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1.
I want to read poems to you in my voice. I want my voice in a lower octave. I adore how the octaves, the notes on piano, are making more sense to me now. I can make poems. I can make chords. Thus I am living.
I have been living the life in art for a few days now. I still keep a logbook. Do you want to know what it says? First of all, blessedly, I haven’t had physical pain from anxiety in about four days. Painlessness is always a simple yet meaningful win.
(Interlude: I want to make playlists for you, show you how I feel certain songs. I want to set the scene. I have a new favorite rendition of “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Sarah Vaughan elevates it so. I’m obsessed again with albums by Black Midi and Eef Barzelay and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It’s a time of revisiting past favorites. Let me write you letters. Between us it’s different. Or maybe I just thought it could be.)
My days are spent working, walking, reading, writing, trying to learn the piano again (fourth time’s the charm), watching videos (podcasts or something about coffee or music), sleeping before midnight.
It would be a lie to say this solitude doesn’t concern me, but as long as it doesn’t consume me either…
A newly added routine is that every Saturday, I’ll venture out into the world with a book of poetry and ‘spend the day’ with it, not returning until it has been totally read. Yesterday it was George Oppen’s Selected Poems.
In an essay called “The Mind’s Own Place,” Oppen discusses the relation between poet and poem, how it cannot be said that any poet is attempting to approach or reproduce or convey ‘reality’ when the word reality itself has been so divorced from stable meaning.
… the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity; a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.
2.
At some point I want to share a poem I wrote, but right now I’m just so grateful to have the floor, as it were. But I wrote in my journal yesterday, so maybe you’ll be seeing less of me here.
I can specifically remember my Self-as-a-child predicting what I’d be like when I grew up. I imagined some complete transformation— myself as a woman, long hair and a ‘real’ job like a journalist or something. I remember thinking there was some invisible yet inescapable division between adulthood and childhood. You step into the role of the self and there it is, the next several decades, decided.
Let me simplify that. I thought I’d grow up and become a woman.
It feels corny at best, incredulous at worst, to say that I was always nonbinary. That I always wanted to be a mix of ‘both’ genders (enjoying sports and American Girl dolls around the same time in my childhood) or neither (reading and music happened to be my favorite ungendered activities). I felt like the less my gender mattered in a given situation, the more I thrived.
I identified with the trope of the ‘spunky’ or ‘smart’ girl character; the characters in most of the American Girl books come to mind, as does Violet from A Series of Unfortunate Events. And, too, I identified with sensitive boy characters (for some reason right now I can only think of Spongebob Squarepants.. lol). I saw myself always as a dynamic mix of qualities— qualities that I now know do not accurately or completely differentiate the two binary genders.
I thought that was what childhood was, that every person had felt these things once and grown out of them, becoming adult men and women.
Let me say what I mean, what I never became, what confusion I feel when the binary I think I quite reasonably find arbitrary plays out in every aspect of life all around me every day.
And what does it mean to lack the luxury of that ignorance? My ignorance, now, hurts, too. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that someone, everyone can see something so fundamentally distinct from what I am, and proceed without a speck of consideration.
Why does everything need to be gendered? Why do you all keep reducing each other to what’s visible, assumed? That’s what it is— a reduction of personhood. A necessary end reached by unnecessary means.
I keep circling the point. I want to make a certain change.
I always told myself that there are two things that will likely improve my life greatly but I first need a true support system in order to actually go through with them: therapy and gender affirming treatment.
My perspective on transness in society has been deepened by recent experience. Tolerance is not acceptance. Not to mention liberation. Almost every time, the well-meaning attempts by strangers to address my gender annoy me, carried out for the sake of being seen doing the right thing rather than actually caring.
I know it would be foolish to increase the amount of confusion my presence begets. It would be painful, isolating, especially in the absence of outright support. I am telling myself that comfort is a want, safety is a need. I know now is not the time to invite into my vulnerable life a new wave of alienation. And yet. And yet.
3.
Eros No. 8 What human voices push against transparency: the sun moving, image set upon firmament. What survives is something else: a cooling shade, a sound like being awakened or otherwise evoked, birthing some haphazard consequence. Not unlike a halved wing or a seedpod or an overturned canoe, not unlike a curve of music one can see new worlds thru, not unlike what happens in the mind to accompany the bowing of the head— I stood in hallways; a shy alphabet of transience, though not useless, largely unused.
August 13 2023