A Game of Me

Once a week, my phone alerts me to the amount of time that week I’ve spent staring at its little screen. 

How quaint. It’s all screen time now. What else is there for me to turn to? At home, I constantly put on Twitch streamers playing video games. Watching them play games is less lonely than playing games myself. I let their voices keep me company for hours and hours a day. I find it hard to turn them off, because when I do, then my loneliness is inescapable. It leaps out to swallow me at the first opportunity. My father used to listen all the time to Michael Jackson (the talk radio host, not the pop star) and Dennis Prager (yes, that Dennis Prager) as, I think, a way of keeping his formidable demons at bay. I use Twitch streamers as a kind of magic spell to ward off my loneliness, but they emphasize my loneliness, too. I feel the screen between me and them. They remind me that for months and months now, I have gone without face-to-face contact in the physical world with anyone I know and trust. The screen is no substitute for what I need. There’s something harsh and draining about it. I feel it burning into my eyes, leaving some part of me exhausted, a part that can only be nourished through contact with others. I wish I could shatter the screen, crawl through, and find myself in the same space as other people.

Of course I look away from the screen at times, though it requires a force of will. I read books. I go for walks. I turn my eyes on the vibrant greens of nature and imagine that I’m draining the life force from those trees and blades of grass to keep me going in this solitude for a little longer. I imagine that all this loneliness and screen time has turned me into a kind of vampire, flowers withering when I walk past them as my soul hungrily absorbs their essence.

I know that screens can nourish us, too, and I try sometimes to commit a decent portion of my screen time to the rich and varied humanity of cinema, though I think even watching movies here in my apartment is providing diminishing returns as the months of isolation drag on. But no, when I think of nourishing screens, I think not of the screens in my apartment which I have almost always watched alone, quarantine or no. Instead I think of the screens at movie theaters, one of my few communal experiences with other people these past few years in this lonely city which most of my friends have left. I think of how I can step out of a great film at a theater, into the light of day, feeling energized, and knowing that the energy I feel comes not just from having seen a great film, but from having shared the act of seeing it with others. 

In Ammonite, Kate Winslet plays a deeply lonely woman with a heart in need of excavation.

In The Green Ray, Marie Rivière plays a woman who finds it so hard to find real, meaningful connection that she feels, in a sense, invisible.

----- “Do you need a bag, sir?” she asked. “Ma’am,” I replied, more brusquely than I intended, but sometimes it hurts, even when I know it’s an honest mistake, the constant reminders that despite having transitioned many years ago, living full time, having had facial feminization surgery, all of it, to the world at large, I remain and will always remain invisible, read as something and someone that I’ve gone through so much trouble to assert that I am not. Carrying my groceries away from the market and beginning the long walk home, I wondered if he’d be there, the one person I sometimes saw on my shopping trips who never misgendered me. Sure enough, as I stepped out of the building’s shadow, I immediately heard his voice calling out to me. “God bless you ma’am,” said the man who often hung around outside the neighborhood grocery store selling copies of Street Spirit. 

“Thank you,” I said quickly, politely, not wanting to make him feel invisible--I know how painful that is--but also knowing where he usually took things and not wanting to encourage him. I continued my brisk walk away from the store and away from him. Then, from behind me, I heard it.

“I’d like to get a cup of coffee with you sometime.”

An involuntary “aw” escaped me, but not the “aw” of “aw, that’s sweet.” An “aw” of sympathetic pain, for him and for me, too. Because I know that, as desperately lonely as I am, there’s nothing he can ever say or do that would make me want to get coffee with him or anything else. And because I know only too well what it’s like to long for time and closeness with people for whom, whatever it is they are looking for, it will never be you. How many of us are doomed to live our lives in solitude and invisibility, being seen only by people who we will never want and yearning always to be seen by people who will never see us? Eleanor Rigbys, the lot of us.

What sorts of vacations did your family take when you were a child?  Were they road trips like the ones my family took?  I know your family had more money than mine did,  maybe you took trips to Europe or something, I don’t know. I want to know. But if you ever did take road trips, did you love the big skies over small-town motels? Did you love seeing what each night’s swimming pool looked like? Did you ever ride past Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas along Route 66 only to find it lodged inside you forever? Did you sit in the backseat with headphones on, completely lost in music, trying to escape from things outside (your father) and things inside (a self you couldn’t be)?  I’m guessing you didn’t. I want to hear all about the difference. I want to hear all about the specificity of you.  Was there laughter in your childhood car rides? Were your parents gregarious? Did you play games together to pass the time, looking for license plates from different states or cars of different colors? Or did pop songs from radio stations fill the air until they shattered into static? Were you ever affected by a sadness you couldn’t name as you moved through the vastness of it all?

Did you feel free out there, as if everything under the grand expanse belonged to you? 

I did. 

I don’t anymore. Do you still? 

Do you think maybe we could go to some of those places again, together, you and me, and get them back?

Recently I read Adrienne Rich’s remarkable 1977 essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying."  At one point, she writes:

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville." You tell me: "She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends." You tell me: "It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining." Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning's weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green women - of threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

It reminded me of what it is to really want to know someone. The way, as Rich writes, knowing someone can meaningfully expand our universe. I remembered how learning even simple, mundane things about the last woman I loved--her father’s name, a bad movie she’d seen at the theater in her early teens, things like that--felt exciting and nourishing to me. They became part of my universe, which became larger as it expanded to accommodate them. I wanted the entire expansive overgrown solitude of my mind to be rejuvenated and made into something new by learning about her. New monuments and statue gardens. I wanted a kind of intimacy with her where knowing how she saw the world might inform how I saw the world. 

Now I feel so solitary, I feel the damage this prolonged loneliness is doing, and I can feel those tendrils in my mind, the ones Rich mentions, withering, drying up, needing to come across someone who ignites their interest again, someone I want to know, and who wants to know and be known by me in return. Elsewhere in the essay, Rich writes, “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life.” But we can’t have that alchemy with just anyone. That’s why Rich calls it alchemy.  To find someone is hard enough. Someone with whom you can “both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.” Without the other, there is no possibility of life.

In Michael Winterbottom’s extraordinary 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson’s passion project Factory Records seems to be on its last legs. Just after a disastrous meeting at Factory HQ, the film cuts to Tony (Steve Coogan) hosting Wheel of Fortune. He strikes a rather more philosophical turn than longtime United States Wheel host Pat Sajak ever has.

In 2018 I gave a keynote at a conference in Cologne, Germany. Today, I wore the same outfit that I wore that day to an interview for a job at a grocery store. So spins the wheel of fortune.

I come from a working class background. My mom kept us barely treading water working the night shift doing data entry at a medical laboratory, the phone ringing off the hook with creditors calling throughout the day. She did that until about a week before she went into the hospital with complications from cancer, which killed her. 

Some of my friends have parents with money. Houses and property. People they can turn to in failure if need be and ask for help. People from whom they stand to inherit some wealth someday. Of course, a lot of Americans also don’t have that at all. I’m one of those who doesn’t have that at all. As heroine Holly Sykes says in David Mitchell’s urgent and thrilling novel The Bone Clocks, “Being born’s a hell of a lottery.”

Society has a way of making class distinctions feel like natural law. They’re not. They’re bullshit. For a while, I got lucky. Got to stop doing coffee shop and call center work and become a so-called professional writer. Even though I know class distinctions are bullshit, there was still always part of me, the part that had internalized society’s bullshit, that felt like I had cheated destiny by breaking out of this life for a while. That part of me now gloats, pleased to see the universe correct itself as I’m returned to my rightful place.

But here’s what’s actually true. The people who are doing those jobs that our culture deems “better”--they’re there because they’re lucky, too, like I was lucky for a while. I’m not saying that hard work and perseverance are never a factor. They certainly were for me. But so much of all of it is down to privilege and circumstance. Impostor syndrome was a constant problem for me in the circles I’ve moved in for the past several years but I know now better than I ever have before that I’m way, way more than competent enough to do any number of jobs in and around the games industry. I don’t know what my failure to find such a job now is about--Being too trans? Being too political? Just plain bad luck after a run of good luck?--but I know it’s not that I can’t do them. 

I acknowledge that part of it probably has to do with certain limitations of mine. We all have our limits, and there are certain kinds of writer that I just can’t be. I can’t be the kind of writer who churns out stories like The Best Starter Pokemon of All Time or Ranking All the Snakes of the Metal Gear Solid Series, because I just don’t care. I don’t think along those lines. That’s not at all how my mind or heart works in relation to games or cinema or anything else, and if I tried to contort myself to fit into that mold, the results would be forced and terrible. If that is what the market values now, then this must be where the market and I part ways. In a 1999 interview with Charlie Rose (which for whatever reason has stuck in my head since I first saw it all those years ago), Johnny Depp says that if he was forced into being a purely commercial, leading man “product” who could no longer make the kinds of creative choices he wanted to make, “I’d rather go back to pumping gas.” I’d really love to keep writing about games or writing for games or working in games in some other capacity entirely or doing any number of things rather than working at a grocery store or a call center or wherever I end up, but if my choices are to churn out pieces of a sort that I fundamentally don’t see any value in or to pump gas, well then, I guess I’m pumping gas. There’s certainly no shame in it, and I’m not entitled to do work of a different sort, at least no more and no less than anyone else is. But I sure wish it paid a little better. 

I’m really scared. So far this decade is shaping up to be far more uncertain, unstable and unpleasant for me than the last. For the whole planet too, maybe, and I know that the problems of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but still, it’s my life. It’s the only one I’ve got. And I’m terrified. 

Earlier in 24 Hour Party People, Tony passes a man on the street who asks him for money. Tony gives him a bit and keeps walking as the man shouts after him:

To which Tony says:

And then again, after a moment:

Because I decided it was too long for Tumblr, I put my new post about revisiting The Matrix, the power stories have over us, and different kinds of liberation, on Medium. You can read it here.

A friend asked what acupuncture feels like, but I don’t know what it might feel like to you. I can only try to explain what it feels like to me.

You have to understand that I wake up every day with my skin screaming for touch. I live the life of the skin-hungry, and this drought withers the mind and the heart as well as the body. 

So, acupuncture. Sixteen or so sometimes-symmetrical precision points of touch that I don’t feel touching me at all, so small are they. But my body knows they’re there, and in fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s the strangest sensation, like dreaming while awake, a vibration runs through all the barren places, all the far-out peninsulas of my body, a vibration that feels like warm water thawing out ice, or like greenery coming back to barren lands. Today, even though I knew my arms were by my sides, for a while I could have sworn they were reaching straight out in either direction. It felt like floating, like expansion, like a memory of homecoming. 

The other day I was walking down Shattuck in Berkeley. Ahead of me, two people were strolling very slowly and talking to each other. One of them caught sight of me behind him out of the corner of his eye, stopped walking and started rapidly repeating a rhythmic three-syllable phrase that at first I didn’t even understand. Then my brain made sense of it: “Come on, sir! Come on, sir! Come on, sir!” he said. “I see you straggling.” He had stopped to insist that I pass, and my soul curled up a little tighter inside me as I did. Finally turning to face me fully, he offered up an awkward correction. “Or ma’am, whatever.”

When I’m misgendered, which I am all the time, I retreat from the world, even as I am out in it. My spirit tightens into a little ball and hides somewhere deep in the core of me, leaving my body a kind of ghost ship, navigating physical space but not really inhabiting it. You could say that I take this approach to every aspect of life. My birthday was earlier this month. I turned 43. But I don’t like to call attention to my birthday. In my darkest, most self-pitying moments, the voice in my head says things like, “Another lonely, empty year. Toss it on the pile with all the others.” It was definitely a year in which I felt the lack of what Bresson called “the bonds that beings and things are waiting for in order to live.” There were few new memories made, no close connections, no seeing and being seen, no knowing and being known, no intimacy, no touch, no affection, no warmth, no love. Will 43 be the year that my life starts? Only time will tell. Maybe the key at this point is to find a kind of meaning that isn’t rooted in close connection with others. But what would that even look like? For me, right now, love is all that matters.

So: I’m extremely guarded against the world largely because I don’t feel seen by it. But the one thing I need more than anything else in order to feel like my life has meaning is close connections with others. I hope you can see my dilemma. 

When the pain is at its worst, it sometimes seems to me that there is a choice I have to make between anguish and anger. The anger is much easier. It’s more seductive. It feels more powerful. The anguish leaves me open, aching, yearning, wanting, needing. It hurts like hell sometimes. But in the anguish, there is still the possibility for connection, for salvation. The anger cuts me off. It puts me at odds with the world, with other people. The anguish is better, infinitely better, I assure you.  On the final page of Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, there is this: 

Maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

And the thing is that at times, in fleeting moments here and there, I am still so fucking grateful to be alive, even though I’m most definitely not always “so glad to be here,” because though I truly do seek to be free of the loneliness and alienation and anguish in my life, I can sometimes see a strange kind of beauty even in my own spectacular failure of a life. 

I found The Goldfinch frustrating for the ways in which it was entirely about whiteness and wealth and privilege but didn’t seem to know in the least that it was entirely about these things, a novel that had the privilege of passing off its experiences and insights and truths as universal when in truth so few of us get to live lives unfettered enough that we can reach for such truths the way Theo Decker does, flying from posh hotel to posh hotel, never really acknowledging that the people behind the counters of those hotels have inner worlds as worthy and wondrous as his own, that they, too, live lives worthy of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. And yet, I adored it in the end. In the novel’s final moments, as Theo reflects on everything he’s been through and the now that all of that has brought him to, I finally understood where the word “breathtaking” comes from when critics use it as a superlative to describe the impact of a work of art. Sitting outside the little neighborhood coffee stand that is part of my daily routine, I felt my breathing shift, so awestruck and exhilarated was I by the truths Tartt was holding up to the light. 

In the closing pages of the book, Theo says,

...I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it--although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. 

Yes. Yes. Those are the truths that matter to me, too. After finishing the book, my brain and spirit buzzing from its ending, I walked into a Target, and my phone shuffled up the song “Pobody’s Nerfect” by Wolf Parade. As with so much of Wolf Parade’s music, there’s a point in the song when the sound just gets so vast, it encompasses cities and mountains and forests and starry night skies and also the most intimate truths, the look in the eyes of a trusted friend, the lowering of defenses between people, the past, the future, a freedom from crushing expectations, all of it, all of it at once, and I felt my soul, normally so very small within my body, so guarded, so tense, so vigilant, sweep out to fill the Target and the town and the universe and I thought, that’s it, that’s where it is, that’s why I’m here, the mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable truth that is microscopic and cosmic all at once and that I will never be able to hold in my hands but will never, ever stop grasping for.

Here’s the thing: My life is so fucking small, just me, here, alone, in this little studio apartment, the solitude stretching like a gray gelatinous blob from day to day to day to week to week to week to week to year to year to year to year to year, and yes, I’ve built a fortress around my heart because I feel besieged in the world, and yes, there’s only very few who can breach it, people who bring my guard down, who make me feel safe and seen and free from expectations that I can never hope to meet. Isn’t it strange how living with the fear of failure, the fear of being deemed too much of a fuckup and cast aside as a hopeless case, has done nothing to motivate me to change, has succeeded only in turning me inward with shame, yet the absence of that fear is what I know could motivate me to change? I’ve lived with the fear my whole life. It doesn’t make me a better person. But love? Yes. Love could do that. 

On very rare occasions people try to claw their way into my life but they’re all wrong to me. They’re people who have me raising the drawbridge, flooding the battlements with archers. Then someone strolls by for whom the drawbridge lowers itself, someone who carries the password to bypass all the magical fortifications our enchanters can devise, and they don’t even wish to enter. So it goes, for what’s true for me is as true for them. Again, from the final pages of The Goldfinch: “We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”

The hype for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was extremely real. I remember talk of people going to movies in the preceding months just to see the trailer. I don’t remember if it was this specific trailer, but I do remember that it was like this--no narration, just atmosphere, just footage, 90 seconds or two minutes you could just get lost in. It tantalized us with Burton’s steamy, shadowy, fully realized Gotham, the raw power of the Batmobile, the star power of Jack Nicholson, and, in a casting choice I found thrillingly off-kilter, Michael Keaton as Batman.

I was 12 that summer. I remember the thrill that ran through me once riding past a billboard on Sunset, just the shiny metallic logo on a black background and the film’s release date. It seemed to herald the arrival of a particular kind of cool that simply hadn’t existed before, at least not in my young life. 

It’s interesting, isn’t it, what falls away as the years go by, and what remains? Now, when I think of that film, it isn’t the (admittedly outstanding) environmental design that I remember most, or the silhouette of the Batwing against the moon, or anything that seemed to make the movie so tremendously important and exciting in the summer of ‘89. Even walking out of the theater after my first viewing, I remember that I’d been blindsided by the peculiar vulnerability of Bruce Wayne, and it’s this that I still love about the film. 

Sixteen years later, Batman Begins would give us a version of the character who’s tremendously capable in or out of the Batsuit, a martial artist who cracks a ton of skulls in a prison camp before being dragged away by guards to solitary. “Why?” Wayne asks.

“For protection.” 

“I don’t need protection!” 

“Protection for them,” the guard quips, nodding back toward the numerous men Wayne has left writhing in pain. 

I can’t imagine Keaton’s Wayne ever being in a situation like this, and if he did get himself into one, I don’t see him being so dominant. As Batman, he’s a capable enough fighter, sure, but one gets the sense that the theatrics of his costume and all his accoutrements do a lot of the heavy lifting, as he uses the shadows of the city to his advantage, instilling fear into the hearts of his opponents. In an early scene, we see a criminal being dragged off by police after an encounter with Batman, raving deliriously. “I’m tellin’ ya, man! A giant bat!” 

When he lacks the suit and has to do what he can in broad daylight, it all feels very different. He pays Vicki Vale a visit at her apartment with the intention of telling her that he’s Batman, but their conversation is interrupted by the Joker, and pitted against him, Bruce feels completely outmatched. Smashing a vase with a poker, Wayne goes all in, doing everything he can to operate on the Joker’s level. “You wanna get nuts?!” he shouts. “Come on! Let’s get nuts!” But the Joker isn’t even fazed. He just pulls out a pistol, asks Wayne if he’s ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and shoots him, without missing a beat. 

Bruce’s attempt to confront the Joker doesn’t feel like one formidable force against another. Compared to his incredibly threatening nemesis, in this moment Bruce comes across like a wounded child, trying very much to make himself seem big and scary in an effort to fend off danger and keep safe someone he cares about, but only succeeding in revealing how small and vulnerable he really is. It’s my favorite moment in the film. It seems to me that the power dynamic is not entirely unlike those moments when I’d try to make myself seem bigger than I was to protect my mom when my father went on drunken rampages, but I actually only felt very small and very scared. It’s in this scene that we most clearly see that Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is still very much the person he was in the moment his parents were killed, that the Batsuit and everything that goes with it are tools he’s created not just to frighten criminals but also to protect himself. I guess this is what’s stayed with me most from the film because as I’ve gotten older, it’s only felt more true to me that those of us who are made to feel lost and scared when we’re young, we can carry on, we can grow, we can heal, but that wound will always be a part of us.

-----

A few days ago, I was reminded of something that happened with my father when I was very young. Like so many memories of my father, this one is frightening and painful, unjust and infuriating. I’m not entirely defined by the painful aspects of my youth, but they’re an important part of my story, and they have left their mark on me. No doubt that’s where some of my vigilance comes from. It’s part of why I have walls around me and so few people can bring those walls down and get close to me. 

Unsurprisingly, nobody really knows anything about that part of my life. I mean, people know about it in broad strokes, but I don’t have a person, not a single person on this planet, who really knows me well enough to know the places I come from. There’s nobody I’ve shown pictures of my parents to, told my parents’ names to, told the stories of where I grew up and how, the complexity of my feelings for my father, a man I admired and feared, loved and sometimes hated. I want someone, someday, to walk through the hallways of my memories with me. Someone I trust. Someone whose presence feels like a kind of light in the dark places. And I want that person to bring me into her childhood, too, to give me a tour of the places she comes from, and be glad for my presence there.

“waiting in a car waiting for a ride in the dark” -M83, “Midnight City”

Every time this song comes on, I’m back. Back in that hotel room in Bangkok, alone, bouncing off the walls, dancing to this song, feeling so fucking alive and hungry. Hungry for life. Hungry for touch. Hungry for her.

“Midnight City” has an incredible video but for now I want you to forget all about that, because the video is about one thing and the song is about something else. The song is about sleek, modern isolation, the insulated isolation of sitting in a car in a city alone, the sounds of the world outside muffled and distant. It’s night. There’s neon. Neon and solitude and yearning. 

Is this supposed to be a metaphor for the way we live our lives now? The isolation of the modern world? I don’t know. It’s a good enough analogy for my life though, I suppose. My own cool, insulated, urban isolation. A placid surface with desperate yearning invisible underneath.

On last week’s episode of Killing Eve, the psychopathic assassin Villanelle had to pretend to be an addict and attend a support group to connect with someone who could lead her to the person she was hunting. Her first day was a disaster, because all Villanelle knows how to do is pretend and the person running the group saw right through her bullshit. So the next day she said something more true.

To which the group administrator responds:

I certainly can. But what puzzles me so much, even all these years later, when memories bring me back to that hotel room in Bangkok is how alive I felt. Physically, intellectually, sexually. I was fully in my body and my body was fully alive. Now, most of the time, I don’t feel much of anything except insulated isolation, painful loneliness, and somewhere deep, deep under the placid surface, a powerful yearning for connection. But I know, I KNOW that I’m capable of feeling something else, of inhabiting my body, of not feeling driven out of my own skin by insecurity and doubt and shame and fear, of laughing from a real place and crying from a real place, of touching and being touched in ways that I truly feel. How do I get it back? How do I get it back?! There has to be a way. I don’t want to go the rest of my life not really feeling anything. 

Was it her? I think maybe it was her. Maybe it was the memory of her touch, the memory of being held by her, that was still warming my skin and coursing through my body some weeks later, when I was in Thailand. But now it’s been years and years and years since I’ve known the touch of anyone who inspired my love the way she did. How are we supposed to keep feeling things when there is no connection in our lives into which we can pour our feelings? Feelings that are just our own, that aren’t part of something shared, can only stagnate and die. But so few people can make me feel the way she did.

It is strange to still be alone long after you have decided that not being alone anymore is the most important thing. 

(The Americans, season 4, episode 8)

Philip (who Martha calls Clark, the name of the identity he used as Martha’s lover and eventual husband while using her to gain access to FBI intelligence) says, “You too,” and Martha, after making a joke about the improbability of her finding someone in Russia, where she doesn’t speak the language, relents and says, “Yeah, okay. Me too.” 

But of course, there’s no danger of Philip being alone--he has always had Elizabeth, his real partner, the one who truly knows him, and Martha--who perhaps appears plain and unremarkable--has very often been alone, her one serious relationship a ruse in which she was manipulated by a Russian spy. That’s gotta be a blow to your confidence. 

When you’ve been alone as long as I have, you start wondering if maybe you just need to either take what you can get and settle, or to accept that you’ll be spending your life alone. But when Martha is visited some time later in her apartment in Moscow and asked if she’s met anyone, she replies, “Nobody suitable.” The line suggests that Martha still has standards of her own, that despite entreating Philip to not be alone, she still lives her life as if it is better to be alone than to be with someone who is not “suitable.” And as much as I feel that my prolonged solitude is taking a real toll on my mind, body, and spirit, I, too, cannot bring myself to be with someone who I don’t feel is suitable.

People sometimes think this means I’m holding out for some unattainable notion of perfection, but it’s not that at all. It’s more like I’m holding out for someone with whom I feel safe revealing all of my flaws and imperfections, all the gaps in my knowledge that come from my lack of experience, all my vulnerabilities and struggles, and for that, I don’t want someone who strikes me as perfect at all. I just want someone I can feel a real connection with. In a world in which I constantly avoid the gaze of others because seeing and being seen only reminds me that I’m almost never seen as the person I really am, I want someone whose eyes I feel safe looking into.

In one scene in the new Hulu series Ramy, Ramy’s making out with Sarah, a woman he’s been hitting it off with, when she does E.

By this time, Sarah’s already taken the E, and Ramy’s unwillingness to take it means that they’ll be in different worlds. The connection they were experiencing is severed (at least temporarily), and Ramy, because he’s not up for something that Sarah expected him to be up for, is alone for the night, while Sarah winds up connecting with someone else. I sometimes feel like I experience this in my own way, like all the things I’m not up for, or down for, or willing to just jump into, interfere with my ability to form the kind of connection I’m so desperate for, because people don’t know how to handle someone who operates so differently. But I can’t change where I’m at, I can’t change what I need. I need time and friendship and trust first, I need to get comfortable with somebody, I need to at least start really knowing a person before I’m at a place where anything can happen. 

Sometimes I feel like the world just isn’t set up anymore to allow for the kind of connection I’m looking for. It feels like everything is dating apps, and something about meeting on a dating app suggests that you’re looking to start at dating, and I don’t want to start there with anyone. But it’s so hard to just make friends anymore. 

And yet, as much as I love films and video games and books and music and the beauty of the natural world, they can’t be the answer to everything. The longer I stay alone, the emptier they feel, because I’m not sharing them with anyone. I need touch. I need tenderness. I need connection and closeness and compassion. I need vulnerability and realness. I need to give love at least as much as I need to receive it. I need to not be alone.

Anyway. I hope Martha found somebody suitable, eventually.

There’s writing that you have to do--as in, you’re obligated to do it--and then there’s writing that you need to do, as in, it’s just sitting there inside you, weighing you down, gnawing at the inner walls of your mind, needing to be expunged so you can do the writing that you have to do.

This is writing that I need to do so that I can get back to the writing that I have to do.

On a recent afternoon I got off BART at the stop near my home and there were Girl Scouts outside at a little table, selling cookies. In an instant an entire scenario played out in my head. I walked up to them, smiling, expressing enthusiasm about getting to buy some cookies, maybe making a comment about how much we all love Thin Mints, though I bet they hear that all the time. I bought a few boxes, wished them well, and went on my way. But none of this actually happened. Instead I just turned away and started walking toward my apartment. Reason being that I figured if I did, in actuality, approach them with the intent of buying cookies, the fact of my obvious transness might, perchance, have made one of the girls noticeably uncomfortable, or perhaps a parent of one of the girls, and I would pick up on this and then I would feel uncomfortable for having made them uncomfortable, and then the whole exchange would be tinged with awkwardness, and I’d just want to end it as quickly as possible to relieve their discomfort at me and my discomfort at their discomfort, and I’d walk away regretting that I’d put any of us through that. Of course I realize that there’s a chance that these particular young people and their present parents are perfectly comfortable around trans people, that there’d be no fleeting “How do I explain this to my daughter later?” flicker across a mother’s face, no girl hesitating awkwardly, caught in a moment of uncertainty about how to address me. But I can’t know for sure, and so even if I tried to approach the situation with the casual, carefree attitude that I wanted to, the fear of the possibility of things becoming awkward would be rattling around in me so loudly that I couldn’t hide it, and my fear of potential awkwardness would awkwardly poison the whole interaction regardless.

This happens all the time. This is how I live my life.

Last month, Bruno Ganz died. I love Wings of Desire, and his performance in it. Like his angel, Damiel, I sometimes feel like I’m observing life, but not really participating in it. I exist at a remove, wondering what real closeness and connection and participation in life are like. I know they can be wonderful. 

“I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here...to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic.”

The film punctures the lie that time heals all wounds. For many of us, the waiting and waiting and waiting is the wound. 

Bruno Ganz was only a few years older than I am now when he made Wings of Desire. I don’t know why thoughts like that so often occur to me, but they do. I think maybe it’s because I’m so aware of time slipping away from me, time that I never get back, and I really want to start living before I die.

Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, I woke up starving for touch. Often the first thing I’m aware of when consciousness comes to me is a kind of ache in the body, like my skin is the frozen surface of a lake, and there’s warm water far, far below that could bring such relief, but it needs a warm touch on the surface to bring it floating up through the cold, to infuse my skin with life once again. This is one of the ways I am wounded by time.

Anyway, I want to tell you a story.

(Bionic Commando, NES)

It’s actually not about the person I met when I was young, though I wish it was. I’d have only very kind things to say about them, but to write about them would not be a kindness. And so, like so many stories that purport to be about someone else, this is actually a story about the person telling it, and the effect that the other person had on me.

Was I young many years ago, when this story I’m about to tell you happened? I don’t know. I mean, yes, I was, and I am. I’m very young. Young like Yorkie in San Junipero. Her body may be 60 or so, but she’s not really 60, because she’s experienced so little. In the virtual world of San Junipero, she has the freedom to be herself, a young woman looking to form connections and find love for the first time. Even there, her complete lack of experience surprises the woman she clicks with, but still, with Kelly she finds acceptance. She can let her walls down and be honest about who she is, what she’s missed out on her whole life, and what she needs now.

Now I’m physically 42 but really I’m no older than Yorkie. I go on dating sites like Bumble and I can’t help but be extremely aware that I’m very different from most of the queer women on there, not just because I’m trans, and visibly so (though that certainly significantly limits the pool of people who might want to even meet me for coffee), but because I’m so inexperienced, and so guarded, and so aware that it takes a special kind of person to make me feel safe, and able to be honest and real.

Of course, I have had long, close relationships before, but that was before I transitioned, and despite all my efforts to pretend otherwise, there was always a barrier between me and my partners, because those relationships were all predicated on a fiction, the role I tried so hard to play while gender dysphoria carved up my insides. I was profoundly uncomfortable with my body, and didn’t really inhabit it throughout all those years. It was as if my soul was hiding away, trying to make itself as small and as removed as possible from the anguish of reality, possibly curled up into a tight little ball in my left pinky toe, barely present in the real world, always seeking escape into books and songs and movies and video games.

Now I’m uncomfortable with my body for an entirely different reason: it seems to prevent people from seeing me for who I really am. I’m definitely in less pain having transitioned, and there’s a relief in living with the integrity of being honest with the world about who I am, but still, the world can’t see me clearly. I’m misgendered constantly, and because I know I’m not clearly seen by the world, fear factors into every decision I make. I’m never free of it. Do I dress the way I dress because this is how I want to dress, or do I dress the way I dress because I’m trying to make myself invisible, because I’m afraid of drawing potentially hostile attention to myself? I don’t know, and as long as fear remains present, I can’t know.

Whether or not it’s true, I feel as if I exist entirely outside the marketplace of desire as a queer woman, and that the only times people want me are when they see me as something I’m not. One woman I dated briefly repeatedly misgendered me and even admitted to me once that she fantasized about me being a man. One woman made a pass at me by saying that she saw me not as a woman or a man but just as a person. How can I be present in a relationship if I know that I’m being seen and desired expressly as things I feel like I’m not, and not as who I am?

Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower, or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others.

--Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

So. Let’s talk about Alex. 

I’ve written about Alex before. I don’t know if i’ll write about Alex again. Some writers are fond of saying that all of us who write essentially write the same story again and again and again, but I’d like to have a new story to tell. I know Alex wants that for me too.

It was several years ago now that I met them. I was in a weird place at the time, having just gone through an intense defrost cycle on my heart. After focusing on transition and not giving much thought to relationships for many years, I’d had an encounter that made me painfully aware that finding love, closeness, and connection was supremely important to me.

There’s a great deal I can’t tell you about Alex that I wish I could tell you. What I can say is that they just had a particular kind of sincerity about them that put me at ease. Very few people can do that. I didn’t feel the anxiety around them that I feel around so many people. I didn’t mind just existing in silence with them. Time with most people drains my batteries. Time with Alex recharged them.

Alex did and still does things that I admire greatly, and I find them fascinating as a person, and I wanted more than anything to engage in the endless process of getting to know them. In the 1990 Hal Hartley movie Trust, a character asserts that respect, admiration and trust equal love. I don’t know if it’s as simple as that, but I do know that all those ingredients were there.

I could tell that Alex knew what suffering was in their own way, and that they struggled sometimes, which is essential if I’m going to be able to relate to someone, but Alex wasn’t wounded in the same ways or the same places that I was wounded, which is also essential. If you put me next to someone who’s like me, there’s just a chasm between us. All we can do is spin our wheels. Alex was someone I could relate to and understand, and also learn from.

Anyway, it eventually came to pass that Alex knew how I felt, just as I knew that Alex would never see me the way I wanted them to see me. The circumstances of this dual revelation would make for a more symbolically fraught movie scene about the anguish of a lifetime spent feeling invisible than anything I could concoct in a work of fiction, but I won’t go into the particulars. Suffice it to say that the next night, Alex and I met, I guess in the hopes of clearing the air. We sat on Alex’s couch, and Alex put their arm around me.

I suppose that’s the sort of thing you might do if you grow up in a somewhat healthy family that teaches you that your love has value.

The effect it had on me was the feeling of years and years and years of ice melting away, warm water rushing to the surface, my skin and my soul awakened in a way they never had been before. I simultaneously wanted to kiss Alex and to fall asleep in their arms. I wanted to sit there talking and laughing quietly while letting phrases like “I love you” slip out of my mouth, and I wanted to cry, to let loose all the grief that I’d carried around with me for so long and had never been able to share with anyone. I actually did laugh at the sheer wild luck of it all, of finding myself in that moment, and I laughed, too, at the wonderful surprise of discovering, after spending all my life in moments that I couldn’t fully inhabit, that really being there, right there with Alex, was the easiest thing in the world.

If I died tomorrow, and it turned out that, like in Hirokazu Koreeda’s film After Life, I had to choose just one memory to take with me, that would be it, the time I spent in Alex’s arms that night.

When I left, it felt as if the whole world was vibrating. That’s not an exaggeration or some kind of metaphor. I mean that it felt to me as if everything was humming, as if all of existence had become charged with life, or perhaps as if all of existence were always charged with life, and for the first time I could see and feel it, because for the first time I was part of it.

Maybe this is what Sam meant in Gone Home when she said she felt like a shook-up can of soda. Maybe almost everyone experiences something like this when they’re young, and they learn that they can be loved. But I still haven’t learned that. I’m still waiting for my first mutual experience of it. I don’t expect love to mean undergoing a massive spiritual experience every time the person I love touches me. Not at all. I want to get to a point where being held by someone I really like doesn’t feel like winning the goddamn lottery. But when you’ve waited for it for as long as I have, it’s powerful, when it finally happens. I don’t expect love to be grandiose. For the most part, my time with Alex wasn’t grandiose. It was low-key friendly get-togethers, conversations over drinks at bars, playing games together, or just working quietly on our own things in the same place at the same time. That was all it had to be.

Of course, I knew even as I was sitting there with Alex, being brought to life by their warmth and their presence and their touch, that they didn’t mean for it to affect me so profoundly. They were just trying to comfort me, their friend, in the hopes that it might be easier for me to let go, to move on, to just be friends. The next day they texted me and asked me if I was feeling better. What could I say? That the night before had changed my life, that it was the most incredible thing I’d ever experienced and that I was, if anything, more full of yearning than ever before, that all I wanted was to hold them and be held by them?

I said that yes, I was feeling better, and left it at that. That was years ago now, and in all the time since, I haven’t met anyone else yet who has felt like a chance to me the way Alex did.

Sometimes some of my friends say that monogamy is bullshit. The people who say this around me, though, are always attractive people for whom love and affection and touch are widely available around the city in or the planet on which they live. When people ask me if I’m poly (as they occasionally do, I suppose because I’m a queer-identified woman living in the San Francisco Bay Area), all I can do is laugh. I can’t even find one person I like and who likes me who I want to know deeply, with whom I feel safe, with whom I can be vulnerable, with whom I can take my time to form a bond of closeness and trust. If my life were completely different, if the world taught me to move with confidence rather than fear, if the world taught me that I was seen rather than invisible, would I be poly then? I can never know the answer to that. We are all shaped by our experiences within the world, the messages the world sends us about ourselves, and if the world sent me different messages about myself, I’d be a different person. But I do resent the attitude among some that polyamory is inherently more enlightened or radical than monogamy. I think that in this world, where people so often use other people and then dispose of them, there’s something radical about ordinary devotion to one person, between two people who know each other deeply, trust each other completely, have seen each other at their worst, and still support and rely on each other.

The other question I get, I guess because of my lack of experience, is whether I might be asexual. But I’m not. When things are firing on all cylinders, I’m definitely sexual. But I really need to feel safe and seen with someone, seen and desired as the woman I am, and the world doesn’t make me feel that way, so it takes time for me to feel that way with an individual. Over and over again on the dance floors of life, I see people seeing each other, desiring each other and being desired, and I feel invisible, and I’m still dancing on my own.

This is Tig, doing what Tig so often did. 

When I first shared this photo a little over a month ago, I captioned it like this:

“Hello human. I couldn’t help but notice that you have a lap which I am not currently occupying. Please allow me to rectify this grave error immediately.”

We said goodbye to Tig today. She had an advanced form of cancer, and didn’t have much time left.

Tig wasn’t my cat, but I was fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time with her, taking care of her, when her actual human was out of town. And boy, Tig was always determined to get your attention and your affection. Almost nothing could dissuade her from this mission. If she wanted to be in your lap, it didn’t matter if you had a laptop or anything else; she would either replace the laptop or she would make it extremely clear to you that she was deeply unhappy about the state of affairs that allowed something else, something that was clearly not Tig, to occupy Tig’s rightful place. 

I won’t pretend that this was never annoying. Sometimes, late at night, I just wanted to lie in bed and watch ASMR videos on YouTube and drift off to sleep, and invariably Tig would hop up, stroll over to me and begin demanding my affection. However, I admit I usually relented without too much pressure. After all, I reasoned, what’s more meaningful? The entirely imaginary human contact that I turn to ASMR videos for as a substitute for the absence of much real human contact in my own life, or the chance to spend some time giving love to a real, living thing, that’s here with me right now?

Tig gave me a tremendous gift, during the time she and I spent together. She made me feel as if my presence and my love are worth something. She reminded me that I do have love to give. For that, and for the opportunity to give her what love I could, in what time we had, I will always be grateful. 

Rest in peace, Tig. I love you.

42, as many people know, is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, according to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Of course, it’s an answer that only serves to raise questions, since nobody knows what the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is, and thus they have no idea what to make of this answer.

This month, I turned 42, and it raises questions for me as well. Am I getting any closer to the kind of life I want to be living? It doesn’t feel like it. But, then, how do I get closer to such a life? How do I not let the bitterness of yet another empty year piled atop all the others get to me? Will I ever find what I’m looking for? Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like it gets increasingly unlikely with every passing year.

This month also marked five years since I last met someone who cracked me open, someone I wanted to be there with and for, someone I wanted to see and know and to be seen and known by. I guess most people meet people all the time who they find attractive and interesting, people they could see themselves being with. It’s not that way at all for me. I’m too guarded. I don’t know how things work for most people because they don’t work that way for me. I try “dating” through dating apps and whatnot but it just feels all wrong. It’s not what I need. I need friendship first, fun and trust and closeness and safety, sincerity and realness and depth, before there can be anything else. Sometimes I look at dating profiles where people talk about sex and I feel like an alien, because even though I’m 42, in terms of my experience I’m 17, and I’m insecure about my body, and I don’t understand at all how people can start there, rather than being concerned with whether or not you even like each other as people first. It’s so foreign to my entire experience, or, rather, my complete lack of it.

My therapist occasionally mentions confidence. The idea that confidence is attractive. Sure, of course, I get that. I want people to glimpse the person I could be, to see what I have to offer. But I can’t pretend that I’m not extremely inexperienced, and sometimes extremely lonely, and also extremely particular, a person locked up who can only be opened by someone who holds the key. I can’t pretend that I’m the same person I would be if I knew love better than I do. I’m not. We are all changed by touch, warmth, love, closeness, or by the lack of those things. By the lack of someone to give those things to, who just by receiving them makes us feel like our own love is valuable, too. Who reminds us, just by being there, that we are worth knowing and loving, worth going places with, worth sharing a life with. And so I can’t pretend that I’m an ordinary 42-year-old, with an ordinary amount of experience, and not someone who still loves with the excitement and the fear and all the uncertain yearning to be seen and known of a 17-year-old.

I played Gone Home again recently. There’s a journal entry in which Sam reveals the doubt she carries inside that Lonnie, the one person who stands out from the crowd for her, the one person with the big gold star around her, could ever look at her and see something that special, too.

And Lonnie answers her question with a kiss. 

The truth is that I’m still waiting for that first experience of validation and reciprocity, where I know, for once, that I stand out for someone who stands out for me. I still don’t know how that feels. So I enter those situations, if and when they come along, with all the trepidation Sam feels in that moment, as she falteringly gives voice to her longings.

It’s not that I haven’t dated anyone the past few years. I’ve dated a few people, but it just felt wrong. They were all cool people in their own way, but none of them had what it takes to open me up. They were too serious for me to loosen up and play and be silly and have fun with, like the 17-year-old in me still wants to do. Or they were too closed off themselves. Or...something. They just weren’t right.

Where’s the dating site for people who hate dating, people like me who need organic connection and friendship first, that maybe then evolves into something else, if it feels right? What are those of us who need to start there supposed to do?

That person I met five years ago didn’t reciprocate my feelings, but one night, they held me for a while. They knew how I felt and were, I’m sure, trying to comfort me, though of course my pain wasn’t their fault, and they didn’t owe me anything. But that’s the kind of person they are. To them, holding me was probably no big deal. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. But there’s been so little touch and closeness with people I actually really like in my life that, for me, it remains the single most powerful and important physical experience of my life. I knew it wasn’t real, not in the way I wanted it to be, anyway. I knew it wasn’t the connection with them I’d hoped for. And yet it felt as if the chorus of angels from Daft Punk’s “Touch” was singing inside me.

“Hold on. If love is the answer, you’re home. Hold on. If love is the answer, you’re home. Hold on. If love is the answer, you’re home.”

It almost felt, for the first time in my life, like I was home. But I knew it wasn’t real, just like it’s not real in the song, as we learn when the chorus of angels abruptly cuts out. Just a dream. An illusion, that leaves the character in the song needing more.

While I was in their arms, they brushed their thumb gently across the skin of my arm, and the whole world started vibrating. After spending my whole life dissociating, fleeing into my own imagination from the pain and upheaval in my own home growing up, from the shame and anguish of gender dysphoria when I got a little older, I finally felt fully present in the moment. Totally safe. With no desire at all to be anywhere but right there. I finally knew what it was to feel like I was right where I was supposed to be.

A few weeks ago, I glanced at their Instagram for the first time in years, to see if anything’s changed for me, I guess. It hadn’t. Their eyes still brought my walls crashing down. Looking at them still made my heart swell with some mix of admiration and adoration and yearning. After all this time, I still miss them so much.

I hope I don’t have to wait another five years to find someone else who cracks me open. I really hope that next time I do, that person feels something for me, too.

So here I am. I’m 42, and yet…

I’m still Elio, for whom one person stands out on the dance floor.

I’m still Sam, for whom the simplest touch with the right person can feels very intimate.

I’m still Yorkie, completely inexperienced, young and old(er) at the same time.

I’m still Diya, who needs to start slow…

And I’m still Min, who sees the signs.

The odds are against me, but I can’t give up.

I saw a tweet today that prompted me to write this post but I don’t want to link to that tweet because this post is not really about the tweet or the individual critics whose perspectives clash within the tweet. It’s about what I see as a perpetual tension between critics of different stripes, with members of each group sometimes asserting that the other is doing criticism wrong. Essentially the tweet was one critic critiquing a “take” on a popular action film by another critic, without acknowledging that the aims of the critic she was critiquing are--it seems to me--significantly different from her own.

In broad terms, I think that many critics strive to illuminate nuance, complexity, meaning, and beauty in a work, with a possible goal of enhancing the individual reader’s experience of that work, and other works in that medium. I’d say the person who wrote the tweet comes from this school of thought. Meanwhile, there’s what might be described as an entirely different school of media criticism that’s concerned with the cultural impact of works. Does this game employ sexist tropes? Do these films perpetuate harmful values around masculinity or violence or misogyny? Those kinds of things. I’d say the person she was critiquing comes from this school of thought.

I find both of these approaches extremely important. It seems to me that the danger of relying solely on the second approach is a tendency toward being reductive, to viewing media only in terms of its larger cultural impact, possibly as an assortment of puzzle-piece-like tropes and not allowing for the soul, or for fragments of beauty or worthwhile meaning to exist in works that may also do some harm. If this is the extent of one’s aims or approach, it can serve to overly simplify one’s perspective on or relationship to art. On the other hand, criticism that ignores the larger cultural impact of a work can be irresponsible. If films or TV shows or games perpetuate racism or transphobia or other harmful ideologies, we’d damn well better say so. But that shouldn’t necessarily mean throwing out a work entirely. There can exist a fascinating tension and even contradiction within art. Skyfall is, in my view, an extremely regressive and misogynistic film (yes, even for an early 21st century Bond film), but I’ll be damned if there aren’t images in it of exhilarating beauty, along with aspects of its tale of death, resurrection, and homecoming that speak to whatever part of me still longs for the spiritual and the transcendent. 

Let’s use Breaking Bad as an example. Would it be wrong for a critic to describe Walter White as a kind of tragic figure who utterly loses his way and his humanity, one whose profoundly immoral actions generate terrible consequences and cost him everything that really matters? No, it would not. One could absolutely argue, then, that Breaking Bad is a deeply moral series, and criticism that explores the moral complexities of the show could absolutely be valuable, enriching viewers’ appreciation for its themes, its characters, its structure. Doing so may be the aim of some critics, and that is a valid pursuit. However, if, in thinking that Breaking Bad was a moral show, they also believed that its impact on our culture was one of net good, I would suggest that they were mistaken. To boil this down to a level of extreme simplicity for the sake of argument and brevity, I don’t think the average, person-on-the-street viewer of Breaking Bad came away from that show thinking, “What a powerful moral tale about a man who utterly lost his way, one that has encouraged me to reflect upon my own life and how I treat others.” Rather, I think the average viewer’s reaction to the show would be something closer to “Walter White was a badass!” Many, many people rooted for him. They wore t-shirts with the Heisenberg image on them. They celebrated his violent victories. And ohhh, they hated his wife. 

That doesn’t mean that Breaking Bad is not a show of moral complexity. It is, and can absolutely be explored and appreciated as such. But in our culture, which is already one where violence and domination through violence are normalized and regularly glorified, Breaking Bad’s often exhilarating scenes of violence and brutality, and the overall story arc of Walter White, probably did not nudge us collectively toward a less violent, less misogynistic, more moral and considerate society. Rather, for all its excellence, taken as a whole, it helped to maintain the status quo where violence and patriarchy are concerned. Examining the ways in which it does this, and encouraging people to think about the impact the media they’re engaging with actually has in perpetuating harmful values that exist in the culture they live in, is also a valuable, if altogether different, goal which criticism can pursue.