isittherightword - Tumblr blog

[isittherightword]

Sufjan I love you so much. This is a masterpiece you're in all of our hearts. So sorry for your loss 💜

JAVELIN is out today. Thank you for listening. I love you.

This album is dedicated to the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend Evans Richardson, who passed away in April. He was an absolute gem of a person, full of life, love, laughter, curiosity, integrity, and joy. He was one of those rare and beautiful ones you find only once in a lifetime—precious, impeccable, and absolutely exceptional in every way.

I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Thank you. I love you.  XOS

[isittherightword]

Just before I moved, a job opportunity to moonlight in surgery at a prestigious hospital in Northern California fell into my lap. As these things go, it took about six months to get credentialed and start working. I thought I'd only be there for a year or two, which was a gross underestimation. My job too, became part of my healing process. In my early days when I was unsteady and leaking, I made the mistake of over sharing with a colleague. It somehow got back to my boss, who I met for the first time when he called me in. At my previous employer, as is true for much of medicine, my mental health had been viciously weaponized against me, and I had learned to go out of my way to hide it. Mental health, until this day is deeply stigmatized in medicine. I was terrified, but instead of contempt and vilanization, I was treated with compassion. I was given accommodations, encouraged to stay in therapy and to build social support. They looked after me and worked with me as I got better, not against me. When I came to California I had trouble identifying myself as a doctor. This was due to the shame narrative I had, because I had left residency I was nothing, and nothing I achieved meant anything because I rendered it meaningless. I was no longer the person who achieved those things, I was a failure. I came to my new job deeply disillusioned by healthcare in America. The memories of my exsanguinating patient still haunted me. I'd developed crippling moral injury as a powerless cog in the racist wheel of healthcare in America- a wheel that had broken and run over me as well. I found it difficult to remember why I chose to be a doctor in the first place.

At ******, I was able to practice medicine on my own terms. I worked shifts and could let go of the experience once the clock struck 7am. In the night, I found time to talk to patients, get to know their stories, provide comfort, allyship, company, and care. I reacquainted myself with what made me fall in love with medicine in the first place, I got to help people, a rare thing, practicing medicine in the US.

One night after signout a few years in at my time at ******, I got to speaking to one of the residents. I told him parts of my story. That I was one of 25 people in the nation to match integrated CT surgery, leaving a ****** program in Boston.

"I was a hot shot back then I suppose. It was so long ago."

He frowned. "You're still that person."

I'm still that person.

Those words remained with me for a while, although I didn't fully believe them, not then anyway. But you get told something enough times by multiple people, you begin to wonder if it is true.

Working here helped me regain my confidence. I built a great reputation, attendings remembered me and my story, told me they were happy I was on call. The residents respected me and trusted my judgement. I made friends. I learned I wasn't worthless without the titles and the categorical position, I still knew my shit and had a lot to offer. I started to believe in myself again.

[isittherightword]

For a long time when I looked at myself after leaving residency I really saw myself as a failure. As a person who set out on a path and got swallowed in the fire of it all. Someone who fell short, who wasn't enough, who was pathetic and too weak to finish what they started. I saw myself through my parents eyes. I internalized the messaging and have long believed I was all of those things. I stopped seeing myself as a person who had finished medical school, graduated at the top of my class, who was brilliant and driven. Without that certificate I have long felt I was nothing.

Over time my narrative softened, I decided I was perhaps lazy or not cut out for hard work. I made jokes about my 8 step skin care regimen and liking sleep and having hobbies. Underneath that narrative was the undertow of self loathing and inadequacy that I had never truly let go of. But at least it wasn't the violent berating of my early California days.

The inability to fully release the narrative that I am a failure and lazy and a shameful cautionary tale of squandered potential I believe directly coincides with the thread of hope I had of being a daughter who was deserving of love from her mother and father. The belief that I was nothing, I now realize, was me seeing myself through their eyes instead of my own. Like Kendall Roy says, "the poison drips through."

I've been in California for about five years now. In that time I've painted, I've planted, I've nurtured, and I've healed. Most importantly, I've learned to love and be loved. It started with what a friend of mine calls the nuclear winter. I cut off many so-called friends who took advantage of my lack of self respect and boundaries. Many of them were broken the way I was, and mirrored the way my parents failed to love me. They made me feel unworthy, they drained me, they secretly rejoiced when I struggled, and kicked me while I was down. There is nothing that tells you better who your friends are than who stands by you when you have little to nothing to offer. A second group of my friends couldn't be near me as I unraveled from the inside out. It was too intense. I probably needed too much and took to much that not everyone has to give when they themselves are trying their best to stay afloat. I hold nothing against those friends, in fact, as I've healed, some have returned to me.

There were just a precious few who stayed through the storm. There were a few new friends too who came along as well. They all had one thing in common, they loved me for me, despite me having little to nothing to offer. They didn't judge me or see me as a failure or at fault for walking away, for the events that lead up to my final departure from my life. Some, all, really, saw me as brave. Brave, self aware, and strong. "Good for you for realizing medicine wasn't for you" they told me. "What they put you through was an injustice" they said. "You're so brave for starting over, not everyone would have the courage to do that" they said. "People change careers all the time, it's normal" they shrugged. "You're one of the strongest people I know." "I'm a better person for knowing you." "You taught me so much."

I heard these things, but I never believed them really. The encouragement gave me strength nonetheless to keep rebuilding, stone by stone. I was never alone, even though many of my friends were far away. My guardian angels put wonderful people in my path, to support me, spiritually, financially, emotionally. Not all of those people remained in my life, but I do owe so much of my survival to them.

The main thing I learned, from being forced to rebuild is how to be loved outside of what I had accomplished. The people in my life saw my value without the titles, the enviable job, the accolades. This was a new concept for me. Something I'd never experienced before. The love I grew up with was always conditional. Contingent upon good grades, the right test scores, the right skin tone, the number on the scale. I grew up believing that the only thing worth loving about me were my accomplishments. Otherwise, I was a bad person, unworthy of and impossible to love.

My friends, the real ones, who survived the nuclear winter, fed me a different narrative. I initially had trouble believing their encouraging words, but I did allow myself to be loved in spite of no longer having the titles, the accomplishments, the accolades. Allowing that unconditional love in was the gold that sealed together the cracked pottery of my soul. It was in their love that I found my horcruxes, and started to piece myself together again. I began to rebuild my self worth, or perhaps build it in earnest, for the very first time.

To get to the place where I was able to receive and reciprocate that kind of love took a lot of work. Just before I left, I checked myself into a partial inpatient psych program. I learned about toxic shame, and realized I was suffering from complex PTSD. That label helped me make sense of what was going on in my mind and body- contextualized the nightmares, the inability to do yoga without overwhelming grief, the reactiveness, the flashbacks. I read books about racial trauma, childhood trauma and toxic shame voraciously. When I was finally able to afford it, I stayed in therapy, I did what I could to cool small pieces of the white hot lava of my trauma. I heard from an old friend early on in my journey, who at one time was just as fractured as I was deep inside, who told me that he did EMDR. He talked to me about unearthing memories of physical abuse and realizing the toxicity of the environment he grew up in. As a result of the difficult work, he was able to maintain a stable loving relationship for the first time in his life. That conversation was a lighthouse on a long journey through darkened seas. The first sign of land, however far away. He showed me healing was possible. He congratulated me for being brave enough to try. I went to his wedding just over a year ago. Last month, he came to mine.

3/?

[isittherightword]

Leaving for me wasn't a simple thing. I truly felt I was nothing outside of my identity as a doctor and a surgeon. I didn't have anything else- I had literally been on the path to being a physician since highschool when I was admitted to a guaranteed medical school program. I firmly believe no one under the age of 25 should ever decide to be a doctor. You don't know who you are and what you want and what it really means to sacrifice all of your youth. And if you decide young, by the time you realize you've committed to something that would erase your youth and eject you on the other side, weary, wrinkled, lonely, and empty save for a scalpel in hand cutting and sewing peoples organs, you'll have come to far and find it difficult to walk away. For me, walking away was a form of dying. Part of me died when I left Boston, or was killed in the struggle of the exorcism.

Since then I've lived in a bit of a state of purgatory, somewhere between life and spiritual death. On a psycho-spiritual quest to recover the pieces of my shattered soul.

By the time I left I had little will to carry on. I had lost everything. Many of my friends abandoned me because the violence of my deprogramming was a threat to the system of belief they had invested so much in. I found myself prey to a variety of vultures who circled my exposed and weakened flesh just to take a bite out of it to make themselves feel better. I came to California broken in a way that not a lot of people live through. I know this because any time I hear about a doctor committing suicide, I shrug, and think, wryly, good for them. The alternative of simply dying is to spiritually die and spend years searching for shards my glass heart splintered in every corner, knowing that my soul will never truly be the same after the rupture. To me, in many ways, dying sounds simpler. Why not reset and just start again, or fade into nothing? Why not rupture your body to mirror the rupture of your soul? It's definitive. It's simple.

Rebuilding for me has been complicated and taken a lot of effort and energy. I voraciously read books on toxic shame, inner child healing, narcissistic abuse, mothers who can't love. I spent a lot of time near the ocean, burned a lot of sage, lit candles, pulled tarot cards, made offerings. I've danced, screamed, sang, painted, planted, watered, fertilized, harvested, drove, miles and miles and miles. At some point in the journey, someone told me about Kintsugi- the Japanese pottery technique of resealing shattered pottery with precious gold. I learned there could be beauty in gathering the shards of my soul and sealing them back together, piece by piece.

In the back of my mind though, for a long time, I waited for a strong wind to blow me over the edge. The work is exhausting, painful, and truly, endless. Healing is a spiral that goes around and around and around. You're never really done. I always knew that I wouldn't be able to sustain another rupture like I did in 2018, when I was left body burned, flesh torn, shivering, naked and afraid on the shores of Northern California. I waited for a strong wind to blow, knock me over, break me, and force me to face starting again or giving up, knowing what my answer would be. "Ask me again, universe" I secretly begged. This time maybe I would allow the waves to pull me under.

The thing is the wind came, and the waves came. But what I rebuilt, as small as it was, was sturdier than the Tower of Babel that came before it. that tower had been astounding and illustrious, but devoid of solid foundation. I found myself, however small, building something with deeper roots and a real foundation, anchoring into what really is solid ground. I did the work, and in that way it was intentional, but I always was skeptical of that process. "Is this really working or will it all turn to ash in my hands like the last time?" I write this in past tense, but this is and was my present until recently. The truth is, building my internal system to be strong outside of what people saw me as, as opposed to fully defining myself and my worth through my accomplishments and through the eyes of my parents, who I never was and never will be enough for.

It's 11:11 💜 angels as always, reminding me they are with me.

After my big wedding, during which my darling dog went blind in her right eye, my maid of honor behaved in a truly unhinged manner, I got covid, and my mother, and more importantly, my father, disappointed me for the last time-- I confessed to my husband about my secret waiting for a strong wind to blow me into oblivion. I confessed because, at last, I realized I had built enough that even if the wind came, there was enough there to sustain me. Even if it it ripped open my windows and tore down my walls, the foundation would still stand I would be able to rebuild. Despite all the bullshit I still had a beautiful, perfect, incredible day where I laughed and loved and felt surrounded by love and experienced real joy. You can see it in the photos. It was, truly, the happiest day of my life.

It took a while to wade through the post wedding depression, nevertheless. Depression is unrelenting and unfair. It will leave for months, even years at a time, but then strike me down with the force of a high speed train. I burst again, but each time into less and less pieces. That's where my hope comes from. I've been shattered and sealed in gold and titanium, infinite cracks and infinite seals. Soon perhaps I won't shatter when the storms come. But even if I do, I know my shards can always be sealed back together and I'll never again start from nothing.

[isittherightword]

And I lost you

The one I was dancing with

In New York

No shoes

Looked up at the sky and it was

So scarlet it was

I'm awake with your memory over me

That's a real fuckin legacy

To leave

So scarlet it was

Maroon

This morning I was dancing in my kitchen, first to bongos by cardi b and Megan the stallion but something came over me, because I'm hoping to do my application today, or at least make progress and see what's required of me. I turned on maroon and this is what came up.

You know the thing about the career shit is that it really was a heartbreak. I was really close to my friend who was going through a divorce after like 14 years together and it was crazy how much the depth of our grief paralleled each other. My first real, deep earth shattering heartbreak was my divorce from surgery.

I actually really did love it. It was love. I was enamored with everything- the discipline it took to wake up in the morning every day at 4 am. The amount of things we got done before most people even got out of bed. The idea of having to know everything internal medicine doctors know and also know how to cut people open and take out and rearrange their organs. The intimacy of it. The weight of the responsibility of it. The knowing of people in ways they could never know themselves. I also was in love with the rejection, the doubt, the need to prove people wrong who said I couldn't do it. I loved the challenge of it. And until this day when I think about doctors, surgeons always will be my people. The specialty I fit most with. It was a real match. There was real shit behind the decision. It wasn't all a lie as I've told myself all of these years. There was love there. Real, love.

So scarlet it was

maroon.

There was enough love that I was willing to endure abuse, cruelty, racism, gaslighting, neglect, rejection. I wouldn't have put up with all of that pain if there wasn't love there. It was love. It's ok to say that.

The job really was my identity. But it never fit right- like a pair of slacks a size to small that you have to unbutton in the car while you drive. There was always something about it that cut a little to deep- there was a cord that led to somewhere a bit to deep inside my soul that made a lot of the shit that we put ourselves through as surgeons destabilize me in a way that it didn't seem to affect my other colleagues.

I had to pause to think of why.

At the end of the day when all was said and done- I didn't like the actual job of performing surgery. The idea I loved- the concept of the intimacy of it all, the tangibility of healing people and respecting disease and leaving their bodies more whole through the trauma of the process. That idea in theory appealed to me. But the actual action of it wasn't enough to sustain me. I found the OR cold and anxiety provoking and draining. I didn't enjoy the pressure of it, and I never really felt that accomplished. I think if I had been in the right program where the abuse wasn't as severe as the places I ended up I may have finished, but I would have been, underneath it all, unsatisfied with my life and career. It wouldn't have been for anything other than a sunk cost fallacy. I have a lot of friends, who finally, after all of these years are just now finishing or recently finished, and when you ask them if it was worth it they laugh.

I had a patient who had a gastric wedge for a GIST tumor- a benign tumor of the stomach. Literally the surgery is cutting out a piece of the stomach like you would a pie. It's not complicated. It's simple, and usually people only stay one night and just go home. You use what's called a ligasure device which uses sound waves to cauterize (or melt) the tissue together and seal it. And that's it. You cut it out like a pie. Simple.

I got a call that night that he felt like he couldn't breathe. I saw him and a man who was as black as I am turned the color of grey sand, clutching his chest, telling me he couldn't breathe.

I thought he was having a heart attack, or a pulmonary embolism, but wasn't bold enough to bolus the heparin without getting the labs back. I did get him to the ICU. After what felt like hours, but must have been 15-20 minutes the labs came back and his hemaglobin was 4.5. If you don't know, normal is 15.

We called the ACS team and right there at the bedside they sliced open his abdomen. So much blood poured out of his belly- it covered the floor and made it slippery. To add to that one of the transfusion bags burst on the ground as we tried to massively transfuse him. So scarlet it was.

There was so much noise and chaos while the code went in it was deafening. Once the more senior residents arrived I had been tasked with the job of calling the wife. I called and called and called and called and called. Nothing.

Finally after all the blood had drained from his body onto the floor, his heart stopped and we had to pump on his chest as whatever was left squirted and slid out of his abdomen onto the floor, onto our hands, our scrubs, our shoes. It was everywhere. So scarlet it was.

Then the silence came. The code was over. What was a room rancorous with the chaos of trying to save a life fell silent with the failure. I have never heard anything that quiet in my life.

Until the sound of an iPhone pierced the air. When we found the phone, a picture of a beautiful black woman on the screen with the word "Wifey".

My senior resident later told me that the screams she let out would haunt him for the rest of his life.

That was when I knew the job wasn't worth it. I had known before. I had had a suspicion. I felt weary with the exhaustion of waking up at 4 am every single day. I was traumatized by the neglect and isolation in that program. I was isolated, I was deeply lonely. At the time, I had nothing. My immediate family was as toxic as ever and had left me to wither away and die, starved of love or support in a hostile, deserted environment. My friends were also suffering and couldn't take on the weight of my flailing arms, lest they get pulled under and drown as well. I was in love with a man who took pleasure in pretending to pull me out just to hold my head under the water again and again- a sick game of emotional waterboarding. I had nothing. And the love that had driven me to throw everything I was and everything I had into becoming a surgeon, had run dry after years of drought.

But that night, as I sewed a dead man's abdomen closed, and wiped the blood from his cold skin, put my hand on his eyelids to close his empty eyes, I knew. It wasn't worth it.

I didn't want the weight of the responsibility. I didn't want to be haunted by the memory of misfiring a ligasure device, wondering if such a small action took a perfectly healthy father away from his wife and two daughters. As doctors, we see people die all the time. Death is a natural event. Sometimes death is preventable, sometimes it's not. Sometimes the difference between life and death is a misfired ligasure or a misplaced stitch. The OR for me was already a cold, joyless, anxiety provoking place. The gravity of wondering if any move I made would haunt me for the rest of my life, rip a son, daughter, father, friend, away from this world, made it unsustainable. I had already sacrificed so much. My youth, my identity, my body, my mind, my spirit- I knew the weight of the job would eventually snuff out what small light was left of my soul.

So I left.

Pt 1/?

[isittherightword]

This broke me. I think a lot about how much he's suffered in his life and how unrelenting that pain and sorrow that he clearly feels so deeply has been. That's been the hardest part of hearing that he's been ill... it just feels so deeply unfair. But life is unfair, and I suppose that we can't chose the lots we're dealt in life, we just have to take our meds and keep it moving as it were.

Hopefully this is pretty private and no one really checks my personal tumblr anymore bc I don't like to spread information unless he specifically says it publicly. But anyway, the partner mentioned in the quote died a few months back, quite young. I don't know if it was sudden or not. I don't know anything. I do know as a person who has dealt with lifelong trauma and mental illness that the onset (or, iykyk, possible recurrence?) of this is not unrelated. As we get older, the mental anguish and agony take a physical toll on our bodies - autoimmune disease is a common presentation of this. In my case I developed massive fibroids and needed a 8 hour surgery to remove them and sew my franken-uterus back together. This occurred in concert with my breakdown... or rupture. Whatever you want to call it.

All this is to say I have thought a lot about the burden of being a conduit for the sublimation of so much suffering and pain for the collective through the relentless suffering of his individual lived experience. Sometimes I feel that my own suffering is relentless as well. I suppose he found something powerful and beautiful to do with it, because here we are on the eve of another masterpiece sired through the abyss of loneliness and grief. He forever remains an example to look to- a lighthouse in the dark sea of depression, trauma, mental illness, anxiety, whatever else. I hope to learn some kind of alchemy with my pain. I have a lot of hobbies... I paint, I garden, I do makeup, I recently picked up crochet. I haven't really written, though, since the rupture. I haven't really invested myself and applied my gifts the way I should since the rupture. I know what I'm here to do. I, like my hero, my inspiration, my love and all time favorite musician forever and always, am here on this earth to help people. To impact lives, to sublimate my trauma into a conduit of experience to heal others. I know this. I have known this since I lit the match and burned the life I once knew to the ground before the flames swallowed me as well.

The feeling that it is time to get to that process started has grown over the years, that have honestly flown by. It's crazy that 2018 will be 6 years ago this winter. Anyway, I know it's time. I will follow his example. Who knows how long we'll even be here for, I don't want to waste it all.

I don’t know if this is the right thing to say because English is not my first language, but some people fly too close to the sun. When I think about Sufjan Stevens or Ryuichi, Terry Riley, Frank Ocean, I feel like their music is great, but you love them because you can really hear their suffering, their agony, their pain. They have been given a role to filter not just their own feelings through music, but other people’s suffering and pain, too. I always feel so sad for them. Like, why them? Why do they have to bear that role of witnessing so much hardship and the difficulty of just being alive in this world and then translate it through music? I have endless respect and support for this type of artist. I went back to Japan for the first time since the pandemic and there were changes in my parents’ lives. I had to help my father change his living situation. It’s never easy to prepare them for the next chapter, the next chapter, the next chapter, and then you die. Yet I’m so grateful for that and to return to Japan and still feel like it’s my home. Sufjan and I share the same birthday, maybe one day apart [Stevens’ is July 1, Makino’s is July 2], so we’ve spent two birthdays together by his place in upstate New York. He made it so special. I was quite shy, and maybe being the same sign is why he’s just as shy as me, but I really appreciate his way of carrying himself. He wears super colorful clothes, he’s super different, and I love the way he’s not shy of being shy, like he just kind of stares at you and then doesn’t say anything. Everything about him hits close to my heart. He was obsessed with the fireworks then, almost like a child, and even though we didn’t talk much, I felt so much tenderness, intimacy, and warmth from him and his partner. Now I think about Sufjan and his surroundings quite often. His music has been helping me quite a bit: Carrie & Lowell, Call Me By Your Name, his recent piano work that sounds massive. I listen to him in the middle of nowhere in Japan, trying to clean up my parents’ shit. I’m amazed by his responsibility when dealing with very difficult stuff. He’s the type of person who flies quite close to the sun. I hope he’s doing alright, I hope he’s happy, and I hope he’s gonna manage. Because some people just have a very difficult role to feel things so intensely, and that’s not easy. It’s a big ask—even of someone phenomenal like him. - Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) on Sufjan

[isittherightword]

Big mood. Stay safe everyone

“What gives me hope? Oh God. Diazepam! Lithium!”

-Sufjan Stevens on the current state of the world

[isittherightword]

I left tumblr, or dramatically decreased my use of the platform after the whole Sufjan is gay troll crisis back in 2015. We were being harassed personally, and I got scared. Tumblr, despite our numerous protests did not help with that situation at all and it took I think a couple weeks(?) to get that blog taken down- which included me contacting John from AKR himself and receiving a pretty heartfelt email back about the situation. It was dark. All this is to say, this platform has a problem moderating content and stopping harassment, so I’m not surprised about the child ponography thing. However, the way they are going about it is basically disastrous. Outright deleting so much incredible content, that people use to explore their sexuality in a typically safe, non-mainstream community is not the way forward. I fear for what will happen to this platform if they go through with this. It’s sad.

[isittherightword]

This is a mess.

you got your cock out there bud? not allowed on this website fucko. oh well you wanna be racist huh? well, who am i to – 

[isittherightword]

FYI world Suf is 100% working on the next album, he goes low key radio silent like this (ie releasing distracting stuff that’s actually not really new, he’s constantly producing music) usually at the 1-2 year mark before the next drop. I’m excited! I hope I’m right!

I love Sufjan so much. It’s weird and a little crazy. But in so many ways he’s like a model for me. How to navigate the way out of the darkness. Ugh so excited to finally hear that song!

[isittherightword]

Omg! I can’t believe this finally happened 🤗❄️

It’s happening! “Lonely Man of Winter” is coming to the public at last!

[isittherightword]

I agree with this accept the forgiveness thing. Forgiveness isn’t for the abusers, it’s for you. And it doesn’t mean you allow them in your orbit. It means you release them.

Important reminders: 

You don’t have to make amends with people who hurt you or abused you.

You don’t have to forgive them.

You don’t owe them an apology.

You don’t have to forget what they did.

You don’t have to have a relationship with them in any capacity!

You’re allowed to grieve and be angry and yell and question things.

You’re allowed to grow and heal without them.

You don’t have to seek “closure” from them. Closure can come in many different forms and ways that don’t require that person or people.

You don’t owe your abuser(s) anything. Not your money, not your time, not your energy, not your love, not your forgiveness, not your blessing. Nothing. You owe them nothing.

[isittherightword]

“It takes a strong person to remain single in a world that is accustomed to settling just to say they have something.”

— Unknown

[isittherightword]

I’m going to expand a little on this; didn’t feel like posting this to the blog. For years, up until the Carrie and Lowell era, when it became clear Sufjan was dating a beautiful black man, I have been one of those who fell into the category of “Defenders of Sufjan’s Sexuality”. It’s not that I didn’t believe he was queer, it just was painfully clear to me that he hadn’t become fully comfortable internally or externally with embracing who he was fully. I felt viscerally protective of that process, because I watched a dear friend go through it and I knew how painful and traumatic it was, especially when you deeply subscribe to a faith as pejorative and punishing as Christianity. I allowed this defensiveness to stunt my reading of his older music. This author did not have that problem and has thus, shown me things I’ve never seen before in the work, but that I intuitively felt.

I have a special relationship with Sufjan’s music and always have, as do many that I befriended on here over the years. Sufjan is what I call a fellow traveler. What I mean by that is someone who has tread to the true depths of darkness, the throws and chains of mental illness and bottomless depression and who made the conscious decision to soldier forward, not fully submerge, to gasp desperately for air in the ocean even when there is no dry land in sight. My experience with mental illness is serious and deep and complex. There are a lot of reasons why I got as sick as I did this past year, why I’ve been as sick as I’ve been most of my life. A lot of it had to do with a fundamental feeling of rejection from my family. A lot of it had to do with a deep sense of self hatred for being the person I am. A lot of it had to do with the feeling that I was never and would never be enough. A lot of it had to do with the pain of being a black woman desperately trying reach for whiteness and erase myself completely to blend into a white-washed world. A lot of it had to do with a desperate need for love but a fundamental inability to attract it in a healthy form that didn’t poison me further. A lot of it had to do with deep, desperate, painful, rupturing, visceral sense of permanent loneliness. It took me a long time, because I am not queer, and I am not a queer man, to consciously integrate why the ruptured soul I lived with always found its solace with Sufjan’s tender voice. I don’t know what it is like to be queer. I do know what it is like to be disowned by your immediate family for being who you are. To fundamentally hate the part of yourself that embodies the very identity the world undeniably sees you as. I know what it’s like to force yourself into a life that is ill-fitting and suffocating as it slowly bleeds the life force out of you, and forces your body to turn against itself and become canabilized with physical disease that exists only as a manifestation of the rot emanating from within the mind. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a mother you never really had, yet. I know what it’s like to live a lie.

All this is to say, Because the parallels were subconscious and not obvious I guess my interpretation of the songs, which I pride myself on, has always been deeply limited. I recognize this today as I read this gorgeous, heart wrenching article. But I think all of us superfans have the ruptured, impossible soul thing in common. Sufjan found dry land. I think I have too. If you haven’t yet, please hold on. I promise there is air above this water.

Sufjan Stevens is so many people. Compiling this list, and hopping from holiday jams to S&M-club electronica to acoustic musings on death, was a complete and utter joy. Let’s get into it! Pace yourself!

Please note: This list includes every officially released song which credits Sufjan Stevens as a primary artist. It excludes live recordings, remixes, demos, and covers. This is a real tragedy, because man’s done some great covers, but I had to draw a line somewhere. Check out “Free Man in Paris” and “A Little Lost,” especially. Also excluded: the piano solos from the D-side of the vinyl edition of All Delighted People, his work with Sisyphus, and “Majesty Snowbird,” which never got an official release, quelle tragique. I should note, too, that Sufjan is co-credited on Planetarium with Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and James McAlister. If I’ve missed anything, if you see any glaring omissions on this list, please let me know.

Please also note: My mom’s dead and I’m gay, so you’ll notice some bias.

[isittherightword]

“I’ve always been obsessed with the sacred and with the profound, and I think birds are these divine creatures, because they can escalate to the heavens. In these physical bodies, trapped to the ground, I just feel like we have to reckon with the reality of the world and our mortality. For me, birds feel like symbols of absolute freedom and transcendence.”

— Sufjan Stevens in an interview with Deadline

[isittherightword]

<3

—Pema Chödrön

[isittherightword]

:) hello

Back, I hope for real this time.

I found my way out of the dark through here before, and I’m a bit better now - in a place where, I was last time I was here, a few years back. I think I need to be here to fully reintegrate. 

It’s hard for me to write about where I’ve been - the past three years of my life have been I think some of the worst. My move back to Boston was basically the descent into a long and arduous period of crushing darkness. This year, I think the bottom fell out of me. The parts of me I held together with glue and tape, just gave way. The darkness swallowed me whole. I almost drowned. I’m not exactly sure how I made it out of it, but I’m making my way, making necessarily changes to my life to be healthy, and that includes walking away from my career. 

Some of you, if you are even still here, know what I do. Some people, who used to be here, are likely long gone, also know how hard it was for me. I don’t think it was ever really the right thing. There was always something unnatural about the fit - that I didn’t have the hardness of the soul to stomach. I was smart enough, so I could attain it, good schools, great programs... but do do it, I had to draw from, corrode, and deplete an essential part of myself that I needed to stay alive. I stayed with it as long as I could, but I just didn’t want to die for that job. So I think, with the last of what I had within me, I found a way to walk away.

Doing what I did was an identity. It was everything I am. All of my friends, my whole family, every hour of every day, the college I went to, the grad school, the hours. It was my entire life. I met someone, who wasn’t in the same career, and I clinged to it, because for me, he felt like a breath of air in a life that was suffocating me. But I realized eventually, the tiny bursts of oxygen he gave me were laced with carcinogenic gas, and even though he felt like air, he was slowly poisoning me as well.

I’m still not quite sure how I got out alive. Blind faith, God’s grace, nothing else left to impart, indeed. Anyway, I’m ready to transition back, and get fully well again. The process takes as long as it takes, but I’m here, I’m ready, I’m full of hope. The blog here was something I objectively loved and was extremely passionate about. I stopped when I got to Boston. Probably the first sign that something was going very wrong. Anyway, I’m back. I’m looking forward to seeing who’s still around, and meeting the new faces too. I wonder if tumblr is the same community... an eclectic collection of the misshapen and maybe broken, trying to make sense of this thing called life. That’s at least what I am. 

Anyway, I’ll be helping out with the blog again. :) 

:)