Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

Happy March. The rain has been steady and insistent—rivers overflowing, streets flooding, both of our dogs look permanently like waterlogged Paddington Bears in their yellow slickers.

Still, last week while walking to Alley Cat, there were two solid hours of sun, which is exactly what you want in the Mission, which is colorful and steams with a heat that isn’t ever a reality for San Francisco: for this part of the city to be somehow hotter than the rest of it. An open-faced sky.

The two hours of sun, plus the two bulbs finally emerging from my tulip bed, are offering a bit of respite: March will be easier, if only because it signifies the end of Winter, which has felt particularly long and sad this year.

When the rainy season hits, I find myself dreaming of the high desert. Tuscon, my grandmother’s old, flat ranch house with the baskets large enough to hold my child body, cold terra cotta tiles that matched the shapely ones curving like fault lines on the roof. Cacti with their arms in the air, holding atop their heads screech owl nests and bats and colorless flowers.

Instead, because it’s clearly a year to stay close to home, I find myself going on weekend trips to places I loved as a child, places that signaled to me, when we moved from Southern California to Northern in the late-nineties, that we’d found abundance in the form of rocky shorelines and tide pools.

My mom, sister, and I took my niece and nephew to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium at the beginning of February, a belated Christmas present. We rented a little house in Seaside, and cooked, and played endless games of Uno, and gave each other nicknames, and spent one rainy day combing the streets of Cannery Row, eating salt water taffy and looking at the leggy jellyfish and seizing any moment when the sun disentangled itself from the clouds.

My favorite exhibit has always been the giant female octopus, even if she has crammed herself into invisibility in spaces the size of a bell jar.

Octopodes are extraordinarily smart, though that isn’t exactly why I admire them. I love them because they are seemingly equal parts fierce and vulnerable.

An octopus can make her skin raised or bumpy, change color, turn to spikes, or do anything necessary in order to match the landscape around her, by controlling the projections on her papillae. While this is a feature of both male and female octopodes, it is usually the female who deploys this skill, turning to a one-woman battalion if her young are threatened.

They have three hearts. Their blood is blue. Octopuses are boneless, which is how they can wedge themselves into jars, behind tight coral or curl around objects or plants in the sea.

Octopus mating rituals are nothing special. Many marine biologists have remarked that they look like “they’re just going about their business.” No pomp. The male octopus has a mating arm, which he extends and inserts into a cavity on the female octopus, keeping his distance lest she try to ensnare and strangle him.

“The males have a host of tricks to survive the mating process,” says Katherine Harmon Courage of BBC Earth. “Some of them can quite literally mate at arm’s length. Others sneak into a female’s den disguised as another gal, or sacrifice their entire mating arm to the female and then make a hasty retreat.” 

Female octopodes are larger and hungrier than their male counterparts. It’s every bit as likely that they’ll mate with a male as strangle and eat him. Conversely, the females die shortly after laying their many eggs, dissolving their own bodies to feed their young. Joan Halifax uses this as an example of pathological altruism in her book “Standing on the Edge”.

As I stood at the edge of her tank at the aquarium, which was covered with small, white, rectangular signs that featured a picture of a camera with an X drawn through it and words reading “DO NOT FLASH THE OCTOPUS”, I watched men of all sizes and shapes shine their iPhones directly in her one visible eye. I thought about the lines from the Mary Szybist poem:

The Lushness of It 

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you 
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon 
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows 
            of seaweed and feel 
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains: as you float, feel 
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  Feel 
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus 
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three 
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

The fourth time the flash flashed—when the octopus didn’t reach through the glass and strangle and eat the man next to me—I put my body between him and her. “You’re done here,” I said firmly. He looked at me with surprise, his own pupils large in the low light. I could see myself shining in his own pupils, arms crossed, a good foot shorter. Something moved in the blackness there, and I felt it as surely as a heart turning red: this is a man who has hit women. He looked at the people gathered around us, the children with their faces flat to the thick glass, and he walked wordlessly away.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. At the same time, she knows when it’s time to acknowledge a great cause—in her case, the need to keep alive an entire next generation of youth.

The no-bullshit of animals means there’s no performance of self, no need to deconstruct the way a self is socialized. Maybe animals are a living manifestation of honesty.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because I have reached a level of self-awareness that includes knowing what I struggle to become.

When I was young, my adopted dad used to take the door off my room when I was in trouble, which always felt like the worst punishment imaginable. He read our emails, our diaries, listened in on our phone calls—he asked his friends around town to keep an eye on me and my sisters. When I had my first kiss in the almond orchard by my middle school, he knew about it before I even registered what had happened. Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.

Context: my adoptive dad was abusive. I got in trouble for everything from legitimate fuck-ups of youth (skipping class) to things that just bothered him (burning incense). As a manipulative, MENSA-level genius with a history of Vietnam-era warfare, my adoptive dad know exactly the kind of violation taking a door off the hinges was for a teenage girl.

Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.
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To circle back around–maybe the female octopus isn’t the best example of boundaries. However, she’s a really great example of understanding where her boundaries are. Anger, for example, is a useful tool because it shows us where our boundaries are, and thus, how they’ve been violated. And while we can’t be 100% certain that the female octopus is angry when she strangles and eats her mate (she might just be hungry, and that’s okay), she has a robust understanding of how to get where she needs to be in the world. She doesn’t care about whether or not her behavior is socially acceptable.

This is the moment where I meet and try to channel the octopus—there seems to be a lesson in this for me/us: the realization that boundaries are necessary for cultivating and protecting the work you’ve done on yourself. That psychic, emotional, physical, intellectual, romantic, platonic energy are expendable resources that all work together in an ecosystemic way.

We are taught, especially people socialized as female, that:

• we have no right to boundaries
• putting up boundaries means sacrificing love and care
• putting up boundaries means people will leave rather than invest the time to respect them
• putting up boundaries is cold-hearted, or less vulnerable than not
• putting up boundaries means you are inflexible, unavailable to change

Furthermore, that forgiveness is not only a) mandatory, but b) must look like inviting someone back into your space and life, and lastly, c) the work of the person most harmed in the situation to do and do alone.

On boundaries, the magnificent Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“What steals energy that you do not fully grant, is a thief in the house of the psyche. Whether it be a person, a place, a memory, a conversation, a meeting, or you yourself being the leaking seal around the chamber wherein the treasure is kept.

Think on these things if you lose energy easily, and make the adjustments to what you can and cannot engage with, accordingly, as you can, as is within your will and within your power.

We all have an energy range, as does a light bulb. Put too little or too much or too sustainedly or not sustainedly enough energy through the vehicle, and the light will not be the brightest as it has been constructed for/to/with/about/regarding.”

In her podcast ‘Tarot for the Wild Soul’, Lindsay Mack says this of boundaries: “The management of the fences around the property of yourself are necessary to make sure your crops and cultivated self is taken care of.”

What a concept to realize that setting boundaries is something that usually happens because you love the people involved. My friend Joey Gould insists, “’No’ is a love word.”

Here’s the not-so-secret thing about introspection in winter: the season is, itself, remarkably boundaried. You have less energy, sleep more, are more accountable to the animal of yourself because the borders of your landscape (the weather, the city, the clothes, the darker days) are starkly clear. And perhaps tulips, and sun, both respectively breaking from their bulbs and the clouds, teach us that we must hold on to the borders of ourselves even as the world around us becomes less obviously boundaried.

The lessons we learn from the female octopus may not be one of taking her boundaries as our own, but rather, understanding what our own boundaries are. What’s more: how to be both fiercely protective and generously tender at the same time.

“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
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But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
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What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?

My good old dog is at my feet in a gray dog bed; he’s injured his back chasing a squirrel. We both forget that he’s fourteen. I give him cannabis dog treats to help the pain, and carry him down the back steps so he can go to the bathroom. Now he’s looking at me with his big, button eyes, glazed over. I barely know how to help.

My students recently did a presentation on Childish Gambino’s “This is America” this week. One of my brightest stopped, mid-sentence, looking at the still of Donald Glover holding an assault weapon.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that we just had another mass shooting,” she said quietly. She is talking about Pittsburg, which, at the time of this class, had only happened a few days prior. We were still recovering from Kavanaugh (they’d been learning about moral reasoning, and we’d used the Supreme Court Justice position as an opportunity to explore ethics).

I opened a bright pink box of donuts. “Please eat,” I said to them, my palms open. They each took a donut gingerly, and I felt my heart riotous in my chest.

Let me backup a minute.

When I took this teaching job, I was shown a tiny black box, hidden in each classroom. “If there’s a shooter,” the Office Manager of my department said to me, somewhat cheerily, “just push this button and say ‘everything is just fine.’ That way, they don’t think you’re reporting them, and shoot you.”

I think about the fact that the dashboard of my car still shows mileage in kilometers because I don’t know how to reset it. How I threaten to throw my perfectly good printer out the window on a weekly basis because I don’t know how to unjam paper. My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.

In a few weeks, I’m traveling to Tucson to teach a Gender Empowerment and Allyship workshop for community members, K12 educators, and parents. I’ve rightfully gotten a lot of pushback about this because even though I’m grayscale genderqueer and a femme who does trauma awareness and transcompetency in education, I’m still pretty comfortable with pronouns that define me as cis.

I get it. The pushback, I mean. And…

I believe that we’re living in a time where we’re redefining what cohesion and solidarity look like. A time when allyship and the work of allies needs to step up and utilize the privileges and resources that we have in order to center and hold up the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities.

My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.
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I know that we (my community, educators, activists) have had many discussions about how to center trans and genderqueer narratives without placing the burden of education on said folks, and I feel grateful that this workshop is an opportunity to begin that work. I recognize that this is an evolving process, one that must remain living and porous in order to consistently identify and meet the needs of those who have been pushed even further into the margins by the very real dangers of our political landscape.

I feel honored and excited to be invited to participate in this larger conversation and skillshare. Excited and honored to be just one small piece of this event, which is made up, aside from myself, of locals. I feel excited to be using the education and privilege that I have to help dismantle the problematic systems that keep our most vulnerable community members disempowered. Excited to see how allyship and solidarity can manifest when we have these intergenerational, interdisciplinary, inter-pedagogical conversations.

I’m having these conversations the day the news about the shooting comes through. I’m on the phone with a trans high school principal in Arizona, talking about listening to the most vulnerable members of our community, when Kavanaugh is sworn into the Supreme Court.

See? Every time we start to make a path to healing, another massive disruption happens in our country that derails us. It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.

I like to say, and say it often, that teaching and writing and reading and staying engaged are the answer, and I believe that — I do. And yet it’s difficult to figure out what to teach, what to write, what to read, what to engage with. Sometimes, I feel like I’m merely teaching my students skills for harm reduction: how to not be manipulated by the media. How to be kind to other people. How to take no shit, but do no harm. To be thoughtful.

Then I remember bell hooks and about how syllabi and pedagogy are inherently colonialist, so I also think a good deal about how to make the classroom less of a white, feminized space. And also how to throw my body into the fire if I need to.

It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.
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Is that allyship? Is that taking autonomy? Am I in the right to do this? Knowing about being or not being in the “right” requires understanding one’s own position, which means understanding one’s self. Which, for me, as a person with CPTSD and chronic pain and a smorgasboard of intersecting marginalized identities, means carving time out for therapies.

Is allyship privileged?

“Yes and no” is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions. Every day I teach my students that many truths can exist alongside one another, that there isn’t really a “right” answer to anything—only an evolving attempt at an answer. Allyship itself, as a concept, isn’t privileged; allyship comes from a place of deep love, compassion, and empathy, which are all traits even people being actively attacked can feel and foster.

But the way self care, as an industry, has been created as a “mindfulness culture” (inside capitalism, inside the United States, specifically)—that is particularly privileged. To have access to therapy, to the education necessary to not only be hired to stand in front of rooms of people for pay, but to also even know that allyship is urgently necessary. After all, it’s a term we use largely in circles that are, if not entirely academic, often radical, activist, or informed by collective consciousness—and in order to have access to that information, that terminology, you still need to have certain resources.

Is allyship privileged? ‘Yes and no’ is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions.
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This has been my year of teaching out of a suitcase. Of traveling across the country and showing up in classrooms and bookstores and living rooms, poetry centers and bars and cafeterias. Of re-thinking the framework of how education *really* works, and where it gets to live. Of putting down the pedagogical framework for de-constructing the very slight differences between “novice” and “expert”.

Not only because of what is happening in the world, the political landscape. But because it’s become alarmingly clear that our institutions—which produce the results they are intended to—are failing the majority of our most vulnerable friends and community members. They’re failing us, too.

Keep evolving your attempt at an answer.

I write: Stalin was more brutal than Hitler.

I write: 10,293 tons of printer ink makes its way to the ocean each year.

I write:  Barack Obama was born in the United States.

They look at me with their half-moon eyelids, heavily. They have likely scrolled through dozens of status updates, tweets, and headlines by the time I am on the road to school with my travel mug of coffee. They know more about a constructed world than I do, and we both know it.

Once the students have all arrived, I have them self-select break-out groups, five in each.

“Now,” I announce grandly, my dry-erase in my left hand, walking to the front of the board like Vanna White. “Which of these are facts, and which are opinions?”

That is the lesson for today: the fundamentals of thinking. Differentiating between when something is opinion (which is overtly subjective) and when something is truth (which is covertly subjective). Once they’ve weighed in on their verdicts (opinion, opinion but easy to substantiate, opinion, fact), we do another round.

“Ok,” I say, “Now, what needs to happen to make these opinions facts?”

We broke it down to it’s cardboard-box basics: in order for an opinion to be a fact, the abstract must become concrete. What does it mean to conquer the world? What if it was universally, specifically defined? Well, then we’d know what it entails, and, under our enterprising capitalism, which shoes to wear while we did our conquering.

Then we do a third round. I give the students context about each of the quotes—information that may compromise their ability to think critically. Suddenly, the oceans affected (even though I made the number up about the printer ink) are very near to our backyard beaches. Suddenly, I reveal that the first statement (roughly) belonged to Marilyn Monroe (“How does it change the meaning to know that the shoes may be stilettos?”). At the end of this exercise, I showed them a video of Mollie Tibbetts’ father, talking about how inappropriately his daughter’s death is being used, to further a racist agenda she didn’t believe in.

“Find the information, find the facts,” I told them, and they set to work. They Googled and scoured social media; they looked at both reliable and unreliable sources using their laptops or their phones. I accepted unreliable information along with reliable, so we could hold each one up to the light and look through it.

A student approached me after class.

“My question is—are there any right answers? At the end of the day, are we all just making decisions based off our core values?” She asked, holding her folder to her chest as if shielding herself from the insult of vagueness.

“You’ve just identified the very crux of this class,” I smiled.

Here are a few facts that help break down the current relevance or irrelevance of facts:

1. It has, as of last year, been two hundred years since John Keats introduced the idea of negative capability, or the ability to sit with uncertainty, mystery, or doubt without needing to reach for reason or fact.
2. Last night, my friend Nadia sat across from me, slumped back in her chair after we’d just finished a two-hour go-around about what art is (and is not). “Art just… promotes thinking,” she said, exhausted.
3. A man in my screenwriting class, who is currently balls-deep in writing a superhero script about an anti-hero superhero who “doesn’t see race,” demanded that I explain to him my two female teenage characters. “Are they gay, or aren’t they?” “They’re teenagers,” I said to him, counting the number of circles in the pegboard behind his head.

Critical thinking, I’m told, is the externalization of the process of thought; it is the consciousness surrounding thinking, which is, or can be, a subconscious process. For example, we can know the following from these pieces of information, from this externalization of my own fact-gathering: negative capability is still in full-force; art is a tool for greater understanding and nothing more/less; and sexuality is more “acceptably” fluid than it used to be.

These are the ‘facts’ I’ve gathered in just the past few days, and they bump up against one another in the darkness of my brain.

Critical thinking, I’m told, is the externalization of the process of thought; it is the consciousness surrounding thinking.
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I am constantly reminding my students that I’m no authority on anything. I’m constantly providing materials that demonstrate that there are only varying degrees of truth and falsehood. It can make a person feel bananas, sometimes, realizing how much of their life they spend talking about the value of not only seeing and navigating gray areas, but also being wholly comfortable with them. That without negative capability, or grayscale, we’d not be able to digest art.

And now, with alternative facts, fake news, and click-bait, we’d not be able to hold our realities and our surrealities in the same hand.

There is value in taking the time to sit back and reflect, be grateful for, hold, how little we know. Or, rather, that the truths we know sometimes go to the mat with one another.

“We live in a post-truth world,” says The Guardian. I disagree. I think we live in a world rife and ripe with a smorgasbord of truths, a world we must show up to with a tool belt of discernment and critical thinking skills. A world that needs a nuanced touch. “Post-truth world” makes me think too much about my twelfth grade English teacher (whom I loved like a father), who prepped us for the world by plying us with dystopian literature, and then died a few years before things got truly dystopian.

However, even if we entertain the thought that we do live in a present state of post-truth, what of it? We humans are by definition irreconcilable, full of contradictory definitions of truths, momentary and life-long.

“The terrible thing about the movie Titanic,” a mentor once told me, “is that there’s nothing complicated about it—it’s just fucking sad. You want a true measure of human nature?” he shook his head ruefully, “Watch Clockwork Orange.”

I don’t disagree. Once, while in the middle of a soul-crushing breakup where I lived off tears and Doritos, I found myself sitting in a room with a woman who had a tipped-over pear on the table in front of her. The pear was so lovely, so shapely. I was suddenly overcome with a lust for the woman that was so intense I had to leave immediately. I can be miserable and lustful at the same time. A person can be bludgeoned in the head while Singing in the Rain plays in the background.  

After all, we hold prisms of truth inside us every day. We love art by artists who have done awful things. We are committed to our lives, but dream of uprooting to Fiji. We help a struggling stranger with change, a hand, a coat, but have violent revenge fantasies about the man in the BMW who cut us off on the freeway. We’re not straightforward in our human-ness, ever, and why should we be? That’d be a disservice to the very best things that we contain (which would be multitudes).

Keep being complicated.

“I do, but I’d rather hear about what you remember,” I said, turning down the heady beats of the Wu-Tang Clan I’d been introducing him to. (“Auntie! he’d exclaimed, “This is so much better than Drake!”)

Folded up beside me like a blue heron, or an oil rig, my nephew is a coltish six feet tall, and nearly all legs; he took a long time to respond.

“I remember the dinosaur stickers on my bed,” he finally said, softly. When I followed his gaze out the window, I saw the cranes of the Oakland Port, looking themselves like ancient, industrial beasts. I saw the externalized thought, the making-adult of a childhood memory, the attempt to make contact. He startled me by continuing, “—before I knew they were dinosaurs. When you’re that little, you have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.”

Long after I dropped him off, his revelation boomed inside me.  

You have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.

I see evidence of this everywhere: sensing danger before it’s visibly apparent, reading a room, attraction (to another body, to an object that shines just right). Those of us who are able-bodied walk around without really thinking about walking around. We’re repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.

Where, I marveled, did he learn that?

My nephew was talking about linguistics, mostly, and motor skills. He was talking about world-building concepts, like space and time. Things you learn through a kind of osmosis. However, my own first responses—how to sense danger, how to read a room, how to tell if I’m attracted to someone or something or not (and immediately after, if I think the attraction is a good idea or a potentially harmful one)—shows a lot about me as a person. That I learned at a young age how to intuit threat, and how to defuse, defend, or otherwise navigate it.

Today I woke up and I noticed this: a tomato plant in my backyard has grown around a brick.

As the tomatoes start showing their bashful faces, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this muscle memory. A few weeks ago, someone threw a brick through my front window in Oakland. Yesterday, a man made a gun of his hands and pretended to shoot me with it. Down the street, MacArthur Bart is still sewed up with yellow police tape, and Nia Wilson has officially been gone for a week. Down the other side of the street, tent cities bloom and die, bloom and die. Civilians and cops circle one another warily.

Humans are repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.
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And it’s the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which reminds us that this systemic racism, this cyclical grief, is not even remotely new.

Even if we didn’t cognitively know that to be true, we feel it. The muscle memory of collective trauma prompts us to slide into unconscious action and movement during times like these. We check in with each other more. We shut down ICE facilities. We write, we draw, we archive, we connect.

“There are many ways to show up for a revolution,” my very wise friend Ste once told me. “Jesus and Gloria Anzaldua feed people. Holding a sign is just one way.”

Do you ever feel uncomfortable with how comfortable we can go from zero to 60, and quickly? As if our lives depended upon it (they do). This response is an infinitely helpful one, of course, but it implies a world that is rife with disaster and destruction, one in which an emergency kit must always be at the ready.

I recognize that not everyone feels this way. In fact, it seems to me that the majority of the burden of showing up, educating, and emotional labor falls on marginalized communities, even within liberal and artistic spaces. I understand that the disenfranchised have a more robust understanding of how to handle crisis—for obvious reasons—but our collective inability to have difficult conversations and engage in difficult labor is what landed us with the president and administration we have now.

#MeToo is perhaps a relevant and ongoing example I can point to. While I feel grateful and slain by those in my community (and those in positions of power outside my community) who came forward and told their own harrowing stories, a little part of myself felt distraught: why is it the responsibility of victims to shock the world into caring? Why doesn’t the world just believe people when they claim they’ve been abused? And, even more upsetting, why hasn’t the movement gone farther? What will it take to end rape culture in our country?

Still, some changes are palpable. Holding people publicly accountable is pretty effective. As I enter into the film and television industry—I’m currently taking my first screenwriting course—I can detect the ways in which Hollywood is trying to change its tune.

Nia Wilson’s killer has been apprehended, and folks are still unsure if it was racially motivated, and doesn’t that say something about the ways in which the baseline holds up? That white men can still get away with being assumed not racist until proven otherwise, even when they kill people of color in front of dozens of onlookers?

I feel proud of Oakland for showing up. I also feel sad for Oakland.

I feel proud because I love a city that knows how to handle itself with aplomb in a crisis. I feel sad because the hard truth is that the marginalized and traumatized are always taxed and overburdened with responding—with grace and empathy—to ride or die situations. Individually, and systemically.

We’re seeing an appalling display of what unchecked privilege and power can do. Everyday, hundreds of examples: a man going on a spree with a knife on public transportation, our president taunting entire nations over Twitter, Oakland cops taking advantage of underage women.

For all our unconscious super power—for all our psychological spidey-sense of self-protection against impending violence—how do we know when we are in a Reckoning? I’m so ready for the meek to inherit the Earth. I’m so ready for those who instinctively have a realistic understanding of the danger and beauty and tenuousness and finiteness of our world to have some power in deciding how to run it.

My nephew is right, but is also too young (I think, but what do I know?) to fully understand the additional layer of this fraught knowledge, the one that comes with time and experience and, unfortunately, getting roughed up a bit: the things we have no memory of learning as individuals, the things we hold to be the dearest of knowledge—these are very, very different than the things we collectively know as a society.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of understanding what is wrong with the world on an individual versus a systemic level—well. It’s tiny. As a society we don’t share that baseline. And that’s terrifying.

Walking through the streets of my city and seeing it fall all around me really does make me feel like my basement should be stocked with water and canned beans. And it is (thanks to my Virgo sweetheart).

But I’m mostly stocked up with myself: my muscle memory of how to move in a world that feels like a war-zone. I’m stocked up with my phone tree, my books, my plants that grow around evidence of industrialization. I’m stocked up with my capacity for listening, with my compassion, with my chosen family. I’m stocked up with you.

Keep fighting. I love you.

Recently, while listening too closely to an audio book of Donna Tartt reading her work The Secret History, I accidentally drove straight in a Left Turn Only lane. I’d been distracted by the cute lilt of her voice, the way she’d managed to make each character sound exactly the way I’d imagined them sounding each of the four times I’d read the novel.

Unfortunately, the California Highway Patrolman who pulled me over couldn’t be convinced of Donna Tartt’s charms. When the citation arrived a week later in the mail, I was so shocked at the $300 ticket that I dropped an entire bag of groceries and my thermos of freshly-made coffee onto the freshly-swept front porch of my house. The yogurt split open, and the hot coffee fell right into it, curdling it into the sickly mess I imagine my stomach to be every morning after breakfast.

I’d never gotten a ticket before — never a ticket I couldn’t wide-eye my way out of, anyway. I have a kind of dopey, doe-eyed face — big green eyes that make me look like the world is slowly dawning on me one watt at a time. It makes strangers think I’m naïve and absent-minded, and since it largely conceals my absolute disdain for authority, I rarely correct them.

The truth was, I couldn’t afford the $300 ticket — who could? I am a poet. My income is largely from the contract work I do for a patient advocacy nonprofit (sporadically throughout the school year), ghostwriting for a publishing company, and the occasional copy editing/journalism job. So I decided to fight the ticket, even though it meant driving to San Rafael and appearing in court.

I’d done everything I could to prepare for court — I wore dark, professional-looking clothes, I carried a manila envelope (which was actually empty, but gave me the look of having proof of exoneration, so I thought). I even wore a casual lip, more maroon than my typical vintage red. When I stepped into the courtroom at my 1:30 p.m. slot, I’d prepared for absolutely everything — except being in court.

A friend from the Midwest once told me that buildings in California have the bizarre appearance of being simultaneously stuck in the ’70s and oddly futuristic, a mash-up that manages to resemble no future, or present, that we know of. The courtroom, dressed in a variety of drab browns, sharp angles, and rectangular florescent lights, did seem to resemble a beige octagonal spaceship.

If this had been television — and it did look like television, if the most epically boring space courtroom drama also took place in a portable classroom — then I’d have courageously and confidently walked up to the stand, delivered my sanctimonious statement of injustice, and been handed back the $300 I’d had to pre-pay, preferably in one-dollar bills that would look like the tears of working writers around the world.

Instead, this is life. Instead, I immediately felt my body freeze, my blood feeling as if it were slowly swelling up inside my skin. I couldn’t quell, nor understand, the sudden feelings of immobility and terror that overtook me, as I surveyed the judge, the bevy of police officers, and the 40 other working-class people who’d come to contest their tickets during my same time slot.

This is San Rafael, 2015, but suddenly it is Indio, Riverside County, 1994. The judge has the same face as any judge. The drone of names being called for attendance transcends decades, buzzing in a low vibration that makes me feel nauseous. I reach to hold onto something, but there only seems to be me, and I am floating somewhere above two of my bodies: the body of myself at age 8, and the body of myself at 28.

“Do you consent to living with this family?” The judge peers down at me. My aunt and uncle are not looking at me. My uncle, who never consented to anything, glares at the stucco on the ceiling above us. My aunt, I can tell, is silently praying, clutching her oversized handbag where she keeps her Marlboros.

My hand collides with the hard backing of a long bench, which elicits the simultaneous comfort and horror of a church pew. I am in Indio, but not. My adoptive parents are not in this room. The wood of the bench has collided my two bodies together so that I am now one person — one very terrified and blood-swollen person, but singular. The case is dismissed; the officer had failed to appear. As I shakily leave the courtroom and find my way back to my old blue pickup truck, I collapse inside the hot interior. I lay down for a good, long time before I am ready to drive home. I vow never to listen to audio-books while I drive again.

Do you know about EMDR? If not, it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing. There are a lot of things it does, but the big one, as I understand it, is this: it reroutes and reprocesses the way your brain responds to things, so that you no longer respond out of trauma-instinct, and instead can process events and situations with rationale and analysis. Like normal, non-traumatized people.

I began going to EMDR last winter, after my life began to become really, really amazing. Because after my life started to become really, really amazing, I began waking up in the middle of the night in terror, afraid, suddenly, of death. I’d be in a crowded room full of people, laughing and enjoying being present and then suddenly, be overcome with the dreadful thought that this was a memory already. I began to feel, even in daylight, that I was floating outside of my body, hanging around myself as if by the ribbon of a balloon.

But the middle-of-the-night terrors — those were horrifying. I’d often wake myself up sobbing, not understand why I was crying, only knowing that I was so scared, and so tired, and so tired of being scared. I began to be afraid of going to sleep, and then afraid of the dark, and then afraid of late afternoon. Only the brightest part of morning was safe.

This made perfect sense to my therapist — because she’s a genius and goddess of the world, apparently. So we set about working on changing the neuropathways of my brain to switch from chronic-trauma brain (the other shoe is always going to drop, always stay ahead of everyone else, trust no one, you are going to lose everything) to normative processing brain (it’s OK to have good things happen, take a deep breath, yes loss will happen but you can handle it, you can handle everything, here’s a plan).

“And then I just became terrified, frozen in place,” I tell her in a session, after the courthouse incident. “I’m grateful I didn’t have to speak, but I am worried about this . . . nonconsensual time-travel that happens when I get teleported back to traumatic events. It’s like ending up in Knockturn instead of Diagon Alley.”

(Note: I use Harry Potter metaphors ceaselessly when talking about trauma. I don’t know if J.K. Rowling knows how much her books made understanding trauma-brain easier for me, but I owe her some serious credit for the way I study brain patterns.)

My therapist has me envision both courtrooms, and my responses to each, while she pushes a button that vibrates the small, football-shaped buzzers in each of my hands. She asks me to think about the responses that come up for me, and to lean into them, even if they make me feel sick, or scared.

“What are you afraid of?” she asks.

“Voicelessness,” I say, thinking about the 8-year-old me who’d lost her parents, who had no say in where to go, who couldn’t even begin to understand what was happening to her. Thinking about the 28-year-old me who didn’t know she was walking into a wormhole when she decided to contest a traffic ticket.

Then she asks me to think about what I need in that moment, in order to feel like I was in control.

I think of my hometown. It is a small, orchard-lined town of about 6,000 people, mostly migrant workers. It is poor, and it is beautiful. There is a road where someone once told me R. Crumb used to live. It’s called Moody Slough, and it stretches out lazily past the creek bed, dry now, alongside the Agriculture Site where high school students raise pigs, and into the foothills. I used to drive my old Volkswagon, Lola, through the darkest part of night, to the end of Moody Slough, and cut the engine. Cut the lights. Open the doors that were nearly rusted shut, and drape myself across the hood, where thousands (it seemed) of frogs yelled into the night, in and out of sync, and the stars glared down as hard and glinting as a million knife points.

When I was a teenager, and my parents would kick me out, I’d often come here and sleep on the hood of my car, or in the fields themselves, until it got light enough to go to my 4 a.m. shift at the bait shop. When I go back to my hometown, I still drive to Moody Slough, and thank heavens it has survived the slow development that all of rural California eventually succumbs to.

My therapist has me transpose the two, and suddenly, I am back in the courtroom, surrounded by the same nameless people who are also fighting their tickets. I cut the engine of my body. The fluorescent lights have dimmed, and as I open my rusted self, every one of us begins to sing the terrible, loud, wild songs of frogs.

“Sharks are feared. Sharks are bloodthirsty. Sharks just cruise around the ocean with their mouths open, full of sharp, dangerous teeth sucking in krill and little fish. Sharks are feared as the killers of the ocean, but actually, they’re an endangered species.” –The Femme Shark Manifesto

Let me start by acknowledging my position as a fierce, femme-identified, queer, biracial dyke. I am a working-class writer who is writing from the privileged position-ality of having come into femme identity in a relatively femme-centric queer community in Oakland, California. I recognize that my experiences do not constitute the absolute femme experience, and that “femme” is a deeply layered political identity with a wide variety of histories, representations, manifestations, and interpretations.

That said, over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time with fierce-ass femmes and femme-allies alike. And I’ve come to realize something: there is intense femmephobia within queer communities.

This realization came about in part because of a move from Oakland to Salt Lake City, where I encountered few femme-centric groups that had the primary objective of community building or betterment. Moreover, those femme or feminine-presenting queer folks (henceforth known as FPP, or Feminine Presenting Persons) I did meet were regularly iced out, disregarded, invalidated, or unwelcome in circles of largely masculine-of-center queers and trans folks. (Important aside: while femmes and feminine-presenting folks are often treated as the same thing, they are not always the same.)

To address this issue, I began a community video project, which started as a zine, by asking folks point-blank: “What does the word femme mean to you?” I generally got one of two highly disconcerting responses:

1. A femme is a queer woman who looks straight!
2. Femmes wear heels!

These answers do a significant disservice to the general bad-assery that is femme identity — and they certainly aren’t specific to Salt Lake City. In most radical queer communities, I’ve witnessed sexualization, fetishization, or sexual harassment projected onto femme or FPP bodies. I’ve seen people expect femmes and FPP to date, play with, be sweet on, or be partnered with other queers who identify as trans* masculine, butch, or any other identity or body that is more visibly masculine-of-center. I’ve witnessed violent and aggressive transphobia surrounding femme or feminine queer identities. And I’ve attended house parties themed in drag representations of femme or feminine identities in largely masculine-of-center queer circles, in which feminine identities or bodies were trivialized.

Fierce femme identity, to me, is a purposefully blurry entity unto itself, and I think there is something gorgeously radical in that ambiguity. I can tell you what femme does not mean with a bit more ease: femme identity is not especially rooted in physical appearance — to qualify as a glorious femme, you do not need to wear heels, glittery eye shadow, garters, or stockings, nor do you need to date butches or masculine-of-center folks, or any other such limiting nonsense. Though glitter, dresses, makeup, bowties, and thigh-high cheetah print boots are my current fierce femme M.O., one of the wonderful aspects of femme identity is that it is inclusive and embracing of femmes with all kinds of styles, abilities, desires, tastes, backgrounds, and preferences.

What’s up, pajama femmes! What’s up, masculine-of-center femmes! What’s up, high femmes, femmberjacks, low femmes, gender queer femmes, femme-on-femme femmes, femme sharks, dolphins, platypuses, etc.!

I believe that it is systematically problematic to create borders and limitations to the definition of identity — in the book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses how the naming of a thing, its taxonomy, can be a beautiful and radical act, but dualistically can lead to the identity becoming a target for policing and violence.

Femme identity is absolutely a political act — there is no way for it to be anything but extremely radical (and hot! Did I mention hot?).

In the Femme Shark Manifesto, written by Leah Lakshmi, there is a magnificent communiqué about how femme sharks understand that going out into the world as fierce femmes is an everyday act of revolution against systems of oppression that actively work, through violent acts of misogyny, to restrict individuals embodying any kind of radicalized gender identity.

And you’re abso-fucking-lutely right that femme identity is a gender identity! And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I think that fierce, radical femme identity (such as the representation of femme identity presented by the Femme Shark Manifesto) is a queer identity, too. This is not to say that a body must identify as a queer to claim femme identity, but that femme identity is a queer, radicalized, politicized gender representation.

Queer femininity and femme identity actively work against oppression and misogyny by representing a gender identity that refuses to be anything but fierce.

A person who is a feminist and is feminine-presenting may not necessarily identify as a femme, and a person who is a femme may not be feminine-presenting nor identify as a feminist. And so on.

Femme identity is a beautiful smorgasboard of radical identity politics and the historical embodiment of learning from a legacy of really fierce femmes who have come before: femmes who helped bail their butches out of jail, clean them up, and sustain them after pre-Stonewall raids; femmes who have held rent parties for community members, who have helped to nurse sick lovers and chosen family; femmes who have stood in picket lines, been tear-gassed, been victims of sexual/domestic/urban/rural violence and all of the subsequent trauma; femmes who have written manifestos, created safe spaces, held conferences and community debriefings — all to help ensure the safe pathways of their fellow and future femmily, and to help build stronger queer communities and foundations.
Many times, femme identity is a reaction to and transcendence from unspeakable trauma, including racism, misogyny, genderism, and classism. It can be a method of survival, as well as a big fat fuck you to the patriarchal systems of oppression that govern everything, including many circles of queer communities.

Yes, I said it, sweet queer family — let’s watch ourselves! We are obviously and absolutely not exempt from gender bullshit, included, but not limited to, misogyny and femmephobia, despite being a part of a political identity that has, itself, been historically and systematically oppressed.

As my brilliant friend and fellow writer-activist TT Jax says, “Any of us who claim community are responsible for what we allow to happen in it. When we protect our abusers — including when we tacitly ignore them, but allow them to continue to perform and access queer spaces — we punish our survivors and maintain the cycle of violence.”

There are many ways to be an ally and to help break the systems of oppression within queer communities. Some dos and don’ts of how to be an ally to femmes and FPP include:

Do Not:

1. Assume all femmes/FPP are cisgender or cis-sexed.
2. Assume all femmes/FPP do or do not identify as lesbian, queer, female, bottom, or submissive.
3. Assume all femmes/FPP are passive and/or weak.
4. Tell a self-identified femme that they are not a femme.
5. Pressure those you see as femme to identify as femme.
6. Become threatened or violent when a femme/FPP steps outside your view of what it means to be femme or feminine-presenting.*
7. Expect femmes/FPP to educate you on identity politics, misogyny, or misogynist-driven community violence.

*It is not about you.

*It doesn’t make them more or less queer.

*It doesn’t make them more or less of a femme/FPP.

Do:

1. Hold femmes/FPP up for the individuals they are, without expecting them to conform to society’s views of normative femininity.
2. If a femme/FPP has specific sexual preferences or boundaries, please know and accept:
3. Ask for help or engage in conversations with your community about how to deconstruct or learn about your own privilege in relation to the further marginalized people in your communities, including but not limited to femmes/FPP.
4. Stand up for femmes/FPP when people speak disparagingly of us. Challenge misogynist thinking.
5. Take accountability for your own actions. Think about your positionality within your community, and how you may or may not be contributing to oppressive structures of hierarchy.
6. Empower yourself to expand your education about different identities within your own community. Read widely and voraciously from the multitudes of zines, articles, discussion forums, and anthologies available to you (like this and this). Like the talented and articulate Mia McKenzie, among many, many others! If you have any questions or concerns, ask your community for help.
7. Allow yourself to be called out, and to call others out, responsibly and constructively.

To invalidate femmes and feminine-presenting folks, or to refuse them the respect they are due, is to inflict hurt on an entire queer community. Take a page from the Femme Sharks, who say: “Believe in communities that heal hurt, apologize, listen to each other, and make things right.”

I grew up in the far-flung wiles of Blythe, California. Never heard of it? You’re not alone.

Blythe has a population of just over 19,000, and at the time I lived there in the late ’80s and ’90s, it was one of Riverside County’s poorest towns. The primary crop was cotton, the average income was $16,000 per year (for families with more than three members), and the composition was 83% non-white — of those documented. The main profession was migrant work: day labor, cotton picking, crop dusting.

My family lived in Palo Verde Mobile Home Park, on the east side of town. The Colorado River and the border of Arizona were a stone’s throw away. Our corrugated home was surrounded by irrigation canals, where my uncles often fished and caught dinner, and where one uncle, years later, was found bloated and floating, death unknown.

It wasn’t what anyone would call a glamorous experience.

This background, this essential part of who I am, makes it particularly difficult to stomach the latest trend in “simple” living — people moving into tiny homes and trailers. How many folks, I wonder, who have engaged in the Tiny House Movement have ever actually lived in a tiny, mobile place? Because what those who can afford homes call “living light,” poor folks call “gratitude for what we’ve got.”

And it’s not just the Tiny House Movement that incites my discontent. Fromdumpster diving to trailer-themed bars to haute cuisine in the form of poor-household staples, it’s become trendy for those with money to appropriate the poverty lifestyle — and it troubles me for one simple reason. Choice.

The Tiny House Movement began in the ’90s, but has only been rising in popularity since the recession. And to be fair, it’s rooted in a very real problem: more and more people being displaced as a result of soaring housing costs, especially in tech-boom areas like the Bay Area.

“When you have lost decades of earning capacity you really need to rethink things,” writes Andrew Martin for the alternative media, community, and production outlet Collective Evolution. Since the global financial crisis, he points out, the average price of a standard home or apartment has become close to or pushed through the million-dollar mark in many OECD cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, Auckland, London, and New York. “Even in the far-flung outlying suburbs of large cities, properties can easily be priced from $500,000 upwards,” he writes. “Even if you are fortunate enough to have a well-paying job or business, mortgages can take anywhere between 20 to 40 years to repay.”

Tiny homes, which are typically sized at less than 500 square feet and cost an average of “only” $20,000 to $40,000, no doubt serve some people who truly need to spend less money on housing in a difficult economic environment. It’s also commendable that the movement helps trim down on excess and reduce the environmental footprint.

And yet, I can’t help but feel complicatedly about the waxing-ons of pastoral nostalgia; about the bright, glossy photos of tiny houses that promise a “simpler life.” In the same article, Martin writes:

“Living light gives people space to define their worlds and gain more control over how they live life, ultimately leading to greater happiness and satisfaction.”

This idea of “returning” to a “simple life” is one I struggle with. After all, there aren’t any glossy photos of the Palo Verde Mobile Home Park where I grew up, enticing people to live more simply and own less furniture as a means to becoming happier.

This idea of ‘returning’ to a ‘simple life’ is one I struggle with.
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It’s likely, from where I sit, that this back-to-nature and boxed-up simplicity is not being marketed to people like me, who come from simplicity and heightened knowledge of poverty, but to people who have not wanted for creature comforts. For them to try on, glamorize, identify with.

Such appropriation isn’t limited to the Tiny House trend, or even to the idea of simplicity. In major cities, people who come from high-income backgrounds flock to bars and restaurants that both appropriate, and mock, low-income communities. Perhaps the most egregious example is San Francisco’s Butter Bar, a trendy outpost that prides itself on being a true-blue, trailer park-themed bar, serving up the best in “trashy” cuisine and cocktails. With tater tots, microwaved food, and deep-fried Twinkies on the menu, the bar also serves cocktails that contain cheap ingredients, such as Welch’s grape soda.The bar has an actual trailer inside, and serves cans in paper bags, so that bar flies can have a paid-for experience of being what the owners of this bar think of when they think of trailer trash.

It’s but one example of an entire hipster movement — can it be called a movement when it’s a subculture rooted not in political consciousness, but in capitalism? — that has brought with it an ethos of poor-culture appropriation and the “re-invention” of things that have largely been tools of survival for poor, disabled, working class, and/or communities of color for decades.

Another example: when I lived in Utah, it was common for people (and specifically, white people from wealthy Mormon families) to want to take me along dumpster diving, or on Food Not Bombs drop-offs at the local anarchist house. At the time, I felt complicatedly about it — I still do — mostly because I am a person who understands the complications of family relationships, and that coming from families that don’t accept you (the reality for many queer folks in religious states) means that you may not have access to the resources you need to survive. But what became apparent to me in witnessing these dumpster excursions and FNB drop-offs is that the food was not going to any folks of color, despite the fact that I knew native folks in the community (who were queer and single parents to young children) who could barely scrape byon food stamps. The drop-offs were happening at a white anarchist collective filled with people who were choosing not to participate in the system of capitalism.

And I couldn’t help but think: that must be nice. To have that choice.

A friend told me of a similar phenomenon in her city. “They go on welfare, so they don’t have to participate in capitalism,” she said. “Yet they participate in a culture that denounces people of color who go on welfare.” She’s right — the same people of color who may go on welfare out of necessity, out of the systemic oppression that makes it difficult for them to have the same access to upward mobility, are considered socially uncouth and lazy, while white anarchists (in this context) are praised for their radically subversive actions.

Also, food. Can we talk about food? I was raised poor as hell, mostly subsisting on frozen food and whatever was canned in the pantry. For years, I’ve hated rice, because its cheapness and starchiness made it such a staple in our meals. Rice for breakfast with milk. Rice with margarine. Rice with frozen vegetables and canned beans. As an adult, it’s hard for me to eat rice unless I can pretend real hard that it’s not rice. But I still have a bag of it in my cupboard, just in case.

That must be nice. To have that choice.
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For other poor folks, it wasn’t necessarily rice — it was bones. Dried beans with a ham hock. Stewed greens. Meat and pickle plates. And now, these kinds of inexpensive, filling food items most commonly found in poverty-stricken households have become de rigeur at some of the hippest restaurants in the country: you can find meat and pickle plates being schlepped off in fancy restaurants as charcuterie, or bone marrow appetizers for $12 per plate at many of the new eateries popping up in affluent cities (or newly affluent, like Oakland).

In writing this, and making note of these circumstances, I’m not trying to penalize or call out radical communities of people who are looking for alternative means to capitalism — capitalism is oppressive as hell, and I am all about alternative means.

But I do think it’s time to start having conversations about how alternative means aren’t a choice for those who come from poverty. We must acknowledge what it means to make space for people who actually need free food or things out of dumpsters, who participate in capitalism because they’ve got a kid at home and they are the only provider. Additionally, we need to shed light on the fact that many people who grew up wanting for more space and access to foods that weren’t available to them don’t understand the glossy pamphlets offering a simpler life.

Because, let me tell you, there is nothing simple about being poor.