The first ten years after Hurricane Katrina felt like a slow, arduous knitting back together of broken bones — rebuilding all the essential structures from the ground up. And then hobbling onward, having to relearn how to walk. The second decade arrived in a flash — time moved faster as it learns to when we age, maybe.

Approaching twenty years since that terrible time is heavy in a different way. No one I know much wants to go there, right now. I think it’s because of how much time has passed, and how much still feels so unhealed. We don’t particularly desire to rub our hands over the still raised scar tissue on our bellies, or raise our shirts to show those scars off to strangers. We don’t owe our pain to anyone who didn’t live through it.

I can say that I don’t really feel like wallowing around in that swamp of despair — especially when the world is so dark, and full of terrors. The idea of watching that new commemorative documentary makes my jaw clench. I just can’t handle it, at this moment. I’ve written so much about the heaviness, about the hardship. It’s not that there’s not more to say — but that it feels unbelievably wrenching to have to acknowledge how much worse things have gotten. New Orleans as a city has healed, in many ways — but the larger world around it has been transformed irrevocably in ways that I fear will only harm its chances of continuing to thrive.

It feels absurd to imagine that I would ever long for the blithe incompetence of 2005 era-FEMA or the Bush administration, compared to the heinous inhumanity and total lack of infrastructure that we have now. But all that was a mere prelude to them finally starting to shout the quiet part out loud, and now we’re living through disaster after disaster — mishandled, ignored, and untended to. The knowledge that both the climate collapse catastrophes and lack of care from a sociopathic government is only going to get worse makes my vision go black at the edges.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get over being called refugees inside our own country, or the way that most people who didn’t go through Katrina just moved on to the next news story, after a month or so.

The invitation to peel back half-healed scabs feels like trauma tourism, a double-decker bus full of rubberneckers swigging sugary tears from crazy straws jutting out of their commemorative edition hurricane to-go cups, on a tragedy tour of the Lower 9th Ward. No thanks.

I used to write about Katrina often here — in the months after it happened, and every August 29th after. When the 10th anniversary came, I thought I might take some space away from revisiting that old wound, and focus on living — but then Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, two years after, nearly to the day, and it all came up again. Then Ida, and now this year, the horrific flooding here in the Hill Country. Weather related calamities combined with the human error and willful neglect have cost so many lives and livelihoods. It’s a constantly compounding fracture that all feels very inescapable, at this point.

Now, I regularly pull on my hip waders to sift through the morass of memory, and retrieve what I can from the mold corrupted hard drives of my PTSD-damaged hippocampus — though that process has become more private, in recent years. I’ve been working hard on turning all this writing here (and much more) into a memoir about my time in New Orleans, what came after, and how I’ve been healing from it. I had hoped to have it finished at out in time for this anniversary — and I’m feeling a lot of grief at how hard it has been to write, and the pressure I’ve felt to publish something so personal in time to meet an arbitrary deadline. Knowing that it would boost attention for the book to have it out for “K20”, and that the news cycles will move on after this, and be less interested in giving it press next year, because who cares about 21 or 22 years after?

I also pitched to Oxford American, hoping to be part of their coverage for the anniversary (which is all fantastic, and very worth reading) — but it a way, I’m grateful to have my own little corner of the world here to say what I need to say in the way I need to say it. My process with this writing has been deep and organic, and I’ve been grateful both the spaciousness and the structure to let it grow how it needed to.

The book is coming together, in fits and starts — but it has been really helped along by the support I’ve found in Nick Jaina’s memoir classes. The unit we’re in right now is about writing through joy — and though all the pieces I’ve written for it are tinged with melancholy, they are all set in New Orleans, because that is the place where I’ve learned the most about joy.

I don’t want to write about how resilient New Orleans or her people are (though they are indeed) — because that resilience has become so weaponized, their defiant joy totally demonized, and deeply misunderstood. New Orleans doesn’t owe anyone resilience, or the comfort it might bring to think, “Ah, see — the city came back after all, even after we’d all written it off!”

I cannot tell you how many people I had to surprise by telling them that the entirety of New Orleans was not, in fact, utterly destroyed — even YEARS after Katrina. Some people saw the images of a flooded city, shrugged, and assumed that those murky waters never receded. It was one of the most insane and disturbing things I directly encountered from non-New Orleanians, after the storm.

So, I choose not to write from two decades of hard-won resilience, but instead explore these assignment prompts on writing towards joy:

Write about a joyful thing in the context of something more emotionally
challenging or difficult. Can you focus mostly on the joy and leave the rest to
the margins?

Write a prayer, which is a request for help or expression of gratitude addressed to an object of worship.

The three pieces I’ll share here are exercises in working with those prompts:

Dear Katrina,
You whirling, swirling force — a highly organized agent of chaos. You uprooted me, unmade me, swept me up and threw me westward. Me, and so many others. Many lives you took. Many, many homes. So many memories melted into swamp water, photographs with the faces washed away, corrupted by mold.

So much lost. 

A few years ago, I sat in my garden, watching the sky. Miles and miles away from the Gulf, but your great-great-granddaughter Ida was blowing her storm clouds far and wide. 

It was nearing the anniversary of when you forced my hand, took me back home to Texas like a child carried over your grey shoulder. I knew it was time to go, and part of me was ready — but when the hour came round at last, I was kicking and screaming. 

Curled in the egg shaped metal swing hanging from the sycamore tree, I let myself be rocked by the wind, letting her knot tangles in my hair. Feeling the storm roll in, and letting the weight of this heavy moment roll off of me. Listening to the cicadas and the windchimes, the leaves rustling and whispering secrets. In my lap a basket of purple basil and ripe tomatoes I’d just harvested. Bounty I grew, here in this soil I came to claim as mine. Hard-won, chosen — I rooted down in this blackland prairie dirt where many have grown and fruited before me. And I was humbled by appreciation for all you gave me, even as you took away. You moved me where I needed to be moved — in a way I’m not sure I could have or would have moved myself. 

I allowed myself to be rocked as wave after wave of complicated gratitude passed through me, and stung bright tears from my eyes: that you blew me here, brought me to this exact moment. You taught me I could build a strong life from the rubble and ashes of my old one. It may be imperfect, and still full of debris — but it is mine. Right here, right now — as it is.

All the broken-hearted nights that found me floundering on dirty hardwood floors, wondering how I was going to do this — make a life for myself, all alone. Each one of those tears I wept carried me here, also. Towards wholeness, towards my own unexpected independence. 

So much found.

My own courageously beating, fervently loving heart. All of those who love me back. My sea legs, moving with the changes. I am the willow boughs who bend and flow, whip in the gales without breaking. I am not brittle, or easily shattered, after all.

Twenty years later, and I am strangely content — knowing how lucky I am, to bear these scars. To be here at all. 

How can I bless so much destruction, so much suffering? How can I not — when it has only made me kinder.

———————————————————————————————————

In loving memory, and deep gratitude for Jimbo Miller

September 2005

That first trip back to New Orleans after Katrina was a series of strange revelations — or something from the book of… Before the city opened up officially, my Uncle Jimbo and I drove over in my cousin’s truck, towing a tiny U-Haul trailer. I was so shellshocked, I don’t remember preparing anything practical or tactical to bring with us — though it wasn’t like we’d be able to buy food, water, boxes, rope, batteries, or anything else we’d need once we were there. I was basically a walking piece of laundry lint, with blank staring eyes. It’s possible that I helped gather provisions, loaded the cooler, filled a backpack with the donated clothes I’d been wearing, but I have no memories of doing any of that.

Jimbo and I hadn’t been super close when I was little. In fact, I was usually pretty frightened of him, because he yelled loudly, and sometimes worse. He and my Aunt Ruth (my mom’s sister) raised me for a while right after my mom died, and my dad couldn’t deal. But after I left home as a teenager, he randomly started visiting me in the one room shed where I lived, to smoke weed and give me elaborate instructions for building earth ovens that I was always too stoned to understand in any useful way.

We took the backroads, though little towns with names like Cut-and-Shoot and Whiskey Bay, making our way towards the place I once called home to see what we could find. I kind of came to somewhere near one of those places, hunched in the corner of the truck, a ball of worry with a phone book in my lap, and a pile of scraggly dirt weed on top of that. You really don’t see either of those things, anymore.

Jimbo was insisting that my main job on this road trip was to roll all our joints — especially since I didn’t know how to drive. I was so out of my body, that unfortunately I proved useless at joint-rolling, too. I managed to become a lot less disassociated over the years, but am still pretty incompetent when it comes to crafting doobies, alas. I just never got the hang of it, though lord knows I was forced (okay, strongly encouraged) to practice enough.

I realized while fumbling with the gummed up edge of those damned OCB papers that my uncle wasn’t going to be offering me any emotional consolation, and that maybe this was actually a good thing. I’d been anxiety dumping for the past few hours of the drive, worrying about what state the city and my home were in, and what trouble we might run into there, and what the hell I was going to do with my life now — but every emotional rabbit hole I ran down was only met with a “Yep. Well, anyway — back in 1987, I was working for the phone company…” and a long, rambling story about climbing telephone poles and guys he used to work with.

I didn’t understand at the time that my Uncle Jimbo was extremely autistic, and neither did he, really. He just didn’t have the capacity for expressing empathy in a demonstrative, tender way — like, at all. But in that moment, it was actually massively helpful to be with someone who was invested in tangible realities, and otherwise keeping me stoned and distracted with meandering stories that had no real point.

At the same time, Jimbo was also immune to my expressions of gratitude and guilt for all he was doing to help me out. There really wasn’t anyone else in my life who would be up for and available to drop everything and drive into a darkened, mostly abandoned city to excavate my belongings from a molded out apartment.

On auto-pilot sometime before midnight I directed us through Slidell (to avoid the non-existent traffic in the CBD?) and pitch blackness greeted us, a military convoy following behind, abandoned cars, high muddy waterlines, all silent — ghostly. My knees were literally quaking as we pulled off of Elysian Fields onto my street, no one around.

The next morning I took my sweet time, deep breathing through another cigarette, another cup of coffee, locating my respirator, my gloves, my camphor. I’d never been so scared in all my life. I didn’t know if I could bear seeing my home, my whole life, and the majority of my belongings blown open like a bomb had hit.

By the time I was ready to pick my way through the rubble up the stairs, just to look and photograph first — I had already accepted whatever destruction lay behind the door. In a way, it was almost fascinating — to see a house taken apart like that.. When the roof blew off, piles of plaster and insulation came down with all the rain. It was such a comprehensive deconstruction, I had to just take it in slowly.

Blessedly, my ex-boyfriend and his now girlfriend had given us keys to their place across the street that had been unharmed, so we could have a place to stay that was mold free. I was so pissed off when they moved in, and I’d had to watch them walking their dog from my balcony every day, but we’d made peace in the months before the storm hit, and now I couldn’t be more grateful to have a base to recoup after mucking around in the ground zero of my former life for hours.

They still had the gas on in there, but Jimbo cooked all our meals on a Coleman stove set up on the tailgate of the truck, parked on the street, underneath my old balcony. He’d make his famous “Round Mountain Stew”, which he’d perfected while excavating my hoarder Great-Aunt Cleo’s house of horrors out that way. It hit me while watching him stir that aromatic mixture of ground beef, bell peppers, and tomato sauce that he was having the time of his life out there.

He’d offer stew to the few folks who we saw walking by, and wanted to talk with them, hear about how they were doing. One night, a man was getting shaken down by the National Guard soldiers who liked to drive around harassing survivors instead of offering help — particularly if they happened to be Black. No one was technically allowed back into the city — and beyond the evacuation orders, a strict curfew had been imposed — but mostly it was just a lot of posturing and dick-swinging. We all loathed those guys, and the way they weren’t doing shit to help anyone. The men from the convoy were getting heated, demanding answers the man they’d cornered couldn’t provide. Jimbo intervened with slow-drawled tales about being in the army and talked their ears off enough to finally get out of our hair. The man stayed for stew on the curb, and more of Jimbo’s stories.

The calming rhythm and country cadence of his voice reminded me of something my Aunt Ruth said about working in an animal shelter, with terrified rescue dogs. She told me how she’d always just “talk a steady stream of bullshit” to them, chit-chatting aimlessly, without any expectation of a response. It seemed to calm their nervous systems down — and it was definitely working on me, and anyone my uncle came across. Ruth had been in Gonzales, taking care of the legions of animals rescued from Louisiana after Katrina, and what she saw there scarred her deeply. So many scared, starved, half-drowned animals — many badly mistreated even before they’d been abandoned to perish.

Our days knee-deep in my ruins were dark, dirty, and sweaty. I sorted through the havoc of shattered drywall, in search of treasures and heirlooms, while Jimbo hauled box after box down from the balcony on a system of ropes. I remember him brushing off my thanks and apologies, a film of grit and rat-shit insulation dusting the muscles straining on his forearms, as he maneuvered another load down, with a giant smile on his face. It was like I was doing him a favor, bizarrely. Though he was working like a mule, it was an adventure for him — and he enjoyed getting to be useful, and getting out of town for a bit. I don’t think he would have enjoyed being in New Orleans half as much, during a more stable and serene time. This was his element — the challenge, useful labor, meeting new people in strange and trying circumstances, and escaping the monotony of Burnet, Texas.

My uncle was the kind of man who’d inexplicably elected to live in a homeless encampment in the woods for a good while (though he had a stable home). I think the outsider part of him needed to be among people more desperate than himself for a while. He learned a lot from them, out there — but I don’t think he was in a good place, internally, when he went.

After he came back, I think he was still looking for something — ways to put his abilities to use, interesting things to do. He kept himself busy enough with volunteering and playing music and gardening, but I found out after he died of sudden heart failure in 2021 that he’d talked endlessly about that time with me in New Orleans — and that the worst time in my life was somehow one of the happiest in his. I loved knowing that it had become another one of the stories that he loved to regale people with, and that for him, despite the grime and toil -— it was all a delight.

My Uncle Jimbo was a huge hero to me, during major devastation. I do not know what I would have done, if he hadn’t been down to make that trip with me, and I know it would have been so much harder on me emotionally, to be there with someone who hated having to deal with all that, and was only doing it because I was desperately in need. It changed everything, that he actually wanted to be there. It was a wild that it ended up being a gift — to both of us. He had my back in way few have ever had it, and he taught me a lot about the value of putting your whole back into hard work and helping out. That it didn’t have to be a burden, or a drag — but instead something deeply satisfying and fulfilling, if you showed up for it with that attitude. Jimbo made me feel strong and capable — even if I was still shit at rolling doobies.

Our last night there, I sat out on the back porch of the place that had been such a respite for us, during many grueling days of scavenging what we could from the wreckage of my old life. The world here had ended for so many, but the frogs had no idea. The night air swelled with their song, the banks of jasmine wreathed and redolent, heaving with unstoppable, chirping life-life-life in the aftermath of so much death-death-death. In that moment, I was almost jubilant — the kind of heady elation you get from coming triumphant through trial, from staring down your worst fear, and emerging mightier for it.

It broke my heart to leave the green parakeets singing and hibiscus blooming — so vibrant against the human desolation. I was strangely happier than I had been in months — since the storm hit… Just to be back, to find my neighbors again, and my friends that had stayed or were newly coming home, too. To see them all and our city so tough and beautiful and alive! It opened my mangled heart up like a flower. I wanted to ride my bicycle through her tattered streets and be part of it all again — to witness La Belle Dame Nouvelle Orleans slowly came back to herself again — forever changed, but still so goddamn beautiful.

The stars were brighter than I’d ever seen them, with no city lights to compete with. I staring upwards, trying to get a cellphone signal to let Aunt Ruthie know that we’d be headed home in the morning. The truck and trailer were packed full of my moldy stuff, and everything else just had to be left behind. A lot of important things were, I realized later — lost under the broken debris of everything else that was too wrecked to be salvaged. We’d run out of room, and out of steam — and it was time to go home, because this wasn’t my home anymore.

———————————————————————————————————

THE LIGHT THAT AUTUMN
Late October, 2005

The lambent light that autumn was so clear, yet soft — it kept startling me as it wrapped around the bright orange tufts of fur in-between Rusty Jack Knife’s raspberry-colored toe beans, turning them to flame. Had a fire been set in the other room? No, just my new cat’s hind feet twitching in hunter’s reveries as he napped in a sunbeam on the mossy velvet loveseat I’d found on Craigslist. Disaster averted, this time.

Colin had been telling me horror stories about houses being burnt down because someone had left their magnifying glasses (or in my case, crystal spheres) on a windowsill, where the sun could ignite a conflagration, all due to errant refraction.

I’d been I’d been back in Austin for a few months, after Hurricane Katrina, and spent most of my time now cleaning mold and plaster dust off my little glass orbs and trinkets, ever since returning to recover what I could from the bombed out shell of my apartment on Royal and Mandeville. My former neighborhood (the Marigny) didn’t flood out, but the copper pieces patching my roof got blown down the street, and afterwards you could see the sky peeking through wood lattice in most rooms. It made striped patterns on the piles of sodden insulation, and the wreckage of what had been our front parlor.

The light was so different, back here in Texas. Familiar, like from the Falls I remembered from before I moved east, to the swamp. A golden hour swathe, pouring in the windows of my little green witch house on Avenue A in Hyde Park, the same “Old Austin” stomping ground where my hippie parents met, and eventually conceived me. I made sure to move the clear objets I’d been cleaning off the window ledge, to a tray on the floor — so as not to inadvertently allow another nature-caused catastrophe to ruin this little haven I’d found for myself. I couldn’t lose another home to elemental mishap or cataclysm.

I stepped out onto my little side porch off the kitchen to take a smoke break. The front porch was covered in mildewy boxes, filled with everything I owned — and the tall stacks of them were still so daunting.

Everything had to be cleaned with vinegar or vodka before bringing it inside. I’d been wheezing with asthma from the spores, and smoking was making it worse. I didn’t want to have a coughing fit disturbing passersby, or have to deal with their intrusive questions — “Just moving into the neighborhood? Oh, where from? New Orleans, oooof. I heard it’s all totally destroyed now.”

As I paused with my lighter mid-flick, I realized that something bright green and bulbous was hanging at eye-level. An alien life form, slightly phallic and curved. What the hell was this thing? The unexpected surprise of it chimed something in me that I hadn’t felt in months — awe, delight, and rabid curiosity. How had this wondrous gourd-like thing ended up in my yard? I followed the vining tendrils over the fence, and realized that my Taiwanese landlady must’ve planted it.

When Colin came home from the metalshop I took him by the hand and led him out the kitchen door to behold my discovery. He immediately identified it as loofah gourd (or Luffa aegyptiaca, Egyptian cucumber). I had no idea that loofah sponges were vegetables (I’d imagined all sponges came from the sea?), or that they could be eaten when young and tender. I claimed this prize as mine, and used that sponge to scrub the grit off, after hours of trying to salvage my treasures. I let that light-fed blessing cleanse me — baptized in hope, home-grown.

There are a multitude of voices, of experiences — remembering this terrible time that changed all of our lives, on this day. I’m so proud of all my brilliant friends — who survived, and especially the ones who have chosen to share what they went through, too. I’m feeling it all deep with them today.

I know there are many more I’d like to share, but for now — here are two important pieces from my dearhearts Lori and Dominique. The piece from Dom contains stories from “Katrina Kids” — many of whom grew up and became friends of mine, after the storm.

“20 years is rude. Like a guest you weren’t expecting. But in the southern way, you have to welcome it anyway.”
— Lori Tipton
Read her recent piece about Katrina here: Details of the War: Fragments from the days after Katrina, when grief and chaos collided.

Written, Produced and Edited by Dominique LeJeune — In honor of the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — Over 30 hours of interviews with 20 Katrina Kids. Hear their voices, stories and memories of the storm that changed it all.

Here are my collected writings about my experiences with Hurricane Katrina, in reverse chronological order.
Dig in:

✸ 12 YEARS – KATRINA/HARVEY
✸ FROG + TOAD IN AUGUST STORMS
✸ REVERSE PHOENIX – HURRICANE KATRINA, 10 YEARS LATER
✸ KATRINA, TEN YEARS LATER – BY RAVEN HINOJOSA
✸ 6 YEARS ON – FRAGMENTS + WET FEATHERS
✸ Storms – 5 Years
✸ Hurricane Katrina: Four Years Later
✸ New Orleans in August
✸ One Year
✸ Lower Ninth Aftermath
✸ MARDI GRAS APRÈS L’ORAGE
✸ AFTERMATH: REVELATIONS
✸ JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT CAN’T GET ANY WORSE
✸ Calamity
✸ The Triumph of Death
✸ What can you do?
✸ Katrina

For Dan
August 19th, 1978 — October 2024

I started writing this in the winter months after Dan died, and then had to put it aside for a while because it just felt too heavy. I’m coming back to it now, in honor of his birthday — the first with him not in his body, and not here to be celebrated by us. It feels awful to write digital eulogies to someone you loved, instead of getting to send them good wishes, or eat cake together. But here we are. Happy birthday, Dan. I’m still so mad at you.

I’ve wanted and needed to write this for you for a while — ever since I found out you were gone. This is the time I chose to finally do it, and I’ve been finding ways to avoid it for hours, weeks, months. I think because if I finally try to weave all the last little shreds of you I have gathered up like a bowerbird, I’ll realize how little there is. How little is left. But I’ll make do with what I have — because it matters.

You mattered, Dan. I wish you could have realized how much.

I’m also feeling a lot of resistance to having to do this again — for yet another person I’ve loved and lost. It just…fucking sucks. I hate that you’re dead, and I hate how you did it, and I hate that there isn’t that much of you still on this earth.

But that’s also why I feel like I have to do it, y’know? I mean, this is one of the only ways I know how to process the storm that’s been churning inside ever since I read the news from one of our mutual friends on Facebook. I’m a writer, like you were — that’s one of the things that brought us together, one of the places we connected. Words. We’re very different, of course — you loved Hemingway (too much, really) and trying your hand at short stories and novels, and I…Well, I write about my feelings. About the hard stuff that doesn’t have anywhere else to go. They say that grief is just love with no place to go, and so that’s what this is — a place for the love, and for my mourning.

I write for my dead so I can understand what I’m feeling, and so that I can make a little space to arrange all the tiny glimmering shards holding their reflection into an altar — a digital shrine to come and pay my respects, because I don’t know if you’ll have a gravestone, or where it will be. So this is what I have: some photographs of you, mostly on boats. Bits of our text conversations over the years. A handful of memories.

I’m still pissed at you for taking yourself out, for trying to auto-delete yourself from the world, from our lives. It started to feel real when I realized that you’d deleted all your social media accounts before you left this earth. Erased all records, all those memories, conversations, comments. Just gone. It was a cruel thing to do — to yourself, and to everyone who loved you. I imagine that there are a lot of people who are still looking for some semblance or shade of you, out in the ether.

Your @shimshak36 account has vanished from Instagram, and all the photographs you took from out on the sea — wiped away with the press of a button. Death does enough disappearing from us, already. I think it’s part of human nature to rail against that erasure, to cling to the locks of hair, the faded images, the gravestone rubbings, the digital footprints — especially in this virtual era where people are rarely buried in cemeteries, and funerals are not always held or attended.

I’m glad we got to have a memorial for you here, in Texas — and I know your family did one for you in up in Connecticut. I’m grateful to your friends who made it happen, who brought us all together for you. It was at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle — one of your significant places. The room was packed, and though I barely knew anyone there, it felt good to be surrounded by people who loved you — their faces drawn and stricken, tear-stained after hearing an excerpt read aloud from the novel you never finished. Your voice was alive in the room with us. There were many stories of your wild exploits, and lots of laughter amidst the tears — but it didn’t turn into a rowdy wake like you might have liked. No one cracked open the bottle of Famous Grouse scotch from your altar — though it was offered to me after everyone had left. I declined — and even seeing it there next to your framed photo (one of the last taken of you) made me sad, though I know you loved the stuff — far too much.

There’s a part of me that worries that I don’t have the right to write or share any of this about you. Who the hell am I? An old friend and tenuous halfway old flame who was barely in your life, at the end. I didn’t know you were living in Maryland, or what you’d been up to, in the past two years. We hadn’t been in touch since that last time we saw one another, out on the dark end of East 5th Street, after dinner at Justine’s. It was the last time I kissed anyone, and it was a long time ago, now.

I want you to know that I’ll keep my promises, and be respectful of the things you shared in confidence — but I also know that the dead need to be remembered, honored, and tended. This is one of the ways I know how to do that, and so I’ll do my best, for you, Dan.

Dan on Halloween, dressed as Capt. Quint from Jaws, a film we were both obsessed with.
All the photos included here are ones he sent to me.

In the many years that I have been writing for my dead here, I’ve found that their friends, family, and loved ones will often stumble across what I’ve shared, even decades after their passing. I know what it’s like to be up late grieving and fruitlessly googling, looking for some shred of that person online — a photo you haven’t seen yet (knowing there will be no more, past a certain date), or some answers as to where the fuck they went, and why. So though I write for my own healing, and to hold a place for the ones I’ve lost — it’s also for those other people who are missing you. Who are still looking for pieces of you out there.

If you’re one of those people who loved Dan, who probably knew him better than I did, I hope you’ll give me some grace in what I share here. And I hope in some way it’s helpful for you, in your grief for the loss of him.

I took these of Dan and Jenn Godsey, on Bastille Day at Justine’s – July 14th, 2010.
I’m sharing them all because any photo I have left of him feels very precious:

Dan and I met through mutual friend circles probably around 2010, and always had a liking for one another. Though we were both in relationships with other people back then, he was just someone I’d always wanted to get to know better. He came to the vintage themed parties I used to throw, and asked me to help throw his going away party/benefit in summer of 2011, to send him off to grad school, and away from Austin. It didn’t end up working out for me to make it happen, and after he left, we drifted apart until mid-pandemic, in October of 2020.

There was this app where you could check in with your phone contacts, and remind them to vote. I was desperate to get Trump out of the White House, and felt helpless, stuck at home without many easy ways to help make that happen. I texted Dan to see if he had a voting plan, and we ended up talking for a few hours after that, and then being in regular contact for a while.

I found out Dan had died in the days after the horror of Trump being re-elected, and the vines of my grief for both those awful losses got tangled up in each other. I hadn’t been able to cry or feel much beyond numb shock after it became clear that Kamala Harris was not going to be our new president, and that the fall of democracy was imminent — but when I heard about Dan, I just fell apart.

I went back through all of our texts back and forth, searching for… answers, clues, some indication that he would choose to end his life like this. The synchronicity of me reaching out to him again after years of not being in touch because of an election, and then hearing that he’d killed himself right before this next one was just… a fucked up full circle set of bookends to our odd friendship that was sometimes something more.

We were both lonely and isolated — him out on a yacht in the middle of the ocean that he was chartering, and me on my immunocompromised island, podless and unable to socialize safely (much less date anyone)… It was exciting to be in communication with him again — and to realize that we’d both been nursing secret crushes on one another for years. We flirted and FaceTimed and messaged back and forth for a bit, until I realized that it wasn’t going to work, between his drinking and the distance — both big dealbreakers for me. Too many wee hours rambling phone calls, with him slurring and me maudlin. I asked if we could go back to keeping it more friendly and less spicy, but I think it was tricky for both of us to maintain that, consistently.

What I have left are these fragments, bits of our late night text messages:

D: Vermillion is one of my favorite words
I was thinking just now of what type of gem you embody

Opal was the first thing that popped into my mind. But it seems silly not to say you remind me more of an emerald.

A: I think you might be sodalite. Looks like those blue breakers you love. Or topaz.

D: If I got to choose, I’d say garnet. But you can’t choose your own embodiment.

I would find them in the wild stuck in the granite when I was a child.

A: That’s magical! Do you still have some?

D: No. Not any. This was in Connecticut

metamorphs and pearls

A: Spectralite and peridot, chrysoprase and chrysocolla.
Chalcedony. Botryoidal.

D: Peridot is my birth stone

A: I know it.

D: But I always felt I was cheated somehow. It’s just a pale emerald.

A: What a Leo you are! Peridots are lovely. It’s a castelvetrano olive, in gem form.
I love green tourmaline even more than emeralds, honestly. As greens go.

D: Tourmaline is another of my favorite words

A: isn’t it wonderful?

D: and tourbillon – a similar word to your gem.
I like this one, too.
I like words that are funny cousins like that

A: Philtrum and plectrum

D: Flotsam and jetsam
Crepuscular and corpulent

A: Favorites, all

D: I’m going to head to bed. I love talking with you. Send me your five favorite words, based on their music alone.
Pretty please

A: It’s hard to choose, but these are my favorites at this moment:
Sussuration
Tintinnabulation
Twilight
Nacreous
Delphinium

D: Antebellum, Causeway, fo’c’s’le, halyard, catamaran

How are you hanging in?

A: Such marvelous words.
I’m exhausted, frazzled, and febrile. You?

D: Exhausted, a bit fragile, ashamed
I ran the boat aground today.
It was a confusing situation, and the navigational aids weren’t located where they should’ve been. But it was still rough

I don’t think I’m sodalite

A: I do love malachite… but I don’t think I am that. And we are definitely not death plates – though those are amazing! I was thinking earlier that you aren’t sodalite after all… What ARE you?

D: I can’t self identify in these situations!
One must choose expense
I’m going to continue to ruminate on it. I do keep thinking about topaz, though. That was my initial choice.

When I was a kid I always liked tiger eye and smoky quartz. But the things you like as kids don’t necessarily define you

A: I can definitely see tiger’s eye…& I love smoky quartz a lot. I feel like lots of the things I liked as a kid still define me – l’ve definitely always been…myself.

———————

Dan was born at 8:10am, on a Saturday, August 19th, 1978 — in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was 46 years old when he died, the same age I am now, writing this. He was always a year older than me, and now he never will be. He’d be 47 today, but he’s not, and never will be — or any other age.

One evening in November of 2020, I pulled his astrological chart for him:

D: My grandfather was born 8/18, the same as his father. I was supposed to be born then, but my mother was in labor with me for over a day. So, the 19th. She told me my grandfather was so incredibly pissed about this.

I’m afraid I don’t know what to make of this chart
Where’s North?

A: You’re a Pisces moon, Virgo rising.

D: The Pisces has always been a pain in my ass.

———————

I didn’t go into it with Dan at the time, but…Pisces moon people are incredibly sensitive, with deep flowing emotions. They are creative, soulful, and prone to addiction (with alcohol especially) and escapism. They take great comfort in all forms of water — especially the ocean. They are good listeners, patient friends, and deeply caring — but they struggle when expressing their own feelings. They might project as extroverts, but would usually rather go off alone to lick their wounds in private.

Piscean moons can be hopeless romantics — but suffer when the fantasy doesn’t match the reality they imagine for their lovers and relationships. They can also feel like they’re playing a part in a play, and can heavily mask who they truly are at their core by adopting a persona to hide behind. Developing a relationship with spirituality and a higher power can help keep them out of depression, but lunar Pisceans who are cut off from connection to the divine (however they understand it) and their own intuition tend to sink into depression and become pretty tortured.

I keep coming back to his chart, trying to make sense of the pain that led him to end his life, alone out there on the water. Was it his Chiron in the 8th house, or the curse of a 12th house Leo sun? It’s a puzzle I keep trying to piece together — all the disparate parts of him, the bits I knew, of what he chose to show.

I’m frustrated by this process — feeling like an archaeologist scrabbling around in the mud for pot shards that are melting in the rain. Like finding tiny scraps of a civilization that we know was once great, but there’s not much to show how grand and complex it was.

There shouldn’t be so little left of someone who was so BIG. I’m crying again now, thinking about his giant Leonine energy, and how he was like a circus tent, with the flaps pulled tight. You knew amazing things were going on in there, behind the curtains, but he didn’t always let you step right up and buy a ticket. When the booze was flowing, he was the ringmaster, the clowns, the strongman, and all the lions and monkeys loosed from their cages and running amok in that 3 ring circus, all at once. But so often, he kept it all on lock — under wraps. He kept secrets, even though he didn’t have to. I keep coming back to his complex mix of bombast, showmanship, demure decorum, utter shitshow fuckery, and hidden depths. There’s so much of him I feel cheated out of ever getting to know.

When we decided to revert back to the friend zone, Dan quoted that old Looking Glass song, Brandy, to me. I think it was kind of an anthem for him — and I think his fallback answer as to why he would always choose the seafaring life over settling down with anyone.

“The sailors say Brandy you’re a fine girl
(you’re a fine girl)
What a good wife you would be
(such a fine girl)
Yeah your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea…

Brandy wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the north of Spain
A locket that bears the name of the man that Brandy loved
He came on a summers day bringing gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn’t stay
The harbor was his home…

The sailor said Brandy you’re a fine girl
(you’re a fine girl)
What a good wife you would be
(such a fine girl)
But my life my love and my lady is the sea…
(doo-doo-doo-doo)
(doo-doo-doo-doo)

Brandy used to watch his eyes when he told his sailor stories
She could feel the ocean fall and rise
She saw its raging glory
But he had always told the truth — lord, he was an honest man
And Brandy (a-a-a-h…) does her best to understand…”

I felt it was a cop out back then, and I think it even more, now. I know Dan loved living on boats — and it feels both shitty and fitting that he chose to die on one. Is that how it happened? Today, another friend who loved him told me it was alone in a house with a gun. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore where or how — but that he was continually choosing versions of living that kept him isolated — kept him from the communities of friends who loved him fiercely. And ultimately that isolation made it possible for him to think that not living anymore was somehow a viable option.

When you think you’re all alone, you can convince yourself that no one will care if you decide to really disappear. Dan never had to worry about anyone asking him to change, or to take better care of himself, of love himself more — if he was married to the sea. And he never had to face the excruciatingly vulnerable ordeal of being truly known and seen. That’s the really scary part about letting people love you. But I know so many of us loved the hell out of him anyway — as much as he would let us.

One of our last real conversations about why we weren’t ever going to be a thing went like this (and this one still breaks my heart):

A: I do care about you, and want you to be supported. I know you have good people for that, too. Sending good wishes, always.

D: Thank you. There’s so many things that I wish were simpler. But, as you know, if wishes were horses…

But I certainly do appreciate hearing from you. Hopefully, in 3 weeks I’ll post something much more positive!

A: I hear that. I remember, when we talked about it before, how uncomfortable you were — being in pain around me.

Your tears are a treasure — not a burden.

D: Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.
It’s very difficult for me to be vulnerable, visibly. Thanks for seeing me 🙂
Take care.

A: I know. I see you. And – it’s never too late to learn, y’know? You take care too, sweet Dan.

D: ‘Night

A: night night captain

———————

After that we would check in on holidays — which were especially weird in those years of Deep Covid.

D: Well, here’s to solitary and soon unsolitary!
Holidays go by. We all know who we love and why why we love them anyway

A: It’s true! And we will appreciate being able to gather soooo much more, when we can again!

D: I believe we will too

A: It’s good, in a way – to really not take those things for granted.
Being together. And how simple it all was.

D: And to really choose who you want to spend time with

A: That too!

D: Blood is for omens and bandaids.
Friends are for whom we really bleed

———————

The next (and last) time I saw Dan was in September of 2022. He was in town for a wedding I think, and asked if we could get together at Justine’s (one of my favorite local restaurants). We had a long dinner, and caught up over steaks and drinks. It was good to see him, but also confusing. I don’t think either of us were sure where we stood with one another, and I felt sad that it didn’t seem like we could talk about it. Especially after he walked me to my car, and we made out for a bit under the streetlight. We’d never actually kissed before, and I think we both wanted to get clear about what we might be missing out on? It’s hard to say, now. Eventually he got strange and drew away — I still don’t know why. We checked in a bit after that, and it was sweet — but I was left full of questions. I wish I’d asked them, now. I realized recently that…Dan was the last person I kissed (as of this writing), which feels strange to acknowledge. I’m holding out for my person, and not doing casual make-outs anymore, but I’m not sorry that we had that moment, though I do wish I’d known how he felt about it all.

I didn’t hear from him again until late July of last year. He was in Austin (I think for a friend’s memorial), and wanted to get together — but I was visiting one of our mutual friends in France. I told him I was in Paris, and that I was sorry to miss him. That was our last correspondence. I very much wish that I’d circled back around when I got home, checked in with him, wished him a happy birthday (on what would have been his last). But we always think that we have forever, that our friends who don’t tell us how much they’re struggling must be fine, and that there will be a tomorrow, a next time. I’ve been learning the hard way, over many years, that this just isn’t always true — but it’s still a shock when you find out that someone you assumed you’d always have in your life has made their exit. An Irish goodbye, in this case.

I don’t know a lot about the circumstances under which Dan made that decision, but I know that he had been battling his relationship with alcohol, on and off, for many years. I’ve heard from our friends that he had decided to try and get sober again not too long before he died, but I don’t know where he was at with all that when he made the terrible choice to seek a permanent solution for his temporary problems. I think for some people, the rawness of facing their emotions without that numbing agent is simply too much. I won’t surmise what was happening with him, further than that — but I know he was really hurting.

It makes me sick to think about — how much pain he was in, and the waste of his gorgeous self, his one and only precious life. I know he knew he had people he could reach out to, and I wish to god that he had, instead of dying alone out on the Bay off the coast of Maryland. As far as I know, he left no note.

All my life, I’ve had the dead come through in my dreams, and so I wondered if I would see Dan there. So far, he’s only come through once.

I’m out on a wide river at just past sunset, but I know it’s the kind of place where the sky and the light are always like that — crepuscular twilight, with the sun vanished over the horizon, but there is still a gradient of colors in the sky, fading perpetually into gray. We are in the West, where the spirits of the dead go to cross the river.

Dan is telling us that ever since he died, he is so hungry. He eats and eats but never seems to get full or feel satisfied. He went to some big holiday meals with his family, but… never managed to eat enough. We all joke around about his voracious appetite a bit — but when I wake, I realize that he has entered the realm of hungry ghosts. I hope in helping him cross over, he can go to the land beyond, where there always is enough. I pray his next incarnation will be gentler, and full of joy.

I wake up and it’s raining hard for the first time in a long time, and I think: Dan won’t ever experience another rainy morning. He won’t get to lay in bed, puzzling over heavy dreams. There are so many things he’ll miss out on, now. And so many things we’ll all miss out on, with him. I’m still so angry I won’t get to know him as a grizzled old man — and that we won’t get to sit around a fire, telling stories. I wish I could tell him that he created a huge rip in the fabric of the universe, by removing himself from this part of the story — and that none of us will ever get to know what that next chapter of his could have been.

I beg anyone reading this who has ever contemplated ending their life to please know that it is very rarely the answer to solving any problems — and that there is always help available. I respect everyone’s right to self-determination, and our lives should always be our own — but I’ve seen too many families and communities shattered by one person making that choice. So many people are completely heartbroken by Dan’s death, and I wish he could know how utterly loved and adored he was. I wish he’d chosen differently.

I want to include the obituary I found for Dan online, because I feel it’s important, and it already seems ephemeral and kind of hard to find. He deserves a place to be remembered — and though maybe this is kind of a strange place for that, I commit to keeping his memory alive, both here, and in my heart.

Beautiful Dan, with his broad, handsome, open face. He had a very big heart, and a passionate writer’s spirit. He was both rigorously moral and a bit of a rake, very capable and grounded but also extremely boisterous and a total hazard all at once — just full of contradictions. Dan loved hard, was a loyal friend, and was always very kind to both dogs and kids — who adored him. I don’t think you can get a higher seal of decency and kindness than that, in this world.

This is from a local Connecticut news website — I made a few copyedits, and am including it here, for posterity.

“Daniel John Szymczak, a 1996 graduate of Staples High School, died this week. He was 46.
A writer, teacher, boat captain and worldwide adventurer, Dan climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro last year. He lived in Florida, the Virgin Islands, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico, Alaska, and most recently Maryland.

A memorial service will be held at a date to be determined.”

I send love, healing, and my deepest condolences to all his family, friends, and loved ones. I don’t know any of his relatives, but I’m thinking about them a lot, especially over this first year of holidays and birthdays and everything else without Dan. I know how brutal that is, and my heart goes out to all his people.

My heart is shipwrecked, hull cracked open, trying to write all this. I can’t stop crying, and it’s making my eyes too blurry to edit properly, so please forgive any errors, and please take care of yourself if you’re reading and crying with me.
We’re building a bridge with our grieving, and we don’t stand alone on it. I can promise you that.

Dan would send me photographs and videos of dolphins he captured from the boats he worked on. I had a filmmaker friend incorporate some of them into a video for a song that I recorded with my parents a few years ago. I had sent the song to Dan, when we first reconnected, because of course it made me think of him. After he died, my dad reminded me that he believes the last stanza obliquely references death — so it feels all the more poignant, now.

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

— John Masefield

Sea Fever – from the poem by John Masefield, set to music by David Polacheck.
Vocals by Angeliska
Arrangement and banjo by David Polacheck, with Karen Polacheck on guitar.
The tune is “Matt Hyland”
Dedicated to the memory of Dan Szymczak (1978 – 2024), who loved the sea.
The dolphins were filmed by him, out on the ocean.
Video created by Justin Wilson

D: It was really nice to hear your voice tonight.

Here’s my take on dolphins:

Common Dolphins riding our wake near the Channel Islands north of LA. They raced us for nearly five miles at thirteen and a half knots, bursting from the water with effortless grace. I don’t get excited when I see fish, unless they’re in great schools or brightly colored or dangerous.

Because a fish is the water, it breathes it in and only leaves it on a hook or as a last resort.
But Dolphins breathe air, as we do. They find themselves born in the water and so must make the best use of it or die.

In a sense they are visitors there—they belong to the water but not in it. But they master it, as dancers master that small bit of sky above the stage or figure skaters the ice.

It was important to me to capture what I felt about them as accurately as I could. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.

That’s how I’m feeling about what I’m trying to do here — capturing Dan accurately is as difficult as trying to do it for those fleeting, fantastic dolphins. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s what I have. I hope it will do.

I shared the above passage about dolphins from Dan at his memorial, sang Sea Fever for him, and also this poem (one of my favorites), by Rumi. I read it aloud to him, years ago. It cracks me open now, in a way it never did before. I sat with it again after I got the news of his suicide, and had to just lay down and sob for a long time. I’m grateful I got to share these things with him, while he was still alive. I just wish he was still here, with us.

You are sitting here with us,
but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body
like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach.
You are the fish.

In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those,
those veins that are lute strings
that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf,
but the sound of no shore.

— Rumi

Every year, on August 8th — the anniversary of my mother’s death, I give myself permission to be with my grief, to process, and sit with whatever’s coming up to be felt and acknowledged now. And every year, it changes — because I am always changing, healing, growing and shifting in how I approach this complex grief. I take this time to explore and what our relationship was for the seven years we had each other, and what it became after she had to leave her body, this earth, and me behind… This year, I gave myself some extra spaciousness to write. Allowed some breathing room and time to help let this writing blossom up from the depths.

I didn’t know that I was allowed to mark this day until 2004, when I traveled back to Austin and my dad gave me my mother’s fiddle. I came back to New Orleans, and started writing a bit on August 8th, or sometimes the day after. Tiny fragments were gathered on timid forays into the musty attic where I’d shoved all my memories of her and I. I began to pull things out over the years, and get more and more curious about what I’d hidden in there.

Up until my mid-twenties, August came and went without mention. Nobody talked about that day (and the horrible weeks and months that led up to it) in my family. We didn’t acknowledge my mom on Mother’s Day, or really much at all. Her unfinished paintings hung around the house like ghosts. I tiptoed around my dad’s intense grief, and hid my own to protect him. When he and my step-momma married, there didn’t seem to be ways to honor my mom that didn’t take away from what they had. And honestly — I just didn’t know it was an option. Everyone moved forward through the routines of work and school and meals, acting as if nothing was wrong. It was very surreal for me, because I knew I was supposed to be adapting to the way everything I had known of family and home had changed so quickly and irrevocably — and I really did try to… But I felt like I was living in an endless bad dream where you can never really wake up.

I can’t remember who in my life first told me about or gave me a copy of Hope Edelman’s book Motherless Daughters, but I wish I could thank them now. Reading that book changed everything for me — and gave me a name for the feelings of lostness, confusion, and pain I’d been grappling with alone for years… For the first time, in black and white, I was seeing that it wasn’t actually strange to feel totally alienated and still in shock — and that losing one’s mother was indeed a massive loss that many people (especially little girls) never fully recover from.

“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother. When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

Reading this passage was the first time that I realized that what I was experiencing was actually very normal. And that needing these grieving rituals was far healthier than pretending nothing was wrong, or numbing my pain with substances or other distractions. If I hadn’t read Motherless Daughters when I did, I fear my path would have been much more fraught. Trying to push down pain in unsustainable, in the long run — and when we protect ourselves from pain, we also protect ourselves from joy…

It’s only because I finally stopped running from my pain that I am able to turn towards and embrace true joy — and to learn to make space for holding some of both, on her death anniversary. The avoidance wasn’t going to lead me anywhere good — and facing all the layers of sorrow and trauma over the years through my writing, ritualizing, altar-building (and of course years of therapy and other forms of deep healing), have led me to a much more integrated place. I’m so very grateful that I’ve been able to receive those things, and to also be witnessed and supported on this journey by friends and loved ones. I hope that witnessing my process has given some of the people in my life (and maybe even people I don’t know, but read my writing here) permission to feel more of their own grief, and to honor their own healing.

Allowing my friends to love on me and support me more with this over the years has been its own journey… There are some years where I feel really alone, and others where I feel very held — and often that’s less about what people are doing or not doing, and more about where I’m at in my ability to receive.

Letting people witness and hold space for me in my grieving is really scary sometimes. I’m terrified that I’ll be judged for still whinging on about my dead mom after all these years… But I know that’s a story my brain tells me when I’m afraid of being misunderstood. I’m learning not to listen to those stories — and instead truly receive the love that surrounds me, not just on this day, but every day.

I know that’s something my mom would want for me — to be held and loved by others in my life, as she isn’t here to get to do it in the way I believe she would want to.

I finally know and trust that she would — want to hold me, and love on me, I mean. But I didn’t always. It took me a long time to come full circle into that awareness, and first I had to deal with what was lacking…

A massive part of my healing in the past decade has been around the developmental trauma caused by emotional neglect before my mom ever died. It took me years to piece together the all the reasons why I struggled with believing that my mom actually loved and wanted me, for the seven years we had together. It was an largely unspoken about mystery that I had to piece together on my own — and I went a long time thinking that her overwhelm with mothering and recoiling from touch were somehow due to me being…fundamentally unlovable and awful.

Now I understand that it had nothing to do with me. I believe that my mom’s undiagnosed neurodivergence (as well as anxiety, depression, and other health problems, including the cancer that eventually killed her) were at the root of why I often felt like she didn’t want me close to her (especially physically), and why she was often so preoccupied with her areas of intense hyperfocused special interests (Hank Williams especially, and her many creative pursuits — mainly art and music, both of which were very inspired by her obsession with Hank.)

The more I healed, the more I was able to understand her, and understand myself. My own neurodivergence makes so much more sense now — and I can see many of our shared quirks and peculiarities in a much more forgiving light. I have names now for so many of the things that lived untamed in us. I’m also more able to make room for the truth that my mom did most definitely love me, and that there were times when showing that love to me in a tangible way was a joy for her, too.

I really treasure the images of her holding me and smiling, or looking peaceful and content. Her smile is radiant, and it completely transforms her face. My mom had a serious case of RBF (resting bitch face) that I’ve inherited, and it really showed when she was zoning out, lost in thought, a million miles away. There are only a handful of photos of her holding me, or hanging out with me — far more exist of me with my dad. So the ones I have of us looking happy together, I cherish especially.

It feels good to gather those here, and share them. These moments were real, even if I can’t vividly recall being there with her. But we were there together, for just a little while.

I’ve been working on somatically remembering and integrating the deep body memories I hold somewhere in my unconscious memory of being held, fed, nurtured, adored, treasured, and cherished by her. I know those memories exist in me somewhere, because those moments happened, too. I think I had to process the awareness of all the times when she couldn’t deal with me, was ignoring me, was frustrated or even disgusted with me — to be able to come full circle towards making connection with all the good stuff we experienced together. The sense memory of her recoiling from sensory overwhelm related to being touched with sticky little kid grabby starfish hands was so confusing — until I understood where it was coming from, and that it wasn’t my fault. And maybe more importantly — that it wasn’t that way all the time.

We had roughly 2555 days together on this earth. I know there were ones where she was feeling good, more resourced, and able to be more present. Now I can also be more gentle with us both, remembering the days where she was shut down, cold, and sunk deep in depression and her own emotional and physical pain during grueling cancer treatments. None of that was her fault, either. She was really, really sick for a good number of those two-thousand odd days — and was also extremely overworked, underpaid, and trying desperately to create constantly. But even with all of that on her plate, my mother made beauty all around her — for herself, and for me.

For a long time, I think that beauty, and trying to understand her through the things she loved most were what I clung to, in trying to know her more. That was my path back towards her. I wanted to understand what gave her joy, and follow the threads of her delight, in hopes of finding her. I had no idea that in seeking to understand her joy, I would find myself.

I know now that I was one of her treasures, her greatest treasure. The very best thing she created.

I can’t imagine what it was like for her, knowing she’d have to leave me. I think a part of her never accepted it, never really faced that brutal reality. I wonder what it would have been like, if we’d been able to face it more, together. But she was too sick, and I was too little. We never really got to have that reckoning — so I’ve been trying to do it on my own, here — for all these years.

As I go deeper into my healing, I’ve learned how to make a cozy room in my heart for my inner child to feel safe in. I know how to listen to her better, and tend to her when she gets dysregulated. It was a big thing to let that part of me have space to relax, and just be a kid. I realize through doing this work that all a loving mother really wants for her child is to know that they are content, able to experience happiness, and feel comfortable being themselves. I’ve had to pick up where my mom was forced to leave off — and take up the mantle of making sure those things are true and available for that younger part of myself.

It’s a gift to me, and to her.

A new friend (and fellow Capricorn) sent me this poem on her death day. I love W.S. Merwin, but had never read this one before. It moved me to tears, and I’m struck by how powerful it is when someone you’ve just met somehow knows you well enough to sense exactly the words you need to read most at that moment:

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

Rain Light -— by W.S. Merwin

Recently, my dear old friend Francesca came to visit friends and family here in Austin, with her seven year old daughter Charlie Luna. We were driving to go get Charlie’s ears pierced, talking about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, when Francesca told me that she’d felt afraid to tell me that she thought I had always put my mom on a pedestal…(I’m paraphrasing here, because I can’t remember her exact words), but it was the sense that when people die (especially our parents), it’s really easy to idealize them, and fall into a kind of hero worship, where they have no faults. I was really glad she told me this, and that we were able to talk through this perception — because I think I’d actually worried that my bitterness, resentment, and longing towards my mom for not… always being able to be a very “mommy” kind of nurturer were what had been coming through most in my more recent writings about her.

I think I understand my mother’s flaws better than most, because I rubbed up against them often — and because I share most of them. I don’t valorize her as some saint, because she wasn’t ever that. I imagine she’d be the first to admit that she wasn’t a perfect person (and who is?), and I know from reading the scant bits of journaling I have of hers that she was highly self-critical and perfectionistic. In fact, there’s a list in her journal entitled “Character Flaws & Bad Habits I Need to Work On”.

Most of them I think could be chalked up to undiagnosed neurodivergence, and I so wish she could have lived to experience a time where these things were understood better — and that she could have been gentler with herself. She worried about not giving me enough attention, having terrible time management skills, and being too negative. My mom desperately wanted to live a fulfilling life, and to be a good person. She focused a lot on self-improvement, and had a lot of goals and visions for things she wanted to do with her time here. I wish she could have gotten to experience it all.

The truth is, I think that if she had lived, that we probably would have had a fairly difficult relationship —- especially as I got older. I believe we would have butted our stubborn, similarly neurodivergent Capricornian hard heads about all kinds of things. We are very similar, in so many ways —- and I think there would have been major power struggles between us. I wonder if I would have rejected her aesthetics instead of embracing them so fervently, in a bid for independence and rebellion? Would I have still had such an intense goth phase? I’m sure she would have hated all that, too. My mom was extremely controlling, when it came to her personal environment. She would get rid of anything in the house she saw as “tacky”, and my stuff was always disappearing. I can’t imagine loving that, especially in my teen years!

I do like to imagine an alternate reality though — where she lived, and we worked through our shit, and got to be very close, once I was grown. I imagine traveling with her, and taking her to art museums to see the Pre-Raphaelite and Flemish painters she adored. My mom never really got to travel much — so whenever I do, I remind myself that I truly am getting to live her wildest dreams. The life I have is one I know she would have wanted for herself. I have a lot of freedom to create, work for myself, and invest in the kinds of experiences and relationships that deeply nourish and enrich me. I like to think that she’d be really happy for me. That she is.

Being able to accept the “both/and” of her, and our relationship is helping me be more accepting and forgiving towards myself, and towards the people in my life. We are all imperfect, all always learning, and all always doing the best we can — with the tools we have. I’m able to have so much more compassion for myself now — as I reckon with how much I’ve survived, and moved through. The time I’ve gotten to spend with Francesca and Charlie shows me a lot about what it is to be a mother, and a daughter. I’ve gotten to watch them grow together, albeit in these precious snippets of visits over the past few years. They orbit one another in tight circles of care and nurturing: hair brushing and bow tying, snack making and listening, laughing and berry picking. And there are times where they are both utterly frustrated and irritated with one another. But these two little moons are always coming back together in love and gentleness, because they’ve been given the gift of time, and the gift of learning how to do this little dance of total dependence and individuality —- with heart and grace.

Charlie and I have a special connection — we just really get each other. We both really really love drawing monsters and wearing sparkles and owls and narwhals and cyclones and bones and collecting magical treasures we find on the ground. I look at her, at the same age I was when I lost my mom, and though she is SO wise and brilliant and interesting and odd and funny, I see she really just is a tiny little bean who needs her mom a whole lot. She craves loads of attention and interaction, and hates it when the adults are talking about grown up things, and not engaging with her. I remember that feeling well.

Francesca and I both experienced a lot of childhood emotional neglect, and I have her to thank for giving me a name for what we went through when we were kids, having to grow up way too fast (as well as recommending this extremely helpful book: Running on Empty, by Jonice Webb).

It makes my heart so happy that little Charlie is getting to grow up in an idyllic patch of countryside, with two loving and attentive parents who work from home. She gets a lot love, play, laughter, nature, and sweetness in her life — and it shows. She’s like a little plant that turns towards the sun, is watered regularly, and has roots in good soil. Always growing and being fed by that love.

It feels like a gut punch to imagine what happened to me, happening to her (or to any child). I think I’m finally able to understand how absolutely world-destroying a loss like that is. Seven is just…so tiny. Too, too young. I’m so fucking grateful Charlie has her mom (and dad!), and that they are both strong and healthy and vital and so very present in her life. It’s a blessing to all of us — but especially to her little daughter who gets to grow up being loved so fiercely and tenderly. And it means so much to me that I get to share in adding to that basket of love, whenever I get the chance (they live in France, so it’s never often enough!) Soon, Charlie will be too big to be picked up and carried or held. I remember when that day came for me, and how sad I was about growing bigger, because I still needed so much holding. When we said goodbye at the end of this last visit, I got to pick her up and hug her extra long, knowing she’ll probably be too big to do that again, next time.

We’re never really too grown to be held and hugged, though. And we all still need it, more than we admit.

There was a part of me that wanted to be a mom for a long time, partially because I adore little ones, and am a nurturer — but also I think so that I could give all the love I needed to a younger version of myself. There are times when I still really mourn not getting the chance to experience the wonders and torments of parenthood firsthand, but I know that I needed to figure out how to give that love to my inner child self first, and reparent myself in a lot of the ways I missed out on with my own parents. I really do love getting to be the weird auntie to many kids in my life, though — my actual nieces and nephews, and to the children of my friends who I have that relationship with. And I’m grateful to just get to love them for who they are. I’m also grateful for the privilege of getting to nurture my animal companions (they really are fur children), as well as my friendships and folks in my community. I know there are those that see me as kind of a mother-figure (whether drag-mother, or witch-mother, or something that goes entirely beyond words and gender roles) -— and that’s a huge honor as well.

I’m learning that receiving nurturing doesn’t have to be something that stops when you stop being a kid, or when your childhood ends prematurely due to trauma and tragedy. A big part of my healing has been in opening to the knowledge that I’m going to be supported and held by my chosen family, by this support network of friends I’ve been working on cultivating reciprocity and trust with. We do our own dances — sometimes two steps forward, one step back — but always coming back together in circuitous paths towards meeting one another on these bridges we’re building over the chasms of grief and pain life carves out for us.

My actual family are part of that healing too — learning to meet them where they’re at, and support each other as we go forward. I know I’m very lucky to have them, especially my dad and my Aunt Ruth (who is like a mom to me). My relationship with my stepmomma taught me so much about how to receive love, too. It was really hard though, especially during all the years where I was a prickly little hedgehog living under the porch, hissing and spitting and so frightened of letting myself trust and be held.

I really have learned that loving yourself is essential, if you’re ever going to fully absorb those nutrients that being able to receive love gives us. You can actually love others when you don’t love yourself (contrary to RuPaul’s maxim) — but welcoming in love becomes terrifying and almost impossible if deep down you believe that you aren’t worthy of being loved. It took me a long time to learn to love myself, and I suffered from serious issues related to that emotional malabsorption for a long time. They still crop up from time to time, when I forget that I am essentially extremely lovable (even with all my flaws and foibles). There’s room there for me to be messy and silly and imperfect just…myself.

Over the days flanking this year’s August 8th yahrzeit for my mom, there’s been an intense process of cracking open, having to talk difficult things through in the rupture and repair process with some of my beloved heart friends. It was painful to go through, but it brought things up to the surface that needed to see the light — needed to be felt and healed. I’m not living in the shadows like I was for so long — abandoned and forgotten about. Exiled in the shame that so often clouds and surrounds sadness. I’m allowed to bring all my complex emotions out into the sun, and sort through them, and I know now that I don’t have to do it alone.

I am witnessed and held and supported in this process, and in my healing.

I am easing into finally receiving the nourishment and kindness that the little one hiding in the corners of my past didn’t know what to do with. There have been times where my loved ones worried that I’d never be satisfied with what they had to give, because I had no idea how to really receive it, much less ask for what I really needed. We’re all still figuring out together, and stretching our edges to be able to have a much greater capacity for this tenderness, these soft places where the wounds are still knitting into scars.

I can change up my rituals, and loosen the rigidity I sometimes clung to because I feared having to be left alone with all this sorrow. It felt simpler to isolate myself, lower my expectations, and prepare for the worst. It’s often still a challenge to not fall back into those old patterns, but I know that healing relational trauma happens IN relationships. But I know now that I can invite my loved ones into my grieving, and that they will hold it with as much respect as they do my happiness.

We’re making space for all of it. And we are learning to hold it together — to come to the altar, bear witness, honor the depth of what has been lost, and what is tentatively growing out towards the light from that dark place. It can be hard work, sometimes confusing and clumsy, and yet so filled with compassion and all the sedimentary layers of what it is to be human together, walking these roads of life and death, grief and reverence.

We are walking the paths through the bleak valleys, back to peace. It’s such a gift to get to do it with the people in my life who continue to find new ways to join me here, on this lemniscate bridge — and who help me remember that I am my mother’s joy.

If you’d like to read more about this journey
of grieving, honoring, and remembering
my mother on her death day,
here is an archive of my writings about her:

THESE TINY THINGS
THE WIZARD’S JAR
HAZY WINDOWS
THE AUGUST RITUAL
FALLING STARS + CACTUS FLOWERS
DOUBLE ETERNITY
MY ANGELIC INHERITANCE / THE HOLOGRAPHIC WILL
38 ON AUGUST THE 8TH
30 YEARS – SEIZURES
888 – HONEY BABE, I’M BOUND TO RIDE – DON’T YOU WANNA GO?
WILD BLUE YONDER
NO ROOM IN MY HEART FOR THE BLUES
FAMILY VACATION – HANK WILLIAMS’ GRAVE
STAR-CROSSED TROUBADOURS
Foxes in the Rain
Triumvirate Lemniscate
Gustav + Mama – August 8th

 Today, August 8th, 2024 it has been 38 years since my mother’s death, at age 38. It’s strange to think that now she has been gone for exactly as long as she was alive — and in the intervening 38 years without her here, I’ve had to navigate what it is to grow up motherless, as well as trying to heal many of the scars of longing and loss from our too brief time together.

In the past few years of my long exploration of grieving, I’ve given a lot of energy and focus to trying to figure out and tend to the wounds of my early years. In the past year, I’ve come to a new clarity about the deeper reasons why our relationship was the way it was, and with that new understanding, I have come to a place of peace and forgiveness for the things that I see now were really difficult for my mom, and likely totally beyond her control.

For over a decade now, I’ve been sitting in healing circles that have been a major part of my journey towards mending some very deep wounds, and my own spiritual growth. These experiences have been incredibly humbling and often extremely challenging — but always ultimately very worth it. Not only I have received profound truths that I do not think I ever could have accessed in any other way, but also for the ability to move trauma through my body, connect to the divine, and be supported and witnessed in my healing by a loving community. Working through my developmental trauma has given me the capacity to delve into the serious “Big T”, or shock traumas I went through as a survivor of stalking and violent crime, as well as being a climate refugee, displaced by Hurricane Katrina. I am in the process of writing a memoir about going through those heavy things, and am still trying to figure out where the writing about my mom fits into all that — or if these writings need to be their own separate book.

Over the years, in the writings I have done about grieving my mother, and our short (and often disconnected) relationship, I’ve alluded to the visions I’ve received while sitting in these spaces (and occasionally on my own adventures in nature) — but tend not to go into great detail about them for reasons related to privacy and legality, as well as a desire to keep those experiences sacred. I will continue to keep my descriptions intentionally vague — but I don’t know any other way to explain how I got here, and I don’t want to make it seem like any of this massive transformation that has taken place over many years, was just happenstance. It truly wasn’t. I had participated in many rounds of talk therapy — since childhood, throughout my adolescence, and into adulthood for my intense fear of abandonment and persistent anxiety, to no avail.

I have come to understand that whatever the medium or conduit for awakening and revelation, some truths will not be handed over to you until you’re really ready to receive them. It’s possible that they tried to come through in other forms and fashions, over the years — but I just couldn’t comprehend what they meant. I didn’t have the language for any of it, or I just wasn’t ready to hold it. This past November, it seems I was finally ready to unlock a bigger piece of the puzzle — but that unfolding took many hours, and countless tears.

The revelation was this: most of the people in my family are not only just somewhat neurodivergent (I’d known or suspected this for quite a while), but actually autistic. My mom was super fucking autistic. And so am I.

It’s immediately confronting to write about this, because of all the doubting voices in my head that chorus, “So, what’s your proof?” or “What right do you have to claim that?” and “How would you know, without getting a proper diagnosis?” But the thing is — it’s exactly those voices (which are plentiful in real life, and on the internet, unfortunately) that have led to so many women and assigned female at birth folks going years and years (or their entire lives, or never) without knowing this essential truth about themselves. It’s true for male and AMAB people too, but they are SO much more likely to get diagnosed, and not fall through the cracks in the way that girls who are socialized to perform care and attention in specific ways are. Being a highly masked autistic person is its own special kind of mindfuck, and honestly it just boggles my mind that it took me this long to finally see it.

The truth is, this is something I’d been questioning for many, many years — but it wasn’t presented to until I was truly ready to grapple with the reality of it. And when I finally saw it, I couldn’t stop weeping. Not because I was distressed at the realization, but because I’d wasted so much time and caused so much unknowing harm in my commitment to misunderstanding so many dear people in my life. So many beloved friends who’ve I’ve knocked heads with over the years, family members who I relentlessly pathologized (trying to figure out what their fucking PROBLEM was) — and not least of all myself.

I won’t discuss the particular peculiar peccadilloes or habits of anyone else still living in my family or friend group, because that’s their business, and I do get that armchair diagnosing people isn’t really the thing — but during one night, I witnessed such a wild cataloguing through a myriad of arguments and conflicts with people who I love and I know love me… and could finally see that it’s just that our ways of being super fucking autistic have often been at odds, and we didn’t know it (and definitely didn’t know how to talk about it). So many hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and miscommunications — often resulting in years of silence and estrangement.

The combined issues of rigidity around plans and routines, sensorial/overstimulation needs, inflexibility in personal views, and sometimes a difficulty expressing empathy and reciprocity (or in my case, demanding that those things be expressed explicitly, and in a certain way!) has led to me coming to impasses with far too many people I’ve loved… But there’s something about that way neurodivergence is often either totally invisible or completely demonized and misunderstood in women that has made it so difficult to understand all these years. After all, it’s easier to just think, “God, what’s HER problem? She’s so controlling/spacey/oversensitive/dramatic/unreasonable/crazy!” My heart breaks to think of all the women (and of course people of all genders) who were deemed insane, or monsters, or worse — because they weren’t able to mask and hide hard enough.

Even worse, there have been friends and loved ones who have come to this realization long before I ever did — but I pooh-poohed it. Not to their faces, usually — but yeah… I’m heavily ashamed of myself for doubting their autism — but to acknowledge their truth would have meant reckoning with my own, and everything it meant… And I simply wasn’t ready to do that, until it was lovingly shoved in my face by a power much greater, more ancient, and infinitely wiser than me.

Now, to be clear — I’m not blaming all my issues in relating on mutual neurodivergence, but… the reality is that most of the time I just couldn’t see it, because it’s the water I’ve been swimming in my entire life. I never thought I was neurodivergent, because I was surrounded by a majority of neurodivergent people in my family of origin, and have attracted and bonded to probably mostly fellow neurodivergent people throughout my life.

In talking with my dad about this, he confirmed a lot of what I’d wondered about for a long time, and as we compared notes, he also told me that he believed my stepmomma Karen was also highly neurodivergent (and likely also autistic). I have so much to process around her death, and our relationship as well. The one year anniversary of her passing is coming up, on August 26th (three days before the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina), and now August is such an emotional tinderbox of a month for me, I’m starting to wonder if writing will even be enough anymore. I might just need to go into an actual cave every August, from here on out. I miss Karen so much, and have been dreaming about her more, as the day of her death approaches. In the last one, I was hugging her, saying, “I don’t want you to go!”

I wish I could talk with her about all of this – wish she could read this piece, as she often used to. There are so many things I would ask her, about her own experience. I wonder what she would think about these ideas, and if she would see it in herself, and in the rest of our family.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a severely neurotypical person being able to really handle (much less fully embrace) the eccentricities of just about anyone in my extremely unusual family. But I was so used to everyone’s weirdness growing up, I honestly just didn’t think anything of it. It took me a long time to comprehend that all our hyper-focused special interests, stims (both subtle and intense), dietary obsessions, and social awkwardnesses was more than just us being your average familial group of oddballs.

The bottom line is that I don’t give a rat’s ass if you believe me or not, or if you’re offended by this supposition, or think I’m delusional for believing any of this about myself or my family. It’s scary to put it out there, and to imagine being doubted or judged — but in the end, what you think about my life or my process really isn’t any of my business, and…the fact that you’ve read this far may mean that you’re staying with me in this so far (and for that I thank you!). I’m so heavily conditioned to the self-doubt, that I completely internalized it…So being able to share about any of this publicly is me pushing against that. It’s not easy, at all. It’s taken me a very long time to write this, and I’ve gotten up and walked away from it, over and over — convinced I couldn’t do it, wouldn’t find a way to say what I needed to say here. But this is me trying.

When I wrote about my relationship with my mother the year before last (HAZY WINDOWS, in 2022), I was in a lot of pain. I was navigating a lot of hurt and anger at how emotionally neglected and rejected I’d been, and the lasting trauma that has given me to work through. And that writing was part of that healing process for me. It’s all still true — but I just know more now. I understand why it was like that, in a way I simply could not see at the time. In that piece, I describe myself as being ADHD and HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), which was my diagnosis at the time. I realize now that HSP is not actually an official or actual diagnosis, and in fact I think that it’s actually just…girl autism.

When I received my evaluation for neurodivergence, I went in thinking there was a pretty high likelihood that I’d discover I was autistic. But the evaluation was given online, over Zoom and self-guided, with very outdated testing materials that were clearly designed with male people in mind. The psychiatrist who led my eval was not neurodivergent herself, and did not perform any kind of thorough testing outside of what I received, which was mostly lists of questions you had to answer on a scale (with 1 being not at all likely, and 5 being highly likely, etc.) though that kind of scoring system has been shown to confound autistic people. In the end, she said I was definitely ADHD (inattentive type), and though I had many of the characteristics of an autistic person, I just “didn’t rate high enough on the scoring” to be diagnosed as such. I took her word at gospel, and decided that she knew more than I did on the subject.

It was confusing, but in some way I was relieved — because it meant that the friends I had confessed my concerns about possibly being autistic to were right, too. They told me that there was no way I could be autistic, because I was too empathetic, and too adept socially to ever really be on the spectrum like that! At the time, I didn’t really understand how the whole spectrum thing worked, I didn’t know what it meant to be highly masking, and I didn’t get that you can very much be both super ADHD and super autistic. Or that one of my main special interests has always been “humaning”, as in — figuring out how to human adeptly, vis a vis: expressing emotions in expected and acceptable ways, establishing healthy and long-lasting emotional connections, doing manners and social cues correctly, and understanding how interpersonal relationships work.

Grappling with this self-understanding has been incredibly powerful — especially seeing all the odd little quirks and struggles I’d just chalked up to being a weirdo among weirdos. It’s also been really painful at times — thinking of how long it took me to accept these things about myself, and not harshly judge myself for things that I really had very little control over. I’ve had to grieve all the years where I felt like a total alien, constantly observing others on how to act, how to talk, or respond — and always worry that I wasn’t convincing anyone. Wasn’t doing it “right”. And then there’s the intensity of unmasking, and of skill regression. It’s been an odyssey unto itself, and one that is still unfolding. I hope to be able to share about it more, because despite the stigma (and potential hazards) around revealing one’s autism publicly — I think it’s far more worth it to be open about who I am, and why I’m like this.

In reading and learning as much as could in the past year, so much has come to light — especially about the vagaries of mothering while autistic. Suddenly, so many of my difficulties with my mom make perfect sense. I can see now how utterly overwhelmed she was, on a sensory level — by the physical reality of an infant, then a toddler, and then a young kid. The constant need for touch, the stickiness, the high-pitched noisiness, the messes — I know she struggled immensely with all of this. Reading and witnessing accounts from autistic mothers grappling with the shutdown a screaming toddler could bring on, or the rage from seeing a room you just set to rights immediately turned into a disaster zone by a pint sized tornado gives me so much more compassion for what my mom was dealing with, and helps me understand how much it all goes beyond typical “parenting stress”. It is majorly intense, and can be totally debilitating.

I can remember viscerally the feeling of her pulling away from my grasping little hands with revulsion, almost shuddering from my touch — when all I desired most in the world was to be close to her, to be held, and comforted. To be wanted. I’ve been honest about all the ways that experiencing that from her repeatedly fucked me up. And I also know that it wasn’t always that way, between us. That there were times when she had the capacity for tenderness, and was able to give me what I needed. I just think it was tricky for her to do it consistently, and especially when she was under stress and duress — which was often during those years of financial hardship, overwork at shitty low-paying jobs, chronic pain and terminal illness. But so much of that pain is soothed and healed in finally understanding that it was never about ME! It wasn’t because I was revolting or fundamentally unlovable! She was just extremely overwhelmed, in a very particular way that is super hard for autistic moms (especially when they don’t know they’re autistic!)

I can have so much more compassion for my child self now, too. That kid was just so confused and hurt and lonely. All I wanted was to connect with and be close to my mom — but I was hyper-aware from a young age that there were rules to engagement with her, and that it really had to be on her terms. I was left to my own devices, a lot — and given headphones to wear to watch my cartoons, at a time when that wasn’t common or very accessible at all. It still hurts — but so much less now that I know it really wasn’t my fault. Or hers. We were both doing the best we could, with the tools we had. And there was so much we just didn’t know about ourselves, or one another.

When I was finally ready to see all of this, to truly know it on a soul level, it was incredibly humbling. I was brought to my knees by the all this truth — quite literally floored by this now extremely obvious thing that had been staring me in the face this entire time. I just wasn’t capable of understanding what it was, until now. It felt like being gently guided toward a mirror in which I could at long last see myself clearly — and behind me, was my mother, gazing into my eyes over my shouder. Her hands pointed backwards, towards all our other family members and ancestors who dealt with this same combination of hypermobility/connective tissue disorders and neurodivergence. I recognize what a blessing it is to be born into a time where at least I am some answers for why my body and mind are so different, and often so troublesome. It was a earth-shaking experience for me, and one that has changed my perspectives of reality utterly.

I’m going to get reevaluated for autism soon, by someone who understands much more clearly and intimately how it’s represented in women and femme-folk. I’m grateful to have access to multiple levels of support, much more awareness, and a lot more in the way of accommodations. My health insurance blessedly covers therapy (my therapist also has AuDHD), and this new evaluation (they are generally quite expensive). My mom didn’t have anything like this, and I don’t know if she’d lived, if she’d even be open to contemplating any of this about herself. It’s a lot to sit with.

Maybe it’s nuts to apply this diagnosis retroactively to a dead woman, but look — the truth is that it explains SO MUCH about who my mom was. She had lifelong obsessions with certain artists and musicians (particularly Hank Williams) that went beyond mere hobbies. They were her special interests, and she leaned into them hard. It’s not surprising that she found similarly hyper-focused friends who had the same special interest, and would get together with them to fixate about every detail of Hank Williams’ life. It’s funny — I could see the autism in many of them, much earlier on…but they were men. It was more obvious, or more acceptable, or…something. Mainly, again — I think if I acknowledged it in her, I would have to start acknowledging it in myself. And it was easier to think of her as seriously eccentric, or maybe even a bit crazy. So many of the habits my dad described to me sounded like OCD, depression, or neuroses — but I now see them for what they really were: aspects of autism.

One of her big stims was trichotillomania — picking her hair out until a bald spot formed. Mine has always been hair twirling (one of the main reasons you rarely see me with my hair down — I’ll play with it compulsively) and finger skin picking. It’s taken me a long time to not feel intense shame about these things (both in myself, and in my mom) — because it was always treated as evidence of mental illness or neurosis, rather than than coping mechanisms that are directed inward. Much stimming behavior for women is well-hidden, body-focused, and self-harming — not because we want to hurt ourselves, but because it’s less noticeable and disruptive than what men and boys can get away with in public (drumming on the table, shaking their legs, being overtly hyper or aggressive). All that pent up energy has to go somewhere — and for us, it was always focused on ourselves, because usually no one would be bothered by that (even if it hurt us).

My mom was extremely controlling and exacting about her home and personal environment — she couldn’t abide sticky messes, and popsicles were strictly prohibited indoors. She couldn’t tolerate things that were even slightly broken or messed up. Those items would disappear into the trash overnight, even if they belonged to me or my dad. She could often appear affectless, and what I think I once interpreted as depression or “resting bitch face” might have been her just… not masking, or forgetting to make a facial expression. Or just thinking intently, lost in her own world. I recognize that in myself.

Regardless of how I got here, or how long it took me — I finally have so much more peace than I’ve been able to access, really ever. That peace, understanding, and compassion is extending outwards too — to other people in my family and friend group who’ve driven me to distraction because they just won’t do empathy in the “right way” that I want them to (not info-dumping on me about their own lives, asking me questions about mine, remembering to show care in certain ways, and on certain days.) And strangely, as I’ve become more understanding and forgiving, they’ve become more responsive and available for showing me kindness and care in the ways I’ve long wanted and needed. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I’m more patient with myself, and more patient with those around me. I judge myself and others far less harshly, now that I can see what our “deal” is. Don’t get me wrong — I still forget sometimes, and get irritated and frustrated with all of us…until I remember why we’re like this, and what it takes from us to have to pretend to be any other way.

I wrote this piece earlier this year, in the wonderful memoir class I’ve been taking. The prompt was “Things that are too small to mention” — and it’s about what all of the above actually felt like, in my lived experience, as a child (at least in part).

These Tiny Things

The little girl is lying on her mother’s bed, rubbing her big toe along the satiny ribbon that divides creamy sections of tea-rose printed wallpaper. It is immensely satisfying to feel the smooth glide as she draws her leg upwards, with her toe tracing the shiny silken line, alongside the coral-pink roses twining towards the ceiling. 

 It feels like sharp scissors sliding through cellophane tape or laminate. Like when she’s sometimes allowed to help her 1st grade teacher trim the posters for the classroom walls. That shivery rushing glide through clear plastic, and the delicate strips of cellophane falling gently into the wastepaper basket is really the best part about going to school — but it only happens every once in a while, and only after she’s finished all her reading assignments, and after she’s helped the kids that are struggling with their reading.

Reading is easy, though. At four years old, after becoming immensely frustrated one evening when her parents were both absorbed in their books and not paying attention to her, she decided she would learn to read, too. She scrambled into her father’s lap and gazed intently at the page of wriggling black shapes that seemed to be so fascinating to him. It made no sense, no matter how long she stared — until one day, when he was reading Hop on Pop aloud to her, the words clicked into place, and she understood the secret language, finally. 


As soon as her father tracked that she was starting to get it, a book of boring bible stories became the bedtime ritual. She pretended to stumble over the incomprehensible tales of Job and Adam and who begat who until her father became distraught, fearing that she would never become an avid reader… 


Meanwhile, she was sneaking Old Yeller off the shelf, and reading ahead — since they only read one chapter a night, and she wanted to know what happened. When she got to the tragic ending, she had to cry in secret — and pretend it was a surprise when her dad read it to her the next night. Eventually her ruse was discovered, and she was able to choose new chapter books over bible stories, and sit in her little rocking chair reading books contentedly with her parents in the evenings. 

 Her teacher says they’ve run out of textbooks for her to read, and they’ll have to ask the nearby middle school for some 6th, 7th, and 8th grade books to keep her busy. Until then, she’s sent to the remedial room to help tutor the kids who aren’t reading well yet. Her friend Debra’s parents were told that she’d probably never learn to read, but after a few weeks of patient trying together, that proves not to be true. They are so overjoyed that they give the little girl a brass bracelet in a velvet box. It turns her wrist green after a while, but it’s very special, so she wears it every day anyway. 

 Math is not easy. Numbers are confusing, because they all have a color and a personality, but no one else seems to know that. The magnet numbers and alphabet letters on the refrigerator are all the wrong colors, but her parents don’t understand when she gets mad because they’re all switched up. Who would do that?


 Everyone should know that two is a just a little baby and always yellow, and three is a kid and true blue. But when added together, they should make green (who is four) but instead apparently it makes five (who should always be red and has freckles)! So addition and subtraction get very confusing. 


 She tries to explain this to the teacher, but for some reason, this is very irritating and she’s told to go stand in the corner until she’s ready to stop being silly and do her math worksheet properly without telling stories. The colorful number people were once her friends, but now she feels betrayed. She doesn’t know that it will only get harder and harder — or that dyscalculia, hyperlexia, ordinal linguistic personification and synesthesia are all aspects of her neurodivergence that she won’t come to learn about or understand for at least four more decades.


The wrongness of things tugs at her, and she can’t let them go. The way adults don’t say what they mean, or get angry when she does. The way the old cat scratches her when she doesn’t pet his fur in the right direction, and the way his whiskery tongue grabs at her fingers when he licks popsicle juice off her hands. She’s not allowed to eat sticky things inside the house because stickiness is very wrong for her mother, who also can’t stand it when things are broken or damaged in any way. The things disappear quickly after that, even when they’re still good, or beloved. Often, it’s her favorite toys that have to go. The flock of butterfly stickers she lovingly applied to her vanity mirror made her mother have to go lie down in a darkened room — but they got to stay, because pulling them off would just make more stickiness.


 She has to be very, very careful when mixing and pouring the purple Five-Alive from the frozen can into the tall blue aluminum pitcher, and then into her aluminum tumblers, all metallic jewel colors. They sweat down the sides in the heat, and become frosted with silvery condensation for a little bit, and you can trace little designs on them with your fingernail. She likes to pretend the punch is red wine, and will be very elegant sipping it as she sits too close to the television playing Sesame Street. She likes to be fully immersed in the psychedelic close up scenes of ocean waves and crayon factories and children dancing to funky songs. 

 You’re not supposed to sit so up close to the TV screen, because you’ll damage your eyes, but since she already has to wear thick glasses anyway, it’s probably okay. No one is around to tell her to move back, so she can do it this time. More and more, her mom is in her room laying down, not feeling good. So she can watch as much television as she wants, and mix her own Five-Alive, as long as she doesn’t spill and make a mess. Eventually they’ll learn that those aluminum glasses are dangerous for your brain, but for now, they’re the fanciest ones she’s allowed to drink out of. 


 Underneath the cedar table they eat dinner at is a secret world no one else knows about. She can hide under there and inspect the spiders’ eggs that look like miniature cotton balls. She wants to collect them and pet them, but she’s not supposed to touch them at all, because she might hurt the baby spiders inside. They’re all Charlotte’s babies. Spiders are good, and friendly, and write words in their webs when they want to. The eggs are so soft looking, but the idea of hundreds of baby spiders pouring out is both exciting and horrifying. She waits a long time under the table, watching to see if it will happen, but it never does. Maybe they’ve already hatched, and if so, surely it would be okay to take some into her doll-house in her bedroom? But what if she’s wrong and they hatch in there and crawl all over her face while she’s sleeping? Better not. The spiders are something she loves, but also so many of them all rushing at her makes her want to throw up and take her skin off and run away. 

 The little girl is still contemplating all this wrongness when she drags her toe down the wallpaper the other way — so it pulls at her skin when she slides down, the opposite of the sweet smooth gliding. Why can’t it be smooth both ways? It doesn’t make sense how touching it one way can feel so good, but the other way feels so bad. But she has to always go up and down, for some reason. Not just up. There are lots of rules to these sensory explorations, but it’s not clear who decided them. The little girl is laying on her mother’s bed, touching the wallpaper with her feet (which isn’t allowed — it’s only supposed to be touched with her hands, and only when they’re not sticky), but her mother isn’t in here at the moment. The little girl’s mother is at the doctor’s, or maybe at the hospital, and she’s very, very sick. 


 The little girl is aware that she’s narrating everything that happens to her, even the really big upsetting things (especially those) in this third person way, even though she doesn’t have the language for that yet. But she knows it’s a weird thing to be doing, and senses that other kids don’t really think about themselves in this way, or maybe at all. She wants to stop it, but she can’t, and that feels even more upsetting. She sits up on her knees and bangs her head gently against the wallpaper a little bit, hoping to re-set her brain, thinking furiously, “No! I AM the little girl! The little girl is me! This isn’t a story! It’s real life, so start acting like it! Just act normal!” But it doesn’t work for very long, really. 


 Pronominal reversal is pretty typical in thought patterns and language for autistic children, but the little girl won’t learn about that until reading about it today, when she’s 45 years old, and doesn’t even identify as a particular gender. There will be so much more understanding, and so many more options, eventually. But for today, she’s only six, and there’s just the ceiling fan spinning above her — around and around, making the frosted glass lights fixtures wobble. She likes to imagine being able to float up to the ceiling and walk on it like upside down world. Maybe then she could talk into the ceiling fan to make her voice go all robot-y like the metal fan that blows the white Swiss dot curtains her mother sewed. The fan on the ground always has to be angled towards the windows, because her mother can’t stand having any kind of wind blowing right on her. So the little girl always has to remember to turn it back the right way after talking into it and making her voice sound like paper folded up accordion-style. It makes her whole body feel funny and she can lay on the cool linoleum of the floor and tell secrets into the fan for a long time, as long as her mom isn’t trying to nap.


Her mother’s bedroom is a forbidden and sacred haven of visual and sensory delights — and a place where she can feel close to her, but usually only when she’s not there. It’s okay though, because even when she’s away, she’s still there somehow — watching from the framed prints on the wall of naked women whose pale bodies are the same shape as her mother’s. It only makes sense that these would be paintings of her mother, in different guises. 

 The one above the bed, hanging right over the best spot for toe-touching the silky wallpaper ribbons, is her favorite. It shows her mother standing in a shell in the middle of the ocean, with her red hair extra long, twining around her white limbs. Her face is gentle and half-smiling, even though she’s flanked by angels who seem upset that she’s naked, and an angel who’s blowing wind at her with an angry face. Her mother won’t like having wind blown at her — but in the painting, she seems serene. 


 In the other painting, her mother is sitting naked on a picnic blanket, looking out at the viewer calmly. She’s sitting with two men, one who must be her father, and the other is maybe an uncle? There’s another lady in the background who might be her Aunt Ruth. They’re all outside, in the woods. This painting is somehow scandalous, where the one of her mother in the big scallop shell isn’t, even though the angels are rushing to cover up her nakedness. Sometimes her mother walks around naked and disoriented, looking for her pills, and her dad gets upset when she walks by the sliding glass door and herds her back into the bedroom to lay down. 



 Years later, when the girl is more grown and traveling, she will see these paintings in museums, and feel shocked at so many other people admiring these images she grew up thinking were pictures of her mom. How dare they ogle her mother like that, naked in public? When for so long, they only existed in the private realm of her bedroom sanctuary… And how did Botticelli come to paint her mom in the Birth of Venus, and when did she model for Édouard Manet in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe?

 But for now, the girl is still six, and her childhood exists in the perfect bubble of this dreamy, pretty room filled with art and everything her mother treasures. She doesn’t know that she is one of those treasures, too — because it’s hard for them to connect, when their needs are so different. Her mom needs a lot of quiet and for everything to be pristine and beautiful, and to not be touched with sticky hands. And the little girl needs to be held, with open arms, and gazed at lovingly, and played with and sang to and to not have to wear special headphones when she watches television so it doesn’t bother her mother. To not be left endlessly alone to occupy herself with books and shows and toys until none of it is fun anymore and she’s so lonely she cries in her periwinkle twilight blue bedroom with the sun making rainbows dance all around her.


 She doesn’t yet know that a year from now, her mother will die of cancer, and they will never get to know one another beyond this time, and these ages. They will never get to have a conversation about their sensory particularities, and all their special interests, and what it is to be autistic your whole life and not know it until much later, or to never know it. But these tiny things live on. The pleasure of touching certain fabrics and textures, or imagining the upside world, or even sometimes finding a fan to talk into.

 That crappy little house on the dead end street in the small town where she lived until age seven still stands. It was too tiny, pre-fab with cheap aluminum window frames — but her mom managed to make it all so lovely, with very little money. Those handmade curtains and chandelier crystals making prisms in the windows. Crocheted aprons pinned to the walls, and beauty everywhere you looked. They moved away after her mom wasn’t there any more to keep the magic in it alive.


 The kindly lady who lives there now let her in to look around one rainy afternoon, a few years ago. There was nothing beautiful left in the house, no remnants of her mother, or her childhood — except for that magic wallpaper with the creamy ribbons and the pink tea-roses, still there in her mother’s old bedroom, somehow, decades later. The little girl, now grown, stood touching it — first up (smooth-smooth-smooth) and then down (rough-rough-rough) for just a moment, remembering. 

If you’d like to read more about this journey
of grieving, honoring, and remembering
my mother on her death day,
here is an archive of my writings about her:

THE WIZARD’S JAR
HAZY WINDOWS
THE AUGUST RITUAL
FALLING STARS + CACTUS FLOWERS
DOUBLE ETERNITY
MY ANGELIC INHERITANCE / THE HOLOGRAPHIC WILL
38 ON AUGUST THE 8TH
30 YEARS – SEIZURES
888 – HONEY BABE, I’M BOUND TO RIDE – DON’T YOU WANNA GO?
WILD BLUE YONDER
NO ROOM IN MY HEART FOR THE BLUES
FAMILY VACATION – HANK WILLIAMS’ GRAVE
STAR-CROSSED TROUBADOURS
Foxes in the Rain
Triumvirate Lemniscate
Gustav + Mama – August 8th

And if any this resonates with you, here are some resources that have been helpful for me in understanding more about autism in myself, and in my mama:

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home — by Katherine May

Toren Wolf & Mama Serenity

The Trauma Witch: A Name For Everything I Feel And Do
The story of how everything clicked into place & I finally found permission to be myself in the world.

Devany Wolfe: Navigating Autism Late In Life

I’ve been partaking in Nick Jaina’s amazing Memoir Class (seriously go check it out if you’re ready to jumpstart your memoir writing, it’s been absolutely fantastic!) and I’ve been focusing on writing about my years in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina blew me back west, and what I learned from living there. I’ve been contemplating especially how much I’ve grown as a costumer from my many years of making Mardi Gras magic.

As I prepared to finally return to Carnival after a long pandemic hiatus, I took a moment to organize the last 17 years of my Mardi Gras Day costumes (I’ve missed a total of three, out of the last 20 years) and to dream about what visions I want to call into being next!

I feel moved to share here a visual walk-through of what I’ve learned in the past two decades of costuming and reveling – and trust that I’ve been writing a LOT about all this, and will have much to share soon – so definitely stay in touch if you want to read more about this masque and mummery adventure I’ve been on for half my life now…

I moved to New Orleans in 1999, but because I was young and stupid, I often ended up working on Mardi Gras and somehow missed the memo for a few years that it would be my most favorite day! I was twenty years old, and more impressionable than I’d like to admit, so for a little while there, I got turned around into believing that Mardi Gras was too messy, too touristy, too crazy for me. What was I thinking!? Eventually I figured out how wrong I was, and from there – never looked back.

Costuming is not only an art – it’s a form of shamanic embodying, of the spirit or archetype you’re drawn to and desire to create and put on for one day, dancing it out into the streets, into the crowds, to be experienced, admired, glorified, and thoroughly CELEBRATED.

You have to play with it, experiment, do a lot of trial and error, make mistakes, and find your sweet spot! Everyone has their own approach and method to costuming, but for me – I consider a costume a success if it makes a big impact (and yes, I judge this by how many steps I can walk before someone flags me down wanting to photograph what I’ve created!), and if my fellow friends on psychedelics have their minds blown by the colors, details, and overall fabulosity of what I’ve put together.

It’s also got to be not only totally extravagant and elaborate, but simultaneously comfortable enough to walk and dance in, party vigorously, and use the bathroom in from early in the morning to late at night – without falling apart, becoming too cumbersome, or making me totally miserable.

I love challenging myself, and now I work on some of these for years, gathering ideas and materials long before the entire look comes into fruition. I plan, make sketches and lists, source trim and appliqués from distant lands, and plot my debut Mardi Gras morning.

It cracks me up sometimes to examine how seriously I take all this – to the point that I’ve long had Mardi Gras anxiety dreams, (where my costume isn’t ready, is extremely ugly, or full of rats, or too big to get out the door!) but I think this just shows my true commitment to sparkle motion!

You can see a clear progression in my journey to understanding all of this, which no one really taught me, but that I had to figure out for myself – and by observing and being wowed by the costumes of so many of the badass masquers I always look forward to seeing out on the streets each year.

I love the way we inspire and surprise each other, and always try to out-do whatever we pulled off last year, in one way or another. As the quality of the photos taken gets better and better with each year, so too do my costumes.

In continuing my costume retrospective, I’ve been learning so much about my own process by laying everything out year by year like this. It surprises me that I never thought to do so before, but twenty years feels like an appropriate time to reflect back, and see how far I’ve come as a costumer and carouser!

2003: Green Antoinette – I wore tattered green and black Victorian shredded finery and took my 89 year old Grampa out in his wheelchair for his first proper Mardi Gras, and in some ways, mine too.

2004: Pirate Antoinette – Same wig (thank you Alisan – she got a lot of wear!) but I’m starting to get this idea a bit better now… That corset was so gorgeous, and I borrowed the bird’s nest neckpiece from Pandora.

2005: Unicorn Princess — I’m full committed at this point, and living with Pandora was a big influence and delight, when it came to costuming and carousing! This was the first (but not the last) time I got into using taxidermy bases to attach animal bodies to my bodice.

2006: Phoenix – the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. A bit on the nose, and I was definitely falling apart by the end of the day, but what a joyous day!

2007: I couldn’t go this year because Helen’s murder had me gripped in really intense PTSD (plus everything from Katrina was really catching up to me, and I was not okay) I still regret not going, though. 💔

2008: Dark Capricorn – Honestly not my best work. I ran out of time and had too much fun partying! But I redeemed the Capricorn magic in 2020, so NO REGRETS!

2009: Foxy Queen Elizabeth — This was such fun to make and wear! But why did I choose such subtle maquillage? I think I ran out of time, and sweated or cried most of my glitter off. Whatever, I had the skin for it back then!

2010: Black Forest Cake – Here’s where I’m really hitting my stride! I LOVED wearing this costume, so so so much.

2011: Green Tara – Another joy to wear, though much of it was put together from vintage pieces someone made in the 60s or 70s. It was here that I realized how much I love being green.

2012: Peacock – I was very pleased with how this one turned out! All the peacock feathers came from the flock out at Lone Grove, and were gathered by my Aunt Ruth.

2013: Bee Queen – Though I was very proud of this costume, but I think I learned here that black is just… not a showstopping color for Mardi Gras! I wish I’d leaned harder into the honeycomb shades, and that my very detailed (and way too heavy) headpiece had been more visible! Buuuut I loved embodying the Bee Queen, even if I couldn’t bear to wear her into the night!

2014: Rainy Gras! This was the year of the absolute most miserable weather on a Mardi Gras I’ve ever experienced (as I wasn’t there for Freezy Covid Gras of 2021! I decided not to wear my Marine Antoinette costume because it wouldn’t be warm enough, and I didn’t want to waste it on a day when it might not be seen under a coat and umbrella, so I switched gears, pulled together a last minute LEWK I’ll call ummm…Copper Eyes! I had warm layers on, and borrowed some sparkly layers and Pandora’s red rainboots and was SET! It was kind of a Bummer Gras (for a lot of reasons), but I learned some really valuable lessons that day:

1. Costume commitment is important, but comfort is key, and you’ll have way more fun if you’re dressed for the situation. Be flexible, and prepared to change it up last minute, if you need to. There will be sunnier and warmer Mardi Gras days to wear your bikini thong thot flossy costume, I promise. You can still have a fabulous day, even if your look isn’t totally on point. And – NO ONE is looking at your shoes! Clip some bows on your rubber booties and be grateful for the gift of warm dry feets!

2. Choose your krewe wisely. I got ditched by the river for the last time that year, and found myself alone, in the Quarter, way too high in the freezing rain. Plus, I was clutching an order of cold-ass Bloody Marys for people who decided not to wait for me to return with them (or let me know where they went!) I experienced a simultaneous Mardi Gras meltdown and Mardi Gras miracle, as I spotted my beloved Jonno and company, and was blessedly invited to roll with that lovely krewe of sweeties, utterly saving my day, and cementing my eternal love for Jonno and his cohort of bearded babes. They were thrilled to share my Bloodys, and we had some marvelous and unexpected adventures that I never would have gotten to experience had that not occurred, so – it was actually a blessing!

P.S. When I say krewe here, I don’t mean it in the formal sense of organized MG krewe, but just the peeps you roll deep with throughout Carnival. Lowercase krewe for me indicates the folks who will wait up for you when you need to go slow, make sure you don’t get lost, safety pin you back together when you’re falling apart, wait with you in the bathroom line, help you out when you are too altered to function, and generally just have your back throughout the chaos and magic of the best (and most intense) day of the year! If you find them, show up for them in the same way, because that kind of love and loyalty is GOLD!

3. Southern Hospitality is a REAL THING, and oh my lord, it is something to be treasured. Before that dismal, miserable freezing weather Carnival, I’d always eschewed going in people’s houses during the day of Fat Tuesday, except for a quick pee or a waterbottle refill or something. I always wanted to be outside on the street, where all the action was!

But holy moly, what a blessing it is for the people that choose to host others in their gracious homes on that day – often allowing heavily costumed strangers into their parlors and onto their balconies to rest their hooves, graze their snack tables, drink their booze, and maneuver their complicated selves onto their toilets. The trust involved is remarkable. There’s an unspoken pact of respect that locals really understand, and it’s very, very special to witness.

I’ve gotten to hang out in some of the most exquisite mansions in the French Quarter, filled with fascinating artwork and wonderfully interesting people. It’s so humbling to be the recipient of such kind largesse, and it’s a dream of mine to one day have a home in New Orleans again (when I am ancient and somehow extravagantly wealthy) where I could return the favor.

2015: Marine Antoinette – A triumph! This costume survived the massive fire at the Mudlark Public Theater and lived to be worn with great delight the Mardi Gras after! It was wonderful to have a mostly finished costume for once, too – so I could enjoy myself with less stress of being up hot glue-ing into the wee hours on Lundi Gras! The jellyfish panniers were especially fun to wear, and my wig is a custom glory from Coco Coquette.

2016: Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights – I was particularly proud of this one, especially the headdress (which has lots of little surreal details, and is a replica of the pink tower in the center panel of the painting. I did have a minor Mardi Gras meltdown Lundi Gras night because I felt lumpy and dowdy when I tried everything on, but I made a last minute wig shift, and somehow that completely changed everything!

2017: Amethyst Deceiver: The Amethyst Deceiver is a bright purple mushroom, and my inspiration for this costume was fungus, spies/double agents, and kind of a mycological revolutionary/military theme… I think it was a bit too conceptual, with a lot of fiddly details that were falling apart (hot glue doesn’t really work when sticking appliques to smooth leather, FYI), but it was fun to prance around in, even if my look might’ve translated to…the Purple Pie Man villain from Strawberry Shortcake!

2018: Karma Chameleon: This year we did a Shamanic Neon Animals theme, and had a Wild Hare, a Lion, a Spider Queen, an Owl, and a clown! I’d had a vision of being covered in chameleons, and becoming one with them – so this was an expression of that experience! Again, I’m not totally sure that my concept translated, but I had a blast wearing it!

2019: CHAKRA KHAN: Solar Plexus / Yellow – this was a major group costume where we all dressed as the colors of the rainbow / chakras! I was the Maṇipūra मणिपूर chakra, and I loooooved embodying this energy and color! We had gone to India that January for my 40th birthday and found lots of intricate trims and bits for our costumes. It was pretty amazing to be part of this rainbow krewe, and everyone looked stunning on their own as well.

2020: Holographic Horoscope: Capricorn – We were iridescent embodiments of our zodiac signs! This was an opportunity to redeem myself after my Capricorn costume fail of 2008, and it felt like another triumph! I was an albino Capricorn with double horns and double eyes! I loved making this – especially my goat headdress, and mermaid tail (an aspect I ran out of time to make the first time around!) My scaly leggy warmers did start to fall down right after we left the house that morning, but some careful safety pinning kept them up the rest of the day (though the bottoms of them were soooo gross after wading through Mardi sludge all day, but that’s kind of impossible to avoid!) This was the last Mardi Gras we got to have before Covid hit (I got super sick by that Thursday, and was ill for 3 months!), so I’m grateful that we really got to live it up, and have such a luminous, perfect day.

2021 & 2022 had to be missed out on due to Covid, the big freeze here in Austin, grief and emotional/financial poverty 💔, but Mardi Gras 2023 was incredible and our theme was FANTASTICAL BOTANICAL – Medicinal Plantasy on Parade! I embodied HUACHUMA / San Pedro Cactus, which was a very spiky social distancing costume, and I hope to share those images here soon. I’ve also got visions brewing for 2024, but I’ll keep mum on that for the moment…

Also included are a few choice costumes from Eris Parades of yore, including the Feast of Appetites where we had cupcake shaped umbrella lanterns, and I was covered in fake candy, a glowy-bug witch moment, and a Sea Priestess lewk:

I hope these images and stories will inspire and delight you – and fuel your glue-gun fantasies for your own future costuming! Laissez les bons temps rouler!