Life Escaped Me

Rabbi Shmuley says that one of the most important passages in the Bible (Deuteronomy 30:19) is where we are told that death is easy, but that we have an obligation to choose life. While many Christians see that as an injunction against abortion, Schmuley thinks that's a call to vibrancy & joy.

Me, well, that was never the lesson for me. People kept telling me I needed to die more, to shrink and shrivel and play small. I was too big, too hip, to overwheming for the room, so instead of helping me find a bigget & better room, I was encouraged to take the arsenic, grow old and feeble.

Now, when I am in a house with two people whose death seems palpable to them, life is even more elusive. Life has escaped me, as my body aches and releasing what little joy I have left seems like too much heavy lifting.

I know that this isn't comprehensible to most people. People hear what strikes them, for whatever reason: where they have an answer, where they see their own challenges, where their own beliefs are challenged. This blog may be all about me, not you, but you can only read it though your own eyes. The limits of my manifestation are the limits of your experience. No matter how many references I make, your life is your life and my life is my life, and we don't share the same point of view on this reality we both seem to inhabit.

I can't help you hear anything that doesn't make sense to you. If you have no context to put what I say in, no way to resolve the references and interpret the symbols in a way that reflects what I am trying to say, well then, communication falters, doesn't it?

I need to tell someone that I feel like I am at the end of my rope. But it is my experience, and therefore my belief, that no one can hear what I have been saying.

I know that my relationship with my creator is where I need to look for real power. But I also know that the way most religions work is that two or more come together in her name, affirmation is created. I know that theraputic process says that I have to acknowledge that my pain is not special, that we all suffer and pain is the same. The problem I find with that is the problem of being trans in the world, being something stigmatized and hard. I know how to be humble and do the work, but I don't have the affirmation and encouragement to be who I know myself to be. Becoming the lowest common denominator really hasn't been fulfilling for me, really triggers the pain and stress in my body rather than releases it.

Just be yourself may be the cry, but when yourself is a fast, sharp, queer tranny, well, somehow that doesn't seem to be a self that others can understand, celebrate and affirm. Stripping me down is denying me expression and without expression, I am stripped of the flowers of my own inner life. That life escapes me.

Everyone faces challenges in life, but when they do, they can find encouragement to get back to normal, to push and become what we understand as a survivior. The encouragement to get back to queer, to push and become what people don't understand as a lifespring, well, somehow that seems almost impossible to find.

This seems an impossible worldview to convey to people who do live in the normative, as I have been trying to do it for over a decade now and failing.

So much of my effort has gone into not actually living life, but into questioning the life my creator gave me. Stigma turns the simple question of if my essence is sick or sinful into the overriding burden of my life and the lives of all those stigmatized. It's in that process of denial and searching that life escaped me, and continues to escape me.

I don't, I don't, I don't want to go and talk to someone who is going to make me go though the process of questioning and denying who I am again. I don't want to have to defend who I am to someone else's satisfaction again and again, which is why I stay invisible, which is why I stay dead. I may deseperately need affirmation & encouraging, desperately need being seen & understood, but I know from long experience that the effort to get that will probably fail, but fail after I have spent a big chunk of the rest of my valuable resource trying.

Life may beget life, but death begets death.  My lifelong relationship has been with death, in my family and in the cutting doubt I have used to dissect my own living brain, working to kill off the sin & sickness and ending up killing the bliss & divinity I was born with. 

Tragedy is here to be smelled.  But living with it — or dying with it — well, that's another challenge.