#4.5 Whoops.
The problem with writing is that life doesn’t stop for it. Shit got hard; writing this got harder. I am back now, attempting inexplicably to explicate my guts. These last three will hurt: special, qualified, yes.
Why? I think I need to remind myself, remind the walls and the dog and the clock, remind my voc rehab social worker and my hud social worker and my sister why I write this crap. It hurts to write, hurts to read. But what is worse than the hurt of reading or writing trauma is the sucking weight of silence. I grew up in that silence. I thought it was me. And most days of my life still I have to remind myself that it isn’t, and still my heart is leaden with shame.
I write to lighten that load- for my kid, for your kids, for my sister, for yours. I whisper through time and clay to the bones of my grandmother. I sing through static to my mother as she lay prone years ago, electricity jumping through her skull. I speak through my fear so that we don’t have to hold ours alone. This may be an arrogant, erroneous wish, to attempt to write space around lungs so that we all can more easily breathe. But it’s why I write: words as containers, words as wedges, levers, pulleys, pumps; words as organic materials decomposing in thick stinking sediment, calcifying, fossilizing, until pockets of space are held despite centuries of weight.
But I get sick of doing it. To be honest, I feel like a freak, a pomo accident: a disabled Southern queer mixed-passing-for-white kinky transgender survivor parent, of a trans kid, living in a homeless shelter? Like, what the fuck, one bullseye wasn’t enough, asshole? 1,347 times a day I think this is bullshit, this is impossible, what the fuck, what the fuck?It is bullshit. It is impossible. My life is pomo compost of inter-sectional oppressive crap and this, this writing, is the fruit of living through it.
Such as it is. I get fucking tired, y’all. Sometimes it is a total shit show just trying to stay alive. Sorry for leaving off on #4 of 7; I hope to be back with the regular program of inter-sectional deconstruction soon.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
TT, it’s really an honour to read your work. I hope you do write more. I’m humbled that you can take your pain and create something so beautiful and raw and dark. It’s so real. I hate that you have to face such hardship. It’s fucked and wonderful that you have so little yet you give so much.
TT, your writing is powerful. I love the imagery of “words as containers, words as wedges, levers, pulleys, pumps . . .”. Yes.