Musings of the Regent of Moss

i wrote this while working in a program for new writers. on wednesdays, two of the teachers would be contractually obligated to read our writing aloud to the group of 300+ teens. i had never read my work in public before. i had something like 6k poems and was panicking about it. none of them are good enough. sometimes the train is howling. it is hard, actually, sometimes, even as an adult.

and then i thought - what is one thing i wish i could tell all of them. each of these 300 kids. what did i need to hear, at 16?

i wanted to tell them about the day you wake up, and the sun feels warm finally. i wanted to tell them about carving a life out of soapstone, your hands turning bloody. i wanted to tell them that sometimes yes - it actually does feel easy. i wanted to tell them about weddings and cookie dough and long road trips. about albums of new music and old friends laughing and the sound of snow falling.

you will learn the pattern of the train. you will learn to close your eyes when you hear the engine rumbling. you will learn to let yourself have the grey days in their lily-soft numbness. sometimes it will feel like life is wet paint, and god has smeared your canvas across a sewer grate. sometimes it will be so boring it isn’t even pronounceable - the tenacious, soundless blankness. survival isn’t just ugly nights and wild mornings. it is also the steady, unimportant moments. it is just driving with your seatbelt on. it is calling a friend on the way home. it is burying your face into the fur of your dog.

when i had finished reading this poem aloud, the auditorium was silent for a solid minute. someone stood up to take a picture of where it had been projected onto a screen, and then three more people followed the action, and then - like a bad internet story, people remembered they were supposed to be clapping. kids came up to me after it - thank you for writing that. i think i hear a train coming.

i would write this differently now, i think, but it has been 7 years. i still live by the tracks. i also haven’t picked up a blade in over 10 years. the scars are still there, but these days i only pick up scissors to cut my hair. i know why you can’t tell your mom about it. i know how the numbness slips over everything, a restless horrible cotton. i know how when you dropped the dish, you weren’t crying about the broken glass. i know about feeling like all the roads have closed their exits, that you aren’t supposed to still-be-here - and yet.

i am still here, and still yours, and i haven’t forgotten. what i’m saying is if any hope is calling to you - i know it’s hard, but you have to listen. i’m saying keep driving, but slow down the car. sit down in the shower, i’m not judging you. we can stay in the dark with the good hot water and do nothing but stare. notice the stab wound. make it through another tuesday.

i know what it is like to miss yourself. do what you need to. come home to me. i am writing to you, my past self, from the future. i’ll be waiting for you.

"she'd tell me if she was mad at me, i don't need to ask"

"they all want me around, they're just busy right now"

"i deserve getting captured and kept in a cage and doted on for the rest of my life"

usually transmisogynistic

even when talking about something like art, and even if not done in an explicitly transmisogynistic manner, self-evidently derivative and i've yet to see somewhere where it didn't become instantly less interesting than the original concept

have you ever had a single original thought

this is something that I wish people would take more seriously. I am a woman who loves women and no one else. that's my sexual orientation. I didn't pick it, it's just who I am.

there's currently no single word I can use to communicate that. when I say I'm lesbian, queer people consistently assume that I mean it in the most expansive way possible.

and no one wants to say it, but the reality of what's happening when people make those assumptions is that they hear the word "lesbian" and replace it with the word "bisexual." they think I'm attracted to all genders, even men, as long as they're the good kind (AFAB).

the problem with this, which should be obvious, is the misogyny. people don't want to accept that a woman could ever be satisfied by only loving other women. they have to squeeze other genders in there to make it make sense to them. and they have to push the limits of lesbianism to include people who are more and more in proximity to manhood until it's assumed as a matter of cour that lesbians are all attracted to men.

we're already very far down that road. I can't call myself a lesbian without having people make all kinds of wild and wrong assumptions about who I am and who I'm open to dating (which leads to sexual harassment and feeds into all other kinds of misogyny that women face from the rest of the queer community).

I don't know whether the right way to reduce the harm here is to push back on the idea that men can be lesbians, or to come up with a new word that specifically means women who love women, or both. If there's a new word then it'll be corrupted sooner or later. That's already happened with sapphic, and, incredibly, "WLW".

all the words we have to describe 'sexual orientation' are descended from the diagnostic categories that a heterosexual and cisgender society used to define us as ill. those terms were then changed over time and redefined to become the vague boundaries of rights based social movements as we ourselves, the queer people who were categorized under them, engaged in social struggle. part of this redefinition was the idea that identity labels *do* have strict definitions and categorize people distinctly, but for the purpose of communicating our true and beautiful inner selves (which are of course completely categorizable) and sorting us into groups only with those who completely share the key traits that define our identities: some people were just born this way as women who only love women (itself a socially defined category...) and they must be categorized strictly in order to ensure that nothing and no-one gets mixed in somewhere where its not supposed to be (impositions which words and categories can surely protect us from). this was strategically crucial to the hugely important victories won by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movements under the traditional social organization we live under, but it is not a truthful or liberating model; it is a model built for compromise with a tyrannical, puritan society which in this case especially operates through the institutions of psychology and state power.

i don't think that model is what anyone needs. the words we use don't just exist as language for communication, they make possible understandings of what is and what can be. a diagnostic category makes a group of people real, and by grouping ourselves in these categories we restrict our agency in order to prioritize the agency of a system of categorization: a system of categorization which, as you've noted, is always malleable to the will of the powerful. in our gendered social hierarchy that means that men have an outsized influence on the definitions of identity categories: again, categories which not only are defined, but also define us in response. categories that we must actually live within.

this is something that I wish people would take more seriously. I am a woman who loves women and no one else. that's my sexual orientation. I didn't pick it, it's just who I am.

there's currently no single word I can use to communicate that. when I say I'm lesbian, queer people consistently assume that I mean it in the most expansive way possible.

and no one wants to say it, but the reality of what's happening when people make those assumptions is that they hear the word "lesbian" and replace it with the word "bisexual." they think I'm attracted to all genders, even men, as long as they're the good kind (AFAB).

the problem with this, which should be obvious, is the misogyny. people don't want to accept that a woman could ever be satisfied by only loving other women. they have to squeeze other genders in there to make it make sense to them. and they have to push the limits of lesbianism to include people who are more and more in proximity to manhood until it's assumed as a matter of cour that lesbians are all attracted to men.

we're already very far down that road. I can't call myself a lesbian without having people make all kinds of wild and wrong assumptions about who I am and who I'm open to dating (which leads to sexual harassment and feeds into all other kinds of misogyny that women face from the rest of the queer community).

I don't know whether the right way to reduce the harm here is to push back on the idea that men can be lesbians, or to come up with a new word that specifically means women who love women, or both. If there's a new word then it'll be corrupted sooner or later. That's already happened with sapphic, and, incredibly, "WLW".

this is something that I wish people would take more seriously. I am a woman who loves women and no one else. that's my sexual orientation. I didn't pick it, it's just who I am.

there's currently no single word I can use to communicate that. when I say I'm lesbian, queer people consistently assume that I mean it in the most expansive way possible.

and no one wants to say it, but the reality of what's happening when people make those assumptions is that they hear the word "lesbian" and replace it with the word "bisexual." they think I'm attracted to all genders, even men, as long as they're the good kind (AFAB).

the problem with this, which should be obvious, is the misogyny. people don't want to accept that a woman could ever be satisfied by only loving other women. they have to squeeze other genders in there to make it make sense to them. and they have to push the limits of lesbianism to include people who are more and more in proximity to manhood until it's assumed as a matter of cour that lesbians are all attracted to men.

we're already very far down that road. I can't call myself a lesbian without having people make all kinds of wild and wrong assumptions about who I am and who I'm open to dating (which leads to sexual harassment and feeds into all other kinds of misogyny that women face from the rest of the queer community).

I don't know whether the right way to reduce the harm here is to push back on the idea that men can be lesbians, or to come up with a new word that specifically means women who love women, or both. If there's a new word then it'll be corrupted sooner or later. That's already happened with sapphic, and, incredibly, "WLW".