April: Sometimes Planting Trees is All You Can Do
It's been a while since I've sent a newsletter. Some housekeeping:
I recently moved! If you'd like my new address, feel free to email me.
I just turned thirty years old! I also just missed Trans Day of Visibility. If you'd like to do something for me for my birthday, consider donating to Trans Lifeline, or just tell a trans person in your life that you love them.
I don't have much to say about this country that you haven't already heard, but if you have it in you to be kind to each other, it makes a huge impact.
Having just turned thirty, it's struck me how solidly I am my own self, through and through. I was lucky to celebrate the day with some close friends while fielding messages from friends who live far away. I felt truly loved and celebrated on my birthday, and for that I'm immensely grateful.
Still, I was hoping turning thirty would make me feel different than I felt when I turned 29, or 26, or 22, or 20. March (and now April) have come back swinging in the usual early-spring ways - the daylight savings time change really walloped me, for one - but I have lately been slung back to thinking about March ten years ago, and of course that brought me back to pictures. So here are photos from March 2015.
For context: I had just turned twenty and celebrated with friends and my long-distance love from Idaho. A few days after he left town, he broke things off with me, which I took pretty hard. He was the first person I'd been seriously considering a future with - a slam poet with a huge heart and a devastating smile. The long-distance relationship prevented me from seeing a lot else. It was, also, the last time anyone's broken things off with me.
I remember taking the train to a class field trip in Manhattan (or maybe PS1), and calling Salvation Tattoo in Richmond to see if they had an opening during the brief window when I'd be in town. I had money set aside with which I had planned to visit my ex in Idaho – earnings from my RA job – and I wanted to spend it on something "that would actually stay with me forever."
The guy working the desk at the time was named Phil, and he picked up the phone and said "Salvation" the same way you might expect someone to announce the next stop on a train. I set up my tattoo appointment in the mezzanine between the G train platform and the E/M platform at Court Square. It was early March and it was just starting to warm up, little by little.
Being twenty, I worried about what my family would think. I was the first person to get a tattoo in my immediate family, except for my uncle, who has a somewhat inexplicable blue crab on his ankle. My first tattoo felt like a safe albeit impulsive choice - not only is the image itself beautiful and timeless, but my artist, Fred Pinckard, had the same name as my maternal grandfather and, right before we started, when I looked up at the flash pieces on the walls, I spotted a heart with my grandmother's name in it. It felt like a sign.
I'm not trying to be sentimental, but I know plenty of people who get nostalgic for "the before times," and I'm no different. If there were whisperings about what would happen to the country in the coming years, I was deeply unaware, safely ensconced in my private-art-school bubble in what's considered the most liberal city in the country, though I do love to prove this shit wrong. It was before the news cycle became what it was, before everyone's attention spans were shot, before I had reason to fear for my and my loved ones' livelihood and safety on any given day. My mom was alive. Lowell was alive. My brother was talking to me.
That said: there was so much good to come. Ruby hadn't been born. I hadn't started taking my writing seriously at all. I was still trying to (unsuccessfully) brute-force my mental illnesses. I hadn't learned that I would fall in love with many, many more people, and wouldn't be forever heartbroken by a slam poet from Idaho. I had yet to get my other tattoos, including one from Fred's wife Katie Davis. Among the other blessings we've experienced over these last ten years, the world had yet to experience Lil Nas X or Billie Eilish, and while Vine was still a thing, it walked so that other short-form video platforms could run. This newsletter would not be coming to you if I had not found some serotonin from this stupid little short video (and many others).
Recently I read Joan Didion's "Planting a Tree Is Not a Way of Life," the 1975 commencement speech she gave at UC Berkeley. She likens planting a tree to what I think my friends nowadays would call "complacency" or "apathy" - not engaging with the present moment, in order, perhaps, to hold onto that which was good or special from the past. I usually side with Didion, but I found myself pushing against this notion that planting a tree is not a way of life. Complacency is no good - I think people should give a damn - but sometimes it's true that all you can do is plant a tree, water your own soil, grow your own fortitude so that someday someone might be able to lean on you, lie under your leaves, and breathe the air you create.
There is of course a time and a place to rise up and shed complacency, but I think it's deeply punk rock to plant trees, or however you want to qualify it – to do what might look like doing nothing. We need both action and inaction in order to exist. Action can be whatever you want it to be, too - whether or not you find purpose in work, so long as you're doing something, I count that as action. And inaction - the stupid videos that make you laugh, the moments with friends around a fire pit that's not yours, watching the low wintering sun through the trees along the highway, the rushing river, the grass, of course I'll mention the grass - are what will take us through that uncertainty.
In "Let Me Tell You What I Mean," Didion writes, "I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor." When you try too hard to do something, it can fail, and as thinking, perceiving, feeling humans, we need that time to do nothing in order to do anything.
Sometimes, for me, "doing nothing" is looking at old photos and thinking back through memories. I know I'm not alone.
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