We are flawed and magic

So.

I haven’t been doing that well, lately. I’ve been triggered with loss and sorrow and rage. September does this to me a lot, and at the beginning of this September, I was in New Hampshire and Vermont, the very places where I began the break from my stepfather and his extreme control and abuse, back in 1993.

Somehow, this year, while I was driving back and forth on i-89 from Lebanon, past Hanover, to Plainfield, while the sun rose through the thick early-fall fog sweltering over the crevices in the Green Mountains to make it up for the day’s Power of Words offerings, and then back down south (through the nearly indelible dark) to my friend’s apartment for good if abbrevited conversation and sleep, I managed to drive myself right back into the past – right back into that 21 year old convinced both of the world she’d been trained into and convinced that there was nothing left to her future but utter soul-destruction if she didn’t manage to get away from the man who’d decided to turn her family into his harem; when the man she loved had given her an ultimatum (him or me, her boyfriend said, because that was what it looked like), she chose her boyfriend and was (don’t ask me how – it’s still a kind of miracle to me) able to pick up the telephone and speak into her utter terror: you can’t do this to me anymore.

It began a process of extraction. I realized, during those few days earlier this month back in that countryside, back on those roads (filled still with the echoes of all my sobbing, traced still with the fear that he would send someone to destroy me, thick still with the impossible desire that had begun to bubble in me for a new way of living, for women, for change), that I’m still extracting myself from those old horrors.

1993 is 16 years ago. Sixteen years. Sixteen years. Why am I still in this struggle? Why isn’t it done yet?

This was the sort of question I was tormenting myself with over the last month
(alongside the old sorrow, of course, trying to reach back to that 21-year old and let myself finally forgive her, forgive me, for all that she had to do to get to where she could make the break that her mother couldn’t make, her father hadn’t made, no one had stepped in to make for her. I didn’t have to crawl through a river of shit literally, but I sure did have to drag the people I loved more than myself through it)…

What good does it do to ask why you’re not over it yet? What does that question even mean? It’s not actually get-overable, this history. It’s of me now. Right?

When I’m thick in the sludge of shame and possibly-irreparable damage, depression laced with terror, sorrow that my sister and I still struggle so hard to share space, to be in the same room and really look at each other, what difference does it make why I’m not ‘over it’ yet?

And all the while, I’m trying to be functional. Functional. Show up at my day job. Truly ‘show up’ (heart and all) at the workshops, be available to hold space for us as a group of survivors writing, be open (then) to not being perfect at it. I try to show up for my husband…

And otherwise, I slip out through the thread of things. I leave conversations. I don’t return friend phone calls or emails. I leave Facebook alone, as I don’t want to be reminded of all that I’m missing, all that I’m not accomplishing, all that I’m not I’m not I’m not…

My friend asked me, when I was finally able to reach out, as the deep trance started to break and I felt my heart start to reopen again to the now: “Who can talk to you when you’re in that place?”

What? What a fantastic question, I thought, and told her. Most of the time I’m asked, Who can you talk to when you need support – but she reframed it. And I saw that there were people in my life who could meet me in the mire of shame and self-hate, who could speak kindly and gently into the midst of those old voices. And I felt a little less alone.

I’m not fixed yet. It almost feels like a confession I need to make. Now that I’m feeling better, stronger around all those fragments I still hold of me, I remember that most of us aren’t – that for so many of us, there’s no such thing. There’s learning to maneuver anew, with these scars. There’s laughing anyway. There’s learning new arms for self-care, like with the bunches of rosemary carted to every workspace, just to clear the air.

These are the voices of the depression, the old training, when I’m in the thick of it: I question who I think I am, offering writing workshops for sexual trauma survivors – and then, I think it’s unprofessional to reveal how I’m really doing. I think I can’t possibly tell my friends – they’ll think I’m pathetic, they’ll talk about me to other people, they’ll ask if I found a therapist yet.

Please note: No friend has ever responded to my sorrow this way – it’s the learning of that decade without a close friend, a pre-teen girl taken into the lair of a sociopath and trained away from the sort of socialization we’re supposed to get as teenagers, about how to have intimate relationships with people who aren’t sex partners. I only learned to relate to people through sex. It was the only option I had for intimacy outside of abuse, and I took it.

Here from this place back where my peripheral vision is wider (here, where I can see out into the music and mystery of a hawk floating over Market street, above the Flood Building, signaling to me that we’re still here, we’re still full of possibility), I know that it’s ok not to be ‘fixed.’ I know that we’re all struggling in different ways to stay engaged with this thing called humanity -- I know it’s ok to be human. Imperfect.

I want to touch that 21-year old I was, hold her hand in the impossibility of her solitude, remind her it’s ok that she’s human: that she needed an ultimatum from a lover to open the door to that previously-unimaginable action, to pick up a phone, shivering, and say, No. Enough. That it's ok that she couldn’t just choose herself: she had to choose (for) a lover. Of course, at that time, she’d (I'd) been trained into such a devaluing of self that that was the only option—and she took it. We took it. I took it. And I survived.

We do what we have to do. We are flawed and magic. And we survived. And I am sorry and I am grateful.

"Real" Butch

(This is a part of a longer, ongoing work in progress about this transition from feminine straight girl to butch dyke to femme…)

I’ve been defending you a lot recently in ways I never would have back when I was you. You never used the term Real Butch, hated that essentializing, that narrowing of focus, that erasure of all the other queer possibilities of the masculine gendering the female flesh. Nowadays, now and again, I tell the ones who ask me, OK, yeah, I was a Real Butch.

They can’t hear the “but…”         but you do, I know it, I can feel you peeling behind my teeth, wanting to push out the whole story, wanting me to keep on telling it like it was—and is—how there’s no such goddamn thing as a real butch and butch is as ze says it is, whoever’s wearing the skin on that body, but we both know that’s always in question, right?

The truth is I’m still grateful to you for the ways you made me know I could be safe in the world and although just recently we, you and me, got told that we had a privileged coming out because there was the semblance of a community at school when I put 2 and 2 together and got gay and because I came out into a place where gayness was relatively acceptable—we both remember that there was not much safe about my life then and your hands had had to go places they were never meant to visit and you carried all the heavy boxes of our terror and you opened the doors for our future possibility – all the things, yes, that a goddamn real butch is supposed to do. You found a way to fit this me, now, into your curvature and flank, into your faggy footwork on the dance floor under the smoke machine’s smog and the one starry sad set of flashing red green and gold lights at the local bar.

And here’s what I want you to know now: I’m sorry we didn’t make it out any deeper before my plumage and finery found its way back out again, before the girl was made possible again and you had to slide that fine black leather motorcycle jacket off your shoulders for the last time – it just doesn’t fit now; I’d wear it for you if it could. But I mean, I’m sorry that we never found those bars, those old smoky hinges of solidarity where you could have shaped and strapped the hard gear of your masculine future, where you could have butted heads with other women willing to ride the hard truth of this existence; goddamnit, I mean I’m sorry you never got to be a real butch with other real butches, be looked upon as something or someone right not just novel or different or brave or odd or whatever. Not as just a shield, but as a real self.

I want you to know I believed in you and needed you in those years, and, of course, it’s not like I can’t feel how you shaped my walk, or how you get me in trouble still, assuming I can make eye contact with anyone on the street and have it be the right safe thing to do.

Here’s what I mean to say – that there’s never anything false about us when one identity shifts and slides into another. We both know that girl wasn’t a safe place to be all those years and you stepped up like a butch does and you made a handful of things a little safer. I know I’m not supposed to say these things: we spent so much time pulling up the roots of our history to find the nascent butch inside and just look, just look where we are now—