Grace and death
Hello from the Multnomah County Courthouse, which is my possible home for multiple days. Hundreds of people gathered in the simulacra of community. We are all tired and bored, all of us hoping for the failed trial. I am at best disinterested, and at worst furious. Where does grace fall here in the jury room? At least the chair is comfortable. At least I have some personal work to do at this point.
And at least I am alive. At least I'm breathing. At least my back hurts and my heady is fuzzy. A new death in my community. Her name was Kayla. She was a mom, a former Mason, a beautiful lady, a fellow lover of the body, extremely sweet when I met her at the Rambler a couple of times, not a close friend but definitely someone that was known by dear friends. This is the first death for a lot of my newer out trans girls. The sad girls. I don't know think many people prepare for this. I hate that I am really prepared. I've been surrounded by death since I was 5 years old. This is my 6th trans woman. This is part of the dozens of dead in my lifetime. I hope I can give the living a place to go to if they need to talk. I hope they know I love them, and am here for them. I hope that Kayla's life was more joy than suffering. I hope I hope I hope.
I was already thinking about grace this week (see below), but when death visits grace becomes jagged and necessary. Grace to yourself as you remember you are a survivor, and that is not a bad thing. Grace to others around them so they do not die alone. Grace to the other broken girls. Sometimes all we have is each other. And that's rough. Because we are surrounded by a culture that doesn't believe in grace.
Anyway, here's some thoughts on grace.
A Note About Grace
I've been thinking a lot about grace this week. Stems from health issues, and also a discussion I've had (maybe not with a lot of grace myself, lol) with a dear dear friend. I have been VERY bad about being gracious to myself this week. But I'm trying. Because I try to make grace my default to others, because I am trying to be gracious to myself.
I think I default to grace because I feel like it's a survival mechanism for me anymore. I have so much anger. I have so much I could be in a constant rage about. How my body has failed me, over and over again. My early transition, and the communities that toppled because of petty bullshit. My loneliness. My first marriage, and how much of it was a sacrifice of my beautiful queer self. My whole career as a teacher. My childhood. My teeth. My neglect of myself. My desire and default to lean into temporary joy when long term joy doesn't feel like it can exist. The rise of fascism (the whole of my lifetime rise of fascism). The deaths of the last 2 years, too many of them. I could be raging and bitter and lash out and arm myself against the world. That's probably the way a lot of people I know would react. None of you, of course.
And yes, absolutely, it's natural and probably healthy to be angry at people who have harmed you. Who didn't do enough. Who didn't give you the permissions in the art you needed when you needed it. Who made movies and wrote books and etc that didn't include the you of now, but did include the you of then. And who did active harm, sometimes without even realizing it. But especially when it comes to art, especially art that moved you in some way in the past, we can give grace, and historical context, and still give ourselves a chance to find the gold in it.
I spent a lot of this week thinking about how the past doesn't go anywhere. This is something that Utah Phillips said in an album produced by Ani Difranco. We now know that Ani has hard views about gender, especially transgender women. Utah Phillips may have been weird around a girl like me, because he was old when I met him in the 1990s. But the idea that the past doesn't go anywhere, and that we have to confront it, and find a place of criticism, yes, but also a place to live with it, to accept it, to acknowledge that it was a step in building us into the people we are now, is something I need right now. So I'm not going to abandon that sentiment because the person who made the art wasn't and isn't perfect. Because if we expect perfect people, we cannot grow or change ourselves.
I also want to be gracious to others who are not ready to be gracious to others. Who need to do the important work of calling out bullshit. Who are at a point in transition of going back and doing that difficult evaluative work. That's important. I just hope those folks can do that work and come out of it without being bitter. Maybe that's self projection, and I have to have the grace to trust them and their processes. So I need to have the grace to not push back too hard against that extremely natural place.
The anger is important. The rage that people didn't do better is important. It's how we find ourselves in a different place, how we outgrow bad patterns, how we can define ourselves as different now. I want a better world, and I'm extremely angry that I have to live in a place where doctors hold back care because of my size, that legislators are actively trying to erase me and my fellow girls, that the world is burning because of greed. I don't believe in a "hey man, let's all, you know, like, love each other, man" hippy view on grace.
But anger without a chance for grace is a poison that can turn people towards harm. I've seen it. I've seen people die over it, kill over it. And maybe I believe that defaulting into an over critical mindset is how we get to the lashing out, the othering, the outrageous cynicism of our long now. Maybe this babe wants a different path. Because I want to live. And I want to try to be happy. And I want us all to come out of this alive.
But I have to have the grace to trust people in the process. I don't know. Maybe the reason I talk so loudly about this kind of stuff is because I worry that not enough people are talking about grace around us. And I want to save my friends a lot of pain that I've felt towards myself.
I'm starting to believe that grace is linked not just to how we treat others, but how we treat ourselves. How we can forgive the things we did in the past for survival, for finding a place for ourselves, for finding a way to not kill ourselves when we had the desire. If I can't give grace to others, I cannot give grace to myself. That feels like the alchemy of grace. By being forgiving to others, maybe I can be better to myself when I fuck up. And by god, I have fucked up a lot.
This is life long work. This is a place of failure and getting up and getting thrown down and getting up. And that's exhausting. I'm tired of having to do it. I hope I have the grace with myself and my friends and my lovers and partners to step back when I need to, and not push, and to be tender and graceful when they need it. Because I love them. And I want to love myself.
And dammit if this isn't just a reversal of the golden rule. Doing unto others so you can do unto you. My heresy knows no bounds.
Anyway, as usual, incomplete thoughts, grain of salt, blah blah blah.
Concert
Friday, head still ringing with doubt and despair, I left the house for the High Water Mark. Jade came along. I can't remember the last time we went to a concert together (Exciting!!!Excellent!!! and Wet Velvet, perhaps?). My occasional lover Cricket and her band Cage Mother played with Surgery Season and Lil T4T. It was fun.
Being in a room full of other trans people is exhausting and beautiful. Being surrounded by people that you love, and people that have wronged you (only one this time. She's alright. We've recovered.), and people that you are meeting for the first time, and people who are complicated and easy and weird and beautiful and find an insidious way into your heart. One of my besties was there, recovering from top surgery, walking a little more confidently. A polycule of friends that I had lost track of was there. A friend who never leaves her house, who came to the show beautiful and nervous, the legion of her dancing and then heading home. Girls in skimpy cow suits (hard to explain). Girls I last saw suspended in rope, naked and bleeding and blissed in that way.
I'm reading On Community by Casey Plett, and I am like her. It's hard to define THE trans community. What I have is MY trans community, and I'm trying to make it as wide and welcome as possible. I'm doing what I can. It sets you up for heartbreak (rest in peace, Graye, Rainee, Jay, Gwen, J@ke, Myra, Etc.). It will set you up for rejection (I'm looking at you, NAMES REDACTED). It sets you up for wonder and excitement and frustration. It shows you that all of us can be victimized by each other. I refuse to arm myself against any more trans women.
I danced and gasped. I panted and flirted. I did the living in community thing. I wonder how these younger girls see me. I wonder if they know how much I love them. Be cause I love them.
Thank you for the invite, Heather and Cricket. I love you.
Outro
3 hours in and no call. Time to stop writing and maybe read more of Casey's book.
I love you friends. I know a lot of you are struggling right now. But you are not alone. You will always have me, as much as you want me.
Love and stuff,
Misha Lynn Moon