So I went to FanimeCon which is something I’ve been planning for a long time. I went the first evening and was so disappointed and depressed that I didn’t go the following three days- I just sat at home, even though I paid 65 dollars for my ticket. I’d say this is by far the worst my depression has gotten.
So, I’m going to Westside Crisis Clinic this morning to get my meds adjusted because I don’t know if I can hold down a job if I stay like this.
I guess that’s all I have to say.
Welp. I intended to update this every day, but these last few days have been really rough and I haven’t felt like updating unless I had something positive to say, which I didn’t. A lot of it has been “I don’t know if I can make it” and other uninspiring messages of fail and depression. Yesterday was the worst, because I was supposed to go to my weekly therapy appointment and I had been hanging on all morning, dealing with thoughts of hopelessness, worthlessness and suicide, and when I got to the clinic, I waited half an hour, only to be told that my therapist changed my appointment to a day I can’t even be there. I also found out I can’t get an appointment with my psych to have my meds adjusted until late June, so there’s that.
I did get to meet with one of the other behaviorists there, though, and told him of my quitting plight. He was very understanding, and said that if I was having thoughts of suicide, then maybe quitting cold turkey wasn’t the best idea for me. I hadn’t even thought of it that way- I felt like I was either quitting or not, and any compromise constituted failure. So maybe I’ll just go into a plan of moderation and wean off instead.
He also suggested working out, which he said could emulate the effects of a high by releasing the endorphins naturally. I’d heard all that before but kind of dismissed it, as doing a whole workout routine while depressed is kind of similar to lifting a train while not Superman. But this morning I found myself with a spare hour and a half, so not having anything else to do, and craving some of those sweet endorphins, I dug out the old workout tape and gave it a shot. I figured if nothing else I could do it for science and see if it really actually emulated the effects of being high.
Needless to say, it really didn’t, but it did give me a sense of having accomplished something, which is something I haven’t been able to say about anything for a while now. Plus it made me actively sweaty enough to actually want a shower, instead of just kind of smelling myself and going “…meh it can wait.”
I wish I had more to say, or more time to write it, but I’m on my way out to meet my case manager, so that’s really all the update you get for today. I hope I can actually work up some enthusiasm for Fanime this weekend.
Earlier this year I fell into a severely depressed state, which is part of the reason why I haven’t been blogging as much. I started smoking weed to ease my depression, among other aches and pains and the sort of thing that most people call Life. I will say that it probably is fine for a lot of people, but not all medicines work for all people. It’s not working out for me.
At first, I really thought I was on to something- it seemed like a magical cure-all. Psych meds making me unstable? Smoke weed, it calms you down. Too depressed to do the dishes? Smoke weed, it makes ALL chores fun! Back pain? Weed. Crying fits? Weed. Fight with bf? WEED. Broken tooth? Forget conventional dentistry, we GOT this. Bored and lonely? Weed is your friend. Hanging with friends? Well, everyone smokes these days! About to do something really fun? Hold on, I gotta get high for this! About to go to DMV? This is gonna suck, better toke first.
As you can see, for a brief time it really just became my standard answer for everything, and I started to realize something: By comparison, being sober really sucks. This is a really bad realization for a stoner to have, because the obvious answer is to be high ALL THE TIME. Basically it got to where the only time I wasn’t high was when I had work stuff to do. Obviously this isn’t an economically sound way of life.
Also I was pretty constantly stupid, which annoyed me, but not enough to face my depression and deal with it in ways that weren’t so self destructive. It started as a way to get me through a rough patch when I couldn’t see my doctor to get my meds adjusted, and several months later, I still haven’t followed through on that. I haven’t followed through on a lot of things. I have paperwork to do, a house to clean, projects that have sat untouched, while I used a cheat code to get to the satisfaction that comes when you’re on top of all that shit and actually earning your happiness. I was doing everything wrong.
The thing is, for a really long time I thought it was the depression keeping me from doing stuff, and for a time it may have been. But after really examining myself, I realize that there were weeks worth of days when I would have been doing something to fix my problems instead of patching them over and ignoring them, if it hadn’t been for weed. It was always a better idea to smoke than to sit down and sort my mail, after all.
When something like weed can make you more productive, by taking your mind off the pain etc. etc., then it’s a good fit, but when it causes you to pretty much falter in every aspect of life, then you know it’s got you by the balls and you’re just letting life pass you by. I was slowly and foggily coming to this conclusion over the course of a few weeks, and man, it sucked. But still I continued onward, blazing a trail of absolutely nothing positive or constructive
I don’t know why I decided last night that this was a good weekend to quit smoking weed and cigarettes all at once (I know that my relapse into smoking cigarettes was comorbid with picking up weed and if I want to quit one, I have to quit the other, and vice versa). I could have picked any day before or after today. On the one hand, the problems that it’s been causing have been going on for weeks without really any uptick in intensity, so it’s not that I got fed up in one moment.
On the other hand, the problems it’s been solving haven’t lessened any, either. I didn’t have any divine revelation, my depression didn’t lift, I didn’t get a sudden kick of manic bursting verve for life that made me decide to get my shit together. I think what it all came down to is, I just got fed up with handing my money over to the jolly green giant.
It came out of the blue, yesterday afternoon. I was running low on weed and getting that familiar panicky feeling I get when I know that I’m going to get off work tomorrow and not have a soft hazy cannabis coccoon to fall into. It was Life, staring right down the shotgun barrel into my face; I was going to get off work and be all achy and stressed and just have to deal with it, like I hadn’t been forcing myself to do for months.
Part of me- a big part of me- would have been scrambling to call any and all my friends with a connection so I could get some bud TODAY so there wouldn’t be a dry gap where I’d sit at home after work, bleary-eyed, watching Adventure Time and biting my fingernails, wishing I had my next fix and furiously ignoring the filth accumulating around me. Those days were unpleasant, mainly because they were days where I was forced to think about my problems and how much I didn’t want to deal with them, as opposed to watching the same stupid cat videos on youtube, laughing like a doofus and eating copious amounts of cheese. (I will say for the sake of transparency that, at this moment, this still sounds like a fuck-all good time.)
But there was another part of me that looked at the stoner part of me, and quietly said, “No.” It wasn’t my guilt (which was a pretty big monster by now), it wasn’t my sense of responsibility, my moral code, or my psychological issues. It wasn’t the ghostlike voice of my parents chiding me for throwing my life away, or my sense of urgency about settling up my job situation before the year of relatively cheap housing runs out. It wasn’t my creative side, begging me to stop numbing myself so that I could paint and draw again. These are all reasons that have been nagging me to quit but none of them were quite loud enough; I could always shut them up with a toke.
No, the part of me that finally made me say “I’m fed up,” ironically, was one part laziness and two parts greed. I just didn’t feel like putting the work into acquiring weed that it normally took, and when that joined forces with my growing realization that my money was getting out of my control, suddenly I finally had enough motivation to tell weed to fuck off and die.
Saying it was one thing, doing it is another.
I think there’s a saying that goes, “Quitting cigarettes literally causes bad things to happen to you, within mere hours.” I used to say in Stop Smoking Class that there’s never a good day to quit so it might as well be today, because you can’t quit in a vacuum- Life keeps happening around you, and no matter which day you choose, you’re going to be stressed out and every little thing is going to be a crisis and you’re going to scream “WHY TODAY” to the heavens and potentially run out and buy another pack. I used to think it was just a matter of perspective- the day you quit is always going to be the worst day ever, no matter what happens.
I now believe that is a lie and quitting actually forces a black hole of negativity to open somewhere in your spleen, which creates a field of bad luck which draws all potential bad things directly towards your face. I think this is governed by the same science that makes Murphy’s Law tick, but it hasn’t been proven yet.
I have been working at the same hotel for months, and aside from one or two minor incidents near the beginning (and the Night of Vomit), every night has been smooth as butter. Not last night. Within hours of smoking my last cigarette, a car literally sped off the median, flipped, and crashed, right in front of the hotel, on Market Street, causing chaos and far too much interest from my tenants. After convincing them the apocalypse was not nigh, I settled in and hoped that was the excitement for the night, which it was far from. Someone snuck into the hotel and was stealing money from tenants, one of my tenant’s guests started breaking house rules left and right, and I got yelled at and written up for forgetting to make a phone call. (I’m probably actually in a lot of trouble for that, and probably won’t hear back about it till my work meeting Wednesday.)
It was right about the time that I was through getting cussed out over the phone that I realized it was a classic moment for a cigarette. All these nights I’d had a pack with me for just moments such as these, and been taking smoke breaks to keep from getting too bored. Now that I actually needed one I had literally just smoked my last cigarette a couple of hours prior. I got to sit and let my stomach churn for hours, wondering just how fired I was going to be come Monday when my boss got in and saw the reports.
I had a couple of choices. I could fold and get a pack and say that IT was my Official Last Pack, since clearly this quitting idea hadn’t been planned well. But I steeled myself and figured, if I can keep my resolve on a night like tonight, then the rest is cake.
And so, somehow or another, I got off work at 8am in a good mood (luckily the desk clerk who always relieves me, and hates my stinking guts, was out sick this morning, so I got to report my wrongdoings to a temp, and I believe that is an example of the negativity field temporarily lifting after the first 8 hours. He was considerably more forgiving than the woman who, for example, basically threatened to report me for not moving one sheet of paper from a clipboard to its proper binder before she came on shift.)
Somehow, I made it to the bus stop without making a certain phone call to a certain guy who would surely have the goods, somehow I made it home without stopping at the corner store for more Death Sticks. As I said I was actually in a pretty good mood, and had the idea to come home and start blogging about my quitting experience. I got a little excited; I thought I’d do a blog a day for 30 days, with a little drawing depicting how I feel each day. Since this whole weed thing has been eating my creativity, it seemed like a good step.
I got to the bus and started to draw a hilarious, melodramatic PSA-reminiscent montage of a giant evil weed leaf stomping around a town, literally smashing buildings and destroying lives. I got about ten minutes into that drawing when I realized I totally fucked up the legs and the city looked stupid and I’d never hated a drawing more in my life. I despaired of the whole project, ripped the drawing out angrily and crumpled it up, feeling defeated. Ten seconds later, I opened my sketch book again, determined to come out with at least a simple drawing. I decided to take the evil weed leaf montage and run with it, but instead of stomping buildings, I thought I’d do him with his foot on my chest and me laying on the ground in defeat- still melodramatic but simpler.
I literally got ten seconds into it, starting with the face, when I realized that drawing heads upside down is not my forte and in a fit of rage I ripped the second drawing from my book, feeling like a failure at life and everything I hold dear. When did I lose my ability to draw everything? It came out looking kind of like this face, only upside down and ten times derpier:
I would show you but I already threw them away out of shame.
So for now I’m just going to do the blog posts, because apparently drawing is still too much of a challenge for my fragile brain. I thought about just drawing a sad smiley and calling it good as a placeholder until tomorrow, when my creativity will surely return, but that’s too much of a cop-out for the first day. Maybe I’ll draw more later today. I don’t know. All I know is, I’ve made a lot of impulsive decisions in my life, and the impulse to quit without really thinking it through can’t be all that negative. We’ll see how this goes.
LAST NOTES: Again, for the purpose of transparency, you should know I’m not quitting cold turkey. I’m taking a week off, but next weekend at FanimeCon (which is the event I’ve been waiting for since the last time I got to attend Fanime like 4 years ago), you bet your ass I’m going to party it up- my last hoorah. You see, it’s easier to quit at first when you tell yourself you’re only quitting for a week. Then you get your closure, and after that, you can say to yourself, I did this once already for a week, I’ll bet this time I can do TWO weeks. And then you just keep going. You have to play sneaky tricks like this on your stupid brain to get around addictions and bad habits. I intend to blog on those days too so it should be entertaining. Stay tuned.
As of yesterday, I’ve been on T for one year. Hey, I’ve been growing a little facial hair, you know?
It’s not much, but you know, it’s there. Time to shave, it looks ridiculous.
I’ve been struggling with depression. There’s nothing there that I haven’t been over a million times, so yeah.
I don’t know what else to say.
I’m tired, and kind of sad.
It’s always a good idea to write a blog when you’re in a good mood and have a positive outlook on the world. You’re putting good energy and advice out there, and probably writing something that might actually be a pleasant experience to read.
It rarely happens.
When you’re in a good mood, you just ride the waves of your current awesome events and experience life. You don’t necessarily feel the need to sit in a darkened room with your fingers alternately resting on the keys and on your temples, pointing your examination inwards and pontificating on page what exactly went wrong. I find it’s only a depression that makes me slow down and take stock. Necessarily, that makes the majority of my writing dark, negative, boring and awful.
That’s not to say that I’m a dark, negative, boring and awful person. I spend a lot of my time on the upper end of the scale, going around doing positive things for my community and fun things with my friends. Just last night, I went out with a couple of friends, wore some seriously anachronistic hats, chemically altered my perception just a smidgen, and had a rousing time on the town. How can a pirate and a repressed englishman from the 1890’s not delight?
But you don’t write about these things, you just do them. Well, unless you’re that irritating facebook sort that feels the need to update whenever you’ve successfully completed laundry, or made it out of the DMV in one piece*, or woken up, or are going to bed, or stumbled across a particularly impressive bowl of onion soup. (*There are some allowances for the DMV thing, as making it out alive is sometimes an impressive accomplishment, and also there are some fertile joke breeding grounds there if you don’t mind your humor a little warmed over from the 90’s.)
The point here is, I’m sorry. I have a lot of guilt and shame attached to dumping out my negative shit on the internet because there is already so much of it here, and I just don’t like adding to the landfill. Furthermore, I’m an adult now. My prefrontal lobe has developed, and now, it’s easy enough to distinguish the difference between
1) an emotional/spiritual apocalypse of doom and depression and angst, and
2) my brain chemistry being kind of temporarily fucked due in part to my hormone levels and in part because my meds are being adjusted.
Like, I get it. Logic is engaged. I know in my brainmeats that this isn’t an eternal state of ugly feels, despite the fact that the depression is inherently just engineered to feel like it’s going to stretch out for an eternity and there’s no hope of ever recovering. That’s why it’s called a depression, that’s why it’s so effective at being the horrible thing that it is. If I could see the light at the end of the tunnel from where I’m standing, it wouldn’t be a depression.
As far as facts and figures are concerned, I get that I’m feeling icky, due to physiological factors beyond my control, and it will pass. I understand that this isn’t the end of the world and eventually I’ll swing right back on up to feeling like that superman who can handle eighteen thousand things at once (for better or worse). I understand that, until that happens, for the meantime, the best I can do is ride it out, hope it’s not my meds doing this to me but some other factor (so I don’t have to switch my meds AGAIN) and try to not to anything destructive.
But fuck it’s hard to keep some perspective when I’m like this.
It’s like being in a house of mirrors. The state I’m in means that my energy is very, very low. That doesn’t translate to “I’m feeling lazy”. What it translates to is, “I don’t have the capacity to process very much without getting immediately burnt out and ragged.” What it translates to is “it does not take very much to overwhelm me right now, and overwhelm is very very bad for a mind that is teetering dangerously close to suicidal and self-harm kind of thinking.” What it translates to is “too much stimulation and input very easily leads to panic attacks and uncontrollable lashing out.” What it translates to is that I need to be very gentle with myself and take a lot of things off my plate.
That kind of self care is very, very difficult for a Type A personality. You get crippled by the shame. People like myself constantly have a tittering demon on our shoulders telling us that we could be using our time more effectively. That’s good on most days, because it means a lot gets accomplished. On the (rare) depressive days, that leads to panic, guilt, shame, anxiety, frustration, and suicidal thinking. If you had an overbearing schoolmarm breathing down your neck 24-7 telling you what a useless lazy sack of sludge you were, and if one day you got exhausted enough to slow down enough that you felt like the words she was saying might actually carry a grain of truth, you might lose your will to carry on a little too.
I think that’s the word I’m scared of more than anything. Laziness. Just about that second that I realized how fast life goes by, I realized that I had such a limited amount of time in this life to actually accomplish the things I want to do. On the days when I have the energy to go out and make things happen, that’s a motivating kind of thought. On the days where finding my shoes is a task that crumples my resolve like tin foil, it’s a sucker punch to the gut that sucks any and all life, positivity, motivation and enjoyment out of anything that I could be doing at any given moment. It’s a mind-shattering realization, one that makes you feel futility in any endeavor, from going back to school to drawing your next breath.
So, my conclusion here is that manic depression is a really dangerous disease for Type-A sorts to have, because the downtime days are just so much more devastating to handle for someone who is so driven that absolutely almost nothing can stop you. When something as simple as your own brain chemistry trips you up, and there is nothing you can do to fight it that doesn’t put your mental health in serious danger, it’s a real kick to your self-esteem, and that deepens your depression further. It’s an exponentially folding, billowing well of tarry black darkness and shame that encompasses everything, chokes your air supply, snakes down your nostrils, tangles your limbs, and commands every sensory input until the only escape is sleep. (Hey check out the imagery in that last sentence, I’m a depressed 17 year old with a livejournal.)
I think what I’m saying is, if I could relax for five minutes, maybe this whole depression thing wouldn’t be so fucked.
It is 2003. I am 14. I’ve never been rebellious.
The first (wrong) hormones are thrashing my body and literally bleeding me out.
The puberty connects with me in all the wrong ways.
I don’t strike out at my dad, start wearing ridiculous spiky clothes, experiment with drugs or run with the wrong crowd. None of the expected things.
I continue to dress like a confused Amish child, struggle to get good grades, and am estranged by my peers. What’s worse is that I can barely be bothered to care.
Bigger fish to fry.
The hormones wreak havok on my inner mind, playing hell with my gender identity, tripping over the Bouncing Betties of dissociative identity and PTSD left strewn about by the mother who waged war on my mind for so many years.
It is a private battle, and an ugly one. How I came out in functional pieces on the other end I’ll never know.
It is 2003. I am starting my freshman year soon. 9/11 is still a fresh wound in the collective mind.
My Chemical Romance is just about to release Headfirst for Halos, which goes completely unnoticed by me for the ensuing years.
I don’t care about music. I’m just trying to survive the battlefield of my mind.
I have a baby face that follows me around for years, and I hate it. Little do I know that one day it will be a blessing.
~*~*~*~
Flash forward ten years.
~*~*~*~
It is 2013. I am 24. For the first time, the dormant strings of rebellion are stirring up in me.
The right hormones are flooding my system for the first time, and the only blood I see is where I stab it into my leg every week.
The puberty is connecting with me in all the right ways this time, and the reoccurring thought on this roller coaster ride is, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
I am angry at the establishment, wearing clothes that, for the first time, I actually care about (and will probably laugh at uncomfortably in 4 years), making friends with dangerous hobos and taking up recreations that most grown adults would shake their bony fingers at. I don’t care.
I continue to try to build my career, pursue my dreams, get independent, and there are some people who call it a pipe dream, who think I’m “doing too much”. Best thing is, I can’t be bothered to care.
Bigger fish to fry.
The hormones rip me through a hurricane of aggressiveness, independence, territorialism, and that special kind of selfish apathy that only teenage punks can properly exude. They inflame the inset manic depression passed down genetically by my dad, but at least this time, there’s medication for it.
The Lithium tremors make my battle a public one. How I’ll maintain my dignity through all this I’ll never know.
It is 2013. I’m starting my non-profit soon. There are people who are still dazed that the world is still here after last December, and I suspect they have some explaining to do.
I just discovered my old friend’s collection of My Chemical Romance tracks on my computer. I listened to them in a fit of nostalgia. As shameful, ironic, uncomfortable, laughable, or whatever it may be, this old music has just caught up to me and somehow it’s the soundtrack of my year. It’s making me want to hear more and more and more music and for the first time, I’m actually trying to hear things that aren’t 40+ years past their prime.
For the first time, I truly care about music.
And for the first time, I am very, very glad that my face makes me look like a teenager.
~*~*~*~
This isn’t just my second puberty. This is my second chance to experience the childhood/teenage years that were ripped away from me by a shitty life. I intend to live it to the fullest, embarrassing music choices and all.
Won’t you come with me to 2003?
[insert obligatory myspace angle pic] 😉
Photo credit to Andrej Pejic,
Source of photo: http://lexiecannes.wordpress.com
I’m not big on fashion, but I’m celebrating someone who dares to do what he wants- beauty standards, acceptance of gender expression, misogyny in the industry, and all other points be damned. Andrej Pejic is on the cover of Elle Magazine, Serbia, and he defies traditionally accepted gender norms by posing for men’s AND women’s lines of clothing (beautifully, I might add.)
read about it here>>>:
It’s all over the web, and opinions on what his exposure to the press is doing for the non-normative acceptance movements are varied and heated. But once again, someone posted a response to all this that hit my rage button just right. It’s the source that shocked me this time.
Posted by some freaked out trans girl:
I suppose this can be thought of as positive if you want people to see us as genderless freaks inhabiting some midway point as third genders. Personally I dont want anyone to think I am anything like this person who is a cartoon. Publicity is only good if it portrays us in an accurate fasion. I dont like being lampooned.
In four short sentences, I was floored. It hit me, hard. There are people out there, people in the trans community, who think like this. If you see nothing wrong with the above statement, maybe my response below will clear things up a bit.
I love how, in this hypothetical situation you’ve dreamed up, you draw this circle (I’m assuming people you consider to be “respectably transgender”) and call it [Us], put Pejic on this representative pedestal, and posit that his gender expression is going to be responsible for casting a bad image on yourself and everyone else [in your trans circle].
I love how you then go on to:
– make a specific point of letting us know how NOT like him you are (which I would have assumed anyway based on your stifling binary presentation),
– belittle and marginalize his gender expression to [Cartoon] when there are plenty of cis-hetero-normative folk who wouldn’t think twice about saying the same thing of you,
– assume that he’s out there, looking for publicity specifically to highlight what it’s like to be [You and/or Anyone Else in your Trans Circle],
– and finally, assume that he’s out there with the intention of representing or “lampooning ANYONE.He’s not there to represent anyone but himself, and/or those who might consider themselves like him (which I would assume are few and far between; Pejic is one of a kind.) Just like I’m not here to represent you, or trans men, or genderqueer folk, or any other number of marginalized, generally considered “distasteful” folk. I’m here to be myself, live my life, follow my dreams, not be invisible, and represent MYSELF, genderflawed though I may be. If you decide to make me your representative, that’s fine with me, but it’s not my responsibility, I don’t want, and I assume Pejic doesn’t, either. He just wants to do what he likes, and why should he stifle his dream because ….someone he doesn’t know might get embarrassed?
You have a lot of self-education to do on the broadness of the gender spectrum and the basic human right to represent oneself as one sees fit. There ARE some people who consider themselves genderless, as inhabiting a midway point, AND as a third (or other) gender, and what gives you the unmitigated gall to say that those gender expressions are less valid than yours when yours isn’t even orthodox?
You can’t just take one or two steps outside of the binary, make your own cute little parody box mimicking the limitations you you and so many others have worked so hard to escape, draw a line that says “I’ve gone far enough! Anyone past this point is a FREEAK!”, and assume that ANYONE, cis, trans, or otherwise, will take YOUR gender expression seriously, or even pay you a shred of respect.
I didn’t want to get mean, but I have to say it- trans people like you, trying to hold back the tides of change in acceptance of gender expression variance, are more dangerous to the movement than the bigoted cispeople we’re struggling against, OR the Pejics of the world that you fear, and you know why? Because your cowardice is infectious. It’s coming from a source on the “inside” of the gender-non-normative community, and young/new GQ people just shaping their worldviews might be looking up to you for guidance, and what you have to say, as ignorant as it may be, just might sound okay and trustworthy to an impressionable mind.
It horrifies me that there are so many people who still say “I may be ___ but at least I’m not one of those despicable ____’s”, because somehow you fail to see that people right now at this very moment saying that about YOU, and it’s making you squirm in your skin, you just can’t STAND it, but you’re doing it to someone else just to feel better about yourself, and it DISGUSTS me. It’s people drawing circles of exclusion like THAT who are enforcing hatred, bigotry, and ignorance. You’re leading the way for people to take three big steps back, and I say, for SHAME.
It’s official. The kid gloves are off. Maybe I’m mean, but I can’t hold back anymore. I’ve been trying to sit back and watch people give their opinions peacefully and with respect, knowing for the most part it doesn’t do any good to to yell back at people, but you know what? I’m entitled to my opinion too, I have a keyboard, and that’s what the comment section is for. It may be ugly and it may be pointless, but god knows it’s therapeutic. So these are the sorts of things I’m shooting all over the internet, and if you don’t want to end up on the wrong end of my raging wall’o’texts, educate yourself before opening your mouth.
You know, I just can’t seem to stop spilling venom at the people who are treating us trans folks like shit.
I used to be nice. I used to carefully and sympathetically educate when it was clear that the person didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I don’t get mad at people very much. I’m a rational person.
But I’ve been running into a whole rash of people who are just plain inexcusably ugly to us, and I get so enraged I just can’t help but wield my pen as my sword. I can’t hold back any more. I don’t care. Why should I continue letting people think we’re meek little lambs?
Recently, Veronika Fimbres, the incredible trans activist who fought MUMC to get the Trans flag on the Castro flagpole for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, wrote a beautiful article about the significance of flags (linked). You should go read it, it’s beautiful. I’ll be here when you get back.
And then, who should arrive in the comments section but Gilbert Baker, the man who created the Rainbow Flag in 1978! You’d think he’d have something awesome to say about the social progress of trans folks being able to honor our dead once a year with a flag. Instead, he had this to say.
GB:
Patrotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. This is Ignorant censorship, never bothering to mention that the rainbow flag was removed so the trans flag could squat on the pole which I put there as a work of art to specifically fly the rainbow flag.
At first, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I thought maybe some delusional schizophrenic had gotten into someone’s facebook account and was posting word salad about some totally unrelated paranoid fantasy. But when I clicked into his profile, sure enough, it said this.
Gilbert Baker created the Rainbow Flag, symbol of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender movement in June 1978. His work as a vexillographer (flag maker) spans 30 years and includes two world records…
My mind was blown.
I clicked blindly back to the comment section, and faster than I could tell my fingers what to do, this poured out of me like someone had pierced my jugular. I don’t know if I was too mean to be readable, too toxic to be related to, sympathized with or educating in any way, but all I could do was post it. It was just the truth.
Me:
Your profile says that you created the flag as a “symbol of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender movement”. How easily can you forget that last word tacked on as a afterthought, that you can call it ignorant censorship when the trans community requests a single day a year to highlight the tragedy of our hundreds upon hundreds of yearly deaths due to senseless hate crimes, poverty, denial of simple health care and unbelievable suicide rates due to societal harassment and torment? Have you looked at the numbers? Have you been listening to us all, or just your favorites?
We didn’t even ask for it to fly on a day of celebration of our community (like the gay community does so freely every day of the year), but on a day of sorrow and mourning, to raise awareness, get people talking, asking questions, instead of just ignoring us or using us as the butts of their jokes the rest of the year.
You consider yourself a champion of the LGBT community, and yet you seem so uneducated on the tragedy of your estranged cousins, so why include the T at all? Have you any idea how comparable our media portrayal in recent years is to the indignity of blackface and sheer parody? Don’t you realize we are one of those last few groups that, for the majority of folks, it’s still okay and PC to say, “I may be this, but at least I’m not one of those dirty transsexuals”? I’ve heard this personally. Did you know last year, a trans woman was dragged out of a public restroom, beaten into a seizure while onlookers jeered, the whole thing was recorded, nobody did a damn thing, and worst of all, when that video made it online to major news sites, a majority of the commenters supported the criminals, posting filth like “That THING deserved it.”
Right here, in San Francisco, where we’re supposed to be the safest in the world, just a few short months ago, I was picked up by an ambulance due to a severe asthmatic episode. The paramedics were so ignorant and uneducated in their sensitivity and diversity training that they treated me with the highest disrespect and verbal harassment, just because I couldn’t talk and they couldn’t immediately tell by looking which gender I was.
My friend, THAT is where we’re at right now. White gay men have had their revolution, they can’t be touched, they have positive portrayal in media, rights, leaders, respect, and unless a person wishes to be totally estranged by their civil PC community, he’d better not voice a negative opinion on them out loud.
We’ve not had our revolution yet, we’re still stuck in the sixties, and nobody but our own cares enough to do a thing about it. So we work tirelessly to educate even those who pretend to ally with us.
And then, people like you come along and have the
unmitigated
GALL
to call flying the trans flag…
Ignorant censorship.I have nothing more to say to this, other than you have so, so much research to do on the community you pretend to be a part of before you can shamelessly appropriate the usage of that “T” for the approval of others without feeling like an utter slimeball, and to the disgust of people like myself. If you feel like that’s too much effort, then by all means, just stop including the T, and it’ll be no skin off my back- at least you’ll be making an honest man of yourself. But I invite you to let yourself in to the circle you’ve made. Your move.
I haven’t prayed in years. But please god, please help me to be compassionate and educate in a way that doesn’t turn people off before they get to the second paragraph. I want to reach people, not turn them into enemies. But how can I take the words of the truth and make them nice when the truth is so FUCKING ugly? I can only do so much, I only have so much strength, only so much charisma.
What can we do? What can we really do but just get blindly enraged anymore?
God give me endless tolerance.
I fight for the dignity of the countless who have died. May their memory give my words the grace to express unconditional love.
Because the next five year old little transgender girl will be SOOO safe in the men’s room.
It’s all been heard before by anyone on this blog, so I’m preaching to the choir. But sometimes someone posts something so profoundly stupid that it’s time to use logic, sympathy, and common sense to tear them a new asshole.
In this news story, a boy won the right to use the proper bathroom at his school, small victory for the home team, big victory for mankind. And then this …ahem. Individual. Comes along and posts this ignorant tripe in the comments.
Captain Humanitarian:
Here we go again! Let’s have 99% of the population throe their rights out the window and bend over backwards for 1%! I guess if I feel uncomfortable with a trans using a men’s washroom I am a bigot! What a joke! If someone threw a petition in my face, I would likely bow to social pressure and sign it – even though I disagree!
I don’t make a habit of responding to internet comments because it’s a lost cause on the whole, but I thought maybe someone could learn something, so here we go.
Me:
Some people will never understand just how for granted they take being able to use the bathroom with dignity. When every single day of your existence outside of your home is planned around trying to decide whether you’re going into a restroom where you:
a) could get arrested or kicked out versus
b) a restroom where you could get beaten and raped,just for looking a certain way, you will then have room to speak on this matter. Till then you don’t have a leg to stand on.
And on the subject of violence, I’d like you to name a SINGLE transgendered rapist or murderer in history you didn’t see on a fictional movie. I’ll wait here while you go and look. Oh yes, the news would have a field day with that too, so don’t you dare say that it was just ignored.
And if you’re “uncomfortable” with someone with slightly different anatomy using your facilities, then just take a second to consider the discomfort of all the trans folks with chronic bladder problems because they refuse to use public facilities due to the terror of the bathroom problem- often learned by personal experience with violence.
In a nutshell? Bathrooms should be available to all. If you’re uncomfortable with diversity, then you should be the one to hold it all day and use your own toilet where you can decide exactly who gets to use it and who doesn’t. Public facility means PUBLIC, end of story.
If you agree, or have that once special friend who seems to think we’re inhuman enough to require a separate facility, or just want to spread awareness, feel free to share this.
I don’t feel like doing a super-long post, but here are some pictures of my facial “hair” growth since I started taking T on April 24th (I think, or was it March?). It’s not much more than slightly darkening peach fuzz, and I don’t have any “before” pics to compare them with, but it’s definitely more than I had before.
derp (my eyes look kinda cool in this one)
Mainly I’m just feeling the pull to start really documenting these things before they go away forever and I have no evidence of things I once had. I mean, that seems desirable in one way, but I’m really feeling the sting of losing my singing voice more than I thought I would. I stumbled across some music recorded by a transman who recorded half his vocals before going on T and then finished the song after he transitioned. It just sucks because that’s exactly the project I wanted to do but never got around to doing, because during that part of my transition, I was struggling to stay alive on the streets and I didn’t have a spare nickel to get socks, let alone rent studio equipment. But it burns mostly because I know that if I’d put some effort and thought into it, I could have culled the assistance and the funding to pull it off. It’s San Francisco and someone would have known someone.
When I saw his video, I panicked and went to look for a song list of duets that I had just wanted to record for the hell of it. I was holding out some feeble hope that maybe my range wasn’t as bad as I thought it was and I just needed some warming up, is all. When I found it, I tested to see if I could hit those notes, and I squeaked and scratched my way through 2 songs before closing my list in disgust. It’s really gone, it’s really irreversible and there’s no way to get it back. I had a good voice, too. Now I’m just this normal guy who can’t figure out what the hell pitch he’s in because his vocal cords are a little different every week.
I wish this post could be less depressing, but it is what it is.
Halloween was fun.
Trans Mission: Freedom! 