A Year Marked by Loss

2016 was a year marked by loss.

From acquaintances, friends, friends close enough to be considered family, coworkers, and fellow fighters in education, this was a year where my personal resolve was tested beyond belief. Accidents, medical fatalities, suicides, overdoses – all results were the same. I went to more funerals that year than I have in the past 25 years combined. And I won’t even comment on the laundry list of celebrities that passed away in 2016. (Here’s a full list. Still miss you Alan Rickman).

However, not all loss equates to death.

By voting in Donald Trump, the United States also lost a piece of its identity. The hope and change Obama promised, only reaching certain areas and skipping over large swaths of land, gave part of the country eight years for the seeds of despair to plant, flourish, and reproduce in gargantuan masses. Fellow Americans, we did this. We all elected Trump. By not fighting hard enough for the justice we believe should flourish. By refusing to acknowledge the truth that some were being ignored. In a fit of seemingly masochistic hate, we all voted in this regime whether or not we cast a vote for the current administration. I truthfully did not believe our country was capable of this kind of sabotage, so tell me my fellow Americans who did vote for him, who are we now? We are no longer the land of the free and home of the brave when we’re controlled by fear. We’ve lost our identity.

But then again, change always follows loss.

Whether we like it or not, our national identity is shifting from from one of meager tolerance of diversity to a far more critical and fear-based populace. I, too, harbor more fear than I used to. But my fear is shifting, morphing quietly in the transitional chaos to something else.

Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. And anger leads to suffering.

I cannot in good conscience call for a ceasefire. Trump has wronged too many people, too many of my friends and family, for me to feasibly do so. They are angry, and they deserve to be. Threatening to erode one’s quality or quantity of life is nothing to be taken lightly. But I can ask for understanding. For those who did vote for him, understand the ideological basis against voting for him. Understand their fears, their passions, their anger at you for voting for him. And for those who did not cast a ballot for him, understand the economic and social ramifications of the past eight years that would  cause 60 million people to vote the way they did. Their fear had already morphed to hatred and anger, but at the core it is still fear. Fear of the inability to protect their own family. Fear of their loss of life. And to the international community, please excuse the US for the next four years. We’re going through a period of transition and have no idea what the fuck is happening.

But remember my fellow Americans, we will all die if we succumb to protecting our own. What allows us to survive is the ability to resist change, but what allows us to flourish is embracing it.

May 2017 be marked by compassion. The world is going to need a whole lot of it.

The Re-Education of Their America

I vividly remember the first time someone found out I wasn’t straight.

Some LBGTQ people choose to have coming out parties, celebrating their strength among close friends. Others make announcements, either in person or on social media. Still yet others only tell individual people in the dark of night for fear of retribution from their family, city, country. I did none of those. My banishment from the proverbial closet was forceful, yet accidental.

And yet, during that night three years ago, only one-third of me came out.

There are three parts of my identity, three pieces of the puzzle that fit together yet remain individual. Gender, sexuality, and romantic identity are commonly correlated, but they are not synonyms. For those that do not understand the separation of the three, I forward The Genderbread Person and a highly recommended article about the difference between sexual and romantic attraction.

I am agender, meaning I do not feel to be either male or female. I am neutral, neither. I am asexual, meaning I have no internal drive to have sex. I am not actively against it – I feel the same way about sex as I do about tables. I am biromantic, meaning I am romantically attracted to both men and women. When I was 22, I first discovered the term “asexuality” after a therapist suggested I research it. I had known since I was 16 that I was attracted to men and sometimes women, and for an equal amount of time I dismissed my gender identity due to growing up a tomboy.

During my accidental coming-out at 23, a small group of friends and I were watching TV when we decided to watch Netflix instead. My computer was the only one that was able to be connected to the monitor, so we pulled out the cords, opened up a window, and hooked up my laptop. Prominently displayed on the TV were then my most frequently visited pages: Facebook, my university’s homepage, Google, Twitter, Netflix, and AVEN. AVEN, with its emboldened purple, grey, black, and white triangle and large lettering proclaiming it to be the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, instantly and accidentally kicked 1/3 of me out of the closet. My friends were curious at first, but on the whole I was roundly supported. After years of hiding my identity, one part was no longer a secret.

I do not have good reason for hiding the other two. Despite their many flaws, my family is largely supportive of all LBGTQ people and even offered to support me financially when I went to Toronto for a Pride conference. My friends are lovely, many of them flying the rainbow flag themselves. I proudly live in a city that is one of the world’s safest places for LBGTQ people. Jews are well known for welcoming minorities as are Vincentian Catholics. Other than my own mild fear of rejection and much larger apathy, there is little reason to hide.

But now, maybe there is.

As the world learned Wednesday morning, Donald Trump is the president-elect of the US. Gov. Mike Pence, his pick for Vice President, has roundly championed a list of anti-LBGT laws during his terms as both Representative and Governor of Indiana. Notable ones include his support of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, belief that being gay is a choice and indicates the societal collapse of marriage, support for religious discrimination in the workplace, and measures to severely reduce funding to organizations that assist LBGTQ people, like homeless shelters and mental health funding. Most importantly, he believes that conversion therapy is a legitimate and effective treatment for being gay.

While I now live in a state that has banned conversion therapy, at one point I lived in both Texas and Idaho, states that have no such protections. Minors can, and are, exposed to forcible starvation, physical restraints, and electroshock therapy at the discretion of their parents for not being straight. And at what cost? Those who go through the process are six times more likely to have major depression, three times more likely to use drugs, and eight times more likely to attempt suicide or succeed.

Mike Pence has made his record on LBGT rights clear. So let me do the same.

Though not under the guise of converting my sexual identity, I have been forcibly starved, physically restrained, and denied medical service in the name of “therapy”. Over a period of six weeks, I lost 40 lbs., got an infection in my arm, and began hallucinating. Although my addiction to pills did not truly bloom until nearly a year later, I began trying to manipulate the psychiatrist into giving me more prescriptions with the hopes that I could either blur my time awake or simply sleep the day away. My already present depression skyrocketed to a point where I tried to end my life by eating copious amounts of toothpaste, the most lethal substance to which I was allowed constant access in a heavily-restricted location. One of the other patients in the facility molested and sexually harassed every single female-bodied person present. Unfortunately, we were some level of bisexual or biromantic and so staff all turned a blind eye.

What I went through was torture.

I will not permit anyone else to experience the same.

To me, Vice President-elect Mike Pence is more than a champion of anti-LBGT policy. He is a decimation to the community in which I call home, a force of utter destruction to the people I call my friends. He routinely advocates the torture of youth for being precisely who they are, and expects me, as an educator, to allow him to do so.

I will not let him use my classroom to amplify his voice.

So Mike Pence, I would like to let you know that I will not shy away from complete and total LBGT inclusion. I will promote textbooks and stories that honor the struggle my brothers and sisters have gone through at the hands of others like you. I will make sure all my students understand that under no circumstance will I tolerate any exclusion of LBGT students, no matter how mild. No matter what policies you throw in my way, my classroom and I will always remain a safe haven.

I will not be silenced to continue the mis-education of your America.

Anniversary of the Pause

Taking the shape of a man, the mountain looms ahead. I must hike over it by nightfall, but its peak sits hidden among the clouds. Trees to my right and left, a storm chases me forward. Cutting straight through would be the fastest, but I abandoned my axe miles back. I wish I had it now.

There is no path forward. Only around.

---

Autumn is my least favorite time of year. Not because I hate the season – I love the light crispness of the fallen leaves and all their many colors, the ability to go outside without melting in humidity – but rather because it is the time of things I would rather forget.

November highlights a decade since I got the letter from the government stating that no matter my bruises and broken bones, my parents would retain custody of me. Sometime in the first two weeks of September I will be five years sober. It will also have been five years since the last time I’ve been homeless. October marks the day I left a secure youth residential facility eight years ago, a day almost synonymous with a prison release date. It also brings my birthday and the seventh year since I was sexually assaulted.

Physically, I’ve recovered. Behaviorally, I’ve recovered. Emotionally, I’ve recovered as much as I can.

---

I’ve been walking too slowly. The splatter of rain is starting to coat the back of my pack, but it hasn’t reached my body yet.

I debate taking shelter while the storm passes through. But I have no way of knowing how long it will last. If I stop to protect myself, I’ll never make it in time. And even then, my safety is never guaranteed.

---

Traditional recovery dictates that there must be one step backward for every step forward. And we, those in recovery, know how to handle them – or if we don’t, we learn rather quickly through the first anniversary. This one is always the hardest. It forcibly dates back to the time when the unthinkable happened. Except, by this point, whatever happened has become a tangible force driving our lives.

Anniversaries are always a step backward. At least, they are for me. And now, I know how to turn that step into a small one forward. The sobriety anniversary is spent with playing games with friends to remind me that there is still connection without intoxication. The homeless anniversary is spent watching TV comedies, curled up under a thick blanket to savor the luxury of stability. I buy myself a chocolate cake for the release day anniversary, for no other reason than I can. My birthday is spent working, playing knock-out and dodge-ball to burn anxiety and assure myself that I no longer have to cower. Now I have the strength to fight back. And the DCFS letter? I work with kids now. I am in a prime position to prevent them from all that happened to me all year long.

If I am now – for all intents and purposes – recovered, why do I still fear the fall? Is it a step backwards or not? What if it isn’t?

What’s the protocol for a pause?

---

The storm pours. I continue walking.

I made the mistake of pausing to weigh my options even though my instinct drove me forward. It was a poor decision, trusting my brain over my heart. Even though I am drenched, battered, and bruised, I keep walking. Standing still is no longer an option.

It was a fool’s errand to try and conquer the mountain with so little knowledge.

---

September is the hardest month to get through. I do little but sit on edge, waiting anxiously for October 9th to come. Once it passes, I finally start to relax and congratulate myself on surviving another year and not stepping too far back.

But lately, I haven’t been stepping back. I still notice the days, the season, the anxiety coating my lungs. For the past year or two, I’ve largely ignored all my anniversaries. It is not an effort at trying to erase them and their effect – that’s impossible given how ingrained they are into my being. But choosing to do something different is not. And given that I no longer flinch at a hand being thrown my way, no longer am scared witless by the smell of bleach, the option to choose my reaction to a trigger is a luxury.

---

This mountain was not my choice. I’ve watched others be forced to walk around it, driven forward by their own fears and those of others. Some made it around the other side. Most fell off or quit. Never did I ever think I too would be placed at its base. But yet, here I am.

Prodded forward by memories, I continue placing one foot in front of the other. Hopefully I’ll reach the other side sometime soon.

---

Little remains of the addict that was attacked. I am physically much stronger. Sensitivity has been replaced by callousness. Mood swings have morphed into dour stoicism. Tears rarely fall anymore. All that I have, that I am, that enables me to stand, has been rebuilt from the former fragments.

Despite the stability of the new growth, the fragments still shake on anniversaries. I cannot stop them. There is no way to disconnect the shards from myself without removing a core components of me. Anticipating autumn then is not a step backwards in my recovery but a pause reminding me of who I was and what mountains I was forced to walk around. And though they be little and tremble, they are fierce.

 

Step 1: Part B

(TW: graphic description of addiction)

After a fall, some of us rise stronger than ever. Some of us just rise. Others shakily stand up slowly, never the same. And others of us just keep digging.

We all have moments where we were all four. Everyone aspires to be the former two, but realistically we cannot always claim to be “stronger than ever” after a major break. From what I’ve seen, it is only those who know how to dig that are even capable of achieving that oft-elusive claim. To those who have yet to experience their digging moment, deliberately exacerbating a problem seems counter-intuitive. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. Money, time management, mental illness, relationship problems, addiction – they are all the same in this regard. Why make a problem worse when the solution is right there? Isn’t fixing it and living happier always better?

Well, no.

Those of us familiar with the 12 Steps know the first step is to admit that A) there is a problem and B) you have the problem. Ironically, reaching Part A takes little effort. The symptoms of it come easily: court orders, lost friends and family, homelessness, selling valuable possessions, selling our bodies and souls. Admitting there is a problem is easy enough.

Admitting you have the problem is often difficult.

I liked getting high. I liked the floating sensation, the feel of pills sliding down my throat and knowing that relief would come soon. I loved knowing that the carefree, easy feeling would shortly be replaced by tiredness so I could sleep without nightmares (I had them regularly when I couldn’t get anything). Learning how to control my hallucinations was a challenge at first, but once I found fractals it became a game. The patterns twisted and warped into beautiful art, a world I had never seen before. Sober me was a tearful, suicidal mess. High me was a well-enough functioning young adult with a couple eccentricities. But while I was high, I never thought of myself as an addict. When I was coming down, waiting for the next dose, I didn’t either. It’s not that I ignored the problem of addiction. I knew it was a problem. I just didn’t think that prescriptions could be addictive.

Addiction is a problem. But I didn’t have it, right?

It took me three years of seeing candy-man psychiatrists to learn that, yes, even prescriptions can be addictive. There are almost zero mentally ill people who legitimately need multiple prescriptions from different doctors. I was not the exception to the rule. I was high. And my insurance paid for it.

Sometime in the second week in September I will have been sober for five years. I don’t even know my sobriety date because that’s how high I was at the time. And yes, my life has gotten an exponential improvement since then. I have a degree, a consistent job that I love, and friends that pull me up instead of weighing me down. If I choose to skip a coworkers’ night out, everyone is fine with it. If I organize a game night and require it to be alcohol-free, sober we all will be.

But this is five years later. The first two years of sobriety were miserable.

In the first month, I had anxiety attacks so severe I could not leave my apartment. This caused me to lose my job. Losing my job meant I had no way to pay for my living space, so I was evicted. Maybe only a week after committing to sobriety I became homeless. At the time I had been living in a halfway house (I was as high as a kite while living there most the time, as some of us were) and had burned my bridges with most of the small town which it was in, so I had nowhere to go. After a week, I caved and called my parents. They bought a one-way plane ticket for me. But a month later, my anxiety attacks would not stop. They gave me a choice – either get a job (another one after the one I had lost), start going to school, or go back on the streets. The first two would require seeing a therapist. I chose school, even though it meant therapy.

She ended up being the best therapist I’ve ever had, but the most recent therapy experience I had at that point was being forcibly and angrily evicted from a sober-living home. From the supposedly-nurturing staff there telling me my assault, the whole reason for me starting to get high in the first place, was made up for attention. Hint: it wasn’t.

I couldn’t tell my friends about any of it. Because who would understand when I could barely grasp my own story?

It was not the events that preceded my addiction, or the things that happened while I was high, that made the first two years so difficult. It was feeling, believing, intuitively knowing, that I could not speak of my story to anyone. I could not tell them what it was like to choose food over drugs, buying a large packet of Twizzlers and making it last for two days because there wasn’t anything else to eat. There was no place in their lives for someone who could barely make eye contact with them for almost four months for fear that they would innocently ask how life in Idaho had been. They wouldn’t understand detoxing, how I could remain awake for nearly four days with chills and pains and hallucinations and an wholehearted ache that could be cured with a simple swallow, knowing that suffering was for the better.

Because who would understand that this was the road to happiness?

 

Like Water

The war continues. I fight to pull myself out of bed, out the door, into work. We struggle to come to a common agreement. There is none, so we pull out our guns and show our cold hearts. Conflicts rage, internally, internationally. There is no beginning or end – only a continuation of the middle.

On the seventh hour of the last day of the seventh month, I open my eyes.

---

This year has been one of the most difficult to date. I have been to more funerals this year than I have in the past 25 combined. Accidents, medical fatalities, overdoses, suicides and suicide attempts – I cannot count the number of times I have called others or have been called by others in the midst of a crisis. The hours of lost sleep slip through my clenched hands like water. I’m glad I’m counted as a source of strength, but at the end of the day, where do I go? To whom do I turn to when I can no longer stand? I am dangerously close to crumbling.

The most recent crisis involved my ex-boyfriend. Like me, he struggled with severe depression and anxiety. It was how we first connected. And we melded well at first. I held the both of us up. He loved enough to make the room dance. But then my nerves frazzled his, and his insecurities scratched my need for independence. After nearly two years, we broke it off. He needed to find himself. I needed space.

Three years later, all of which I’ve been single, I’ve had enough space and am ready to enter back into the dating pool. He found other girls and multiple drunken nights. My anxiety and depression got better. His did not.

Last week, he finally said enough and swallowed all the pills in his house. His saving grace was that he posted it on Facebook and that someone called 911 just in time.

I’ve been wrestling with the decision to reach out to him. On one hand, I know how awful being in a psych ward can be, especially when a suicide attempt is the thing that put you there. It’s boring, restrictive, even more depressing to the already depressed, and above all, lonely.

On the other hand, I was sexually assaulted the last time I was in a psych ward. I’d be on the verge of a panic attack the entire time. I also don’t want to open the door to another relationship. He’s vulnerable and would want to get back together. I’ve moved on.

No matter how the last part of our relationship went, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I hope he finds his purpose and lives well. But this time I had to do what was best for me. I stayed home.

His attempt and my decision to let him be wore on me the entire week, so much so that I made a critical error at work and almost harmed someone. My supervisor knew it was an accident. Her supervisor even knew it was obviously a mistake and out of character for me. We might be a team, but it was still my fault.

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There is a branch of Eastern philosophy called Taoism that is based on natural cycles. Spring turns to summer, which turns to fall and then winter, only to be replaced once again by spring. Day turns to night but is then chased away by the rising sun. Moon rises. Tide rises. Moon sets as does the tide. We rise, help others rise, and then we ourselves fall.

The waves of the ocean rush to land and then trickle back home. In, and out. There, and back again. Water never fights the waves, no matter how violently they crash or how little the impact upon the sand. It just rides them. I am forever a work in progress, learning to be like water.