Today I'm figuring how I can juggle money around between various debtors to pay for fixing my truck, so that it will keep running, which enables me eek out a bit more of a living doing massage when I can find the clients...Moving has helped me to appreciate the vast wealth of resources I had available to me in my hometown. I understand resources as connections and networks that facilitate me trading my skills to meet my basic needs, rather than as the money itself. Connections open up opportunities, and I had many of them back home. The capability to earn a living. It's harder here. I do have some folks trying to pull strings for me to help scramble some extra work, but the 20 hours a week packing boxes in a warehouse certainly isn't going to cut it. I know myself well enough by now to see that if I do that repetitive stress job much more than 20 hours a week, I will damage my wrists and hands, which are valuable to me for so much more vital work than packaging someone else's product, not to mention kill my spirit. I'm not cut out for the 40 hour a week grind doing the same thing all the time, especially when it's not particularly engaging more of my brain and passions. Honestly, I don't think most of us are cut out for it; some of us can just cram down the reactions deep into our bodies and psyches to keep plugging along more easily than others.
This is such an old, tired story. I don't think I am anywhere near as decimated by economical disenfranchisement as so many others, even in this city, but I feel the strain of this capitalist beast, nonetheless. It manifests in my body, my shoulder locking up tight toward my head after working a twelve hour stretch yesterday. Couldn't sleep. Puts a gloomy cloud over my head to be in pain all the time.
I am so thankful this has eased some from being the daily phenomenon it was when I was still injecting testosterone into my body. More slight muscle structure equals less tension and daily pain for me, this is good. This decision about what I'm putting into my body has also opened up the floodgates for my emotional life to move again. Tears come easily, when they were blocked up behind a thick and impenetrable dam for years. I cannot hide from the tender quiet words of my heart. Thankfully, building my heart a sturdy home inside this chest is much more a challenge of internal resources.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Heartbreak is sometimes the best medicine
I started this blog business a few months ago. After years of staunch ambivalence about all things technology, I was genuinely surprised to find myself investigating and stumbling through the steps of setting up a blog. "If I put myself and my work and ideas all out there for the world to have access to, they might read them." Exactly. As a self-defined writer my whole life, I have mostly kept my words to myself. Fear of failure is debilitating for artists. I began to branch out a few years ago at the motivation offered by a rad filthy queer open mic in my hometown of Portland, OR hosted at In Other Words bookstore. Having an audience helps put a fire under my ass to keep writing and sharing, as it turns out. As of yet, I've only posted bits that have been groomed and thought-out for days before rendering them to the web. I'm researching other people's use of this cyber-connectivity and I am beginning to understand the value of letting it flow...
It's taking heartbreak to get me here. How much of my queer life have I spent pouring my focus and energy into other people, more specifically my intimate relationships? I am truly the child of baby-boomers, and not the types that ever strayed onto the hippy path in the 60's or 70's, the put-away-toward-retirement-through-a-soul-sucking-job and trust-the-big-"They"-experts-to-take-care-of-us types. Maybe it was the socialization of growing up in a household with a mom that bent her will and spirit to caretake the male authority figure (dad) or coming out into dyke community at such a young age laden as it is with hyper-processing tendencies and uhaul syndrome. At any rate, here I am almost 30, sure I was ready to shed the patterns of basing my sense of self on the well-being of another, stuck right back in the depths of such a situation. And I'm far from home, to boot. I transplanted myself to the metropolis of the Bay Area last spring to follow my creative dreams and ostensibly to be closer to said lover, so my extensively developed support network of folks I've been weaving community with over the last more than a decade are not here to call upon when I just need to get out of the house, remember other pieces of myself as alive and vital.
I'm a fire sign, I thrive on passion and the vibrancy of connection, be it intellectual, performative with an audience, a walk in the woods where I can quiet my brain enough to listen to the forest or intimate exchanges with lovers and friends. I pride myself on my hard learned abilities to communicate, yet I feel like I am speaking a different language from the one I am working to sort through this relationship with. I feel that I am becoming invisible sometimes from lack of being seen. It's strange to share space so much with someone so shut down to me.
How do we keep our sense of self alive when we don't have opportunity to see positive images of ourselves reflected back to us by those around us? I have been committed to creating this kind of community in my hometown for years, it is at the root of all my creative work and networking and travels. I know that I come from a place of privilege to have experienced this at any time; this point in history we occupy is tumultuous and challenging, and as queers it's probably the best we could ask for of anytime in the last few centuries on most continents. Those that went before us made this time of above ground community-making possible. So how did those folks survive their spirits without others to share with?
I think they found solace in their work, their art, the few precious ones enough like them in their difference that they banded together. We don't need each other like we used to. So far my experience of the Bay Area queer community, although sparse, has been that everyone has their world crafted and they don't necessarily have room for or need for more amazing, creative queers.
Branching out, this will take time. I recede into myself, believing this solitude amongst the masses to be the holder of lessons for me presently. Otherwise, why on earth would I be here, right now?
It's taking heartbreak to get me here. How much of my queer life have I spent pouring my focus and energy into other people, more specifically my intimate relationships? I am truly the child of baby-boomers, and not the types that ever strayed onto the hippy path in the 60's or 70's, the put-away-toward-retirement-through-a-soul-sucking-job and trust-the-big-"They"-experts-to-take-care-of-us types. Maybe it was the socialization of growing up in a household with a mom that bent her will and spirit to caretake the male authority figure (dad) or coming out into dyke community at such a young age laden as it is with hyper-processing tendencies and uhaul syndrome. At any rate, here I am almost 30, sure I was ready to shed the patterns of basing my sense of self on the well-being of another, stuck right back in the depths of such a situation. And I'm far from home, to boot. I transplanted myself to the metropolis of the Bay Area last spring to follow my creative dreams and ostensibly to be closer to said lover, so my extensively developed support network of folks I've been weaving community with over the last more than a decade are not here to call upon when I just need to get out of the house, remember other pieces of myself as alive and vital.
I'm a fire sign, I thrive on passion and the vibrancy of connection, be it intellectual, performative with an audience, a walk in the woods where I can quiet my brain enough to listen to the forest or intimate exchanges with lovers and friends. I pride myself on my hard learned abilities to communicate, yet I feel like I am speaking a different language from the one I am working to sort through this relationship with. I feel that I am becoming invisible sometimes from lack of being seen. It's strange to share space so much with someone so shut down to me.
How do we keep our sense of self alive when we don't have opportunity to see positive images of ourselves reflected back to us by those around us? I have been committed to creating this kind of community in my hometown for years, it is at the root of all my creative work and networking and travels. I know that I come from a place of privilege to have experienced this at any time; this point in history we occupy is tumultuous and challenging, and as queers it's probably the best we could ask for of anytime in the last few centuries on most continents. Those that went before us made this time of above ground community-making possible. So how did those folks survive their spirits without others to share with?
I think they found solace in their work, their art, the few precious ones enough like them in their difference that they banded together. We don't need each other like we used to. So far my experience of the Bay Area queer community, although sparse, has been that everyone has their world crafted and they don't necessarily have room for or need for more amazing, creative queers.
Branching out, this will take time. I recede into myself, believing this solitude amongst the masses to be the holder of lessons for me presently. Otherwise, why on earth would I be here, right now?
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