Author: Alyxander James

Having a Body

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Sometimes, having a body is exhausting. This feels like one of those weeks.

Last Thursday I had an unexpectedly positive experience at a new rheumatologist’s office, and I’m feeling a little more hopeful that this one will actually try to figure out what is behind the chronic pain I deal with (as opposed to the last one, who basically just wrote it off as, “because you’re fat”). So that’s a happy thing.

Monday, in the middle of a staff meeting, I felt my back seizing up. I needed to stand but felt like I couldn’t (because everyone else was sitting and I felt the social pressure of not drawing attention to myself), and as a consequence have been in a not inconsiderable amount of back pain all week. It’s slowly working itself out, but it’s a process.

While this has been going on, I’ve also been trying to tackle multiple projects at work. I have a desk that can adjust from sitting to standing, and that’s been a lifesaver in terms of back pain management. But I’m finding the types of work I need to do are harder to focus on while I’m standing. On the other hand, sitting for any length of time makes my back stiff and sore. I feel like I can’t win.

Add to that the rain and temperature shift today, and I’m in a place of “everything hurts and I am exhausted.”

Thankfully, I have some bright spots to focus on this week. Most notably, I finally got to play the show I missed the night I had to go to the ER a couple of weeks ago. It was fun, more people than I expected showed up, and I even made some money in tips!

Anniversaries

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Happy Thursday, dear readers!

I was so focused on my ER adventure last week that I completely missed the fact that last Thursday was my 6 year HRT anniversary. I’ve been on testosterone for six whole years! Which, incidentally, means this blog will hit its six year anniversary in a couple of weeks. I’ve blogged almost every week for six years, which is mind-boggling to me.

My therapist is constantly reminding me that I need to take time to recognize and celebrate progress. I’m not good at this. So today’s blog will attempt to do a bit of that.

A lot has changed in the past six years. My life has gained a welcome level of stability that wasn’t there before. I’m in a better place mentally than I was then. I had no idea when I started this part of this journey what would happen with my family. It’s been a trip…but I’ve ended up in a largely positive space. So that’s cool.

In addition to those personal anniversaries, there’s another important one coming up: Sunday will mark nine years since my partner and I went on our first date.

NINE YEARS. In two years we’ll have been together for a third of my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been worth it.

In therapy this week we talked about how after three or so years in a relationship, we shift from thinking about that person as a new person in our lives to thinking of them as family. That means that unless we consciously work to rewire whatever dysfunctional attachment patterns we developed in our family of origin, we’ll perpetuate those in our family of choice. (On the one hand, breaking those dysfunctional patterns is overwhelming and difficult, but on the other, what a cool opportunity to strike out into new territory!) One of the things I’m working on is letting myself be cared for, even when I feel like I’m inconveniencing the people around me. I’m so grateful that I have a partner who’s so thoughtful and intentional about making sure I’m cared for.

What about you, friends? Any anniversaries, big or small, happening in your lives these days? I’d love to hear about them!

Whoops

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So it’s now 5pm on Thursday evening and I only just realized I never posted anything today.

In my defense, it’s been a bit of a week.

Tuesday night, I was supposed to play a gig that I was super excited for. I woke up Tuesday morning feeling under the weather, but determined to make it work.

It wasn’t meant to be, though. On my way to work I noticed on my Fitbit that my heart rate was high. As the day went on, it stayed up. The “active minutes” bar on my watch kept climbing as I was sitting at my desk. It was disconcerting.

When I got home, my partner double checked my heart rate, and the Fitbit wasn’t wrong. So I called off the gig, he called us a Lyft, and we headed to the emergency room.

Long story short, they sent me home about 4.5 hours later, after all the tests they ran came back normal. My heart rate went back down overnight, and it’s been normal the past two days. I worked from home the past two days, just to take it a little easier. I’m currently in the waiting room at my primary care doctor’s office for follow up.

It was definitely unsettling, and I’m still concerned that I don’t have any answers. Hopefully I can get some clarity from this doctor’s visit.

In happier news, Hamilton was fabulous on Friday! I’m so glad we got to go.

Under the Weather

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It’s snowing in Chicago at the moment. Not much if it is sticking – mostly, everything is just cold and wet.

Generally I don’t mind snow. I like cooler weather – I run warm, and I like to show off the stuff I’ve knitted. Today, though, I’m a little cranky about it.

I’ve been getting over a cold for two weeks now. I have a cough that just won’t stop. I sound worse than I feel, at this point, but the cold, damp air isn’t helping anything.

We visited my grandmother for her birthday last Saturday. It was a good trip, and I’m glad we went…things weren’t perfect (she tried avoiding pronouns altogether, but when they did come up, she defaulted to the wrong ones for both of us, and at one point she introduced my partner to the staff as my “friend”), but they went about as well as I could have hoped. I hope I look as good at 92 as she does.

Tomorrow night we’re finally going to see Hamilton! I am very excited about that. The first time my partner played the soundtrack for me, I remember not being sure how I felt about it. But it was our main road trip music for our trip back to Minnesota one Christmas, and by the end of the trip, I was sold. It’s so good!

Finding Time to Rest

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Friends, apologies for another late post – I stayed home sick today in an attempt to recover from the cold that’s plagued me for the past week before I go to visit my grandmother for her birthday on Saturday, which meant I slept in rather than writing a post on time. I’m feeling a bit better after the extra sleep and a shower, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign.

Part of why I called off from work and took a sick day was also due to the fact that this is just a bit of a bonkers week. My bestie from Minnesota was in town over the weekend, which was delightful. She left Monday afternoon; Monday evening I had therapy and my partner and I both played sets at an acoustic show. Tuesday I had the day off, but somehow it went by very quickly…that evening, we got dinner with our friend Emily Ann Peterson who was in town for a show, and then I had songwriting class. Yesterday I went to work (despite the fact that I felt pretty crummy when I woke up), and then in the evening we went to Emily Ann’s show, which was super fun. Tonight, I’m volunteering at the Old Town School, and tomorrow after work I’m picking up a rental car, picking up my partner, and driving to western Wisconsin. Saturday morning, we’re getting up early and going to eastern Iowa to have birthday brunch with Grandma, and then we’re driving back to Chicago for another show (our friends Heather Mae and Crys Matthews). Sunday I’m returning the rental car, playing Monsterhearts 2 with some friends, and possibly (if the game ends at a reasonable time) going to my songwriting class showcase. So yeah. Busy week.

So while I didn’t really want to use my sick time, I am taking today off, because if I keep going at the breakneck speed I feel like I have been, I’m going to end up with more than a cold. I’m going to try to get some laundry done while I’m home today, but beyond that, I’m trying to rest.

Remarkably Healing

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Hello, dear readers, and apologies that this post is going up late – it’s been a weird week, and I nearly forgot what day it was.

I wrote last week about my grandfather’s passing, my complicated feelings around our relationship, and my anxiety about going to the funeral, which was last Saturday. I am pleased (and still a little surprised) to report that going to the funeral, while hard and sad, was actually a remarkably healing experience.

My extended family, including the folks I was most nervous about seeing, all either called me Alyx or avoided names altogether. I heard one aunt use the wrong pronouns once, but she corrected herself smoothly and moved on. I didn’t feel othered at all – I was included every step of the way. I felt…well, like I had a family, in a way that I haven’t felt in a while.

I know that some of the responsibility for my prior estrangement from my family is on me. I chose to pull away rather than engaging with them. I still feel like I had good reason to (I didn’t have the mental or emotional resources to manage their potential responses when I first came out), but I also recognize that I did not give them a chance to prove me wrong about how I thought they would react to my coming out.

I’m also 100% certain that a large part of why the weekend went so well has to do with my grandmother. She and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but since we reconnected this spring, she’s done a phenomenal job of showing up and showing me love and respect, which I am doing my best to return. I think the fact that my nearly-92-year-old grandmother can manage to call me Alyx and meet me where I’m at meant that no one else had any sort of excuse to do otherwise.

It was a long day (I drove from Chicago to northeast Iowa on Friday evening, and back to Chicago on Saturday evening after the funeral), but I’m glad I went. I was genuinely disappointed that I wasn’t able to stick around and spend more time with my family (it was snowing in Iowa by the time we finished lunch, and I decided to head straight home rather than risk icy roads as it got later), which I was not expecting.

One of my aunts, as we were saying our goodbyes, gave me a long, firm hug before telling me she was so proud of me, and that if anyone wasn’t, that was on them, not on me. I still well up a bit every time I think about it.

I guess what I’m saying is people are surprising, complicated creatures, and I need to do a better job of remembering that rather than jumping immediately to worst-case-scenario planning when I interact with people who I expect to disagree with. (I’m also grateful that this funeral was not a place where politics came up, because I’m sure a lot of the warm fuzzies would have been…well, less warm and fuzzy.)

Grief is Messy

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It’s been an emotional week. On Sunday, I heard from my mom that my grandfather (who had been in a nursing home for a while and was on hospice) seemed to be fading, and my grandmother didn’t think he’d be around much longer. Monday morning I woke up just as my mom texted me the news that he’d died in the night.

I have been having a lot of complicated feelings about this loss. My grandfather was a sweet, gentle man in my childhood memories of him, and I looked up to him. He was also unwilling to come to terms with having a queer and trans grandkid.

The last time I saw my grandfather was at my brother’s wedding, a little over 7 years ago. We wrote letters for a while after that, attempting to reconnect. I tried to explain who I was becoming. He threw a lot of bible verses at me and tried to get me to come back to Jesus. After a particularly painful exchange, I eventually gave up. We stopped talking.

Several months ago I reconnected with my grandmother, and it went better than I expected it to. Unfortunately, by that time, we were losing my grandfather to dementia, and we decided that it was better for everyone to not try to have that conversation with him again.

I love my grandfather. I was also deeply hurt by him. In many ways, I’ve been grieving this loss for years, but there’s still a fresh element of finality to the loss, now. Grief is a messy thing. It’s not linear. There’s no timeline and no roadmap.

I’m also rather anxious about the funeral, which is happening on Saturday. I haven’t seen any of my extended family (aside from my grandma and one cousin who won’t be there) since well before I started transitioning. They all know – I sent out a zine over the summer reintroducing myself – so it won’t be a huge shock to them. But I’m still not really sure what to expect. I’m grateful for my grandmother’s support – she requested that I join the other cousins in attendance as a pallbearer, and I think the rest of the family will follow her lead in interacting with me. But it is stressful.

My grandpa was a storyteller. He was who I got my own love of storytelling from. I hope that now, released from his body, he’s able to be proud of the stories I tell and of the person I am.

Running Late

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It’s Thursday morning, and I’m running late. Again. This has been a common theme of the past few weeks. I don’t know if it’s the changing weather or allergies fogging my brain or a general dissatisfaction with my job or all of the above, but it’s been a struggle to get up and get moving most mornings that I need to go to work.

We have entered the season of Jewish high holidays, so I get a bunch of extra days off from work for most of October. This helps. I had Monday and Tuesday off this week, and while I wasn’t as productive as I’d intended to be, it still felt good.

Over the weekend we did a very adult thing: we bought a couch, and it didn’t come from IKEA! It’ll be delivered in 4-6 weeks, and we’re excited at the prospect of finally figuring out our living room setup. My partner did a lot of work around the apartment the other night after I went to bed, and it’s looking much more put together now.

Dreaming

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I’m in a weird, waiting space in a few big areas of my life right now. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it’s uncomfortable and I’m hoping I’m able to start moving again soon.

In the meantime, I’m dreaming, and I’m trying to figure out how to manifest some of these dreams. (I’m also thinking about how “manifesting your dreams” usually comes down to some combination of hard work and privilege.) What do I want my life to look like? What do I want to give more time and space to? Where is my focus shifting away from things that have taken up a lot of time and space historically?

I’m trying to stay on top of assignments for my songwriting class (which I’m super grateful for at the moment, because if I didn’t have those deadlines, I probably wouldn’t be writing much at all right now). There are dreams tied to that, too – when will I hit the point where I can save a little money to record an EP? Since 2012 I’ve written almost 175 songs; more than half of those have happened in the past two years. I’m sitting on a lot of material, and it would be nice to be able to put some of it out into the world in a way that feels more permanent than the (very) occasional live show.

I really, really hope I have some more concrete news to blog about soon. In the meantime, I am trying to learn to breathe through the discomfort of waiting. I don’t know that I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I am trying to see what I can learn from this liminal space. Patience is not always my strongest virtue, but I’m working on it.

Optimistic

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Happy Thursday, dear readers! I feel like I have been confused all week about what day it is, and so I very nearly forgot to write something today, but here I am. Part of my confusion is, I think, related to the fact that I’m still fighting some sort of cold/allergy bullshit that’s fogging up my brain (and making me feel physically pretty blah). I’m working from home today because I woke up achy and feeling like my body temperature was all over the place, which is usually a sure sign that I’m fighting off something.

It feels like there’s a lot going on in my life, but a lot of it is at a stage where I can’t talk about it yet. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll have more on that. I will say that thanks to some of these secret goings-on, I am feeling more optimistic about many areas of my life than I have in a while, and that’s a really nice place to be.

In therapy this week, my therapist and I talked about how hard it is for me to find language to express what I need (which, as a generally language-oriented person, is suuuuuper frustrating). I’ve spent much of my life trying very hard to make other people happy, and in the process have neglected to learn how to recognize what it is that I want and need. I’m making huge progress here, though – my therapist pointed out that all the work I’ve been putting into creating safe space for myself is paying off, because I am finally getting to a place where I feel like I can try to name what I need instead of ignoring it. And it’s true. I’ve worked really hard to establish a sense of safety for myself, and it feels really good to have that work noticeably making a difference.

I’m not totally sure where I’m going with this post except to say that while the world is definitely still on fire and there’s a lot that I’m upset about on a global scale, things are actually going pretty okay for me personally right now. I feel like I’m getting closer to a place where I can move past just surviving and getting by and into engaging more with the world around me. So hooray for that!