stick up for yourself, son

I’ve been [searching for/trying to create] language to talk about my needs+desires+boundaries+feelings around my trans* experience/identity.

• “medical costs” —> “health care costs” —> “self care costs”
• “transition” —> “transformation” —> “trans* experience”
• “feminize my body” —> “grow breasts” —> “change the conformation of my body to better communicate/illustrate my queer non-binary femme identity” —> “help other people experience my non-binary self”

At this moment, I think that maybe my process is about giving a [better/queerer/more non-binary] me to my community.

…that super [weird/lovely/gross] [intimacy/violation] of the emailed receipt that shows Amos Mac’s legal name very close to my legal name. The dissociative fugue brought on by the hegemonic identity politics of institutional commerce.

After Ana Božičević’s Same Difference in Evening Will Come.

I encountered a wolf once. I was walking home from another farm. It was dusk, and I walked down the road and the wolf followed, parallel, in the field. It felt exhilarating like I could be eaten. But the exhilaration was a function of not being eaten.

—(p. 3, as posted to my Facebook wall by KS)

The exhilaration of not being eaten. The sexuality of not being fucked. The wanting-as-autonomous-experience. I am not a poet.

Maybe I don’t have a good imagination, but [the thought of]/[not] being [b]eaten doesn’t do it for me. I don’t find any exhilaration in [the wanting]/[the waiting]/[the near miss]. The being [b]eaten itself is where the passion lies for me, in the literal/first-hand experience, not the literary/imagined experience. To say it from another direction, I like my feelings to be words on the page or in someone’s ears, not in my head or my heart.

—(p. 4)

I love the moment that Božičević captures here. If I see someone once, they’re a stranger. If I see someone twice, they might become an element of the landscape. But the act of noticing a pattern in the life of a stranger can carry an emotional intensity; suddenly, that part of the landscape pops and becomes the-possibility-of-a-character. I guess maybe familiarity breeds empathy sometimes.