Suffering, Suffocating, Insufflating, Insufferable

Here I am, the night before two midterms, writing. I can’t get myself to focus, but truth be told, I should be fine.

I feel the stakes poking my vampiric heart as I go out for a walk to digest my dinner in the stead of studying. Some nauseating anxiety, swallowing my head in waves, my eyes throbbing and vision swelling with purple plumes blinding me consequentially for sitting too long. An unending moment becomes my life on the edge between hyperventilation and the kind of breathlessness that captivates the dead for eternity in a flash.

Consequences

That is what captivates me, adding up the moments from one inconsequential action to the next, stringing together a series of events, drawing some constellation to be sure I am not deluded when my feelings shout to no longer be ignored.

There is fear, academic probation, jeopardizing my housing, financial aid, scholarships, my food and shelter for the rest of the year and into the next. In jeopardy because I wore a dress to Thanksgiving. An issue because our family comes from the world’s first Christians, and Fox news is chronically on air back home. An issue because some racists decided the kind of garb worn by the Indigenous made them savage. A catalyst for the most productively destructive global economic system the world has known, rooted in racism, transphobia, peddled by power hungry, inbred, sexist kings and lords.

Well why would I care about my grades, the merit this fucked up system deems me worthy of while stripping away my humanity; money, of course. For food, for my own rent when I can’t rely on school. For healthcare, for consuming goods that make me happy, to travel, to give gifts.

I suppose there are many consequences, each cause with its own effect, all intertwined in some infinitely complex web I have no hope to understand. So caught in it that I would rather face the spider and say it good enough that I don’t wriggle enough to draw its attention so swiftly. That I can find some joy in her silky threads tying me to my bed, that she may grant me the pleasure of swallowing me whole instead of biting off my head.

Privilege

I have spent more hours than I would like today, at this integral moment, thinking of past lovers. This unfortunate privilege, the multitude of bosoms and bottoms that can spill into my head from some recesses of unprocessed emotion, triggered by some seemingly inane thing on a Monday.

My first real job was not until I was 21, recently withdrawn from school and desperate for money. I found a well paying job by St. James Infirmary to work at a navigation shelter for Trans people and Sex Workers. I was mildly qualified and received minimal training. Much of the staff was largely made up of younger trans and queer people, racially diverse, from many different backgrounds.

One of the first things that happened to me at my first job, our site’s lead administrator, going by Sage Hapke, a 25 year old, tattooed, white trans woman with a degree, invited me out for a beer at a bar after work. Then to her place, and while drinking my third beer I sat on her couch, having explicitly expressed my desire to not engage with her further. She jumps on me and starts violently kissing me. It really hurt actually, not just because she had ghoulishly thin lips, but she was actively biting mine. Not in a sexy way, in a, you better go along with this kind of way. So, I did. I went home, and work the next week was fine.

As soon as I started to withdraw from anything outside of a professional relationship with her, she withdrew from a professional relationship with me. A problem because, she managed my payroll, scheduling, handled email communication between admin and staff, and had plenty of sensitive information on me and my coworkers.

Naively, I filed HR with a complaint of sexual harassment and rape, which turned up with no evidence, concluding that I had willingly engaged with my administrator. There was no policy against this, but it was soon drafted after that fiasco. I was moved to the another shift, my pay was cut, I was not allowed to pick up shifts where she would be on site, despite our need for coverage and my ability to do so, and my sleep schedule was fucked.

Anyway

My supervisor on the day shift, a woman named Alyce James, around when Sage and I were “having disagreements”, began to flirt with me. She starts to make comments about my clothing, talking to me extensively during our shifts together, sharing company emails with me, and calling me her emotional support person. I guess at the time, I didn’t mind, I was just doing my job: supporting my boss, feeding our participants, handling business. I saw people making comments about her body, no matter what she wore, approaching her and touching her, and her semi-willfully disengaging with them.

We hang out with her roommates/coworkers outside of work, and it felt normal. Then we hung out alone, and nothing happened. Then we showered together, and nothing happened. Then, she showed up drunk to work, and then we are drunk at hers, and before long, in a wildly inappropriate relationship.

After the boundaries began to blur and our working relationship began to fall apart when our intimate relationship’s problems went unresolved for weeks, I again naively emailed our admin what was going on. I was told how we were a community, we would have accountability, restorative justice, we would fight to acknowledge and work through power dynamics with the goal of serving, housing, and feeding our community.

Well none of that happened, this coincided with the investigation with Sage and was a pattern of behavior for me, so I was let go after some months with them. Consequences.

Now

Whatever was not a right fit, I have no quarrel letting go of, it was such an eye opening learning experience, however traumatic, challenging, frustrating, and full of sex, drugs, and alcohol it was. In my mind we really lack the tools to care for each other, so many issues were rampant there that I was just a footnote, and I have no shame or problem with that. I don’t really hold any bad blood for those people, though perhaps if I truly meant that I would not mention them by name here! Oh well, fuck me I guess.

If I didn’t have a mental break after being kicked out of home, after dating transphobe after transphobe, dropping out of school, and needing a job, and taking a well paying one in the non-profit industrial complex, that had been being flooded with money because of trans politics in San Francisco, I would not have ended up there. I would likely be done with school, largely avoidant of most drugs, or celebrated for drinking and snorting instead of shamed, if I was just a normal boy.

I am not, for the same reason you may wear a cardigan or sweater or a hat and feel comfortable looking at yourself in the mirror, I happen to want to wear a dress occasionally. For that, I must suffer. For that, almost everyone I can come close to dies faster, lives a riskier, poorer lifestyle, has less opportunities, and is more isolated from society, than the friends my sophomore year college roommates surely have now. They can pursue grad school, join consulting firms, return home to their families, know where they will sleep and where their next meal will come from. Not fear arbitrary violence to the degree me and my friends, community, or past lovers have to. If they are the ones that are still alive.

Many of them are not. Yet, I have to sit and memorize physics equations so that I can have a bed next month. Or I can not, and suffer the consequences.