"A space in the air only your bones could fill"
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want out of life, which I suppose is a natural effect of having currently unlimited time to contemplate what still matters to me in circumstances where my options are inherently limited. I’m not so sure about the concept of a career — whether it’s important to me or whether it even exists anymore. I would like to write things, and ideally for people to enjoy them. I would like to continue living indoors with Internet access and power and heat and water. I would like enough money to buy food and drink, and books often, and clothes sometimes, and other sundries occasionally. I would like to have access to hormones and elective surgery as part of my transition. I would like to be able to travel. These don’t seem like unrealistic goals.
I don’t care so much about recognition or about being in charge of things. When I have the opportunity to make other people’s lives a little better, I’d like to have the ability to take it, but that’s all. I want to see the results of my work, when possible. I would like to be good at the things I care about, but I don’t want to be the best at anything. I want to be able to care about things again without feeling like I have to monetize or optimize them to justify the expenditure of my time and energy. I want to feel like I can do things just for the joy of them, or the joy of the process, or even to see if they bring me joy at all. I don’t want my remaining lifespan to feel like one long zero-sum equation. Writing like this, for the practice and pleasure of it, on a schedule that I set for myself, on subjects that I choose arbitrarily, feels like a step in the right direction.
Writing it all out like that makes these ambitions seem simultaneously lofty and pedestrian. These don’t feel like a lot to ask, but only in the last few days have I realized how unobtainable they seemed just a few months ago, when I couldn’t imagine a way out of the great trap of the expected and established: seeking promotions in order to secure raises, working to make sure each day was not worse than the one before it, running at full speed to remain in more or less the same place. I had less trouble seeing how unsustainable and inescapable this was before transition wrecked my confidence and I went scurrying for cover behind a life patterned after what I thought other people would find easiest to accept. I thought I had to compensate for my transness in order to have a place in the world. In many ways I was not wrong, but ultimately I have ended up at the same conclusion I reached back when I had all the untested bravado in the world — that it is not worth wasting my brief time according to somebody else’s idea of how I should.
Crab bucket, thought Glenda as they hurried towards the Night Kitchen. That’s how it works. People from the Sisters disapproving when a girl takes the trolley bus. That’s crab bucket. Practically everything my mum ever told me, that’s crab bucket. Practically everything I’ve ever told Juliet, that’s crab bucket, too. Maybe it’s just another word for the Shove. It’s so nice and warm on the inside that you forget that there’s an outside. The worst of it is, the crab that mostly keeps you down is you…The realization had her mind on fire.
A lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say ‘Do not do this’ in the hope that it’ll work, but if it doesn’t, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all. Look at Juliet talking to all those nobby ladies. She didn’t know that she shouldn’t talk to them like that. And it worked! Nobody hit her on the head with a hammer.
The place I am tentatively circling right now is post-hammer. Dylan has been calling it the end of the myth of certainty — the idea that if you follow all the rules, you will be rewarded for your compliance. It’s a rule that holds particularly strong sway in the Midwest for some reason, where the greatest currency of all is agreeability. People have very little to do other than hold grudges, as I’ve mentioned before, and the auxiliary market for grudges is judgement, which rules the way people live: where they do it, who they do it with, how they do it. There’s just enough space for everybody to do whatever the fuck they want while simultaneously living in total terror of what everybody around them will think about it. Midwesterners do most of their crying in the car, as far as I can tell. This was a surprise to me as I’ve cried:
on the 1 train uptown
on the 2 train uptown
on the 2 train downtown
in Union Square, by the statue of Gandhi
on 12th St, between Broadway and University Place, on a random stoop
in Paul’s Da Burger Joint at the end of St. Marks Place, staring at the cow mascot on top of the counter
in every apartment I’ve ever lived in, obviously
in the Clark St subway station
in the Chambers St subway station
in the 66th Street–Lincoln Center subway station
in front of my parents
in front of my friends
in front of my professors
in front of total strangers
quietly, openly, and unceasingly
What Midwesterners tend to think when they see somebody crying in public is, “People can see you!!!” But now it doesn’t matter if anyone sees you. Odds are pretty good they’d like to have a bit of a cry as well. A few days ago Dylan and I saw a man crossing the street with one pair of glasses dangling from the back of his shirt and the other on his face. People who have spent their entire lives following all these bullshit rules for the promise of someday getting to ignore them — committing to the Pascalian wager of a lifetime — are realizing now that it never actually mattered whether you wear white after Labor Day or cry in public or tell people that they’re being assholes. Some of them are becoming better people as a result of this. A lot of them are not.
Dorothy Thompson, the first American reporter expelled from Nazi Germany, wrote a piece in 1941 that describes this phenomenon well. You’ve almost certainly seen it on Twitter, passed around by political journalists and the people who love to retweet them: “Who Goes Nazi?”
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
You know someone who would go Nazi. Even if you think you don’t, you do — especially if you’re patting your back about how you don’t know anyone who would go Nazi, because you’ve done such a good job of curating your friends to eliminate potential fascism. You haven’t. If you truly don’t know anyone who would go Nazi, congratulations on finally escaping society to live in a tree. You still aren’t entirely safe — are you sure about yourself? There’s a reason the historical response to Nazis and the generational trauma they inflicted involves constant vigilance. You can’t kill an idea, even the most abhorrent one possible. Leave even one window open an inch, one dripping faucet untended, and the rot creeps in.
In 2016, I learned a lot about which of my friends and acquaintances and family members would go Nazi. A lot of people I know did, as well. People show their true priorities during times of crisis, as they are doing right now. Just because it doesn’t make sense for those priorities to be stripping the rights from immigrants and Black people and trans people and women doesn’t seem to matter to these people. What matters is that for the first time in their lives they are realizing that everything they thought made them so special — the money, the stock options, the whiteness, the bootstraps myth papered over generational wealth, the vacation homes and the enormous cars and the concierge medicine and the delivery services and the six-weekly cosmetology appointments and the Pelotons and the memberships — will not save them. Your lungs will still fill with liquid; your blood will still clot; your organs will still fail. Just this once, you cannot buy your way out of mortality.
Scared people do things that seem irrational to everyone but them. Some people run for cover to the only people who are willing to promise them the impossible, at a price: fascists. They say, you are special, just like you always thought, because you’re the right kind of people, you good white upstanding Christian citizens, you stalwart heterosexuals, your morals are pure and accordingly you have been rewarded with prosperity and eternal life can be yours, too. All you have to do is sell out your Muslim neighbors and your Jewish friends and your transgender children, your sisters and daughters, the people who stock the shelves of your local grocery store and enable your lives of rarefied isolation. And don’t you think that’s right, that you should be rewarded while they suffer? Don’t you think you should do everything you can to show them that their lives are lesser than yours because of the way that they pray and the gods they pray to, because of the people they love and the way they fuck and the clothes they wear and the pronouns they use? Isn’t it love, to punish other people for not being like you, for not living the way you think they should? Isn’t it salvation, to stamp on their faces and call it kindness?
The word for the kind of person who is willing to make this kind of bargain is fucking coward. The people who are protesting for the right to leave their homes and spread disease like the selfish plague vectors they are — ironically often the same people who think it is just that children should be raped in cages by an unchecked army of white nationalist thugs who sign up to do just that — claim that their love for the taste of fascist boot-black is bravery. It is abject fucking cowardice. I know it, and you know it, and they know it, or they wouldn’t be doing it. It is almost always easier to be selfish and cruel, to see the suffering of others and tell yourself that it must be their own fault, to justify your own success as a matter of manifest economic destiny. It is much more terrifying to say, this could happen to me too; I am just as mortal as everyone around me, and all of them matter just as much as me. All of their hopes and dreams matter just as much as mine, and all of our lives have the same value: that of one person, no more, no less.
I like to end these rhetorical études on a statement, an emotional flourish of some kind, because that leaves me satisfied as a writer and (I think) you satisfied as a reader, but sometimes that’s the easy way out, too. Instead: How much is your life worth? How much are the lives of the people around you worth? Are these values the same? What do you want out of life, and how do you want to leave the world? What do you want people to remember about you when you’re gone? What do you want them to say years later, when the world is no longer recognizable as the same one you occupied once? Will they care more about what you did or how you rationalized it? Do you think history will look kindly on the choices you made? At the end of the day, you have only your own life to live and you are the only person who knows the truth of it. You will always have to live with what you’ve done — can you?
—R.