Maybe

I think I know what I need to do.

First Nationals Update

I haven't even had the chance to sleep in my own bed since getting back from nationals early Monday morning. I was pretty eager to start putting away all of my things, reorganizing my room, and getting on with the business of everyday living again. But each time I touched anything in this room--each time I picked up a piece of a costume or a trophy or even opened my suitcase more than a crack--I saw the things, feelings, and people connected to them, and I couldn't bring myself to do it just yet. I've had more fun in the last week than I have in years, but I have also felt more pain than I thought I was capable of enduring.

Most people know that I didn't win this year, and I knew exactly what I did to lose the very moment it happened. I can't pretend that it wasn't one of the most painful experiences I've had to deal with in my performance career. I had no one to blame but myself, and these were mistakes that just simply shouldn't have happened. I didn't think I could ever feel that broken again. I had let everyone down, again, and this time, I couldn't walk away feeling like I had done the best that I could, which would have made everything perfectly fine. I was convinced I never wanted to put myself in that position again, risk feeling like that yet another year later. In those hours immediately following the conclusion of the pageant, I had finally come to the point of believing I just had nothing left to give. The magic was gone. And I couldn't get myself out of it.

I don't know what brought me back to reality. Maybe it was hall twerking in my underwear with three of my best friends. Or eating four pounds of Chinese food the next morning. Or seeing one of the people I love and respect most in this industry win his dream bar title the day after stepping down as Mister Gay United States MI. Maybe it was seeing my drag kids place top five in their very first national pageants ever. Maybe seems to be kind of a useless word at this point in the conversation. Collectively, my experiences began to chip away at pain enveloping my every thought. Would I really want to give this up? Ultimately, I had to ask myself, "What kind of person do I want to be?" What will be my legacy? Perseverance.

Because nothing worth having is ever easy, and someday, I will look back on all this pain, and it will be invisible. I know this isn't over for me. I know I am my own worst enemy. This year, it was about celebrating my demons, not fighting them. Now I realize that it's not so hard to fight them, and it's not so hard to be proud of them, but it is infinitely more complicated when you need to discover the balance necessary to achieve success.

But, while I was sitting expressionless in the front seat of the van, unable to move from the parking garage back to the room, he reminded me that I had achieved so many victories that weekend, regardless of my placement on the final night. I gave my kids the experience of a lifetime, and though I may not have won the war, I won a few very important battles. Interview and Question and Answer. I beat something I have been fighting for years. I still don't know how to feel about losing the category that I'm "supposed to be" the best at. My head probably wasn't able to keep up at that point. Everyone keeps telling me how well I did, but there is that part of me that knows how many mistakes I made. I know that I didn't get to show them the best parts of me during talent. That will stick with me for a while, but for now, I can celebrate the win for my new brother and sister. I can look forward to a fantastic year of growing, strengthening, and promoting a pageantry system that has made me who I am today. I cannot wait to work with everyone. The energy has returned.

More later.

Ten Days

I've only been in Pittsburgh for ten days, but it feels like I have been back for several weeks already. Though the first few days were very difficult, it didn't take long for me to feel at home. I want to expound upon this at some point--why transitioning to a new location is such a mindfuck for me and how I have learned to cope--but I leave in a few hours to head to nationals for GUS, and though such a topic deserves more than a passing mention, my head isn't quite ready to commit to writing about it.

The day it sank in  for me was the day we played softball in the rain. I have and will always connect with people through shared experiences. It's not enough to just talk about common interests. I need to do things with you. Sports and their basic mechanics, like music, have a natural rhythm to them. 

Rhythm is a form of communication. It is a form of interaction all its own. 

Playing on that field in the rain made me feel things I had forgotten I could feel. Playing sports, dancing, and playing music all require you to somewhat share the same consciousness as others. I finally felt grounded in my city again. I finally felt able to call Pittsburgh my home again. It became real that afternoon, and despite the abysmal weather conditions and the possibility of getting struck by lightning, I can say without a doubt that I was just plain happy. 

It's so much easier for me to talk to people when I do things like this. 

I too am ready for whatever comes next. 

I have finally learned to say "no" to people. It's been the hardest lesson I've had to learn. I am naturally a much too giving person, and when I also care about the things with which people need assistance, I tend to feel guilty about refusing. I have something very big and very important coming up this weekend, and it has been a constant struggle to remain focused and to love myself enough to put myself first for the time being. I am excited to see old friends and begin working on these new projects, but now is happening now. I will treat my present with the same respect I treat my future. 

Trying to Decide if I Should Perform This

Do you know what it’s like when your eyes hold their breath?

I’m sitting here in this blue box built for a boy who’d rather build his own--perfectly pink, plastic-people-populated and perched perpendicular to my past, our lives intersecting where mine became his. Where pink became blue before either of us had ever been born.

I have fumbled my way through a series of pendulums, dodging left and right, falling face first in the mud and failing to see them swinging right for me each time I rose my head to breathe and I breathed in genderqueer and choked on an indecision that felt like sitting on the fence.  With a post up my ass.

And I wiped the mud away and fell backwards in time through the dirt and the dust of trying to forget years of looking at my body betraying every move I made and every pound I benched and every mile I ran, and I coughed up the night I first saw my chest flattened against my skin with her by my side

And before I could inhale that moment one more time the smell of my past caught up with my plans and I puked up the five-year-old, naked and peeing outside

And in the puddle before me I saw the second-grader who didn’t understand why her middle name couldn’t be Matthew and the fourth-grader with a rope around her neck and a knife in her lunchbox and the sixth-grader with a pen in her cheek and a face that never saw the light of day again, throwing fists and throwing chairs, and locking doors and running away into the seventh-grader who found music and got lost in the notes of sad songs, black clothes, and the chorus of “You’ll grow out of it eventually”

“You’ll grow out of it eventually”

Eventually. Eventually.

Eventually if you say a word enough it stops sounding like a real thing at all, like the sound of my birth name

bleeding out the mouth of the boy whose ex-girlfriend’s lips bleed for no one not even God anymore.

(Because she’s a man now.)

I lay there night after night, sweating out the years I spent as a genetic fraud, broad shoulders tucked tight, sleeping tight, breathing tight and then

I swallowed the pink and blue and white flag-shaped pill with a capital T on the back and a blank slate on the front,

Hoping to finally be able to fall asleep with a blue blanket pulled over my head and an empty needle in the can

but then came the side-effects.

I woke up in the mud again, just like now, coughing it all up, layer by layer

Unexpected expectorant, the not-this-again guanifisan,

Warning: Never change gender on an empty stomach.

Mucus covered labels no longer stuck to the inside of my lungs, no longer clinging to my alveoli like the child who became the girl who became the boy who became the man who clung to a blanket of blue and shut out a world of rainbows

And there they were, covered in snot, just lying there.

Genderqueer. Freak. Shim. Faggot. Sped. Retard. Butch. Twink. Nerd. Woman. Princess. Liar. Tranny. Female. Male. Lesbian. Gay. Asexual. Bottom. Top. Girl. Boy. She-male. Dyke. It. Masculine. Feminine. Nothing. Everything. Whatever you want already as long as you stop asking me what’s in your pants,

 does your family hate you?

 so what are you really?

What’s in your pants?

When are you going to get surgery?

What’s in your pants?

What’s your real name?

Oh and by the way what’s in your pants?

I’m tired of picking up snot-covered pieces of the people I tried to become—the identities I snorted so that I could just learn your name before you said you only dated real men and too bad you don’t have a dick and well I can still see the girl in you and you know

Sometimes it gets really old doing trans 101 when all I want from the woman whose name tag says becky is my fucking chicken quesadillas.

That’ll be 8.66. Please pull ahead to the next window and have your genitals ready.

Here’s your receipt.

So what’s in your pants?

Fine.

Four years and a lot of awkward conversations later, I can tell you that It’s pink and blue and people-shaped. No. Pink. Blue. A mixture of the two. Somewhere in between like the infinitesimal cracks between visible and invisible light, indivisible, no gender, under God, with liberty avenue and gender justice for all. A man. A-fucking man. Fucking men. Sometimes. Fucking women sometimes. Fucking sometimesmen and sometimeswomen and sometimes no times fucking at all.  

For B, Who Has Been Waiting

Peter came into Rainbow without really knowing me as Elise. (That seems so strange to write when it isn't on a medical form.) But he told me that he always perceived my energy to be masculine, and he said this and acted in ways that really made me believe it. There weren't many extraordinarily detailed conversations about the process: no Trans 101. Peter was the kind of person who educated himself on these details so that he could enter into a conversation with a trans person as an informed ally. He focused on me when he was with me, not my transition or my trans status. But what impressed me more was the he embraced genderqueer concepts in his own life. As a cisgender gay male, that's not an easy thing to do without facing some sort of backlash. The gay male community is full of bottom-bashing stereotypes and pressures of its own. I've grown to fear some of them myself.
He told me a few times how he knew there was a bit of woman inside him. That he didn't really care about his penis but found it quite useful. Peter had his own sense of style, both internal and external. The best part about that was that these things hardly ever had to be discussed. Two people who know themselves never have to defend their identities around each other. That's what was relieving. No walls.
I didn't have to prove my masculinity any more than he did. Or femininity. Or gayness. Or anything.
And that allowed us to approach both public and private interactions at a much lower level of tension.
He made me feel safe because of this. Not necessarily in a physical sense, but in every other way.

Off the Bench

I want to write about drag for so many reasons now, but I need to wait until I have all the right words about all of the pieces. These pieces are all somehow connected, and I want to see those connections clearly. I want to write about how being a drag father is an amazingly rewarding experience--how I am somehow the person people turn to when they want "expert" advice. How people know who I am without ever having met me. To be that kind of influence and feel so removed from it at times. About how I am very proud that I still believe you can never take yourself too seriously.

I want to write about autism and my job. And I want to write about my past. I have this goal of revisiting every journal entry I have ever written, typing them all out in chronological order. I've kept pretty consistent records since the seventh grade, though there are a few scattered entries before that. But I want to write in a way that exposes some of the events that made me who I am today. It has recently occurred to me that most people I know have no idea about the life I had before. I always have to remind myself that the entirety of my story cannot be read in the lines on my face. Life would be all too convenient otherwise.

I want to write about the realization I had last night. It wasn't exactly an epiphany, but I understood something in an entirely new way. They weren't just words to me anymore. I had a face to go along with them. I made a connection that just didn't exist before. Having good intentions does not make you a good person. Good actions make you a good person.

I went through my phone the other day and wrote out the hundreds of names and numbers in my phone, just in case it decides to die one of these days. I'm aware that there are ways of recovering your contacts should such a thing happen, but I like my way better. I got to revisit my relationship with each person as I went down the list, and I went through quite a range of emotions, from anger to fear to elation to grief. I saw his name in the middle of the pack. I lost my breath. I stared at the phone, then at the page. And back again. I wrote it down anyway. It was somehow important. The right thing to do.

There were living people on that list that didn't make it onto that paper. That also seemed important and like the right thing to do.

I'm looking for better words to describe what it is like four years later. More than four if you count the pre-T days. I made two videos. Neither one is good enough right now. I might need to be in a different place to get it right.

I am revisiting the idea of pursuing physical therapy/physical therapy research. I have so many questions. I have so many things to say. But again, the words aren't ready yet.

My mind is getting ready for something big. Every day, I am growing more confident overall, even with the occasional flashes of panic. I am ready to rejoin the world.

Catching Up

I miss when things used to be simple--when I would come home from school as a little kid, knowing that there would always be a bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting for me (yes, EVERY day). I miss knowing where I was headed in life, and I miss that feeling of invincibility. I miss believing that nothing could stand in my way.

Tonight, I feel a kind of miserable I don't quite understand. I know I am not reacting like I am used to when I am devastated. I'm being calm, and I am able to do other things, and I am not an emotional wreck. Somehow, I am in control, and it doesn't feel normal for me. I'm not complaining. This is just new territory for me. 

The final rejection letter came from Pitt's School of Education. So now I feel like I have to start all over. I feel lost, hopeless, useless, aimless, etc. And I'm tired of it, really. I do not want to be an endless wanderer. I want a home. I want a life. And I want a purpose. Or some idea of what mine should be. I know what I want to do, but what if I never get the chance now? What else can I do? I don't know any of the answers yet. And while that is tearing me apart inside, I am somehow still okay. Still doing what needs to be done, helping where I am needed, and trying to better myself and my circumstances regardless of the pain. 

But if Friday hadn't happened, I probably would have had a much worse time with that news. Last week was beyond stressful. Illness, not sleeping two nights of the week, having to spend the majority of one in a parking lot with my mother, routine changes, overwhelming days at work, late night pageant preparation, phone calls, late paperwork and write-ups, worries about moving and school and jobs, a shutdown situation,and the thought of seeing my brother for the first time in four and a half years...plus the usual things. A seven day battle to keep my head above water. 

And I lost on Friday morning, during a supervision meeting. Everyone knew something was up. I could tell by the way that everything began to get louder and more intense--by the way I just kept focused on the pattern in the carpet and by how I twitched and had to fight not to scream and fall out of my chair--that it was coming, and there was no turning back.

So I wrote a note to my BSC, who was sitting right next to me once I realized this: "I am very, very close to having a meltdown, and I don't know what to do." 

I was able to at least sit through the rest of the relatively short meeting, and I suppose it was convenient that I work in an office full of therapists. The main boss came to help. It took about 45 minutes after he came in for me to fully calm down, but I talked a lot after the first 20 minutes. Needless to say, I didn't make it to work that day. But no one seemed to mind. Now I am waiting on a call for actual therapy sessions paid for by work, which I think have been long overdue. 

I don't think I would have been able to handle the news had I not come that close to exploding. I needed a fresh start, and as shitty as it was to experience and have others witness, I needed it. I knew it was coming, just not when. 

So I made it a point to arrive to work early, and I came out to the teacher. Not as gay. Not as trans. As an autistic person working with autistic children. And the twenty minute conversation that ensued was also something that I needed. I wonder why it is so much harder for me to come out about this than anything else. And, yes, it really is a coming out process. It changes how people perceive and treat you. 

I still don't have too many words about my visit with my brother. I am not sure what to say yet because I am not sure of those emotions yet.

Jumping back to today, I've been fighting the feeling I always get when big things are coming up: I always want to quit everything and drop off the face of the earth. I end up asking myself why I am doing any of it at all. But I usually get my answer after it's all over. 

I still have so many fears. But I have a different answer to how I think things will play out. I may not always believe it, but it wasn't an idea I was willing to entertain this time last year: that I'm going to be okay, even if bad things continue to happen. 

Also, yesterday was my four-year T anniversary. Two people remembered without my saying, and I am okay with how quiet I was about it this time around. Maybe next time I will celebrate in some way, but for some reason, I feel that this was the way things needed to be done this year. 

I can survive this week because I've already made it this far .