Loss

The hardest thing to lose
is our dreams.

We mourn less for what we actually lose
than for what we imagined having.

We get old and we know what we have tried and given up
but what we never tried, our secret wishes
still abide in us
and giving those up is giving up jewels
that kept us going.

I have spent years coming to grips
with what will never happen for me
with the “reality” people clonk over the head
of queer me.

And now, when heart hurts and feet freeze
and I think of loss
I just touch what I have already lost
all those potentialities
to know I am lost already
long lost.

Easy Blindness

Still working with my sister on all her technical needs, from copy writing to graphical design to rebuilding computers.

Her boyfriend was over when I stopped by to help her with the templates I made overnight and reconfigure a printer.  He wondered why I left so fast.

“I’m a necessary evil to my family,” I said.  ‘They need me to do things that they can’t do, but they don’t like me very much.  Heck, I don’t like me very much.  So they just want me to do the dirty work and get out.”

He took another puff on his cigarette.

My sister told me that I make what I do look easy, that when she steps up to do some of it she realizes how hard it is.

I think that’s a lie.  They see me start pounding my head to force myself back into discipline and denial, she gets stories from in e-mails that she doesn’t respond to, and so on.  There have been lots of flags in the last seven and a half years that this is killing me.

No, I just believe that they don’t want to see how hard it is.  They don’t want to see the costs.

It’s easy to believe that the housekeeping staff make it look easy when you come back and the place is perfect, but that’s only because you never enter their world, don’t open to the sweat, effort and cost.

I may talk about how the undiagnosed/untreated metabolic syndrome gets worse, my feet swelling when I lie down, the panoply of challenges, you may see wearing nothing but shearling boots in July, but if you never enter that challenge, well, I make it look simple.

I guess the only other option is to be seen as whining about things; either being invisible or a pain, because the reality must be erased.

It’s not me making it seem easy.

It’s others being blind.

But they don’t like me much, anyway.

Voice Break

It was early in the morning, and I was at my sister’s studio installing a computer I had rebuilt overnight for her; new power supply, network card, hard drive, operating system, driver suite, graphic software, all that.

As I worked to get it together, the door opened, and I heard a voice I never heard before.  It was my sister’s voice, yes, but it was cooing a cheery good morning, sweet and upbeat.

She came in the door and saw that the woman who would be instructing the class wasn’t there; it was only me.

And then the voice I know so well came back quickly.  I wasn’t worth the performance, even if I was going out of my way to do something exceptional for her.

My sister is now in mid-life woman mode, an exciting new adventure of following what she loves, her art.  It involves get-togethers with smart women and books on how to reclaim your own life.   She is enjoying it, as she should.

But the idea that, somehow, any of what she is doing might apply to me, well, that’s just not on.

I’m just locked into her expectations of me, which is as a caretaker.

I have an hour to make dinner.  I lost ten minutes of that last night, talking to my parents.  At twenty minutes I got called upstairs to be told my sister would be joining us.  At thirty five minutes my sister came in and started eating the ingredients I had prepared and telling stories about her adventures.

It ate my time and my focus.

I did what I usually do when I need more discipline.  I slammed myself in the head, multiple times.  Get focused, don’t get sad, don’t feel, just work harder.

My father saw it, and felt compelled to whisper to my sister.

I tried to tell him why I did it, to explain my experience.  He said that slowing down was the thing that worked for him.

When I was a kid, the poem I would ask him to read over and over again was

Christopher Robin goes hoppity, hoppity
hoppity, hoppity, hop.

Whenever I ask him politely to stop
he says he can’t possibly stop.

If Christopher Robin ever stopped hopping
he wouldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t go anywhere.

So Christopher Robin goes hoppity, hoppity
hoppity, hoppity, hop.

I knew even then that momentum, inertia was vital to me.

My father said that there was a reason he didn’t cook.

I watch my sister blossom.

I listen to my sister babble about blossoming, repeating her stories.

I make sure she is fed, listened to, and supported.

She seems to be sure that she knows who I am, one of them.

She can’t imagine me in her circle of cool women.

Who can imagine me, unless I embody myself?

And my body is slaved, my body is failing, my body is male.

Which has always been at the root of the problem.

After all, most other people I know who PAT, pass as transsexual, always have to fight or isolate to keep their center.  It’s a tough life, out as trans.

I kind of wish that sometimes, it would be about me.

But I have been labeled and dismissed.

And I don’t get the sweet, encouraging and empowering voice.

Mistake

Whenever I have emotions
I am wrong
or so I have been told
since I was old enough to understand.

My mother can have emotions
but the rest of us just negotiate them
keeping the rational and considered
just like my father taught us.

My emotions are intense
and very queer
as befits a power femme drag mom
as must be denied by a dutiful son, a scary man.

My emotions are my touchstone
but I keep them in a bottle
like fireflies in a lantern
to illuminate my life.

Emotions bright on the page
painful in the heart
as they must be denied action.

This morning I am afraid
afraid of an infected foot
very poor circulation
very bad scratch
that did what was demanded of pushing my mother
and is now swollen and discolored.

Nowhere to take my fears
not to people who cannot engage
not to professionals who ask what I do not have to give.

I can only tend
trust healing, trust god
and deal with the fear
that makes my heart ache even more
than the regular chest pains.

We heal or we decay
both are natural
unlike the isolation
when emotions are wrong.

Three Months

It was three months ago my sister told me that my father had tasked her with getting me medical insurance, because he saw places where I am failing.

I said that would be fine, but that I was resigned to my fate of decay into squalor.

A quarter of a year later, and my choice to be resigned is again proven correct.  I live between the cracks.

My father did the “well, they are an intense, weird asshole” thing again on the phone with my sister tonight, saying that I was noting her rejection of an idea, but that I could be dismissed because I am just, well, weird, intense and stupid.

He sees it as a way to bond with others over just how hard it is to be around me.  I am other, and “we” all have to tolerate that.

Yeah.

Resigned.

When FU! Comes Up

Essay for the caregiver support group tonight.

There are two sides to caretaking.

The most obvious part is the mechanical bits.  This, too, can be divided into two sides: the reactive — all the washing and moving and cooking and such, so important and so routine — and the proactive — the planning, the scheduling, the medical and legal, thinking through the challenges that those we care for face and working with them to make good choices.

The part of caretaking, though, that seems to be most challenging to people isn’t the mechanical.  The emotional bits are where the real struggle lies, negotiating the emotions of those for whom we care, of others around them, and our own emotions, whatever they are.

It is never enough to just care for people’s mechanical needs, though those needs must be fulfilled.

It isn’t enough to just care for someone.

It is vital that you also make them feel cared for.  That means addressing their emotional needs

This is the hard part, the wearing part, the challenging part, the suffering part, the maddening part.

The emotions around aging and disability are intense.  People lose things that they have always valued, that they worked hard to achieve, things that they aren’t sure that they can live without.  They lose memory, agility, vigor, acutity, self-activation, friends, and more.

And maybe most important, they lose dignity and a sense of self-worth.

Aging and disabled become isolated, needy and scared.

Much of the care they need is to address those feelings.   They need not just to be cared for, but also to feel care for, need to feel seen and understood, protected and valued, need to feel respected and loved.

This part of caregiving is the hardest bit.  Anyone can clean a mess, wipe a bottom, make a dinner, go to a medical appointment or even make a budget.  But not everyone can meet people where they are emotionally and make them feel cared for.

I know that many people find it hard to understand why caregiving is so draining and immersive.  Can’t you just leave dinner in the refigerator, just schedule weekly shopping trips?

To me, the biggest draining factor is the FU factor.   When people hurt, hurt from frustration or anger or fear or anything else, we want to express that emotion.  The most basic way people express deep emotions is simple: Fuck You.

• “You aren’t listening! FU!”
• “I don’t care, I want it the way I want it!  FU!”
• “This is too hard to deal with right now, so FU!”
• “I don’t have the damn strength to change, serenity to accept or wisdom to know, so FU!”
• “You are so frustrating!  FU!”
• “You never appreciate what I do anyway, so FU!”

It doesn’t matter if we are the one who is saying FU!, the one who is hearing FU! or the one who wants to just say FU! but is trying to find communication & common ground, whenever the FU! feeling comes, up it drains you.  The emotion has a cost.

Maybe people who have been emotionally mature as adults find it easier to be emotionally mature and less needy when they are elderly or disabled in some way, though I can’t imagine it is ever easy for anyone to face the dimunition of their faculties.

I wouldn’t know about them, because my challenge is with two people who have always been needy, in different ways.  I was taught I had to take care of my mothers emotions at an early age, and my father has always been rather disconnected from his emotions, with little empathy or emotional insight.

This need to feel cared for isn’t limited to challenged people.  A kid who feels cared for might see being pushed to do homework as an act of love, while a kid who doesn’t feel cared for might see a gift as an attempt at manipulation.  We can all do with a little less stuff, but doing with a little less attention, caring and understanding is often very difficult.

Making someone feel cared for means not just doing for them but understanding them, actually being able to enter their world. This is very difficult for anyone who is used to demanding that others enter our world, is used to dealing with children and spouses who can adapt to us, rather than those who are struggling to adapt to themselves.   And the more time we have to stay in their world, the more we lose contact with our own world, our own life and our own power.

There are lots of mechanical challenges in taking care of aging people, from the simplest cleaning to the complex planning.

But the stress those challenges offer aren’t a patch on the emotional challenges inherent in caretaking, in making sure that everyone, including ourselves, actually feels like they are being well taken care of.

My Challenge Is To Kill My Challenge

So TBB showed up and my sister took over our meeting, kicking me out, and then told me what I needed to change to make my family’s life easier.

I needed to be less defensive, hold fewer memories, be more explicit, all that.

I was furious.

Who the hell stands up for me and tells others what I need from them?

Nobody.  Not even my friend TBB.

It’s been challenging since my sister left her job.  She’s been building a new business and needing help from me.  However, she can’t really engage me; she needs me to be just an on-call technician.

Expensive for me, but in this family, the cost to me can never be a consideration.

After all, I’m just a whiny failure.

I explained to my father last night my challenging position with my sister.

He decided that, in a phone call today, he would project his frustrations with me onto her.

“Oh, too fast, too fast, right?”

Not useful.  I tried to silence him.  Fine if he wants to hear her vent about me.  Not fine if he wants to tell her what the problem is.

The “target patient” is the one who takes the slams of the family.  They are the scapegoat as they scramble towards health, showing the dysfunction in the system.

I get the idea that I am challenging to others.

The notion, however, that my being challenging is my fault, my sickness, my problem, well, I didn’t like it when my standard family nickname was  “stupid” when I was under 12 (until the therapist told them to stop), I didn’t like it when TBB told me that my sister was hurting so I needed to get normal to make her life easier, and I sure don’t like it when my father replies to my recounting my experiences with a dismissive “Ya, ya, ya.”

My mother was watching the replay of a transsexual woman on Oprah yesterday, but the leap as to why I can’t watch these shows when I have to be in denial to serve is beyond her.

It’s the 50th anniversary of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and the quote “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” just seems to mock me.  It is something I do all the time, and something I never, ever seem to get from others.

No, instead I am called upon to suppress myself so people don’t feel challenged.  I do it, and I die a bit every time.  And like every survival strategy, the more I use it, the more entrenched and isolated I become.

But where do I find safe space with potent understanding?  Not at the caregiver’s support group, I tell you that.  I never hear myself echoed back there, rather I just have to echo back to others.  So many places not.

I get it.  I’m past the point of no return.  People can’t come to me. I’m just too corrupt.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.
Small people always do that,
but the really great make you feel that you, too,
can become great.
Mark Twain

Mark Twain was clear; being around people who are big is the only way to engage your own greatness.  People who need to stay small will cut your knees off, crabs in a barrel, all that.

I just never did the right thing, to strike out and find big people.

So now, I am vivisected, my parts kept in a jar of my own bile, existing only to serve.

Slam me, slam me, slam me, slam me, and pray for my death.

A mitzvah for me.

The Cost Of Learning To Suppress Emotions

I learned early to suppress my emotions, both to stay safe around my narcissistic mother and to keep my trans nature under wraps.

The New York Times has a discussion of the cost of learning to suppress emotions.

Turns it isolates you.  Bad.

Just Be Yourself

We all want to be loved for who we are, to feel seen and valued for what makes us special.

Simple.

I was told that it wasn’t appropriate to be seen as being a girl.

And it wasn’t appropriate to be seen as being a shaman, priest, prophet, visionary, whatever, unless I assented to some orthodoxy.

That left me visible as a problem solver and caretaker.

Visible not as who I am, but rather as what I can do.

Seen and valued not for my essence but rather what I could do for others who felt unthreatened and unchallenged by me.

I know that my mother in the sky loves me, my creator and deity.

But people around me?

No wonder I hate those bumper stickers that say “Jesus Loves You.  Everyone Else Thinks You Are An Asshole.“

We all want to be loved for who we are, to feel seen and valued for what makes us special.

Simple.

But not for me.

All Elephants, All The Time

I am amused by some pretty trans blogs, where cheer and pictures of beautiful women fill the blog.

I like pretty pictures, sure, but mostly I enjoy watching smart people dance around the elephant.

Sure, there may be elephants in the room, like a wife who doesn’t want to see any trans expression, or dresses that don’t work without hips, or years of denial that leave one dried out, or a job to be kept,  big challenges, but the “absolute euphoria” of the first while just seems to erase elephants.

It’s when the stigma of making an out, integrated and authentic queer life kicks in that you finally have to learn to dance with the elephants in the room, not just ignore them.

Maybe it comes from the liminality of growing up with a Canadian identity in the US — Trudeau said that Canada was like a mouse lying in bed with an elephant — or from my management intensity, engaged as Elizabeth Moss Kanter spoke of teaching elephants to dance, but for me, there are always elephants.

And I suspect that is one of the challenges in engaging my blog.  I don’t offer a lovely place that appears elephant free; it’s all elephants, all the time for me.

It’s a perspective that fascinates me.  For example, I watch participants on “The Real L Word” dance around elephants like bisexuality, polyamory and drug use, and it is their relationship to elephants that is the interesting bit, even if they work hard to keep the elephants invisible.

Well, invisible and pink.

Sticky Truth

Lies and pleasantries, by their very nature, are ephemeral.

Lies and pleasantries are designed to be effective in the moment, to ease the way, offering a pleasant pop or a shared enemy to take the focus and allow a quick slip around challenging truths.  The truths don’t actually go away as the lies will, but they do seem less important.

It’s true that if you pile too many lies on top of one another, their very transience will start to cause problems.  As lies at the bottom of the pile decay and disappear,  the pyramid will start to crumble and fall.  Lies, while they may seem to make exepident motions, in the end do not make strong foundations for anything.

Truth, on the other hand, is quite sticky.  It always seems to hang on, to show up again, to become evident after lies have corroded and dissipated.

“Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it,” goes a vintage slogan attributed to Phillip K. Dick.

It’s not just intellectualized, factual truths that refuse to go away.

Emotional truth, spiritual truth and even physical truths are also quite, quite sticky.

All this is challenging for someone who has always had a clear eye and ear for resonating truths.

I remember Marianne Williamson saying, in one of her taped lectures, that she often had the capacity to tell someone exactly what was wrong in their life, clearly and sharply.

It took her a while, though, to understand that wasn’t always the best thing she could do for them.

Truth is so sticky, so persistent, so hard that humans often have to slowly engage it.  We spend a lifetime working on what others expect from us, on the desires implanted in us, and when we find out that they don’t tend to hold up, and that pesky truth we knew as a kid keeps coming, well, it’s rarely easy to accept.

So we keep playing with pleasantries, rationalizations and lies, what others find easy to hear, what pleases others enough to seem to get us what we want in the moment, hoping that someday that imagination will stick.

One of the hardest things I have to do is find ways to speak truth that don’t get other people’s hackles up.  How can I be truthful and gracious at the same time, keeping them engaged but also being faithful to what I see and know to be true?

This is one of the key challenges for “too” people.  Do we play nice when we meet someone, hoping that if they find out about our x-ray vision after they get to know us they will tolerate the challenge, or do we just show ourselves to be “too” people right up front, hoping that the people who stay around will be open and engaging with us?

The first post I wrote for this blog in 2005 was about my experience of existing as a “human doing” rather than a “human being.”  People love it when I use my power to do what they need, to serve them, but when I expose myself as just a being, they get freaked out.  They want me to be a flashlight rather than a beacon, able to be focused and switched off rather than illuminating what they do not yet wish to see.

It’s wearing for me to always have to play small and do what others want to try and get what I need.  I don’t want to have to always be negotiating the fears of others.

The writing workshop leader sent me a poem she has been working on for a while, a poem of a lover lost in the waves of another.  I told her that I think she would be great when she moves on from maiden poetry to mommy stories.  She hasn’t gotten back to me.   I understand the challenge there; that’s not a simple transition, and there are many obstacles that may need to be overcome in that.   I made a bold statement to her.

But it’s truth.  It’s truth not just for her, but for every woman.  We can’t stay maidens forever.  Some of us never really get a run at maidenhood anyway.  We need to grow up, to lead, to create, to head a family of some kind or other, even if we are denied our own biological offspring.

And as truth, it’s sticky.

It’s not going to leave her anytime soon, no matter how she covers it over.  The cover will decay, the truth will persist.

Now, I could have been more subtle, taken time, let her grow into the realization.  And if I was getting anything out of our relationship, I might have done that.

To me, there always is a cost in sweetening the truth, in coating it with honey so it slips down easier.  That’s hard work, even if I can do it.

And people who can’t handle the truth, well, that pretty much means they can’t handle me.  No use stringing it out to see if they will get around to it.

Sometimes I just need to speak the truth and let people go away to process how they feel about it.  Maybe that’s the five steps: anger, denial, withdrawal, bargaining, acceptance.

But it still leaves me lonely and lost.