Moon Memo: Hiding Quiet
Hello from work, where I am on lunch break, and stealing a little time. This one is going to be a little short. I'm going to grab some essays I wrote this week during lunch. Some lunch notes, if you will. It's a good practice to get me out of the building when work is too much. Anyway, enjoy.
Hiding
2025-07-23-Lunch notes
A lunch note is half baked. It can't be used as a statement of fact. It's thinking on screen, then sharing it to the world.
Yesterday my friend E and I had dinner, and we were talking about how many people face the fear of transition by running away from the world. They either make their apartments their whole world, or drift deeply into online personas rather than the difficult meat space of existing, or they get deep into obliterating their world with drugs, or they die.
And I'm thinking about that in the same way that I thought about learning to live on my own after college, etc. I didn't have a safety net, really. I had to work the moment I left high school. My grandparents didn't have room for me afterwards, said "We love you, and we have a place for you to land, but we are going to expect that you are gone as soon as you can be. Because that's what adults do." I had to learn to take care of myself as soon as I could. I had to be an adult.
And I think that my time being out as a public trans from the moment I came out is part of that whole schema. I was a teacher. I had to be out to my students and coworkers. Because it was important. And because it was impractical not to be. I had to do the work of how to negotiate living vividly in the world. I couldn't escape. I couldn't just hide in my room hunkered over a Thinkpad. Though I did enough of that. I had to be out here in the world. And that meant finding a way to deal with misgendering (because it was going to happen). And I had to find a way to survive with really inappropriate questions (because they came). And it's been exhausting. And it's been heart breaking. And it's been what I've done. Because there was no world to flee to. There's just this world.
A coworker this morning asked me about pride weekend. I told her about meeting up with hundreds of trans people in a park. Meeting ghosts. Giving them hugs. Worrying that I wouldn't see them next year. She didn't understand what I was saying at all. Her and her wife are so thoroughly integrated into a community of queer moms that they don't have anyone that just disappears. And I'm not jealous of that. But I am a bit.
Quiet
Quiet
When I'm feeling a little stressed out I resolved that later I can be a little quiet. I write that as a note to myself all the time. I don't even know that that means for me. What does it mean to live a quiet life?
I get very depressed when there isn't much going on. When I'm stuck in my brain a little too much. But I also thrive in something that I call active quiet. When I have projects, like poems. Like books to read. Like movies and art. That's replenishing to me: small little times with friends that are mine to choose from.
That's another root of it. Quiet means freedom. When I don't have too much to do. When I can be a little understimulated, but not too understimulated.
Right now, I'm sitting in the office conference room. I'm on my blackbook, the quietest computer (text editor, question answerer, that's about it). I have the lights off. I'm writing things down on index cards (next week: Jury duty for J. Domming C. A big training Wednesday and Thursday. Not much else.). I have coffee and a bottle of water. I've been very busy this week. Stressed out. Today is quiet. Being away from my desk feels like freedom. So it's a good kind of quiet. No dogs playing. No 20 minute descriptions when 2 minutes would do. Just quiet.
It looks like I'm not busy. I'm not. I'm working, but I'm not busy. Busy is the enemy of good. Busy for busy sake is death. This job does not get my whole life. It gets enough to be good. It's enough to be quiet.
Tonight will not be quiet. It will be busy, and full of dancing girls, and drinking, and loudness. And I'm ok with that. This is fun. It's really fun. But it's not restful. It's not replenishing. It's a chore. I have to put on my best Misha Moon face, the kind that doesn't have aching knees or the smudge of depression. It's worth doing to have community, but I'll have to pay it back with quiet in the morning.
Tomorrow I will have a bath. I will listen to the blissful drone of the exhaust fan. I'll read a book, or some article, or stare off into space. I'll be quiet. That's what I mean by quiet. A baptism of rest.
Outro
Love you all a lot. Have a great day.
Misha Lynn Moon