We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).

Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.

It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.

Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.

They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.

So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.

We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.

YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.

“What’s wrong? Titanic asked me this morning, when she found me lying on the ocean floor with all my suitcases strewn open.

Oh, I dunno, I moaned. I was looking through National Geographic and saw some pictures of you, and thought I might come have a chat. You looked great, by the way, in the pictures.

Me? No. Titanic smiled. If anything I seem to have become a Picasso. And I have a beard.

It was true; she looked more like a collage of a ship. Strangely two-dimensional, in a crater of her own making: French doors, boilers, railings every which way. And she did have a bit of a beard-rust icicles hanging in red strands from her iron engines.

Sitting up in my own little crater, I sort-of blushed.

To be honest, I told Titanic, My honey’s leaving town soon and I’m afraid it’s gonna wreck me, so I dove down here.

Well come on in, Titanic said, but I’m not sure I’ve got what you’re looking for.

So in I climbed, through a window between two rust stalactites, and began to pace her great promenade. (Which should have been awesome, by the way — walking by the ghosts of all those waving handkerchiefs — except that I was in that feeling-sorry-for-yourself state where every hallway is the hallway of your own wretched mind, every ghost your own ghost, so I didn’t take a good look around.)

When I got to the Turkish baths, I sat on the edge of a barnacled tub and watched weird crabs scrabble at my feet.

I was hoping you’d teach me how to sink, I said. You who have spent a century underwater with 1500 skeletons in your chest.

I don’t know, said Titanic, I’m kind of a wreck.

Exactly! I said, Me too! I’m here to apprentice myself to wreckage. I’m here to apprentice myself to you! Great bearded lady, gargantuan ark, you floating hotel. With enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone I’ve ever loved.

My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the iceberg coming?

I did, Titanic said.

And you sailed right into it?

It was love, Titanic said.

And the band just kept playing? And the captain stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel?

It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean.

She’s a straight talker, the Titanic.

Alright, I said. Now let’s talk about rust. When my love leaves, I’m planning to weep stalactites from my chin. I will wear my sadness in long strands. Like you, I will be bearded by it.

Then I made a terrible noise. Eeeeeeeeeeeerkkkkkkkkkk! I’ve been practicing the sound of wrenching metal, I told her, from when my love leaves.

But you aren’t made of metal. Titanic said to me.

I’m a writer, I said, I can be made of anything.

Well then, be a writer. She said.

Be a writer? I paused, anemones between my toes. Okay. When my love leaves. I will start with SOS. I will Morse code odes as the whole world goes vertical. I will write nosedives as my torso splits in two.

And the next day I will write the stunned headlines, and the next day I will write the obituaries, and the next day I will write furious accusations, and the next day I will write lawsuits, and the next day I will write confessions of wrongdoing, and the next day I will write pardons, but I won’t really mean it, and the next day I will write sonnets, but they won’t fit the schema, and the next day I will write pleas, please, please come back. The next day I will write epitaphs, navigation maps, warnings for future generations about the hubris of human love. I will write quotas and queries and quizzes, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense all the way down and no diving teams will find me, no robot arms will retrieve me in pieces, never will I be reassembled in plain air. No, I will remain whole, two miles down, with my suitcases strewn open, and in 100 years I will still be writing about this feeling, though my heart be a Picasso, though my heart be bearded at the bottom of the sea.

The Titanic let me cry for a while, my sobs echoing off her moldy mosaics.

Then she said: Girl, you’re too young for a beard like this. You’re never gonna get some if you rust over now.

I sniffled a little and scratched my name into the green slime of the tub.

The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable. Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

usb: universal serial bus

usc: university of southern california

usd: united states dollar

the joke is never “haha cecil’s jewish” the jokes were an ancient chant being similar to one he learned in torah school and his mom covering up all the mirrors even though, as far as we know, no one had actually died yet.

Well... They at least give hope/have hope filled endings/stories.

And I do really enjoy them so much that I stay up to all hours reading...

What I'm trying to say is

Like, if you go on meds and that happens, it's not because whatever's going on with you is jut Too Severe or that you're doomed or only people with Other Illnesses get to have meds that make them feel actually good and you have to settle for "miserable but somehow so hollow I no longer care about the misery" and be grateful you're no longer actively suicidal or whatever.

if i don't take this pill i spend the day as a dirty, inept husk, a sad sack of well-meaning but futile intentions just sapient enough to be dimly aware of everything im unable to be.

The person I was when I was very depressed did not feel like the real me. That was a version of me that was very ill. The "real me" is the me that is able to dance at stoplights and make art and enjoy food and laugh at jokes. And for now, I need pharmaceutical help to get back there.

The seventies had a much more limited menu of psychiatric drugs, many of which were harsh as hell. The antipsychotics were notorious for causing tardive dyskinesia, to the point where "weird twitchy body language," became an indicator of "crazy" in our movies—that's not because they were confusing schizophrenia with something like Tourette's (although precious few writers bother to find out much about Tourette's), it's because for a bunch of people, their ability to manage psychotic episodes was dependent on drugs that would give them lifelong tics if the dosage was the slightest bit too high, or sometimes if it wasn't.

What it also had—what I saw slowly changing during my lifetime—is the idea of a doctor as an authority figure rather than the doctor as an expert whom you consult for their specialized knowledge.

Listen, though. Listen, I was a kid in the eighties, and I had multiple health problems even before third grade, starting with multi-strep-infection festivals of pain every winter (this was eventually traced to a large sinus cyst, but not actually fixed until my twenties). You have that many strep infections, they give you antibiotics, that's just the way of things.

When I take antibiotics, often enough, all it does for me is give me a rash. I remember my mother taking me off the Pink Goop Of Yecchhh (this was when I was too young for pills) and bringing me back in to the doctor to inform them that I was reacting to penicillin. And I remember the doctor absolutely browbeating her about trying to diagnose me with something without medical backup, about taking me off the medication before I'd gotten an appointment, and finally grudgingly offering to try another antibiotic instead.

(As it happens, I also react to all penicillin drugs, even the ones they thought I wouldn't, and all sulfa drugs, even the ones they thought I wouldn't, and the only safe one that they commonly prescribed was erythromycin, which I despised, as the stomach friendly versions were not there yet. But. That's not the point, or not the point exactly.)

When I had my kids, one of 'em ended up with a very familiar little bumpy rash while being treated for an infection, and I went in to the pediatrician prepared to fight for my life, because I remembered how hard this was. And the pediatrician nodded, and said, "Your instincts are good, this looks like penicillin reaction to me. We've got some alternatives…"

Because doctors, although they can still be overbearing and arrogant, cannot take completely for granted that they are the ones in charge.

Which makes an enormous different in psychiatric treatment especially. Because there's a ton of nuance. You can go in and say, "Look, I can tell this is working at raising my mood but I'm also jittering out of my skin, can we find a relative drug or just chop the pills in half?" Or you can say, "I mean it's fine on one level but I don't feel like myself, can we try a different thing?"

When a doctor is an authority figure who tells you what to do, who decides when you are sufficiently fixed and what you look like (and feel like) when you are yourself, you cannot trust psychiatric medication.

And it didn't feel like being forced into an unfamiliar mold, turned into someone I was never meant to be. It felt like having layers of weights and shackles and masks stripped off so I could finally see and feel the person I was supposed to be the entire time. Discovering that medicated for anxiety I'm an extrovert, not an introvert, didn't feel like medication had forcibly turned me into another person. It felt like a revelation. Suddenly I understood why my mother talks to strangers at the grocery store. I'm more like her than I was. I'm more like me than I was.

Maybe your problems are less severe. Maybe you aren't nearly housebound with physical and mental health problems, with anxiety so bad you've developed agoraphobia and are starving because you can barely force yourself to leave your room once a day to eat and go to the bathroom. Maybe medication doesn't turn you from a miserable lump that lies in bed and has mental breakdowns and feels guilty for imposing on their friends and basically nothing else, into a person who can hold down a job and feed themself and live on their own and make art and laugh and take the bus without spending the entire time petrified with terror of the other passengers.

But medication is fucking important. Having the option is important. Not being talked out of it is important. My dad tried to tell me he'd read online that people went off antidepressants after six months, and I told him maybe people with temporary situational depression, but not me with lifelong intractable depression.

If I wasn't on medication I'd be dead.

you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.

and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.