anti-hero

These things take weeks, months, years. Whole parts of your life get eaten away on waiting lists for services that are already stretched to their limit. And all the time you want everything to stop - to right itself in some magical overnight miracle. You spend nights crying and asking ‘why me?’ Why am I the one who has to be stuck here? 

But you will get there. I promise you. Nobody knows patience like us trans folk. We have to be strong, mentally, emotionally and physically, because we are forced to be by our very nature. It’s something huge to bear and it’s okay if you’re not always okay. It isn’t fun, and it isn’t fair. And it’s okay to grieve - for being born with the wrong parts, or for all the times that your body restricted you in life - for the things you wish you had. Grieve if you need to. 

There is light and dark to everything in life. Being trans is no exception. Keep going. Wait and fight and grieve and celebrate and live - in the way that only we trans people know how. 

Not me, but my mom.

In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.

She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:

–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.

–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.

–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.

–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.

But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:

–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.

the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose to spend money on flammable cladding because rich tenants in nearby penthouses didn’t like the ugly council building ruining their view. 

the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose not to spend money on a centralised fire system or sprinklers or an additional fire escape. 

the people in grenfell died because the tories voted against a law that would force landlords to make their buildings inhabitable and safe for their tenants. 

the people in grenfell died because of the privatisation of social housing.