Advice

Please don't touch me without asking. This applies to everyone, even people with whom I am very close. This has absolutely nothing to do with you, so please don't be offended.

If I tell you I am okay when you ask, don't ask me again. And please don't make reference to how miserable I look, make fun of me for being awkward, or continue to comment on it all night. That's a good way to make sure what you are worried about happens. 

Sometimes I just don't feel like talking, but it doesn't mean I am not listening. If you try to force me to interact, again, it will probably just make things worse.

When I ask you not to do something, and you refuse to listen and say that that's just what you do and will do it anyway, I REALLY bothers me. 

If you don't understand, please ask. But don't make everything about this. I would prefer that you treat my interests and needs like those of everyone else you know. Sometimes it just gets old when everyone gets to laugh at how weird I am or how abnormal the way I do something is. It makes me not want to be around you. Or people in general. 

Obviously I haven't been okay recently. 

Don't make it a big deal, and it won't be. 

I have a very hard time trusting ANYONE. It will take a lot of time. Please don't try to jump into my life and assume a role that you haven't earned. It actually scares me and makes me really uncomfortable. You can't fake a relationship of any sort or just make one up, and if you can, I have no idea how that works. I have no idea how to interact with new people anyway, though sometimes I make an educated guess that works pretty well, and I have gotten better at this. But when you try to jump to a point further along the line--if you could envision the relationship as being linear--it messes with me too much, and I just can't figure it out. 

At this moment, I am not okay. 

Not Braining Well

I am tired. I am in pain, which is my own fault because I thought I could definitely get that 5th rep on the highest weight I've ever incline benched. Well, I did. But in the process, I twinged something, and now it's difficult to rise from a supine position and turn my head. (Don't worry. This has happened before and has never really lasted more than a day and a half. It just sucks for right now.) But I am also stressed, and that doesn't make the pain easier to deal with, and that in turn makes me even more stressed.

I don't know why I thought it would be a brilliant idea to have two jobs. Though I am supposed to be working about 45 hours a week, it has turned into more like 60 since not every hour I spend at the gym is paid. Only if I do some tidying up on the floor or perform assessments/free workouts for the people that happen to show up that day do I get paid when I am not actively training someone. Since I am relatively new, my client list is kind of small, so you can imagine how most of my day goes. My exhaustion is making me less effective at both jobs, which is also making me miserable because I am the product of an old-fashioned Eastern European upbringing (think of something similar to Jewish moms if you don't understand the cultural reference).

I'm depressed about not getting anywhere with my life, and it is even more depressing to know that my boyfriend is fighting the same thing that I am, though he is a few years older. I wonder if we will ever be able to crawl out of this hole. Neither one of us wants to believe that this is as good as it gets. I am starting to discover that I may not be able to stay in Pittsburgh if I want to keep moving forward in my life. I came here because the opportunity was better. I am getting a lot of the things I need out of life, but I am also fucking up a lot. I don't like always having to worry about money. I don't like not being able to buy the kind of food I want or not being able to get the new shoes that I desperately need.

There are so many things that still make me happy, but I am constantly fighting off crippling anxiety, and my inability to process emotions, situations, and make decisions in a typical timeframe is causing me to shut down more often. I have near-meltdown experiences almost every day. I'm much better at fighting them off than I used to be, but that is both a blessing and a curse. It just means that there is more stored up for next time.

I feel like I am having a hot flash.

I want to know what it feels like to breathe without feeling like there is a rock in my chest. It's constant. It's been nearly constant my whole life, and it's not okay. But I do hate being on medication because it fucks with my body in so many other ways.

I can't figure shit out when all this is happening around me.
Even though I love what I do and it has saved my ass financially more than a few times already, I am looking forward to having the next few weekends off.

Time to cry. For no reason really.

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.