The First Drive and The Darkness

Yesterday I filled my car with too many boxes. With nearly all my clothes and 20 books and all the food I had in my cupboards. Just in case. Just in case I might need something. Just in case I might not be able to afford to buy it again. The frugal is returning. Seeping back in like an old friend, one who has betrayed me too many times.

It is cheaper to travel across the country than it is to pay my rent for a month in Oakland. That is real. So I’m in motion. Traveling through states I’ve longed for in the hopes that a next right step might become clear.

Yesterday I drove over 600 miles. By the 2nd hour I’d already taken a 5 Hour Energy. I was exhausted. Not by driving. Not by emotion as expected. There were no tears as I pulled out. Only a hollow knowing that it was the thing to do. Only a hollow disappointment that I couldn’t allow myself to feel more held and steady in that place.

I was exhausted because for the past two months I have not slept. Not a single full night. Instead there were too many hours of internet tv, too many dawns almost greeted, too many nightmares that shook the hope for a restful sleep. My sleep has always had a rhythm. There has always been a few weeks out of the year that I knew it would not greet me. Usually one week at a time. This moment of sleeplessness has been exceptional.

There are many reasons for it. Namely a job that is no longer mine. A job that spoke to my purpose and destroyed it at the same time. A job where I worked for the community and felt so exquisitely alone. There is much to say about that. About the ways that is familiar to me. About the ways I grew and flourished and decayed. About betrayal, the way I found a calling, and stress hives that stayed for half a year. In the end it was not my choice to leave. Not really. Though sometimes grace intercedes when you cannot do it for yourself.

Yesterday I drove and considered the ways this life could have gone. My body buzzed with multiple doses of caffeine, something I usually avoid all together. I drove and sang and still did not cry. And sometimes the corners of my mouth would pull up involuntarily into something like a smile. A smile closer to crazed smirk. Product of caffeine induced mania. My chest thumped too quickly and rest stop patrons gave me side eye when I mumbled aloud to myself at the vending machine.

In my car I thought addiction, madness, grief. All of which could have killed me but didn’t. But hasn’t. I thought of how my Mother’s body must have buzzed for the years that Speed coursed through it. I wondered if that buzz gave her the same hint of happy. I wondered if I could continue to fault her for it. I thought of my high school self and her secret diagnosis. How she didn’t sleep most of Junior year. How that is still one of the most productive and inspired years of my life. I pondered the brilliance of mania brought by substance, brought by soul. I wondered what was so different. I wondered when it could be allowed to be a gift.

I thought death and anniversary. How this will be 8 years since he left. I thought ritual and longing and close calls. I remembered how his death almost killed me too. Remembered how a lover once told me that having a relationship with me meant dating his ghost. And I wondered if his ghost would ever leave me. I wondered if I wanted it too. I wondered if anyone would ever love that shadow side alongside me.

Yesterday dusk came at 3:30pm and it did not get light again. It was part storm and part season. It will get darker still before it brightens. But it will brighten again. Short days will stretch into a new spring. I will be pulled forward into a new calling. One that does not cost so much.

But today I am called to hurt with no qualifier. With no hope for a brighter day. Not because I’ve forgotten it will come. But because despair deserves some dignity too. Some room to breathe and exist and decide to dissolve on its own. Today the road is gray and slick. And I am being asked to integrate shadow and self. Asked to name my struggle and let it sit a while. Let it travel beside me as a guide and not a threat.

I am asked to trust that I can survive my own wholeness

Hot & Heavy. And Not Giving A Fuck

Great writing, in my opinion, are stories woven together so truthfully that they pull on threads of your own story. They make you remember and relate and deepen your curiosity in yourself and your community. They give you life through their resonance and their art. Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion is full of great fucking writing. This book has struck a nerve. A nerve that needed so badly to be strummed so that maybe I could start to see the truth of my own story, of my own body.

Rachel Kacenjar's piece 2Fat2Fuck, Emma Corbett-Ashby's piece Public Stretch Mark Announcement, Golda Poretsky's piece The Fat Queen of Speed Dating, Deah Schwartz's piece Take Off the Damn Shoe, all touched something profound for me. Sometimes it was through curt sass and sarcasm. Sometimes it was with gentle empathy. But always they employed profoundly impacting truth.

As I read I couldn't help but write. That's how you know it's good. The words are not stagnant. They encourage movement. They are part of a movement.

At some point in middle school I chose not to give a fuck. I can almost remember the exact moment it happened. I realized that people were going to try and make me hate myself more than I already did. I knew they were gonna tare me down, holler fat jokes at me in the hall, and refuse to date me. I knew because they were already doing it. Boys oinked at me between classes, girls whispered about me behind my back, and everyone had a good laugh when I actually believed it was my crush who'd called asking me to be his girlfriend, when really it was just his friend playing a prank.

My family wasn't much different. I remember the tears welling up in my Grandmother's eyes as she touched the red raw beginnings of my first stretch marks. She exhaled deeply and said, “Oh honey, I just don't want you to suffer”. She had managed to forget that those stretch marks were partially due to the fact that I had enough food for the first time in a long while. Somehow the sufferings of living poor didn't stack up nearly as tall as mangled skin due to sustenance.

But I was well versed in victim and I wasn't going to let things play out like that. So I chose not to give a fuck. More to the point, I chose to think I was beautiful. My mother taught me that confidence was the purest form of sexy and that you didn't need good looks if you could ooze self assurance.

Now I wish I could tell you that this was a tale of coming to love my body. A tale about overcoming adversity and showing those middle school assholes just how shallow they were. It's not. Instead it is a tale of the remarkable power of distortion. Maybe even dissociation. Choosing not to give a fuck did not mean coming to love my fat, my curves, my full breasts. No. It meant choosing to distort my image of self so completely that when I looked in the mirror I managed to see someone skinny. I managed to mentally photoshop away about 6 dress sizes so that I could be a respectable size 12.

This meant I could walk through the halls with my head up, with pride. It meant I didn't have to wonder if that boy at church would like me even though I was fat. I wasn't fat. Which meant I could put my hand on his thigh during service and he would probably like it. And he would probably like it even more when I pressed him against the door in the pastor's office. It meant if people stared at me while I walked down the streets of my small town wearing jean shorts shorter than most underpants and a worn black bra, then it was their own fucked up problem. Because confidence, in my world, looked more like irreverence.

And that irreverence carried me through most of high school. I fell in love, wore outlandish outfits, indulged my sexuality, and rarely dealt with anyone hurling fat at me like a weapon. I had faked it until I made it. But that all changed senior year after I was raped and forced to come to terms with the real and vulnerable nature of my body. Again. My brazen femininity that involved drinking boys under the table, wearing slips as dresses, and changing the brakes on my car, shrunk as even the faux sense of self I'd created was shattered.

It took years to even consider confidence again. Fake or otherwise. It took a girl at a party leaning over her boyfriend to kiss me to remind me I had a body at all. For the next three and a half years I had sex with only her. It was the first queer relationship for both of us and our sex brought me back to life. Real life. Even though there were moments when I felt like she treated my body like a science experiment. Mostly because she was actually noticing it. The reality of it. She marveled at the weight of my breasts, grabbed the rolls of my sides in her hands, and dove deeply between the flesh of my thighs to find what she craved. She was skinny and never shy about my fat.

This is still not a story about loving my body. Not yet. Though I did move to California where I dated a fancy genderqueer butch who fancied herself a fat activist. We would talk about Nomy Lamm, Marilyn Wann, and Beth Ditto. We would coo over their revolutionary body politics and I would silently struggle with the secret of my sexy. The secret that my sexy came from a place of thinking myself beautiful only because I thoroughly denied my fat. I didn't hate it. I just didn't consider it. I still kept it far from me, lest it ruin my chances in this new queer mecca.

Over time I came to realize that confidence here looked like something totally different. I saw fat folks strutting their shit like it never occurred to them not to. They wore tight clothes on purpose, fucked with all sorts of patterns, and rarely obeyed the laws of fashion or anything else. They reminded me of the insolence of my younger years. And it occured to me that without knowing a fuller version of my story folks could have seen my teenage self just as I saw them, as a radical fat activist. And partially she was. But mostly she was just steeped in a different sort of self hatred. One dressed up with sass and sex and swear words. There was something different about these fat folks. They knew they were fat. And some of the time they really liked it. Hell, loved it even. They talked about their fat, touched their fat, showed their fat in public. They blew my fucking mind.

For the first time I began to consider the idea that confidence and sexy didn't have to require mental self sabotage. Many of the folks I crushed on commented sweetly on my fat, on how gorgeous they thought my body was, how much they desired it, how they liked the feel of it. This was confronting. Taking in those compliments required a come-to-jesus that I wasn't sure I was ready for. It required admitting, to myself, that I was fat. And that I still deserved to live with dignity. It's something I'm still working on.

I once thought that to truly be a radical fat activist you had to love everything about being fat. I assumed that the folks I had admired had shirked any hint of self loathing. Had summed it all up to sexist-racist-heteronormative-capitalist culture and they were above all that. But some of those folks are in this book. And Hot & Heavy humanizes the stories. Allows them to expand. Hot & Heavy reminds us that we were all born under that culture. So it is highly unlikely that we are going to automatically operate from a place that encourages us to embody our fat truth, let alone our fat bodies. It is work to get there. It is work to stay there. But the stories in this book make it just a little easier to remember that telling the truth about yourself is one of the most radical acts there is. Vulnerability is what truly changes the world. And this book does just that. It shifts things ever so slightly. It makes more room. For all of us.

Go and buy it. Right now. Here.

With much gratitude and respect for Virgie Tovar and all the other amazing authors featured in this piece. <3>

While The Veil Is Thin

While the veil is thin I asked my Great Grandmother. I asked her what she would want for me. Maybe what she never had for herself. And I heard an answer. Felt it bubble forth from some secret spot under a gut so used to worry. There was no judgment. There never was. Judgment was always just confused concern. She has only ever wanted the best for me. She has only ever wanted to love me.

Time, I heard her say. I want time for you. A chance to choose a life, a love, a place to root. She spoke about time to wander. To wonder what life might be. What I might want of it. She asked me to remember that wondering is a luxury not often afforded. Never afforded to her. Not on that farm in South Dakota. Not in the 8 years she was pregnant in L.A. Not in the home she refused to hide in or at the cemetery where she buried her daughter. Her road seemingly predestined. Never challenged. Never time enough to feel the impact.

She asked me to see the road before me. See it empty and fertile. She asked me to walk it like it mattered. To walk like that freedom was fought for. And then to stop. To pause like bones were for resting and not for weary. Pause to make room for grace and questions and instruction. Pause like it was safe enough to slow now. Because it is. For the first time. For the women of my family. She asked me to breathe.

She wished for me, a legacy. Time to learn the trades of my Grandparents. To take them to heart in the old ways, by touch and recipe card. To study them with reverence and no trace of obligation. To treat motor oil and cooking grease like secrets of survival. To treat them with respect. To study them like they, like we, are worth remembering. Because our work has rarely been separate from our worth. And to learn a skill is to embrace the heart of something so often overlooked. It is to hold a silent longing for lineage. To be gentle with a history that has only ever gone one generation back. She asked me to learn like we were worth growing. Asked me to honor my ancestors by beginning to build a base. One we were willing to remember now. One I could belong to. She wished for me a foundation like family. 

She whispered many things. Told me she wants secrets to be joyful and know nothing of shame or birthing. She spoke of love. Love that sews together sections of self so long ago split. A thread that spins story into ritual, into creation . She asked me to risk for it. To reconcile desire and dignity. To allow the wounds to weep out and have the courage to be held. To let the holding become our creation myth. A ritual that could be returned to. A love that costs no more than tending. A love that does not cost my pride, my skin, my self. It is instead a mending, an integration, a wholeness, a magic.

She asked for my brilliance and my mistakes. Asked me to hold them both as holy. To hold tight to need as an invitation into something sacred and never scarce. She has only ever wanted the best for me. She has only ever wanted to love me. And for me she wishes time. Time to feel the impact of this heart I carry and this road before me. Time to heed her teaching and feel her always beside me.

Surviving. Fatness. Part 1

During the early years of my life my Grandparents lived on a fairly secluded street in Southern California. Their home was not always safe for me, but it was steady. And for a long time steady felt like the closest thing to safe that I could hope for. It was a time when I was moving at least every six months. Usually in and out of the same homes. Frequently in and out of my Grandparents home.

Adaptability became my most useful tool. It made it so that chaos was always secondary. It made it so that I still got to do some of the normal kid things. My best friend and I set up a lemonade stand and tried to sell our toys to the other neighborhood kids. We would wear our side ponytails on opposite sides for symmetry’s sake. I traded X-Men cards and pogs with some of the boys in the neighborhood and had to give up three of my best slammers to get the Storm card I coveted for weeks. I ran and jumped and climbed things and got bloody knees. I was exuberant and maybe even a little bit daring.

Because I moved so frequently I didn’t form a lot of close relationships with kids my age. My best friend who lived down the street from my Grandmother was my one of my most important relationships because it was one of the most consistent. There were other kids in the neighborhood too. Mostly boys. Some I had crushes on and some I made cry by twisting their arm behind their backs after they called one of my girl friends a nasty name. And then there was Anthony.  

Anthony was an older boy who never had to go to school and walked around the neighborhood with a broken walkie-talkie and a faded thrift store security uniform. He would break up our games of wiffle ball or kick the can in the interest of safety or noise regulation. There was a shared and unspoken understanding that he was different from us and that something was wrong with him. Which meant we both humored him and paid very little attention to him. Sometimes if he would steal our ball we would plead with him or encourage him to join the game. To which he always responded with a threat to tell our parents that we were misbehaving. We were never quite sure if we were actually doing something wrong, confused by his absolute confidence in his authority, so we frequently would break up the game and go our separate ways.

As a younger girl I was fairly athletic. When I was able to I played softball and would swim wildly in any pool I had access to. I got dirty, loved the feeling of my skin baking in the sun, and thought of myself very much as a tough girl. With rare exceptions I preferred being outside on my bike to watching television. But at some point that all changed.

Nobody asked me why I began refusing to play out in the street or why I would only play in the backyard alone. I started to sneak Fruit Roll Ups and whole tins of Pringles. I sat and watched cartoons and locked myself either in a room or behind the backyard gate. I still wanted to see my best friend but would have full melt downs if she refused to spend the night at my house and instead asked that I walk seven houses down to where she lived. As my chubby body got fatter my intense anxiety was mistaken for laziness and still nobody asked me why the change.

The change came underneath the pine tree in the front yard. That was the day Anthony dug his knee into my stomach after pinning me to the ground. He told me he needed to search me for stolen goods and put his hands in places that no girl child would think to hide. I hissed and kicked but he was not a boy that I could make cry. And when he was done probing the corners of my body he stood up nonchalantly and walked away mumbling that he would catch me next time.

My 7 year old self walked into the house through the garage and stood waiting for somebody to see what happened. I imagine myself quietly standing next to my Grandfather or Grandmother, mouth slightly agape in shock and horror. And nobody noticed. So I walked upstairs, remembering I’d heard this silence before and I knew what it meant. It meant danger. It meant I was on my own. I remembered my 4 year old self and the banister I was walking past at the top of the stairs. I remembered how I’d been hung from it and how that cheap chandelier hung in my focus, upside down, as I waited to find out whether he would choose to drop me or not. Somewhere in me I remember the deep sadness that came when I realized that I would have to forego so much of what I loved to avoid feeling that fear of falling once again.

From ages 3-5 one of my Mother’s boyfriends beat me regularly and severely. It was why I was put in foster care, it was why I was in court mandated therapy for the earliest years of my life, it was why I knew home was not safe. So I had the streets. Not even all of them. Just this one in front of my Grandmother’s home. And then it was gone. And once it was gone it was like it had never been there at all. That adaptive skill tricked me into believing that I preferred being alone, I preferred being inside, I didn’t like those kids anyway. My fear of being caught by Anthony once again made it so I would travel only with the thick shield of a car around me. I was a smart girl.

By age 10 I began to buy into the idea that I actually was lazy. That I didn’t ride my bike anymore because my now fat body wasn’t capable of it. Riding my bike in public and walking down any street alone filled me with a panic that I mistook solely for body shame. And the reality is that fear is and was a swirl of things. Yes it was a way to avoid the insults hurled at me from moving cars, yes it was a way to hide my heavy breathing from those who would taunt me for it, but it was also based on a well-founded fear that being visible in a way you could not control was dangerous. It could get you caught, it could get you hurt.

At some point my Mother asked me if Anthony ever hurt me. I told her I think so and she asked me what I wanted to do about it. My Mother had a way of walking that fine line between empowerment and forcing me to be overly responsible at too young of an age. I think I told her that I wanted her to tell his parents. Which I don’t think she ever did. There was a common understanding that Anthony was not capable of controlling himself or his actions. I watched him never get in trouble for things other kids got grounded for. Because he had a disability he was treated as if he was incapable of control, sound decision making, remorse, or feelings. Which meant that he couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the harm he caused me, because well he just didn’t mean it. People’s incorrect assumption about what he was capable of meant that he never got to be a whole person and I never got to feel safe on the same street as him.

21 years later and I still do not ride a bike. I still am sometimes gripped with intense anxiety when I cross the street at a busy intersection. I still prefer to be at home instead of playing outside. I still navigate intense fear that my adaptivity has named normal. But I am just now realizing that the root of this fear is not the shame or anxiety that my fat body would be seen or noticed. In fact I may not even hate my body at all. No, the root of the fear is violence. Decades of it. And it is so much harder to adapt to relative safety than it is to adapt to danger. And this new realization, it makes some room. Some room for risk and compassion. It offers a sliver more space for that daring girl to come back and walk the streets again. Knowing that her grown self, her fatter body, is stronger now. Is safer.

Trigger Warning

Trigger. I hear the word constantly. It rolls off tongues with ease, especially in my line of work. Because supporting survivors of domestic violence is learning to navigate booby traps. Is learning to crowbar breath between instinctual alarms and reality.

People talk trigger warning as a way of being gentle. It is a way to prepare someone for information that could stimulate old ache. It is done with the best of intentions. Or it is done with a complete lack of awareness of what a real trigger feels like. Either way people are trying. But for me the word itself has always felt loaded, heavy, violent. For me it speaks to an act, a memory, so violent that it can annihilate. It is the trigger of a gun, it is the pull before the possibility of destruction.

But generally what follows does not destroy. Does not even maim or hurt or sting. What follows is usually just a reminder of what I already know. A reminder that people are being hurt in extraordinary ways and being asked to pretend as if it did not happen. This violence is not an exception in my life, so I don’t need the kid gloves. In fact the kid gloves just remind me of the childhood I never had. They speak to false protection. They speak of uncomfortable hands unwilling to get and stay bloody for me. Because this life has never been able to expect clean, gentle, and safe, as a base line.

Still I appreciate the sentiment. And I’ve learned to notice the words, the tones, the topics that make me want to crawl deep into my own skin or run screaming. I’ve gotten better at naming when my memory usurps reality and makes me feel younger, weaker and more vulnerable than I really am. But triggers, those have been fewer and farther between. At least for me. At least until recently.

A few months ago I was standing in my beautiful new kitchen with a boy I really liked. I never thought I would get to live in a place so nice and I never thought that I’d actually get to be alone with this boy. I found myself smiling from the inside out. I was optimistic, grateful, open. Until he kissed me. Until he pressed his sweet mouth to mine and I felt the wall behind me.

Then I was panicked, paralyzed. Then the only focus I could have was on breath. The search for it. Then I could only try not to choke or die or implode. Because his lips were not the lips on mine. This doorway I was pressed to was not the same doorway. For the first time in such a long time I was in that doorway of an old bedroom with that old friend. And all that stood between me and the destruction of my body was the turn of a door knob and eleven years.

I slipped away from him and that should have been enough to tell me he was a different man. I could escape. There was nothing I needed to escape from. But my body was still not breathing, my eyes were still tearing and the whole of me was still shaking. And he did not know, well he did not know the whole of it. Because I have learned to survive but I am still learning to share that survival. Still learning to trust that others can handle it, can hold it, can want to. Still trying to believe it’s possible that someone could help take some ache away and not just add to it.

That was our last date. The last time I’d let him kiss me. The hopes of something solid and sweet, shattered. For no reason. I have been kissed rougher, been pushed tight against a door, I have wanted it, craved it, called out for it. This is how I like my sex. And that kiss was much sweeter, much softer, but random explosions of trauma still ripple through this life. They have no warning, they give no reason. They just destroy and move on. Leave you feeling that old sort of confused and stupid. Leave you with the memory that once your body was not yours and sometimes still, they have their hands on it. From thousands of miles away, from decades beyond, from the grave.

They make you feel silly for making such a big deal of it. After all this is just one boy. It is not all the time. There was no guarantee he was the forever one. And others have it so much worse. But that is not the point. The point is that the trigger is not a poem about rape, it is the kiss I’ve been longing for. And there is no predicting, no protection. So please, don't make it sound so simple.

For 28

Intentions For This New Year:

• Look around more. Once again allow yourself to see what you once needed sheltering from.
• Put your faith back into practice. Live simply, be generous, acknowledge others. 
• Meet peoples eyes while walking down the street.
• Risk for what you want.
• Say when you are uncomfortable.
• Remember safe and comfortable are not the same things.
• Practice asking questions along the way in your dating life, your work life, your family life.
• Be openly and wildly sexual.
• Act like your family wants you. Maybe they do.
• Create community meal space in your home. 
• Start inviting people to things again. 
• Spend time in Montana.
• Remember that feeling stuck is a call to action not a cause for protection. 
• Say the risky things. Always.
• Embrace healthy conflict as a means of deepening a relationship. 
• Love the simple moments.
• Foster deeper friendships.
• Increase the number of people you can call when you're upset. 
• Ask for what you need. Every time. 
• Be honest about your desire to be held and cared for. Then let it happen.
• Interact with your body beyond living in it. Dance, exercise, move.
• Go hiking. 
• Stop limiting what you can do based on what you fear your body can't. 
• Buy better shoes.
• Build a stockpile of gifts so you can give more.
• Love yourself above all others.

Of Moving and Mother

My Mom and I used to go to open houses for fun. We would walk through empty bedrooms with my little brother and play at asking just enough questions to make the realtor think we might actually be interested. We would plot out which room was whose and where the kitchen table would go. I'd ask the realtor if there was a pool and then I would shake my head disapprovingly. There was never a pool.

We would collect fliers for homes we couldn't afford. She would pull over to the side of the road and have me run out to grab the usually damp piece of paper from a container hung on a splintered wooden post. She would look at it carefully, like she could actually consider it. I knew that we weren't moving into any of those homes. But somewhere there was always the hope.

I don't remember ever believing in magic or Santa or fairy tales. Reality always took up too much space. But there was hope. Perhaps it was just an endless faith in my mother. I thought, yeah, we're not gonna have that now....but someday. Someday we'll do it. So we might as well start looking.

By the time I was 10 I moved about 14 times. Give or take. Luckily I mostly bounced back and forth between the same areas so I only had to change schools 4 or 5 times. Sometimes I lived with my Mom, sometimes with my Grandparents. Sometimes we all lived together. Sometimes I was in foster care.

When it was just my mom and I we would live in apartments or condos. We would move when she couldn't pay rent or a dealer was looking for her or after the court mandated it so she could regain custody of me.

We made coffee tables out of cardboard boxes, milk crates and contact paper. We shared a room or we didn't. I don't remember ever feeling tied to a place. Somehow it just felt like an adventure, a life. Maybe I even felt lucky. Lucky that I wasn't stuck in the same shitty school all the time. Lucky that I had beds in different places. Lucky to have just one friend waiting for me down the street at my Grandparents.

We didn't start looking at homes until after I had made the big move from Southern California to Ohio. My Grandparents had started going to Al-Anon. They came to realize that tough love was the only love they had left to give a child who hurt them, stole from them and was not so slowly destroying herself. My Grandpa grew up in a small Ohio town and wanted to return. This meant deciding to move me and my new baby brother across the country. They told my mom that we were leaving and suggested that she finally stick to one of the many rehab facilities they'd checked her into. If she didn't then she would have no contact with me or my brother again. If she did then she would be welcome to move to Ohio and live with us after being clean for at least 3 months.

We said goodbye in a Denny's parking lot. It was dark outside, probably about 5 in the morning. I don't think we even ate breakfast first. And I don't remember if I cried. After all, in my 10 year old brain my mom was no longer a free spirit or a hard worker, the two narratives I'd used to explain our constant moving and her absence. She was just a drug addict.

6 months later she was waiting for me in my driveway after school. My Grandparents didn't tell me she was coming. The story is that they wanted it to be a surprise. Really I just think they wanted to make sure she showed up first. She moved into my room with me. My trust in her was broken so I made her sleep on the floor.

6 months after that my Grandparents moved into their own house about a mile away from us. My mom, brother and I remained in the small brick house on one of the two main roads in town. We listened as the trains rushed by on the tracks across the street. The town was divided by those tracks. There really was a right and wrong side. We lived on the wrong side. Still the wrong side there was a hundred times better than the wrong side of San Diego or any other California city I'd lived in.

It was the first time I lived with my mom when she was clean. Consistently clean, I mean. I hated it. I hated it because her effort to step up and be a parent made it clear that I’d never had one before. Her desire to build a home made me realize that maybe that was something I was supposed to want all along. Something that could have been possible but was taken from me. My pre-teen self wrestled with wanting to have this new fairy tale she tried to present and knowing that anything I'd ever clung to before eventually disappeared. So there was no use in pretending.

But resenting my mother, actively hating her, was exhausting. So I tried. I allowed my faith in her to remain intact. I treasured our nighttime drives on the right side of the tracks. That was when we could collect fliers and let ourselves dream like we'd never been torn apart. We would pull up quiet in front of beautiful houses and whisper to each other about what life might be like if we lived there. We would write new versions of ourselves and took pleasure in playing those roles when we walked the halls of the home the following Sunday during it's open house.

A few years later we moved again. This time to the right side of the tracks. My mom re-married and her new husband was not accustomed to wrong side living. So they moved into a two story home on a street with a cul-de-sac. It even had a pool. But it was not the dream home I’d been waiting for. By that time I hardly lived at home at all. I stayed with friends, slept in my car, stayed at my Grandparents, kept myself busy with work and a dozen or so after school activities.

Faith is a layered thing. My faith in my mother was never lost. I knew she would get what she wanted. I believed in her power. But as the years went by I grew to understand her limitations as well. I knew she would not know how to hold her new fantasy and my old reality.  Not at the same time. So I moved on from her. I’ve watched 4 new siblings grow up in that house. In 11 years they’ve never moved. Not once. They have a pool and a swing set in the backyard. They play softball and soccer with the other kids in the neighborhood. They have a dog and pet rabbit. I live 2,500 miles away.

This Friday I will move out of the home I’ve lived in for the past 4 years. That is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my entire life. I’ve lived with 2 good friends who are sweet and sane and steady. The room is small, small enough to touch both walls if I stuck my arms out. But it was mine. And for a time it was my dream. Living 3 stories up on Haight Street in San Francisco felt like success.

But now I am ready for something new. Ready for more space to grow. To dream. To build a future and a different kind of family. Something slower and sweeter. Something that isn’t trying to distract me from what I’m missing. So this Friday I’m moving into a new home in Oakland. I’ll live in a studio in the backyard. I’ll have a large bedroom all my own, a bathroom, a mini kitchen. And I’ll still be connected to the larger house with its porch swing and gentle community. And just outside my door, right beside my breakfast nook, is the pool.

In many ways my mother and I are nothing like. But in many ways we are. And maybe this next step is a step towards better understanding my own power now.  A power worth having faith in. A fantasy that might still come true.

To Believe In Roots

I want to believe in roots, the things I've never had. Tendrils have tangled in trying, in trauma, in tomorrow, but nothing has tethered me to things that grow.

I want to believe in roots. That they can be soft things, like fingers deep in something fertile. Fingers that clasp together and make a base for something to seed and be held.

I want to believe that rooting can be learned, that there are many ways to do it. I want to believe that shallow soil does not have to be generational.

I want to trust that digging in and hopping for something is not the same as being trapped. That choices expand, not restrict, when I nurture now.

I want to believe that roots can look like a mess of veins that stretch between us and bleed when broken.

I want patience for the cycles of living, fruiting, withering, blooming and death. I want the core of me to relish in how impersonal it all is. How it is out of my hands. How I do not have to hold so tight or work so hard now. How it will come to me, and it will leave me, and it is ok.

I want the pieces of me tied to a home I can invite people into. Where they can see sweet scents of my living. Where they can understand how this gore and glory weave together.

I want to believe in roots. That truths can be spread over a kitchen table top and people will tuck in to feast without consuming.

I want to believe in roots, a place for each of us, a home, a life.

A Time of Transition and Stretching Towards Surrender

I remember this cafe. The one I'm sitting in. I was here two years ago. Another time of transition. A road laid out before me. Things are not so different now. It makes sense to feel comfort here. Here in my oversize knit sweater. My black rimmed glasses. My too dirty hair. It is the scene. On another day I might resent it. Today I'm grateful to have a touchstone for change. Two years passed and this place is the same. It makes it easier to get to work.

And what is the work that is laid out before me? The work of transformation, transition? The work of visioning and grieving and holding the many possibilities before me. The work of reassessment. Is this where I want to be? Where do I want to go? How do I get there? WHAT DO I NEED?

I have become skeptical. This illusion of stability has slipped again and again. I have slipped with it. Slipped into judgment. Into fear. Into ambivalence.

My therapist wont stop talking about ambivalence. About how it factors into my dating, my housing, my work. About how it so primarily informs my life. I'm working on it. I'm working on certainty. Or no, not that, I'm working on clarity. I tell myself I had it once. I think I'm lying.

So I am here. There are a few things I know: I want to feel like part of a family. I want a home. I am not clear on what home means. I need more space. For my heart. For my body. I want to be good at my work. I want to feel free. I want to feel rooted. I want to be held. I am afraid of change. My job pays me well. I still cannot afford to pay all my bills and go out dancing. I have to make a choice. Something needs to change. I want more than I can afford.

I am afraid of change. The feeling of how it once was is always just under the surface. A warning, a paralysis. I have struggled to get this small slice of stable. I have struggled to find friends who weren't playing at their own ways of dying. I have struggled towards crisp vegetables and away from hunger. I have struggled with love that has leveled instead of lifted. I have struggled to be able to stay still. In the same place. The same apartment. The same body.

It is terrifying to feel like one wrong step lands you back in all of that. And it is a feeling. Not a reality. At least not likely. But that feeling, that fear, it's a big one. Takes up a lot of room. Has guided my life thus far. I do not know how to let go of it. I do not know if I want to.

I remember looking down. Looking for a safety net after others had showed me theirs. And I did not find one. Not family. No unearned money. Not friends. I feel the same way now. But both are untrue. Both are harmful ideas I created myself. Both are reflections of stubborn self-will. The stubborn self-will born of survival.

What does it mean to let go? To stop fighting? To realize there is so little to fight against (here)? What does it mean to fall into flexibility? Into uncertainty. To knowing that steadfast survival skills are, now, a barrier to flourishing. What does it mean to know that the best way to get what I want is to surrender? And what if surrendering feels impossible? What then?

How I Learned to Eat Greens

Most of my time in my mother's house was spent eating something quickly over the sink, changing my clothes or maybe sleeping. From age 11 on I made it a point to be in a house with my mother as little as possible. To say I left home would imply that home was something steady. When the truth is that home had always been in transition, so it was not a place I could leave, it was something that traveled with me. Most nights I stayed with a friend or alone at my Grandparents. Andrea's mother fed me more frequently then my own. Most of the time food was not expected anyway.

When I was in college I went home with my freshman year roommate for a holiday and embarrassed myself by starting to eat the lavish meal her mother prepared for us while I leaned against their kitchen cupboard. She looked at me with confusion, and maybe a little sadness, and said, “Would you like to sit at the table?”. It was the first time I noticed my inclination to eat standing. It ensured that there was little room for feigned intimacy and my ability to walk away was always close at hand.

Nobody taught me to eat. Nobody told me that people should share a table or chew slowly. Not that vegetables could come from somewhere besides a can or that bread could be made fresh. I was 15 when I walked into a friends kitchen and saw a pot of potatoes boiling on the stove. I asked her what she was making and her response shocked me, mashed potatoes. It never occurred to me that mashed potatoes could be made from anything besides pale flakes in a brown box. I remember the surprise registering in every limb of me and the humiliation of not thinking of that sooner.

I grew up working class. We went to pick up our welfare check and food stamps on the first of each month. Food stamps back when they still came in small booklets of play money. Some booklets were worth $10, some $20, some maybe even $50. And each booklet had an assortment of $5 or $1 'bills' inside it. Though really I only remember the $1 bills. The ones that always tore too noisily from the binding at the end of the month when you were searching desolated packets for just 10 measly slips of paper. There was no way to be quiet or quick about it. And you weren't allowed to rip them out ahead of time because they wanted to make sure you weren't selling them or giving them away. They had to be torn from the packet in front of the cashier, which also meant in front of everybody else in your small Ohio town.

Shame and eating for a poor fat girl is a layered thing. There was the shame of being hungry, of feeling watched every time I put something to my mouth. And there was also the shame that had to be endured just to get the food in the first place. People make a lot of assumptions about poor folks on welfare. Like we're all just taking a vacation on the system. Somehow my large body seemed to prove that point. So all of a sudden I was not just deciding on food for my ten year old self, I was also trying to guess at what would please every tax payer around me so that they wouldn't think I was ungrateful. So I could earn the right to eat at all.

My eating and access to food seemed to always be negated by my weight. Even though I ate much less than anyone I knew and much less frequently. In reality we rarely if ever had the food we needed throughout the month. Most of the times because the food stamps ran out, but some of the times because neither my mother or I could face going to the grocery store to buy any.

When we did have food we ate Hamburger Helper, Tuna Helper if it was a special occasion, shit-on-a-shingle (which is ground beef, salt, and flour over a slice of white bread), pasta with Prego sauce, discount cereal and whatever my Mom happened to bring home from the deli counter she worked at. Vegetables were canned corn or green beans. Every now and then someone would decide that we should eat healthier and frozen broccoli would get thrown into the mix for a while. Of course these meals always changed depending on where we were in the month and whether we could actually buy food at all.

After lots of work/saving/borrowing/ass-kissing, I left for college when I was 17. And when I got there I found I could camouflage my broke roots with politics. All of a sudden I wasn't poor, I was anti-capitalist. I learned where to dumpster dive for food and got most of my toiletries from the trash at the CVS where I worked. Any extra food I got was from the $1 store or purchased for me by a friend with too many points on their college meal plan. And I didn't stand out because my friends (who I was shocked to learn weren't actually broke) were digging for dumpstered donuts right along side me. All of a sudden this was a value system. It was something to be proud of.

In my junior year of college I started dating a woman. It was my first queer relationship and I was so into her I could hardly stand it. She was sexy and nerdy and political. She grew up in Connecticut with parents who were still together, who loved her dearly, and who had taught her the importance of balanced meals. In an effort to woo her I invited her over to my place for dinner. Angel hair pasta from the dollar store, flavored with a dash of vegetable oil and a heavy pour of Adobo seasoning. It was classy. Nothing came from a trash can, it was angel hair pasta instead of regular old spaghetti, and I might have even stolen some of my housemates olive oil to use instead of vegetable. She wasn't impressed, though she never told me that. She asked me later if I ate like that all the time. I told her no, sometimes it's not so fancy. I remember that not being the answer she expected. We talked in length about food. Where we got it, what we learned about it, what we liked about it. She told me she wanted to be a farmer and was fascinated by nutrition. And I don't remember feeling ashamed. Which is really a credit to her and how she framed things.

She was good at slipping things underneath the radar. She once asked if she could make me my lunch, since she was concerned that I didn't eat frequently enough. I told her she was sweet to worry but I could feed myself. She tried to argue the point but my pride ballooned bigger and bigger. However, over the next few months it happened more and more frequently that her quest to try and cook a new vegetable left her with way too much food. And of course she needed my help eating it cause her fridge was too small for storage and she didn't want it to go to waste. So I would cross the campus from class and sit down to a lunch of brown rice, sweet potatoes and kale. Had I not been so deeply infatuated with her I probably would have never put any of it in my mouth. As it was, I smothered nearly everything in ketchup until she banned it all together. She told me I could only put it on potato products like french fries or tater tots and she rolled her eyes at me when I pointed out that sweet potatoes were actually in the potato family.

These lunches were her way of feeding me, nourishing me, and side stepping my ego which was wrapped in a desperate need to fend for myself. She taught me how to boil rice and what vinegars tasted good. She introduced me to leafy greens and showed me how to let a vegetables flavor shine through instead of being smashed by seasoning. She sauteed chard, reminded me to drink water and managed to make squash a dessert. She would casually comment about how inexpensive rice and beans were and how kale was only 79cents a bunch. She set a table for us and I ate those meals seated, plates spread out on a small dorm room table. Of course I knew what she was doing, though my pride and perhaps my shock wouldn't let me say anything at the time. But she was teaching me how to eat. How to receive love. She was showing me what it was like to be cared for. It was overwhelming. And so desperately simple.

Now, years later, I live in San Francisco and find myself among many others who have the privilege of choosing their food. At the moment I'm a lapsed vegan who does her best to avoid the gluten and cheese that wreak havoc on her body. I eat remarkably slowly. It is something friends and lovers comment on, though I hardly notice it. The perfect bite has become a prayer, a gesture of gratitude. It is a reminder to separate shame and sustenance. It is a reminder to appreciate not only the food on my fork but also the space and safety required to enjoy it.

For This New Year:

Practice radical vulnerability\ Aim for being met 50/50 in all my relationships\ Support my body in being stronger\ Treat my writing with respect. Practice it, strengthen it\ Have more fun!\ Listen when people tell me about themselves. e.g., if someone says they don't think they're good enough for you, take their word for it, they probably aren't\ Take my vitamins\ Cook all the dried beans in my cupboards\ Stop feeling embarrassed by other peoples bad behavior. Remember their actions aren't my responsibility\ Stop looking for support in the form I want it and open my eyes to the many forms it's already presenting itself\ Be militant about gratitude\ Strive to remain present\ Submit at least one piece of writing for publication\ Apply for a writing residency\ Grow into my influence at work and in the world\ Watch the ways that old hurt seeps into conversation just because it's easy, not because it's genuine\ Remember the deep origins of wounds and stop letting lesser hurts and lesser people take the fall\ Encourage deeper thinking\ Get clear about who to confide in\ Get a car\ Return art with art\ Send more mail\ Travel more. Maybe out of the country, definitely through the middle of the U.S.\ Buy nicer underwear\ Get a new bed\ Trust my own love and turn some of that inward\ Remember all my siblings birthdays\ Go to the FemmeConference\ Remain open to the Holy\ Eat the foods my body likes\ Eat more than one meal a day\ Be intentional with my friendships\ Cultivate midwest manners and kindness where I live\ Bake cookies for neighbors\ Make more time for reading\ Explore the masculine edges of my Femme identity\ Spend a significant period of time away from San Francisco\ Pay all my bills\ Save some money\ Start processing whether or not I would ever want to have kids\ Make more room for intuition and follow it\ Consider forgiveness.

A Year. A Reflection.

The Taste of 2011:
Learning how to take space. Or rather to ask for it instead of just slamming a door shut slowly; Corrective experiences; Navigating an abusive cycle outside of a romantic relationship; Having someone notice harm happening to me and, for the first time in my life, using their power/authority/voice to try to end it; Stress rashes and the effort to work beyond old coping skills; Getting my heart split open. Twice. And the pros and cons of that; Letting go of what doesn't work with a lighter heart; Kentucky rainstorms; Long drives in borrowed cars; Friendships shifting and moving around the globe; Durham, North Carolina; The desire to deepen relationships; Riding in Dykes on Bikes with a hot femme sister; Trans Womyn Belong Here and The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival; Sobbing loudly in the woods and being held by a woman who had been set up to be my enemy; Internet TV; Talking in detail about sexual assault in therapy for the first time; Strengthening friendships and support at work with fellow supervisors; Getting better at my job; Questioning San Francisco as a home for myself; Dairy; Disneyland vacation with Best Friends; Being single ladies with Kristina and her loving/ass kicking friendship; Growing into my role as trainer for new survivor advocates; Scooter rides over steep hills; Having a few pieces of my writing circulated and appreciated more widely than before; Femme friendship; Deep generosity; Glitter Babes and performing with GLITTERACTION!; Dogs; Death defying first dates; The Hunger Games; Appreciating my Great Grandparents; Dignity; New and solid friendships; Friday Night Lights and the longing for small town life and working class values; Dates full of laughter and sharing and cute; Sex and bruises and learning; The Occupy/Decolonize Movement; The General Strike; Getting tear gased by the Oakland Police; 3am wake up calls to show up and defend the peoples right to have their needs remain visible; My revolution daydreams coming true; The 99% and our power; Making the personal political and feeling the life affirming affects of that; Speaking my truth to my Mother and her trying to hear it; Naming clear boundaries for myself; My Mom saying, 'Sometimes I don't know what to do' and me replying, 'You can honor my story and treat it with reverence, instead of giving into shame'.