Is grief always an entry into a dramatically unfamiliar world? Some days I don’t think about the meta experience of my life. Other days it’s all I can think about. My therapist might mention that these are levels of dissociation, where my awareness will sit piloting from the backseat. Lately I’ve been a passenger in a meatship wondering who is responsible for the moving, because it’s not me.

I’m waiting. If grief is not just an emotional processing venture, but rather one of physical recovery, of the four dimensional body connecting and reconnecting, synapses rewiring and an empty space, an empty space, an empty space? Empty? Is it empty or something missing? Was it ever there? Time stitch it up, stitch it up, stitch it up. Mend, and like new. No therapy or letter to write can touch it, so wait. Like, tired of trying wait. Like, I’ve done it your way now it’s going my way — wait.

I’m tired.

My new relationship has given me a front row seat to witness bigotry from micro-aggressions to all-out assault, based on anti-queer and anti-trans bigotry. While my identity and expression over the past few decades has changed very little, what has changed is I no longer enjoy the privilege of being assumed straight. A handful of interactions with folks on my block over the past few weeks has me disillusioned.

And maybe also people in general, because allyship can be conditional. And we see this all the time, queer folks eating hate chicken and picking their house assignment from that wizard boy franchise. Ally ship when it doesn’t interfere with my regular schedule. And on the other side, friendly neighborliness until you or your partner’s belonging here is in question.

Lately I feel like I’ve been getting a hard, but necessary lesson in compassion. If I ever had any calling, as long as I can remember it was to bear witness and do better. Now is like another handful of seasons of my life where I’m called to witness, to cultivate — but not to fix. There’s something else here I’m meant for, but I haven’t figured it out. It’s an empty space.

What is there to be done? I deserve no comfort for discovery of privilege suddenly lost, because that’s my lesson to learn with gratitude. But I do deserve comfort, as that scared, bullied queer kid inside me did. That kid who learned to hide their fire. The kid who grew up a storyteller, but the gathering around an ethanol flame.

I could find things, I could fix things. I would emphatically embrace a chance to find or fix anything, and I swear I remember I was good at it. Since Jon’s passing, maybe since the year before he died, I’ve felt like a fraud. It’s like my brain works differently; my hands manipulate space, and problem solve differently. I long to fix something. To cure something. To solve not just an annoyance, but a life-altering, improving solution.

To go from being the one people go to, to the one that needs people, feels impossible. I have measured myself in my utility and the skills I was proud of no longer work for me. Asking me to accept that my existence is enough, when my fixes fail again, is like sending me beachside to my own cabana, no phone service, and a perfect day. It’s hell, what would I do?

A week late on my Griefletter. I was driving my kids to their weekly music lesson, feeling dull because I had to take a propranolol (beta blocker) to keep me from a panic attack, as my girlfriend has a concussion and I still can’t handle anything medical aside from maybe a minor scrape or bruise, without sending me into a fugue. I wondered if there’s something broken irrevocably, or if I’m trying to keep a zombie part of myself alive when it needs to be put to rest.

I don’t like it, the persistent feeling that interrogates my existence or raison d’etre about five minutes after I stir awake. My broken dishwasher over the past month was enough to nearly break me, as I’ve run to my limit of what I can handle, and once I get something handled, a new thing pops up. I never rest. I sleep, but as long as my waking hours are consumed, sleep is a necessary formality that keeps me going, but for what?

Bumbershoot is this weekend. Eldest says to me me that last Bumbershoot was great. All I can remember is the panic in Jon’s eyes as he struggled to breathe. I can’t fix it. Can I wait this out? Can I? There’s got to be another way.