Hi all, it’s been a while, so here’s a little treat. This is an essay I wrote a few months back that’s about to be published in my local Heatwave Visions Magazine. I hope ya’ll enjoy.
Sitting blank-faced in front of my monitor, combing through fellowship opportunities, looking at previous candidates, their skills, their experience at five years younger than I am now, they’ve done things that I didn’t even know were options.
“I was just a poor kid, raised by deeply complicated people, and I’m transgender, of course, I didn’t get those opportunities,” I try to tell myself to soothe some of the growing anxiety in my chest. “I didn’t have the privilege to take risks, to fail.”
Of course that self self-soothing doesn’t work. I’m still intensely aware that I’m living a life that I don’t want, and explicitly jealous of people who are. I am who I am, where I am, and I don’t feel like I had much choice in that.
“For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice,” renowned ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ Audre Lorde writes in her poem, A Litany for Survival.
I wasn’t familiar with Lorde or her writing. I knew the name, but only in passing. But the more I read, the more seen I felt.
In her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals, she writes, “Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.”
In reading it, I felt regarded. The situation is something that I never experienced, but having experienced alienation within my own body, having a gnawing insecurity about ‘passing’, reading the words “Nobody will know the difference,” hit straight through my chest.
Now, as I dig through Audre Lorde’s breadth of work, A Litany for Survival makes home in the back of my mind. How could a poem so thoroughly describe my feelings?
I’m hyper aware of my place in the world, as a trans person, as a poor kid, as a woman, and yet I still see myself as a survivor before anything else.
“We were never meant to survive,” Lorde writes.
Before I write more, I want to share my biases. I am a white woman who in no way wants to co-opt the feelings and experiences of a black woman. I cannot begin to understand the lives of women of color; it’s just that Lorde’s words have spoken to me. I feel compelled to share how they connect to me, and I just hope the sheer love and appreciation I have for Lorde’s work is clear.
Cool? Cool.
I began reading bell hooks about a month ago, specifically All About Love: New Visions. I was so excited to read it that I stopped halfway through another book to start it early, and I left feeling dissatisfied. There were deeply compelling points throughout the book, and I deeply respect hooks’ place in the zeitgeist, but I had the feeling that if I didn’t already agree with many of the things she was writing that I would have deemed the book unsupported and uninspired.
I’m having the opposite feeling with Lorde.
My first exposure to her was the aforementioned poem, A Litany for Survival, that I came across through my therapist. It was January or February, and Trump had just been sworn into office. Within the first few weeks, it felt that hundreds of pieces of anti-trans legislation were flying past my head. I’m lower class, with few resources and little familial support. If they came for me, there wouldn’t be anything I could do.
I felt hopeless, like a walking corpse waiting to be buried, and then he shared the poem with me.
I remember the therapy session clearly, sitting at my desk, speaking to him over video call, lo-fi music in my headphones lulling my mind. He references the poem, and I quickly pull it up on my second monitor. After a quick read, I sat, dazed. We chatted for a few more minutes, scheduled our next session, and then I shut down my browser, put my head in my hands, and sobbed.
There’s something so deeply earnest in everything I’ve read from Lorde. She comes across as someone deeply fiery and passionate, but also incredibly empathetic to anyone under the umbrella of her cause.
“The pattern that emerges is that, in some way, what Audrey Lorde wrote gave them permission to be themselves, and to speak their truth and to love themselves in a way that they didn’t before they read it,” Lorde biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs said.
I’m 27, and started transitioning at 24. I didn’t permit myself to be myself for most of my life, too wracked by trauma, identity, fear, and doubt. When that period of my life crosses my mind, I think about my dad. He’s a troubled man, an abusive alcoholic, a misogynist, homophobe, hateful bigot. But there were these moments of clarity, times in between his vodka-laced screams that painted a deeply hurting man. He was a man in so much pain that he wanted to force that hurt onto me, his daughter. He wanted to force me into his mold even if it killed me, and eventually it would have.
“For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive,” Lorde writes.
Tomorrow, I’m going to work a job that I don’t hate, but every passing moment, I feel this rolling disdain. “This is what life is supposed to be?” I think about freedom, about exploration, about living a life that I want to live. Even today, I am still living out of need and for survival. I have more resources, and I’ve healed, regained strength, but how far am I from the little girl with my father’s hand around my throat?
These are the feelings Lorde’s work pulls out. In the span of 244 words, four stanzas, a minute of reading, I feel seen, I feel grief, I feel pride, I feel hopeless, and I feel inspired.
Then I have to get ready for work.
I’m brought back to reality.
Driving, riding down the congested I-95, I daydream of something more than this life I have, then I clock in and wait for the day to end.
I was promised the moon and the stars, told that the world would be putty in my hands, that my mind would lead me to the mountaintops. Then we were homeless.
I was promised that I would overcome it, that my station in life was completely within my control. Then there wasn’t enough food.
I was promised… then the drugs. The drinking.
A character in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke says it plainly.
“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.”
The character, a leper, is at the outskirts of society, his body rotting away before his eyes. Even in his state, and the states of other lepers around him, they still choose life. I guess that’s why I’m still here.
Nothing promised is destined, no matter the purpose. A Litany for Survival sits in the back of my mind again.
“ And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again,” Lorde writes.
We were never meant to survive, but I try to anyway. I think about my early days in therapy, where I was an emotional mess. I was numb and dissociated, prone to emotional outbursts, completely enraptured by the feeling that something inside me was broken or missing.
I was living in survival, my entire nervous system rewiring to prolong my life. So now, even after years of work to build myself up, I still fear that things may just as quickly crumble. Fighting to live takes its toll. But we find a reason to live anyway.
Living through trauma and strife brings up complicated feelings for me. Given the choice between a much easier, less strenuous life and the one I currently have, I don’t think I could answer.
The struggles have brought meaning, and even if I don’t have many opportunities, the few successes I do see feel hard fought, earned, and meaningful. I often think of that in the frame of my transition. My womanhood is one that I chose to chase; my fight for my identity brings it meaning and complexity. I am not a woman because I just ended up being one; no, I made myself one.
The things I’ve seen also offer a level of perspective, knowing just how bad things can be.
In my best moments, that’s a freeing force. If we’re only a few steps away from failure or desolation, then why not take risks? Risk and safety can have the same ending.
I’m proud of my resilience. Even if I’m not where I want to be, I’m still working toward it. I am in a better place than I should be, given my life. I am still alive, and that in itself is beautiful.
Even in the darkest moments, appreciate life, because even that is miraculous.
As Lorde wrote, “ So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”