all our faculties falter and blur.
Nobody knows how our tongues got so swollen and furred.
What truths are there left to be told
when we're all lost for words?
Incoherence, When Language Corrodes
Peter Hammill”
So much I wanted to do, and say today.
Instead, this.
I always worry about treading too far over an invisible line that is, for me, still very real. I am many things, and many of you come to me from many different places. Some of you knew me before, some of you are just getting to know me. And I know, for example, that I often find myself defaulting to quoting others when my own words seem pale and insignificant. But, indeed, I am large, I do contain multitudes, and as I am predisposed to death by drowning in my own analysis, I do often worry that perhaps I am presenting too much of one part of me, no matter which part that is.
I do not necessarily want to be the trans girl who only talks about trans stuff. But being trans IS my life. I do not necessarily want to focus on the politics of it, the discrimination, the lack of understanding and willingness to try and understand by so many people. Yet again, being trans IS my life, and some small part of me hopes that in the saying and the telling, some small amount of...something...even if it is insignificant and unimpressive...to be tossed into the sea of information that is our mutually shared lives.
I do not want to write about the fact that three people I know and follow on Twitter had a transphobe directly attack them in order to ridicule them. Yet I just did.
I do not want to write about the fact that I woke up this morning in agony, both physical and psychological, yet I just did.
I do not want to write about the fact that every day I come on Facebook, I come on Twitter, and I am at once faced with the breadth and scope of hatred and erasure that we face...yet I just did.
I don't want you, reading this, to finally sigh and say 'I am sick and tired of Julie writing about this stuff. Can't she just be normal? Can't she just...not constantly focus on this?'
And yet...I just did.
I make certain allusions in my writing from time to time, to past events and past things I have had to deal with, as a way of trying to create metaphors and comparisons that might be more easily digested. I don't know if they are at all successful. I know that they are uncomfortable comparisons, borne from the fact that two things massively changed my life, and I can do nothing but try and find connections between them. I am NOT those things...yet those things ARE me.
I don't know how to say the things I want to say, because for every one of you who tells me that I am such a good writer, I sit here erasing and deleting and reshaping and throwing out and carving and whittling away and adding to in an attempt to hide each glaring flaw, each miscut, each place I took the easy way out rather than do the craft properly. Somehow it seems to work, yet for myself, I see every patch, every join, every poorly engineered angle, and wonder why no one else sees them. I question you because I question myself in all things. As I write this, I realise how unfair this is to you, yet there it is, laid bare...I question your words and actions because for everything, I do not know how you do not see what I see. Is it me being hyper-critical, or is it simply a case where no one wants to damage an already broken Julie?
I don't know the answer to that question.
And any answer I am given would be placed under my microscope anyway.
So the question, ultimately, is rhetorical.
The more I become myself the more I am terrified of myself. Does that sound as strange to you as it does to me? Each step I take away from the lies that were my life, the further I go into truly uncharted waters, the stronger the fear grips me. Will I finally go too far out, will I lose sight of the shore, will I finally submerge and drown in the depths? Do I want to submerge?
What if I fall?
What if I fly?
~~~//||\\~~~
At the core of it, I am an angry, sad, scared girl. I have never seen girl, when applied to myself, as a diminution of who I am. I do not feel limited or minimised by the tenor of that word. I am a girl, and I have no problems saying that. I am angry that I have to fight every day just to be myself, that I have to fight to stay alive, that I have to fight in order to feel as if I have value to someone, anyone. I am angry that I have to speak out against people that are supposedly members of my own community. I am angry that I have to create my own community because the one that was created for me is a load of cobbler's. I am angry that I am 44 years old and I have waited this long to transition. I am angry at a person who held me in their thrall so much that they cowed me into silence, into a kind of submission that I do not accept, and who ultimately kept me from doing this sooner. I am angry at myself for allowing that to happen.
I am sad for the girl inside me who has spent 44 years waiting to live. I am sad for every lost opportunity she will never have. I am sad for a childhood I will never know, I am sad for teen years I will never get to experience. I am sad for things I will never have the ability to experience because of the circumstances of my birth. I am sad that there was no way for that last one to be overcome. I am sad that I will never experience the things that some people cling to as being the only defining elements of womanhood, because I was born with a penis and testicles, not a vagina, uterus and ovaries.
I am scared that no matter what, I will end up losing the people closest to me. I am scared I will never be trans enough, that I will never be good enough, that I will never be woman enough. I am scared that I will be left behind. I am scared that I waited too long. I am scared that I will spend life with people thinking I am a bloke in a dress. I am scared by things that I am dealing with today, at this very moment, and the degree of uncertainty that comes with those things.
I am angry.
I am sad.
I am scared.
All those things are part of me today, and I feel that I should keep them inside, keep them secret, keep them safe.
I spent all my life keeping everything inside.
Secret.
Safe.
And look where it got me.
~~~//||\\~~~
Over the past nearly 3 years I have lost a lot of people along the way, and I talk a big game about how none of it matters to me, how they obviously didn't belong here for the journey.
And I know each and every one of you knows that for the lie that it is.
Because every one hurts.
I have been told that I talk too much about depressing things. And that statement is correct.
I have been told that I spend too much time on politics. And that is probably right too.
I have been told that I am too militant. And I am. I know I am.
But. At the same time.
I've tried being other things. I've tried being other people. I have tried being nice. I have tried being a push over, a door mat, and I know when I am those things I am easier for other people to stomach. I am somehow sweeter, more polite.
Nice.
Nice people are the ones getting shot, spit upon, murdered for being themselves.
And what is left are people like us. Angry. Militant. Pushed to the edge. Left with nothing else left to us but a chunk of rock and a piece of broken glass. And when you are pushed that far, when all that is left to you are scraps, you take those scraps and make a choice.
And do you want to know something?
Neither of those choices is a defeat, because both of those choices is an act of survival. Resistance. Militancy.
I am fighting for my life every day, by inches and feet, scrabbling by my fingernails dug into the dirt. Life is trench warfare, muddy and dirty and choking gas filled wastelands of terror that no person should ever have to be confronted with. There is no wonder so many of us are diagnosed with anxiety, with depression, with PTSD. We are not even metaphorically at war. It is literal, and it is real, and it is war without end forever and ever Amen. It is a war fought on more than one front because even as we are fighting a world that often vocally expresses a desire to stamp us out, we are fighting a war inside our brains, trying to find some small amount of advance even as we are being shelled from within and without.
All those times I have joked about losing my sense of humour during the shelling of Sevastapol in April 1943? Understand that it is not simply a way of joking that I'm a Time Lady. I am living that shelling every bloody day of my life.
And thus here we are, surrounded by the wreckage that is my life, trying to tend the small space I have allowed myself, hoping that the seeds I have planted will find some way to bloom in this otherwise grey blasted cratered landscape of terror and sadness that is Life, 2017.
If I act needy, it is because I am.
If I act like I am clinging, it is because I am.
I am reaching for anything I can hold onto in this swirling maelstrom of chaos, hoping it'll be enough for me to stay afloat one more second...minute...hour...day.
What if I fall?
What if I fly?
“And if language explodes
in our faces like shrapnel
all self-defense is blown away.
In the end this reasoning's sound:
how can we be found
if we're lost for words?
Oh, still in the search for the words...
I've said my piece,
I'll take my leave now,
breathe not a word
of my disarray.
Ssh.
All of the words have flown away...”
Incoherence, If Language Explodes
Peter Hammill
(NB: as always, this is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)
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