I Don't Know What the Date Is

I finally got reimbursed for my Pitt Drag Show expenditures, so my bank account will remain above zero when my credit card payment goes through. I don't even know why I bother paying them anymore at all. It's never enough, and the way things are going, it's never going to be enough. I don't even want to think about it. I avoid about ten phone calls a day. I'm not going to argue about options that just aren't going to work for me. I've given up trying to stay ahead because I know I'm not. I'm just trying to get by, and sometimes, it's just trying to find a way to eat the next meal. I hate asking people for money. I hate taking things that aren't mine. Don't get worried. I have enough cheerios and packets of tuna to coast on for a while, but sometimes I just want something more. I'm feeling better, but I'm tired, and I'm losing weight. I've been scared of doing my shot all day because I know I will be even hungrier. I'm pretty sure if you told me I had to walk an hour for a few slices of pizza, I'd do it without thinking. You can get a hungry person to do anything. Really.
I think I will clean and write letters tonight. I need to write another coming out letter. It's been a while since I've done that. And I should probably write another one to my brother and one for my grandmother. I've even been thinking of writing my parents by hand. I wonder if that will make things easier for them. Maybe it will be more real for them.

I did a hot spot last night when I really shouldn't have, but I think I managed to push through to the other side somewhere in the middle of my number. It was an interesting night all around, and I don't have it all pieced together yet. And that's making me a little nervous, but I've discovered that almost everything has some sort of effect on me. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't anxious or nervous, generally speaking.

I'm not wearing pants. And this is fine.

I'm trying to be positive about my life and find reasons for things. I need a way to deal with it. I need more single friends. Or I need to start asking my friends to do things without feeling guilty or like I'm wasting their time. I've slowly begun to do this, but I don't have too much luck because almost everyone I'm close with is seeing someone and spending most of their time with that person. It's insanely difficult for me to make new friends. I mean, I can be friendly with anyone, but it takes a lot for me to feel a connection with someone. I think there's something about trust involved. And maybe I need to know that the other person can understand me without my having said a word.

There are people that used to be a big part of my life that I still see, and I see some of them pretty regularly, but I don't feel really connected to them anymore. One of those connections has been slowly fading over the course of a year, while another seemed to vanish almost instantaneously. I think I'd feel better not seeing them anymore because when I do, I am reminded that my memories are real, and I start feeling happy for a minute. But that goes away pretty quickly because all I end up thinking about is how those feelings just don't exist for me anymore. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose.

And now I'm worried about losing people before I even have them. And I hate being timid. I hate feeling this out of control.
Someone asked me this question the other day: "Are you sad?"
I didn't even think about my answer. It just came out. "Usually."

It's not like I'm in a raging depression all the time, but that does happen occasionally. I'm just sad. And it won't go away.

I keep going back and forth on this. I want to believe that everything's going to turn out okay if I just keep moving forward. And the more that I believe that I am not even in control of this, the worse I feel about myself.

I just heard fireworks outside. That reminds me that the fourth of July is coming soon. I don't know what I'm going to do. I may not be able to do it this time. I'll be alone thinking about it, most likely, and I won't have anyone to distract me because I'm sure everyone's going to be all coupled up. Maybe I can try to sleep through the whole thing. Sometimes I wish I could have normal holidays again. Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. I haven't had a real Thanksgiving with my family since just after turning 16. I am starting to forget what that even means. I've spent most of my recent Christmases traveling about three hours to the prison, staying for 12, and then traveling three hours back. And I am thankful for the time I do get to spend with my family, for the most part, but sometimes I want things back. And I'll never be able to have them again. I have never figured out how to deal with loss appropriately. I react the same way whether I lose an object or a human being. And that really sucks when all I want is my damn fire extinguisher pin.

I really tried to start writing something positive. I've been writing a lot lately. Most of it seems very whiny, and that usually annoys the shit out of me, so I can imagine how everyone else must feel about this crap. I do apologize. But maybe this will help.

It passes the time, and it gives my hands something to do.

I think I'm going to look at apartments on Craigslist and give myself something to look forward to if I can manage to find a fucking job. I'm serious in that if I don't find one soon, I'm going to have to leave.

Yet More Gender Shit

I'm a transman with a very low tolerance for people within the community who feel that, in order to affirm their trans identity and represent it to the rest of the community, they must rely on binary stereotypes. I do enjoy a great many stereotypically masculine things, but I also do some very stereotypically feminine things, and those things are just as much a part of me as the others, and I am not ashamed of them. I'm trying the best I can to prove to those around me that these things we call masculine or feminine are just attributes that cannot be partitioned objectively. My "feminine" attributes are included in my own personal definition of masculinity. From a lifetime of experience, I feel that my essence is masculine, and anything that comes from it, regardless of how society may label it, is rooted in my internal sense of masculinity. I do not need to reaffirm my masculinity by using external definitions to shape my behavior, and I do not need to represent it to the rest of the world in stereotypical ways.

Another person may describe hir internal essence as feminine, a mixture of the two, neither of the two, etc. To me, it's the same sort of issue I have with arguing that they are still men's clothes when a woman is wearing them.

My head seems to be all over the place tonight, but I have to say this as well: I know what it is like to not feel masculine. There are times when situations arise to disconnect me from my internal masculinity, and this masculinity is NOT replaced by femininity. It is an emptiness. A feeling of nothingness. Femininity is not the absence of masculinity, and again, this is known from the inside, not the outside.

I've been ranting about gender a lot lately, and I'm glad. I was having a lot of doubts about feeling disconnected from some of my friends because of the way I view my own gender, but when I opened up, I found that there are many more friends of mine who actually share similar ideas about what role labels play in how a person is represented in the community.

Shifting gears just a tad...

I don't think that I believe that I should have been born male. (I'm still working on this one.) I don't generally believe in the phrase because things either happen or they don't. Oddly enough, that's one situation where the binary thing kind of works. Perhaps the only things that "should have" happened are the things that DO end up happening.
I was born in a female body. And perhaps there were things already in me at the time of my birth that would lead me to discover this trans identity of mine. I think this is the body that I was meant to have, and I think I was meant to make this decision to change it. If I want to use the same old terms, my body and mind didn't line up, but I see nothing wrong with that, just as I see nothing wrong with making the decision to align them. Believing that there is something inherently wrong with being a man born in a female body seems insulting to those who do not choose physical transition. For me, I knew it was wrong to stay. For me.

I'm going to have to develop this further. I have so much to say about this because of a few recent conversations that have really helped me get closer to a person who is remarkably like me, as I've been privileged enough to discover over the last several months.

I don't know if I need to say something else tonight. Today. I mean, it is almost six in the morning. If I do, maybe it should go in another post.

Body Developments

I caught myself looking at my hands earlier today. I saw the veins that weren't visible just over a year ago, unless I had just finished working out. Now, they're always there, and I feel like new little branches find a way to surface every now and then. I remember literally feeling the expansion of my vascular system during the first few months. It feels like a tiny pop in your arm, with a little bit of a slap in there. You feel like you just missed rupturing something. I keep wondering if anyone else knows what I mean.

I've said it before, but it's extremely difficult to remember what it was like to have a different body. I can see pictures of what I used to look like, but I can't FEEL it anymore. And that is very strange to me because I am very, very good at feeling things when given any sort of stimulus. When I sit here and look at my arm, I can't replace what I see with what used to be there. It just feels like it's always been that way. I see pictures and wonder how I could have ever been that small or how my hips and ass could have been so big. I never felt small. And, for a female, I definitely wasn't. I mean, I was small in certain ways, but I think you all know what I mean. I can only attribute this to the fact that I tried to ignore my body for so long. I avoided being alone with it and wanted to separate myself from it any way that I could. I would cover up the parts that bothered me the most.

Just now, for the first time in over a year, I caught a memory of what it felt like for about 0.5 seconds. And then it was gone. I was standing in my underwear, looking at myself in the mirror. I turned around. I wanted to cry. I was disgusted by the lower half of my body. Nothing I could do was going to change what was there or make my clothes fit better or make me feel happy. The only thing that made it better was to cover those parts and forget about them. To have the lights off during sex so I didn't have to think about what the other person was seeing--didn't have to think about what I was seeing. I would try on clothes in dressing rooms, thinking they'd be awesome, but I'd leave with nothing except the urge to cry again because I was there with nothing but those bright lights and a mirror to show me nothing but the truth.

The most ridiculous part of this to me is that I know that people found me to be an attractive woman. And I can understand why looking back at these photographs. But at the time, I just couldn't get it, being immersed in a body that I really wasn't that happy with. There were things about it that made me happy, and those were the things that I had managed to change or was fortunate enough to have been born with. I have very broad shoulders and a great back. I've always had these attributes, and it made it almost okay for me to look at the upper half of my body. My chest has been hidden behind this little bit of breast tissue for a while now. I wish I could know what it will look like. I still look in the mirror sometimes and feel terrible about it. I'm getting more comfortable, though. I can walk around the house without a shirt on sometimes, but that is still a little tough. I think people might find that surprising considering how naked I get during some of my performances. Yes, I am more comfortable with my body than I have ever been, but I have a long way to go. It's not a bad thing. It's just where I am at, and I know that I will get there. I was terrified about the gold booty shorts. I would NEVER have worn something like that as a woman. I would have tried to cover as much of my lower body as possible. I would have felt fat and disgusting. And I hadn't tried anything like that at all in several years, and I was worried that wearing them would make me feel all of those terrible things again. But it didn't. And looking at the pictures, I know that they looked great. I'm proud of myself for being able to do that.

It's now light outside. But my mind wants to keep going. I think I'm starting to get better because I'm really starting to think again. I just need to be careful not to push things too soon.

Why We Do

Whenever anyone asked him "why?", my dad had a habit of responding with "why not?"
He may or may not realize how profoundly a statement like that can affect someone's life. It's a question I learned to ask in almost every situation I encountered, and I've gotten my share of looks over the years because I frequently do and say things that make absolutely no sense to other people. "Why not?" is not an apathetic response uttered because the speaker couldn't think of anything more clever to say to a potentially offensive question. Rather, it's an assertion of the idea that certain dichotomies like right/wrong, appropriate/inappropriate, masculine/feminine are ultimately arbitrary and subject to interpretation. In looking at the same situation, the two questions can be posed simultaneously. The key to making the best of a confrontation like this is simply (notice how I didn't say "easily") to understand what makes one person say "why?" while the other says "why not?"

Drag--or gender performance, I should say--is a subject that often enters into my first encounters with fans and friends-to-be. Many of my trans brothers and I are asked why we are not drag queens because drag is "supposed to" be dressing up as someone of the "opposite" gender. Some more traditional performers continue to criticize us for "cheating" with the use of hormones and surgery. But "why not?" is the response, explicitly a question itself highlighting the pure absurdity of the original interrogative, that seems to make my conversational counterparts pause, at least for a moment...

"You're a girl. Why would you want to play hockey?"
"You're a boy. Why would you want to wear a dress?"
"You're a butch. Why would you want to wear a dress?"
"You're a transman. Why would you want to do drag as a boy?"

Those who ask why we perform our chosen personae fall into the trap of using heteronormative assumptions to define a community of performers whose mission has always been to challenge those assumptions. All of the sentences above begin by affixing a label to the myriad factors, situations, and attributes that have interacted to develop the complex human being standing before you in the present moment. We are not--nobody is--as simple as the label you may want to attach to them.
We perform to tell the stories of our experiences, to make you keep questioning the boundaries between what is "real" and what is not, to introduce another small slice of the world to the idea that any BODY can be the vessel for any story, that any person has just as much right to that stage as the next...Just like any person has the right to love whomever s/he wants, just like any person has the right to be masculine, feminine, something in between, or neither one at all, whether on stage or off.
We take these challenges to the stage, sometimes making you laugh and sometimes making you cry. We keep putting ourselves out there, and everyone in the community knows our names. We take on the burden of showing you the truth as we and those we represent see it, regardless of its beauty or ugliness. We are the the most vituperated of villains among those who transgress gender barriers. Misplaced masculinity and its feminine counterpart are cited as reasons for physical and verbal assault, rape, and murder. We fight this battle every day, whether we are in transition or not, whether we are on the stage that day or not, because we believe that everyone-- from the straight guy down the road who loves romantic comedies to the over-the-top-fierce drag queen walking home alone on a Saturday night--deserves complete and total liberation in terms of gender expression.

Head. Ow. Sick. Fuck.

These are the times I realize how alone I really am. You can say all you want about having close friends and people that care about you, etc. But most of you aren't in this position at all. Most of you are sleeping next to someone who cares about you more than anyone else in the world. What do I mean by times like these?
The times when I'm sick like this and just want someone to be with me through it all. The times when I can't sleep and just want to hold or be held and talk to someone. I know this must be getting old because even I have trouble not being able to get past feeling like this. I keep wondering if there's something genuinely wrong with me or if maybe I'm just supposed to feel like this.
My head really hurts. The pressure is so bad that my eyes keep watering. I'm sitting here in nothing but my gym shorts, but I'm dripping sweat all over and sticking to everything. My ears feel funny too, and I have to keep stopping because reading hurts.

I keep getting the feeling like I want to try something with someone soon (and no there is no particular person in mind), but it's almost impossible for me to feel that way about anyone else right now. I may get transient crushes or feel like I really have something in common with a certain person. But I always worry about fucking things up or just being too fucked up. And then there are times where I have completely normal reasons for not wanting to attempt relationships with people. But sometimes the reasons get a tad mixed up, and I always end up feeling like it's my fault.

I don't want to just get by anymore, but there's no way for me to fix that now. I keep wondering if I made a mistake.

For as confident as I have become in the last few years, I am still one of the most insecure people I've ever known. I feel like if people really knew who I am, they'd run away instead of try to chase after me.

People who are very obviously flirtatious make me really uncomfortable, and I have no idea how to respond appropriately. People say that I flirt with people all the time, but there are very few occasions when I consciously attempt such a thing. I just try to talk to people the way they want to be talked to. And if I am saying or doing something flirtatious, it's usually so extreme that I can't take it seriously, even if other people do.

No matter what I say at any other time, I will say it here again. I can't be with another person right now, no matter how much it hurts to be by myself. I'm worried that that won't change, but I also worry about rushing into something because I want so desperately to be out of this situation.

I'm getting dizzy. Time for more juice and sleep. Ugh.

For the Book, Perhaps

I meant everything I said last night. I never really felt sexy until I got to be Dylan for the first time. I mean, I know that other people may have perceived me as such at various times in my life as a female, and I was aware of that. But I couldn't feel it. That was a very external kind of sexiness that didn't really belong to me, and it always felt like coming out from under water when it was finally time to take it off. I'm not the first person to say it, but drag was my gateway drug. It was when I realized that my drag persona felt more real to me than the person I was trying to be in real life that I knew something big was on the horizon. Drag wasn't so much about doing as it was being for me.
It wasn't an instantaneous realization. And it wasn't an entirely pleasant experience. Dylan had to be yanked out of me, and there was a time when I fought back with all I had just to keep him inside. I was terrified of losing everyone and everything. I was terrified of being a freak. So I slid myself into genderqueer, attempting to believe that I could fluctuate between man and woman as I saw fit, but each time I gravitated toward the masculine end of the spectrum, I was better able to see the emptiness of the person that existed on the other side. The thoughts kept coming back, and I would just cry as I watched video after video on YouTube and began to realize that this was REAL. I opened the book signed by Scott Turner Schofield, made out to a straight tomboy named Elise, and let the tears come crashing down onto the pages. I sat on my bed for a long time staring at the graffiti my girlfriend and I had painted on the wall, words uttered by an estranged drumline instructor named Will: "Nothing worth having is ever easy."

It would still be months before I could bring myself to say the words. But they were there. And I could feel them rising from deep down inside, rising into my throat and getting stuck there. When they and I (and he) finally came out, she told me that she knew this day would come. I think we all did.

Mr. Pittsburgh Pride 2011

Mr. Pittsburgh is over, and while I didn't win, I pretty much did everything the way I wanted to do it, minus a few dance moves I wasn't exactly comfortable with. I mean, if the worst things you can say about me involve my underwear showing when I kick my legs over my head and that pink paint was peeling off my ghetto-ass spraypainted shoes, then I'd say I'm doing just fine. I just wish I were better at speaking. One judge seemed to think I was particularly terrible at it, but I knew that part was really going to get me, and I know what I need to fix for next year. I'm a bit sad that I won't get to do this outside like I wanted to, but I'm still really happy for Britton and Skyler. And that's about as far as I've processed things. The old me would have been quite upset about not winning and probably would have taken it personally. But I can tell that I have grown as a person and as a performer because of my reaction to all of this. Quite a few random people came up to me last night, saying things like, "You should have won." The only thing that I could respond with at the time was "I'm still happy, and things happened the way they needed to. And that's what I really wanted from tonight." I proved to myself that I don't need a crown to feel validated as a performer--that I can be confident, even when I'm absolutely terrified.
When I saw the look on his face after the contest, I knew I had done it right. He's helped me so much through all of this, and that includes dealing with my random bullshit moments of panic and trying to convince me not to quit when something wasn't going the way I planned. And I will let you know that he wasn't lying when he said he felt like he was going to cry. And when I looked in his eyes and saw how genuinely proud he was of me, I felt the tears coming too.

I paused to look at the pouring rain, and I am somehow at a loss for words. I guess that's another thing. Even though I think I could have done much better with the question (I did write my answer in JJ's apartment just hours before, after all), I couldn't have been happier with the way I handled it. I could tell it was going to be difficult because the crowd didn't seem very interested in serious things, especially that late into the evening. But I didn't stutter or stumble. And I really didn't even use that cheat sheet. I'm proud of myself for actually going through with this. Every time I step outside of my comfort zone, it gets easier and easier. I can't wait to see where I am at this point next year.

As much fun as the whole experience has been, I'm really glad the competition is over. It was intensely stressful, and whether I was actively preparing for it or not, it was the only thing on which I could focus, and that was definitely starting to get to me. I didn't enjoy feeling like I wasn't going to be prepared enough, like my costumes were going to be too ordinary in comparison to my friends', like I was just going to look like I didn't belong up there. But I think I proved myself wrong in a lot of ways, and I was approaching the point where I absolutely needed something to make me realize what I have to offer and why people enjoy watching me perform. I'm still wondering what comes next. Should I keep trying this competition thing? Part of me wants to say yes because I know it would motivate me to step it up even more, but this shit costs a lot of money that I don't have. (I'm kicking myself for not splurging on those damned pink shoes.) And as much fun as bragging rights are, I enjoy entertaining people more than I do winning. I know I'm not the only one who appreciates that, and I am starting to think that my energy would be much more beneficial to the community if directed toward creating a scene for younger performers. There's something about helping other people discover things they didn't know they had in them that's incredibly rewarding. And I know how great it feels to be on the receiving end of that.