‘i’m sad and i’ve hurt people and i’m a beautifully tortured survivor of my past’
i'm in new york. it's been wonderful. i’ve been reading hanif abdurraqib’s they can’t kill us until they kill us, which micaela kindly gifted me, even decorated with touching annotations from her brain. it’s been getting me thinking about the point of writing.
it's strange to have written personal essays that have undeniably meant a lot to a fair few people, touched their hearts in the way i’d hope to, and still feel some vague insecurity about my life being interesting enough to write about. and look, ‘some vague insecurity’ is an accurate descriptor for most of what's going on in my brain at any given time, but this is one of the more consistent. frequent as the imprecise hatred of the curve of my jaw, the curve of my hips, the lump in my throat, the gravel it produces, the lumps in my throat that sound induces.
comparison is the thief of joy, and i have been robbed quite a lot (metaphorically and literally – i’ve been informed four attempted muggings in my short life is a lot). it's silly to compare myself to an essayist like hanif, sure — a man who has lived so much more of a life in just number of years spent breathing, let alone his variety of human experiences. ‘i’m sad and i've hurt people and i’m a beautifully tortured survivor of my past’, he writes half-jokingly in under half-lit fluorescents. he's speaking in a satirical impression of emo lyricists, but not exclusively; there's an awareness of its entwining with his own trade. he's speaking as someone else in his own voice. i mean, what is an essayist if not someone speaking to you in words you can’t find yourself.
anyway. that was a lot of speaking as someone else in someone else's voice. it's a comfortable mask to hide behind. to talk to the ends of the earth about beautiful art because i do not feel worthy to waste your time talking about my own time on it. i’m sad, i've hurt people but i do not feel a beautifully tortured survivor of my past. i usually just feel tortured — as in brief notes on staying, ‘the tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time [...] but the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. so many of us begin tortured and end tortured.’ i wish to keep writing words that mean something to me and might mean a little to another tortured person.
and look, many things have happened to colour that past. i wrote a book at 23. i was assaulted at 15. i realised i’m a woman at 22. i had my heart filled, truly, for the first time last year. i've had it broken many times before and will again. i watched, with far less ability to help than i would have preferred, as the woman i love most in the world almost left it. in the same essay, hanif writes that ‘there will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and i am wondering, now, if i've had enough.’ i often feel the latter. simultaneously, i know i have an immeasurable amount of love and trauma and complication and grief ahead of me, whether i feel i can handle it or not. that’s up to some higher power, not me. but, hey. all this love and trauma and complication and grief sure makes for great essay material.
in death becomes you, he asks ‘if i tell a sad story, and then you, reader, tell me a sad story, and then your friend tells me a sad story, how do i take that with me and try to make something better out of it?’ and i think, if i may shamelessly thieve this beautifully efficient and salient outlook, that’s what my thesis is becoming as to why i write. there is such sadness, on the streets and in each other. it permeates every cell, every moment, a cancer metastasising and blackening the little joys we have. we have each other, even if that’s all. reflecting on 'being black and still alive in america' in the transitional aside III, he notes ‘i know what it is to feel that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. ones that you cannot take with you, but cannot be taken from you. a place where you still have a name.’ i'll keep writing. to build a small heaven. for other trans people. for other writers. for those sadly few gorgeous, wonderful people in the middle of those circles. i'm biased, but i love you.
i'll close by letting hanif do it for me with another line from death becomes you. hiding behind the mask of art again, maybe, but like i said: speaking in words i can't find myself.
‘that which does not kill you may certainly kill someone else. that which does not kill you may form a fresh layer of sadness on the shoulders of someone you do not know, but who still may need to press their ear to the same thing that told you everything was going to be all right when you didn’t feel like everything was going to be all right.’