Gratitude

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A friend of mine nominated me on Saturday via Facebook to come up with three moments of gratitude a day for five days. Well, that was about five days ago, and I haven’t done it yet, but that seemed like a good direction for the blog this week. So Amanda, here’s my list; thanks for the inspiration.

  1. A partner who will join me on silly, spontaneous adventures. Last Thursday, I had the wild idea that we should rent a car over the weekend and drive to Cedar Falls, IA to catch Joe Stevens in concert. The conversation went something like this:

    A: We should go on a road trip and see Joe Stevens!
    E: But it’s Iowa.
    A: But concert!
    E: But IOWA.

    I acknowledged it was a pretty ridiculous idea, but I was a little sad…until I got off work and was greeted by a text to the effect of, “So, about that concert…”

  2. Friends with whom I can escape reality for a while. Saturday was Dungeons & Dragons & Knitting, which is the monthly Pathfinder game with some folks in our knitting circle (the original idea was to play D&D, but Pathfinder ended up happening instead…we just never changed the name). Four of us have an adventure in group storytelling while our partners hang out in the other room and knit and make fun of us. It’s consistently one of the highlights of every month.
  3. Open spaces. We did end up renting a car this weekend and going on a road trip into Iowa, taking a detour on our way to Cedar Falls so that I could show Ethan some of the northeast corner of the state, which is not entirely flat and very, very pretty. The farther we got from Chicago, the more I relaxed. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in Chicago. But wide open spaces do wonders for my soul.
  4. People who choose to love me because of who I am, not in spite of it. The reason I know that there is a pretty part of Iowa (the aforementioned northeast corner) is that my grandparents live there, on a farm in a valley surrounded by trees and bluffs and wildlife and gardens. I remain convinced at age 26 that their farm is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. We were close enough on Sunday that, had I so chosen, we could have stopped by for a surprise visit. But I didn’t. I love my grandparents very much. They love their grandchildren very much. But when I came out to them as Alyx in a letter two years ago, their response (also in a letter) was that they would never call me Alyx, because Alyx was “an imaginary person.” I am almost entirely certain that they don’t know that I started any sort of physical transition. I haven’t seen them in over two years, and I haven’t been on their farm in at least three, and I don’t know when (or if) either of those things will happen again, which is heart-wrenching whenever I think of it. But it also reminds me that I have a whole bunch of people in my life who not only accept that I am Alyx but actually celebrate my life with me, and that is a great comfort.
  5. Those moments of recognition by others in our communities. Visibility is such a huge thing, both for those of us who are still frequently misgendered, and those in our community who pass so well that no one believes they’re trans. There were a handful of those moments this weekend.
  6. Approachable heroes. Meeting Joe Stevens was great: he’s one of our songwriting idols, and is just a fantastic person. But even better than meeting Joe was the fact that we got to actually talk with him. By the end of the night, we were giving each other hugs goodbye. We’re now friends on Facebook. This is still blowing my mind.
  7. Adventures that lead to more adventures. When we got to Cedar Falls and started talking with Joe (and River Glen, who’s touring the Midwest with him), we mentioned we’d road tripped it from Chicago, at which point they told us they were actually going to be playing a house concert in Chicago on Monday night. Throughout the night they told us several times that we should come. We got in touch on Facebook and got the details, and despite the fact that my partner had only slept about 45 minutes and had worked a full day, and the fact that we’d returned the rental car and weren’t entire sure how we were going to get home after transit stopped running, Monday night we found ourselves in the very humid basement of a hippie couple we’d never met, sweating with strangers (and new friends, and someone we met at a karaoke bar three-and-a-half years ago), enjoying more music.
  8. Music that inspires me to create more music. I felt two things in regard to the music at both shows: first, that my songwriting is totally inadequate, and second, that I want to write more songs. There are times when I get the first feeling but not the second one; this was one of the beautiful moments where my feelings of inadequacy were outweighed by inspiration.
  9. New friends. We met some awesome people on Sunday and Monday.
  10. Thinking about the future. My partner and I have been doing a lot of talking about our future together, and it’s really wonderful not only to have a partner I want to have a future with, but to be able to think about the future at all. There was a long time when I could barely see past tomorrow. I’m learning to dream again.
  11. Air conditioning. This is a silly one, but it’s been ridiculously humid in Chicago this week. We don’t have AC at home, but I have it at the office, and I’m grateful for the times I can spend in places where everything does not feel soggy.
  12. Comfort in my skin. This isn’t a constant, but I’ve been feeling fairly centered and okay within myself this week. I was able to go to both concerts without feeling more than momentary social anxiety, and a lot of that had to do with being comfortable being myself. I spent a lot of years stuck in self-loathing, and while I’m not my biggest fan, I’ve at least reached the point where I feel a sort of benevolent indifference toward myself, which is unbelievably better for my mental health.
  13. Fresh perspective. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this one, because it’s been a largely internal thing. Mostly, there have been tiny things happening in the past few weeks that have helped me to look at the world in new (or old but forgotten) ways, and it’s been refreshing.
  14. A (mostly) calm brain. There have been a lot of storms here in the past week. My brain tends to get really uncomfortable when the weather is shifting back and forth rapidly. I’ve felt surprisingly stable in the midst of all of it.
  15. Concrete future plans. I alluded to this in last week’s post, and now that I’ve told my family, I can announce it to all of you: at the end of September I will be filing the requisite paperwork for a court date to legally change my name. By the end of the year I will legally be Alyxander James! There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express how excited I am.

Three Tiny Reasons to Smile

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

The world is still a dark and scary place, and the part of me that wants to fix everything is really struggling right now, because I feel so utterly powerless to do anything meaningful.

Despite the darkness, though, there have been some small glimmers of light this week. Here are three of them.

  1. I’ve been knitting more. Not every day, but more days that I’ve been knitting all summer. Knitting is one of those things that, particularly in the summer, I tend to forget how much I enjoy it and how relaxing it can be until I sit down to actually do it. I bought some really lovely yarn from The Verdant Gryphon at Stitches Midwest a couple of weekends ago, which helped to kick-start my knitting mojo just a little bit. It’s nice to be excited about creating things with my hands. (On a knitting-related note: knitters should go to Ravelry and check out the pattern my partner published this week!)
  2. I’m getting more excited about music again. I’ve been seriously slacking off for the past couple of months, in part because I was dealing with DepressedBrain, and while DepressedBrain is greatly helped by music, sometimes the thought of taking the instrument out of the case (or even taking it off the stand) is too overwhelming. I decided to swap out the strings on my tenor guitar and play around with a new, lower tuning, and that’s gotten me to play more this past week. I even set up a SoundCloud page for myself. It doesn’t have anything on it yet, but I’m sifting through the songs I’ve written for class and hoping to start recording some of them and throwing them online sometime in the next week or so.
  3. The third thing is going to be super vague for the moment (I’m hoping to post more next week), but in the past week I’ve nailed down some details and made some actual plans for moving forward on something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. There’s still a lot of waiting and there will need to be some challenging conversations before it happens, but it’s finally starting to feel real.

On Darkness and Inner Demons

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long, hard, scary week in the world, and it’s only half over. There have been so many awful things happening that, when I sat down to think about this week’s blog, I wasn’t really sure where to begin. But I’m going to try to address two of the big things.

First things first: on Saturday, a black teenager was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. It’s an appalling and altogether horrible situation, and is just one in a long line of similar murders in recent history. I’m still trying to educate myself on the situation (despite the overwhelming urge to bury my head in the sand), but this is the best article I’ve seen on the whole situation so far, and while I had a lot of thoughts similar to this bouncing around my head, I would never have been able to express them so powerfully. When my partner posted this article on Facebook, ze posted it with the comment that, “If you are a white person in America, you need to read this. (Everyone else in America already knows and lives it.)” which sums up the truth of it pretty damn well. Read it. If it’s a choice between reading that article or finishing this blog post, go there, now.

One of the other things that’s been blowing up all over the news this week is the death of Robin Williams, which, it’s thought, was a suicide. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this. The fact that the suicide of a rich white man has gotten more media attention than the murder of a young black man is profound evidence of a number of deeply-rooted issues in our society. And Robin Williams wasn’t a hero. He, like many comedians, sometimes went for the cheap joke at the expense of people who absolutely do not need any more of that from the world (for example, the transmisogyny-perpetuating man-in-a-dress trope of Mrs. Doubtfire). At the same time, he was undeniably talented, and undeniably troubled by inner demons the rest of the world didn’t always see. Suicide, like any loss of human life, is always a tragedy.

These two news items have served as powerful reminders that this world is a dark, scary, overwhelming place a lot of the time. And not just the world around us, but the worlds we inhabit internally. We all have our demons. Darkness seems to be everywhere these days.

I find “it gets better” tropes to be pretty useless. Sometimes, it doesn’t really get better. It definitely won’t get better on its own. Things only change when we make them change. But we don’t always have the resources available to us to make things better for ourselves.

Which is why it’s so important that we, as human beings, take care of each other.

We can take care of each other by listening to one another, whether it’s to educate ourselves about the experiences of people who are different from us, or simply being aware of when the people around us need some extra gentleness. We’re all in this together. At the end of the day, we’re all human. If we could learn to value the humanity in ourselves and to recognize it reflected in others…maybe the world wouldn’t turn out to be such a dark place after all.

Vacation in a Three-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Between the 24ish hours I drove while we were on vacation and the fact that I may have picked up a cold in the process, I’m feeling pretty muddled. I can’t even come up with the usual complement of five things for a blog. So here’s a three-item list of what happened on our trip to Minnesota:

  1. The most vacation-y part of vacation was probably our day in Duluth on Friday. It was really wonderful to not be in a big city for a day. Neither of us was feeling particularly great when we woke up, and we almost didn’t go. It wasn’t the best day ever, but I think my soul really needed that time by the lake. We didn’t really do much; mostly, we sat on a bench by the boardwalk overlooking the lake, and my partner knit and I sketched some things and we talked and got a little sunburned. It was a nice day.
  2. I got to see my nephew, who is now five months old and increasingly fun to interact with. It’s been really cool to see him more and more aware of his surroundings each time I’ve visited. This time around, he smiled at me a lot, and let me tell you: there’s something incredibly wonderful about having a cute baby smile at you. It gives you the feeling that really, you can’t be all that bad if this kid thinks you’re worth smiling at that hugely. Before that, we had breakfast with my best friend (who is wonderful and who we don’t see nearly often enough), and I had a massage, which was much-needed. (My massage therapist pointed out that I kind of did things backwards in getting the massage before spending time with my family. Thankfully, cute babies are good buffers for potentially uncomfortable situations.)
  3. We saw Paul McCartney live. It was incredible. The man played for nearly three hours and never once took a drink of water. May we all be so full of life at 72. I wasn’t raised on the Beatles, and to be honest the most exposure I’ve had to their music has come from the movie Across the Universe and the Beatles Ensemble at the Old Town School of Folk Music that meets across the hall from the school’s Resource Center where I volunteer each week. But I enjoyed the concert immensely, both because Sir Paul is incredibly good at what he does and because my partner’s family (who we were with) were enjoying themselves so much. It was great, and I’m so grateful to have had that experience.

A Tiny Blog…with Art!

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I’m writing this Wednesday evening as I crawl into bed and hope for quick and restful sleep. At 4am, five hours before this posts, my partner and I will be packing up a rental car and heading to Minnesota for a mini-vacation. I’m beyond excited.

I’ve been so preoccupied lately that I didn’t come up with a topic for the blog this week. Part of what’s been keeping me busy, though, has been a different sort of creative pursuit. When I was a kid, along with being a voracious reader, I was a fledgling artist. I was never great, but from the time I could hold a pencil, if I wasn’t reading or making up stories, I was drawing. Last weekend, somewhat on a whim, I picked up a 5.6mm lead holder, some different types of lead, and a couple of sketchbooks, and started to draw. I even incorporated some of the fountain pen ink that’s been sitting around on my desk for a while. Here’s the proof (the turtles are concept sketches for a tattoo I’m dreaming about):

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Five Happy Things

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This week has been relatively drama-free (woohoo!), so I think it’s time for a positive post, don’t you?

  1. I’m finally getting away from DepressedBrain. Cyclical highs and lows are just part of life for me, but this latest low spot lasted longer than any I’d had in at least six months. While ManicBrain has its disadvantages as well, it at least comes with the feeling that I have enough energy to sometimes be a productive human being.
  2. With the extra energy, I’m finding a renewed passion to create. It’s hard to focus on any one project for any length of time, but at least I want to try.
  3. I officially have a new job title: I’ve gone from being an Administrative Aide to an IT Support Specialist, which sounds a lot more like what I’ve been doing for the past year. It also comes with more money. Yay!
  4. Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve been making a little bit of time each day to meditate. This has been really helpful and centering for me. My brain is constantly working on numerous levels, and I’m not always paying much attention to what’s going on beneath the surface. Meditation (even when it only lasts about ten minutes) is helping me to get back in touch with those deeper thought processes.
  5. Next weekend, my partner and I are taking a road trip to Minnesota. Planned highlights include seeing my nephew, going up north and getting away from the city for a day, getting a massage, and seeing Paul McCartney in concert. Admittedly, it is very hard to focus on the present with so much fun in the imminent future!

On the Validity of Self-Definition

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A well-meaning coworker asked me several months ago if she could give my contact information to a young person she knew who had recently come out as transmasculine. I handed over my email, but I never heard anything from the kid. Yesterday, after coming into my office for a brief reprieve in the middle of her day, my coworker asked if I’d ever heard from them, and then proceeded to tell me,

She’s just confused. You know what she did for gay pride? She wore boxer shorts, and a…a…well, you know, a thing. But then she had no shirt, and suspenders and pasties. I mean, people who want to be boys, they’re not going to show their breasts! That’s the last thing they’d want to do. Right? She just doesn’t know what she wants.

She then emphasized her point by explaining that they all still called this kid by their given name, and they never said anything (though I can clearly recall her saying that they were really upset by the use of their given name over their taken name several months ago), so clearly, they’re not trans. They’re just confused.

And because it was in my workplace (which is not especially unsafe, but is still not a place I feel I can be particularly vocal about identity politics), I smiled a tight smile, and shrugged noncommittally, and muttered something about that being a hard age for everyone, and she finally left, with one last, “She’s just confused.”

Once it was over, my office, which I have worked so hard to turn into a place of calm and safety (for myself and for my coworkers), felt toxic. I felt physically sick. And I felt like a traitor, both to this kid that I don’t know, and to the trans community at large. Because implied in my coworker’s statement was the idea that I behave the way she thinks a trans person is supposed to act. And I hate that, because I feel like I’ve been assimilated into this toxic culture of gender essentialism that I don’t want to join, but to dismantle.

It’s probably true that the majority of transmasculine people aren’t super into showing their breasts off (in public or elsewhere). But though that may be the prevalent narrative of what transmasculinity looks like, it’s not the whole story (or even any of the story) for all transmasculine people. Who knows? For this kid, who probably can’t afford surgery and who maybe doesn’t have the strongest support system, walking around shirtless at pride might have been a way for them to feel empowered, to reclaim their body as their own. Or maybe they’re genderqueer or otherwise nonbinary, and wanted to express their own gender fluidity by contrasting boxers and a packer with pasties. The fact is that I don’t know what this kid’s motivations were, and neither does my coworker. But whatever the motivation, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter. Their body is their own, and no one else gets to decide for them what is or is not the “right” way to exist in that body.

There is not one right way to be a trans person, no matter what the media tells us, no matter what cis- and heteronormative culture tells us…no matter what we tell each other. Each one of us is the sole expert on our own lives, on our own hearts and minds and motivations. Anyone else who tries to define those things for us is doing a disservice both to trans people in general and to themselves, because those of us who have learned to define our own lives have a lot to teach the rest of the world, if only they’d stop trying to categorize us into nonexistence long enough to listen.

On Misogyny, Masculine Privilege, and How I Could Be Better

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Last Friday was full of explosions (gunshots or fireworks, anyone?), barbecues, and all sorts of other things that screamed “America”. Also on that list? Misogyny.

Rather unexpectedly (and to my and my partner’s delight), my best friend ended up coming down from Minnesota for the weekend. Friday I got to play tourist with her while my partner was at work, and then we all met up for dinner. It was a lovely day…until the train ride home, when an extremely drunk soccer fan boarded the train, waving his Brazil flag and shouting about how much Colombia sucked. We tried to mind our own business, hoping he would turn out to be just a harmless drunk too caught up in his own stupor to pay us too much attention.

No such luck. Within minutes, he had started harassing our friend. She expressed a lack of interest, but he persisted, at which point my partner and I stepped in. We told him to fuck off. He got more persistent. My partner stood up and physically shielded our friend from him. He moved and continued trying to get her attention. Soon, both my partner and I were standing between him and our friend, telling him to back the fuck off, and he was threatening to crack my head open and asking my partner, “What are you, anyway?” My partner ended up getting off the train to talk to the conductor, and after trying to stare me down for a while, the guy left. Our friend asked me later if I was scared. I wasn’t. I was just really fucking angry.

I am not usually a violent person. But I would have been, had he gotten any closer than he did.

And now it’s almost a week later, and I’m still angry. Angry that women have to put up with that shit. Angry that this drunken douchebag thought he was being clever asking my partner “what” ze was. Angry that no one else on the train said or did anything at all, because this is so commonplace. Angry that I stood up for my friend without thinking, but have been too afraid to stand up for other women on the train who I’ve seen in uncomfortable situations. Angry that this is what society calls normal. Angry that my friend immediately started apologizing when it was over, as though it was her fault.

It’s not okay. It’s not right or fair that I have never dealt with that bullshit, because I am read as masculine and/or male. It’s not right that a dude won’t back off when a women tells him no, but that there’s a chance he’ll stop and listen to people he perceives as masculine. It’s not okay. I have privilege that allows me to choose whether I engage with such asshattery. Women typically don’t. I know from past experience that I will not necessarily do for a stranger what I did for my best friend, and that is not right or okay, either.

I want to do better. I want to wield the power of my masculine privilege to make whatever spaces I inhabit safer for women. I hope that last Friday’s encounter sticks with me and pushes me to show greater strength of character whenever I see men making women feel uncomfortable or unsafe, regardless of whether I know them.

Another Week in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Sorry for the late post today, folks; it’s been a bit of a nutty week, and I kind of lost track of what day it was.

  1. New England was great. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was lovely, I bought some gorgeous local yarn, I got to eat a lobster for the first time in my life, and I checked three new states off my list of places I’ve visited. There were a few hiccups along the way (including a horrifying moment where I brushed something off my cheek only to discover that IT WAS A JUMPING SPIDER), but for the most part, it was a really nice weekend away.
  2. I’m pretty annoyed with my country right now. Yeah, tomorrow is Independence Day and patriotism abounds, but the recent SCOTUS decisions allowing corporations to deny women’s health coverage on religious grounds and overturning the abortion clinic buffer zone law in Massachusetts are beyond maddening. The Hobby Lobby case in particular is causing all sorts of problems, and is going to keep causing them: If a corporation can deny health coverage on religious grounds, it’s not a great leap to allow them to discriminate against certain groups of people in their hiring practices, either.
  3. Aside from that frustration, though, I’m getting back to a better mental place. I’m still on the low end of this Bipolar cycle, but I’m not struggling as much to focus as I was last week. I feel like I’m actually accomplishing things at work. Things feel a little less hopeless than they did two weeks ago.
  4. On Monday, there were some pretty outrageous storms in Chicago. At one point, we had an enormous flash of lightning and immediate crash of thunder directly over our building (there was a lot of jumping and swearing in our apartment, and a car alarm outside started going off, it was that loud). Our internet went out. It’s not back yet. After two calls to our ISP, it looked like the problem was the router, so I ordered a new one and had it rushed to our house. I discovered when attempting to set it up last night, however, that it’s actually the modem that’s not working: the ISP can see the modem is connected, and they can reset it, but nothing comes through on our end. It is a little embarrassing how frustrating this has been. Being limited to internet just on my phone makes me cranky, apparently.
  5. Due to an unexpected change in her plans, my best friend will now be visiting us this weekend! I am unbelievably excited. We don’t see nearly enough of this human, and in fact yesterday we were bemoaning the fact that it had been too long since the last time we hung out with her. It is rare to find a friend I can have over without feeling pressured to entertain, and I am excited for a weekend of low-pressure hangouts with one of my favorite people in all the world.

A Five-Item List of Smiles

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I’m in the middle of last-minute packing for a weekend trip as I write this, so I’ll keep it short and sweet this week.

  1. I can breathe again. I was pretty sure last week that I was coming down with bronchitis. While I still feel slightly under the weather, I’m not gasping for air all the time, so this is an improvement.
  2. Smiles from my nephew. My sister-in-law is really great about sending me pictures and videos of my nephew every week. The kid is adorable, and never fails to make me smile.
  3. Coffee. Sometimes, it’s the little things. This week, it’s been coffee consumed in greater quantities than I’ve been used to lately.
  4. Knitting. I go in spurts with my interest in knitting. I will be very dedicated and enthused about my projects for a while, and then I’ll get sidetracked by something else. I’m back on the bandwagon at the moment, so I’m super excited to work on this awesome purple and grey shawl I started in October and haven’t really touched since January.
  5. Vacation. The frantic last-minute packing that’s happening right now is for a trip to Maine for a family reunion with my partner’s mom’s family. Since it’s been a stressful and depressed last few weeks, vacation sounds particularly wonderful right now. Also, I’ve never been to Maine. Hooray!