the Infinite

on Chosen Family/on Chronic Illness/on Deathwork & Griefwork/on Decolonizing/on Harm & Reciprocity/on Mental Health/on Queerness/the Pandemic

I write what hurts my feelings

Posted on 25 April 2023

cw: existential dread, hopelessness, chronic illness, miscarriage, gender feels

Note: I’ve tried to put my writing on a schedule, and that was not the right call, lol. I will continue to write when I have something to say, and hopefully no more weirdly empty RSS emails will arrive in your inboxes.

I wanted to write something yesterday but I couldn’t think of what to say. I don’t like to say something when I could have said nothing instead. Instead of ‘this meeting could have been an email’ it’s more like ‘this email didn’t need to exist at all’.

But I realized, as I thought about it for the past couple of days, that the reason I sometimes don’t have anything much to say is that I write about what hurts my feelings. It’s not all that I write about (I hope), but it is one of the leading internal triggers for me that means write about this. And when the things that hurt my feelings don’t need to be said to everyone, I don’t write them down except in my own personal journal, and I don’t say them except to the people I trust the most.

the crumbling of American society hurts my feelings

As one of my family members often expresses, the great experiment of the United States is reaching its too-broken-to-fix state. Entropy has hit hard and everything seems like it’s either currently broken, currently breaking, or completely destroyed. And there are people dancing on the broken bits like the sociopathic maniacs that they are. It hurts to see it. It makes me feel angry and hopeless.

I no longer think that if we just talked to the people breaking things, that maybe they would stop first and think about it and then NOT break things; that hasn’t worked for a while and it’s foolishness to think it might start to work now, even if it may have worked before. It’s like the country and society in the US has become the inside of a rage room ¹ and the people doing the smashing are making sure their safety glasses and gear are on before they act like Godzilla in a city full of high rise buildings.

the complications of my relationship with some of my kids hurts my feelings

I personally carried and birthed four full-term babies. One very early pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Even though my upbringing was infused with the usual gender segregation and expectation that people with a uterus were supposed to marry a man and have his babies, I have always felt that having and raising children is part of what makes me happiest. They are my joy and my source of deepest pain.

My second oldest — it really stings right now to refer to him as my former second oldest, even though that helped my emotional regulation over it for a long time — may never be someone that I can have a relationship with. Even in his darkest hours, in the minute-by-minute lies and calculated responses, even in the midst of the real pain and harm he was coping with in unhealthy and unsustainable ways, I loved him and I wanted so much to help him. I spoke words of comfort and support to him in so many situations where he did not deserve it except that he was my child and I would rise out of a grave to defend any of the children of my heart. And in the ending of our relationship, before we had a chance to know each other as adults, he had already chosen to cut the cord that bound us together and so I had to see that for the truth that it was and accept it and let go on my own.

The grief that I feel about this is a sorrow that comes from the awareness of the severed cord. I never wanted it to happen, and even though it was the right thing to do for both of us, I can’t un-remember it and I don’t regret all the years I spent doing everything in my power to keep him alive and safe and protected.

the things I can’t do or aren’t mine to do hurts my feelings

I’m sure I am not the only person active on any social media that sees so many cries for help, so much crowdfunding for medical bills and cell phone balances and emergency rent money. Because of my experience of being in poverty and being in abusive relationships, I feel these needs keenly — and I usually can’t do anything but boost or share a post, which feels akin to doing nothing. I realize that this is because what I want to do is fix the entire thing, and not being able to fix the entire situation causes feelings of despair and uselessness in me.

(This is one of the key things I work on in my therapy)

I don’t have a solution to this for myself yet. I don’t know how not to care. I don’t know how not to see the need. I don’t know how to believe that I am doing my best and that my best is the only thing required of me. I don’t know how to stop requiring more of myself than my own gods and oaths require of me.

climate change plus the pandemic hurts my feelings

I used to go for walks in the evenings. Walking in the cooling air, the end-of-day scent heavy in the air, stretching my legs and taking in oxygen and seeing the bigness of the sky and the tallness of the trees; these things brought me such a suffusion of joy. I live in Michigan, which — for all its weather-y nonsense ² — was always safe for evening walks.

But now, because I have to be careful of my immune-compromised self and careful not to go outside when the conditions are unhealthy, I don’t get to go for many of those walks. The particular irritation of not being able to continue a habit that I have internalized as necessary is truly frustrating. I want to go for walks in so many places. I want to walk with other people sometimes. I want to go places I haven’t been and walk there; botanical gardens and indoor butterfly sanctuaries and dirt roads hidden around a bend in the road, but I have to be so goddamn careful that the risks usually outweigh the effort for me.

living in a state of chronic illness & being immunocompromised hurts my feelings

Following on from what I was just saying, I am so tired of my body being hyper-sensitive to allergens, to sunlight, to high pollen levels, to mid-range air quality, to barometric pressure changes. It’s not my fault that I am sick, and it’s not my fault that a lot of the meds I have to take have led to my ridiculous levels of allergy-type reactions to things. One of the biggest issues I have right now is that the continued use of the amount of antihistamines my doctor prescribes to me, that I need in order to function, causes me to essentially be allergic to the sun. I’m the opposite of a cat. Is that a sunbeam? Here, have a rash and a flare to along with it. Maybe if I’m lucky, I won’t need someone to help pop my joints back into place while I deal with the physical fallout of what a flare does inside my body.

And some of the meds I take have suppressed my immune system in order to keep me alive (what a terrible trade-off, really), so I have to be even more careful. Seeing people without masks, talking out of their mouths into the actual air with no filter, sincerely scares me, and fear keeps me indoors, anxious, sulking, wanting things that it isn’t safe for me to have.

I fucking hate it.

gender + body dysphoria and dysmorphia hurts my feelings

Lastly for today, but certainly not least, is the ease with which I run into a dysphoric or dysmorphic feeling. I don’t want to have either spectrum-end of body type; I want to be a mystery even to myself. I want to wake up each day and wonder what kind of being I happen to be that day.

But I have to put on bras to keep some of that at bay; if I’m lucky, they flatten my chest without harming my ribs. I have occasional menstrual cycles that make me feel both physically and emotionally like shit. I like wearing makeup but I don’t want to wear makeup that’s nice to look at because it highlights the ways in which I appear femme. If I was born with different sex organs, makeup would feel like an experience of pushing the edges of gender for me. But with the body that I have — the hips and the roundness — the things I can do to push those gender edges away from myself are: wear non-femme clothes, and wear a non-gender-specific or even masc hair style. And it never feels like quite enough.

Right now I have a good hair thing going on, but it won’t last long because it’ll grow out again and then I’ll feel gross.

One of the other reasons that I write, besides putting into words what hurts my feelings, is getting those feelings out of me, externalizing them in a way. I can read back through what I said and analyze why I am feeling those feelings, and either I have an epiphany or I don’t, and either way it’s more for my therapist and I to discuss.

The pain leads me to what is true.

Writing is good for my mental health.

Thank you for being here. If you want to get an approximately weekly-ish email with the latest essay here, or even VERY RARELY an email that’s just from me to you, please use the form in the sidebar to sign up. If there’s no form or you can’t see it, you can use my contact page to ask me to add you to the list manually, which I will gladly do.

xox, Nix

featured image is a photo by Maksym Tymchyk 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Footnotes

1
a rage room is one of those places where you can pay to wear safety equipment and break everything in the room until you’re done or your time is up
2
is it [insert current weather]? wait five minutes and it’ll change, etc etc

on Hope/on Neurodivergence/on Praxis/the Work

praxis is complicated and hard

Posted on 19 April 2023

cw: change, personal ethical choices

If you’re reading this in your email inbox, that means I have successfully moved my Substack subscribers to my refreshed website, which I am using along with MailerLite (that’s a referral link, a non-referral link is here) to write and send my writing out into the world.

(If it didn’t work, well shit, I tried really hard.)

There are a handful of websites and services that I read through, signed up for, and played around with, before settling on this configuration of things. This way, I can own my content by way of owning the website it’s on, which I host on a server that I pay for. Digitally speaking, it’s the closest to ownership that one can get, I think.

Part of my issue with most things is that they don’t LOOK pretty to me. I am very interested in whether or not my work is aesthetically pleasing to my own eye, and Substack was doing a pretty good job of scratching that itch until I became aware of just how problematic and dangerous the platform itself has become.

I don’t want to discourage anyone else from using it. I think it’s an individual judgment call, although I would like to encourage you to use a different platform that isn’t run by people whose values are not the same as yours, if you can. Not everyone can, and I acknowledge my privilege — I have enough resources to pay for hosting, and enough design and code years behind me that I can take a WordPress theme I already like and make it look the way my imagination guides me.

I haven’t moved my death doula writing yet, but that’s a project for later. (Probably sooner than later, who am I kidding. I’m so hyperfocused that I keep forgetting to eat and go to the bathroom and drink water.)

I want to say that this started with needing to leave Twitter, but that’s not entirely true.

There are plenty of things I stopped using or participating in online, or drastically scaled back my time spent there.

I used to exclusively use the Thesis theme for WordPress (I’m not linking to their site because I don’t want to give them the delicious SEO), and I stopped when I found out what a terrible asshole the theme creator is. It was my comfortable space; I had spent years perfecting my ability to customize and restructure it for new design clients and for my own web spaces. And I spent months afterward bouncing around, trying to figure out what I could do next. This coincided with my scaling back my work in web dev and design, and whether or not the timing was good, it certainly led to me winding that work down; I don’t do it at all any more except for myself and whatever projects I’ve dipped my little fingers into.

I used to use Facebook as a power user, administrating groups and interacting with people almost hourly during certain periods of the day. I made a lot of really important relationships there, and then it started to suck as each new UI overhaul and company pivot affected the way the users were able to use that damn site at all. It became almost impossible for me to use it for my work, and after a couple of long breaks that I hadn’t meant to take for health reasons, the website (and the app) became almost unusable for me. I still check up on people every now and then, and I try to remember to link my writing there when it’s ready for the world, but it’s more of a token of my ongoing quiet attention than anything else. I don’t know if I’ll ever delete my account there, but I have definitely never been able to recover the way I used to be able to use it.

Then Twitter — god damn, that was really hard. I was power-using Twitter in a way that had become so comfortable that it was, for me, releasing an addiction to wean myself away from it so that I could delete my account for safety reasons. I’m using Mastodon for my social media expression now, and between writing essays at (formerly) Substack and dipping into my Mastodon instance feed a couple of times a day, I feel good about what I’ve left behind and what I’ve chosen to keep.

I think we’ve all been leaving things behind as we’re able.

Family members that don’t support us the way we need them to, identities that have become dissonant, the religious beliefs of our families of origin, fandoms for authors and comedians that we used to love. Relationships that used to be our lifelines. Social groups we’ve grown away from.

I don’t believe that any of us are always looking for another thing to say ‘no’ to. I’m pretty sure that NOT needing to change what we’re doing is preferable to figuring out what to do next in the absence of that thing, especially if it was a big part of our lives. But right now, there’s a huge amount of information we have about social issues and political moves and the dirty laundry of people that used to be able to lie through their teeth on the regular.

Do we want to have to respond to these kinds of things? I don’t think so. Change is always a stressful experience, to a lesser or greater degree. And what we’re having to do is choose to change, to spend our precious time and energy looking for what’s better, what’s less harmful, what’s more loving for ourselves and for our communities. We are several generations undergoing an amount of exposure to information that is actually impossible to get through every day, which means we have to trust people to tell us the truth; and when one of those people ends up being found out a liar? Add another thing to the list of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.

This is another privilege that I have — the people that I trust with information that they hyperfocus on in order to be the most informed people about those things — they haven’t let me down yet. It’s not my job to keep track of security risks, either political or online or both. It’s not my specialty and it doesn’t have to be, although I always get a huge list of supporting information when I get to catch up on This Shit Is Fucked Up And This Is What Happened (you’d better sit down first).

I try to pass along as much of this information as I can, but for you, it’s second-hand or maybe third-hand information. Sometimes, what I know is information that can keep me and mine safe, and it never really goes further than that. I don’t like that this is true, and my god complex is certainly annoyed about it, but that’s just the way it is. I’m not sure that I’d say we live in a post-truth era, but I would say that we live in an era of untruth. It’s not the cleaner version of lying to your face when you already know it’s a lie; it’s the shuffling cups to hide a solitary pea — we know it’s lying, but we don’t know how it happened exactly and because of that, it’s really difficult to trace a direct path between the lie and the liar.

Here’s the playlist I’ve been making this month, and here’s my love to you as you try to figure out how to fucking live in this messy, no-nice-things world.

(April 2023 playlist on Spotify)

I wish you a cool side of the pillow and a blanket that’s not too warm.

— Nix

P.S. If you happened upon this post and aren’t subscribed for content but would like to be, there’s a handy dandy subscription form in the sidebar, and if you can’t see it for whatever reason, you can always send me an email or a text and ask me to put you on the list. The next Mercury Gatorade (I do love a good in-joke) is looming and things are already somewhat awry.

P.P.S. I decided that I am now reading banned books, and if I remember to do it, I’m updating the list that I’ve put in the sidebar. So far I read the deluxe version of GENDERQUEER and it was even better than the original version.

featured image is a photo by Eileen Pan on Unsplash

on Deathwork & Griefwork/on Hope/on Queerness/the Work

fight like hell for the living

Posted on 2 April 2023

cw: trans & nonbinary existence, death

I’ve been having such a hard time consuming any news whatsoever. The disparity between the rights of queer people — very specifically trans and non-binary people — here in the US and in other countries is becoming a wider and wider gulf.

My fear for my trans and non-binary siblings is at an all-time high.

Even for myself, being probably as safe as possible right now given the blessings, ability, and security folks that I live with, I am terrified.

And in my role as a deathworker, all I can feel right now is all the death that is coming. All the rage and mourning and unchecked violence by both the state and its citizens. All the precious ones who will not live to see this through to the other side, whenever that happens to one day be. All the angry ones who fight for us that will become nameless martyrs as so many die or disappear that there is no one that can keep track of all our names.

When I am deep into my feelings of sorrow and the portents of grief-to-come, I often default to thinking and speaking phrases and quotes from either the Lord of the Rings books and movies, and I always feel in Theoden’s words the echo of mournful rage and the battle-loss that is nigh. For him, there was an end and it was near ever since he awoke and found his son had died while he went wandering in dark dreams.

soldier [referring to Aragorn]: ‘Why does he leave on the eve of battle?’
Gamling: ‘He leaves because there is no hope.’
Theoden: ‘He leaves because he must.’
Gamling: ‘Too few have come. We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.’
Theoden: ‘No, we cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless.’
selection from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, film adaptation

I am torn; my life is taking a trajectory that may give me a safe boundary between me and mine and the terror that has descended and will continue to fall upon this place. And in the meantime, the reality that I may need to meet these things in battle is still hauntingly near.

It is never far from my thoughts that some of us have already said our last words to those who are beloved.

The gaping, ever-hungry maw of death that cannot be sated has opened and will not close, not for what may feel like an eternity. So many of us will fall into it, either fighting, or letting go, or being pushed. While the halls of our own personal hereafters may be blessedly different than the life we must endure now, our experience of death may be not just a tragedy, but a crime against life itself, a war crime that can never be sufficiently punished and for which no reciprocity could ever hope to rebalance. We are a feather on the scales and everything that is being done to us will always, always, be heavier than the feather. But that fact in itself will not stop it happening.

We are at war and it is a war that many of us will not win. We cannot all make it through. If we could, the danger would not be so real.

‘So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?’
Theoden, son of Thengel, King of Rohan

I like to try and find hope so that I can give it, pass it along, pull it into something that feels real and tangible. To give it to you so that you can carry it with you as you go along.

We have just had a Trans Day of Visibility, and I have the heavy dark feeling that in the future, this day will be a day of death more than a day of celebration. Perhaps I see death everywhere because of who and what I am; it’s not necessary for everyone to see the world like I do. It’s not necessary that other people live this kind of liminality. Most people do not need to practice the kind of energetic daily hygiene that keeps me Here and not There.

Here is where my Work is found. Here is where all kinds of death happen all the time; natural, quiet, loud, surprising, awful, final. We will all touch death, as it touches us. And I am not afraid for you in the finality and end of your life here; I am seeing the resignation and sometimes terror on so many faces when they realize that this is now the end.

Before I go, I will try to give some hope:

We will not all die because we are trans. We will not all die because we are non-binary. We will not all die because we are queer. There will be people who remember, who can carry the memory forward, who will be safe for one handful of reasons or another; and some of those people are us. We will live decades and decades and reach old age.

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
―Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

I am also a follower of many gods, and even if human memory cannot hold the names that should be remembered, there are beings in this world who remember far longer than we do, and many of them are here with us.

Be comforted, I hope, by the knowledge that even in these dark hours, we still do have each other. And that is better than anything else, because love is the deepest connection we can ever have.

Even if all I can ever do is see your names and email addresses, I am seeing you. You exist. And may you continue to exist and to love and to survive as we all fight the darkness that wants to take us. I hold the Light; you can also hold the Light. So long as we have one another, we are never alone.

P.S. If you’d like to leave a comment for me to respond to, or send me an email, I hope that you do. If you would like to dip into the waters of Mastodon, I would love to see you there. If you just want me to know who you are, I want to know you too. I’m here.

— Nix

featured image is a photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash