Writing Ourselves Whole

"Liberty is the right not to lie." - Camus via Califia

A blog about sexual healing, erotic writing, and the transformative power of words.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

On leaving

I'm saying goodbye to Oakland, goodbye lake view and long cement walks, goodbye lake birds who've let me stalk and hold you with my eyes, goodbye Preacher man on Sundays and 3-redwood stand in the park across the way and the flock of Canadian geese who take over and scare the dogs away. Goodbye Hanover street and neighbors who rankle and ratchet and share and watch out for each other. Goodbye neighbor with the two small white barking-at-all-times-of-the-day dogs and goodbye walk to Woody's. Goodbye Woody's. Goodbye this neighborhood dreams: you have been so good to us. Goodbye up the street flock of chickens. Goodbye neighbors houses with windows we can see into and who can see into ours. Goodbye coin-operated laundry, goodbye one bedroom apartment, goodbye sunset view in the living room and sunrise from the kitchen.

Goodbye Grand Lake Farmer's Market on Saturdays and goodbye Jack London Square Farmer's Market on Sundays. Goodbye interracial neighborhood. Goodbye Lake Merritt walkers who say hello and good morning to each other. Goodbye partially blind man who walks the lake every day with his cane and scruffy beard who has lost so much weight. Goodbye bird sanctuary, goodbye Grand Lake district, theater, Parkway (again).

Goodbye walking into the Trader Joe's and seeing lots of folks of many races. Goodbye morning walk to BART. Goodbye morning view of people making their way into the world, headed to work or exercise. Goodbye morning window writing here in #8. Goodbye walk-in closet/dressing room. Goodbye quick drive to our friends' for dinner for hsingyi for movies. Goodbye Jack London Square walks, white pelicans in the lake, great blue herons stretching out from morning to dusk with their wingspan. Goodbye Alameda beach walks, goodbye house-hunting for the time being.

Goodbye stairstep sidewinding jasmine and hawthorne. Goodbye Lake Merritt BART and goodbye lurker night herons, goodbye man who sits and listens to headphones and thinks and watches the morning come up over the Oakland hills across the lake from his vestibule outside shelter at the Oakland Auditorium, living there. Goodbye Witnesses at BART, goodbye It's a Grind at 11th and Clay, goodbye 7am garbage pickup banging, goodbye bright flowering backyard, goodbye electric stove, goodbye big lakeshore eucalyptus and big big oak.

Goodbye Oakland. Just in the living-in way, not in the forever or break-up way. We are always here, too, sheltered, heartsick and home.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

'indelible erotic loss'

A man at the Indy Arts Expo this weekend stopped at Fresh!'s table (we were there to promote Affirmative Acts Coaching!), and this man and I talked a little bit about the writing workshops. I said I did a little bit of blogging, about sexuality, about sexual trauma, about writing as a transformative practice -- he was very interested in what sorts of sex blogging I did, said, "I'm trying to figure out what about sex you write about."

Here is what I want to have said: I write about sex in the aftermath of sexual trauma, I write about the scarred desire that remains. I write about that crystalline brilliance and shame. I write about indelible erotic loss, the way it fills our hands sometimes at the same time we are touching someone... I write about the madness of that split, the surrender and joy of it, too. I may not be what you'd expect of a 'sex' blogger.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

We are family?

Thursday night at the phenomenal Girl Talk: A Cis & Trans Woman Dialogue, curated by Julia Serano and Gina de Vries, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz talked about family, about how if we're family how can we 'outreach' to each other? Families who've been separated have reunions, not outreach -- it was brilliant (as were each of the other performances shared at that show) and of course there were many more points she made and images she shared in her piece...

And this one, though, sticks in me -- sticks in my troubles -- the way performers talk about family sometimes, how we should treat each other more like family, meaning we should treat each other better, more kindly, with more open hearts, right? I guess that's how my inside hopeful heartsick places interpret that phrase.

But I think we do treat each other like family, already, unfortunately. 'Cause what are our experiences of family? We drop one another when it's expedient, we shut each other out and off. We take sexual advantage and then turn our backs. Isn't that family?

I get tired (and by tired I mean heartbroken-sad) of hearing about family like it should be understandable, like by referencing family as a metaphor for unconditional-yet-complicated love and acceptance, I will understand what that means. But I don't. My history of family is retracted love, pure and unabashed abandonment, extremely painful attempts at reconnection across severed ties -- and now we're supposed to make family together, you and me, we in these queer communities, and family, to me, looks like the horrifying inbred, yes, incestuous (and I use that metaphor deliberately) difficult raw puritanical stuff we have created and find ourselves struggling against.

'Cause I understand what she's talking about (how we don't outreach to family -- so how are you going to talk about 'outreaching' to queer folks of color, for example, to transwomen, to the others who are 'underrepresented' at the mainstream white queer gatherings that many of us find ourselves participating in), and I love it with all the inside webs of my heart.

But/And, also -- we need a different word.

I understand about needing replacements, about using and reclaiming 'family' to mean queer sisterbrothers and brothersisters, but we bring with that word all the baggage that shaped us crooked and raw and bent and ashamed and scarred. We carry into that word, and this new collection of people we're trying to connect with, all the pain that that word learned to bear, all the while we were learning to keep ourselves alive within its bounds, until it was gone.

How do we make 'family' good? How can we engender that word into something worthwhile, settle into it with a sense of hope instead of trepidation? You say we are family -- to me that means there is no hope between us, no common language, a warped tongue, an indelible severing. That's where I grow out of.

Not outreach but reunion. Maybe this truth of family is the way of all of us, and reunion will be painful alongside possible, as much as when I return to my blood family and see the shapes that crafted me and feel cup around my face each pair of arms and every set of hands that released me into the grip of a monster. Is that how we feel each other -- that we sisters and brothers and others haven't stood up for each other enough, haven't protected each other enough, haven't sent enough letters or enough I Miss You cards, or called enough to hear how your life is, to hear how he blessedness flows and hear how the hurts hit you and how can I share in both?

I don't do those parts very well, I'll admit it, the reaching out. She says we don't outreach to family, and I get her meaning, and and and -- I always feel like it's an outreach when I try to touch anyone with a tie to my insides: old friends, blood family -- a tentative feeling those lines: Are we still connected? Have you dropped me yet?

More and more thinking on this to come ... so many thanks to you, Ryka, for these considerations, this possibility, your words!

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Friday, August 3, 2007

The Revolution and the possibilities of beauty

I’m reading The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence), and I am feeling hopeful. It’s so scary to imagine being truly non-competitive, remembering that I am a part of a movement and that I am not alone, not reinventing the wheel, that there are all these communities, like circles of friends – and sometimes like cliques – that I am a part of: anti-violence movements, anti-rape movements, movements challenging sexual violence, power of words movements, sex educators, pornographers, writers, racial justice activists, movements questioning abuses of power and hierarchy, queers, and anti-conformity communities…

I have all this energy and the coffee is making me impatient with the movement and slowness of my hands, this physical body. So, while reading, I am also thinking about how to do this work. I don’t feel it’s necessary to shape my mission to feed funders’ language requirements – I have just seen that so many times, seen people lose jobs and others lose services/communities/programs because of an ostensibly-surprising loss of funding. I see organizations losing track of who they’re there for – not funders, right? Aren’t our non-profits supposed to be in the service of/to the people?

Of course, this has changed radically, this idea that all non-profit organizations exist to serve the people, rather than those foundations paying the bills. So what do we do, we organizers and activists and social change workers who want to somehow keep a roof over our heads while also devoting our lives to doing the work we believe in, to changing our communities, to engagement with others doing the same?

I believe in the power of words to save us and to transform us – and I believe that individual transformation is an important and necessary ingredient of larger social change. I believe in the mantras of One at a Time and that real, lasting change is slow steady, persistent change: like practice. Change isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an every-day, collaborative and individual (both) bit of consistency. I believe that change is relationship-based, that change happens through connection and through the reality of hearts recognizing each other, no matter how different we thought we were on all of our various surfaces.

We don’t have to do what everyone – i.e., the “mainstream” – says we have to do to survive; we can create new possibilities through our words, through our sharing, which create fissures inside of and alongside the systems that have shaped and snared us. My stepfather (and perpetrator) was very fond of the spaces in-between. He believed in shiny surfaces and lies, taught me to look critically at what hides in plain view. This was unfortunate for him. We saw him hiding there because he revealed himself to us (ah, the way entitlement eventually hangs itself!), and we held him to account (to some extent, anyway).

I am not someone who *believes* too much in shiny things. Now, shiny and polished are nice, but I recognize that they're fronts.

I do not believe in hiding in plain view. I believe in visibility. I also believe in using what’s available and loving all the spaces we exist within: that is, looking at our whole world and admiring not just the storefront, but also the back alley and the unweeded side yard, and the spots that need paint and repair. I like seeing the real, the spaces still dirty, the smudged mascara, the pressed shirt with a stain, broken fingernails, chipped teeth – the broad possibilities of beauty.

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