Blog Post

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!

DepressedBrain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a bit of a rough week, between the return of DepressedBrain and the fact that all the cottonwood fluff flying around Chicago has me wheezing. So I’m keeping it simple for the blog today.

  1. Everything is overwhelming. I’ve been giving myself a pretty packed schedule (particularly for the introverted homebody that I am), and while I was manic, I was handling everything fine. Now, though…I’m recognizing that this might be part of the reason I’ve been more anxious the past couple of weeks. DepressedBrain is easily overwhelmed.
  2. It’s really hard to focus. I’ve been finding myself forgetting things a lot. I’ll walk into a room and not remember why I was headed in that direction. Today I got a support request call at work, and after I took the notes and assured the caller I would take a look at it, I hung up and promptly forgot that there was something that needed looking at. Imagine my embarrassment when they called back later to ask if I’d been able to make any progress, and I had to tell them I had been sidetracked and hadn’t gotten there yet. (Thankfully, they were extremely gracious, and I was able to knuckle down and deal with the issue once I hung up from that call.)
  3. Nothing is particularly exciting. I am a passionate person. It rarely takes much to get me excited about things, and when I get excited, I am like a small child: I bounce around a lot and I don’t shut up. But my passions are often intimately tied to my mania. New things that I know I was excited about two weeks ago have lost their luster. Even things that I’ve been excited about for years aren’t doing much to raise my energy level. I feel trapped in this perpetual state of “meh.”
  4. All I want to do is sleep. This is often the case: I’ve been particularly sleepy since diving into the whole second puberty thing. But it’s harder to wake up now than it has been in a long time. I also have this sinking feeling that I should be expecting a visit from the insomnia monster sometime soon, which never helps.
  5. Everything hurts. This is a pretty common state of being for me (I have back and knee problems, and chronic pain is so normalized by my experience that I forget that not everyone deals with it), but between the dampness outside, feeble attempts at Aikido, and the fact that those “depression hurts” commercials really weren’t lying…yeah. It hasn’t been fun. (The silver lining of this is that last week I discovered the miracle that is Tiger Balm. As someone who has a rather ridiculous tolerance for things like ibuprofen or aspirin, finding something that makes my knees feel like they might not explode when I go up and down stairs is a pretty huge deal. So that’s been nice.)

Accidental Fudge Episode 32: AnxietyBrain Strikes Back

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

It’s been one of those weeks.

Being Bipolar means that my brain has multiple modes of existence. The two big ones are ManicBrain and DepressedBrain, but there are others that can manifest themselves in different ways depending on which end of a cycle I’m on. The worst of them, the one that causes days when my brain and I just don’t get along, is AnxietyBrain.

I was first diagnosed as Bipolar II five years ago. I’d been wrestling with cyclical mood changes for several years at that point, and finally having a name to attach to the thing that was happening made it all a lot easier to manage. I am medicated enough that I don’t go flying off too far to either extreme, and I have a host of coping mechanisms that work well for me about ninety percent of the time.

The other ten percent of the time, I am just barely hanging on. Nine times out of ten, this is because I’m being visited by AnxietyBrain.

This week has been full of AnxietyBrain. For the most part, it’s just been generalized, unfocused nervousness. I get a little twitchy. I feel vaguely unsettled. But then Monday rolled around, and as I was waiting for a bus and trying to talk myself into going somewhere and doing something intimidating, I nearly blacked out. In the end, I admitted defeat and went home feeling like a failure, because I’m not supposed to be the sort of person who gets so overwhelmed by such trivial things.

I wish there was some sort of descriptor for the state between generalized, low-grade worry and the sort of panic that causes a person to think they’re having a heart attack. I worry that applying the label of “panic attack” to the seemingly endless stretches of heart-pounding, trembling, dizzying time that I spend trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to let anyone else see how completely unhinged I feel is too extreme, because I never think my heart is going to stop…I just don’t know how long I can handle hearing its racing staccato before I scream. It’s probably a useless thing to worry about, but hey, that’s what AnxietyBrain is best at: taking trivial, mundane things and fixating on them in such a way that they gnaw at the fabric of sanity until the vague feelings of unease compound and snowball and turn into something monstrous.

On top of the AnxietyBrain, I think I’m heading into a bit of a down swing. My depressive episodes have been unbelievably mild and unexpectedly brief for the past seven months or so (whether this is tied to the fact that I started on testosterone around that time, I don’t know for sure). This has been nice. However, past experience has taught me not to trust that this will last, so every time I feel myself slipping down from ManicBrain in the direction of DepressedBrain, I am apprehensive. DepressedBrain has significantly less energy than its partner, and that makes it hard to keep up with life. I have a lot of activities packed into my life these days, and I am not confident that DepressedBrain has the horsepower to handle all of that. This, of course, makes the AnxietyBrain that much worse.

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this particular post is, other than to say sometimes, brains are frustrating, and no matter how much we might know, from a rational standpoint, that the current state of things will probably not last forever, it doesn’t really make what’s happening NOW any easier…and there’s always that lingering doubt. What if this is the way things are now? What if I’m stuck being an anxious ball of sad forever? It sucks.

What does help, though, is the knowledge that my life is full of extraordinary people, people who love me and will not stop loving me even if I am an anxious ball of sad forever. They will let me be anxious and sad, if that is what I need to be, but they will also comfort and cheer me, and I know that if anything or anyone has the power to get me out of a slump, it’s the incredible people I am blessed to call friends and family.