Rainbow Kitty Sex Machine

Dear Diary,

Triggers are weird. I know that, at my heart, I have a problem with envy, and with jealousy. Not of people while I’m in a relationship, I don’t think: I tend to trust my partners.

Maybe it’s hard to see an ex flourish in arenas that, while we were together, were problem areas. It hurts, especially because I felt like a pervert and a monster. Where was this libido, where was this interest, when we were together? Was it me? Is it me?

I wanted to write, “It has to be,” but it doesn’t. I’m sure this is just me being triggered, and me being sad, and...

Dear diary,

You feel ugly. You’re not, because objectively (whatever objectivity means) there’s someone out there that will desire you.

But god damn it you feel ugly and undesirable and you can’t see a way out, and knowing that there is a way out doesn’t help, it might hurt.

Dear diary:

Dear diary,

I wanted to start this out with a very melodramatic sentence:

“I’m afraid I’m broken.”

But of course, halfway through my own indulgence (nested inside the indulgence of this diary post itself) I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Because I’m not broken. I’m just lonely.

I don’t think I’ve ever truly learned how to be alone. Throughout my 20s I was eaten up by jealousy and envy that the drug addled friends I had were able to be with all the girls, were able to attract them and be with them and, shamefully, yeah, were able to fuck them. (Now, later in life, I realize that these girls were underage at the time, and my friends - whom I was envious of - were using the pills and alcohol to commit statutory rape. None of them will see this.)

Arguably I was at the center of things then, just as I seem to be at the center of things now. I’m maybe even more at the center of things now; so many people look to me and talk with me and even, sometimes, if I allow myself to believe them and I’ve gotten very good at allowing myself to believe things, like to be around me.

Even though I take up all the space with my racing thoughts and my babbling. My anxiety. My transgender shit.

With my loneliness. Poetically I feel like a gaping maw, unable to be fed even by the nice people that tell me that I’m well liked, that I’m pretty, and that I have a sense of style. That I’m valid in my gender, valid in my beliefs, valid in my life.

Diary, I’m ending this melodramatically, of course: it’s one of my favorite modes. I know I’m not broken, because broken is a fucked up idea to begin with.

I’m just hurting and lonely and wondering if leaving people who loved me to become who I wanted to be was a mistake. Wondering if I could have transitioned without breaking up with L. Wondering if I would have discovered who I was if I was still with M.

The rawest of my poems has a line: “I wonder what she wonders.” Now I fucking wonder this about myself. And I don’t have an answer, because in all my recursive wondering I’ve just found emptiness and want and desire, and a desire to be desired.

Dear Diary,

Going to be an overwhelming day today. PhD life has slammed me, and we all know that I’m pretty terrible at the studying. I’m an okay scholar, but the study aspect of it, especially certain parts, well they don’t seem to sit well with me. I get distracted, antsy, anxious. Need to move around a lot. I should get tested for Adult ADHD or something.

It’s fun to write some wish fulfillment into your stories:

(Years later, after we had been dating for a few months and I had let her go down on me, something terrifying even then, even now, she put on a fresh layer of my burgundy color and left her impression all over my neck, chest, stomach, thighs. She told me that she didn’t know when we first met at this holiday themed office party - she leaned in on the word know, making italics in conversation - but even if she did know, she said that she wouldn’t have cared. I told her that I believed her, like I always did.) 

You were optimistic this morning, and maybe you’re paying the price for it. Because right now, you feel ugly. Your hands are huge and your skin is hairy, malformed. No woman will ever love you. And you’ll see this in a few days and wonder, “what a maudlin bitch.” So I want you to remember that even though you feel ok, great even, sometimes, that there are lows and that you’ll get through them. I hope you get through them.

Dear diary,

Definitely a mood swing, but there are triggers, too. One thing I’ve discovered is that knowledge itself tends to trigger me; even something as benign as learning how to properly condition my hair sent me into a terror of dysphoria. No one teaches you these things, at least not at my age, and so when I hear something that sounds like common sense, even if it’s from an extremely helpful source (I really do adore you, Elle) it randomly sets me off.

Dear diary,

I love the way that my hair flips out behind my head, and I love these earrings. Earrings are everything.

I just injected myself with dat ladyjuice, and I already feel amazing. Brain fog is gone! Hopefully what was happening was not simple existential malaise but hormones being very low.

I would like girls to be attracted to me.

I’m 36.

I’m 36, and in a PhD program for creative writing (check out my work https://mockingheartreview.com/archives/volume-4-issue-3/poetry/david-ryan-palmer/ and at http://adelaidemagazine.org/p_d_r_palmer.html and at https://thewildword.com/fiction-nonah-ryan-palmer/). The last one there is under one half of my new name. What happens when you transition from one name that you’ve been published under to a new name that doesn’t? I’m not famous (for SURE) but it sure will be nice to see Nonah Cagney Palmer instead of that old name. I can bring myself to write it; I don’t have the same kind of trauma associated with my old life that many others do. But memory is a different post.

This post is about how I’m 36, and I’m about to be 37 in late October. That’s a weird time to be going through a second puberty, and this time I get to be super visible as I teach classes and take classes and read publicly.

So dear diary: I’m anxious in all the ways you’d expect.

I’m 36 and largely full time femme, except for today, when, in a torrent, a waterhose from God turned on to flood the streets, I hid behind a macho veneer so masculine that it shot me back to high school. My roomie J reassured me that code switching in that way is probably not something I should be worried about. Anxious about.

Not something I should be afraid of, or feel cowardly because of. Not feel like it’s a betrayal of myself and of my new sisters, brothers, and nonbinary loves.

But I’m 36 and it feels like I’m too old to be afraid of a well meaning man who connected with me because we talked in the same register. He didn’t see any earrings in, and my chest was hidden under a very wet poncho. He might have seen my nails but I hid them.

I hid them.

I hid them.

And I have all this shame.

I’m 36 and I’m anxious and I have all this shame from this one interaction, because it feels like a betrayal of all my principles. I told myself I’d be visible because there are going to be other girls and boys and nonbinary folks here in this shithole state that can’t be out and can’t be visible, and at least they’d be able to see me doing well and think that things CAN be ok.

And I hid them.

-Yours,