I don't have any starting point or ending point for this post. I just need to write. I had to come into work today, pretend it's a normal day like that, when I just wanted to stay in bed. I am thankful to be surrounded by people who are all just as depressed as I am by last night's election results but I don't want to talk about it with them. And I don't want to listen to them talk about it from across the office. I don't want to skim social media. This is a post written out of a need to shut everything out -- to just focus on my fingertips typing away without knowing where they're going. It probably won't be interesting as such, but it's helping me get through this morning so I'm just going to go with it -- whether I actually hit publish at the end is right now a question mark, one you'll already know the answer to if you're reading it.
On the subway ride to work this morning I was sitting minding my business when a woman tried to shove herself into the small space between me and another woman. I was already up against the bars on the side, over as far as I could go, but apparently this wasn't enough room and the two women - strangers to one another - both turned on me together all of a sudden. To them I was taking up too much space. I wasn't "man spreading" - I am a six foot three not small man, I just take up some room. But they began commiserating on how this was apparently "Trump's America now." I turned my music up - I was comfort-listening to Tori Amos as I do in times of need -- but they went on this way for the entire ride. I was suddenly emblamatic of Trump's America.
I had a political tweet that went viral a couple of weeks back where I angrily railed against those not voting or voting third party, saying that those actions would do nothing to help the Gazans experiencing an ongoing genocide. It was an angry tweet aimed at someone I know in my own life who was choosing that path -- not close enough to confront her personally, but enough for me to want to vent. Anyway I had to mute the tweet pretty fast as the comments got extremely aggressive quickly. I'd been avoiding even looking back at it since, but yesterday I did, and I saw a bunch of people commenting that of course a white middle-class man would be so blind to the needs of POC and the poor.
Both of those experiences sit on me today, holding hands. All my life I've felt trapped in this giant fumbling white man's body. As I've gotten into many many times here on this site and in my film reviews I was raised poorer than poor -- when my parents separated when I was seven my mother and I moved into two rooms in the house of my former babysitter where I lived until I graduated from high school. We were on food stamps and welfare. My father often skipped or forgot about his visitation weekends. It was just me and my mom, and I was furious and mean to her much of the time.
It didn't help that we were deeply Pentecostal, and I spent my teenage years falling darker and darker under that spell, becoming more and more convinced as I realized I liked boys not girls that I was evil and destined for hell. I compartmentalized everything. I really still don't feel like an entire human being -- just a pile of boxes stacked up in the shape of one. My father is rotting in a nursing home right now, dementia apparently eating away at him, and I feel nothing about it. I am numb and angry and broken. And I just don't know what to do with strangers looking at me and seeing the problem. I want to fold up into nothing most of the time.
I don't have any answers. You get older and you think you will have answers -- my beard if full of gray hairs but I feel like a child in so many ways. I just want my friends and my loved ones around me. I want to tell them that I love them. And I want to say thank you to each and every one of you who come here and dutifully read my nonsense -- I am extremely shy in person and this site has been in many ways my only outlet. I have built a persona on here that is an expression of some part of me, but nothing like the person you would meet in real life. I suppose it's just another box. But it's been, and meant, so much to me over the years. To have people come and comment and laugh. To help y'all have distractions from the bullshit at our doors. It does give me a little bit of purpose. So thank you.
One fucking step in front of the other, I guess.
Posts
