I Treat My Brain More And More Like An Unreliable Adjutant Once, I thought I needed a logical, rational answer for everything. I often couldn’t find one, so I went along with what I was being pressed to agree with. Once, I thought I remembered things. I could remember story plots, so I figured I remembered most important moments in my life. Once, I thought I was a brain, riding in a body that I controlled. The body was there to move me around; sometimes it needed maintenance, and indicator lights turned on. Advil made most of them turn off. Others I used as reading lights. I was wrong. I’m a body full of feelings. My body offers mercy. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. She remembers my traumas, and holds them for me. She tells me when I need to fear. She knows I’ve forgotten much, and she tells me when it’s time to act and when it’s time to rest. She doesn’t have all the answers, but she knows when I find questions that will lead me there. She knows my brain is not to be trusted. But it’s part of her. It’s part of me. I’ve learned to listen to what it has recorded, but feel for the ragged edges where things are missing. I’ve learned to listen with detachment to its opinions. My body exists. When I am quiet inside, she can feel the way.

Some days, I like being a writer for the resistance, some days I just wanna be a pretty girl with empty head, no thoughts.

Why I Write I write because I’m #trans, and every trans voice matters. I doubt that I have novel things to say; I nod to the socialists, I repeat my trans siblings, I retread the ground feminists have walked, I find markers left by people of color, and I know I’m not alone. I do not seek to break new ground. I seek to hold ground, ground that was taken from us. To hold space and memory. To leave behind a record of who I was, of what I knew, of why I fought, of how I loved, and of the lies I was told, so that those who come after me will know they are not alone. I won’t bore you by making the point that not all voices matter, that cis voices who babble platitudes offer nothing to liberation and allies who push us aside to speak for us do so without regard for the cliffs they shove us over. I’ll trust you learned from Black voices. I know I’m still trying to learn from them. But fascists know trans voices matter. The patriarchy knows; capitalists and racists know. They know what a threat self-actualization is. It’s how I’ve come to understand the importance of valuing any trans voice that speaks, and why it’s important to add my voice. Our stories are brilliant spotlights shined into the darkness of the lies used to keep our siblings from knowing themselves. Each time we speak, it is a spell of curse-breaking. Our lives are resistance. Our stories are beacons lit by crystallized memories of our lives. I write because let’s face it, even better than ruining a transphobe’s day with my joy is ruining many of their days with records of my joy. And I write so that when I’m dead, trans people will know what I had to do to be myself. I cannot tell them how to be themselves. But perhaps I can show them what I did, and why.

Has anyone else spent the past twenty years wanting to be spun by a swing dance partner while holding onto jangly Kegels balls with your pussy?

I Grew My Feelings and Desires in Bottles Before I accepted that I had to be the most me, I grew my feelings and desires in bottles. (I kept them contained, never to grow so large as to change anything.) They were in a hidden cupboard, in the space behind the drywall in my closet, between two wall studs, covered with a makeshift door and hidden by a hamper. (I concealed them, often even from myself, in illicit places inside myself, often in traumas felt in my body.) I kept them in the dark, clustered around flickering grow lights, powered by batteries, when I could manage to replace them. (Sometimes, I didn’t have the hope to nourish them.) I rigged them with incendiary charges, reasoning it was better to immolate my hopes than let anyone find them. (I gave up on them, rather than let people know about them.) It was a horrible way to live. I don’t want you to live like that. It brings tears to my eyes remembering it. I want you to grow your feelings and desires and hopes in a garden. Tend them. Let them feel the sun. Share them with your friends. Know that not all of them will flourish, but some will, and with your love, more will than you might expect.

Being Not-Me Is Traumatic; Being Pushed Towards Being Not-Me Is Triggering I’m trans. I tore my way through the supposedly unshatterable bonds on me and found myself in a body. A body full of the history of trauma. I sifted through the memories in the brain I met, and at first they seemed complete. Where had I come from? Why was I suddenly in this body, at THIS point in its life? There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to be myself earlier. But in time I found places where the fabric of the narrative had been overlapped to hide the holes. Where the traumas had rejected the memories. I studied the body’s reflexes. The way it lied casually and without a second thought to appear untraumatized. I lined up its personal history and its medical history and found causation. I tried trusting my feelings, and the body reacted. It unclenched, a little. I returned to the stated truths I’d been given when I introduced myself to the brain, and I experimented with inverting them. Not, “I am well adjusted,” but “I am traumatized.” Not “I was happy,” but “I was choosing to kill myself with alcohol and neglect.” Things that never made sense started to coalesce. I was hidden deep. The body I was sequestered within was compelled to reject and suppress me for decades. It built lies in my brain, it trashed my joints, it refused to move like I move. And it positioned itself in relationships in ways that are hostile to me. It was industrious and inventive in this task. To carry out the directive of making sure I was never able to take ownership of my own body and life, it reinforced patterns in how I behaved in romantic relationships that were antithetical to me. I survived, and I claimed myself. But the body I claimed is filled with these memories of BEING in ways that are not who I am or how I am. Filled with reflexes, reactions, and relationship patterns that are antithetical to me. And when those are active, it’s traumatic. The tragedy I struggle with now is important people in my life express themselves in ways that constitute trauma triggers for me, activating the impulse to fall into those patterns that will further suppress me. Holding on to myself during that is extremely costly.