on Hope/on Praxis

a fire sale, if I had things to sell

Posted on
tilt-shift view of feet in sneakers, presumably belonging to people sitting atop a stone wall

do not go gently

Hello! Ahem. Mm. This is awkward.

Now that The Twitter Buying has gone through and a certain person is now in charge that has terrible taste in memes and also politics, I have to delete my Twitter account. That I’ve had for fifteen and a half years. I am going to miss its particular way of bringing me bite sizes of news, near-immediate notification of daily mass shootings (I’m not actually kidding), live captures of racism, and — most of all — I will miss how fucking stressed out it has made me.

If I told you why it’s been so important to me that I keep being there and keep showing up, it’s going to sound ridiculous, so I’ll keep that to myself. But please know that I showed up on purpose. I wanted to be there for myself. I wanted to be there for the culture, for the holes cut in my reality so I could see someone else’s. I wanted to be distraught, wordless, angry, weeping alongside you. I wanted to be happy when we were all happy. I wanted to give to every fundraiser I saw, I wanted to heal every wound, I wished for the ability to fix all that was wrong. But I can’t do that. What I could do, though, was witness it. So that someone was there and you weren’t alone.

I was never perfect, but I did my best.

I know I’ve got an interestingly different kind of family structure than usual, and it’s been fun to write about it, but one of the most valuable things for us, individually and as a family unit, is that we have two security specialists in the house. One is the person I’m married to, who is in a current security position and has in the past done [redacted] for [redacted] because of or on behalf of [redacted]. (I don’t know what’s in the redacted bits either, and I’ve asked.) The other is someone that spends multiple hours a day researching and collating data so that we can be as safe as a family of queer disabled socialist pagan weirdos can be. And we collectively made a decision that we will no longer have individual accounts at twitter dot com.

So I’ve been making lists and reaching out to people and finding some of you at Discord, at Mastodon, at your websites, at your links pages. As I scroll through my timeline, I realize that there is a small group of people that bring me joy each day I log on, and those are the people I want to try to stay connected to.

Losing my Twitter account will mean losing some of my voice, for a time.

I’m so used to the way I’ve learned to use social media from Twitter, Facebook, and all the older versions of things from back in the day, that I have had an initial horrified response of despair. How would I ever be connected again? How could I find all my people again? Will I be cut off now indefinitely? Is this the end of it?

… and then, I realized that it’s just a frame of reference. It’s not reality, or it is, depending on how you look at it, but that’s the trick anyway. It is a way of connecting, of communicating, of sharing information. It is not the only way.

I did join Mastodon (again, and I am embarrassed to reveal that I think I had three or four existing accounts on various servers), I’m on Discord, I still have email, I still have this publishing platform, and even though I barely use it — I do have Facebook, and I kind of hate that I always make sure I have Facebook Messenger installed on any phone I use. It isn’t impossible to find me. It might be a little too easy to find me, but after years of taking that risk I’m not going to try and scrub myself from the internet.

Momentarily, I need to be creepy —trust me when I say menacingly that if I *do* need to disappear, you will never find me. Okay. Done with being creepy.

I’m just leaving Twitter.

My friends, my enemies, those of you that made me laugh and shared great memes and wrote hilarious threads about rice, those of you that posted live video of Ferguson right after Michael Brown was murdered, those of you that I tried to learn from, those of you I wanted to slap, those of you I followed to other places too — I mostly love all of you. I will miss you. And I will figure out a new shape for the Twitter-sized hole in my heart.

the start of one of the funniest threads I ever read on Twitter

But seriously, I’m still here and you’re still here and I think that matters. And if you know there’s someone who’s going to worry when they can’t find me, send them my way.

xox, Nix

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

decolonizing death, part one of many

Posted on
a dark path lined by trees, looking toward a break in the horizon bright with sunshine

cw: discussion of death, discussion of cultural harm

I had an epiphany today: I’ve been thinking and pondering for two years now on the concept of how to be of service to they dying and their loved ones. The risk to my personal health, as an immune-compromised individual, is too significant for me to be able to consider traveling yet; not to mention what I may unwittingly bring back into the place where I live, where many of us have chronic conditions that leave our immune systems susceptible.

The fact that right now, I can’t be physically present for someone as they are dying, is hard for me to accept. That I can’t hold a hand, or create a safe and sacred space in person. The distance inherent in this time of apocalypse and separation is a source of grief for me.

what if, instead of staying in my own grief, I could hold yours gently instead?

My epiphany was that I’ve been thinking about this from a direction that doesn’t make sense to what’s true right now. Rather than try to imagine what I can or can’t do, I could instead spend my time imagining how to help us help ourselves.

It’s a catastrophic example, but I think we’ve all heard stories of people without flight training being given instructions on how to land a plane safely, because there was no one else to do it. Maybe the future end of your life doesn’t feel like a plane about to crash, but the metaphor seems to work for now.

I have been doing a lot of internal work trying to understand how to decolonize my thinking and my frame of reference of myself and of the world I live in. I have been studying abolitionist ways of being, and I am incredibly blessed to be living in a house full of my chosen family, who are all learning better ways of being and choosing. And I think that my urge to be helpful, it stems from a sense of power imbalance in which I am the one holding the power-over.

We train and learn and become experienced so that we can be the best version of us that we can — not to engage in a fight with our shadow self or to punish and root out what we view as wrong, but to find the living truth within ourselves and bring it into the light so that it can grow to compassionately cover the ways we’ve been taught to harm ourselves and each other, like a climbing flowering plant that holds but doesn’t suffocate.

Now this is the law of the jungle —
as old and as true as the sky;
and the wolf that may keep it must prosper,
but the wolf that may break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,
the law runneth forward and back —
for the strength of the pack is the wolf,
and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Rudyard Kipling

It follows, I think, that in feeling cut off from what I expected to be doing, I have fallen into a habit of seeing things I think I need to fix or adjust, and trying to scoop up all the responsibility and necessity that would help me feel useful. But this is a harmful way of being. It is a harmful way of seeing, of choosing, of becoming.

I know things about grief and death and traversing the liminal pockets of space-time we enter when it is time to experience these things. This doesn’t mean that I need to ever be an authority on any of it, and it doesn’t mean that my knowledge or wisdom is necessary to anyone’s experience of dying. What it means is that I can be someone to hold that sacred space, to be there so you aren’t alone, to listen to what you need to say, to advocate for you.

It is not my job to save you. It is my Work to be the light for you if I can, when or where I’ve been invited. In remembering this, I’ve have arrived back at the place I was when I trained as a death doula.

I don’t want to support the kyriarchy in my efforts as a deathworker.

I don’t want to take money from people who need me.

I don’t want to take time and attention that many of us do not have.

I want to be aware of what kind of dangerous world we inhabit.

I want to be aware of what I can affect; and what is not mine to touch.

I need to be that which is needed, but no more, so that I don’t take up space that isn’t for me to occupy.

This is a thread of thought that I’ve had for quite a bit more than two years: how can I offer my Work to the world in way that will not reinforce the harm capitalism has caused us all? How can I expect anyone to see me trying to do that as anything but a trick to draw you in and then pounce on you for money once you’re psychologically dependent on me?

Judging by the dozens of asks and fundraisers and desperation that I see each week, most of us are not in a position to assume we can pay for something, especially if it’s end-of-life care, maybe because of the ways that dying has been commodified. It costs money to be sick, it costs money to die, it costs our loved ones money to honor us in death. Everything we desperately need seems to come with a price tag. Notarized wills and last wishes. Funerals. Coffins. Urns. An ambulance ride. A burial plot. Time away from work for laying our dead to rest. Emotional bandwidth we don’t have, to decide what to do with our loved one’s possessions. This all, directly or indirectly, costs us money, whether we have it or not.

What if, instead of money, the price could be connection and time? What if the price is to be vulnerable and to trust that we will not be harmed? The most precious things we have to give are our time, our love, our trust.

Our kyriarchic culture of scarcity, structural racism, punishment, shame — it has stomped its boots onto our broken hearts and left scars that may not ever heal.

There is still a lot here that hasn’t occurred to me yet. I’m very aware of how close to the beginning I still am of understanding concepts as big as abolition.

I am doing my best to find the most harmonious way to hold my candle in the darkness so that you can see it and find me, bringing your own light, so that we have more light together.

The only way to survive these many griefs is in community with each other.

Hold on
Let us take it slow
We need to stay strong
Right here
I’ll stay here and keep you warn
As you sing

Help me guide me through the night
Help me conquer all of my fright
Keep me sheltered from the storm
Play the song of warmth

from Song of Warmth, by Nekonomicon

You are loved, and you are not alone.

featured image is a photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

on Chosen Family/on Hope/on Queerness

on #NCOD

Posted on
a rainbow flag hangs from the metal balcony of a brick building

National Coming Out Day, in this economy?! cw: queer identity, death

I’m becoming more cynical the older I get.

I’ve written before on wanting to love Pride month and why that’s difficult for me — in short, Pride seems to have become a platform for allies to be louder than those of us in the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Pride has become less of a rallying cry for me, and more an epitaph, a month of remembrance. So many of us are gone who should still be here.

This might just mean that I’m not a Baby Queer 1I think a Baby Queer is someone that’s excited about being queer and doesn’t know that the floor is lava and the stove will burn you, and graduating from Baby Queer means you, unfortunately, know now that the floor is lava and have likely been burned by the stove. any more, or maybe it’s because I’m suspicious and mistrustful. In today’s world, with the cultural backlash against trans people specifically, it feels unsafe to be visibly queer.

It has always been unsafe to come out. I think that a lot of us that have come out did so because of a combination of the urgent life-affirming need to be our true self, and bravery in the face of both real and potential violence. For those of us who risk it, the price we pay for visibility is lower than the price of not being truly known, and so we string together little moments of hope into a rickety bridge over a chasm that’s so deep you can’t see all the bodies that are already down there.

I want to be done coming out, but I think I need to continue to do so, not just on this yearly National Coming Out Day, but every day. I think that coming out can be as small as pronouns in a Twitter bio, as big as being extremely gay in front of thousands of fans, or as quiet as being my favorite children’s book author Arnold Lobel when I was a child (and I still love his books; Frog and Toad, Owl at Home, they are beautifully nostalgic for me). I think coming out is important when you’re able to do it, if only for the sake of other queer people so that they know who can be their chosen family when their families of origin give up and leave.

Despite my bio parents making sure they taught me that queerness was sinful and disgraceful, I never really believed it. Despite the crushes I have had / still have on many different genders of people over my life so far, I didn’t think that I was queer until six or seven years ago.

Coming out is a journey. Originally I came out as bisexual. Then I decided that pansexual was a better descriptor for me and I came out as pansexual. Then at some point I realized that I was gender non-conforming, and I refer to myself as genderqueer. Then alongside a low-dose testosterone regimen combined with an epiphany about my queerness, I realized that I’m part of the trans community and I have been this whole time. I’m not any binary of any kind; my gender is myself, which doesn’t — for me — need a word or phrase to describe it. It’s enough that I know that it’s my truth.

In the middle of evolving identities, I had many other coming-out moments; asking my chosen family to use new pronouns for me (and being abandoned by most of my blood family because of pronouns, which is honestly probably one of the most ridiculous reasons to pretend someone doesn’t exist for you any more); telling my kids about my new pronouns; choosing a new name that described to myself who I understand myself to be; telling my kids about my new name; navigating the constant experience of being misgendered and deadnamed 2A deadname is a person’s original legal name, usually given to them at birth, along with cultural assumptions about gender based on which genitals are present; it’s so gross and rude to use someone’s deadname when you know better, that most of us wouldn’t even deadname people we don’t get along with. Being misgendered is often the result of gender assumption based on how you look, or an assumption based on medical paperwork, or an act of disrespect. almost any time I need to interact with anyone that isn’t my chosen family, doctor, or therapist; cutting and shaving my hair into an extremely queer hairstyle; wearing clothes that could mark me as obviously queer to a stranger — my rainbow kilt, my flannel shirts, my suspenders, my sleeveless jacket (I had no idea how queer it would look when I first put it on). I dye my hair turquoise. I have a pretty big tattoo on my right arm. I have facial piercings and gauged ears. Even if I don’t look queer, at least I look weird.

Does any of this make sense?

I don’t want to keep coming out all the time, and sometimes I just avoid it by not interacting with people who don’t know me. Sometimes I avoid it because I’ve already used up my gender-advocate spoons for the day and I can’t manage another conversation that’s just me correcting someone about my pronouns or asking to be called by my name instead of what’s on my driver’s license.

Coming out is tiring and I wish that we lived in a world where it wasn’t necessary to be so specific about our identity in order not to be harmed in simple conversations.

But we don’t, so here it is: I am a genderqueer trans person with question marks where ‘romantic / sexual attraction’ goes, I haven’t finished changing my name legally yet because I’m terrified, I detest dating apps, and I’m queer. QUEER. Rainbow queer. Screamingly, frog-lovingly, flannel-owningly queer.

“For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”

Frodo, as Mount Doom erupts around them, from Return of the King

Hi. I’m Nix. It’s nice to show up and meet you here.

featured image is a photo by Sand Crain on Unsplash

Footnotes

  • 1
    I think a Baby Queer is someone that’s excited about being queer and doesn’t know that the floor is lava and the stove will burn you, and graduating from Baby Queer means you, unfortunately, know now that the floor is lava and have likely been burned by the stove.
  • 2
    A deadname is a person’s original legal name, usually given to them at birth, along with cultural assumptions about gender based on which genitals are present; it’s so gross and rude to use someone’s deadname when you know better, that most of us wouldn’t even deadname people we don’t get along with. Being misgendered is often the result of gender assumption based on how you look, or an assumption based on medical paperwork, or an act of disrespect.