a year ago i had a nasty staph infection at the base of my skull that took two months to clear up.  doing that made me face the diabetes that left me with peripheral neuropathy and all the rest.

since june, i’ve been blind in my right eye.  third nerve palsy.

and in august, while getting ready to take my mother to a few doctor’s appointments, i found my father having a stroke.  in hospital an mri confirmed the stroke and also showed that his prostate cancer is in a vertebrae.  this week he went for bone scan and all, to see how much it is the cancer that has left him weak enough to appreciate help in undressing at the end of the day.

between that, there has been a universe of details to prioritize, with many not rasing to urgent while others just loom like the hurricane clouds that caused hundred year flooding around here.  i basically have a bit of time between one and four pm on some days, but mostly i need to be around my parents.

in all that, i lost.  i lost magic.

i don’t know what you define magic as, but i define magic as the transcendent.  its what we do to transcend the mundane.  maybe it’s beauty or faith or art or stories, but whatever it is, it is what reminds us that we are connected to something bigger than the grind of living.  magic is awe and insight, connection and creation, transformation and miracles.

i might not have been able to be beautiful in the world, but i had my voice, had my creation, had my art.  i had something that let me see and speak beyond.  my life had the asthetic discipline of a nun, without the performance, but at leasy i had a way to open my vision and share my deeper experience, beyond the mundane.

and i lost that.  it’s still gone.

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“In the end, it is vitality and not virtue that makes characters in novels engaging.”
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks On Fiction.

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i have traded vitality for virtue. And i have lost energy, spark that might make me engaging.

i do the virtuous thing, like dan savage demands of transpeople.  and the virtue trap means that people believe they can demand even more virtue, for what level of self-sacrifice is ever enough for those who demand virtue?

the poetry is gone, the song is stilled

and i am dessicated.

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Hurricanes, and the turning of the year, are simply events, they are what happens. And yet, they also are symbols, and messages, And of course this doubleness is hard for so many people to understand–either they are random and therefore meaningless, or they are designed by God personally to tell us things. But you know, with your deep and painful perception of life’s subtleties along with life’s crushing burdens, that they are both, and the messages are within us.  How sad that the farmstand, one of the things you could give your father, is now underwater.  What a strange sad symbol for you, as well as the overwhelming shock for the stand’s owner.

Ms. Rachelle, a magickal transwoman herself.

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magic.  for me it has always been in the voices.

i know what i know, i hear what i hear, i imagine what i imagine.

and i know how hard it is to communicate the truth of the voices in the world.

i speak, i write and i am erased.

too.  too challenging, too queer, too intense, too cerebral, too dramatic, too thoughtful, just too much.

i know i have always had the voice of a trans-woman, a shaman, but i also know that there was no one around who knew what the hell to do with that.  in other places or times, they would have taken me to the temple and i would have learned from the wise old priestesses, but that wasn’t really an option in my time.

but the spirit is strong, and the feelings always pull me to what feels natural and powerful.  jenna elfman in “friends with benefits” kissing her dementia challenged father.  justin vivien bond singing from a connected place.  varla jean so playful and funny from deep inside jeffery robertson.  images and wisps of pretty and potent, resonating in the world that call to me.

but i do the work here, and my own immersion is in service, not in expression.  it is in virtue, not vitality.

i do not transcend the mundane, but I am mired in it, as those around me cannot engage magic.

and i miss my life.  i miss my magic.

and it calls to me.  callen the name of my fathers nurse up on the board, the social worker at cancer expecting a woman.  it calls.

without magic there is no context for struggle.   without  the possibility of transcendence, there is no hope.

a therapist told gene simmons that because shannon tweed is in relationship with him, because she loves him, that she knows what is good for him.

people around me aren’t in relationship with me.  they are in relationship with themselves, and that means relationship with their limits.

they know what they want, what they can see.

and that’s not my magic.

i need magic.  playful, engaging, transformative, joyous magic.

i need transcendence.

it’s the gift my mother in the sky put into my heart.

to hold open the space for transformation beyond the mundane.

and now, all i can do is scrape for it beyond the service that they need, need so much.

and come up empty.  though i know it is still within me.

happy birthday to me.

(oh, and if you can avoid having your birthday fall around 9/11, i would very, very, very much recommend that.)

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?, by Guy Deutscher,  New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2010

Sheldon got the role of Bernadette and then the hard part began. “I’m not just playing a drag queen. I’m playing a post-operative transsexual who loves and thinks as a woman. I had to get rid of the whole man thing.”

“Terence Stamp (Bernadette in the original film) did a press conference with us where he said he wanted to concentrate on the pain of a person trapped in a body of the wrong gender.

“I thought, ‘Well that’s fine for you, love, but I don’t want to be doing it for three hours every night.’”

So he researched the grande dame of Australian drag on whom the role was based, a performer named Carlotta.

“She was very glamorous, very tits and feathers. She had it all. But she also had the dignity of an old-time Hollywood star. That’s what I clung to. Dignity.”

Priscilla Queen of the killer corset, Toronto Star, 22 August 2010

Lea, who says she “cannot allow [herself] the luxury of being in love”, is pessimistic about her chances of finding happiness with someone else. Those transsexuals who do enter into serious relationships, she says, often do so by keeping their past from their partners.

“They live as hypocrites; it is a variation on solitude,” she said. “We transsexuals are born and grow up alone. After the operation we are born again, but once again alone. And we die alone. It is the price we pay.”

Lea T and the loneliness of the fashion world’s first transsexual supermodel, Guardian, 1 August 2010

She has to go public.

She spent a long time playing a role in someone else’s play, Manager #47, but now she has to not only be out there, she has to own the content.

We bought her a cheap video camera and encouraged her to post video on her studio’s blog.  I’m not stupid; I may love text, but I know that there are huge numbers on the web for whom text is more an obstacle than a engagement.  They want to see and hear, not just read to hear with their inner voice.

She hasn’t done that yet, and is feeling uncomfortable.

My mother spoke about her own orneriness and how, when she spoke out,  it would embarrass my sister.

I certainly have similar stories.

Now, though, I have to encourage her to do something she has always discouraged me from doing: being visible, standing proud, inviting gaze, and trusting her own beauty.

As I said to her, if she thinks coming out as a mature woman artist is hard, she should think about the challenges for a queer shaman, a power-femme drag-mom.

She has to do what she has always discouraged me from doing, and she knows I am not wrong.  If she wants a practice as an artist, she has to be visible.

Maybe after she makes it, she can finally support me.

Though the way my chest feels from a half an hour, 3:30 AM to 4 AM, getting my mother up from the floor when she fell, I suspect it is too late.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.