Tag Archives: Family
Grief Pickles
On the days
when I forget
to eat anything
but my
weed laced oatmeal,
sometimes I still have
Grief Pickles.
When my depression
or my disordered eating
grabs a hold of me
and prevents me from moving,
I can lift a Grief Pickle
to my mouth,
the temptation
to feel again
too great.
In a moment,
the tiny sweet gherkins
yield to my teeth,
meaty matter crumbling
into itself
along the structures
that created it,
and I remember
my Grandma.
I remember
every Saturday night
when she would
consider it
something special
to break out
a frozen pizza
and some
potato chips
and some
tiny sweet gherkins.
Not a balanced meal,
nothing like her
homemade roasts
or goulash
but she thought
it was special
(probably because
it took less work),
so I thought
it was special.
I bite into a
Grief Pickle and
I remember
my Grandma,
who kept the house
at 76 degrees
for two years
after my
Grandpa died,
never thinking
that she could
change it to
what she liked.
I remember
my Grandma,
who played
strategy games
as if she didn’t
quite fully
understand
everything
she could do
to screw
other people over,
until the time came
that she didn’t quite
understand
strategy games
that deeply at all,
not for the benefit
of others
or herself.
I remember
my Grandma,
who would
subtly rib
on my weight
by suggesting
things like,
“perhaps you
should check
the weight limit
on the chair.”
I remember
my Grandma,
complicated,
human,
trapped
just the same
in a society
and a family
with such profound
generational trauma
that we don’t
speak of emotions
much less feel them.
I remember
my Grandma
on the hospital bed,
looking lost and tiny,
a wrinkled fetus
abandoned in the
slow gradual breakdown
of the prison
that holds
our consciousness.
I remember
my Grandma’s
hand, small
and soft and spotted.
I take another bite.
Unfinished Daddy Issues Poem
My father says I can’t be a man because I express too much. I’m a slave to my emotions, and I’m using a gender transition to stuff my trauma.
I feel.
I sit.
I process.
and everything I make is steeped in emotion, every drip of paint or drop of ink or flash of flame or cut or weld or arc is sacred feeling encapsulated in a single moment on canvas or metal but then
I feel.
I sit.
I process.
and I abandon those loving harsh moment of truth in closets because they are past truths and they are therapy and they exist for me.
Some of my favorite cows
This ain’t a
digital scrapbook
and it isn’t
a Polaroid,
this is pure
photographic
evidence,
absolute
silver
processed
proof
that my grandpa
would’ve had an
Instagram,
here’s
“Some of my favorite cows.”
Words of Wisdom
My Very Wise Friend said
“If your family
demands you perform
what they perceive
as your You-ness
in order to be
part of the family,
that’s not family
and that’s not love.”
My family has struggles.
Every one does.
I think we battle
more about
my You-ness.
See I can’t restrain my me-ness
and all they seem to think about
is imaginary penis
while my brain attempts to run from all
of these problems with expert fleetness
but really could I be less
Worried
Ashamed
Real
if I wasn’t truly here
or am I pretending that my absence
is a problem solving algorithm
when the question posed
by the riddle was always
“How do you have your best life?”
and the answer to the system
was never supposed to be
“Tap out, give up, it’ll only get harder,”
but instead the lesson was
“FIGHT. Fight and YOU’LL GET STRONGER.”
Pure Sterling
My mother told me
that God is the potter
and I am a cup
but I’m trying to
become a plate
but what she
doesn’t understand
is that I was
never meant
to be so simple
and utilitarian
in the first place
and it’s much
more likely that
I’m an abstract sculpture
out of precious metal clay
and this is my trial by fire
in the kiln of cruel expectations
burning away impurities
and anything less
than what I need
to be pure sterling.
Dangerous path
What dangers
am I
in if
I keep
going down
this path?
Because I
think it’s
damn impressive
that 24
random weasels
banded together
with enough
determination to
convincingly play
a human,
so a
slight adjustment
mid script
seems reasonable.
Dreaming
Dreams are very powerful for me. I have vivid, imaginative dreams, a woven tapestry of realities and falsehoods that make me question everything when I wake up. A drinking dream shatters me. Dreams catalyzed my coming out process. A dream is how I knew I was pregnant.
It’s not something I talk about often. But it’s niggling at my soul, a little catch in the back of my mind. It’s a hurt that’s coming back after being repressed, so that means it is time to process it.
Vulnerability is a risky dialectic of connection and rejection. I know that there is a chance that saying what I have to say will bring closeness and help to salve an old wound. There is also the chance that I will alienate people and start battles I don’t want to get into.
Ultimately, however, the decision comes down to whether there’s someone else out there that might read this and find some peace from it. And so I move forward.
In 2010 and 2011 I was going to school and living in Grand Rapids with my boyfriend at the time and one other girl. I was a shitty roommate to her and I regret that, since she and I had planned to move in together and my boyfriend just kinda never left.
One night I sat bolt upright on the goddamn futon, having had a dream that I was pregnant. I tried to remember when my last period was. I asked him, he didn’t know either. We hustled to a grocery store and got several pregnancy tests, and the first one came back positive almost instantly.
I couldn’t have a child. I am not meant for child rearing. Especially not as my life was. Especially not as my descent into alcoholism was going.
But I didn’t have health insurance. Or a spare $900.
So I turned to the internet.
I don’t recommend anyone try to induce a miscarriage or self abortion or whatever you want to call it. I combined three or four methods and hoped and prayed.
Vitamin C stings. Parsley tea smells like horse piss.
But it worked, over several days. I started to bleed. And bleed. And bleed.
I felt nothing but relief then.
It hurts now.
Sometimes I think about the child I might otherwise have had. Somehow I imagine a boy, and I’m pretty damn sure he’d have curly blonde hair. I wonder about the way things might have gone with my boyfriend/ex husband, who wanted children later on. I question whether I would have cleaned up my act, whether I could have saved a few years of the depression institutionalization yo-yo. I know this sort of thinking is useless though.
Not much can keep me safe from my own insecurities though. About what this makes me, whether I’m a good person. You can be pro-choice all the live-long day and still struggle with internalized hate. I feel so alone. I don’t know anyone else who’s done this, because no one talks about it. So I stay inside my head with all my thoughts, and they percolate into vile piles of self loathing, and little story lines for dreams.
I take a prescription medication now though, one that prevents dreaming. I also have an IUD.
Writing a Suicide Note to Myself
I think I deeply underestimate the effect of pain on my mental health.
Oftentimes that pain will lead me to seek out medical care.
That medical care will fall short in myriad ways.
The most damage is done when I am treated like I do not know what I am talking about(which I do, it’s my body and I’m a smart cookie).
They go on to not listen or ignore symptoms.
Systemic misgendering.
Ultimately, ineffective treatments and I have wasted hours, expending myself mentally and physically, with nothing new tried, no answers, no treatments, no referrals, no belief that it would improve, a whole mess of micro aggressions, and worsening pain.
I was writing my suicide note in my head while driving home.
I wasn’t worth listening to. I wasn’t worth respecting. I wasn’t worth treating. I was a drain on the system.
A creature of pure torture and it wasn’t going to get better.
Because I will always be the person that writes “LOL” when a form leaves 8 spaces for you to put your medication list.
Because I will need multiple specialists who for some reason can never coordinate their blood work requests.
Because the combined costs for the surgeries I will need to no longer squirm like a child at a funeral just at the idea of being in my body exceeds that of most suburban homes.
Because I have wanted to die as long as I can remember, and only regular therapy, medication monitoring, inpatient hospitalizations, and the occasional emergency interventions keep it from happening.
There’s so many stories lately about resuscitating addicts. Someone mentioned a “three strike rule,” where they’d no longer administer emergency medication.
So where does that come in with suicide? How many times do you wake someone up with a smile and tell them they aren’t worthless and sit beside them coloring and chatting as they stare off in to space and beg the universe that JUST ONCE someone would have thrown up their hands and said “well I guess they weren’t worth saving after all.” How many times do you say hello and goodbye to the staff that all knew you anyway before the EMT blacklists your house?How many interventions does it take until when a patient says “I’m worthless,” the reply is, “Well, you’ve met your mental health value quota so, yeah, you’ll have to find some worth somewhere else in life. ”
The mental health system is slow, toxically still full of stigma, and prey to every -ism.
But here I am still.
I was past three strikes years ago, folks.
I thought a line should go in my suicide note- “In lieu of flowers, please send letters to local hospitals and your congressmen.”
I came up with some clever lines. Even some stuff about the selfishness of suicide.
Because it’s not. It’s not about you, and you’re being arrogant if you think that. If anything, it’s selfish of you for wanting to keep someone who is suffering that much around, just so you can feel marginally better.
Things like that mindset guarantee I’m not pleasant to be around, I’m pretty sure I don’t have all that many friends, mostly acquaintances.
Profound mental illness, it turns out, is uncomfortable.
I hide behind biting sarcasm a lot. It’s actually the shield that bites back.
Then I got to thinking about family. Ain’t that a can of worms.
I thought about the funeral. It’d probably be at the church I grew up in and was chronically awkward in. The one that was 400 people that met in a pole barn when I was 2 and vomited on someone’s shoes and will never live down. I was there as it expanded. As it moved. As it kept rejecting me socially. I was there for the newest addition, millions upon millions of dollars raised. I toured it it when it was scaffolding, sheets of plastic and exposed concrete. I watched as it stretched a video outreach across the globe and my father would occasionally do some paint touch up work on the pastor’s massive boat.
Somehow non-denominational is its own particular denomination. Whodathunkit, it has some very traditional and conservative mindsets.
I knew that without a legally changed name and gender marker, I would be deadnamed among my family until we were all dirt.
And when I came out as pansexual I was told that “a line has been crossed in the eyes of God” if I would ever touch a woman.
And when I came out as transgender I was told that “this was an exploration” and “I will find a revelation.”
“God loves her more than we love her.”
You can change if it’s supposed to cut or be supportive depending on what you emphasize.
My dad had said in the session with my therapist that I have an “emotionally built feminine psyche” and that “guys don’t deal with these emotions.” He figured that a part of my transition goal was to get over trauma through that reasoning. He also said he has nothing but compassion for those that are internally conflicted, which I have been for a very long time.
He challenged me to find one person who was truly happy having done this, 10 years out, figuring that anyone who was transgender would just be so conflicted that they’d never really improve their lives.
Months later my mother was teary eyed when she asked me if I thought I was still saved.
She said “I have to hold onto the thought that you might still be in heaven.”
I wondered at the hellfire that was currently eating her alive, fresh and meaty and ripe, right on this plane of existence.
I thought of all this while I plotted my suicide note. The idea I could be so wrong, so broken that I would be cursed to brimstone and damnation had such a hold on her heart. I fumed.
I spewed. You know, in my head.
Then I craved. I wanted someone to read the note at my funeral. Read the note at the church I was raised in.
I wanted someone to tell them that this is not the gospel. Christ’s blood was spilled so no more has to be.
I got home.
I took some medication.
I pet fuzzy animals.
I relaxed on the bed.
I felt a little bit better.
Then I got angry.
Angry enough to do some good.
When you are low enough that you’ve almost stopped feeling bad, stopped feeling anything, you can find angry.
You can tap into it.
I realized that no one is going to do my advocacy for me.
I may already be fighting hard.
I will have to fight every damn day.
And it will keep hurting.
But I can’t give up and leave my mantle for another, they must carry their own.
I have to be vulnerable.
I have to do it myself.
I have to tell my story myself.
I have to live long enough to improve MY life myself.
To show who I am.
To prove it.
Maybe only to myself.
Whisper Sweetly
I have never been able to view myself as smart. Other people would hold that for me- teachers, tests, peers. My self esteem would not allow it. My parents had a systematic lack of regard for what I HAD done versus what I COULD do. “A 97? Why not a 100? A 100? Why not perfect attendance? We’re worried about your weight. Say, why are you coming home in tears so often? I guess it’s a teenager thing. Must need some space.” I lived in the shadow of my own potential, and my potential whispered sweetly about dreams and a future and having worth.
I cried writing the end of that sentence right there. It sinks me that I remain so far away from viewing myself as a creature with worth, yet I can dialectically hold the concept that all lives have inherent worth. I remain a raw, rotten lump of meat in the corner, an exception.
It’s been a rough 6 weeks or so. I’ve gotten strep, kinda beat it, had it come back with a vengeance and morph into walking pneumonia. My testosterone shot caused a giant weird painful lump in my leg. My mental health regressed enough that I ended up in a crisis residential program for a week. Additionally I’ve been in the ER three times, the Urgent Care once, and my PCP once. I got in a car accident and messed up my shoulder nicely. My anxiety is through the roof. Also, I’m not sure if it’s related to the car accident or the strep-hell but I can’t bind because it makes me completely unable to breathe. I’ve missed enough work that I’m worried about whether they’ll just give up on me like my last employer did.
I also got married, so that was cool.
I kept doing this weird thing during all this stress though. I kept house shopping.
See, I found out we were eligible for a down payment assistance program that’s really nifty.
It was a fun distraction if nothing else. But I let myself hope, and when it came down to it, if you’re getting 36 hours and your company still calls you part time, you have to have been there for 2 years.
Bye-bye hope.
I’ve had big dreams in the past.
Now all I want is a cute little fixer-upper and to SOMEDAY finish a damn degree above an Associate’s.
I was supposed to be so smart. One of those assholes that throws off the curve.
I’ll probably work entry level for the rest of my life because I am deeply, profoundly mentally ill.
Maybe smart doesn’t mean much if you’re broken.
The big bad monster crept out of my mind to stab potential repeatedly.
It doesn’t whisper anymore.