#radical vulnerability

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I need to learn how to sit with myself. To be bored, without reaching for something to escape through. I've been sober for a month and the escapism during that time has helped, but now I need to shift away from distraction.

It's tough, because my therapist and I have discovered that my brain has its own little schedule that tends to cause me to shutdown in the evenings (which makes sense for Trauma Reasons), and getting high used to distract from that. Since getting sober, it's been a time for mindless scrolling, video games, and trying to excessively plan little details of my life -- anything to keep myself from shutting down, or my thoughts from bubbling up.

But it's not sustainable. I'm always doing three or four things, which means I'm basically never present. I can't... think, anymore. I don't feel much. It's like I'm on autopilot, all the time, even when I really don't want to be.

I miss having feelings. Even the bad ones, because at least I could use those for art or writing or whatever. Now, everything is just kinda leveled out. Flat.

I imagine eventually it will get easier to not be constantly distracting myself from, uh, myself... But I have to get through the hard parts first.

You don’t have to disclose your mental illness/disabilities.

I mean it. I truly do.

I know theres a big wave of neurodivergent folk disclosing their journey and experiences and reaching out to other ND folk who relate, and that’s great! I totally understand the reason and value of sharing experiences but you don’t have to. I 100% get the appeal of telling these things about yourself so you can hopefully reach other people who also know what you’re struggling with. I also 1000% understand how invaluable talking/drawing/writing about your experience can be to those who are scared/confused about these parts about themselves. But you don’t have to do any of that.

You don’t have to tell people you struggle with suicidal thoughts and severe depression, you don’t have to advertise on your blog you have this or that disorder. You can simply just say your neurodivergent, or don’t even disclose that.

Hell, esp on other platforms like Facebook or Twitter, advertising that stuff while starting your career out might actually harm prospects. I wish it wasn’t the case but ableism and it’s shitty judgement is real and has consequences.

An essay published in the South Atlantic Quarterly (116.3), July 2017.

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are undertheorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize transfeminine brokenness for a radical transfeminism. It argues that the material basis of transfeminine brokenness involves the marginalization of the labor of trans women and trans feminine people within a radicalized and gendered division of labor under capitalism alongside transmisogyny within queer, trans, and feminist spaces and communities.

I know my words have meaning.

I've found them in hearts I look to for guidance - hearts bleeding beating their way through moments too ready to cut the palms of hands trying to tend to desert gardens - hearts that tend to this desert garden heart.

I was raised by a disabled, ill, trans woman - 6 years my senior, more a girl still learning the stutter of her steps, of her tongue, of her heart. She taught me what it means to be soft, to sit in that softness and find its value, to hold space for all of it and what it brings - all my broken, all my sad, all my try and fail and give up and try again. She gave me space to find love for all my broken, all my sad, all my try and fail and give up and try again.

My softness is radical politics; is this body - this disabled, ill, trans body; is loving bodies like and unlike this one; is learning the ways we are broken under this world determined to bury our meaning.

I know these broken bodies have meaning.

We are told we are too much to be enough, too messy to find our place, too whole to know this pain. We are told not to seek comfort in the ways our ancestors survived - the ways our brethren are still surviving - through our messy, painful, broken wholeness.

I am not always soft, but I have learned to find my softness in everything I grow - in my bitterness, my anger, my frustration - there is still soft, still broken, still brave vulnerability, vulnerable bravery.