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.

The chairs in the classroom of the Escuela Amaranta Gomez are organized in a circle. The crowd of children takes a while to simmer down, their ages ranging from 7 to 16. Tall, thin, and beautiful, Miss Antonia Jorquera presides before them, wearing a crown and a sash. She waves to the girls, who look at her agape as if she was a Disney princess. Antonia talks about her childhood in the Chilean south, where there was little to no television. A time when she adored pink.

“Like me!” a girl answers.
Antonia laughs. “I’d also put on my mom’s high heels,” she continues.
“Did you do it in hiding?” another girl asks.
“I’d wear them daily! But secretly, otherwise my mom would berate me.”
“My mom lets me,” another girl brags.
“My mom would also let me,” another voice joins.

The side conversation goes on for a while—the classroom brims with the noise of the children. Teacher Romina intervenes: “Could somebody in the classroom define what is a ‘Miss’?”

“A beautiful woman, a diva!” answer some girls. “It appears in the video games, whenever I miss a shot,” jokes a boy.

“What could you say about being a Miss, Antonia?”

“To be a Miss means a lot of things,” she answers, ever smiling, waving her hand softly as she speaks. “It doesn’t have anything to do with beauty standards. It’s about socializing things that are not shown—it is to represent the people who live in hiding.”

“No to fracking!” says a hand drawn poster on the wall. Below, a grieving Earth is filled with iron towers. “I’m radical because I want happiness for everybody,” quotes another. It shows legendary Communist politician and Pinochet critic Gladys Marín. In a corner, messages dangle from a string: “It doesn’t matter what you decide to do. Just make sure you’re happy”; “What’s broken can be forged once again”; “If it doesn’t hurt you, let live”;“It’s not a wrong body, it is mine, it belongs to me, it identifies me and I LOVE IT.”

To be a 'Miss' means a lot of things. It is to represent the people who live in hiding.
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Jorquera is Miss Chile Trans, and minutes later will be joined by Fernanda Muñoz, Chile’s representative for Miss Trans Star International. They’re there to talk to the children as a part of their Civil Formation Workshop, one of the landmark classes in this trans feminist school. Profe Romina and most of the children here are transgender.

The school was created a little less than a year ago by Evelyn Silva and Ximena Maturana, both mothers of trans girls. It is a project of Silva’s Selenna Foundation, which protects the rights of transgender children in Chile. Wherever there’s a trans child, Selenna is there—usually using the school structures—offering speeches and workshops aimed at normalizing transgender and non-binary identities. (Just this past November, Chilean President President Sebastián Piñera signed a measure—the Gender Identity Law—which allows transgender youth over 14 to legally change their names, and guarantees their right to be officially addressed according to their true gender.)

“We have 50 families, more or less, with whom we work actively,” says Maturana. “This a communal work. It’s child, family and school. The foundation establishes strong bonds with whatever schools its children are in.”

Maturana says she didn’t realize the radical immersion she would undergo when she found herself fully committed to the cause. She began her journey by participating with her daughter—who is now a teenager—wherever and whenever she could, always following Silva’s lead. But eventually, she got asked to give talks by herself; she compares her change of worldview with her daughter’s transformation.

“I realized that my life before my daughter’s transition wasn’t going to be the same after,” she says. “I suddenly felt super involved with this social change—I realized that I could not only support my child, but also other children who needed it and whose parents didn’t have the time to do it.”

As a parent, Maturana recognizes the difficulty of accepting the reality that once your child begins to transition, their life in school could inevitably become more difficult before becoming better. There’s a lot of self convincing: It’s gonna be alright, they’re going to respect my kid.

“The thing is, children remember,” Maturana explained to me. “They’ve got enough consciousness to say, ‘you were previously this and now you’re that’. Then it’s the trans child’s turn to do the explaining. Over and over. And over again. It’s much easier when you start from scratch with your chosen name than having to struggle with an old version of yourself.”

Inevitably, violence kicks in.

While it manifests in all kinds of ways, Maturana says school violence often emerges through everyday actions, like when she used to pick up her daughter at school and every parent’s eyes were fixed on her as she came out. “‘I’m okay with you, but don’t mess with my child’, their eyes said. Before you realize it your kid ends up being the only one not invited to birthday parties. It’s sad that everybody’s in the birthday picture except for your child.”

Usually, before trans children officially enter any school, their parents speak with the headmaster in order to explain the need for the Foundation to preemptively address the students to raise awareness and respect through speeches.“The first thing the director often says is, ‘But the parents, they won’t understand’… I don’t believe any excuse to be valid, but there’s no one who knows parents better than the directors,” Maturana says.

Parents are—painfully—often the first to object to the speeches the Selenna Foundation gives. “Why should my child learn this stuff?” they complain. Maturana says she finds this rather ironic, considering that the Foundation has received calls from schools regarding “concerned” parents who’ve reported that their children are dating a trans classmate.

“I think parents can be even more screwed up than the kids,” Ximena posits.

The Misses’ visit became venting ground for both them and the children on their experiences in the school system. A trans girl of around ten years talked about the time a teacher shoved his foot into her path, tripping her onto the ground. Another trans girl remembers a series of violent bullying episodes. A gay friend of hers was beaten and bullied so much he hid in the bathroom and broke his finger punching the wall out of rage; she described a second episode where she lashed out and beat up a girl after being bullied herself.

Before you realize it your kid ends up being the only one not invited to birthday parties. It’s sad that everybody’s in the birthday picture except for your child.
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Teacher Romina intervenes quickly at the tail end of these recollections to remind the children that violence isn’t the answer, which was quickly objected to by another student. She felt it is only natural to lash out when you suffer from so much rage.

Romina knows something about pent up anger. A history teacher and trans activist, she put her pedagogy studies on hold for ten years in order to transit successfully. She finally got her degree two years ago, just after she got to change her name. Around the time of our conversation, she was going to retrieve her diploma with her new name as well.

Parents often recognize that their child can’t handle being in the same school they previously attended while they’re also in transition, so they take them out and let their children stay home. Some keep up by taking standardized tests, but others don’t even do that. “There’s a kid here [In the Amaranta Gómez School] who’s 16 and is about to enter fifth grade,” says Maturana. For years the child would constantly change schools, but only ever lasted a few months before giving up.

The Escuela Amaranta Gomez exists to put an end to that stigma, shame, and derailing of education. Classes start at 9 AM and end around 2:15 PM. Maturana arrives earlier because one of the girls arrives around 7:15, the only time her parents can drop her off. “The idea is to be as uncomplicated as possible so the parents can come drop off their kids. There can’t be any excuse for them not to come.”

With 22 children, the classes are divided in two, according to age. The day is divided in three modules and, according to the day they may have language, math, science, history or English. They also have workshops, which can range from art therapy and yoga, to programming and the aforementioned Civil Formation.

“The focus of the Civil Formation Workshop is more about participation rather than political alphabetization, like knowing about institutions, voting or traditional politics,” says Profe Pedro, a cis male history teacher for the teenage group. The Workshop is the only time all of the students are together. “It’s more focused on community participation, where the kids recognize themselves as political subjects in daily life and get to see school as a space for democracy.”

The Escuela Amaranta Gomez exists to put an end to the stigma, shame, and derailing of education that transphobia can cause.
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Such a radical vision of school also means democratizing issues such as content. What do the kids want to learn? When I was interviewing Pedro, they were divided into groups of three tasked with drawing a comic on a different moment in colonial history.

Maturana discussed the merits of a roleplaying game the teens created:

“They made their own characters and through some chips and dice, they created a parallel world in which they travel through time. If you’re in a determinate space and time, in order to go further you have to get to know that place. So you have to learn if there’s a president, an emperor, what did they eat, how did they dress, if it was cold, whatever. They end up learning about science, history, human traits like empathy and responsibility, because your character also has qualities and defects.”

While trans children are the majority of the student population, the school’s not exclusive to them. It has also received cis children who have had problems with bullying or are sent by government support programs. The only requirement is for the parents to agree with the school’s priority: trans issues. Maturana talks about a cis boy who had suffered from a lot of bullying and had entered just three days ago: “His mom was telling me that yesterday afternoon he was feeling badly and that the only thing he wanted was to come here.”

There’s a reason it’s called Escuela, and not Colegio, two words often looked as synonyms in Spanish. If it’s Colegio, it means it has the approval of the Education Ministry. The approval of the Education Ministry means it fulfills certain requirements, which Silva and Maturana aren’t sure if they want to accomplish or abide by yet.

There’s no way a formal school would allow a child to enter just two weeks before closing the year. The Amaranta Gómez School does. The Education Ministry allows some flexibility in applying a different grading system rather than the traditional Chilean 1.0 to 7.0 (worst to best), but that’s not enough in this school. “It’s not like you’ve got to study for a test and that’s the all reflection of what you’ve learned,” says Maturana. “It doesn’t have to be a 7.0. It can simply be an accomplishment, a congratulations, and that’s something we don’t wanna lose.”

Profe Romina believes the Ministry’s focus doesn’t represent an adequate type of education. “It doesn’t give the teachers enough space to do the work we should really do, which is more oriented towards creation and not just obeying rules.”

Nevertheless, the Minister, Marcela Cubillos, actually came once and handed out a prize. “I forgot the name,” says Maturana, “but it was like ‘best relationship among the students.'” She still seems puzzled by the visit and no wonder, given that Cubillos is so conservative that when she was a Congresswoman, she voted against the legalization of divorce in 2004.

What’s most important about being recognized by the Ministry, however, is that the school receives financing by the State. As of this moment, all eight teachers are volunteers, and the children’s families don’t have to pay anything. Meanwhile, they’ve found financing through two international NGOs, one from the United States, and another from Switzerland. Now they’re going to apply to the International Trans Fund.

Such a radical vision of school also means democratizing issues such as content. What do the kids want to learn?
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“What do you think about the people that criticize you because ‘that’s not how God made you’?” a boy asks Jorquera. “Actually, I’m a strong believer,” she answers. “Thanks to God I’ve achieved many things. I would say those people are wrong because he made us all according to his image.”

“When we went to the Civil Registry, there were a lot of religioses screaming at us,” remembers a girl, speaking of the bigoted protesters using their gender inclusive neutral form created by the trans community. As young as she is, she shows empathy even for those who are not willing to grant her the same.

Maturana doesn’t remember the episode in the Civil Registry, but she does remember a time they had a field trip to Congress. It was the first time protesters aimed their ire at the children. Religioses.

“That had never happened,” said Maturana, “and it was super uncomfortable, but the kids were very brave.” Usually it’s the parents who get all the bullets. They’re the degenerates, they’re the ones distorting the children. A news crew came along with the Minister during her visit, after which “a lot of people started writing on our page. Really nasty stuff.”

Luckily, there haven’t been any physical attacks, and Maturana believes the neighborhood has something to do with it. They feel safe there. Unlike other quarters in Santiago, this one boasts a hot history. The last bastion of social housing in Chile, the National Stadium nearby—created during the ‘60s—had served as a camp for torture and extermination during the days after the coup.

It was also there where, years later, a dozen freedom fighters in hiding were slaughtered by dictatorship soldiers. After the damages suffered during the 2010 earthquake, the neighborhood organized itself into an assembly that still exists today and offers services such as cleaning brigades, newsletters, recreational activities, and a mobile library.

For the moment, though, they’re still uneasy about posting their exact address.

Like so many places in the world, Chile finds itself in the crosshairs of two colliding forces. On one side, not only did our own Daniela Vega became the first trans person to present in the 2018 Academy Awards, but the film she starred in, A Fantastic Woman, won the Best Foreign Film Category. After a heavy debate, the Gender Identity Law was also approved, a process that until this legislation passed, could take years. (You can thank the 14 years limit to the concerned conservatives who, as always, issued their “think of the children” shields).

On the other hand, you’ll still find fascism. Pinochet fanboy, José Antonio Kast, lost his presidential run in 2017 with 7% of the votes and a unified base in the ultra right, among them evangelicals and neo nazis. A few months ago, the conservatives rallied against the “Gender Ideology”, a term they use to demonize anything related to gender equality, from feminism to trans rights. The gathering amassed thousands and featured quite a few gems: neo-nazi splinter groups going out of their way to beat up kids who were dancing to K-Pop, the police force—famous for gassing any kind of protest prowled the forefront stick in hand like guard dogs—and President Sebastian Piñera’s government defended the conservative demonstrators’ “freedom of speech.”

The jury’s still out on how long this hate-wave is going to last, but Romina is sincere with the teenagers. Given the life she’s had, her insight is useful, especially taking into account that at some point, they’re going to apply to colleges and jobs. “I believe they should learn to defend themselves. Not to make them rioters, but to make them aware that there is violence outside—it would be an irresponsibility not to convey that knowledge.”

Regarding the smaller children, Romina offers another strategy. “Personally, I just try to allow them to live their childhood. I don’t talk politics, gender or anything. As kids, they’re worried about the next Disney film, about Christmas, about screaming, playing and jumping.”

That’s Maturana’s strategy as well: “What they need the most is a mother’s complicity.”

As the Civil Formation Workshop was ending, and the younger children who had succumbed to uneasiness and had started slipping under the tables, sliding over the floor and playing, came back to their seats, Miss Fernanda provided some final words of advice: “What’s important is that we don’t put a shell on against the world.”

Men always want me to share more. From my first boyfriend on. Craig slurred at me in a dorm room hallway that I’d never really let him in, never talked about my feelings or had a single serious talk with him throughout our senior year of high school.

I shook his grip from my arm.

“But you didn’t either?” It was a question how I said it, and stepped back against the damp wall. We’d been broken up for months, the way I’d expected us to when high school – and what I saw as our role for each other—was over. I was less drunk than him (always) and couldn’t quite follow his logic.

But, then, it wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully. My thoughts along with my legs. And because I hadn’t, he explained to me, I was “super fucked up,” around relationships. He teetered and slumped to the floor.

“You never even gave me a chance to know you,” he looked up, his lush eyelashes in full effect. I was fucked up because I didn’t open: instantly, easily, for him. We’d known each other since we were 12, but he felt he’d never gotten enough of me. He wrenched up his face and twisted toward the floor, and so, across the narrow hallway from him, I sunk down too.

“I’m sorry?” I said, hoping that would end it, but regretted it as soon as I spoke.

In The Body in Pain, her classic text describing the philosophical and spiritual features of pain, Elaine Scarry addresses biblical depictions of the inside and outside of the body, and the dynamics of the divine that operate between. Scarry observes that when a person in the Bible resists God, or belief in God, “…the withholding of the body…necessitates God’s forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior.”

I can’t help but see here a masculine God, one that refuses any scenario in which a person refuses to fully give themselves over. As Craig did, pulling at me in that dorm hallway for something he felt he wasn’t getting.

It wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully.
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It’s not fair, though, to make this only about men.

“He just wouldn’t open up to me,” Cara sighs. “We spent a whole weekend together and I barely feel like I know him.” I’ll readily admit it’s not always the case that the one prying open is gendered masculine: the penetrating gaze of women and queer people all around me bores towards the deepest darkest secrets of the people we want to know.

“I want him to let me in.”

“She’s hiding herself from me.”

“I want more of you. All of you.”

As if there was only one way in to where we’re trying to go, and the tunnel is to blame for not being open.

One weekend camping with friends in the Sierras, we laugh the whole time and I feel closer to them than I have to anyone in a while. My eyes tear and my throat is sore from laughing about our sad and weird experiences learning sex at summer camp from older kids, the stupid things we’ve said while trying to be cool. We are academics, therapists, entrepreneurs and artists—adult people whose intelligence (emotional and otherwise) I respect. But in this weekend I get a break, mostly, from speaking this intelligence. And in these conversations that I’ve sometimes termed more surface, I feel something more like closeness. More like trust.

“Yes, because we’re trusting each other to know we’re not stupid,” Ellie says from her perch on the granite boulder. “We don’t have to spend the whole time proving we’re smart or emotionally articulate, or have good politics, or have worked through our childhood shit…” She trails off and scratches the back of her leg, reaching awkwardly around to where a patch of calf got ravaged by mosquitos. I look away instinctively, not wanting to witness her weird body position. But then I look back.

“…the pose of awkwardness is very dangerous, because at this post-feminist moment one should be a top, one should win, etc,” writes Eileen Myles in “Long and Social.” Myles is speaking here about the ways in which their own work is “a bad recording” of lived experience, as opposed to the careful curation of a memoir. They term this position of “bad recording” dangerous for women expected to be getting things “right,” topping the narrative, so to speak. Myles points here also to the precarity of power by noting their refusal to top. This choice to maintain an awkward pose (a crouch, perhaps) leaves their narrative-body vulnerable to risk. The awkward narrative allows for others to also enter and also make claims upon the truth. The awkward body leaves the story open, incomplete.  

I want to see this awkward body – in part because I have it. I’ve been managing chronic illness and pain these last few years, and lately doctors have focused on a problem with my hormones. The OB-GYN says too much estrogen in my body is forming the cysts on my ovaries, and the herbalist says my diet has too many estrogen-heavy foods, that I need to eat less of everything on the list she hands me.

“It’s important not to feel defeated if the diet changes don’t fix everything right away,” she tells me. “You are managing a chronic condition.”

I’m still trying to understand what exactly this means: how to explain that I’m incapacitated by endometriosis pain one month, but the next am out late and energized every night. I’ve been turning to sick, crip and disability theory to try to better understand – even though of course I know these are not all the same. What I’m trying to understand between them is how to manage a condition that is largely invisible much of the time, how to manage something intentionally or inadvertently pushed out of view.

But: “…disabilities are not exactly ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ but intermittently apparent,” writes theorist Margaret Price in “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” “…a better metaphor than vision for some kinds of disability might be apparition.” I latch immediately onto this, the way “apparition” flickers and returns at unpredictable times – often frightening those present when it appears.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down. Sometimes I feel better but I don’t know why. I get up from bed, then later fall over, over and over, never over. I stumble on my words when anyone asks how I am and I try to explain.

“Clumsiness might provide us with a queer ethics,” writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. “Such an ethics attends to the bumpiness of living with difference, so often experienced as difference in time; being too slow or too fast, out of time.”

The apparition of chronic illness is also “clumsy.” Because my body moves clumsily in pain, but also because it is out of time, unpredictable, inconsistent. It does not respond well when asked to be consistent or reliable. (“Sick time is always escaping the institutional technologies invented to contain it,” writes Anne Boyer.) It does not respond well when asked to be fully seen and understood. And it does not respond well to normative relations, queering the sense of my relationship to others in care, in attraction, and attractiveness: always incomplete and refusing the happy ending.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down
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This is why I began with my teenage boyfriend. Because what’s awkward and clumsy if not one’s first relationship, one’s first times attempting sex? Especially in a relationship where I was primarily attracted to the idea of sex, the performance of relationship and its accompanying teenage drama: not to any kinds of hot sex we were actually having. I didn’t have the knowledge or communication skills at the time to re-direct or explain this, and so remained stilted in what I told him, how our bodies moved together, and the way, ultimately, we broke up. I guess we should stop dating now, I bumbled on his porch steps the week before we left for college, and bolted away across his lawn into the night.

He remained angry at me for years for this breakup, and for refusing to “let him in” on what I had been thinking, wanting, needing. Things I didn’t exactly know myself at the time. And I’ve come to understand the ableism beyond the misogyny in his anger, the insistence that a body and mind should even be available to seamlessly open.

But also I am grateful now for the clumsiness that surrounded us then, my hormonal body ineptly attempting to work alongside another. I remember us in basements pretending to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on a couch we couldn’t figure out how to arrange ourselves upon. Our limbs not knowing where to go against one another, yes, but also the emotional inelegance, how I rarely knew where to look or what to say.

“I considered how one cannot continuously manage one’s emotive surface and, mostly, that this lack of control is something to be grateful for,” writes Caryl Pagel. So I am grateful to my teenage self, the self that stuck her ass in boys’ laps while dancing and didn’t know what it meant, genuinely shocked later by their desire. I am grateful to the awkward teenage self who avoided intimacy wherever possible, terrified of risk and then on occasion spilling it all, with Smirnoff Ice.

And not just me but him, her, them, us: crouching underneath bathroom stalls because we’d locked ourselves in and didn’t know where else to go but the sticky floor. The sense that we did not need to blast one another open in any masculine-, female-, God-like or therapist-way, because, really, we already were shattered (a la Scarry) open, slithering on the floor and around in our hormones. Our unpredictable bodies our first hint that we might be that way—forever.

This is how I’ve found myself embracing the clumsy, as a body half performed and half messy, half closed and half open. A person allowed to open only sometimes, a body willfully aware of change and potentially shifting states. To be clumsy is not to be fragile: it is to know that one is breakable, and to live (speak, interact) knowing this.

Clumsy might come in any gender, but because they’re the ones I use, I’ll use she pronouns here. She’s been a beacon to me when I’m in pain, and a beacon to me when I try to explain my illness. She lets me shrug: “it’s hard to know how I’ll feel next week.” She lets me refuse to talk about it when I don’t want to. She performs gender as she is available: she lets me spend half an hour on my eyeliner and then say fuck it, and smear it off.

She wants to be seen, but at the same time refuses to be seen completely: a position I’d want, for any person—the understanding that a public presentation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to be taken, opened or entered entirely. Or that she’ll be available in this same way tomorrow. Her hormones, her blood, her gender, her feelings, her laughter: none of it demands to be shattered or unwrapped for consumption.

I summon the spirit of clumsy from my teenage self, picking nervously at the pimples alongside her mouth as she tries to end the conversation with Craig on the porch. She doesn’t know how to break up with someone gracefully. Her legs are half-shaven and bumpy, and her shorts are the wrong thing to wear in this late summer chill. She blurts and runs. She’ll learn more later about what people want to hear. But for now she doesn’t know what to say, and I love her for it.

As a long-time Shirley Jackson fan, I was eager to binge the new Netflix show based on her book, The Haunting of Hill House. While I don’t love slasher films, give me anything in a creepy old house. The Shining wouldn’t be what it is without the Overlook Hotel. Settling in to watch, I expected to feel the usual emotions you feel viewing something scary—dread, fright, perhaps revulsion. But suddenly I felt an emotion wash over me that took me by surprise: anger. Anger over watching a character being forced to view the embalmed body of a loved one.

Told over a series of ten episodes, the visually stunning show is a reimagining of Jackson’s story, rather than a direct adaptation. Jackson’s group of strangers meeting in Hill House to take part in a paranormal study are now a nuclear family, the Cranes. Olivia and Hugh Crane purchase Hill House with the intention of remodeling it over the summer, then flipping it for a fortune so that they can build their “Forever House” for their family of five children. Hill House has other ideas however.

The Cranes are haunted not only by their experiences that summer, but by the lasting devastation of grief. Director Mike Flanagan tells their tale in present time mixed with flashbacks that reveal how they became the fractured adults that they are. The show has received mainly positive critical reviews, and is currently the most popular user rated Netflix series.

Living a life damaged by grief is something I understand well. When I was eleven, my sister died. I usually just tell people that she died in a car accident, which is sort of true, but really, she drowned. It happened in Colorado, during the spring thaw when the melting snow on the mountain peaks turns peaceful, meandering rivers into dark, raging torrents.

Living in a tiny coal mining town, restaurants and teen-age entertainments were both in small supply, so one April evening, she and a few friends decided to drive a few towns away for pizza. The driver lost control of the car, and in the mountains, when that happens, you either drive into the side of the mountain or you plunge off the other side, over a cliff. He swerved to the cliff-plunging side that had a spring-swollen river at the bottom. I don’t know if my sister drowned in the car or was thrown from the car into the river. I suppose it doesn’t really matter—the outcome was the same. She was seventeen.

In the Netflix series, Shirley (Crane sibling #2) is a mortician, running her own funeral home with her husband as the business manager. In the first episode, we see her counselling a child named Max, who does not want to view his dead grandmother lying in her coffin. Max has been seeing the ghost of his grandmother at night, who shows more signs of decay with each visitation. Shirley tells Max that viewing the open casket of his grandmother will give him the opportunity to say goodbye, to have closure. Shirley tells him that she has “fix[ed] her, that’s what I do.” She will “look just like you remember her — just like she’s supposed to.”

These reassurances do not work on Max, as we see in episode 2. At the funeral, Max is still firm in his resolve to not view the open casket. “I don’t want to,” he insists. But for some reason, he must look. Shirley tells him, “If you don’t, you’ll be upset later. I promise. This is a good thing, and you’re a good boy.”

We don’t learn if Max does view Grandma or not, but most likely he was forced to do so. The show at this point flashes back to Shirley as a child, at a funeral, unwilling to view her mother’s corpse. Young Shirley gives in, and is amazed at how her mother looks lying against the satin. “You fixed her,” she says to the funeral director, highlighting the seminal moment to her becoming a mortician. (Likely the kittens and her need to control played a role as well).

Watching these scenes with Max resurged feelings of frustration and anger that I thought I had long let go of. Why won’t anyone listen to him? Why does he have to see his Grandmother’s dead body? Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?

Like Max, I was very certain that I did not want to see my sister lying in a coffin. I did not want that to be my final image of her. Like Max, none of the adults around me listened to me either, believing that they knew what was best for me. “You need to say goodbye to your sister. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” “She’ll just look like she’s sleeping.” “It’ll be okay.”

Unlike the dramatic, stylish gloom of Shirley’s funeral parlor, the one in which my sister’s casket was displayed had bright white walls, her burgundy carpeting, gold detailing, and multiple blinding flood lights; there was nary a shadowy nook to be found. No spaces for lurking specters. No place to hide from well-intentioned spectators. Bouquets and wreaths of flowers lined either side of the room. The peppery scent of lilies was so thick, you could taste it; to this day, I am triggered by their smell.

Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?
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While I wasn’t physically dragged to the coffin, and absent of support from any adult, the continual emotional pressure eventually broke down my defenses. I finally was a “good girl” and went to see how the mortician “fixed” my sister.

She lay on white satin, in a white dress. You might have thought she was sleeping, if you viewed her from a distance. But up close, no amount of pancake base or pink blush could cover the green and purple bruises. She was swollen, caused either by drowning or embalming. The glue used to keep her eyes shut was visible. Her face was in a grimace, and nothing about her looked peaceful.

As I stood beside her, the hope that it was all a horrible practical joke and she might sit up — alive — all dissolved when I clasped her folded hands. Hands that had brushed my hair a thousand times, turned the beloved pages of hundreds of books, and caught lizards just to make me laugh, were now the icy hands of mannequin.

As my delusion shattered, a fellow mourner came up beside me and said, “Oh, look at her! She looks like a sleeping angel.” Unable to face such obvious posturing and lies, I ran outside to wait on the steps until it was time to drive to the cemetery. I didn’t say goodbye, because she was neither there nor gone for me.

The act of burial — placing a dead person in the ground with intention — is indisputably traced back 100,000 years to a group burial in Israel and possibly goes back 250,000 years, to a Homo naledi find in South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Paige Madison describes the desire to bury the dead as a part of the human ability to think in the abstract:

“Humans use symbols to communicate and convey these abstract thoughts and ideas. We imbue non-practical things with meaning. Art and jewelry, for example, communicate concepts about beliefs, values, and social status. Mortuary rituals, too, have been put forward as a key example of symbolic thought, with the idea that deliberate treatment of the dead represents a whole web of ideas. Mourning the dead involves remembering the past and imagining a future in which we too will die.”

As humans began creating more complex living arrangements, so too, did the rituals surrounding burial become more elaborate. It’s difficult to tell if the earliest burials were secular or involved any spiritual meaning, but soon, funeral rites took on a religious element, typically involving a belief in an afterlife. The development of social hierarchy also played a role in the development of how we bury our dead. The higher up the social ladder, the more elaborate and costly the service.

The specific traditions widely vary, across time and cultures. Since the Civil War, embalming and underground interment within a coffin has been the traditional burial practice in the United States. While embalming does delay decomposition, the notion that viewing the body somehow helps with the grieving process is not scientific, as noted by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford in her exposé, The American Way of Death. Rather, it’s a justification put forward by those who have a financial stake in encouraging embalming: the funeral industry.

As an adult, I took a class on grief. Part of the course work was a field trip to a funeral parlor. It was a large blue Victorian house that had been converted to part living space and part business, much like Shirley’s set up on the show. Keeping with the Victorian architecture, the interior decoration was heavy wood, silk-lined walls, and sumptuous fabrics of deep peacock-blue. The air was vanilla scented. It could have been an upscale bed and breakfast.

Our tour guide was tiny, with a sleek business bob and black-framed glasses. She was a recent graduate, joining the family business right out of college. “Third generation mortician!” she chirped. “I know I look really young, but I’ve been around this business my whole life. A lot of morticians are multigenerational. I guess we like to keep it in the family.” She was “passionate about helping people in their worst time.” After touring the viewing room, the coffin showroom, and business offices, we trooped downstairs to see the embalming rooms.

Walking down the narrow stairs, I began feeling the short breath, racing heart and sweatiness of a panic attack, knowing I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn. The pull to know what had been done to my sister was stronger and I kept going, doing calming breathing techniques. Downstairs was completely different world than above. Hospital doors, Dijon mustard-colored walls, dim fluorescent lighting, and cement floors. Odd chemical smells, plus something undefinable replaced the vanilla. It felt cold. And here? There were dark corners.

The embalming room looked much like it did in The Haunting of Hill House, except I remember more hoses and sprayers hanging from the ceiling. When I learned about all the draining, and injecting, and filling, I felt a screamless horror. I viscerally knew that my sister would not have wanted any of that done to her body. A body that she was so meticulous in maintaining. Not only was her death violent, but it felt like she had been further violated, after death.

Seeped in a commercialism that has largely removed meaningful ritual from burial rites, the funeral industry in the United States rakes in many billions of dollars each year. With the cost of cremation being many thousands of dollars less than embalming, funeral homes have a vested interest in steering their clientele in the direction of chemical preservation. Still, the number of people choosing cremation in the U.S. continues to rise.

According to the Cremation Association of North America’s 2017 industry statistics, the number of people cremated vs embalmed was 51.6%. Reasons behind the growth are varied, from cost to decreased religious stigma against it (the Catholic Church opposed cremation until 1963). Concern for the environment is shaping people’s choices as well, with the growing awareness of the toxicity of embalming chemicals leaching into the soil and water.

I’ve chosen cremation for myself because I don’t want anyone I love forced to see my death face; I want them to only recall how I looked alive.

My mother and I have only talked about this issue once, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t recall who brought it up, or how or why we discussed it. What I do remember is that I wanted her to know I was angry over being forced to view the open casket. I wanted — at least — an acknowledgement that my autonomy had been overlooked, that maybe a mistake had been made.

“I told you then that I didn’t want to see her, and now I’ve had to live with that image of her dead stuck in my mind since then. No one would listen to me!”

“I just had to see her one more time.”

“Then why couldn’t you look at her back in a private room? Instead of demanding that everyone see her? That I see her?” My resentment was like a pin popping a balloon; my mother’s entire body deflated. Looking at the ground, she mumbled, “I don’t know. I just couldn’t think really about anything at the time.”

In that moment, she seemed so tiny and fragile—something I could either choose to set carefully down or hurl at the floor, smashing to bits. Witnessing her hurt, I felt ashamed for only focusing on myself, and decided to let the anger go. I thought I had until it flared up while watching The Haunting of Hill House.

While the final episode is the one most negatively reviewed, I believe it gets it right. In order to move past grief — at least enough to heal and learn to live on — the raw honesty that comes from a moral inventory is needed. I’ve never wavered in my certainty that seeing my sister in her coffin was not right for me. I still wish one person had listened, and helped me, rather than being coerced into what other people thought would bring me closure.

However, I did need to let go of my anger, because I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted in my mother’s situation. The possibility that I might find out is my own Bent Neck Lady. I don’t fear my own death, but I am afraid that I will know the nightmare of burying my child, that I will have to make the impossible decision: embalming or cremation?

And does either choice really matter? Death’s outcome is the same.

In Pakistan, and in my native language Urdu, woman translates into Aurat, which comes from the Persian Awrah, meaning “parts to be protected.” Literally, too, in my present Muslim, closed-knit, patriarchal society, women like me are guided—by their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons—to be protected from threats against their body and family honor.

While these men encourage “Western” trends to an extent—like education at reputable schools, recreational sports, or even temporary employment—cultural traditions halt these prospects after marriage. You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.

Because culture is reinforced by practice, and because most girls in my family and neighborhood were married off at nineteen or twenty, naturally I grew up understanding that my life would turn out to be largely the same.

And like most families around us, my family was also wary of sending their daughters abroad for higher studies. Local education until we reached marriageable age seemed sufficient. My sister and I were taught that there were enough boys in the house to look after the family distribution business; thus, for us, a long-term career wasn’t a priority. I would, instead, have to marry well, and learn how to manage my in-laws’ household.

My father, Baba, maintained from my birth that our culture was different from the “West’s.” He was adamant that we both expand our horizons and maintain our own set of traditional values. While our family travelled every summer, to Europe or the U.K., my parents were their own Pakistani selves there. At eight, I shuffled awkwardly behind Mama, who wore a traditional, full-length shalwar kameez, while Baba—his trousers religiously hitched above his ankles—stood in line to buy tickets at Disneyland Paris.

Baba never reacted to the half-naked foreigners around us. He took it as a means to educate his daughters. “People dress and live differently here,” he’d explain. “They value independence over family. We don’t. See everything, Mehreen. Gain exposure. But always stay true to your culture.”

I was fully clad under his protection, yet embarrassed. A part of me was enchanted by the liberation around me, by how the women we met—at somber restaurants, glittering hotel receptions, crowded tours—could have the authority to choose what to wear, where to work, how to live, all by themselves. Baba didn’t notice when, in our rented car trips around Germany and France, I’d roll my pants up into shorts and sit smugly on my seat. Or at least, with his eyes in the rear-view mirror, he pretended not to.

You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.
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Baba’s “exposure” showed me that there were opportunities for women in cultures different from ours. As we visited bookstores abroad, my mother, beautiful and passive, introduced me to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton’s works, books she had reveled in herself throughout childhood. On car trips around the glittering lakes of Lugano and Lucerne, I read about Matilda’s victory over Ms. Trunchbull, Sophie’s adventures with the BFG, Anne and George’s explorations of Kirrin Island in The Famous Five, and this new, literary world seemed to unravel before me.

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl. Still, to my eight-year-old self, societal boundaries seemed malleable and time-bound, and I continued my readings in the hope that when I grew up, I’d have equal opportunities to pursue my dreams as the boys my age would have too.

Funnily enough, my resolution didn’t waver with time, and three years ago, at eighteen, with my reasonable grades and no marriage proposals, I began to think of a career as a writer. On a high after finishing A Hundred Years of Solitude one night at 4 a.m., I decided what the hell—I wanted to write well, with expertise and precision. But first, I wanted to study great literary works in depth, maybe at a good university, maybe even…abroad (Pakistani universities don’t offer a degree in English).

My mind began to spin wildly. Why not apply abroad to the best institute, maybe to Oxford or Cambridge? You won’t get in anyway, I told myself. But the vertigo continued. What was the harm in trying?

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl.
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So a week later, when everyone was fast asleep, I switched my computer on, dimmed the study lights, and hastily applied to Cambridge. A month later, when I got the call that they’d like to interview me, my eyes nearly popped out. I asked Baba to take me to Cambridge for the interview. He downright refused, but he didn’t reprimand me for secretly applying, or punish me for it. Baba was relatively open-minded compared to the System. After seeing the tears in my eyes and my relentless persistence, he agreed—with a condition: if I did get in, there was no guarantee that I’d actually go.

We trod the Cambridge grounds in a cold December wind amid rustling fallen leaves. There were six other girls for the interview—from Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.K. We discussed The Weeknd’s latest music, and Netflix’s Stranger Things. I was excited, confident, and thoroughly comfortable. The interviews, each thirty minutes long, turned into more of a literary chat. Two interviewers sat opposite me on mahogany chairs. We discussed my personal statement, analyzed Mansfield and Keats, made jokes about how the lack of sunlight affected our literary mood. When I was free to go, I felt satiated. Content. I knew I’d tried.

Two months later, while browsing through my junk email, I opened one that confirmed my unconditional offer from Cambridge. I fell off my chair howling. I was ecstatic, dumbfounded, but at the same time there was a touch of melancholy: I remembered Baba’s condition.

I approached Baba, whose eyes glittered with pride at the sight of my admission letter, while his head shook into a firm, “no.”

I felt crushed, ashamed, angry. I’d hoped that maybe Baba would, by some miracle, relent. I’d come too far this time, for my writing career to remain intangible—a mere dream left unlived. “Don’t you know it’s CAMBRIDGE?” I argued. “People don’t go for financial reasons, and you’re stopping me because of what the people in our community will think?” Baba’s response was always, “I supported you as much as I could, Mehreen, and I’ll continue to do so of course, but every culture has its conventions.” With a glance at Mama who stood silently in the bedroom corner, never intervening, I wailed that he was enforcing obsolete, draconian values on his daughters, and burst into tears.

After numerous arguments, I discovered Baba was more stubborn than I’d expected him to be. At times, I felt desperate enough to imagine myself grabbing my passport and running away. I envisioned Baba’s voice breaking on the other end when I’d eventually call him from Cambridge. In my mind, he’d take it on himself for exposing us to that “Western” culture, and would finally give me his blessing (and the university’s tuition fees).

Yet I admit, I’m glad I didn’t run away. Cambridge or not, it wasn’t worth leaving my family. Baba tried to make amends with hugs and gifts, which I accepted. He was still my father after all.

Four months after I’d received the Cambridge offer, a “good” proposal came. His name was Ali. He was well-established, twenty-six (six years older than I was), and according to my family, a genuine guy. Knowing I wouldn’t go to Cambridge, and still bitter with my family for their treatment of me, I hesitantly accepted. I wanted a new start, a different environment, some time to heal—even if it was under the “protection” of another man. Two years later, last August, Ali and I entered an arranged marriage.

Every culture has its conventions.
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Post-marriage, I learned to love and respect Ali for his easygoing nature and his unwavering care for me. He was open-minded, more so than Baba, and was comfortable with my having a writing career, even if I were to attend fiction writing workshops both locally and abroad. Inevitably, we discussed the Cambridge topic, and I confided how big of a blow that was to my career. “Why so?” he replied, his gentle brown eyes unfazed and soothing. “You want to be a writer, and you can be. Cambridge isn’t the end game.”

“But…but the networking—” I spluttered. The contacts! The teaching! How could I be a writer without all that?

Ali insisted that I was making it about Cambridge, not about my writing, which is what really mattered. As he spoke, I tried to listen. Virginia Woolf didn’t go to Cambridge. Shakespeare wasn’t well educated either. Maybe I would have to work harder than other people, put in more years, enroll in a local university…but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a writer.

With time, I learned to empathize with my family and their decision, accepting that Baba was only a product of his environment. Both he and Mama were firm in their orthodox beliefs. Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard their own culture in an alien world.

Yet I can feel hot winds of change around me. Pakistani society is learning and developing from the globalized importance of education and independence. With events like Malala’s Educate Girls campaigns, and #timesup, the current generations—including myself and Ali—yearn to give space and independence to each other and teach our offspring the same.

But of course, Cambridge is an opportunity lost that I still regret. Sometimes when I’m staring at the computer blankly during writing sessions, I long for the warmth of ancient fireplaces, the rusty smells of centuries-old libraries, the meandering and brilliant discussions with tutors, communal meals with my peers…

Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard my parents' own culture in an alien world.
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Then, I look at pictures of Ali and me, hand in hand at our wedding, while Baba stands with an unabashed smile in the background. I tell myself that Cambridge was my road not taken, and life deals you cards that you to learn to manage instead of getting depressed over. In my case, my gender and cultural values obstructed me from having the same opportunities as boys my age did. I can either hate it and run from it or confront it and hope for change.

Still, I realize that in this time and society, I need the blessings of men around me in order to establish myself. These men might be supportive and kind-hearted—like Baba, and Ali—but I yearn for the freedom, the authority, and independence that women like Jane Eyre, Jo March and Hester Prynne craved, albeit in different shades and tones than my own longings. And, every time I pick up my pen, I take on these societal structures can only be altered by awareness and exposure, which come from lots and lots of reading. And writing.

For now, as students my age savor their goodbye hugs and farewell parties before leaving for universities abroad, I glance at a crisp, white letter on my right—my Cambridge acceptance—then at the wedding ring on my left hand.

And I know I won’t be among them.

content warning: sexual assault

Much of my time as a teenager was spent counting down the days until my next concert. I was a five-foot, sixteen-year-old girl, and I spent all my money on floor tickets to watch my pop punk idols thrash around on stage; I maneuvered my way through the masses of sweaty men, hoping to secure a view of the band before the chaos ensued. My mom worried, and most of my friends didn’t get it, but there, with no need to impress the strangers dancing and singing along beside me, was my refuge.

I could lose control and take up space. I didn’t know how to dance and it didn’t matter. I could sweat all my makeup off and it was only proof of how much fun I had. When men pushed me, I could push back harder. I could scream until my voice went out — and I did.

That was where I felt safe — for a while.

As I grew older so did my list of unpleasant experiences and wariness of the men around me. As much as I wanted to cling to the things I loved about live music—the release, the rush, the sense of connection that breathes new life into the intimacy of listening to music—it became harder to ignore the pervasiveness of dangerous male aggression in the spaces I wanted so dearly to call home.

When men pushed me, I could push back harder.
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It was in the pit that a man looked me in the face and told me he hoped I’d get raped.

It was in the pit that a man questioned my belonging, called me “little girl,” and shoved me to the ground.

It was in the pit during a Gaslight Anthem show I’d travelled three hours to see that a man gave me one look, called me a bitch, and punched me in the face. I still remember the fear of his fist coming towards me and the hot tears that slipped out after he was ejected while I tried and failed to look unfazed. (How else would the other men know I actually deserved to be there?)

It was in the pit that I was groped. Time and time and time again.

It’s at shows and bars and DIY venues that I am harassed and interrogated by the self-appointed gatekeepers of punk who are apparently so mired in their imagined 1981 utopia that they can’t fathom a woman wearing a band t-shirt because she genuinely enjoys the music. Where men call me a bitch because I’m there for the show and not for them, or a poser because my interests or image don’t perfectly align with their expectations. Where even self-identified progressive punk bands protect their predatory friends and image rather than use their voice for the good of the community. Where popularity still outshines virtue.

In the poignant memoir Tranny, penned by the frontwoman of Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace, she breaks down the ever present dichotomies of punk politics and her experience navigating the scene as a trans woman. “Show spaces were supposed to be open to everyone regardless of age, race, class, sex, or sexual preference, but for the most part it was just white kids oblivious to the privilege they came from,” she explains. “It also became clear to me that while these were the politics heralded by the scene, often they were not actually practiced.”

For a while, I tried to avoid  these interactions by making myself smaller or dressing the part. I started watching shows from the side of the crowd for fear of getting trapped amongst men who weren’t interested in the ethics of showgoing. I followed the Guidelines of Being a Woman in the Pit: stay near a friend, definitely avoid skirts, move out of the way of men, keep to yourself, watch your drink, and accept the groping as a consequence of crowdsurfing while appearing female or queer, or being anything but a straight, while man. But unsurprisingly, none of these things made the harassment disappear.

It was in the pit that I was groped. Time and time and time again.
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I became hypervigilant and afraid; my refuge was stolen from me by the same power dynamics that threaten women on the streets, at their jobs, and even in their homes. The loss of safe spaces for uninhibited self-expression and catharsis is ultimately a loss of freedom.

One night, sitting outside our favorite dive bar after a show, my friend noted, “you know, a lot of punk dudes are really just bearded frat boys in leather jackets.” I wanted to laugh. And cry.

There’s this idea that being part of a “scene” guarantees acceptance and safety — that a community born out of guitars in basements and dive bars is somehow inherently inclusive, progressive, or just moreso than, say, a frat house. And while it’s true that punk has historically fostered community and solidarity among working class men, it’s also the genre where skinheads and known abusers run free. Even the Riot Grrrl movement failed to resonate with women that weren’t white, cisgender, and middle class.

But the (frequently ignored) reality is that people of color and queer folks have been punk all along.

Punk promises refuge from the oppressive institutions and ideologies that permeate everyday life, yet when its direction is dictated primarily by white cisgender men — as has often been the case — the same power dynamics and hierarchies that undervalue and suppress marginalized people recreate and uphold themselves. As with any subculture, the reluctance or outright refusal to acknowledge and address patterns of misogyny, racism, and transphobia only exacerbates the issue, and marginalized people are left behind, ostracized, or worse.

It's in the pit where men call me a bitch because I’m there for the show and not for them.
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But white men are not the protectors of punk — they just think they are.

Where men can voice their feelings and opinions freely, but women and queers are degraded or silenced, there is no liberation. Where concerned women are dismissed as “bitches” and “feminazis” and people of color are consistently alienated and sexualized, there is no liberation. When cis men get to choose which issues “matter,” the most vulnerable people lose.

I can’t lie and say I wasn’t or am not still attracted to the nihilistic attitude of punk; feeling lost, alone, unheard, and depressed will do that to a person. But I always thought of making music and going to shows as an outlet to express and manage those feelings of cynicism and rage—likely planted by a largely uncompassionate world — not to heighten them. I understood gigs as a space that honors solidarity — a place where I didn’t have to “prove myself.” I understood punk as community and a celebration of difference, not as an expression of self-superiority.

But it seems that I was wrong. At least, in practice. And isn’t that where it really matters?

Bad things happen in the pit. But it’s also where I found refuge as a quietly but deeply lost teenage girl harboring more rage than I knew how to manage. It was where the man who punched me in the face was almost instantly knocked to the ground by a group of men who proceeded to check in with me without commenting on my poor attempt to disguise my tears. The pit is where I desperately scanned the crowd for someone to notice I was being sexually assaulted and silently met eyes with a kind woman who stepped in and flagged down a security guard that fortunately took his job seriously enough to kick the creep out.

White men are not the protectors of punk — they just think they are.
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The pit is where most people understand that when someone falls, you help pick them up.

I don’t think many of us would willingly and repeatedly enter a situation that typically ends in bruised ribs, mysterious cuts and scratches, dehydration, and aching feet if we weren’t at least a little self-destructive, but there is a difference between the consensual physical exhaustion of the mosh pit and having your physical being threatened or assaulted. It seems that with this chosen loss of control—women love to get dirty too—the threat of real danger continues to loom.

Almost ten years later, when men challenge my music knowledge or demand a list of my favorite Dead Kennedys songs, I walk away knowing their insecurity and fragile masculinity are not my problems to manage. But when I go to shows, I’m more withdrawn. Live music is still very much a part of my life, and sometimes I still fight my way toward the stage, but sometimes it feels like I’m pushing through bodies looking for something that just isn’t there. Maybe I’ve outgrown it.

Or maybe I’m just tired.

Something is wrong at school.

It’s Tuesday morning, and you’re supposed to be in the middle of art class. Ginger, the art teacher and your close friend’s Claire’s mom, often runs late, but never like this. You’re still adjusting to fourth grade, but you’re looking forward to class with Ginger, who knows what she’s doing and disregards rules.

Claire is at school, so Ginger can’t be absent because her daughter is sick. In the words of Madeline’s Miss Clavel, something is not right.

The following series of events seems simultaneous. Ginger walks into the small room where your Montessori school’s Upper Elementary class keeps its math supplies and language material. The main teachers, Ms. Tethel and Mr. Josh, tell the entire class to sit in a circle on the floor. Someone pushes a TV on wheels inside.

You learn new words that day: The first is hijack.

Somebody hijacked two planes and crashed them into a tall building in New York City — another plane is aiming for the Pentagon, which until this day you only know as a shape.

The second is terrorist — the people who did this are terrorists.

Why will be impossible to grasp, but right now you’re concerned with the what. You don’t know much about war or attacks — years ago, when your dad tells you about Iraq, the enemy in a war, you picture lines of people shooting muskets, alternating like some twisted version of Red Rover. At Montessori school, you’ve only learned peace.

You aren’t sad yet, because you still don’t understand. What if someone calls from the airplane toilet, Akangbe, a sixth grader, jokes to sound clever in a situation the group doesn’t understand. You don’t say anything, but you know people can’t use electronics on a landing plane from all the times an attendant has told you to shut off your GameBoy. And crashing is like landing, right?

When your mom picks you and your sister up from school that day, which rarely happens, she says that Jodi, her boyfriend, and the soccer team are coming over. They need somewhere to react.

A bunch of blonde girls, teenagers, cry in your family room. They need something to eat, and you need a minute away from them. You walk to the snack drawer — next to the freezer, bottom drawer. There’s a bag of tortilla chips that’s stale, but they don’t seem to care.

You never paid much attention to Afghanistan before, but now you feel pressed, awkward. Afghanistan is right next to Iran. Does that make you complicit? There is going to be a war and people are sending anthrax around in envelopes. Even opening the mail can kill somebody now. You write “no” next to Taliban, terrorism, and war in your diary. If that’s in there with your most personal thoughts, people won’t think you’re lying, right? Don’t people know you want the world to be better?

Things change at school. It reminds you of the divide you felt last year during the election, one of the first times you realized people don’t get along. Is your dad going to fight in World War III? you wonder. Then you remind yourself that he is almost 40, safe because he’s too old. You draw words — elementary protest signs — opposing the war. Years later you learn about radicals and you want to become one. Maybe even for Iran.

High school is emotionally excruciating, but at least nobody seems to care about you being Iranian. It takes you years for you to realize it’s because you look just like your white American mother. You lucked out: People like your grandmother’s rice and call you exotic. Your friends never assume you’re Muslim (of course, as an arty kid, most of your friends are freshly declared atheists), or associate you with the threat of nuclear weapons. Instead, they thank you for bringing them headscarves back from Iran.

Barack Obama takes office, and over time the battles overseas and in your mind subside. Even in the summer of 2009, when the election is rigged and a quasi-rebellion hangs in the air, people side with the Iranian populace, especially after seeing a militiaman shoot Neda Agha-Soltan in the heart, the one death that overshadows Michael Jackson’s. Your worries subside a little, because it looks like Americans finally understand that Iranians are people.

You move to another city for college, opening up a new world — a world that, to your surprise, teaches Farsi. Obviously, you take it — you’re obligated. Maybe within a few years you’ll be less embarrassed, able to communicate with great aunts and uncles who never fully mastered English.

Introductory Persian is challenging, but manageable. There’s a good mix of students in your class: international affairs and political science majors, a handful of Iranians and halfies. You take every available class for your degree, and as you advance you feel further behind. Class sizes dwindle and your handicap sticks out more: your accent, your cruddy compositions you can barely read, your inability to roll your tongue or sound out unfamiliar letters.

At home, you felt Iranian. Your grandparents practically lived with you — for a few years they did live with you. Your father, the patriarch, decides everything. You eat rice and eggplant stew for dinner at least once a week. You dance with your hands at loud parties. But here, among real Iranians, you are different. You don’t look like them or speak like them. You realize you are not very Iranian at all. Something is wrong, and it’s you.

You are 24 on Election Day when you pull into a church parking lot to cast your vote for the country’s first potential female president. Today feels symbolic. The system of buildings connected to the church used to be your school. The swings and slide are still there in the front playground where the older kids spent recess. You smile at the porch outside the room where you learned about September 11th, but right now your mind’s set on the future.

You’re on a friend’s couch, eyes rapt on the television, cracking open a beer because you’re starting to worry. You tell yourself it can’t happen, but at the same time you’re not surprised about certain states. You know a state that won’t let people use the bathroom is going to vote red. Perhaps you see more evil in the world — by this point, you know damn well that not everyone is considered a person. And you’re right. Another red state, another beer. You seek comfort in addition, calculating the electoral vote. You try to think about the FiveThirtyEight projection that turns out to be horribly wrong. Michigan’s results come in and you know numbers can’t help anymore.

You only worry about yourself a little, because in the second debate he approached the “Iran issue” like a business deal. Iran has oil, saffron, caviar. Messing with Iran when all you care about is money is moronic. You’re fretting over everyone else you care about: those who really have something to lose. You can’t believe that voters would put so many people in danger to keep their sense of superiority and enjoy slashed taxes — never mind, you can.

“I’ll be okay, but I’m afraid for everyone else,” becomes your new motto.

You aren’t Muslim — hell, you can pass for one hundred percent white girl, or at least Jewish — but you are a dual citizen. Your existence is tied to a place news commentators think is bad. At this point, you don’t want to believe he’ll take charge. That denial won’t fade.

Your existence is tied to a place news commentators think is bad.
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And you’re angry with everyone who voted for him, everyone who thought they were more important than all those people who have something at stake — like your stepmother, whose child shares your Iranian blood. As a pacifist, you understand where she comes from to a degree, but you’re still angry, because that language didn’t spark a shred of hesitation or concern.

And you know they ignored him because they thought they had nothing at risk, even though you know they did.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

January comes and everyone starts quoting Orwell. 1984 becomes a bestseller again, but you think the country’s become like Animal Farm. People who wanted to keep their power are about to lose it. You have to be more than white to have power these days — you have to be the one percent of the one percent. A hundredth.

It’s kind of funny, actually, because this “dystopia” people say America is becoming is based on real historical events, as all dystopia is. Government corruption is inevitable. People just don’t care unless, or until, it’s personal.

His name is inescapable. You can’t stand to use it, to acknowledge that the “freest country in the world” was that easy to con, so you call him The Government. The guy you used to make fun of in middle school is the President, and now there are thousands of rich white males who want to annihilate people you care about from this hypocritical conglomeration called democracy.

Less than a week before you’re supposed to leave the country, the government tries to enforce a travel ban. No Muslims. By this point, you know that “Muslim” just means brown, or white but not white enough. Iran is on that list of seven countries. The fear that haunted you a decade ago rushes back because he’s trying to start a war. Iran isn’t the same as it was 30 years ago, but you know most people here don’t know that. No, they don’t care to know. For the first time in your life, you are afraid to exist.

There’s a protest at the airport tomorrow. You have to go. You have to. You spend hours assembling an Iranian flag from nine pieces of construction paper, exacerbating the tendinitis in your elbow, to draw the four crescents to scale. The next morning, you become inspired to write “TRUMP IS THE NEW SHAH” on your masterpiece, but first you need a silver Sharpie. If you aren’t going to mince words, then people need to be able to see them clearly.

You talk to your dad about it. The government is horrible, you say, but seeing so many people come together gives you hope. Movements are afoot. “You didn’t grow up in a totalitarian government,” he responds. He doesn’t have to say anything else to assert that you don’t understand.

If you aren’t going to mince words, then people need to be able to see them clearly.
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Your parents don’t want you to drive to the airport — they don’t want you there at all. They’re worried about you getting stuck in traffic, detained, harassed, hurt. “People are crazy,” they say, and emotionally exhausted, you pass out. You don’t think Atlanta will become Tehran, but you also don’t want to argue.

You realize you’ve taken your luxuries for granted far too long. That others have dealt with far worse for far longer.

At work the next morning, your boss cracks a joke about a coworker not being able to come back from France. He’s unambiguously white — they all are.

“Sarra, you’re not a dual citizen, are you?” But you are, and you’re terrified. You’ll probably never get to see certain relatives again — your great aunt will die and you won’t even get to say goodbye. And you make sure to say it in a dry, distraught tone. It must have not worked, though, because those jokes keep coming back.

You’re still mad, three days later, at the airport. Of course, you actually have a reason to be scared. While your group works out a check-in mishap, you flip through family passports. First, you admire yours, and catch the place of birth: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA. Then you thumb through your dad’s. It doesn’t bear a city, just IRAN. It might as well say THREAT. You start breaking down in TSA because your father’s passport bears a word that shouldn’t be heavy. He tells you not to cry, but you’re convinced the law will capsize in a few days and you won’t be able to come back, that he’ll get taken away. The pressure weighs you down like a wrecked car, compacting panic and pushing out tears.

You dad’s passport doesn’t bear a city, just IRAN. It might as well say THREAT.
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You learned early on that being Iranian means you’re always on the defensive. That people will avoid your family and struggle to understand that Middle Easterners share their humanity. Maybe it doesn’t even matter who’s in charge of either country. People learned to hate the country that both is and isn’t yours long before you were born; they’ve just been invited to openly embrace that prejudice once more.

At least, you think, the government can’t take your tears away. So you just keep crying.

Falling in love with Peter Kavinsky—right along with Lara Jean—shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. And not just because of his swoon-inducing smile, his ability to make a back-pocket spin in the middle of a cafeteria look downright sinful, or even his impressive emotional depth, either. Rather, I love him—as so many other grown-ass women now do—because I have spent my life falling in and out of love with Peter Kavinskys, just as I was trained to.

I should begin by saying that my now, maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame. As a young black woman who came of age at a flashpoint in our nation’s relationship to and dialogue about race, it’s the dirty little secret I aimed to bury once I reached adulthood. I’d promised myself it would go the way of my heinous Aeropostale tee collection and my hot pink Samsung SEEK: matured past, grown out of.

My maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame.
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While I was never the type of girl to pour her feelings out onto the page like Lara Jean—for fear of making them tangible would make them too real, perhaps—I was the type of girl who daydreamed. Who imagined herself tangled in all sorts of intricate, decidedly un-Indiana romances with the kinds of boys that populated all of my favorite stories: the sensitive nerdy musician type a la Nick O’Leary (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), the bad boy with a troubled past in John Bender (The Breakfast Club) and especially the, “It’s your dream dad, not mine!” star jock and secret poet of Austin Ames (A Cinderella Story). These characters, or what I thought these characters embodied, helped me formulate what would become The Perfect Boy.

The “White” following “Perfect” kind of just went without saying. (The “Boy” and not “Girl” or “Nonbinary Person,” on the other hand, was reiterated strongly and often.)

You should know that I’ve only ever dated people of color. Even in high school, my not-so-spectacular track record with almost-boyfriends is exclusively black. Somewhere deep, somewhere beyond the formula of book-and-movie boyfriends I’d concocted, I was still much more interested in finding kinship and solace and—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this about my high school “ex”, but here we go—passion with other people who looked like me than I was with finding my Kavinsky.

But the white boy thing was more than an embarrassing blip on the radar of my adolescence—my longing for these boys was the product of a sound indoctrination from years of white media consumption.

To All the Boys I Loved Before (both the book and the movie) subverted narratives in which the quirky white girl is the one deemed worthy enough to get the get The Perfect Boy—girls like the one I was relegated to background roles and left romance-less by the end of the story—in so many of the right ways. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before created, for me, a rich world of beautiful, smart young women that neither relied on men to uplift them not validate them. But, you know, it was sort of a perfect bonus when that happened too.

Even now, weeks after its release, my inbox still occasionally pings with messages from friends watching it for the first time. Today, for instance, one of my closest friends couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll before she texted me. She said she’d tried to get away from her love of romances, but this managed to draw her right back in. There were moments throughout where she worried she’d have to turn it off, abandon it once it followed the same trajectory of so many of its predecessors.

“I just knew [Peter Kavinsky] had to do something to ruin things. I just knew there was no way they could end up together,” she said. “The happy ending just felt impossible.”

So many of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the catch. The first time I watched it, I just knew that the inevitable breakdown seen was right around the corner. The part of the story where the young bookish girl, or so often the woman of color, has what seems like a light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished. Where she encounters some sort of embarrassment, some unearthed trauma that precludes her from a happy ending without also enduring great suffering.

The perceived impossibility of To All the Boys, I realize, is at the heart of why I loved it—why I found myself clicking replay before we’d even reached the brief mid-credits scene. The image of a young, smart, bookish woman of color falling in love without grief (related to the relationship) or shame on screen felt too big to assign a name. Felt too close to a dream not to hold tight to it, to close my eyes and will myself back to a world in which those things still seemed attainable.

Half of the story is the fact I didn’t grow up with images of young girls of color falling in love on screen at all, let alone with a heartthrob like Kavinsky. But the other half—perhaps the half that’s even more harrowing—is that I certainly didn’t see us falling in love separate from trauma, or rarer still, with another person of color.

I watched and read hundreds of stories in which the luckiest girls fell in love and rode off into the sunset—often in a cool Jeep!—with their Prince Charming. And that Prince Charming always looked like Peter Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky—and by extension, Peter and Lara Jean’s fauxlationship—was everything, but it was also precisely what I’ve been implicitly taught to desire. In this way, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before did what so many of its genre forebears had done before it.

And the thing is, I’m not asking this movie to be some wild break from the genre. I don’t even really want that of this particular film. What I do want, though, is thousands of different narratives about what it looks like for girls from all backgrounds to fall in love. We deserve every iteration of story in which young women of color get to fall in love with a sweet, emotionally-adept, whatever-trope-suits-your-fancy partner.

So much of what makes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before an unbelievably awe-inspiring, tweet-worthy movie, particularly for adults like me, is the element of unconscious wish fulfillment. Like, of course I’m not a teenage girl in a hyper white space, yearning for a story about a bookworm woman of color who falls in love—period, let alone with the “it” guy—anymore. And of course I’m no longer relying on these images to help me feel worthy of love and affection in the way I once was. But I’ve been sitting with that same yearning since then. That girl, the me who needed those things so desperately when she was a kid, never went away, she just evolved.

But even in that evolution, there are moments of deeply troubling considerations about what my love of Peter Kavinsky and this story might mean. Is it him, this particular character and this particular actor, or does my desire speak to something greater?

I’m 24 years old and settled into a community of black folks—friends and found family alike—that not only affirm, but uplift me. Everyday I am reminded of the beauty and brilliance of our people. And I am reminded of my own beauty and brilliance, by extension. This is a far cry from my hometown in suburban Indiana, from an upbringing that was largely populated by people and spaces that could do neither of those things. But that juxtaposition only serves to ground me more firmly in what I know to be true: one of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.

Yet, knowing those things doesn’t automatically undo the years of isolation and forced assimilation I endured to get here. Knowing those things doesn’t automatically help me unlearn the lies I internalized about myself and any potential partners who looked like me.

One of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.
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What I’m saying is shaking this doesn’t happen for all of us overnight. I’m saying that the mechanisms of white supremacy are complex and, oftentimes, hidden in plain sight. If I spent a lifetime both abhorring and simultaneously craving the white male gaze, then it’s going to take some time—ruminating on my understandings of desire and shame and identity—to walk back the decades of deeply entrenched ideologies which taught me to aspire to finding my happy ever after in the arms of a white man.

At the long end of 1986, two households emerge and I absorb the remnants of the home that split four people open. After my parents’ separation, I am always looking around for the rest of me, making sure I am still there. I am several parts of one body, holding two homes and four people’s memories.

When the phone rings at my mother’s house, my father’s berating increases to make up for the fact that he can no longer yell at her in person. Instead of embodying different parts of myself with each parent, I begin to present all of me with my mother and a shadow of me with my father. When I am with him, I am a mistake to be corrected. Most of what comes out of my mouth is wrong, so I eventually stop talking.

In my sixth year I learn that I should never have to go to the bathroom away from home. When I need to, it’s very bad and it upsets my father, but I do not know how to stop. He asks me why I don’t go before we leave, but I don’t have to go then or I do and then I have to go again. I do not know why my body works this way, but it must be wrong because he gets very irritated and lectures me for a long time—whether we find a public restroom quickly or not.

Dinners at his house feel like sharp teeth on me. He picks at me for how I eat, how much I eat and the baby fat I gain in adolescence. I come to realize he is using meal time to poke at my brother and me; asking us questions that no kids could answer, only to laugh at us then lash out at us for getting them wrong. Eventually my brother loses patience with the picking and starts to respond back. This results in a Ping-Pong game of verbal confrontations that bounce back and forth between them and latch onto my skin, assaulting me. I want to escape to the basement or the attic but my limbs are stiff against me. My body is still though I am slowly floating away from me.

In my 13th year, my brother begins to taunt me. We are at my mother’s kitchen table when he smiles, insisting I am holding my fork wrong and people will shun me for it. I melt into my plate and realize I am being eaten down to the core of me. When I look for myself in my body, I can barely find a trace of me.

How old were you when your face fell through? Did you hold it in your hands? Did you catch it in your skin? Did you lose track of where they end and you begin?

In my 17th year, I am in my first year of college when I meet Daniela*—the older cousin of one of my best friends. She becomes part of our friend group and we’re envious when she starts dating the cute guy we’re all curious about, until we find out he pulls her hair by the root when he’s angry.

We are parked in front of the house Daniela grew up in when I notice my skin becoming heavy, as though I am falling out of myself. I feel a draft in my body as though a door has opened that cannot be closed. It is on this day that I learn from my friend, that Daniela’s brothers used to throw her down the basement stairs when they were angry. I look up and stare at the house, as if for the first time, and something cracks in my bones.

I am ripped open and that tear becomes the catalyst for my sociology project—women rappers using art to discuss gendered power dynamics and abuse. When I take the risk of telling my brother and father about it, I do not mention the door of the house, the staircase or the hair pulled from Daniela’s head. I do not tell them the focus is on Eve’s Love is Blind. I simply say that I did a presentation on women rappers using music to illuminate social issues. I explain that I worked really hard and I know my professor doesn’t care for hip-hop, but I have the sense that she might be able to look at the genre in a different light after this.

For a moment, neither of them are saying anything, but they’re both smiling and they eventually begin to laugh. They make fun of me for thinking I had an impact on my professor and I begin to disappear into the length of my hair. I sail away to all those nights at the dinner table, the staircase at Daniela’s house, and the distance from the top of that first step to the basement floor.

I imagine the door to my father’s basement, the safety of his attic and the way edges of houses hold some little girls together, but pull other ones apart. When I float back, they’re still laughing. I know how quickly they erupt when disagreement is present, so I draw a smile on my face too.

Were you tangled in your words, when your flesh fell to your ankles? Could you see yourself around? Were you stuck inside your own sound?

In the last week of my 28th year, my agoraphobia and sensory processing disorder spill out on either side of me. Preparing to get on a plane for the first time since high school, I am terrified. I am washing my hands in the airport bathroom when my mother appears, telling me it’s time to board the flight.       

I check my hair and make-up and walk back to where she and my brother are sitting, only to find him exploding at me. I try to figure out what I’ve done, but I am fading down to the seams of me. I am transported back to the ‘90s to the small apartment we shared with my mom. My skin snags on the image of him shouting in my doorway. I remember the shape of the bedroom door, the contour of his mouth, and the screams that shook my skin out. I think back to the day I found my room trashed and the way I held the damage like souvenirs. I recall the string of punches that came after I interfered with his business call; I remember the rhythm of his fists hitting my arm.

When I drift back to the airport he is still yelling, grating me down to my ankles. Apparently, my having to pee was very selfish and those two minutes I took to look myself over meant that the three of us could’ve missed our flight. As the screaming tapers off, I find the edge of my abandoned body, pick it up by the shreds and drag it onto the plane.

In the coming months I begin to wear my silence like armor. It becomes the protector of me. I find that the only way to be around my brother and father is to be a ground down version of me, an acceptable facsimile; it stands in for me as a way to survive. This makes me feel like I am not a real person or they are not real to me. I start to feel like I don’t really have a father or a brother. The two of them are essentially strangers to me, flaming things that mostly know how to rage at me.

Do you live inside the skin of you? Are you the girl behind the face? Did you find yourself in the shadow box? What’s left of you after the chase?

As my twenties begin to evaporate, I begin to part down the length of me. I feel enamored with men, but when they’re standing in front of me, it seems like there’s a wall between us. I think there must be something wrong with me that cannot be fixed or reconciled, so I eventually stop dating them—but the pull towards them remains.

When I tell my therapist about it, she asks if I am more attracted to men’s or women’s bodies. I tell her that is not the right question. I ask a friend for advice and they tell me that if I enjoy having sex with women, then I am queer. I know that is not the right answer. I feel drawn to men inside my bones, but when I get close to them, it feels like the best parts of me drop out of my body. I know there must be a reason why thinking about it makes me feel like I am holding my breath. I know there must be a reason why they light up so many parts of me, then leave me split up in messy piles.

On the raw edge of my 29th year, my long-term partner starts transitioning and something is pulled up and out of me. I begin thinking about the way people both transcend and encompass gender. I think about the way I am absorbing and categorizing gender and I begin to ask what I mean when I say I cannot connect with men. I begin to ask if I mean that I cannot connect with cis men. Like my other relationships at the time, there is unwarranted anger and an inability to show up for difficult conversations. But when I think about all the ways he is different than my recent partners, the most obvious difference on both a superficial and spiritual level is that he isn’t a girl.

I freeze into myself when I think about the way our relationship took shape. We are best friends and it is New Year’s Eve—one week after my 27th birthday.

He’s coming from work as a bartender, but I’m the one who’s been drinking. He starts a violent argument with me in the public hallway of my apartment building and I fall out to the edge of me. His words draw a fence around me, yelling that he can no longer play this “friend role.” I am confused and tired, but I understand he feels I’ve wronged him and now I owe him a right. I am drunk and drowning in this hallway. I just want it to stop. I cannot imagine losing him, so I have sex with him. When I come, it’s the kind of orgasm I wish I could take back.

I know there must be a reason why men light up so many parts of me then leave me split up in messy piles.
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Five years after the waves rush out and over our relationship, I read Jenny Lumet’s letter to Russell Simmons, and I am cut through to the other side of me. Her words are gentle but unapologetic and I am reminded of the intimacy that is having patience with Black men, even after experiencing harm at their hands. I wipe my face with my own hands and count how many years I’ve held on to things for fear that the men who have hurt me, would feel some of the same hurt if I use words to say what they have done to me.

She talks about making a trade—”just keep him calm, and you’ll get home” and I am yanked down to the tightest threads of me. I think about the way silence and sex turn into offerings when men decide you owe them something. My eyes spill out to my formative years and then back to adulthood. I remember the weight of being covered by flesh that never asked.

I think about all the times my eyes stood still while my body stiffened into a “no” because my words couldn’t do it. I’ve been making trades with trauma since I was 14.

Did you make oceans with your eyes, when your legs dropped out from under you? Do you recognize your body, when you split right down the length of you?

In the wake of 4:44, I awoke—30 years after I first swallowed my mouth closed. Three decades after one house became two, I widened out like unfolding fists. When I heard those words, “You had no father, you had the armor,” it felt as if they lived inside my fingers. When Jay Z says, “You got a daughter, gotta get softer,” I am holding both lines in both hands; I am holding the child me and the grown-up me in the skin of my palms.

I consider the way the world conflates hyper-masculinity with Blackness and vulnerability with femininity. I think about the way self-reflection is conceptualized as something men do in honor of daughters—but not wives. I remember my mother’s ability to hold my father’s rage. I think about the length of my emotional intelligence and how little I was when I learned to shut my mouth. I consider the way abuse patterns wrap around us like rope.

Of all the things that tried to split me, it was the juxtaposition of having a white mother and a Black father and the pain of being accepted by her and rejected by him that ultimately severed me in half. It was the confusion of not being Black enough for my father and feeling like I was supposed to partner with men who acted like him in order to prove that rejecting his abuse does not mean rejecting my Blackness. It was the cut of feeling so guilty; I would see his face in other people and believe I could undo what had been done to me by having it done again by them.

Feeling like men were in charge of me made me feel like my body wasn’t mine long before I knew what words like consent meant. So when it came time for me to say yes or no to a man, I would tighten into my mouth and fall out of my skin. I would later attribute it to my Selective Mutism, my Non-Verbal Learning Disability, and a confusion around my sexuality.

But my tendency to lose my words was born out of a trauma that developed from being unable to speak freely in my home as a child. And my difficulties with non-verbal communication were informed by a childhood that left me feeling like I was safer when I didn’t speak.

In my 36th year, I learn about the R Kelly sex cult accusations and several memories converge as if on cue. The idea of a man controlling women so much that he has power over their eating and going to the bathroom makes me fall backwards into my six-year-old self. I realize that I have spent my entire life being unsure if it is ok for me to speak, eat, go to the bathroom or do anything that reveals me as human around men.

You are not a shadow box, an after-thought or a vacant sketch of you.

My father did not get softer, as a result of having me. He simply reproduced what had been done to him as a child. And my brother’s ability to replicate my father’s abuse came from absorbing my parents’ dynamic and being able to identify more with losing yourself to a fit of violence, than being able to identify with the body that holds the scars after the fit.

I know now that people rage when they are disconnected from their person. Having so much rage projected onto me eventually resulted in my belief that I am too much of a person. Men regarded my most basic needs as something to get rid of. So I believed that if I wanted to be with a man, I’d have to get rid of myself.

When I was able to connect with queer and lesbian people, I thought it meant there was something queer about my attraction to masculinity. I started to think there was something inherently queer about me—something internal that exists outside of my attractions. But as my queerness became wider, it felt like the puzzle was being solved outside of me. The more I tried to grow into these understandings, the more I seemed to grow out of me.

When I learned I was dating a man, I simply thought the way in which I was attracted to men had revealed itself as a different shape. I thought my attraction to him could explain why my chemistry with cis men never translated properly. But I left the relationship still feeling like there was something wrong with me.

It is only now after spending years of my life depriving myself from relationships with all men and then cis men specifically as a way to protect myself, that I realize the only relationships I’ve ever had were replications of the abuse that led to the repression.

And most of the sexual experiences I’ve had with men reinforced that my body was theirs. So I became averse to the abuse and called it an aversion to men.

As I thaw out into the larger part of me, I know that the thing standing between myself and other people in relationships is not their gender. It’s the way my body viscerally responds to gender, since my early understandings of masculinity and intimacy were tied up in abuse. It’s about the way my skin translates injury, after years of experiences taught me to anticipate blood instead of love from men.

I am finally starting to ask if I am truly a poor fit for cis men or simply not attracted to men who act like my father and brother.

You are real raw love and gorgeous flesh. You deserve to be held like the entire shape of you.

In the aftermath of the home that broke open, I know that girls like Daniela* and I will have a steeper climb towards finding home in the arms of a man, because of what happened at the hands of men in our homes. I know that relationships aren’t about breaking somebody down or taking away their person, as a way to regain yours. I know that intimacy doesn’t feel like being trapped inside a house. I know that love doesn’t feel like the wrong side of the basement door.

When I look at the place inside me that split, I can see the wound and feel it closing. I know that people are neither good nor bad, but in a constant state of becoming. When they engage in harmful behaviors it’s because they’ve been profoundly hurt and they’re perpetuating that learning. I know unlearning is a process. I know I’ve survived both my child and adulthood due to my ability to read people who were so checked out from their person, they didn’t care if what happened next froze me out of my person.

I know that brain structure, systemic and familial post-trauma can complicate the ability to say or hear a no. I know that doesn’t make it a yes. I know the thing that causes people to control and rage is the same thing that allows them to keep going during a sexual act, after a face has gone blank. And I know I don’t owe it to anyone to be an emotional punching bag while they work through their trauma superficially through me.

On the long end of my 36th year, I figured out why that complex, primal, physical and emotional longing for men never went away. It is part of me, but it is no longer a gash on me. I am learning how to stop the blood. In the wake of my healing, I know that trying to love people in similar pain as me was an attempt to grow the skin over the cuts that once divided me.

I am not broken, but I have existed in pieces and I know that being deeply harmed during childhood is a particular kind of bruise. I have a higher level of empathy because of it and I know that empathy will translate into the highest level of love for myself as I continue to learn that I cannot love the rage out of a person. And if you are navigating that kind of trauma, you deserve to learn it too.

You deserve to be loved like survival, like the spelling of your name, like the softest whisper and the loudest yell that sounds like the entire length of you. And you deserve to hear it over and over again until you know it’s true.

By July Westhale

The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

Dear you,

When I was 4, my mom drew me a bath.

“Watch the water,” she said, “and come get me when it’s full.”

I’ve replayed this scene thousands of times — her piano fingers on the rusted faucet, the bathmat an inky-gray, like a fingerprinting. I remember the water filling, filling, the plastic toy boat rising victorious in the swells. I remember calling for her, and hearing only silence. I remember the water overflowing, soaking the mat, leaking down the hallway linoleum, past my sick and sleeping mother.

I don’t remember the moment the water reached our neighbor’s apartment next door, but I do remember that when Child Protective Services was called, I put my body between them and my mom.

“She was sleeping,” I said. “It’s my fault.”

I was taken to a children’s home and, screaming, dunked into a bathtub of ice water.

No one gave me information about what was happening. No one offered comfort. It seemed to me, even at the time, that those in charge thought that silence and isolation was a better solution than explanation and solace.

I had it so so so much better than any of these children in the news.

I’m so proud of my community for standing up and staying compassionate and tender. Of the radical empathy you’re showing to each other and yourselves. I’m so proud of your hand-lettered signs and your fundraising and your yelling and your insistence on better behavior, a better world.

And your stories. I’m most proud of your stories.

For those of you scared to act, or feeling dissociated, or overwhelmed —

hear my story. Take it as a place that helps creates space for whatever you’re going through. That’s what narrative can do in times like these. Take it moment by moment. In this moment, you’re listening, and that’s massive.