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Late July

I spent a lot of this trip thinking about Corey and me and Mom and Dad

I made a fire and sat next to it while I looked through a roll of film from Wilmington, NC. I don’t know exactly what year, maybe ‘99? The one with the picture of Corey lying in the sand pit on the beach, a child in child’s pose, as though she is already sheltering herself from her own life.

It is so complex and gut-wrenching, the history of that little family, the way bits of the future would weave a tapestry of love and broken trust and promises. How the fibers would tear and weaken the whole piece, leaving holes throughout. 

I looked at the picture of Mom holding Corey near a dock, the only picture of her in the whole roll. It is taken from far away, and they are small and blurred, but their smiles are unmistakable. We loved her so fiercely, our mother, like a mystical fairy goddess, floating around with two babies in her arms, barefoot in the grass, smelling like sandalwood and roses. She was our queen. What a childhood we were blessed with, with her as our guide to show us the beauty of humanity, the earth, our animal friends, and just how much she loved us. She was so prone to seeing the good in others that she could not see the darkness ahead.

Our father is pain that lives deeply in me. It is so much harder to grapple with him because I am him. I feel his exact sadness, his loneliness, the emptiness inside him that nothing will ever fill. But he chose the darkness, I chose light. I am so glad and grateful for the chance to experience the world as a woman, because I was allowed to choose light. 

His masculinity was self-punishing. Despair, sadness, anger...he could not evaluate himself, sit with himself. It was his fault he felt these things, so he pushed harder. Filling his existence with endless work and chores and jobs and books and substances to mask whatever tried to come out at the end of the day, when he had no choice but to sit with his tired body.

What happened to him? What could have been done before it was too late? He never talks about Ann, never mentions her, so I always thought it couldn’t be her. But maybe it was. I think about how my life might have turned had Corey met the same end, what would happen to me? Would I feel like I could have saved her if I’d tried hard enough? Would the entire weight of losing her break me? I don’t know, and I hope to god I never know. Maybe it would be enough to seize my life right from under me. 

We did follow the same pattern as he and Ann did, truly. She lived alongside him through a lifetime of parental abuse and no safety. And then they had to navigate adulthood in the absence of any parenting. Mental illness that was hidden away, treated behind closed doors. Like a shared secret between them, holding hands on the floor as children, with no one to protect them but each other.

So you see, it is all so complicated. We were set up, in some ways, to be the perfect family. In others, we were doomed. If he had chosen to start over with us, I wonder how different life would have been. 

[mxrenacer]

Woke up feeling displaced, as I have day after day since March. But today was different: the feeling was not the same existential dread and hopelessness which have plagued all of us for months; rather, a sense of conviction over my life and a desire to actually live it. 

Every day, for most of my waking hours, I overanalyze myself, my worth, berate myself for mistakes I’ve made and for my inadequate productivity by our cultural standards, for my lack of motivation and energy, for the things I do poorly or don’t excel at. This is all in direct contradiction to that which I have been preaching and trying to embrace mentally, the idea that our worth is not measured by our intellect, or our productivity, or our motivation. I have told myself these things over and over, trying to adapt to the strangeness of those thoughts. For some reason, the more I try to convince myself of these truths, the more negative self-talk I seem to come up with. Something has not been lining up for me in these cold new times. 

When I woke up today, my first thought was an aching need for change. I have lived in this place for so long, I am stagnant in nearly every part of my life. I have loved it here at times over the past 11 years, but now the idea of this city fills me mostly with sadness, and the gloom of the incoming gray winter is almost unbearable. I have never really felt at home here, in all honesty, I have truly never felt that it was good for me, mind, body, spirit. I feel a need deep in my core to try a new place, a new home. I know that these are unprecedented times and every ounce of my being is saying, “You can’t trust yourself right now. We are in unknown territory. You cannot make decisions in these circumstances.” But then I think, doesn’t that make it the most ideal time? Nothing will ever be the same again. We are witnessing the fall of capitalism (the way we have known it, at least). Half of Americans are on unemployment. The virus has killed over 200,000 people in this country alone, over a million globally. Many of us are starting to face the truth: that our lives have been informed and shaped all along by keeping the economy alive, and we are supposed to die having lived for that and that alone. The American Dream: you work and get married and work and have babies and work while someone else cares for those babies and watches them grow, and work and spend fleeting moments here and there with your loved ones, and work as your children slip away to new lives, and work and (maybe?) retire a few years before you take your last breath. And your life has gone by and you didn’t even see it pass. I don’t want to keep saying “someday I will” and die before someday comes. I want to do it now. I want to see more, work less, live more, feel more.

I want to stop waiting for something to get better, and go after it myself. 

[mxrenacer]

father’s day

TW: abuse, violence, addiction, suicide

My parents might have been in love once. But their relationship was never without unhealthy (at best, toxic at worst) dynamics. My dad was buying my mom flowers and dancing with her in the kitchen one day, punching holes in walls and calling her a fucking cunt the next. In our world, love means compromise, which has been twisted and manipulated to mean sacrifice. A term which often directly implies forgoing your values, your self-worth, your children’s feelings of safety and stability. We lived on a roller coaster of emotional turmoil, small doses of happiness interspersed between heaps of violent language and huge blowups. Even when the big fights weren’t happening, the low-level bickering was so constant that I thought it was normal, that that was how all parents communicated. My mother internally battled thoughts of leaving him, back and forth, stay or go, for the 22 collective years my sister and I resided in their house. I knew in my gut it would never happen. That her thoughts were more like wistful daydreams, that she never had any intention of following through. She didn’t want us to grow up in a tiny apartment, struggling to live on her teacher’s aide wages. She told us she didn’t want us to carry a stigma as children of a single mother. I wish she had gotten the chance to prove how great a single mother she could have been. We have both been gone for nearly a decade, states away. And still she battles. 

Love was a privilege that was held under the absolute authority of my father. When he decided to give it, he was the ultimate romantic for my mother, the definition of caring dad to us. I wish I could wipe the memories of dancing on the kitchen table while he played The Beatles on guitar, hikes on his shoulders through Jefferson National Forest, learning from him about the beauties of the planet and poetry and food. I tend to use them to gloss over the bad parts, But look at this, he loved us. He gave us so much. But he could take it away just as swiftly. He terrified us with brutal shouting on bad days and his seething tone when he was angry at our mother can only be described as hateful. I could feel my blood pulse in my ears when he was in that state, not sure what would happen next. I silently hoped my mom would disengage, not respond, not add fuel to the fire. She usually couldn’t help herself and argued right back, which was exactly what he wanted and most often ended with him leaving to get drunk and disappear until the next day, sometimes we wouldn’t hear from him for two. She often called him a tyrant, which sounds funny but was not an exaggeration. He made it abundantly clear that our respect (all three of us) was not earned, but owed to him regardless of his actions toward us, a given that came with marriage and fatherhood. We were frequently punished with his drinking, a punishment intended for our mother, but we were always casualties, and we usually got a heartfelt apology when he sat us down the next day and responded to our “it’s okay”s with “no, it’s not okay.” He said that every time, and every time I felt as though I couldn’t even forgive him correctly.

He always felt dangerous to me, teetering on the edge of lashing out, leaving and getting blackout drunk and crashing his truck (he eventually flipped it over a guardrail after I’d moved out; the cop who found him drove him around until his BAC was low enough to reduce his DUI charges -- the privileges of white masculinity. He got community service thanks to his reputation of being such a beloved teacher in the county, a detail I’ve always found amusing considering his relationship with his own family). We were often threatened with his impending self-inflicted death, reminded of his severe, untreated mental illness, my mother shaking her head and warning us that we should be prepared. It always felt like I had to be very careful with my words because if I pushed him too far, it would be my fault he left, my fault he drank. My fault if he killed himself. 

We were told we had to keep his addiction a secret, otherwise he could lose his job. So after those weekends when he left in a rage and didn’t come home for a day or two, the ones I spent shaking with anxiety and unable to sleep or think or focus on anything else, I went to school and pretended everything was normal. I could not process what was going on with anyone else, could not enlist my friends for any sort of validation or support. Looking back, I needed therapy badly, but it was never mentioned. 

It never occurred to me that he was abusive because he never hit me. I only saw him put his hands on my mother once, and he played it off like an accident, like they got caught up somehow and that resulted in him almost dislocating her shoulder. Even now, I have a hard time feeling like I deserve to say I was abused. But I know that after I left home, when only my sister was there with our mother, the physical violence escalated. I know she sometimes put herself in the way so he couldn’t get to our mom. I know she sometimes got hurt, intentionally, unintentionally, I don’t know. Probably both. He was volatile and unpredictable. And good at playing the victim, filling everyone else with his guilt afterward. 

My mother enabled him, continues to enable him. I hate to say that she was complicit in all of our abuse, because it is so much more complex than that. Abuse is hard to escape; that is a main component of its power. She was just as much a victim as we were, and sadly, continues to be. I disengaged a long time ago, stopped emotionally investing myself in him. It has cost me in some ways (mainly, he is weird and uncomfortable around me, because he knows how I feel about him), but proves over and over to have been the right choice. I can usually breathe. There is always sadness and I imagine there always will be. But the fear is worse: Is the bad in him inside me too? If I have children, will I hurt them too? Am I capable of abuse? I want to say I know myself, that it’s impossible, but I am terrified. 

[mxrenacer]

Millvale

Today we walked from home to Millvale, over the 40th Street Bridge, down the sidewalk bordering the highway, into the little rust-belt-meets-post-punk neighborhood. We passed few others, waving or nodding to compensate for the ambiguity we have come to accept as a feature of wearing masks. For the morning, wrapped in his presence and bathed in sunlight and the novelty of walking past shops (a few of them open), unperceived by strangers who could not fully observe the peachy softness of my face, I just felt like a person.

If I remove the physical aspects from my description, I am left with silly, passionate, enthusiastic, romantic. When I replace them, I see too much, too little. Weeks like this, I sit in Zoom meetings and miss all the content, obsessed with repositioning myself to broaden the appearance of my shoulders. I want to stop looking, but it's as though my eyes are glued to the tiny box with my own image. The box looks like a jail cell. I cannot sit still, I feel the need to run from the lens, the minutes like hours passing through gritted teeth. When the meetings end, I walk away and avoid mirrors for a while.

Someone in my project group addresses us as "ladies" and I want to throw my phone.

I sit in my bed, reading. I catch a bit of my own scent, leftover from our walk, which I can't bring myself to call musk. I smell earthy and warm, almost like a m*n, and I don't want to say or think that word. When every part of you rejects both universally accepted options, how do you relate to anyone? Where do you fit? What the hell are you? I used to think I was a writer. Now I don't even know if I am a boy or a girl, and words have not come easily in years.

I think back to high school, all the nights straining my eyes in the glow of my laptop, Queer as Folk keeping me awake until 4 or 5 am. I couldn't explain my feelings to anyone so I made it into a joke, just another routine obsession like David Bowie and ballet. It wasn't truly the show I was obsessed with, but the depiction of the focal relationship between two men: one a ruthless, brooding, biting-but-incredibly-loyal character, dripping gay masculinity and gradually revealing the childhood trauma that had created his harsh persona (hot); the other a small, sweet but tough high school senior just coming into his queerness. I spent nights alone feeling so much my chest hurt, trying to understand why a stupid TV show from the early 2000s was affecting all of my sensibilities so dramatically. I wanted that relationship, and I knew that. And I told myself sternly to get over it because You Will Never Be A Gay Man.

Now I know why it hurt, what it was that manifested that way. I am in love with someone who loves all the parts of me, treats me like whatever gender I want at any given moment. It has been life-changing. But there are still moments when I hurt in the familiar way I used to. So I am still on the path toward finding what I want to see in the mirror, whether it will be ever-changing or eventually transform into something concrete. It is a process, but I am learning to be okay with the journey.

[mxrenacer]

femme ideation

Something that I’m trying to work through in quarantine:

I have been in and out of a femme phase over the past few months, where I feel deeply connected to the feminine part of my fluidity. I’ve badly wanted to reconnect with it, explore it, learn new things about it, but I find myself holding back over and over, for several reasons:

-Fear of being labeled as cis when I know I am not

-Fear of people concluding that my gender identity is not real

-Fear of returning to something that I wore very differently before I started exploring my gender and not knowing how to navigate it in a new context

But there is something else that is deeper and more troublesome to me when I begin to dissect it: the moment I start to grow my hair, or put on a wig, or wear a dress — the moment I embrace femininity — I start to feel weak, uncertain, not very bright. I look in the mirror and morph into someone who laughs to hide ongoing embarrassment of…just about everything about them. I watch my posture collapse and my apologetic nature take over. I see someone others won’t (and shouldn’t) trust to do things well. Someone no one would look to for a valid opinion or an answer to a question.

A friend of mine told me that I changed when I started presenting as more masc-leaning. She said that I used to giggle nervously every time I spoke, like I shouldn’t be taken seriously. That I stopped when I cut my hair and switched to boy clothes, that I began to carry myself differently, with strength and certainty. And she’s right. I feel cool and collected and capable most days now; the more masc, the more in control. When I sense people observing me, it feels good. It no longer makes me worry that they’re picking me apart or judging something about me.

I want to be clear: I do not think women are weak. I look up to so many (famous women and women in my life) as powerful, strong, brilliant, highly capable. There are dozens of women whose shoes I would kill to walk in. But for some reason, I never saw myself that way. I only started to feel confident or believe I was a capable person after I began to present as more masculine. I know it’s an unfortunate side effect of the way I was socialized. I also know I am far from alone.

I’m not writing this to make anyone feel bad. My influences didn’t teach me anything other than what they were taught. It’s just been a deeply visceral experience and has given me cause to stop and closely study the path I took to get here. It’s made me grateful to identify as gender fluid because it has taught me that confidence was possible for me, that I was a person capable of believing in myself. A person — not a woman or a man. There is no reason I should gain some hair and lose my strength — that doesn’t make any sense. Nothing will have changed except my perception of myself and the way others choose to perceive me. I literally can’t cut my hair right now so I’m gonna keep working on this — I’ll keep you posted.