today i decided to inbox zero all of my old email addresses with the hope that when i get back to work on Monday my admin coordinator will have done the same for my current inboxes. while doing so, it seemed as if a year ago someone liked a thing i posted. it was about doing poly, which is what got me to those inboxes anyway. an old letter or two that i had avoided reading because of past anxieties led me to reading them all calmly today. in doing so, i grieved past relationships, who i've been, and offered myself a little more space as to who i'm becoming. i wrote this letter that i will not send and instead will offer to a version of the internet that was so much more wordy:
it was 6 am, my accounts were officially over withdrawn, i'm brown, i have no job, i'm trans, my teeth are falling out which is leading to wicked migraines, i look younger than i am, and i have no health insurance. the visual/identity stuff being just as important since there's a whole lot of assumptions that were going to happen when i went to apply for benefits. that brown folks/ young folks/ transfolks and public healthcare have quite a history and that in my 4 years of advocacy i know how difficult this can be. i remembered that f on my id and my under-beard (and my reasons for keeping that f). i massaged my pressure points, made a tincture, did some breathing, took an hour nap and then went on errands.
dc medicaid explained that my unemployment paperwork is not enough to demonstrate my unemployment and that in fact, i would need a letter from my org (which no longer exists) to prove it.
after errands, i came home to my toothache tincture, a really great lunch that included greens from the garden, and a clear head.
a little dejected but not hurt and sitting in the benefits coordinator's office i came back to the same question i've intermittently wondered over the past month, "how did i get here?"
learning the neighborhoods of denver. waking up to the person i'm in love with sleeping on my shoulder. walking around the hearst castle touching columns from 2 b.c. being in a workshop with two partners and 4 of my kids. holding someone's hand and wanting them to be deeper inside of me. being unsure about how to communicate with my closest friends. smoking a bowl while watching the black keys. kissing and only being able to see mountains and the moon for miles. laying on the ground after falling off of my bike in dc night rain. being broke. being full.
so, how did i get here? a year ago, i was just trying to deal with the loneliness of san francisco and salvage a relationship that made me feel bad.
this has only been a month and i keeping coming back to, "what would 14, 17, or even 21 year old shay think about this?", would they even get it.
i am laying in bed topless in my underpants and a kitten is purring on my leg. it's warm enough, there's just enough light, and Oakland feels like the East Coast in the fall. there's very little that i can want for right now and this moment brings me back to a very specific spring day in Brooklyn we're i sat in the bathtub for hours listening to an Arts & Crafts comp and writing. a specific broken happiness that i attribute to the heart of poets, this feeling of (almost sad) wholeness. a smirking beauty.
i use punctuation more now than i did in college and perhaps i'm growing the understand their power in a different way. (yes, in such a way that it needs to be personified)
last night coming in from ikea, i told him that recently i understood Erykah Badu's "Bag Lady" in a different way than i had in the past. he asked me to "say more" his equivalent to my "what do you mean when you say that" and i tried but i don't know if i did it justice; i wanted to explain understanding the denotations better. i wanted to go on with the language i'd learned to use at Lang. the language that i learned better than i had at other points in my life but stumbled and really all i mean it is that i felt it. that "recently i was listening to it and i felt it in my chest". this was in the back of my head amongst other things last night when we were cooking and talking about comprehension and suddenly he became real. not physical, not 3d, not just that boy across the country, he'd been those things for much longer than expected. but he BECAME a person and not this idealized being.
"And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. "Passion for substances" seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. "
i think in that moment i was simultaneously in awe and broken. in that moment i felt like i knew what my hesitation was around saying i was in love with him the first time around (aside from the baggage). not that i wasn't, but that i knew i was missing something. last night i knew that i could love him completely if he'd let me. at least for a good while.
i've spent the past two weeks thinking about change and what that means exactly. Change is a constant word in my mouth and i'm not looking for it to loose spirit. Last week i spent 5 days at the 1st annual NY POC LGBT Health Summit, the week prior at an Undoing Racism Workshop either with the entire staff of SW or funded by SW. Needless to say race has been a very crucial to all of this and that my race or at least racial identity has been very crucial also. This is not to say that I don't think about race because at this point my race is like a past time to me (is that bad?). This is also not to say that at some point race went from a place of being to a place of understanding, take my first day at lang in an education class for example, that was the day i began to get it.
Needless to say i've spent the past two weeks discussing, more so listening to discussions of oppression, in terms of race, class, gender, age. All your regular liberal arts school edict. However, there are distinct differences in 1. having these conversations in rooms with primarily people of color. 2. Having a heightened awareness of these things from both personal and educational advantages. i say advantage because Lang is within itself an advantage despite other things i may or may not have chosen to be blind to because of it.
Now the problem, self-satisfaction v. guilt or perhaps responsibility to a community v. systems. So the past year and a half my largest problem has been with the idea that i feel as if my work sets my youth up to fail, of course this is a completely gross overstatement and in saying it i mean my job is to get folks from one crisis to another while encouraging support on a system that is inherently set up for failure.
The system? Public Assistance, Medicaide, SSI, the list goes on.
Failure? Because at some point if you're working you loose the ability to attain these assistances, which if you have outside social/financial support can be managable however when your are homeless and in one of the if not the highest age/race of risk for things not limited to mental illness and hiv/aids support tends to be a little less available. This is not to say I don't feel as if these systems fail folks aside from the homeless, this is to say that you either can have assistance or have a job but the assistance ideally would be help you get a place of dependency to independence instead of co-dependence. In addition to the run-around it takes and the amount of respect one looses by walking through the door or at least being treated as such.
Back to the problem, now while i feel the work i'm doing is useful in demonstrating how to properly attempt to mangage these systems and encourage dissent (okay so i just like throw that in for fun for those youth that will listen) I understand that my job is not about creating change. It is about attaining societal acceptable goals and while harm reduction adds space for non-socially acceptable goals my funders require a number of things that don't always make that possible. With that said that kind of individual change in this type of work takes years to see unless you have other resources and with the burnout rate my ass only averages another 6 months to 1 1/2 years. If i leave i understand that i'm just another absentee person in this young persons life. if i stay i become wrapped up in the logistics and protocol of an organization and while a little bit of boat rocking is acceptable i'm working on my voice and learning use it, then again i don't want to rock the boat i'd like to flip it over while handing out life jackets to specific individuals along the way. Finally, those who know me know i have a bug or more appropriately lust for movement and i've come to learn that movement doesn't always equal change. My movement however removes me from the communities that i'm building around myself and also from my youth, my movement on average is completely selfish despite that eventually it stops in a place of my working for others.
i've lived in New York for about 6 years. The longest place I've ever consistently lived my entire life and i feel the urge, it was sated by Streetwork but now i'm not really sure.
confused
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