. However they come, whoever they are, let them get here. I miss them so much.

Talking With My Childhood Self About Bill Cosby

Photo by my Uncle Steve

Before I get to the soul searching, I want to say that I think Hannibal Buress is a hero for bringing the reality Bill Cosby’s victims into the public consciousness, but I really wish that women were taken as seriously on the same set of topics—Jen Kirkman has been censored and Julie Klausner vilified for pointing out similar allegations  and hypocrisies, (about Louis C. K. and R. Kelly respectively) and I would very much like to live in a world that isn’t trained to dismiss women’s point of view, especially on this particular matter.

For a lot of my adult life, I’ve been a trusting, open, jump-in-with-both-feet kind of person. I made friends and became devoted to them instantly (okay, I still do that) got crushes on poets and wrote reams about them, greeted nearly every person and new situation wholeheartedly.  I’ve never been afraid to walk alone at night and I’m still not, but in the past few years, I’ve ended up seeing the world through rape-colored glasses, seeing facets of coercion and exploitation everywhere. The problem with this lens is not that it isn’t true, but that it isn’t helpful; it’s not taking me where I want to go.

I want to slay those dragons and really start to live knowing I have agency and hope. The personal reasons that I tend to see the world this way are well-documented; they’re private and complex, but the psychological impact, the pulling-the-rug out-from-under-me that Cosby-as-rapist has wrought matters.

Like probably so many little girls, I LOVED Bill Cosby. This is not an overstatement like “Oh, I love Netflix,” but real, abject human love of a child for an adult man who seemed more than deserving of that love. My dad had all of his records and my brother and sister and I listened to them so much that it was almost like we were the siblings in those stories.

But The Cosby Show. It was one of the few shows we were allowed to watch—somehow that Thursday night block was highbrow enough for my dad (who before long would give into the slippery slope of Growing Pains and Perfect Strangers) (Mike Seaver didn’t do much in the not-letting-me-down department either, did he?) so we watched it as a family every Thursday night, like everyone.

Was there ever a more appealing paragon of manhood than Cliff Huxtable? He danced with his wife. He goofed around with the kids. He lovingly and hilariously laid down the law when necessary. And sometimes, as I think was pointed out once on Community, an entire episode could be about making a sandwich with his daughter. He was a perfect picture of what it means to be a man in a family, exactly the beautiful grownup my ten-year-old self needed.

There are a lot of factors that combine to make me generally skittish, but the shift from what I felt about Cosby then to what I know now exacerbates the feeling I have sometimes that if I relax for one second, if I trust for one second, the world will turn upside down and I will be completely fucked. But I certainly don’t want to approach the world that way.

So.

Dear Little Self,

What you loved was a story, and that story is still true. Everywhere there are families with singing and laughing—you’ve lived in one for a long time. Everywhere there are men, dads and brothers and friends and strangers who wish you and everyone nothing but love, safety and happiness.

You can grieve for Cliff Huxtable and be mad that Kurt Cobain was such a creep to that girl in high school and still be pretty peeved about that one episode of Buffy. I will always be mad with you and on your behalf. I will always be on your side.

But let’s look for other, better examples, and allow them to be true. I’ll do my best to keep you safe, if you’ll do your best to let it go. Take all the time you need.

Love,

Grownup You

Say Hello to Gladys

I like people who give names to their depression. In his awesomeawesomeawesome memoir The Big Rewind, Nathan Rabin calls his "Vice Admiral Phinneas Cummerbund." Another friend of mine calls hers "The Situation.--no relation to the Jersey Shore guy.

I think I'll call mine Gladys.

Maybe, Gaga...

This quote seems equally true and self-destructive. Whatever it is, I kind of love it.

“When you work as hard as I do or you resign yourself to something like music or art or something, you have to commit yourself to the struggle and commit yourself to the pain. And I commit myself wholeheartedly to my heartbreak…It’s a representation of my work. As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.”