In psychodrama, Valerie opts for the hot seat and wants to dive into how she gets treated at her doctor’s office.
Jeremy puts his chin to his palm for a moment, then suggests, “From what you’ve been saying, doing your conversations with the nurse at the office desk seems like a good place to start. Noelle, how about you be the desk nurse?”
“And like I said”, Valerie adds, instructing Noelle, “you know I’m in recovery, you know all about my relapses and all that...”
“Yeah, been there myself”, Noelle grins.
Marie raises the VHS camera and frames the two of them and starts filming.
“Hi, Phyllis”, Valerie says, playing herself, “I was wondering if I could get renewals with extra refills on these prescriptions because I’m going to be away for awhile.”
Noelle braces her arms against an imaginary desk, thumbs through a couple pages of imaginary chart. She bites her lip, glances at Valerie, then shakes her head. “You think this time it’s gonna turn out different, huh?”
“That’s none of your business! Can I just get my meds renewed?”
Noelle rolls her eyes and pantomimes scribbling an entry in the chart.
“How was that?”, Marie asks, glancing up from the movie camera. Valerie says she wants to switch roles and play the desk nurse.
“So, umm, I need these prescriptions refilled”, Noelle begins, “and can I get extra refills for these? I’m out of town for awhile.”
Valerie-as-nurse does a wry one-sided smile, then shakes her head. “It’s hard to believe that somebody with all your advantages would just throw it away. Look how your sister’s doing!”
Noelle puts her hands on her hips and snaps, “Hey, like, invasion of privacy! How about you spare me the lecture, Phyllis, and just do your job.”
After psychodrama is over, I get back to the piano and this time I have the space to myself. I launch into a sonorous atonal composition I haven’t named yet and then shift into “If Only To Wonder” and I like the sounds I’m making. Which is the reason I play. Not to show everyone. Not to be a star. Not to get rich or make a career out of it.
Admittedly, I’d like to amaze everyone and get a huge audience. That would be so cool. And I don’t have a way of supporting myself, as my parents are so fond of reminding me, so it would be convenient if I could do this professionally.
But if I’m not good enough or lucky enough for that to happen, I still get to sit here and produce this tapestry of sound, and it makes me feel better. It expresses how I feel on the inside. So part of wanting an audience is about that, wanting to express myself to people.
The piano I crave, the one I wish I could talk my parents into buying for me, is a Yamaha CP-80 electric grand. A portable piano you can take apart and put in a car. Take to places where people are gathering, the way other musicians might bring a guitar with them. But when you get it there, it has real strings and hammers, it’s truly a piano, unlike that popular portable keyboard, the Fender-Rhodes, which sounds like doorbell chimes, a round translucent sound that isn’t at all like the sound a real piano makes.
I can’t buy it for myself. I have no income. It’s a frustrating situation, but it’s actually unusual that I find myself craving one of the world’s expensive toys.
For the most part I don’t feel deprived despite being sidelined from the world of money.
It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. God that sounds self-righteous and pretentious, but it’s true. I don’t like being painted as a failure but I still worry that maybe I can’t just blame everyone else and that’s another conversation. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the approval strokes, you know? Take some pride at what you can do and contribute and feel good about that too.
That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?
Before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa, I spent the year out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted, that Yamaha CP-80. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, spending my days cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.
When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.
It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Ellen and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.
My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.
So some of it, I think, is a sort of classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting that requires at least a minimal college degree has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture didn’t perform the approved set of behaviors while you were growing up, it’s not your native language, and you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes. I’m not saying class inequality is just some kind of mutual and equal oil-and-water situation, as if being kept out boardrooms and congressional chambers is equal to being kept off of shop floors and construction crews. But I’m focusing on how, not why. And for how it works, it’s useful to look at how social class makes you a misfit any time you don’t stay in your lane.
I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. I have a cousin who does volunteer work in the admin office of a charity foundation. She once told me about a time when she followed in the wake of a program administrator while he tried to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator she was tagging along with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.
I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the truly rich try to have an actual profession, on their own and independent of their parents’ clout, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?
The system subdues the children of the rich, too. Class analysis urges us to blame the wealthy folks, as if they’re in charge of the unequal social structure. I think maybe as individuals they have no more experience of control than the rest of us. They’re defined by the structure too.
A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t consider it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.
Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.
The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t bothered by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.
Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class informed me that I walk wrong, that I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also annoyed with me.
They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking me.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Jeremy puts his chin to his palm for a moment, then suggests, “From what you’ve been saying, doing your conversations with the nurse at the office desk seems like a good place to start. Noelle, how about you be the desk nurse?”
“And like I said”, Valerie adds, instructing Noelle, “you know I’m in recovery, you know all about my relapses and all that...”
“Yeah, been there myself”, Noelle grins.
Marie raises the VHS camera and frames the two of them and starts filming.
“Hi, Phyllis”, Valerie says, playing herself, “I was wondering if I could get renewals with extra refills on these prescriptions because I’m going to be away for awhile.”
Noelle braces her arms against an imaginary desk, thumbs through a couple pages of imaginary chart. She bites her lip, glances at Valerie, then shakes her head. “You think this time it’s gonna turn out different, huh?”
“That’s none of your business! Can I just get my meds renewed?”
Noelle rolls her eyes and pantomimes scribbling an entry in the chart.
“How was that?”, Marie asks, glancing up from the movie camera. Valerie says she wants to switch roles and play the desk nurse.
“So, umm, I need these prescriptions refilled”, Noelle begins, “and can I get extra refills for these? I’m out of town for awhile.”
Valerie-as-nurse does a wry one-sided smile, then shakes her head. “It’s hard to believe that somebody with all your advantages would just throw it away. Look how your sister’s doing!”
Noelle puts her hands on her hips and snaps, “Hey, like, invasion of privacy! How about you spare me the lecture, Phyllis, and just do your job.”
After psychodrama is over, I get back to the piano and this time I have the space to myself. I launch into a sonorous atonal composition I haven’t named yet and then shift into “If Only To Wonder” and I like the sounds I’m making. Which is the reason I play. Not to show everyone. Not to be a star. Not to get rich or make a career out of it.
Admittedly, I’d like to amaze everyone and get a huge audience. That would be so cool. And I don’t have a way of supporting myself, as my parents are so fond of reminding me, so it would be convenient if I could do this professionally.
But if I’m not good enough or lucky enough for that to happen, I still get to sit here and produce this tapestry of sound, and it makes me feel better. It expresses how I feel on the inside. So part of wanting an audience is about that, wanting to express myself to people.
The piano I crave, the one I wish I could talk my parents into buying for me, is a Yamaha CP-80 electric grand. A portable piano you can take apart and put in a car. Take to places where people are gathering, the way other musicians might bring a guitar with them. But when you get it there, it has real strings and hammers, it’s truly a piano, unlike that popular portable keyboard, the Fender-Rhodes, which sounds like doorbell chimes, a round translucent sound that isn’t at all like the sound a real piano makes.
I can’t buy it for myself. I have no income. It’s a frustrating situation, but it’s actually unusual that I find myself craving one of the world’s expensive toys.
For the most part I don’t feel deprived despite being sidelined from the world of money.
It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. God that sounds self-righteous and pretentious, but it’s true. I don’t like being painted as a failure but I still worry that maybe I can’t just blame everyone else and that’s another conversation. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the approval strokes, you know? Take some pride at what you can do and contribute and feel good about that too.
That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?
Before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa, I spent the year out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted, that Yamaha CP-80. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, spending my days cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.
When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.
It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Ellen and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.
My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.
So some of it, I think, is a sort of classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting that requires at least a minimal college degree has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture didn’t perform the approved set of behaviors while you were growing up, it’s not your native language, and you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes. I’m not saying class inequality is just some kind of mutual and equal oil-and-water situation, as if being kept out boardrooms and congressional chambers is equal to being kept off of shop floors and construction crews. But I’m focusing on how, not why. And for how it works, it’s useful to look at how social class makes you a misfit any time you don’t stay in your lane.
I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. I have a cousin who does volunteer work in the admin office of a charity foundation. She once told me about a time when she followed in the wake of a program administrator while he tried to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator she was tagging along with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.
I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the truly rich try to have an actual profession, on their own and independent of their parents’ clout, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?
The system subdues the children of the rich, too. Class analysis urges us to blame the wealthy folks, as if they’re in charge of the unequal social structure. I think maybe as individuals they have no more experience of control than the rest of us. They’re defined by the structure too.
A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t consider it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.
Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.
The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t bothered by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.
Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class informed me that I walk wrong, that I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also annoyed with me.
They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking me.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
= July 27, 1982 (Day Nine) =
“Turn to your left and high-five your neighbor”, Irma tells us. Now turn to your right and do it again! Good morning, community!”
The hands I smack belong to Ronald and Valerie. “Go back to bed, Barbie”, Valerie tells Irma, not loudly enough for it to actually carry to her but sufficient for those of us nearby to hear. Jake makes an amused sound.
I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels like there’s been a subtle shift. It’s not quite that Valerie and Jake and Noelle and April have decided I’m bestfriend material, but more like they’ve inspected me and decided I’m all right. They’re more okay with me seeing that they’re not entirely in love with Elk Meadow and its programming and staff. I won’t use it at their expense to make a point to Barnes, and at the same time I’m no longer the symbol of opposition around here either. They know I won’t mock them for trying to get something out of being here.
I’m more comfortable around them too. They can roll their eyes at Gary Stevens and Dr. Barnes and Mark Raybourne, they aren’t creepy indoctrinated cult followers.
So I’m looser around them, a bit sillier. When I’m trying to describe an example of some kind of behavior or attitude, I’m more likely to act out a parody. Any of them may speak critically of me, say something dismissive or even downright contemptuous, but it’s at the same level of caustic familiarity with which they speak to each other, not real hostility. I’m not carefully picking my words as if they might be used against me later.
They still treat me as a nerdy bookish sort but they’re less critical of me using obscure words. I’m more inclined to giggle when they say something that hits me as funny, and I catch myself skipping down the hallway towards a cluster of them when I see them outside the cafeteria.
* * *
There’s someone sitting at the piano stool, which is unusual. It’s Emily. She hasn’t opened the wooden cover that goes over the keyboard and isn’t poised like she’s going to play, just sitting there. She sits very still in the piano alcove, leaning slightly forward, arms tight at her side. The overhead light is turned off, so she’s in the dim light from the corridor, the green and yellow mural colors on the wall faded to shadowed olive shades.
I approach slowly, walking quietly; when I’m within about four feet of her, I pause and wait for her to become aware of me. I see a slight lift of her head. “Hello”, I say.
“Do you want to play the piano? I’ll leave...”, she says dully.
“What’s wrong? If you don’t mind me asking...?” I wait quietly. She looks like she might have been crying. Not that she’s red-eyed as if she’s been bawling for half an hour, just a little smudgy and disheveled around the face.
Emily looks at me from the side for a couple seconds, then shifts on the piano bench to face me. “I miss my boys. My children. Do you have kids?”
“No.” Which means maybe she won’t want to talk to me about it, whatever it is. I wait again.
Emily sighs. “I just got promoted to Level One. Did you hear? Emily Sanders, that girl’s really pulling it together.” She pauses. “I’ve worked hard in here. I’ve really tried to listen? And do what’s expected, what they want, to show I’m serious about getting my life in order.” She speaks faster, more emphatically. “I’ve been Unit Leader for two months now. I’ve got Mark for individual. He promised me if I made Level One I could get a pass and go home and visit my kids. I’ve done everything they ask. Well, Dr. Barnes overruled Mark. He says I’m treating it like a trade, what he calls tit for tat, and says it doesn’t count if I only do what’s right because I expect a reward from Mark in return.”
“That’s twisted. They should keep their promises.”
Emily scowls. “It’s not like Dr. Barnes didn’t know about it. They all talk with each other, and nobody would tell us anything like that without running it past Dr. Barnes first. They dangled that in front of me just so they could pull it away and say I want special favors for making progress. They set me up.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that they can be really manipulative. It’s not fair.”
Emily looks at me, long and slow. Then she says, “Don’t tell anyone. If they see I’m angry about it they’ll hold it against me. Thanks for listening. Hey, you better go out for recreational, okay? I don’t want to make you late.”
Having been dismissed, however gently, I leave her to the aloneness of her own space and go out the doors, although it’s actually a good ten minutes before I’m due out there.
* * *
Joanne comes around the corner. So far the only other residents are a couple of new admissions I don’t know yet — Kim and Javier. We’ve done mutual intros but otherwise we’re just shuffling back and forth waiting. “Oh...umm... listen, Derek”, Joanne fumbles as she gets closer. “I, umm, we... staff had a discussion”, she says, trailing off. She’s trying to hold on to her confident smile but it’s sliding, and her eyes skitter away from my face. “...it’s not a good idea for you to be outdoors without sufficient supervision. So I need you to go back inside.”
Seriously? They’re worried I’m going to scale the fence and run away? Or is it that I might ...disobey instructions and engage in unapproved forms of exercise?
These people really need to synchronize their messaging better. So much for ‘Derek has made good progress and has decided he likes it in this place’. I reach out for some low-hanging contempt and stare at Joanne without replying and whirl around and stalk back into the building.
Emily is still over by the piano but Mark and Jeremy are there too, Jeremy sitting next to her on the bench and Mark hovering, standing and holding on to the top of the piano.
They’re being circumspect about anything specific, but as I walk by, I overhear Jeremy saying, “Just play the game. Put this all behind you”, so I figure Emily decided she can trust them enough to tell them about it.
I feel like I’m getting some privileged insights. Perhaps more people on staff than I realized are less than fully enthusiastic about the things that happen in this place.
I would like to play the piano, actually, but I’ll come back later; meanwhile may as well hang out in the cafeteria area until psychodrama. I’m still not interacting as much as I should.
Jake and April are over at one of the tables, with an open bag of potato chips in front of them. I wave, get a return wave, and go to sit with them. “What’s going down?”, Jake greets.
“I’ve been demoted down to Level Five”, I tell him.
“Say what?”, April reacts. “Level Four is the lowest level they’ve got. There isn’t any Level Five.”
“They’re not calling it that, but I’ve got fewer privileges now than when I came in. They don’t want me to go outdoors any more.”
I recap what Joanne had told me. April and Jake proclaim this to be seriously fucked up.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
“Turn to your left and high-five your neighbor”, Irma tells us. Now turn to your right and do it again! Good morning, community!”
The hands I smack belong to Ronald and Valerie. “Go back to bed, Barbie”, Valerie tells Irma, not loudly enough for it to actually carry to her but sufficient for those of us nearby to hear. Jake makes an amused sound.
I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels like there’s been a subtle shift. It’s not quite that Valerie and Jake and Noelle and April have decided I’m bestfriend material, but more like they’ve inspected me and decided I’m all right. They’re more okay with me seeing that they’re not entirely in love with Elk Meadow and its programming and staff. I won’t use it at their expense to make a point to Barnes, and at the same time I’m no longer the symbol of opposition around here either. They know I won’t mock them for trying to get something out of being here.
I’m more comfortable around them too. They can roll their eyes at Gary Stevens and Dr. Barnes and Mark Raybourne, they aren’t creepy indoctrinated cult followers.
So I’m looser around them, a bit sillier. When I’m trying to describe an example of some kind of behavior or attitude, I’m more likely to act out a parody. Any of them may speak critically of me, say something dismissive or even downright contemptuous, but it’s at the same level of caustic familiarity with which they speak to each other, not real hostility. I’m not carefully picking my words as if they might be used against me later.
They still treat me as a nerdy bookish sort but they’re less critical of me using obscure words. I’m more inclined to giggle when they say something that hits me as funny, and I catch myself skipping down the hallway towards a cluster of them when I see them outside the cafeteria.
* * *
There’s someone sitting at the piano stool, which is unusual. It’s Emily. She hasn’t opened the wooden cover that goes over the keyboard and isn’t poised like she’s going to play, just sitting there. She sits very still in the piano alcove, leaning slightly forward, arms tight at her side. The overhead light is turned off, so she’s in the dim light from the corridor, the green and yellow mural colors on the wall faded to shadowed olive shades.
I approach slowly, walking quietly; when I’m within about four feet of her, I pause and wait for her to become aware of me. I see a slight lift of her head. “Hello”, I say.
“Do you want to play the piano? I’ll leave...”, she says dully.
“What’s wrong? If you don’t mind me asking...?” I wait quietly. She looks like she might have been crying. Not that she’s red-eyed as if she’s been bawling for half an hour, just a little smudgy and disheveled around the face.
Emily looks at me from the side for a couple seconds, then shifts on the piano bench to face me. “I miss my boys. My children. Do you have kids?”
“No.” Which means maybe she won’t want to talk to me about it, whatever it is. I wait again.
Emily sighs. “I just got promoted to Level One. Did you hear? Emily Sanders, that girl’s really pulling it together.” She pauses. “I’ve worked hard in here. I’ve really tried to listen? And do what’s expected, what they want, to show I’m serious about getting my life in order.” She speaks faster, more emphatically. “I’ve been Unit Leader for two months now. I’ve got Mark for individual. He promised me if I made Level One I could get a pass and go home and visit my kids. I’ve done everything they ask. Well, Dr. Barnes overruled Mark. He says I’m treating it like a trade, what he calls tit for tat, and says it doesn’t count if I only do what’s right because I expect a reward from Mark in return.”
“That’s twisted. They should keep their promises.”
Emily scowls. “It’s not like Dr. Barnes didn’t know about it. They all talk with each other, and nobody would tell us anything like that without running it past Dr. Barnes first. They dangled that in front of me just so they could pull it away and say I want special favors for making progress. They set me up.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that they can be really manipulative. It’s not fair.”
Emily looks at me, long and slow. Then she says, “Don’t tell anyone. If they see I’m angry about it they’ll hold it against me. Thanks for listening. Hey, you better go out for recreational, okay? I don’t want to make you late.”
Having been dismissed, however gently, I leave her to the aloneness of her own space and go out the doors, although it’s actually a good ten minutes before I’m due out there.
* * *
Joanne comes around the corner. So far the only other residents are a couple of new admissions I don’t know yet — Kim and Javier. We’ve done mutual intros but otherwise we’re just shuffling back and forth waiting. “Oh...umm... listen, Derek”, Joanne fumbles as she gets closer. “I, umm, we... staff had a discussion”, she says, trailing off. She’s trying to hold on to her confident smile but it’s sliding, and her eyes skitter away from my face. “...it’s not a good idea for you to be outdoors without sufficient supervision. So I need you to go back inside.”
Seriously? They’re worried I’m going to scale the fence and run away? Or is it that I might ...disobey instructions and engage in unapproved forms of exercise?
These people really need to synchronize their messaging better. So much for ‘Derek has made good progress and has decided he likes it in this place’. I reach out for some low-hanging contempt and stare at Joanne without replying and whirl around and stalk back into the building.
Emily is still over by the piano but Mark and Jeremy are there too, Jeremy sitting next to her on the bench and Mark hovering, standing and holding on to the top of the piano.
They’re being circumspect about anything specific, but as I walk by, I overhear Jeremy saying, “Just play the game. Put this all behind you”, so I figure Emily decided she can trust them enough to tell them about it.
I feel like I’m getting some privileged insights. Perhaps more people on staff than I realized are less than fully enthusiastic about the things that happen in this place.
I would like to play the piano, actually, but I’ll come back later; meanwhile may as well hang out in the cafeteria area until psychodrama. I’m still not interacting as much as I should.
Jake and April are over at one of the tables, with an open bag of potato chips in front of them. I wave, get a return wave, and go to sit with them. “What’s going down?”, Jake greets.
“I’ve been demoted down to Level Five”, I tell him.
“Say what?”, April reacts. “Level Four is the lowest level they’ve got. There isn’t any Level Five.”
“They’re not calling it that, but I’ve got fewer privileges now than when I came in. They don’t want me to go outdoors any more.”
I recap what Joanne had told me. April and Jake proclaim this to be seriously fucked up.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I’m walking back towards my room when Valerie accosts me. “Hey, sissyboy. Do you play cards?”
“Some. Not poker, and not for money.”
“We aren’t betting. Just for fun. You know spades?”
“Decently well. I don’t know it as good as I know as hearts.”
“We need an extra person. We got me, Ronald and Jake, April and Joe. And it’s Joe’s last day.” She motions for me to follow.
“Hey hey, Derek! Have a sit down!”, Joe says, riffling the card deck. The classic red sketch of a bicycling angel beckons from the top card.
Hands are dealt. Bids are made. Tricks get taken.
After several games have been won and lost, I ask if they’d ever played Cutthroat Hearts or Oh Heck. Nobody’s heard of either.
“So tell us about them”, Ronald demands. “How are they different? How do you play?”
“Cutthroat hearts is where you shoot for low score. Every heart you take is a point. Queen of spades is thirteen all by herself. But the Jack of diamonds is minus ten, and you can also run hearts, if you get them all you take thirteen points off your total instead of adding a point for each heart.”
Jake says, “I know that one, I’ve played it, we called it ‘Shooting the Moon’. It’s not bad but I like Spades better.”
I nod, shuffle the deck, and deal out the starting cards.
* * *
I sit in my room with pen and paper, scribbling out edits to one of the chapters of The Amazon’s Brother. Ka-snap. I open the three-ring binder and put back the pages with the new notes. Close it again with a pop.
The Amazon’s Brother is really my first attempt to describe what it was like being me, growing up, going through puberty and adolescence, and on into early adulthood and finally coming out as...something different. Heterosexual sissy. And radical feminist. The second half of the book is my attempt to write contributions to feminist theory, integrating my experiences with the perspective that feminists understand and believe. They’re the visionaries and radicals of our time, my teachers and heroes, the people who gave me tools and viewing angles for discussing gender; and I want to contribute and belong. I want to be part of a shared identity, to be plural. For once in my life I want to join something.
And now I’ve had new thoughts and new analyses, prompted by my recent recollections of being at UNM that fall, when I was semi-accepted socially. I’ve been pondering the resultant questions about having a sense of belongingness and how being accepted can be a two-edged sword if the people who accept you don’t understand you. Hence my recent thoughts about needing to pull people closer and push them away at the same time.
I have The Amazon’s Brother here with me because I’m still working on it, but also because I always want to have it with me. I left a backup copy in my bedroom at my grandparents’ house, but I certainly didn’t want to leave the only copy of the book behind and risk something happening to it while I’m gone. I want it within reach.
And...did I take it with me the other day when I slipped out the unlocked door? Of course not.
I’ve thought at times that I might share The Amazon’s Brother with people here at Elk Meadow. That could still happen. Maybe.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
“Some. Not poker, and not for money.”
“We aren’t betting. Just for fun. You know spades?”
“Decently well. I don’t know it as good as I know as hearts.”
“We need an extra person. We got me, Ronald and Jake, April and Joe. And it’s Joe’s last day.” She motions for me to follow.
“Hey hey, Derek! Have a sit down!”, Joe says, riffling the card deck. The classic red sketch of a bicycling angel beckons from the top card.
Hands are dealt. Bids are made. Tricks get taken.
After several games have been won and lost, I ask if they’d ever played Cutthroat Hearts or Oh Heck. Nobody’s heard of either.
“So tell us about them”, Ronald demands. “How are they different? How do you play?”
“Cutthroat hearts is where you shoot for low score. Every heart you take is a point. Queen of spades is thirteen all by herself. But the Jack of diamonds is minus ten, and you can also run hearts, if you get them all you take thirteen points off your total instead of adding a point for each heart.”
Jake says, “I know that one, I’ve played it, we called it ‘Shooting the Moon’. It’s not bad but I like Spades better.”
I nod, shuffle the deck, and deal out the starting cards.
* * *
I sit in my room with pen and paper, scribbling out edits to one of the chapters of The Amazon’s Brother. Ka-snap. I open the three-ring binder and put back the pages with the new notes. Close it again with a pop.
The Amazon’s Brother is really my first attempt to describe what it was like being me, growing up, going through puberty and adolescence, and on into early adulthood and finally coming out as...something different. Heterosexual sissy. And radical feminist. The second half of the book is my attempt to write contributions to feminist theory, integrating my experiences with the perspective that feminists understand and believe. They’re the visionaries and radicals of our time, my teachers and heroes, the people who gave me tools and viewing angles for discussing gender; and I want to contribute and belong. I want to be part of a shared identity, to be plural. For once in my life I want to join something.
And now I’ve had new thoughts and new analyses, prompted by my recent recollections of being at UNM that fall, when I was semi-accepted socially. I’ve been pondering the resultant questions about having a sense of belongingness and how being accepted can be a two-edged sword if the people who accept you don’t understand you. Hence my recent thoughts about needing to pull people closer and push them away at the same time.
I have The Amazon’s Brother here with me because I’m still working on it, but also because I always want to have it with me. I left a backup copy in my bedroom at my grandparents’ house, but I certainly didn’t want to leave the only copy of the book behind and risk something happening to it while I’m gone. I want it within reach.
And...did I take it with me the other day when I slipped out the unlocked door? Of course not.
I’ve thought at times that I might share The Amazon’s Brother with people here at Elk Meadow. That could still happen. Maybe.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
The unstated goal of biofeedback appears to be to get us to doze off. The most obvious and self-explanatory readings are for heart rate, respiration, and muscle tension, and although we weren’t specifically instructed, nobody in the biofeedback lab is ever focusing on making these numbers go up. The less clearly defined measures, the galvanic skin whatever-it-is and sweat rate and the various brain wave patterns also have associations with relaxation. Don’t sweat it. Alpha waves. Chill out.
I’ve tried to push the colorful lines around in different configurations to see how it would feel. What would it be like to have low heartbeat, high respiration, low muscle tension, and sweating like crazy? But I don’t really have that kind of granular control. Maybe it will come with practice. Watching the line patterns is kind of calming anyhow. I zone out for awhile, and then my block of time is over.
After lunch, I head down to the piano, where I’ve invited several of the folks on my unit. I start playing “The Hitchhiker’s Song” but my voice isn’t warmed up yet and I don’t like the way I sound. My throat is too tight, too tense. I apologize and do some vocal warmups then kick off the song again; this time I am driving the phrases comfortably. I’m mostly relaxed but my abdomen is taut, like someone about to pick up heavy suitcases. Supporting the vocals. Belting it. The piece is a narrow-band song, with most of the notes falling within a span of a fifth, although fairly high in my range. Then there’s a middle part that goes higher.
I twist around on the piano bench after letting the last chord die out.
“I like the piano part, the way that intro starts off”, George tells me. “You start with that high bit, and then each time you repeat it, you put a little more under it.” Valerie and Ronald are also nearby, standing against the wall listening, with Jake and April and Ellen at the little table that George had helped me drag into the space earlier in the week. I’ve got an actual audience.
“You sound good”, April tells me, “so don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t sit there and do what you’re doing. But I’ve known people who could play crazy good. And you could yell out any song, like ‘Levon’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and they could just play it perfectly with all the riffs and frills and shit. And they aren’t famous and making money from it. And you don’t quite have those chops. I think this notion you’ve got that you’re gonna support yourself and get your message out into the world by playing the piano and singing your songs, that’s wishful thinking.”
Noelle points out, “You write some stuff that’s pretty good. That piece you wrote about being here in Elk Meadow, that was pretty and powerful. Like the guy singing it, he’s got all these strong feelings, all sad and angry. Maybe you could get someone who’s already in the business to sing your songs and play them.”
Whenever I listen to musicians who’ve successfully made it, it seems like there’s a wide range of talent out there. Some people who could do damn near anything, like April described, but some others who just had a particular sound that nobody else was making. I wasn’t convinced I couldn’t somehow catch on and get popularized, under the right circumstances. But like the rest of the whole communicate-with-society thing, I don’t know any secret tricks for making that happen.
While I’ve been in internal reverie, thinking about my prospects as a musician, Jake has been speaking to Ellen. I start to pay more attention. “It gets messy when it’s your family”, he tells her. “You start out trying to divide the world into the ones who are really on your side and the ones who are dragging you down, but then there’s family.”
April adds, “You got to believe in yourself. They can either line up behind that or they can get out of the way.”
I scooch to the end of the piano bench closest to where they are sitting. No one shrinks away, including Ellen, so I guess I’m not unwelcome.
Later, I contribute, “I have to agree with Jake. It’s complicated when family is involved. That makes it a lot of wear and tear, and I’m sorry you have to deal with that right now. Is this mostly about the vacation stuff?”
Ellen nods.
April gives her a brief hug. “You got to believe in yourself. You are tougher than you think. Tougher than they think.”
“Yeah”, I chime in again. “You’ve been through so much, and that makes you a survivor. You’re tough. You don’t take shit from me, so you shouldn’t take shit from anyone else either. You get to decide.”
Jake hugs Ellen from the other side.
I find myself wishing I knew more of the backstory about what was going on. But it does seem like Ellen has been profoundly isolated somehow. I remember a John MacDonald series where the main character has a soft spot for characters he designates as wounded birds, and ponders that tendency in himself. There could be sexist things about wanting to be a caregiver and rescuer. Getting off on the other person’s vulnerability and your own power as gallant knight and all. But, at the same time, isn’t that also a lot of what the feminine role is built around, the interactive mutual empowerment that comes from taking care of? So what does it mean, if and when I’m the person doing that?
* * *
I show up at Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m not happy to be here, but Mark implored me to attend. Get something out of it. Yeah right.
I listen to the testimonials and the focus on the step of recognizing that a higher power could restore us to sanity.
Ronald says, “I tried everything, you know. I think I knew I needed God in my life, but I wanted God to do lines with me, you know, I wanted God as a drinking buddy. It wasn’t until I bottomed out that I reached out and asked God to save me.”
Valerie testifies, “I just couldn’t cope any more, not on my own. I am not a churchy person, so I don’t believe in God, but I reached out to the universe and I just said ‘I can’t do this alone’ and I turned everything over to what I felt was there.”
Gary doesn’t like me sitting there in sulky silence. “C’mon Derek, let’s hear what’s going on with you”, he prompts. Doing that raspy folksy voice of his.
I sigh. “One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about in AA is the prayer you always end this thing with. It’s all aimed at giving in and giving up. My sense of higher power isn’t focused there. I think your Serenity Prayer is upside down. I mean, it should be... ‘God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot, and the courage to change what I can, and when all else fails the serenity to accept the things I cannot change’. I want the wisdom and the courage. I even think maybe I already have the courage. It’s the wisdom. Show me which things I can change. And how. That’s what I want. If I know for sure that I can’t change something, I think I can accept it, but first I want a chance to change the things that I can.”
Gary gives a half-smile. “Cute. But I mean tell us about your higher power.”
“Seriously? You mean I get to introduce you to my religious perspective?” I grin. I don’t often get discussions to veer towards me so nicely. “My atheist friends like to hassle me about my ‘need’ for there to be a God. What shortcoming there is within me that needs for there to be a God.”
I let my grin settle down to a wry smile. “The most intensely I ever prayed, I started out with ‘God, I don’t know if you’re out there but if you’re not, you ought to be’. I asked some questions and I got answers. Which was kind of startling.”
Gary snorts. “Got yourself a hotline to God, huh?”
“Everything is still subject to scrutiny. I think I’m okay with answers popping into my head as if out of nowhere, but they still have to make sense, you know? I do sometimes use the word ‘God’ to refer to something that seems real to me. So I’m not an atheist. But God likes to be understood, not just blindly followed.”
Valerie chimes in, “That’s kind of how it is for me, too. I don’t know if it’s the same as what other people mean when they talk about God but it works for me.”
“Well, Derek, it sounds to me like you want to hedge your bets”, Gary says, basically ignoring Valerie. “You say you need God in your life but you aren’t ready to let go and turn your problems over to him. That’s your problem, you know, you think you know better.”
I nod. “There may be some truth to that. Learning to trust and letting go of control and all that.”
“So why don’t you give the Elk Meadow staff a chance to help you? We’re right here, all you have to do is relinquish and accept!”
“Well, I did come back to Elk Meadow. That was my choice, twice now, and I’m here. And I am participating in the parts of the program that seem useful and helpful. But I don’t have Elk Meadow confused with God, Gary. You staff folks have control issues of your own you should be working on.”
Gary scowls.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I’ve tried to push the colorful lines around in different configurations to see how it would feel. What would it be like to have low heartbeat, high respiration, low muscle tension, and sweating like crazy? But I don’t really have that kind of granular control. Maybe it will come with practice. Watching the line patterns is kind of calming anyhow. I zone out for awhile, and then my block of time is over.
After lunch, I head down to the piano, where I’ve invited several of the folks on my unit. I start playing “The Hitchhiker’s Song” but my voice isn’t warmed up yet and I don’t like the way I sound. My throat is too tight, too tense. I apologize and do some vocal warmups then kick off the song again; this time I am driving the phrases comfortably. I’m mostly relaxed but my abdomen is taut, like someone about to pick up heavy suitcases. Supporting the vocals. Belting it. The piece is a narrow-band song, with most of the notes falling within a span of a fifth, although fairly high in my range. Then there’s a middle part that goes higher.
I twist around on the piano bench after letting the last chord die out.
“I like the piano part, the way that intro starts off”, George tells me. “You start with that high bit, and then each time you repeat it, you put a little more under it.” Valerie and Ronald are also nearby, standing against the wall listening, with Jake and April and Ellen at the little table that George had helped me drag into the space earlier in the week. I’ve got an actual audience.
“You sound good”, April tells me, “so don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t sit there and do what you’re doing. But I’ve known people who could play crazy good. And you could yell out any song, like ‘Levon’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and they could just play it perfectly with all the riffs and frills and shit. And they aren’t famous and making money from it. And you don’t quite have those chops. I think this notion you’ve got that you’re gonna support yourself and get your message out into the world by playing the piano and singing your songs, that’s wishful thinking.”
Noelle points out, “You write some stuff that’s pretty good. That piece you wrote about being here in Elk Meadow, that was pretty and powerful. Like the guy singing it, he’s got all these strong feelings, all sad and angry. Maybe you could get someone who’s already in the business to sing your songs and play them.”
Whenever I listen to musicians who’ve successfully made it, it seems like there’s a wide range of talent out there. Some people who could do damn near anything, like April described, but some others who just had a particular sound that nobody else was making. I wasn’t convinced I couldn’t somehow catch on and get popularized, under the right circumstances. But like the rest of the whole communicate-with-society thing, I don’t know any secret tricks for making that happen.
While I’ve been in internal reverie, thinking about my prospects as a musician, Jake has been speaking to Ellen. I start to pay more attention. “It gets messy when it’s your family”, he tells her. “You start out trying to divide the world into the ones who are really on your side and the ones who are dragging you down, but then there’s family.”
April adds, “You got to believe in yourself. They can either line up behind that or they can get out of the way.”
I scooch to the end of the piano bench closest to where they are sitting. No one shrinks away, including Ellen, so I guess I’m not unwelcome.
Later, I contribute, “I have to agree with Jake. It’s complicated when family is involved. That makes it a lot of wear and tear, and I’m sorry you have to deal with that right now. Is this mostly about the vacation stuff?”
Ellen nods.
April gives her a brief hug. “You got to believe in yourself. You are tougher than you think. Tougher than they think.”
“Yeah”, I chime in again. “You’ve been through so much, and that makes you a survivor. You’re tough. You don’t take shit from me, so you shouldn’t take shit from anyone else either. You get to decide.”
Jake hugs Ellen from the other side.
I find myself wishing I knew more of the backstory about what was going on. But it does seem like Ellen has been profoundly isolated somehow. I remember a John MacDonald series where the main character has a soft spot for characters he designates as wounded birds, and ponders that tendency in himself. There could be sexist things about wanting to be a caregiver and rescuer. Getting off on the other person’s vulnerability and your own power as gallant knight and all. But, at the same time, isn’t that also a lot of what the feminine role is built around, the interactive mutual empowerment that comes from taking care of? So what does it mean, if and when I’m the person doing that?
* * *
I show up at Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m not happy to be here, but Mark implored me to attend. Get something out of it. Yeah right.
I listen to the testimonials and the focus on the step of recognizing that a higher power could restore us to sanity.
Ronald says, “I tried everything, you know. I think I knew I needed God in my life, but I wanted God to do lines with me, you know, I wanted God as a drinking buddy. It wasn’t until I bottomed out that I reached out and asked God to save me.”
Valerie testifies, “I just couldn’t cope any more, not on my own. I am not a churchy person, so I don’t believe in God, but I reached out to the universe and I just said ‘I can’t do this alone’ and I turned everything over to what I felt was there.”
Gary doesn’t like me sitting there in sulky silence. “C’mon Derek, let’s hear what’s going on with you”, he prompts. Doing that raspy folksy voice of his.
I sigh. “One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about in AA is the prayer you always end this thing with. It’s all aimed at giving in and giving up. My sense of higher power isn’t focused there. I think your Serenity Prayer is upside down. I mean, it should be... ‘God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot, and the courage to change what I can, and when all else fails the serenity to accept the things I cannot change’. I want the wisdom and the courage. I even think maybe I already have the courage. It’s the wisdom. Show me which things I can change. And how. That’s what I want. If I know for sure that I can’t change something, I think I can accept it, but first I want a chance to change the things that I can.”
Gary gives a half-smile. “Cute. But I mean tell us about your higher power.”
“Seriously? You mean I get to introduce you to my religious perspective?” I grin. I don’t often get discussions to veer towards me so nicely. “My atheist friends like to hassle me about my ‘need’ for there to be a God. What shortcoming there is within me that needs for there to be a God.”
I let my grin settle down to a wry smile. “The most intensely I ever prayed, I started out with ‘God, I don’t know if you’re out there but if you’re not, you ought to be’. I asked some questions and I got answers. Which was kind of startling.”
Gary snorts. “Got yourself a hotline to God, huh?”
“Everything is still subject to scrutiny. I think I’m okay with answers popping into my head as if out of nowhere, but they still have to make sense, you know? I do sometimes use the word ‘God’ to refer to something that seems real to me. So I’m not an atheist. But God likes to be understood, not just blindly followed.”
Valerie chimes in, “That’s kind of how it is for me, too. I don’t know if it’s the same as what other people mean when they talk about God but it works for me.”
“Well, Derek, it sounds to me like you want to hedge your bets”, Gary says, basically ignoring Valerie. “You say you need God in your life but you aren’t ready to let go and turn your problems over to him. That’s your problem, you know, you think you know better.”
I nod. “There may be some truth to that. Learning to trust and letting go of control and all that.”
“So why don’t you give the Elk Meadow staff a chance to help you? We’re right here, all you have to do is relinquish and accept!”
“Well, I did come back to Elk Meadow. That was my choice, twice now, and I’m here. And I am participating in the parts of the program that seem useful and helpful. But I don’t have Elk Meadow confused with God, Gary. You staff folks have control issues of your own you should be working on.”
Gary scowls.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
46 years ago, in 1980, in 19-freaking-80, I decided I had a social message that the world needed to hear, about an identity that wasn't gay (or bi), and wasn't trans; it was something else.
As other identities became recognized and given a label and began to be discussed, things like nonbinary and genderqueer and demisexual and agender and fluid and so on, I continued to say and think that yeah but my story is different and it's important that it get out there.
Y'know... ... at some point it starts to feel like I just want MY story told and heard, not because it represents some kind of larger untold and unspoken-for identity, but just because I want it all to be about ME. Me wanting to be found fascinating and relevant. Me wanting people to go "wow" after hearing my story.
It's not a total surprise, this particular glance into the mirror; I mean, I've known that I'm self-immersed and self-important. But I don't like looking ridiculous to myself, and seeing it all stripped down to ego makes me look rather ridiculous.
As other identities became recognized and given a label and began to be discussed, things like nonbinary and genderqueer and demisexual and agender and fluid and so on, I continued to say and think that yeah but my story is different and it's important that it get out there.
Y'know...
It's not a total surprise, this particular glance into the mirror; I mean, I've known that I'm self-immersed and self-important. But I don't like looking ridiculous to myself, and seeing it all stripped down to ego makes me look rather ridiculous.
= July 26, 1982 (Day Eight) =
That small animated nurse with the freckles is on the phone with someone who has a loud boomy voice, and I can hear him complaining about something on his bill. Someone must have transferred a call to the wrong line. I make eye contact with her and find myself smiling. God she’s cute. What was her name? Patty? She rolls her eyes and holds the phone farther from her ear. “Sir, that’s not my jurisdiction. You need to call back....”
I give her a nod and attempt a wry and sophisticated cynical smirk.
In a chromium rack on the counter, manila folders stand up with plastic tabs that have our names on them — Noelle’s, mine, Ellen’s, Jake’s, Ronald’s...
The nurse finally manages to get off the phone and says something to her colleague about needing a break. Colleague replies “See you in a bit, Penelope”, which gives me her name. Oh yeah, and I think Gary called her Penny, that’s the name I heard. Hey, I was close. We end up walking together down the hall.
With plastic trays and stainless steel utensils and napkins in hand, we point at hash browns and sausages and the counter person dishes out what we’ve chosen. “I’m curious about something”, I mention to her. “When this place was being described to me, one of the things they said would be part of the experience would be an examination of nutrition and vitamins and electrolytes and all that stuff, how the things that we eat affect how our brains work. I was in nursing school before I got here, studying to be an LPN, and I really liked the classwork ... anyway, it doesn’t seem like they do any of that here as a class, I mean it’s not on my schedule and I haven’t seen anything like that on anyone else’s.”
“No, I mean we have a dietician who sets guidelines they use in meal planning. But you’re right, there’s no instruction. Did you like nursing?”
“I liked a lot of things about it. I liked being a member of the nursing team, and I liked the patients.”
“Think you’ll go back to it?”
“I have been thinking about that...but...I don’t think caring for people on a physical-body level is what I’m best suited for. The biggest problem was feeling like I was invading people’s space and interfering with their autonomy. I had a patient die once while I was at lunch. I took his vitals and gave him his meds, went to lunch, came back and he wasn’t breathing, no pulse. It wasn’t unexpected, congestive heart failure and a DNR order, so it was just a matter of when. Anyway, I asked my nursing instructor ‘What do I do now?’, and she said after I report it to the ward supervisor, if I could clean him up for the family, that would be good. So as I’m giving him a bed bath and rolling him over and arranging, I realize how much easier these things are when the person is dead. Because then I’m not worried that I’m bothering him, you know? Anyway, I think maybe when you feel like it’s inconvenient that the rest of your patients aren’t all dead, that could be a sign that nursing might not be where you belong.”
* * *
I walk past the piano and down the corridor to the doors to recreation. Sun glares down out of a pale blue sky. Texas hot and dry. Same as it ever was... yeah thanks, David Byrne.
Many of the other residents are dressed more sensibly than I am. George and Ronald are in cutoff jean shorts; Valerie has nylon shorts with piping. All I brought were full-length pants.
”Hey everybody”, Joanne greets. She’s attired in dark rose spandex and she has very nice shapes. “Today I want us to take turns running a lap around the track. I’m going to time you, and I want you each to try to do your run as close to exactly three minutes as possible. That’s not all that fast but it can be a challenge if you’re not used to running.”
I feel like moving; I’m restless and I’ve got the urge to walk for hours, which is my favorite way to let the back of my head process stuff and sort things out. Instead, I shuffle and stand and wait my turn with the others.
I’m not the first person to whom Joanne calls out, “You’re going faster than pace. Pull it back a bit”, and I’m also not the last. The speed she’s picked for us is just barely faster than a brisk stride. Awkward, too slow to run, too fast to walk. Maybe it’s useful to exercise this weird gait but it’s unpleasant.
Ronald just ignores Joanne and runs at a much faster speed. “I don’t care, I used to run track, c’mon Joanne, this isn’t fun!” Then Valerie clowns around, running backwards part of the way, finally sprinting to the end. Mutiny.
”Well, I’m going to run around the outside perimeter”, I point.
”Couldn’t you just do jumping jacks or something?”, Joanne suggests. She’s admittedly cute in her stretchy clothes. Male sexuality is annoyingly stupid. I don’t like Joanne. She flattens my ears, I don’t know why. I do like the way she looks. I don’t like how that makes me feel.
”I’d rather cover some ground”, I reply, then take off at a lope. Enough other people aren’t following instructions that I don’t figure my own insurrection will matter.
Initially, I run around the outside border of the recreation space, the tennis courts and track and ballfield area. After two laps of that, I widen out and run along the inside edge of the fence that encloses the undeveloped area of the hospital property with trees and underbrush. Things had been cut back to put in the fence, but it means hopping over dead branches and leaping over boulders, so it’s more of a cross-country run.
Joanne yells out to me. As I come around the building side of the rec area, she waits in front and I slow to a stop. “I’d really rather you didn’t get that far away”, she tells me.
* * *
I take my customary seat in Mark’s office. He comes around and briefly clasps my shoulders in a greeting-hug. I think he’s sincere about wanting to be a caring counselor-person. I’ve thrown a lot at him, honestly. He’s still here, trying.
“You got out and then you decided to come back in”, he says, stating the somewhat obvious. “What do you think you learned from those events?”
“The important thing here is that I get to be the one to decide how I’m going to spend my time. Even when I’m showing up for all the things that are on my schedule, that’s me deciding to go along with that, and I don’t have to. Speaking of which, by the way, I still have AA and NA on my schedule, and as I’ve told you, I don’t think they’re relevant to me and I’d like them taken off. I get that not being an alcoholic or a drug abuser doesn’t mean I don’t need help to come to terms with how I’m living my life, but if I accept that, I’m still not a drug addict or an alcoholic.”
“I see your point, but the twelve step programs aren’t on your schedule because you have a drug or alcohol problem. That may be what they’re mostly focused on, but you can probably get something out of them anyway, and apply them to your own situation. Everyone here is signed up for AA and NA. I can ask, and see what your treatment team thinks, but we don’t want to start a mad rush for everyone dropping sessions that they probably need, so I can’t make you any promises. Meanwhile, please keep attending.”
I look back at him, noncommittal.
“I’ve noticed”, Mark comments, “that you take a certain pride in being immune to other people’s opinions. What I want you to think about, is that it may not be all positive, this not caring what other people think. You’re going to find it hard to bridge gaps and connect with people if you don’t give a shit about how they feel.”
I am thinking about that pretty extensively these days, but it’s not a simple situation that reconciles easily. I think Mark Raybourne would like to establish it like some kind of ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ maxim, some profound and single-sided truth, the kind of insight you embroider into a sampler and frame for your wall. ‘You can’t get close to people and push them away at the same time’ or something like that.
The example situation that my mind keeps harkening back to is fall of ‘79, University of New Mexico, the semester just before I came out. Unlike a lot of other places and times prior to that, where I’d been harassed and attacked, ridiculed for being femme and called queer and faggot and all that, the UNM students had mostly been pretty non-judgmental and accepting. Several of them came right up to me and told me so. They’d say things like, “If you can accept yourself, you’ll find that other people are ready to accept you as you are.” The central problem was that most of them perceived me as a shy gay guy who was uptight and in denial about it and still in the closet, but freaking out. That’s the pattern they had some familiarity with; it was the phenomenon they knew about.
I didn’t have a handle on my difference yet myself, I just knew their tolerant reaction made me really uncomfortable. That particular acceptance wasn’t letting me be myself, it was pushing me into something. Or towards something. That sounds homophobic, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t gay male people who were doing the pushing here. Think about that. I was being pushed towards thinking of myself as either gay or else embracing straight-plus-masculine, the only alternative.
By the time spring rolled around, everything was different; I was cheerfully telling people “I’m actually not a gay guy, I’m a sissy, like the opposite of a tomboy. Think of me as one of the girls except I happen to be male. It’s similar in some ways to being gay, but also different.” But I couldn’t have told them that in the fall. Things hadn’t clicked into place for me yet.
So sometimes it is necessary for me to tug on people to pull them closer with one hand, while pushing back at them with the other. A type of ‘yes, but’ reaction to what they are thinking about me and how they are behaving towards me. I mean, sure, if people are being hostile and judgmental, I don’t need to bother with them and their opinion of me doesn’t matter. I know I don’t deserve that. And I don’t even hate them for it any more—they’re messed up and their heads are full of twisted notions and lots of avoidance. There’s some creepy horror movie version of us that they’re scared of, and it isn’t even us they’re scared of, it’s their own weird horror movie shit. At the opposite extreme, if people are taking time to really get me and understand me, I do care and their thoughts do matter. But so much of the time it’s somewhere in between those positions. Not closed off to me but seeing me in skewed ways, filtered through assumptions and attitudes.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
That small animated nurse with the freckles is on the phone with someone who has a loud boomy voice, and I can hear him complaining about something on his bill. Someone must have transferred a call to the wrong line. I make eye contact with her and find myself smiling. God she’s cute. What was her name? Patty? She rolls her eyes and holds the phone farther from her ear. “Sir, that’s not my jurisdiction. You need to call back....”
I give her a nod and attempt a wry and sophisticated cynical smirk.
In a chromium rack on the counter, manila folders stand up with plastic tabs that have our names on them — Noelle’s, mine, Ellen’s, Jake’s, Ronald’s...
The nurse finally manages to get off the phone and says something to her colleague about needing a break. Colleague replies “See you in a bit, Penelope”, which gives me her name. Oh yeah, and I think Gary called her Penny, that’s the name I heard. Hey, I was close. We end up walking together down the hall.
With plastic trays and stainless steel utensils and napkins in hand, we point at hash browns and sausages and the counter person dishes out what we’ve chosen. “I’m curious about something”, I mention to her. “When this place was being described to me, one of the things they said would be part of the experience would be an examination of nutrition and vitamins and electrolytes and all that stuff, how the things that we eat affect how our brains work. I was in nursing school before I got here, studying to be an LPN, and I really liked the classwork ... anyway, it doesn’t seem like they do any of that here as a class, I mean it’s not on my schedule and I haven’t seen anything like that on anyone else’s.”
“No, I mean we have a dietician who sets guidelines they use in meal planning. But you’re right, there’s no instruction. Did you like nursing?”
“I liked a lot of things about it. I liked being a member of the nursing team, and I liked the patients.”
“Think you’ll go back to it?”
“I have been thinking about that...but...I don’t think caring for people on a physical-body level is what I’m best suited for. The biggest problem was feeling like I was invading people’s space and interfering with their autonomy. I had a patient die once while I was at lunch. I took his vitals and gave him his meds, went to lunch, came back and he wasn’t breathing, no pulse. It wasn’t unexpected, congestive heart failure and a DNR order, so it was just a matter of when. Anyway, I asked my nursing instructor ‘What do I do now?’, and she said after I report it to the ward supervisor, if I could clean him up for the family, that would be good. So as I’m giving him a bed bath and rolling him over and arranging, I realize how much easier these things are when the person is dead. Because then I’m not worried that I’m bothering him, you know? Anyway, I think maybe when you feel like it’s inconvenient that the rest of your patients aren’t all dead, that could be a sign that nursing might not be where you belong.”
* * *
I walk past the piano and down the corridor to the doors to recreation. Sun glares down out of a pale blue sky. Texas hot and dry. Same as it ever was... yeah thanks, David Byrne.
Many of the other residents are dressed more sensibly than I am. George and Ronald are in cutoff jean shorts; Valerie has nylon shorts with piping. All I brought were full-length pants.
”Hey everybody”, Joanne greets. She’s attired in dark rose spandex and she has very nice shapes. “Today I want us to take turns running a lap around the track. I’m going to time you, and I want you each to try to do your run as close to exactly three minutes as possible. That’s not all that fast but it can be a challenge if you’re not used to running.”
I feel like moving; I’m restless and I’ve got the urge to walk for hours, which is my favorite way to let the back of my head process stuff and sort things out. Instead, I shuffle and stand and wait my turn with the others.
I’m not the first person to whom Joanne calls out, “You’re going faster than pace. Pull it back a bit”, and I’m also not the last. The speed she’s picked for us is just barely faster than a brisk stride. Awkward, too slow to run, too fast to walk. Maybe it’s useful to exercise this weird gait but it’s unpleasant.
Ronald just ignores Joanne and runs at a much faster speed. “I don’t care, I used to run track, c’mon Joanne, this isn’t fun!” Then Valerie clowns around, running backwards part of the way, finally sprinting to the end. Mutiny.
”Well, I’m going to run around the outside perimeter”, I point.
”Couldn’t you just do jumping jacks or something?”, Joanne suggests. She’s admittedly cute in her stretchy clothes. Male sexuality is annoyingly stupid. I don’t like Joanne. She flattens my ears, I don’t know why. I do like the way she looks. I don’t like how that makes me feel.
”I’d rather cover some ground”, I reply, then take off at a lope. Enough other people aren’t following instructions that I don’t figure my own insurrection will matter.
Initially, I run around the outside border of the recreation space, the tennis courts and track and ballfield area. After two laps of that, I widen out and run along the inside edge of the fence that encloses the undeveloped area of the hospital property with trees and underbrush. Things had been cut back to put in the fence, but it means hopping over dead branches and leaping over boulders, so it’s more of a cross-country run.
Joanne yells out to me. As I come around the building side of the rec area, she waits in front and I slow to a stop. “I’d really rather you didn’t get that far away”, she tells me.
* * *
I take my customary seat in Mark’s office. He comes around and briefly clasps my shoulders in a greeting-hug. I think he’s sincere about wanting to be a caring counselor-person. I’ve thrown a lot at him, honestly. He’s still here, trying.
“You got out and then you decided to come back in”, he says, stating the somewhat obvious. “What do you think you learned from those events?”
“The important thing here is that I get to be the one to decide how I’m going to spend my time. Even when I’m showing up for all the things that are on my schedule, that’s me deciding to go along with that, and I don’t have to. Speaking of which, by the way, I still have AA and NA on my schedule, and as I’ve told you, I don’t think they’re relevant to me and I’d like them taken off. I get that not being an alcoholic or a drug abuser doesn’t mean I don’t need help to come to terms with how I’m living my life, but if I accept that, I’m still not a drug addict or an alcoholic.”
“I see your point, but the twelve step programs aren’t on your schedule because you have a drug or alcohol problem. That may be what they’re mostly focused on, but you can probably get something out of them anyway, and apply them to your own situation. Everyone here is signed up for AA and NA. I can ask, and see what your treatment team thinks, but we don’t want to start a mad rush for everyone dropping sessions that they probably need, so I can’t make you any promises. Meanwhile, please keep attending.”
I look back at him, noncommittal.
“I’ve noticed”, Mark comments, “that you take a certain pride in being immune to other people’s opinions. What I want you to think about, is that it may not be all positive, this not caring what other people think. You’re going to find it hard to bridge gaps and connect with people if you don’t give a shit about how they feel.”
I am thinking about that pretty extensively these days, but it’s not a simple situation that reconciles easily. I think Mark Raybourne would like to establish it like some kind of ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ maxim, some profound and single-sided truth, the kind of insight you embroider into a sampler and frame for your wall. ‘You can’t get close to people and push them away at the same time’ or something like that.
The example situation that my mind keeps harkening back to is fall of ‘79, University of New Mexico, the semester just before I came out. Unlike a lot of other places and times prior to that, where I’d been harassed and attacked, ridiculed for being femme and called queer and faggot and all that, the UNM students had mostly been pretty non-judgmental and accepting. Several of them came right up to me and told me so. They’d say things like, “If you can accept yourself, you’ll find that other people are ready to accept you as you are.” The central problem was that most of them perceived me as a shy gay guy who was uptight and in denial about it and still in the closet, but freaking out. That’s the pattern they had some familiarity with; it was the phenomenon they knew about.
I didn’t have a handle on my difference yet myself, I just knew their tolerant reaction made me really uncomfortable. That particular acceptance wasn’t letting me be myself, it was pushing me into something. Or towards something. That sounds homophobic, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t gay male people who were doing the pushing here. Think about that. I was being pushed towards thinking of myself as either gay or else embracing straight-plus-masculine, the only alternative.
By the time spring rolled around, everything was different; I was cheerfully telling people “I’m actually not a gay guy, I’m a sissy, like the opposite of a tomboy. Think of me as one of the girls except I happen to be male. It’s similar in some ways to being gay, but also different.” But I couldn’t have told them that in the fall. Things hadn’t clicked into place for me yet.
So sometimes it is necessary for me to tug on people to pull them closer with one hand, while pushing back at them with the other. A type of ‘yes, but’ reaction to what they are thinking about me and how they are behaving towards me. I mean, sure, if people are being hostile and judgmental, I don’t need to bother with them and their opinion of me doesn’t matter. I know I don’t deserve that. And I don’t even hate them for it any more—they’re messed up and their heads are full of twisted notions and lots of avoidance. There’s some creepy horror movie version of us that they’re scared of, and it isn’t even us they’re scared of, it’s their own weird horror movie shit. At the opposite extreme, if people are taking time to really get me and understand me, I do care and their thoughts do matter. But so much of the time it’s somewhere in between those positions. Not closed off to me but seeing me in skewed ways, filtered through assumptions and attitudes.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Afternoon group therapy. Dr. Barnes begins with the announcement that Joe is ready to transition to the outside world. “Joe was Unit Leader last spring, and he has remained involved in everybody’s progress. We had some serious mountains to climb, didn’t we, guy? Hey, there were times when you carried a black cloud over your head everywhere you went. Thought you hated us, hated this place, and hated the man in the mirror the most. But I hope you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished. We’re proud of you. C’mon, bring it in!”
Joe steps forward somewhat awkwardly and Barnes embraces him and administers a couple fist-pounds to the back.
Dr. Barnes congratulates some other people who are being advanced to a higher level and comments on various people’s progress. In due course he comes to me.
“In Derek’s situation, we’ve seen the arrival of a critical juncture, a sort of climactic moment after several days of tension and buildup. First, there was his stated dismissal of my qualifications, and I think along with that, his disbelief that this community had anything to offer him. A stance that upset me, as you all saw, because I really believe that we do. Then he listened as we made our case for Elk Meadow being worth a gamble, and to his great credit he set aside his cynicism and disbelief and opted for a new beginning. That takes courage, and we should all applaud him for that.” I get my applause.
Dr. Barnes continues, “Now, Derek, I want to ask you to consider something. On your door, you have those handmade posters or whatever you call them. I don’t think I’m being unfair if I describe those as coming from a position of suspicion and distrust. That doesn’t mean you didn’t have any legitimate reason to express that, but as you have heard, they have felt to many of the other residents as a hostile attack on them, and a pushing away of the community. If we’re truly to start fresh and begin again with each other, perhaps they don’t need to remain on your door.”
Annoying. I’m not seeing a noticeable shift in the institution’s behavior. I get reintroduced as Dr. Barnes’ protégé, but immediately I’m asked for concessions. Still, everyone has seen and read what’s on my door, so they’ve accomplished their original goal. At this point keeping them up is akin to keeping a brand going, and I suppose I can’t expect unilateral changes. And I could choose to go first. Dr. Barnes and his staff should know by now that I’m not going to drink any cult leader Kool-Aid no matter what.
I take the materials down from my door before I go to bed that night.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Joe steps forward somewhat awkwardly and Barnes embraces him and administers a couple fist-pounds to the back.
Dr. Barnes congratulates some other people who are being advanced to a higher level and comments on various people’s progress. In due course he comes to me.
“In Derek’s situation, we’ve seen the arrival of a critical juncture, a sort of climactic moment after several days of tension and buildup. First, there was his stated dismissal of my qualifications, and I think along with that, his disbelief that this community had anything to offer him. A stance that upset me, as you all saw, because I really believe that we do. Then he listened as we made our case for Elk Meadow being worth a gamble, and to his great credit he set aside his cynicism and disbelief and opted for a new beginning. That takes courage, and we should all applaud him for that.” I get my applause.
Dr. Barnes continues, “Now, Derek, I want to ask you to consider something. On your door, you have those handmade posters or whatever you call them. I don’t think I’m being unfair if I describe those as coming from a position of suspicion and distrust. That doesn’t mean you didn’t have any legitimate reason to express that, but as you have heard, they have felt to many of the other residents as a hostile attack on them, and a pushing away of the community. If we’re truly to start fresh and begin again with each other, perhaps they don’t need to remain on your door.”
Annoying. I’m not seeing a noticeable shift in the institution’s behavior. I get reintroduced as Dr. Barnes’ protégé, but immediately I’m asked for concessions. Still, everyone has seen and read what’s on my door, so they’ve accomplished their original goal. At this point keeping them up is akin to keeping a brand going, and I suppose I can’t expect unilateral changes. And I could choose to go first. Dr. Barnes and his staff should know by now that I’m not going to drink any cult leader Kool-Aid no matter what.
I take the materials down from my door before I go to bed that night.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Jeremy signals the sense of a question mark, turning those big hands palms upward and then outward. “So what do you think is causing this, this difficulty in communicating? You make the effort. And you don't think people are deliberately tuning you out.” He's expressive with his long gangly arms; definitely a good communicator himself.
“I don't know”, I reply, “that's part of the frustration. Dr. Barnes and some of the counselors are always telling me I'm intellectualizing. But they do it too, I mean concepts like alcoholism and being in denial, those are all intellectual concepts, it's just that people are already familiar with them. Whoever explained those concepts for the first time had to lay out what they meant by those terms, they're abstractions. Well, when I try to do that, it's really difficult to get people to listen long enough to see if I'm making sense.”
“I've got an idea”, Marie tells me. “Let’s set up a scenario...”
Jeremy and Marie script a new drama setup, assigning Noelle to play me and a handful of others to represent the people I try to speak to. Jeremy gives instructions to Joe and Jake and Valerie: “Joe, you start off complaining... I know, complain that your children won’t do their chores around the house. You other folks try to give him advice. Then Noelle, as Derek, will have something to say.”
Meanwhile, Marie is whispering to Noelle, and the two confer conspiratorially, glancing over at me, scheming, Marie's sandy-honey hair bobbing next to Noelle's short brown cropped head.
Lights, camera, action. Marie wields the VHS recorder.
“These kids”, Joe states, “I love them but they’re driving me nuts! They won’t lift a hand around the place, they’re lazy and irresponsible!”
“Well, are they getting an allowance?”, Jake asks. “Cut them off until they pitch in!”
Valerie suggests, “Have you sat down with them and tried to talk with them about it when you aren’t mad at them?”
“I talk, but it goes in one ear and out the other!”, Joe replies.
“I have some important wisdom to offer you”, states Noelle-as-Derek, walking in with an arrogant strut. “Children and chores both appear in front of us but we can’t project the synthesis. Illusions can create that for us in our thoughts, and we invent theories but never analyze the intellectuals because we’re too busy in concrete. There are concepts! Chores have meaning. But only on Fridays! Do you understand why? Have you considered the cognitive? You can be a discrepancy!”
Joe, Valerie, and Jake look at each other in cartoon confusion, putting on bewildered faces and shrugging. Then Valerie shakes her head and turns her back to Noelle-Derek and continues what she was previously saying to Joe, “Maybe if you made a chore list and posted it on the wall.”
I feel a strong hot flash of anger. I’ve opened myself up to these people! I get mocked and ridiculed often enough without it coming from people I’ve let in. And I most certainly do not go around pretending I have something to say just to spout incoherent word soup at people! Then, amazingly, I find myself giggling. Yes, that’s exactly how people act, like I’d just said something that made no sense at all!
“That was beautiful”, Jake pronounces. “She’s got you nailed.”
“Derek”, Jeremy says, “I’d like you to reflect back what you’re feeling after watching that.”
“Well...”, I begin, “I do have an ego stake in thinking I have something important to say. One thing that’s a bit of a hot button for me, I guess, is when people think I’m just trying to sound smart and impress people. Like that poster that people used to have, ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit’. I’m not playing that game, I’m not doing this to look smart. Promise. I don’t speak up unless I think I actually have something to say. But I admit that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to be regarded as smart. Or wise.”
“That may be”, Valerie says, “but sometimes you say stuff that sounds like what Noelle just said. You ever stop to think it might make other people feel dumb? It’s like ‘What’d he just say? Did you get that? No, me either, I guess we’re too stoooopid to understand him’. So maybe it feels like that’s something you do on purpose. Even if it’s not.”
“Yeah, man”, Jake agrees, “we got one of them there ego stakes in this too, you know”, he says, making quotation marks with his fingers. “You could maybe work on saying what you want to say without using the most college level words you can come up with.”
“Well, I don’t do that on purpose either. A lot of time I’m trying to be precise. Words and phrases that don’t get used by people as often can sometimes be very exact in what they mean. Like latching onto an idea with a set of surgical clamps, you got a really precise hold. Everyday words get stretched to mean a wider range of things, because they get so much use. And they also, a lot of the time, they take on additional implications, a sort of package deal, and if you don’t want to include stuff that’s associated, especially if you’re trying to call those assumptions into question, you want a clinically detached kind of word. And I think in those words. I don’t have to rummage around in my head for them. To say it in simpler language, that would require searching for the right words.”
Noelle nods and says, “Yeah, but if your problem is you’re not getting through to people, maybe that’s what you’ve got to do. Take time to find the right simpler words and bring it down to earth.”
* * *
I end up sitting across from Valerie in the cafeteria after psychodrama lets out. “I’ve noticed something about you”, she tells me. “You don’t get all upset and bent out of shape when somebody tells you something right to your face that’s not quite what you want to hear. But you act like nobody’s done that very often. Are you like an only child and your friends don’t set you straight and shit?”
“I’ve got a younger sister”, I answer. “But it’s like you said about your own sister the other day, we weren’t very close growing up either. When I was a kid, I wanted to be her older brother and I guess I wanted her to look up to me and let me take care of her, but she never wanted that...she probably wouldn’t have put up with it from anyone else if they’d been her older sister or brother, either, though, she was always ‘No, I can do it myself, I don’t need help’, but yeah, anyway, I felt pretty pushed away from early on”.
“That’s kinda unusual, I think it’s more often the younger kid who gets pushed away.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. So for once in my life I’m an exception.”
Valerie grins.
Anyway, once she was old enough to go to school, she had more friends than I did. I was the weird brainy one, she was the more popular one that people liked. We didn’t really have the kind of relationship where either of us could tell the other one something and not have them on edge like this was maybe an attack. I think it’s fair to say we cared about each other but... we didn’t trust each other entirely.”
Valerie nods. “Me and my sister got to be like that. Not so much originally, it was more like we were always trying to outdo each other, but when I was in high school was when things really went sour. She knew the stuff I was doing before anyone else, and she started thinking of me as a fuckup.”
We eat for a while in silence. I think about all those long years in elementary school and junior high and high school.
“I’m tired of always being an outsider”, I say to Valerie. “I think I’m getting better at being with people and not thinking they’re out to get me, but it’s always kind of hovering there, in the background, that they could be trying to hurt me, because people did, a lot, and maybe that’s never going to completely go away.”
Valerie tightens her lip and nods slowly. “Trust is hard.”
* * *
"Can you push up your sleeve a bit more...", the nurse says to Joe. She’s not one of the nurses who were on shift when I came back from the Harrisons, but I think I might have met her on that first long evening when I came in. She has red hair with a tinge of brown in it, a scattering of freckles, and she’s small and moves rapidly. I watch as she pumps the blood pressure cuff and records Joe’s numbers. It's Sunday. Routine vital signs for our unit. "Okay, that's good”, she tells him. “Hey, so how're you doing? I haven’t seen you in about a week."
Joe nods and smiles. "I think things are working out pretty good, I guess. They don't always tell me, but I get the feeling."
She jots down some more notes in her chart and Joe stands up; I’m in line behind him, so it will be my turn next.
Joe continues, "You really got to be all in on the program if you wanna get something out of being here, I’ve always been onboard with that... but lately I’ve been kind of thinking you can't be going around all worried and wondering about how well you're doing because that's like not believing in the program. I'm really into positivity at the moment. Like sooner or later you gotta go out that door."
I'm momentarily thinking he means the door we found and opened yesterday afternoon. Joe had been there with me, along with several others, but I was the only one who actually went out.
Then I reinterpret Joe’s statement — Oh, I bet he means he's expecting to be discharged soon and be on his way. He’s been all-in on Elk Meadow since I first met him, total cheerleader for the place, even more than Ronald and Ellen, but yeah, once he’s out of here he can’t exactly be glancing at them for some kinds of thumbs-up approval.
Gary Stevens comes around the corner, his shoes making a little squeak on the linoleum tiles, and he slips a resident’s file into the file rack on the counter. The animated nurse gives me a little nod and gestures to the chair, then glances back over her shoulder at Gary. “You getting off-shift?”, she says. “You might want to stay off the Sam Houston, there was some kind of pileup in the outbound lane.”
“Yeah, thanks Penny. Long day. Be glad to put my feet up.” He heads down the hallway.
Penny the nurse turns to me where I’m now seated. “Welcome back. Umm, don’t tell anyone, but I endorse playing hookey now and then. I think I’m due for making a run for it myself!”, she adds with a wink and a grin. Co-conspirators, she and I. I guess word has gotten around about my little outing.
She wraps the Prestige Sphygmomanometer (same model of blood pressure cuff we used in Athens Hospital) around my upper arm, pulls the outer layer velcro down smoothly to the matching inner section, thumbs the release wheel closed, and pumps with fast squeezes. “How’re you feeling? Any leftover itches and sneezes from being outdoors? You said before that you’ve got respiratory allergies, right? That must suck in the summer with the jimson weed everywhere. And you came in from out of state, didn’t you?” She shakes her head. “So you’re not used to it. That stuff’s bad. I get red eyes from it myself.”
I’m impressed with how she can be casual and friendly with everyone and so totally efficient taking down these routine measurements and herding everyone through the process without being pushy about it. And she remembers people.
I think I could be good at some of this stuff myself. I realize as I sit there watching her scribble down my results that I’m not entirely ready to let go of the notion that I could be a nurse. Although I couldn’t do what she’s doing now. I’d have to learn how to recognize people by appearance. But Ms. O’Neil said I had a good rapport with my patients, that they reported that I was kind and listened to them. And I understand the biology and I’m good with words, so I can follow complex instructions and my charting is clear and has good details. As my Dad says, I’ve got to do something. I have to think on this some more.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
“I don't know”, I reply, “that's part of the frustration. Dr. Barnes and some of the counselors are always telling me I'm intellectualizing. But they do it too, I mean concepts like alcoholism and being in denial, those are all intellectual concepts, it's just that people are already familiar with them. Whoever explained those concepts for the first time had to lay out what they meant by those terms, they're abstractions. Well, when I try to do that, it's really difficult to get people to listen long enough to see if I'm making sense.”
“I've got an idea”, Marie tells me. “Let’s set up a scenario...”
Jeremy and Marie script a new drama setup, assigning Noelle to play me and a handful of others to represent the people I try to speak to. Jeremy gives instructions to Joe and Jake and Valerie: “Joe, you start off complaining... I know, complain that your children won’t do their chores around the house. You other folks try to give him advice. Then Noelle, as Derek, will have something to say.”
Meanwhile, Marie is whispering to Noelle, and the two confer conspiratorially, glancing over at me, scheming, Marie's sandy-honey hair bobbing next to Noelle's short brown cropped head.
Lights, camera, action. Marie wields the VHS recorder.
“These kids”, Joe states, “I love them but they’re driving me nuts! They won’t lift a hand around the place, they’re lazy and irresponsible!”
“Well, are they getting an allowance?”, Jake asks. “Cut them off until they pitch in!”
Valerie suggests, “Have you sat down with them and tried to talk with them about it when you aren’t mad at them?”
“I talk, but it goes in one ear and out the other!”, Joe replies.
“I have some important wisdom to offer you”, states Noelle-as-Derek, walking in with an arrogant strut. “Children and chores both appear in front of us but we can’t project the synthesis. Illusions can create that for us in our thoughts, and we invent theories but never analyze the intellectuals because we’re too busy in concrete. There are concepts! Chores have meaning. But only on Fridays! Do you understand why? Have you considered the cognitive? You can be a discrepancy!”
Joe, Valerie, and Jake look at each other in cartoon confusion, putting on bewildered faces and shrugging. Then Valerie shakes her head and turns her back to Noelle-Derek and continues what she was previously saying to Joe, “Maybe if you made a chore list and posted it on the wall.”
I feel a strong hot flash of anger. I’ve opened myself up to these people! I get mocked and ridiculed often enough without it coming from people I’ve let in. And I most certainly do not go around pretending I have something to say just to spout incoherent word soup at people! Then, amazingly, I find myself giggling. Yes, that’s exactly how people act, like I’d just said something that made no sense at all!
“That was beautiful”, Jake pronounces. “She’s got you nailed.”
“Derek”, Jeremy says, “I’d like you to reflect back what you’re feeling after watching that.”
“Well...”, I begin, “I do have an ego stake in thinking I have something important to say. One thing that’s a bit of a hot button for me, I guess, is when people think I’m just trying to sound smart and impress people. Like that poster that people used to have, ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit’. I’m not playing that game, I’m not doing this to look smart. Promise. I don’t speak up unless I think I actually have something to say. But I admit that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to be regarded as smart. Or wise.”
“That may be”, Valerie says, “but sometimes you say stuff that sounds like what Noelle just said. You ever stop to think it might make other people feel dumb? It’s like ‘What’d he just say? Did you get that? No, me either, I guess we’re too stoooopid to understand him’. So maybe it feels like that’s something you do on purpose. Even if it’s not.”
“Yeah, man”, Jake agrees, “we got one of them there ego stakes in this too, you know”, he says, making quotation marks with his fingers. “You could maybe work on saying what you want to say without using the most college level words you can come up with.”
“Well, I don’t do that on purpose either. A lot of time I’m trying to be precise. Words and phrases that don’t get used by people as often can sometimes be very exact in what they mean. Like latching onto an idea with a set of surgical clamps, you got a really precise hold. Everyday words get stretched to mean a wider range of things, because they get so much use. And they also, a lot of the time, they take on additional implications, a sort of package deal, and if you don’t want to include stuff that’s associated, especially if you’re trying to call those assumptions into question, you want a clinically detached kind of word. And I think in those words. I don’t have to rummage around in my head for them. To say it in simpler language, that would require searching for the right words.”
Noelle nods and says, “Yeah, but if your problem is you’re not getting through to people, maybe that’s what you’ve got to do. Take time to find the right simpler words and bring it down to earth.”
* * *
I end up sitting across from Valerie in the cafeteria after psychodrama lets out. “I’ve noticed something about you”, she tells me. “You don’t get all upset and bent out of shape when somebody tells you something right to your face that’s not quite what you want to hear. But you act like nobody’s done that very often. Are you like an only child and your friends don’t set you straight and shit?”
“I’ve got a younger sister”, I answer. “But it’s like you said about your own sister the other day, we weren’t very close growing up either. When I was a kid, I wanted to be her older brother and I guess I wanted her to look up to me and let me take care of her, but she never wanted that...she probably wouldn’t have put up with it from anyone else if they’d been her older sister or brother, either, though, she was always ‘No, I can do it myself, I don’t need help’, but yeah, anyway, I felt pretty pushed away from early on”.
“That’s kinda unusual, I think it’s more often the younger kid who gets pushed away.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. So for once in my life I’m an exception.”
Valerie grins.
Anyway, once she was old enough to go to school, she had more friends than I did. I was the weird brainy one, she was the more popular one that people liked. We didn’t really have the kind of relationship where either of us could tell the other one something and not have them on edge like this was maybe an attack. I think it’s fair to say we cared about each other but... we didn’t trust each other entirely.”
Valerie nods. “Me and my sister got to be like that. Not so much originally, it was more like we were always trying to outdo each other, but when I was in high school was when things really went sour. She knew the stuff I was doing before anyone else, and she started thinking of me as a fuckup.”
We eat for a while in silence. I think about all those long years in elementary school and junior high and high school.
“I’m tired of always being an outsider”, I say to Valerie. “I think I’m getting better at being with people and not thinking they’re out to get me, but it’s always kind of hovering there, in the background, that they could be trying to hurt me, because people did, a lot, and maybe that’s never going to completely go away.”
Valerie tightens her lip and nods slowly. “Trust is hard.”
* * *
"Can you push up your sleeve a bit more...", the nurse says to Joe. She’s not one of the nurses who were on shift when I came back from the Harrisons, but I think I might have met her on that first long evening when I came in. She has red hair with a tinge of brown in it, a scattering of freckles, and she’s small and moves rapidly. I watch as she pumps the blood pressure cuff and records Joe’s numbers. It's Sunday. Routine vital signs for our unit. "Okay, that's good”, she tells him. “Hey, so how're you doing? I haven’t seen you in about a week."
Joe nods and smiles. "I think things are working out pretty good, I guess. They don't always tell me, but I get the feeling."
She jots down some more notes in her chart and Joe stands up; I’m in line behind him, so it will be my turn next.
Joe continues, "You really got to be all in on the program if you wanna get something out of being here, I’ve always been onboard with that... but lately I’ve been kind of thinking you can't be going around all worried and wondering about how well you're doing because that's like not believing in the program. I'm really into positivity at the moment. Like sooner or later you gotta go out that door."
I'm momentarily thinking he means the door we found and opened yesterday afternoon. Joe had been there with me, along with several others, but I was the only one who actually went out.
Then I reinterpret Joe’s statement — Oh, I bet he means he's expecting to be discharged soon and be on his way. He’s been all-in on Elk Meadow since I first met him, total cheerleader for the place, even more than Ronald and Ellen, but yeah, once he’s out of here he can’t exactly be glancing at them for some kinds of thumbs-up approval.
Gary Stevens comes around the corner, his shoes making a little squeak on the linoleum tiles, and he slips a resident’s file into the file rack on the counter. The animated nurse gives me a little nod and gestures to the chair, then glances back over her shoulder at Gary. “You getting off-shift?”, she says. “You might want to stay off the Sam Houston, there was some kind of pileup in the outbound lane.”
“Yeah, thanks Penny. Long day. Be glad to put my feet up.” He heads down the hallway.
Penny the nurse turns to me where I’m now seated. “Welcome back. Umm, don’t tell anyone, but I endorse playing hookey now and then. I think I’m due for making a run for it myself!”, she adds with a wink and a grin. Co-conspirators, she and I. I guess word has gotten around about my little outing.
She wraps the Prestige Sphygmomanometer (same model of blood pressure cuff we used in Athens Hospital) around my upper arm, pulls the outer layer velcro down smoothly to the matching inner section, thumbs the release wheel closed, and pumps with fast squeezes. “How’re you feeling? Any leftover itches and sneezes from being outdoors? You said before that you’ve got respiratory allergies, right? That must suck in the summer with the jimson weed everywhere. And you came in from out of state, didn’t you?” She shakes her head. “So you’re not used to it. That stuff’s bad. I get red eyes from it myself.”
I’m impressed with how she can be casual and friendly with everyone and so totally efficient taking down these routine measurements and herding everyone through the process without being pushy about it. And she remembers people.
I think I could be good at some of this stuff myself. I realize as I sit there watching her scribble down my results that I’m not entirely ready to let go of the notion that I could be a nurse. Although I couldn’t do what she’s doing now. I’d have to learn how to recognize people by appearance. But Ms. O’Neil said I had a good rapport with my patients, that they reported that I was kind and listened to them. And I understand the biology and I’m good with words, so I can follow complex instructions and my charting is clear and has good details. As my Dad says, I’ve got to do something. I have to think on this some more.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
= July 25, 1982 (Day Seven) =
A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”
I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.
“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention.
Lowers his voice. It’s still resonant.
“For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek here has been trying to tell us that — that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of anyone here at Elk Meadow that counts...”
Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me, conjuring with his posture. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that a man has to live with.”
Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.
“I agree with you”, I tell him, “about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards. But what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and goals for myself, and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults and defenses, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me all my life in the name of proving I’m a man, and frankly I’m tired of that stuff. And I do get to talk back about it.”
“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”
Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did and don’t realize it.
“I’m not saying that you are”, Barnes continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a fashion that doesn’t leave you open to failure? Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals. Hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”
“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing fine in all my courses, but I also started keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room. I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. When I was a kid, I always used to think I was better than them. I mean...the girls were definitely better than the boys, and here’s me joining: I’m with the girls, and we’re better. I’m a sissy, just like some girls are tomboys. And I always have been, and it’s not a problem. At least in and of itself. But to your other point, yes, I think I have other things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.
“Well, I suggest you...let’s see, how did you put it the other day? Treat that as your premise but consider the possibility that I might be on to something here. That’s all I’m asking.”
* * *
So Barnes wants to talk about gender.
I do want to have this conversation that he’s pushing, but I’m still struggling to put it all into words that express all of what I want to say. And although I can argue my side, I’d really prefer not to have this conversation adversarially.
I didn’t go through my elementary and high school years thinking that the lack of acceptance and the mean-spirited hostility were all due to me being more like one of the girls than a boy is supposed to be. It looks that way to me now, but that’s a retroactive interpretation.
It’s a theory; it seems to make sense of my life, and it fits the facts as I know or remember them, but my mind saying it fits the facts, that’s also an interpretation, isn’t it?
Under the right circumstances, I could talk about this with people, including the possibility that I’ve latched onto this theory because it lets me feel like I’m making sense of things, but that it isn’t necessarily right, the most valid interpretation. And including the possibility that I’ve latched onto it because it absolves me of being some kind of horrid unlikeable selfish disgusting person whose hideous personality and creepiness and atrocious social skills are the real reason almost nobody liked me when I was growing up, and everyone picked on me and called me names and so on.
Under the right circumstances, I could talk about all that, but it seems unlikely to happen in here. Which is quite sad.
But everyone in this place who pokes into other people’s motivations and rationales for things is in the habit of making their pokes as if from a position of absolute certainty. Telling the other that this is how it is and if you don’t agree you’re in denial.
So that provokes my own protective sense that my uncertainty is more of a technicality than a worried fearful state of not knowing. Because it does seem to fit the facts and explain things, it’s the model of reality from which I operate, and I have as much confidence in mine as you folks have in yours, dammit, and I probably have better reason for the confidence.
Back before I had this understanding of myself, I was a long way from confident. And it showed, and that combination of being different and uncertain really set me up for a lot of hostility and ridicule. Now I have this clear vision, this explanation, and I come across as quite confident, perhaps pushing into outright arrogance. Arrogance would be worrisome, I mean if I became unwilling to consider any possibility that I might be wrong or that I needed to examine my behavior or my beliefs. I don’t want that to happen. When you stop questioning what you believe, you stop learning things.
But, anyway, sure, I get defensive. I’m pretty sure I can lay that defensiveness down. I can be open to questioning it all. Or I could be.
But in this place, that feels too much like it would be unilateral disarmament or something.
* * *
I am meandering down the hall with the notion of seeing who else is hanging out in the cafeteria area. Barnes’ redheaded assistant Irma is coming my direction and calls out, “Hey...you, hold on a minute.” So I do. She strides towards me to such close range that I back up a step.
“I know you think you’re a fucking smartass”, she snarls. “You ever think for one moment that maybe we got something good here and you’re messing it up? I seen lots of people get their shit together in here, and I don’t know what your thing is, but you’re ruining things up for everybody. You ever think of that?” She’s authoritatively crisp and a bit scary, glowering at me in revulsion. The inside out of her gameshow-host morning-meeting persona, but she’s still an effective people pusher. Her mouth twitches. Scowling, waiting for a reaction.
I shuffle backwards and to the side and lean against the wall, but I look directly back at her. “You really believe in this place, huh? I can see both good and bad things happening in here, but there’s a kind of ‘one size fits all’ attitude I don’t care for, and it’s too pushy and coercive in here. You can’t help people against their will, you know.”
Irma glares at me. “A lot of people don’t know what’s good for them.”
I glare back. “And you think you do? What if we don’t agree?”
“I know you think you’re charming and clever, but you’re just a disgusting pervert. How can you stand yourself? Go look in a mirror. You’re a thing, you belong in a toilet and someone should’ve flushed you a long time ago!”
Irma impales me with her eyes, mimics throwing up, and then stomps off down the hall.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”
I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.
“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention.
Lowers his voice. It’s still resonant.
“For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek here has been trying to tell us that — that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of anyone here at Elk Meadow that counts...”
Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me, conjuring with his posture. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that a man has to live with.”
Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.
“I agree with you”, I tell him, “about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards. But what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and goals for myself, and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults and defenses, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me all my life in the name of proving I’m a man, and frankly I’m tired of that stuff. And I do get to talk back about it.”
“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”
Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did and don’t realize it.
“I’m not saying that you are”, Barnes continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a fashion that doesn’t leave you open to failure? Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals. Hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”
“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing fine in all my courses, but I also started keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room. I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. When I was a kid, I always used to think I was better than them. I mean...the girls were definitely better than the boys, and here’s me joining: I’m with the girls, and we’re better. I’m a sissy, just like some girls are tomboys. And I always have been, and it’s not a problem. At least in and of itself. But to your other point, yes, I think I have other things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.
“Well, I suggest you...let’s see, how did you put it the other day? Treat that as your premise but consider the possibility that I might be on to something here. That’s all I’m asking.”
* * *
So Barnes wants to talk about gender.
I do want to have this conversation that he’s pushing, but I’m still struggling to put it all into words that express all of what I want to say. And although I can argue my side, I’d really prefer not to have this conversation adversarially.
I didn’t go through my elementary and high school years thinking that the lack of acceptance and the mean-spirited hostility were all due to me being more like one of the girls than a boy is supposed to be. It looks that way to me now, but that’s a retroactive interpretation.
It’s a theory; it seems to make sense of my life, and it fits the facts as I know or remember them, but my mind saying it fits the facts, that’s also an interpretation, isn’t it?
Under the right circumstances, I could talk about this with people, including the possibility that I’ve latched onto this theory because it lets me feel like I’m making sense of things, but that it isn’t necessarily right, the most valid interpretation. And including the possibility that I’ve latched onto it because it absolves me of being some kind of horrid unlikeable selfish disgusting person whose hideous personality and creepiness and atrocious social skills are the real reason almost nobody liked me when I was growing up, and everyone picked on me and called me names and so on.
Under the right circumstances, I could talk about all that, but it seems unlikely to happen in here. Which is quite sad.
But everyone in this place who pokes into other people’s motivations and rationales for things is in the habit of making their pokes as if from a position of absolute certainty. Telling the other that this is how it is and if you don’t agree you’re in denial.
So that provokes my own protective sense that my uncertainty is more of a technicality than a worried fearful state of not knowing. Because it does seem to fit the facts and explain things, it’s the model of reality from which I operate, and I have as much confidence in mine as you folks have in yours, dammit, and I probably have better reason for the confidence.
Back before I had this understanding of myself, I was a long way from confident. And it showed, and that combination of being different and uncertain really set me up for a lot of hostility and ridicule. Now I have this clear vision, this explanation, and I come across as quite confident, perhaps pushing into outright arrogance. Arrogance would be worrisome, I mean if I became unwilling to consider any possibility that I might be wrong or that I needed to examine my behavior or my beliefs. I don’t want that to happen. When you stop questioning what you believe, you stop learning things.
But, anyway, sure, I get defensive. I’m pretty sure I can lay that defensiveness down. I can be open to questioning it all. Or I could be.
But in this place, that feels too much like it would be unilateral disarmament or something.
* * *
I am meandering down the hall with the notion of seeing who else is hanging out in the cafeteria area. Barnes’ redheaded assistant Irma is coming my direction and calls out, “Hey...you, hold on a minute.” So I do. She strides towards me to such close range that I back up a step.
“I know you think you’re a fucking smartass”, she snarls. “You ever think for one moment that maybe we got something good here and you’re messing it up? I seen lots of people get their shit together in here, and I don’t know what your thing is, but you’re ruining things up for everybody. You ever think of that?” She’s authoritatively crisp and a bit scary, glowering at me in revulsion. The inside out of her gameshow-host morning-meeting persona, but she’s still an effective people pusher. Her mouth twitches. Scowling, waiting for a reaction.
I shuffle backwards and to the side and lean against the wall, but I look directly back at her. “You really believe in this place, huh? I can see both good and bad things happening in here, but there’s a kind of ‘one size fits all’ attitude I don’t care for, and it’s too pushy and coercive in here. You can’t help people against their will, you know.”
Irma glares at me. “A lot of people don’t know what’s good for them.”
I glare back. “And you think you do? What if we don’t agree?”
“I know you think you’re charming and clever, but you’re just a disgusting pervert. How can you stand yourself? Go look in a mirror. You’re a thing, you belong in a toilet and someone should’ve flushed you a long time ago!”
Irma impales me with her eyes, mimics throwing up, and then stomps off down the hall.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I finally get passed onto my wing, my unit. Emily, being Unit Leader, is in charge and has every opportunity to berate me, but she doesn’t. “We’re so glad you’re back”, she says.
I see Jake and April. Now I see them as a pair. It was probably right there in front of me before and I wasn’t parsing it. I do feel a mild resentment. There’s a space in my head for ‘Why not April and Derek’. I don’t mean we were destined to be and now I’m deprived, more like ‘why isn’t it ever me’. April is somewhat atypical. She has characteristics and expressions that a person might tag as more like the boys than the girls, and she kind of pushes that out there. Therefore somewhat like me on the other side of the divide. And too often when I notice someone like that, especially someone broadcasting it as a defintion of who they are, it turns out she’s only attracted to female people, so then when that’s not the case, it’s annoying that it’s often still not me, or at least someone like me, that’s she’s inclined to latch onto. Well, not their fault, April and Jake, either of them. I nod to them both. I also wave to Ronald, Noelle, and Valerie, who motion for me to join them.
Ronald is apparently addressing Noelle: “...thing you gotta realize is that men are always gonna be in competition about it, it’s that old caveman inside us, spread your seed, make as many babies as you can, but then we get all jealous and shit if our women are being all loose and easy with other men. We want the babies to be ours.”
Noelle shakes her head, her short brown bangs flying. “That’s uncool, you don’t get to have one rule for the girls and different rules for the guys. He was fucking around and I caught him at it, that’s all there is to it!”
Valerie nods, adding, “Besides, it doesn’t make sense, I mean, let’s say you’re a caveman and you’re screwing cave chicks left and right, and the other guys in your tribe are doing that, too...you don’t know which kids are yours, none of you do, and why the fuck would a caveman care?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with kids”, Noelle says, “it’s selfishness. People want to cheat but they don’t wanna be cheated on.”
“I think it’s kind of silly to worry about that”, I say. “If you care about someone and they care about you, why should it bother you if they have sex with someone else? I think the sixties flower children had it right, jealousy isn’t about love, it’s about being uptight and controlling!”
“That’s not realistic”, Noelle replies. “It feels like a gut punch, a betrayal, after you’ve trusted someone like that and then they go and do this shit behind your back.”
“Yeah, I get that”, Ronald says. “I’m not saying it isn’t a fucked-up thing to do, because it is. Just because guys act like that a lot of the time don’t mean it’s all right.”
I shake my head. “It’s only cheating if you make a promise that you won’t be sexual with anyone else. It’s a stupid promise that people shouldn’t make, because it’s an attempt to make love safe, but everyone ends up worrying there’ll be cheating, so love still isn’t safe, and then we resent being restricted and confined by the promise. I see all these people going around, like...” I switch to a cartoon voice:
“‘Oh, Love of my Life, because I love you so much, I insist that if you find yourself wanting to have sex with someone else, you won’t’...”,
then, dropping back to my regular voice, “that’s not an expression of love, that’s a demand for a sacrifice!”
Noelle scowls at me. “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, and you acting all superior like you’re above all this jealousy, I mean, can you hear yourself?”
Valerie adds, “Yeah, you do like to act like ‘this is just the way it is’, passing judgment and shit on other people, I guess you can dish it out better than you can take it.”
“Truth, bro”, Ronald says, pronouncing from that horse-face of his.
I feel my face flush hot. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I didn’t think about how that would come across. Jealousy doesn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m right about this and y’all are stupid not to agree.”
The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about thirty-five students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. Thompson and Ms. Dixon, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.
I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun too. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. Thompson spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called terpen hydrate. But then there was the TURP surgical procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). Or how to interpolate from a series of vital sign measurements. Anyway, at some point I was sitting next to her and glanced at her exactly when I heard the syllable “turp”, and I guess we both reacted as if her name was being called — and it made us giggle. And after that, in one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.
I liked my classmates and our camaraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Reena said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.
I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly-smiling dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband.” Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.
“Where’s Marjorie?”
“Well, she’s not coming.”
I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.
Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally be interested in going that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.
How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem in the same way? I mean, where these are the people that you like, the people</io> you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also sometimes attracted to them... and you want that to happen too, some of the time? What if you don’t start off making a distinction? Just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.
Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.
The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part. I’m really bad at it.
So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning manly courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.
Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even downright creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices. I mean, I never properly learned to. I’m pretty unfiltered.
It’s all rather complicated. I long ago (well, two years ago) reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. Flouncy Derek. What I really really want, though, is a chance to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I see Jake and April. Now I see them as a pair. It was probably right there in front of me before and I wasn’t parsing it. I do feel a mild resentment. There’s a space in my head for ‘Why not April and Derek’. I don’t mean we were destined to be and now I’m deprived, more like ‘why isn’t it ever me’. April is somewhat atypical. She has characteristics and expressions that a person might tag as more like the boys than the girls, and she kind of pushes that out there. Therefore somewhat like me on the other side of the divide. And too often when I notice someone like that, especially someone broadcasting it as a defintion of who they are, it turns out she’s only attracted to female people, so then when that’s not the case, it’s annoying that it’s often still not me, or at least someone like me, that’s she’s inclined to latch onto. Well, not their fault, April and Jake, either of them. I nod to them both. I also wave to Ronald, Noelle, and Valerie, who motion for me to join them.
Ronald is apparently addressing Noelle: “...thing you gotta realize is that men are always gonna be in competition about it, it’s that old caveman inside us, spread your seed, make as many babies as you can, but then we get all jealous and shit if our women are being all loose and easy with other men. We want the babies to be ours.”
Noelle shakes her head, her short brown bangs flying. “That’s uncool, you don’t get to have one rule for the girls and different rules for the guys. He was fucking around and I caught him at it, that’s all there is to it!”
Valerie nods, adding, “Besides, it doesn’t make sense, I mean, let’s say you’re a caveman and you’re screwing cave chicks left and right, and the other guys in your tribe are doing that, too...you don’t know which kids are yours, none of you do, and why the fuck would a caveman care?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with kids”, Noelle says, “it’s selfishness. People want to cheat but they don’t wanna be cheated on.”
“I think it’s kind of silly to worry about that”, I say. “If you care about someone and they care about you, why should it bother you if they have sex with someone else? I think the sixties flower children had it right, jealousy isn’t about love, it’s about being uptight and controlling!”
“That’s not realistic”, Noelle replies. “It feels like a gut punch, a betrayal, after you’ve trusted someone like that and then they go and do this shit behind your back.”
“Yeah, I get that”, Ronald says. “I’m not saying it isn’t a fucked-up thing to do, because it is. Just because guys act like that a lot of the time don’t mean it’s all right.”
I shake my head. “It’s only cheating if you make a promise that you won’t be sexual with anyone else. It’s a stupid promise that people shouldn’t make, because it’s an attempt to make love safe, but everyone ends up worrying there’ll be cheating, so love still isn’t safe, and then we resent being restricted and confined by the promise. I see all these people going around, like...” I switch to a cartoon voice:
“‘Oh, Love of my Life, because I love you so much, I insist that if you find yourself wanting to have sex with someone else, you won’t’...”,
then, dropping back to my regular voice, “that’s not an expression of love, that’s a demand for a sacrifice!”
Noelle scowls at me. “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, and you acting all superior like you’re above all this jealousy, I mean, can you hear yourself?”
Valerie adds, “Yeah, you do like to act like ‘this is just the way it is’, passing judgment and shit on other people, I guess you can dish it out better than you can take it.”
“Truth, bro”, Ronald says, pronouncing from that horse-face of his.
I feel my face flush hot. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I didn’t think about how that would come across. Jealousy doesn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m right about this and y’all are stupid not to agree.”
The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about thirty-five students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. Thompson and Ms. Dixon, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.
I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun too. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. Thompson spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called terpen hydrate. But then there was the TURP surgical procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). Or how to interpolate from a series of vital sign measurements. Anyway, at some point I was sitting next to her and glanced at her exactly when I heard the syllable “turp”, and I guess we both reacted as if her name was being called — and it made us giggle. And after that, in one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.
I liked my classmates and our camaraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Reena said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.
I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly-smiling dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband.” Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.
“Where’s Marjorie?”
“Well, she’s not coming.”
I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.
Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally be interested in going that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.
How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem in the same way? I mean, where these are the people that you like, the people</io> you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also sometimes attracted to them... and you want that to happen too, some of the time? What if you don’t start off making a distinction? Just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.
Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.
The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part. I’m really bad at it.
So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning manly courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.
Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even downright creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices. I mean, I never properly learned to. I’m pretty unfiltered.
It’s all rather complicated. I long ago (well, two years ago) reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. Flouncy Derek. What I really really want, though, is a chance to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Comments