Moon Memo: Winter Solstice with Meltdown
The sunlight streams from the windows. The car is cold and wet inside, the weather sealing failing more and more every year. I watch the houseless men struggle across the street, their backs ruined from a long year of sleeping on concrete. Wrapped up in blankets and screaming at the traffic. The yearly Residence Unknown report has come out. More houseless dead than any year.
It is the winter solstice today, and it's beautiful, bright and cold. The windows are dripping everywhere with moisture. Everything here is green and lush, as usual this time of year. The most golden thing about living here is the winter weather. The winter coat stays hidden in the closet most of the time. It's mostly hoody weather until summer.
End of year protocols are engaged. Not a lot of work left to do. Just finished the second to last meeting. The next one is going to be tomorrow (friday) at 10 a.m., and then I am done for 4 days. And next week is going to be quiet. We all know what we have.
Tonight my friend Rachel is opening her home to Jade and I. Along with other friends and chosen family. Going to reflect on the joy of the world filled with Trans women. Eat something delicious, and hope for the light to return.
Orientation was hard this week. I had a panic attack in the middle of a spiel on the first day, and had to go into recovery mode. I'm actually going to be reading about it at a variety show next month. The rough draft will be shared below.
If you want to attend, here's the flier for the event. Put on by one of my coworkers. Exciting times.
End of year keeps catching up. I'm trying to read more. Spent an hour in the tub this morning reading between two books: Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey, and Draft 4 by John McPhee. Both are excellent. I want to actually finish some books this year. I don't think I finish nearly as many books as I begin, and the one New Years Resolution that I have is to be able to finish what I start.
Here's that essay that I wanted to share. Really, it's the only reason I'm writing this today. Probably will write another one this weekend to send out. I love you all immensely, and hope that you have a delightful and blessed solstice.
Love and stuff,
Misha Lynn Moon
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Meltdown
This feels like coming out again. Talking about my neurodivergences in a room full of my coworkers has been risky in previous jobs.
As a teacher you are taught that your first priority is always your kids, and neurodivergence is not really accommodated for. And I was the first trans woman in Oregon to transition mid career. And the stereotype of the autistic trans woman is a real thing, and has been weaponized against us, has been used to belittle our gender identity as a symptom. So I spent the 6 years before I started here in another kind of closet than the one that I did for the 37 years before that. Coming out as autistic can make things awkward professionally.
But our agency has a mission of being there for community members who come as they are. And I have to believe that extends to our staff as well. So...
The first time I had a meltdown at this job was in the middle of a presentation about the History of Our Agency and Harm Reduction. I could feel the usual fizzing away of all the borders of reality around the edge of my eyes.
Try this: look at the point of your finger right in front of your nose, and try to get it to look like one finger instead of two. See the edges of your vision, where it gets distorted and rippling and strange? That's what my entire vision looks like at the beginning of a panic attack.
I love leading new hire orientation. I love being the trans mom of the agency for a couple of days at the beginning of a coworker's life with us. I love talking about our history, how we started in the basement coffee shop attached to a church. How the Day program lived in the basement of Building Two for a while. About how the first trans woman that I know of to receive hormones from us was in the 1970s, when we used the term "women's specialty clinic" as what kind of health services we provided. I love talking about how queer we are, about how fucked the barriers to health are, about the reasons why so many of my sisters say "I got HRT for the first time from Outside In when I arrived here and was sleeping on a couch somewhere because I didn't want to die in Florida." I love that for many folks their first exposure to our agency is a fat non passing trans woman.
But I'm also on the autism spectrum. And being in enclosed places with too much stimuli overwhelms me, leads to a short circuit. I began to short circuit.
The purple room is small, and hot, and there were 10 other people in the room, and technical issues were happening which means a lot of cross talk was happening. As I walked through our history a cocophony of sound entered me: the traffic outside of the open window. The voices of coworkers trying to get Paycom to work, really, it will work this time. The laughter from the other side of the wall, the youth department meeting about the upcoming day in the Day program. And sometimes the thing that is quirky inside me began to push me towards my shut down protocols.
I didn't receive a diagnosis until I was well into adulthood. It came after I got tired of masking my gender all the time, and realized that so much of the work that I did to hide myself wasn't only gender related but also was my neurotypical brain coping. I went through a multiple session diagnostic, and came out with a diagnosis that was meaningless in many ways but answered a lot of questions.
I grew up with a brother on the spectrum, who couldn't hide his tics and panics. It was expected that I had to be the good sibling, the one that could handle things for so much of my life. So I set up rituals: have to be on time. Have to be prepared. Have to have to have to.
Whenever I had melt downs in my previous life, a gender ago, I would get angry at myself. I would think of it as a personal failure. I would think of it as stubbornness, or being too male, or rage filled. I accepted that it was my failure, rather than just a part of my brain being brainy.
Having a diagnosis didn't change that panic happens. Medication helps. I'm on a low dose of anti anxiety meds. I have more powerful meds if I get too worked up. And I have protocols I can follow. Counting techniques. Writing exercises that seem to help to focus me back into my brain. But those don't help when I'm in the middle of a training, explaining harm reduction theory, and I am alone, and I need to power through it.
I finished my presentation, and the next one, I think. I hope. I called lunch, and took myself down to the basement. The lactation room was empty, so I turned off the lights, and laid on the floor, and counted to ten forwards, then back words, counted my breath, let the darkness calm me. The room had just been painted, so I breathed in the paint fumes. I came back to myself. And I went back upstairs, into the tight hot overfilled room again. And I made it through the rest of the day, and went home to crash out.
If you see me searching in a bit of a panic sometime in the hallways of 1132, or 1226, or building 2, or the east clinic, the best thing you can do is suggest someplace quiet. I'll be fine. I just need a few minutes. And please, if you are my boss and are here, I won't give up this part of my job, because it's the part I enjoy the most. It's just that sometimes I melt down, and the world gets a little fuzzy, and unreal, and I'll be ok. I'll be ok. I'll be ok.
Misha Lynn Moon (She/Her) has been writing and publishing poetry since she was 13 years old, both under a dead name and her living one. She was one of the first teachers in the State of Oregon to transition on the job. After 20 years as a public educator she started at Outside In in the fall of 2022 as its first Training Coordinator. Her poem "Trans Girls of the New Abundance" will be appearing in Arboreal Literary Journal in 2024.