what do you even say anymore
I assume that you have no shortage of people telling you how fucked we are. My reluctance to join the chorus is, shamefully, a matter of self-preservation. It’s not just that I worry about my speech being wielded against me when I have to renew my green card in 2026 (although I do, obviously, worry about that). It’s that I can’t look too long at the scope of what we’re facing right now. I have to live through it, and I do not have the grit I would prefer.
Thus, months of no newsletter updates. Hi, though! Nice to see you again.
It’s surreal how normal our life still feels. In San Francisco, there have been incursions, but nothing like what’s happening in Chicago or DC. My workplace, against all odds, continues to trundle along; Isaac’s job is funded by a private grant, for now, so there’s that. He still has a book coming out next year. We are planning a trip to England in December. I’ve taken up swimming, which I last did at about the age of ten. The other day our cat headbutted my leg and I almost cried.
What is there, if I can’t write about the why of all of this? There is a monstrosity that underpins every new day in America, casts its long shadow over everything I try to do. Months ago now, I sent an email to Isaac: my A-number, some legal and political contacts, a list of steps to take in the event of my arrest or deportation. I can’t tell you what it does to you to send an email like that. The act of preparing for your own extralegal capture kills a part of you that you never would have guessed could die.
How do you write around it? I don’t know. I don’t know how to write in the first place, though, and haven’t in years; maybe I am just the wrong person to ask.
Last weekend we watched the Lambda Literary Awards with a friend who had been nominated (she didn’t win, #stopthesteal). For those who remember, I was a Lambda Literary fellow in 2019. That was a small lifetime ago, when I thought I was going to write YA. I wrote some poetry as a result of that visit to LA that got published, which feels absolutely wild this long after the fact. Meanwhile, one of the people in my cohort was up for two Lammys, and won one. (Go read Metal From Heaven. It’s incandescent.)
Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, wrote that “A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses.” A good piece of work is the sum of your own experiences, and on that basis, I suppose, It’s no wonder that I’ve stagnated. Somewhere in the pandemic, or the immigration process (the first one), or the immigration process (the second one), or the Current Moment (seemingly eternal), I stopped living the kind of life that yields writing.
You can tell me that’s unhinged, if you like. I’ve lived in multiple new places, gotten married, started transitioning, et cetera. What is all of that if not invention and richness?
But the problem lies in how I have responded to it all: By retreating into my own brain and going blank. If you ask me how I feel about transitioning, I’m going to take a second before I manage to say “good? I think?” If you ask me how I feel about the world, I am going to do a wretched little laugh and then say something glib and unhelpful (and, crucially, inarticulate), like “so it goes,” or “lmao it is what it is.” I’ve stopped reading because it reminds me of my own creative work. I’ve stopped thinking about my creative work because it reminds me of my acute disappointment in myself. I literally just corrected myself when I tried, reflexively, to end this paragraph with “It’s neat.” It’s not neat! It’s miserable. But the alternative is liable to render me non-functioning, at least for a while, and I need to function. I can’t afford not to right now.
That’s what I mean by self-preservation. I don’t know what’s coming, so I need to be able to brace, so I can’t look too long or too deep into the abyss. I can’t take a chance on losing my shit when the moment requires me to choose a plan and follow it through. I will deal with it when I am safe. I am losing track of how long I’ve been telling myself that. I will deal with it, all of it, somehow, when I am safe.
I don’t know that I have a solution. If I had a solution, frankly, I would not be writing this newsletter.
I do have a list of things that might make your day a little better, though, if you need that (God knows I do):
Roxy, resting her little foot on Isaac:
This menu I made for Roxy, which led to my making a bunch of other pet menus in exchange for donations to trans-supportive charities:
This poem I wrote, which in the first instance is about the JetPunk.com quiz game “500 Biggest U.S. Urban Areas”
Hugs.