A Pesach Kavannah: Reflections on Love, Solidarity, and Mirages

As an act of self-care, I want to express how much I care for you. I recognize that sometimes I come off as abrasive and demagogic It’s something I’ve always with which I’ve always struggled: finding balance. The balance between passion and paternalism; constructive criticism and destructive confrontation.

I spend my life fighting a tidal wave of silence. The only way I've learned to fight it is to scream. The only way I know to resist the sting of rejection is to push against it. But. as I turn 29 this year, I’ve realize how tired I've become as a result of it. I've realized that it’s time to make t’shuvah--to turn around, and to find a new path.

I revel in nuance. I’m wired to always see things beyond the surface. I see hidden meanings of things--the tendons between actions and words; the gaps between silences and broken promises. Lately, though, I’ve realized that that scares a lot of people. And that’s okay. It’s a lot to hold. The challenge I’m facing is: how do I talk about these nuances--especially when it comes to things about oppression and privilege--without pulling people into a space that they’re not ready to be in? How do I prevent myself from forcing them from having their click moment before they’re ready to have it? At the same time, though, I do think that conflict and confrontation can be beneficial. Both have the potential to make us ask questions of ourselves and our positions, and they may make us think in potentially new ways. They act as astringents--purging us of inaccurate assumptions and incongruent realities.

I’m talking about solidarity--of radical empathy. Support and solidarity are complicated, because we’re complicated and we live complicated lives. When it comes to disagreement, activism, coalition building, accountability, etc., the question, I think, isn't: "why are we fighting and not supporting each other?" But: "Can be support each other in multifaceted ways and still hold each other accountable to the ways in which we may still hurt each other? Can we affirm each others hurt, isolation, and truth, even if we don't understand it? Can we admit to ourselves that we may never understand what another person feels, but give them room to feel it, and help them carry it, so that their not suffocating it in the loneliness of it all?"

That, to me, is what activism. It's an act of bearing witness. That's what solidarity is. Because, at its root, solidarity is an act of love. And love, at its root, isn't a warm fuzzy feeling. It isn't always comfortable or safe. It often has sharp, jagged edges--and these edges are necessary for cutting down the barriers that prevent us from having authentic, mutually affirming relationships. It demands truth. It demands justice. But love also requires us, once those barriers are stripped away, to carry each other when we’re tired and weary. It requires us to recognize our limitations, our humanity, our fragility.

It’s Pesach (Passover) right now. The week in which Jews ritually recall the Israelites’ struggle for freedom and liberation from the oppression that they experienced in Egypt. They wandered through the desert, guided by hope and driven by despair, in search for a Promised Land. I so deeply resonate with this sacred story. How many of us experience the blistering heat of homophobia, ableism, poverty, racism, transphobia, depression-anxiety-other mental illnesses, and other forms of hatred and stigma? How many of us are tricked by mirage of normalcy, which promises us false and temporary refuge--at the expense of our unique and profound power and beauty? How many of us have swallowed our truths, forgotten our histories, our connections, to our peoples, and our many selves--all for the sake of an oasis that wasn't ever there in the first place?

Mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov,mishk'notecha Yisrael.
How goodly are your tents, Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel.

These are the lessons I’ve learned on my journey thus far: 

Keep one side of your tent open. Provide shelter to those who wander through the desert, trying desperately to find a land flowing with milk and honey. Be the hidden well-spring that saved Hagar’s and Ishmael’s lives after they were cast out by their own people. Feed each other’s mind, body, and soul with mana--the essence of your being. Share your truth, your jagged, beautiful edges. Hold each other’s complexities and contradictions gently.

And when the dust storms come, and the inevitable downpours of pain shower down upon you, close your tent and take care of yourself. Learn to say “no” without guilt, or feeling compelled to explain yourself. Learn to say “yes” without guilt, or feeling compelled to explain yourself. Recognize your fragility. Praise your limits. Enter into a sacred covenant with your interior self--go into that secret, holy space that no one can enter but you. Rest there, and come back when you’re ready.

Dayenu. It is enough. It is enough that you got out of bed, got dressed, and left the house. It is enough that you couldn't get out of bed because of pain, anxiety, and depression. It is enough that you exist. In a world that, at every turn, attempts to deny your existence, dignity, and self-worth, the fact that you’re still here--learning, living, loving---is a revolutionary act.

Hineni. Here I am. Learn to accept yourself as who you are and not as what you do. You are made of flesh and bone, of blood and tendon. Your worth is not based upon your career, studies, or being a parent, sibling, or child. Let your soul pull you towards your destination, but recognize that life’s paths are never linear. And realize that no matter where you are on your path, you’re exactly where you need to be. There is no magical “there” where things will be better. There is only “Here.” Love those around you; and understand every choice, action, and inaction you make in this life has both meaning and consequence that ripples out far beyond imagining. But don’t be defined by them. There is only “I am.” “Here. I AM.”

Because, as we journey through the desert together, the winds of change are constant. You will lose everything. Life will break you, over and over. But you’ll realize that you posses a fortitude, a dignity, a grace that you never imagine you had. No experience, no feeling, no perception is final. Learn to treasure your sadness as much as you treasure your joy. Let both pass through you. Let both teach you secret knowledge as they guide you on your way.

Learn to value the inbetweeness of things--the sacred twilight of memory and forgetting, of resisting and resting. There is, in that liminal silence, a beautiful ebb and flow to everything. A chaotic peace--the tethering of connection and alienation. It’s the space between souls--the place where we can bridge the infinite gap between us and finally meet each other as our whole, fragile selves. We are, in fact, islands. But once we do the hard work of bridge-building--a task that requires commitment, love, and authenticity, we finally greet each other for everything we are; and we finally greet G-dess in and through each other.

Lastly, recognize that as we journey through the desert, with all its perils, traps, and turn arounds, no one will ever reach the Promised Land until everyone has. No one will ever find true liberation at another’s expense. Progress, in this sense, is just another mirage that the desert heat tricks us into believing. Queer, class-privileged cis men will never be liberated at the expense of Trans* Women of Color; physically Disabled people will never be liberated at the expense of people who are Cognitively and/or Intellectually Disabled; Jews around the world will never escape anti-Jewish hatred, or the haunting memory of the Shoah, pogroms, and mass expulsions at the expense of Palestinians.

As we (Jews) remember how our ancestors fled Mitzrayyim, the constricted spaces, we must also remember that we've been tasked with the sacred duty of Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) by collecting the the Divine Sparks. Traditionally, we do this by keeping the mitzvot (commandments). But, what if we interpret it in another way?


We (humanity), who are created b’tzelem elohim (in the image of G-dess), are the sparks. The sacred fire that burns within all of us, kept alight by ruach (spirit, breath). How would that change how we treat each other and ourselves? Would we recognize that that fire has the potential to both keep each other warm on cold nights, as well as burn everything in its wake? Would we recognize that we have the potential to snuff out another's fire--their reason and ability to live--as well as breathing renewed ruach into them when they've lost it?

חג פסח שמח

Chag Pesach Sameach

Interpretive version of the Ahavat Olam (G-dess’ Love in the Torah/Universe)
We are loved by an unending love.
We are embraced by arms that find us
even when we are hidden from ourselves.
We are touched by hands that soothe us
even when we are too proud for soothing.
We are counseled by hands that guide us
even when we are too embittered to hear.
We are loved by an unending love.
We are hands that uplift us
even in the midst of the a fall.
We are urged on by eyes that meet us
even when we are too weak for meeting.
We are loved by an unending love.
Embraced, touched, soothed, and counseled…
Ours are the arms, the fingers, the voices;
Ours are the hands, the eyes, the smiles;
We are loved by an ending love.
Blessed are you, Beloved One, who loves your people Israel and the entire universe.
--Rami M. Shapiro (adapted)

To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I
have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin's blister?
To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival?

A Litany For Survival
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language….And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
-- All by Audre Lorde

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change. - Octavia Butler

I am looking for friends and allies, for communities where the gawking, gaping, staring finally turns to something else, something true to the bone. Places where strength gets to be softened and tempered, love honed and stretched. Where gender is known as more than a simple binary. Where we encourage each other swish and swagger, limp and roll, and learn the language of pride. Places where our bodies begin to become home - Eli Clare

Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes - Anaïs Nin

So stretch your practiced strengths between two contradictions.
For the g-d[ess] within you wishes to consult. - Rainer Maria Rilke 

On Judaism, Change, and Reconstitution.

I think one of the reasons why I’m feeling so many things so intensely right now—especially with regards to my gender—is the time of year and what it means to me. This month, on the Jewish calender, is Elul. It’s the last month of the Jewish year, during which time we ask for forgiveness from those we’ve hurt (including ourselves, I think). In Judaism, this process of of repenting is called t’shuvah—which means “return” or “turn around.”

 But what happens when you’re going in circles? Where do you turn, and how? Perhaps  moments of clarity come in a flash of an instant. But I find that most of mine comes in a nagging whisper that I try to ignore for the sake of my convenience, fear, and emotional/physical exhaustion. I’ve been feeling a lot of things for a long time—things I don’t really know how to process. Things that feel way too big for me to piece apart. Add that to the fact that I get completely flustered when I feel like I’m comprehending something completely (but really, who completely understands something as complex as gender[s]?).

 There’s a profound pain in making t’shuvah—if it’s sincere, anyway. One has to accept their own inability to be everything they wish they could be (or at least maintain) To keep every promise they wish they could. The promise to be uncompromisingly true to oneself; to never ingest silence when things need to be spoken, expressed, made known.  It’s the moment of twilight when you see/feel two or distinct realities: The one you live now, which has outlived its purpose and is starting to feel tight around and within you, and the new one(s) in other directions, full of excitement and fear and unknowable things. At the end of things, the only thing to which you’re returning is the maelstrom of boundless chance. To the fundamentals of what makes you: you—the swarms of stardust churning, sifting, and shifting—all to give birth to a new and glorious creature. 


It’s not just the shedding of skin. No. It’s something much deeper. Something much, much more profound. You know it only when language and metaphor can no longer hold it in its tendrils. 

 So, here I am. On the precipice of that change. Looking down into the glittering darkness of be-coming—with all my fear and exhaustion. Waiting to fall into oblivion.

Choked Voices and Dampened Fires

I write this not because I was to have a pity party. This is why I dipped out of the blogosphere for so long. It’s also the first time I’m writing any of this down. So, part of it’s for me.

You cannot, cannot use someone else fire. You can only use your own. But first, you must be willing to believe that you possess it.”- Audre Lorde

 I’ve never been one to hold back. I’ve always, always spoken my mind, even when it’s gotten me into trouble. I’ve learned, through strained relationships, how to tone it down, but I’ve always refused to be silenced. I had to. Words, my voice, were my fists. I grew up a physically disabled kid in a house with physically and emotionally abusive parents, a younger brother who tortured and teased me for as long as I could remember, and I had no one to talk to. So, I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could.

I moved to Atlanta in 2006. Atlanta. The city I’ll always love. The place where I learned that I was capable of being loved and loving in return—the place where I fell in love. The place where I learned to love myself. Love myself as the queer, disabled, chronically ill, trans* femme almost-Jew that I am. The place where I finally understood my white privilege and how I uphold white supremacy; how I live on colonized land; how I benefit directly from transnational slave labor. The place where I learned to hold all this shit together, at times barely.

 Like in 2010. My mom died a very painful death because of a very, very rare genetic lung disease. I became very close to  her after I became sick. She and I shared an language that no one else in my life did--even other crip folk without chronic illnesses, or so I thinkfeel. I was shattered. I was evicted from my apartment in a fucked up way two weeks later. Because Medicaid kept denying me, even after a massive kidney infection. I was lost. My lover at the time stopped talking to me without an explanation. I was numb. I was taken in by some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met. People who held me when I was at the lowest I’ve ever been. They held space for me in my rage and sadness. And I’m sure I was emotionally draining. I left Atlanta for Maryland with a heavy heart—from exhaustion and regret.

A couple of weeks after I left Atlanta, I received an email from someone I loved very much. Someone I trusted without hesitation. In it, they said that they had talked to mutual friends and the consensus was that I talked about ableism too much, that I didn’t respect other people’s opinions, and other things I can’t remember. This was like a punch in the gut. Especially because I had defined my activism as emotional care giving ever since I gotten sick. I always tried my best to carry people emotionally in whatever they could. Yes, I can be intense at times. Sometimes I don't know how to control my fire. And sometimes I don't have a language for things that I'm feeling or experiencing so it comes out as pure rage. And at other times I refuse to be silent and refuse to sugar coat to make it palatable. After my mom died, I made a promise to myself that I would never again live (or die) on anyone else's terms. But still. Isolation is isolation. As Mia Mingus says:

I have watched ableism tear apart relationships with people I love.  I have seen access be too much of a barrier for people to be in relationship with each other.  I have made excuses for inaccessibility because I loved people and didn’t want to lose relationship with them.  I have excused racism, sexism, violence, homophobia because I didn’t want to, couldn’t afford to, lose access.  I have asked for access or raised ableism in relationships, only to have those relationships end abruptly. I have stayed in relationships for access and I have been too afraid to enter into relationships because of access. I have had access held over my head, leveraged for able-bodied supremacist means, or treated like a reward for good behavior.  I have had access made invisible or belittled by loved ones; I have had to make access happen so the person providing access didn’t know they were.  I have kept parts of myself from people I love because I was afraid to, didn’t know how to, be whole and complex in the context of needing access.
This is the cruelty of ableism: it robs us from each other.  This is the weight of access.  This is what gets said in whispers, not on the microphone and at the panel.  This is what gets shared in a fleeting glance between us, disabled, sick, crip folks; a recognition, a silent sigh, an unfocused stare.  This is what we don’t share, don’t know how to share, because it is so instinctual, so ground-level, so what’s-the-point-it’s-never-going-to-change.  This is the air I’ve breathed since I can remember, as a disabled child, never knowing it could be any different—never having been able bodied.
The weight of inaccessibility is not logistical.  It is not just about ramps, ASL interpreters, straws and elevators.  It is a shifting, changing wall—an ocean—between you and I.  It is just as much feeling and trauma as it is material and concrete.  It is something felt, not just talked about.  It is made up of isolation from another night at home while everyone else goes to the party.  The fear of being left by the people you love and who are supposed to love you.  The pain of staring or passing, the sting of disappointment, the exhaustion of having the same conversations over and over again.  The throbbing foolishness of getting your hopes up and the shrinking of yourself in order to maintain.  It is an echoing loneliness; part shame, part guilt, part constant apology and thank you.  It is knowing that no matter how the conditions around me change, my body will still not be able to do certain things—it will still need other people, it will still signal dependence, it will still be disabled.

So, for a long time, I felt as though the people in Atlanta—who I had grown to love so much—secretly resented me. I still don’t know what to think of it. Perhaps I still do.  So here I am. Exhausted. I don’t have the fire I once did. I shrug off the most of the fucked up shit people say to me anymore simply because I don’t have the energy to explain, to lecture, to educate. And a big part of me simply doesn’t care. What’s that mean, though. Am I, as Audre says, choosing to swallow tyranny? And what kind of relationship, friendship or otherwise, is it if it’s predicated upon my silence?

 While I may not be able to use other people’s fires, I think I can stay warm by them. And I offer mine to you.

Thoughts on San Fran's anti-circumcision ballot.

So, Russell Crowe--who I tend to think of as a bit of a douchesnozzle--recently went on a twitter tirade about circumcision, and after recieving "blacklash" from Jewish followers, he tweeted a ~joke~ to a Jewish friend, Eli Roth, who quickly defended him:

"I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies  - Source.

Great. So glad you like our "apples and honey" and "funny hats," the first being a symbol for one of our holiest days (Rosh HaShanah) and the other being a sign of humility and respect. Again. Douchesnozzle.

But let's get to the meat of this, shall we (kosher meat, of course).

I'm a disabled Jew against circumcision. I've gotten a lot of flack for it, since I'm a convert and my Jew-card is constantly being revoked when I question conventional Jewish thought.  I'm against it because I'm Jewish and disabled and had no choice about the numerous surgeries I had to "fix" me when I was a kid--and I have to learn to love the scars despite/because of the rage they often invoke. So, I take bodily consent--especially when it comes to permanent alterations to someone's body very seriously. Non-disabled Jews rarely engage me on this, but I refuse to give up all other parts of myself to be consumed into a monolithic expectation of what it means to be Jewish. Another post, perhaps.

Having said all of this, I'm outspokenly against San Fran's anti-circumcision ballot and the shit Crowe and others spewed. And it's part of something much bigger than circumcision as a single issue. When Crowe thinks he "knows what God really wants," and defines Judaism only as a religion and nothing else, his missing something crucial about what's going on here. Namely: Judaism isn't just a religion. It's a complicated mix of several cultures, histories, languages, and ritual practices. This whole thing is especially problematic because as long as world Jewry have been in diaspora (and I don't equate israel as the solution to that--though we can't have a critical conversation about Zionism/Jewish nationalism without talking about global and/or systemic anti-Jewish hatred), there has always been non-Jewish authorities telling Jews how to live--sometimes at the cost of mass expulsions, eradication, pogroms, and coercive cultural changes (i.e. the Anglicization of Jewish surnames). Add this to the historical, and often present realities, that Jews are often seen as security threats. These range from things like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the ludicrousness idea that Jews caused 9/11 to blood libels that accused Jews of using Christian babies' blood to make matzah for Pesach. The "Monster Mohel" comic has to be understood as the perpetuation of this, because we miss key aspects of it when we treat it as a solitary issue.

Finally, there's a growing number of Jews who are deciding not to circumcise their amab chidlren (amab = assigned male at birth). They're replacing the Brit Milah (Covenant of Circumcision) with Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace). It's definitely not part of more orthodox parts of the tradition, and I don't see that changing any time soon since brit milah is such a huge part of it. Either way, I think it's important for Jews to have the space so that we can have this tough conversations in the context of our own lives and traditions.

Edited to add:


I x-posted this on my tumbr, and I got an ask. I want to add the ask here with my response, because it gives other details.

The reader asks:

I read your thoughts on the San Francisco circumcision ballot, and I understand what you're saying, but don't you think that every person should have the right to choose which religion they're part of? Let's saying you're born into a Jewish family and circumcised as an infant. Then as an adult you decide you're an Atheist. You're now forever scared from that religion. It just doesn't make any sense. Your religion should end where another person's body beings. Your religion should not give you the right to harm your child.

This is my response:

I appreciate your imput, but I think you missed my point. Like I said in the post, Judaism isn’t just a religion. It’s much more complex than that. You can be a Jewish Atheist/Agnostic, although theistic Jews would obviously say otherwise. See Humanitic Judaism and historical Jewish intellectual intellectual movements like the Haskalah. I personally find the latter troubling, but’s part of [European] Jewish history and set the stage for liberal forms of religious/observant Judaism. I should also say flat out that by “Jewish history” people usually mean Ashkenazi Jewish history; there is no Reform branch in Sefardic Judaism, for example. That’s why I always say that Judaism is composed of many cultures—a good book on this is Melanie Kay/Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Jewish Politics and Radical Diasporism.

Anyway, the clear delineation between religious identity and a non-religious identity comes largely from a Christian idea (I would say an American/European Protestant idea). I’ve known many self-identified Atheist Jews who still keep Shabbat, have Passover Seders, etc. That’s not to say that there are Jews who are born into Jewish families who grow up not to identify as Jewish at all, which is perfectly fine, too.

Your second point is more complicated and it’s the crux of my post. There are Jews, and Jewish organizations, who are engaging in critical conversations about this stuff. And it’s their/our work to do that. Not non-Jews, or ballot measures that create overarching laws that dictate ethics across all cultures. Because the reality is that as much as correctly reject that the US is a "Judeo-Christian” (barf) country/colonialist project, there IS a Christian supremacy intact here. And Judaism has had a really precarious (to put it mildly) relationship with Christianity and the constant enforcement of Christian mores for centuries. I recognize that it isn’t a Jewish/Christian divide here, necessarily, but I would say that people who grow up in Christian traditions don’t always understand that Jewish ethics and cultures are profoundly different—no matter how those people identify now (i.e. someone who grew up in a Protestant household and is now an Atheist who still tends to see everything as between “me and not-god,” rather than being “amongst me, my people, and (not-) god.”)

Lastly, ballots like this simply don’t work. We’ve seen it when abortion is illegal, and we see it with the “war on drugs.” While coercive anti-circ laws might be on a smaller scale, it’s dictating ethics to communities in which everything is taken out of context and ignored. If this passes (which even if it did, I have a feeling it’d be overturned on constitutional grounds), ritual circumcision will just “go undergound” into really unsafe spaces.

On "Life."

It's narrated by one of my favorite biologists/scientists, David Attenborough. He's kind of like Carl Sagan for me, with a biological focus. The cinematography is absolutely stunning, and it shows an incredible variety of species across all kingdoms. The only thing that bothers me (of course you know I was going to talk about this) is the normative, heterosexist and binarist explanations of gender, sex, and reproduction. There's been no mention (so far) of the gender, sex and sexual diversity in non-human life forms. It often recapitulates the coy female waiting for the aggressive male fighting to the death in order to mate (which the female doesn't mind, since ze wants the "strongest genes." There's a slight exception with the female damselfly, who actively searches out a mate in really dangerous (close to predators) territory. And when male and female mate, they form a heart:

[image: close up of two Azure damselflies (Coenagrion puella)==insects that look very similar to dragonflies. The male is holding on to a blade of grass and the end of its long tale is attached behind the neck of the female damselfly, whose tail is attached to the bottom of the males abdomen. Together, there bodies form something that looks like a drawn heart.]

This is why work by people like Joan Roughgarden is so important. She's a trans woman ecologist who challenges essentialist fundamentals of darwinian thought: natural selection, mate selection, ethology (study of animal behavior), etc.

Also, not all animals have sex only for reproductive purposes. Dolphins, Bonobos, some species of antelope (often female-female sexual pairings), and others have sex for what what could be considered pleasure by human standards. Also, several marine mammals engage in massive orgies.

Chinstrap penguins have been known to form long term, monogamous relationship which they raise young. One-fourth of black swan sygnets are reared by homosexual (male-male) couplings.

And some animals, like the blacktip shark, have been observed to reproduce asexually (more specifically, parthenogenesis - the absence of the male gamete)
Lyretail anthias (Anthias squamipinnis) undergo chromosomal sex changes when necessary.

In the protozoan Paramecium bursaria there are eight sexes.


Life is beautiful and complex. And for every rule or axiom, there is always an exception or important nuance.

Can I be real with y'all?

I feel really sick right now. I'm achey all over. My joints are screaming at me. I'm vomiting and dry heaving. My eyesight is blurry and I'm getting these odd flashes of light in the edges of my vision. I'm afraid that my cortisol is dangerously low again. I'm scared that I'm having another bout of renal failure. I feel alone and all I want to do is curl into someone and cry. But I'm thinking being touched will make the physical pain worse. But I'm sure it would be worth it. I'm feeling really disphoric. I don't know if I want to hormonally transition, and if I do, I don't know where it's coming from. Is that how I want my body to look, or am I internalizing binarism, and do I have to reconcile those things? And even though I'm feeling dysphoric, I abolutely refuse to frame it as body-hate. I spent damn near all my life hating my body. Hating the spasms, the scrawny crip legs, the gnarled gimp toes. The leathery scars left by non-disabled white cis male doctors who cut me open and filled me with shame. I've learned to love my body by being around beautiful crip/queer/trans*/perverts. But fuck it. Let's be real. This hot mess of a body is hard to love all the time, and sometimes I feel deeply betrayed by it. Love isn't always easy, and I can't do it myself. I need to be touched and loved and caressed and fucked when I feel like I want it. I want to feel connected to something again. I want warm, cllamy skin against mine. I'm angry that my non-disabled friends couldn't hold my anger--that they sometimes caused it and silenced me when I called them out on it. I'm ashamed that I made them feel like they weren't good enough, even when they tried their damndest to support me and love me. This is what's underneath those scars I lovehate so much. Confusion, desire, revulsion, serenity, pride, passion, love, patience, anger. I feel really broken. And I'm trying to learn that I don't need to be whole to be beautiful.

For Mama.

You, of mud and ruach
daughter of thunder and justice
mother sister lover
of life.

I first lived in your womb and was impatient
to be in your arms
to hear you and to know you
beyond the walls of blood cells and membranes.

And even when I came to you unannounced and unready
you signed contracts in contractions of blood
to love me--even as it pained you
and in my infantile foolishness
I tasted freedom between gasps of air in underdeveloped lungs
after they cut the cord that binded us.

And now that you're mud and ruach and thunder again
I'm trying to find my way out from under the weight of your absence
tracing my way back through my scars on body and soul
back to the place where we shared the same lifeblood
before you named our difference by naming me.

But all I have now are the phantoms of distant dreams of that place
of that connection too early lived to keep as memory
and my heart is heavy with regrets of trying to rid myself of that cord
from the space I now call
my belly button.

For Julie Gaither. October 23, 1963 - September 26, 2010
Your memory is a blessing.

Living the Questions and Sitting at the Crossroads

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.--Octavia Butler

I haven’t updated in awhile. I always want to write, but each time I feel ready to, another emotional upheaval unsettles me. In these moments, I’m always stunned into silence, trying desperately to maintain the patience to undertake the arduous work of collecting shattered pieces of myself and how I understand the world and put them back together in radically new, unrecognizable ways. Language leaves me; time is suspended. I have more questions than answers, and I feel as though I’m failing because I’m not finding answers quickly enough. But things that’ve happened to and around me lately have challenged me to revolutionize my understandings, goals, and desires in finding these answers.


This very moment—for a lot of reasons—marks an end of an era. About three weeks ago, my mother and my hero went into a coma and was placed on life support. She has a progressive illness, so although we’ve been expecting it for years now, one is never really prepared for it. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, she pulled out of the coma twice and she’s back home now (Mama is seriously one of the most fierce, kick-ass people I’ve ever known). But as I sat there holding her hand as she was unconscious and on a ventilator, something in me broke—shattered, really. Although I’ve confronted my own mortality because of a very serious situation with my kidneys failing completely, and even though I’ve lost very close friends in traumatic ways, none of this affected/effected me as much as the thought of “losing” my mom. Memories that I thought I lost came flooding back in a storm that only a buried past can create. The echoes of our giggles while we painted Easter eggs filled every crevice of my being ; and I felt on my skin the sticky heaviness of the humid South Georgia air as I thought of us sitting together on the back patio talking as two adults about our fears, regrets , and goals. I told her, or her body at least, that I love her, that I’m proud of her, and I asked for her forgiveness for my part in the years long silence that engulfed us, and made us grow distant. It was a crossroads collapsing the past, present, and future into a single moment, linking Jeremy with Tali, of my mother’s cis, descriptively disabled son with her (gender)queer , politically crip child. It linked a mother who struggled in silence against seemingly insurmountable odds and who passionately and painfully struggles to accept me, with the courageous, powerful woman who lives with regrets and unfulfilled desires that I think she’s afraid to utter to another living soul. I saw her more completely then than I ever had before, and as I held her hand in mine, I also held her complexities, contradictions, and powerful fragility gently and appreciatively. And in the process, I’m allowing myself to do the same thing for myself.I’m still picking up the pieces and figuring out where they all go.


My best friend of four very intense years is moving to India for at least six months, maybe a year, on Wednesday. Kate, Kali, Katherine. I remember very vividly the first time I saw her. She was working at a tea shop in a mall—a place where lifeless consumerism flourishes. She still doesn’t believe me when I say this, but she breathed life into that place as she stood there with a dignified presence that literally took my breath away. I approached her, and she simply said “Would you like to try some tea?” I knew then, and even more now, that this was the start of a profoundly deep connection that would change me forever. And it has. Kate is one of the first people—one of the only people, who have shown me what true friendship is, who’ve given love in its more transformative form, and unconditional positive regard in its most supportive. In some ways, as I said goodbye to her for the last time last night, I mourned the death of who we are individually and the relationship we have now as both of us have said to one another that when we meet up again, we’ll be totally different people. We’ll have to re-introduce ourselves then. And although we’ll stay in touch, we won’t be able to feel each other’s touch—something, I think, we both need. Significantly, though, we’re going through this together. She’s going to India; and I’m going to California—both (metaphorically) totally different worlds than that which we know now, and in the process we sacrifice our sense of place, belonging, and connection in order to go on to the next and necessary chapters in our lives. The pain we feel is real. And although we say to each other, “see you later, friend,” both of us know that there’s a certain permeable finality to all of this. We committed to each other that we’ll push each other passed our fears and delusions of safety that comes with not taking risks and making sacrifices that we need to in order to recreate ourselves, to  become something wholly else and unprecedented.  So, crossroads again: holding at once feelings of intense sorrow that the end we always knew was coming is finally here, with the ecstatic excitement that the new beginning is just around the corner.

And so I sit here at the crossroads, lost in torrential sandstorms, not knowing what’s on the other side or even how to get there. This is what it means to live the questions. The answers will come when we’re ready to receive them.

have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

To Mama: Thank you for being a mother and a friend and for showing me that strength doesn’t always have to be loud. I love you.

To Kate: Thank you for being a friend and a sister and for being an anchor through some really hard times. Faire well, my love. You have what it takes.  I love you, too.

For Fuck's Sake: On Negotiating Non-normative Embodiment, Shame, and Sex

I tend to write my blog posts in essay form--something, I've come to realize, that gives me an intellectual distance--one that keeps me shielded from becoming to vulnerable.But this one is different: it comes from a place of emotional anguish that I’m just now articulating in ways that I think-feel are concise and intentional. But I must preface this: Whatever I write shouldn’t be misconstrued as me implying that people who don’t live with these things shouldn’t have lovers, including multiple ones at the same time. What I’m writing about is the ways in which people with non-normative bodies usually become hyper-aware of how our bodies take up space and how, sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be much space for our bodies. And so it begins…

I often talk and write about loving one’s body, but I’ve realized recently that I continually fail to talk about something of utmost importance: the process of loving one’s body. By this I mean the ways in which we find and/or create language that articulates love for bodies, how we find connection with and through other bodies, and how occupying erotic spaces with another person/other people is a way of unlearning shame and insecurities. I think it’s important to recognize that neither shame nor insecurities about our bodies are existential, “inherent in the human condition,” or felt with the same immediacy and pervasiveness by all persons. Rather, they're products and processes of systemic oppressions that steal our bodies, and the language to describe them in erotic ways, from us.

We have to frame all of this in terms of ableism, fatphobia, racism, oppositional sexism, transphobia and transmisogyny, cissexism racism, sexism, classism, serophobia, and somatophobia (the impulse to conceptualize things in a disembodied way), and how they inform and create discourse of bodies and sexuality.* The tendency, though, is to depoliticize the ways in which we occupy bodily and sexual spaces by reducing these complexities to simple “preferences.” I read a lot of personal ads that say, “no fats, fems, or blacks” on sites like manhunt and okcupid. They then qualify it: “I have nothing against them, it’s just a preference.” This fails to recognize the ways in which non-normative bodies are understood only in the shadow of normality, and those of who are forced to negotiate living in that shadow end up internalizing it. Our bodies because repositories of shame; they’re desexualized and/or hypersexualized and/or fetishized, and some of us are read as asexual (not that there’s anything wrong with actually being asexual).

Personally, I’ve spent most of my life “comfortable” living in the shadows. I feel safe there. But I pay a tremendous price. I look around at my friends who have both normative bodies and multiple lovers, and I feel the sting of isolation, confusion, and sometimes resentment. I’ve been feeling that sting very intensely lately; I’m beginning to realize that I’m read as the very flirtatious, fun to be around friend. But, I echo Loree Erickson’s sentiment: "I want to be both a good friend and a good fuck.” I’m also tend to be a counselor of sorts, always inhabiting very intimate emotional spaces with people I love—and although I value it and understand it as beautiful and erotic, it always tends to end there. I sometimes feel that I’m in people’s headspace so much that they forget that I have a body—one that I’m trying my hardest to reclaim, recreate, and call home.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not as direct as I need to be, but I also realize that I simply don’t have the language to be direct. As someone who’s been the “good [disabled, asexual, desexualized] friend” for as long as I can remember, I simply don’t have the words to be blunt, honest, and open. I’m working on it, but I need people to meet me half-way. I need people to realize I can’t consistently love my body in a vacuum, that I need to be naked, fucked, and told that I’m beautiful in that extremely vulnerable place. It’s the only way any of us—especially those of who have to constantly resist oppressive representations of our bodies can develop ways to resist internalized somatophobia and shame.

I want to breathe Eli Clare’s and Audre Lorde’s words into me:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision - a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
---Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

But it isn't only oppression that lives in my body, our bodies. The many experiences of who we are, of our identities, also live there. I know so clearly that my queerness, my disability, reside in my body--in the ways that I move, dress, cut my hair; in who I am attracted to and who's attracted to me; in my tremors, my slurred speech, my heavy-heeled gait; in the visceral sense of muscle sliding over muscle as I lie with my lover; in the familiarity of tension following tremor, traveling from shoulder to fingertip. Identity, of course, can live in many places all at once--in the communities we make home, the food we eat, the music we play and dance to, the work we do, the people we feel wild and passionate about, the languages we speak, the clothes we wear. But so much of who I am is carried in my irrevocably different body.

Irrevocable difference could be a cause for celebration, but in this world it isn't. The price we pay for variation from the norm that's defined and upheld by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism is incredibly high. And in my life, that price has been body centered. I came to believe that my body was utterly wrong. Sometimes I wanted to cut off my right arm so it wouldn't shake. My shame was that plain, that bleak. Of course, this is one of the profound ways in which oppression works--to mire us in body hatred. Homophobia is all about defining queer bodies as wrong, perverse, immoral. Transphobia, about defining trans bodies as unnatural, monstrous, or the product of delusion. Ableism, about defining disabled bodies as broken and tragic. Class warfare, about defining the bodies of workers as expendable. Racism, about defining the bodies of people of color as primitive, exotic, or worthless. Sexism, about defining female bodies as pliable objects. These messages sink beneath our skin.

he stolen bodies, the bodies taken for good, rise up around me. Rebecca Wight, a lesbian, shot and killed as she hiked the Appalachian Trail with her lover. James Byrd Jr., an African American, dragged to death behind a pickup driven by white men. Tyra Hunter, a transgendered person living as a woman, left to bleed to death on the streets of D.C. because the EMT crew discovered she had a penis and stopped their work. Tracy Latimer, a twelve-year-old girl with severe cerebral palsy, killed by her father, who said he did it only to end her unbearable suffering. Bodies stolen for good. Other bodies live on--numb, abandoned, full of self-hate, trauma, grief, aftershock. The pernicious stereotypes, lies, and false images can haunt a body, stealing it away as surely as bullets do.
But just as the body can be stolen, it can also be reclaimed. The bodies irrevocably taken from us, we can memorialize in quilts, granite walls, and candlelight vigils. We can remember and mourn them, use their deaths to strengthen our will. And as for the lies and false images: we need to name them, transform them, create something entirely new in their place. Something that comes close and finally true to the bone, entering our bodies as liberation, as joy, as fury, as a will to refigure the world.

The work of refiguring the world is often framed as the work of changing the material, external conditions of our oppression. But just as certainly, our bodies--or, more accurately, what we believe about our bodies--need to change so that they don't become storage sites, traps, for the very oppression we want to eradicate. For me, this work is about shattering the belief that my body is wrong. It began when I found communities committed to both pride and resistance. It was there that I could begin to embrace irrevocable difference--come to know the grace in my shaky hands, the rhythm of tremor and tension in my muscles, the joy in my transgendered butch body, sun on my back, a lover's hand on my belly.

I am still in the middle of this work. I think of my lover cradling my right hand, saying, "Your tremors feel so good"; saying, "I can't get enough of your shaky touch"; saying, "I love your CP." Shame and disbelief overwhelm me until I stop and really listen to the words. Another layer begins to shatter… At the end of the day, I went to sleep adoring irrevocable difference.

In the end, I am asking that we pay attention to our bodies--our stolen bodies and our reclaimed bodies. To the wisdom that tells us the causes of the injustice we face lie outside our bodies, and also to the profound relationships our bodies have to that injustice, to the ways our identities are inextricably linked to our bodies. We need to do this because there are disability activists so busy defining disability as an external social condition that they neglect the daily realities of our bodies: the reality of living with chronic pain; the reality of needing personal attendants to help us pee and shit (and of being at once grateful for those PAs and deeply regretting our lack of privacy); the reality of disliking the very adaptive equipment that makes our day-to-day lives possible. We need to do this because there are disability thinkers who can talk all day about the body as metaphor and symbol but never mention flesh and blood, bone and tendon--never even acknowledge their own bodies. We need to do this because without our bodies, without the lived bodily experience of identity and oppression, we won't truly be able to refigure the world, turning it to a place where, to quote the poet Mary Oliver:

. . . each life [is] a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

--Eli Clare, Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness

* I think it's also very important to recognize that these oppressions don't effect our bodies, or how we understand them, in the same way, or even with the same immediacy. I'm still forming this thought, so bear with me.

Words and meanings--

transphobia - hostility towards, people who are transgender or who otherwise transgress traditional gender norms

cissexism - the belief that cis (non-trans) people are more "natural" or superior to trans people.

oppositional sexism - according to Julia Serano: Sexism that is rooted in the presumption that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. It targets those who do not conform to oppositional gender norms.

serophobia - hostility towards people who are hiv positive. This can be direct violence, or something like outing.

trans misogyny - a kind of sexism that targets people on the trans feminine spectrum.

transgender - Also, trans; A general term describing people whose gender identities/expressions differ from what is expected. “What counts as transgender varies as much as gender itself, and it always depends on historical and cultural context,” (Stryker 2008: 19).

for more trans related definitions, check out Gendersaurus Rex.

Learning the Language of Butterflies

I'm not interested in you telling me who you are. I want to know you ache for, what feeds your soul. I want to know if you can promise yourself to never again make apologies for your own intensity. I want to know whether or not your afraid to sit with yourself, and not move from distraction to distraction, and what that fear can possibly teach you. I want to know if you're willing to let the tidal wave of confusion and anger and rage and disappointment to wash over you, consume you. I want to know if you'll let sorrow, yours or another s, be your cocoon.

I want to know if you can teach me to remember always that storms will pass, and that we never wade it alone. I want to know if you're willing to learn the language of the butterflies so that they can teach you how to be gentle, but resilient, and that the only way we can make it to our destination is by braving life's strongest winds together. I want to know if you truly understand that we don't burst forth from the ashes like a phoenix, but as a butterfly, who experiences transformations slowly, painfully--and who understand that those transformations are necessary for survival. Can you, like the Monarch, feed on its own chrysalis as a life source, knowing that your past will always be a part of you? I want to know if you can treat others as butterflies. Can you allow someone to simply find rest from fluttering on the tip of your forefinger? And will you not hold them back when they journey without you?


In the end, it doesn't matter what you study or what your goals are. What matters is whether or not you know that a butterfly only lives about 24 days, and that you, too, have to learn to accept your own mortality.

Find beauty. Be beauty. And then flutter off into the sunset.

Claiming Napantla: Bridge-Building & The Need for Unsafe Space

We often talk about Safe Space in our activism: a space that is defined, at least implicitly, by the expected suspension of the dynamics of oppression and privilege in our relationships. it sounds nice, for sure--the world's unsafe, so shouldn't we attempt to create safe spaces in personalized places? Perhaps. But what're it's implications, meanings, and actual consequences? Who's responsible for safety, and who, in the end, actually benefits from it?

Gloria Anzaldua, one of the most meaningful and transformative writers in my life, talks a lot about the affect of displacement, border-crossing (both geographic borders and ones of identity), and a radical conciousness that can come from these. She writes of the mestiza consciousness:

By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject/object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.

But what work does the creation of this "third space" require, and of whom? She offers a suggestion in her introduction to This Bridge We Call Home--Napantla and bridge-building:

Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, border crossing, and changing perceptions. Bridges span threshold (liminal) spaces between worlds, spaces I call Napantla, a Nuahatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition lacking clear boundaries. Napantla es tierra desonocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in Napantla so much of the time that it becomes a sort of "home" (pg, 1, emphasis added).

For those of us who live at the intersection of identity--of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, dis/ability[...]--Napantla is a space of familiarity, as de-centering as it can be. I'm a queer, disabled, poor, chronically ill Jew, who, although I am learning to queer the way people read my gender, doesn't experience gender oppression/violence with the same immediacy as ciswomen and trans men and women (at least not yet). I'm also white, neurotypical, thin, an Amerikan citizen who is often complicit in economic and and political imperialism, who speaks English as my first language, and a child to non-migrant parents. I'm also not read as Jewish until people learn of my very Hebrew-sounding name and/or I'm wearing a yarmulke, so I don't experience anti-Jewish hatred in ways that Jews who don't "pass" do*. I'm also sheltered, have access to food (most of the time), and have shoes and clothes, so that I don't experience classist violence with the same immediacy as people who're houseless. I live in the interstices of privilege and oppression (as a lot of us do). If we do the work to recognize that oppression and privilege are systemic, conditioned, and often unmarked, how do we create a notion of safe space?

Again, Gloria clarifies:

[There] are no safe spaces. Home can be unsafe because it bears the likelihood of intimacy and thus thinner boundaries. Staying "home" and not venturing out from our own group comes from woundedness and stagnates our growth. To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing them off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gates t the stranger, within and without. To [move] across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamilar territory that does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded. Effective bridging comes from knowing when to close ranks to those outside our home**...and when to keep the gates open (p. 3).

But this still begs the question: who's responsible for the work of bridging and leaving "home?" All too often, I think, the responsibilities to do so fall back on the people/aspects of our complicated identities who have no choice but to live in Napantla as a means of physical, psychic, and spiritual survival. To elucidate: Part of recognizing that there are no safe spaces is to accept the reality that dynamics of privilege and oppression are not only systemic in, but constitutive of our society, languages, his/her/zestories, literatures, bodies, and intimate emotional and sexual spaces. As my very dear friend, Mia Mingus writes about racism and white supremacy:

Racism and white supremacy are so pervasive, that we don’t even have to be consciously or intentionally doing anything to participate in them. It’s in the air we breathe; it’s how the machine rolls; it’s the default. It’s backed by everything in our society. That’s the thing about oppression, power and privilege: unless you are actively challenging it, you are colluding with it.

This means that the "suspension" of privileged/marginalized positionalities in safe space is not only disingenuous, but detrimental to our work and relationships because fails to challenge unmarked privileged and invisible oppression. Those of us in marginalized positionalities and who argue for safe space, I think, have internalized the notion that feelings of alienation and displacement are only ours to feel and experience. It is, in many ways, using the the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.***

Those of us in privileged/centralized positionalities are afforded the illusions of safety precisely because of our privilege/centralization. We must be willing to be betrayers of our privileged race, gender, sex, class, non-disabled, neurotypical, non-ill positionalities precisely because we understand that if we don't risk our own safety, we are complicit in maintaining complicated networks of violence and domination. We must act on the understanding that it is our responsibility to do the majority of bridge-building and not expect marginalized people to our work for us, and not be the only ones who feel the displacement, alienation, and woundness that comes with it. The act of decentering ourselves is our alone, and we must perform it as a duty of love and solidarity for those who we explicitly and implicitly oppress.

At the same time, we in marginalized positions must ensure this happens as an act of love for ourselves. The work for justice cannot be romanticized in such a way as to abstract it from the hurt of holding each other and ourselves accountable. It's a painful and "violent" process that notions of safe space both miss and prevent from happening.

All of us must learn to claim and live in Napantla together. It's the only way that we continue our fight.

* This becomes even more complicated within the context as my (marked) status as a Jewish convert. I often have non-convert Jews tell me that I'll never really be Jewish because I don't have Jewish family, I didn't lose family in pogroms and the Shoah, and that I'm able to escape systems of anti-Jewish hatred because I pass. This fails to acknowledge, however, that family isn't necessarily biological, that I did lose my queer and crip family members and lovers through because of Nazi/American eugenic sciences, and that Nobody Passes.

** Closing off ranks to those outside my home, like I'm doing now, is just as important and necessary to my growth/well-being as keeping the gates open.

*** I recognize the possible issues of me using Audre Lorde's idea of the Master's House/Master's Tools as a white person and to describe oppressions other than those grounded in the historical and present forms of slavery. Please feel free to let me know what you think.

Let Peace and Justice Kiss: Ruminations on Criplove

My good friend, Bethany and I use the word criplove quite often. I meditated upon this for the past couple of days, and I’ve realized that it’s more than a charming neologism of our community/ies. It’s an epistemology of and expression of a radical kind of love, desire, and resistance.

Foundational tangent: I was talking with my incredible friend, Amariah over at Radical Politics, Radical Love about what it means to be perceived as weak, especially in relation to the risk of exposure and vulnerability when we express our love for another. Weakness. What's it mean? What’re its connotations?

1. the state or quality of being weak 2. a deficiency or failing, as in a person's character.

failing imperfection imperfectness insufficiency inadequacy a lack of competence fatigue flaw helplessness impuissance impotence impotency powerlessness

I still feel the sting of shame that I get when I'm so sick that I'm too weak to bathe and feed myself. I cry and scream as a result, even though I know that the shame is a process and product of internalized ableism. There are those of us who are oppressed and marginalized--who have to fight to exist—the queer of color disabled (im)migrant chronically ill poor trans gender nonconforming nonchristian neurodiverse fat poz deaf intersex multiracial twospirit transabled femme butch womyn man—who have to struggle to form our own language to articulate our own experiences. How can we develop a linguistic cultural armor that helps us from ingesting the poisons of self-doubt and self-hate? How can we resist the compulsions to be “on” all the time, to fight, scream, and work—especially when we have to deny our own physical, mental, and emotional limitations do to so. In the end, we pay the price: not only do we realize that we’ve been screaming into the void this entire time, but now we’re weary and tired and disappointed and jaded.

I think that we need to revolutionize our understandings and experiences of weakness (in all its forms) as something beautiful and necessary. A softened, quiet strength that lets us relinquish control so that we let our friends, comrades, and lovers have the space to nurture and carry us when we’re too weary to do it for ourselves. It warrants the recognition that our work is hard, and that we refuse to be slaves and robots to it. We need to do that for one another. Our path towards justice must have moments of serenity in it—moments where we scrub off our war paint and look at each other with no pretenses or illusions. Moments where we touch each other, feel each other, skin to skin.

.

1. the state of being present and honest about or needs, wants, and desires; that simply be-ing is enough. 2. the recognition of our own power and limitations as embodied, living, loving healer-warriors.

beauty mutuality courage relinquishment survival solidarity community beautifulimperfection honesty.

That’s criplove.

It’s a love of becauses and not even thoughs:

I love you because of your intensity, your rage, your passions.

I love you because of your meekness, your timidity, your quietness.

I love you because of your scars, both physical and emotional.

I love you because of your dreams and your nightmares—your hopes and your fears.

I love you because you feel so strongly in a world that tells you not to feel at all.

Others call it depression. I call it empathy.

I love you because of your crooked hobble, your twitching, tremoring hands, your slurred speech.

I love you because you let me love you.

I’m here to tell you that I don’t need to fix you, because you’re not broken.

I’m here to tell you that I don’t need to make you whole, because you were never half.

Let me take care of you when you need me to.

And help me learn that it’s okay for you to take care of me when I need you to.

We seal the rifts of the world when we cradle each other in our arms.

“Let Peace and Justice kiss” – Mother Tongues

Coming Here and Leaving There.

I posted this today on Facebook after serious meditation about the people and things that I (don't) need in my life. While it's probably not the best way to start a blog, it establishes my politics and how I understand collective liberation, mutual caring, and intersectional anti-oppression work.

_________________________

On Why I Love the Community, and Why I'm Leaving It.
Friends and comrades,

I've been thinking-feeling a lot lately about the issues of being in a community where we attempt to address the ways in which systemic oppressions are interlinked and inter-sustaining. In these spaces where solidarity and allyship are understood as acts of love and loyalty, I've experienced profound and meaningful moments of belonging. But those memories and experiences are also tainted by the reality of my own isolation within it. This isolation usually takes one or both of two, or possibly more forms. Both/all of these are deeply rooted in ableism and the lack of disability justice within our work, our spaces, and our relationships as comrades, friends, and lovers.
In one aspect, the isolation occurs when the architectural-attitudinal spaces that we find and/or create remain inaccessible (in terms of both physical and social space) and where ableist privilege and oppression remain unmarked, in tact, and unchallenged. As one of the very few (the only?) disability activist with a disability within the community, I am expected to embody disability resistance by constantly asking and reminding people about inaccessible entry ways and bathrooms at community centers and other meeting places. More often than not, the politics of inaccessibility are read and configured as an afterthought ("I've never really thought of/noticed it before;" I haven't been to the [meeting place] so I'll check I'll have to check it out). Now, I know very well that Atlanta (and the rest of the country) is inaccessible -- that we valorize stairs and non-disabled bodies and minds because of a very complex and convoluted history, aesthetics, and meanings of ableism. That's why I, as well many other cripfolk, have been homeless more than once. Here I'm not making any one person bear the responsibility for all of this, but part resisting it as an ally is to really think about the ways in which our society/culture/architectu

re/technology is catered to your body by shoring up the boundaries of the normate (Rosemary Garland-Thompson) and the "natural." This means recognizing that accessible entryways and (and trans/gender-nonconforming safe) bathrooms are not luxuries to be thought of in terms of mere (in)convenience, but rather integral parts of anti-oppression work.
The other aspect, defined and sustained by the first, is much more nuanced, subtle, and pervasive. It's the messiness of it all--the part that lacks cohesion, coherency, and any form of intelligible articulation. It's about how ableism constitutes the very dynamics of how we interact with each other and the group. It's the about the very real alienation and backlash I constantly experience when challenging non-disabled supremacy, either in language/rhetoric that we use in our work, the fact that disability justice/ableism is very rarely, if it all, at the forefront of ant-oppression organizing. It's about the ways in which non-disabled people (un)intentionally enact ableist privilege by regulating where, how, and when critical discourse of disability justice takes form. It's about diminishing the effects/affects of my rage and anger in my own resistance to internalizing ableist violence through sef-doubt, deprecation, and body/mind hate. it's about centralizing non-disabled people in the discourse in such a way as to prevent me from speaking/somatically feeling my truth and all the anger and rage it takes to face the demons of erasure, denial, and oppression head-on, without backing down. It's about non-disabled people using privilege to ensure the illusion of safety and of being comfortable in ways and times that only their privilege affords them in the first place. It's about people expecting me to remember that privilege is systemic and conditioned so that mistakes are inevitable, and then deny me the ability to be angry and hurt by it. It's about people being self-congratulatory for putting in ramps or doing other work, and then accusing me of holding grudge, being ungrateful, or diminishing their the work that they have done when I say that it simply isn't enough and that there's still a lot of work to be done. It’s about people asking, demanding, and expecting me to teach them about how to be a better ally.It's recognizing the fact that I am the one who experiences this oppression, and all too often I am the one who is solely responsible for resisting and correcting it. It's about the amount of energy I waste because I'm forced to carry this for long periods of time by myself. Most importantly, it's about the failure of normates to recognize cripculture, language, history, literature, and politics that includes all of the interstices of race/ethnicity, health/illness, gender/sex, class, body type/size, age, sexuality, and geographic (dis)location. Part of being a non-disabled ally is to learn this history and language and literature, and taking on the challenge of unlearning the ableist things that you've been taught about it. How many of you have read the works of Eli Clare, Simi Linton, Chris Bell, Tobin Seibers, Leonard Davis, Kenny Fries, Nancy Mairs, Rosemary Garland-Thompson, Nancy Eiesland, Nomy Lamm, Sunny Taylor, Emi Koyama? Know and love the art/music of Frida Kahlo, Riva Lehrer, Jessica Blinkhorn, and Leroy Moore, Loree Erickson? Read the blogs of Mia Mingus, Stacey Milburn, Joe Stromando, Bethany Stevens, Jill Ford, Katherine Mancuso, Moya Bailey? How many of you came to the Disability Film Festival at Georgia State over the last two years? These are our stories told in our language. It's important that you listen to us telling them.
I’m not only disabled. I’m also quite ill. I live with very limited amounts of energy, and tremendous amounts of pain. Christine Miserandino-Donato’s “Spoon Theory” has helped me to conceptualize this. After reading it, I would ask you to think of all the spoons I’ve given to individual people and the community over the years, even in the midst of debilitating pain and fatigue.. I’m simply asking for some in return. I'm also asking us to think about ways that oppression affects our bodies and minds as a direct cause of chronic illness.
In conclusion, I’ve realized now that there is no room in this community for me, and it has a lot of work to do until I can come back to it. So, I’m leaving with no grudges or expectations. I’m doing this for my own well-being, and while it may not seem like it in this note, I do love and respect the majority of you. It’s my hope that you process this with an open mind and an open heart. To hear the desperation in my voice.

Important notes: Please don’t think that I’m calling for Oppression Olympics. In no way am I intending to suggest that my oppression is worse than others. I’m also not seeking to invalidate or diminish the work that you do for disability justice, but it simply isn’t enough. I DO NOT want to stop maintaining individual friendships. I’m risking a lot of alienation/backlash here. Please think about this. And please, id you choose to respond, please don’t say something like, “I’m sorry that this is the way you feel[, but…]. It’s not about feeling; it’s about recognizing the reality of the situation. Also, I’m up for talking about strategy , but please be mindful that I will not entertain any discussion about what doesn’t constitute ableism.

"I am looking for lovers and teachers to hold all my complexities and contradictions gently, honestly, appreciatively. Looking for heroes and role models to accompany me through the world. Looking for friends and allies to counter the gawking, gaping, staring...I am looking for friends and allies, for communities where the gawking, gaping, staring finally turns to something else, something true to the bone. Places where strength gets to be softened and tempered, love honed and stretched. Where gender is known as more than a simple binary. Where we encourage each other to swish and swagger, limp and roll, and learn the language of pride. Places where our bodies begin to become home."--Eli Clare, "Gaping, Gawking, Staring"

"Damn right, you better look. Look long and hard. Watch my crooked hobble, twitching body, my whithered legs. Listen to my hand sign a language you don't even know. Notice my milky white eyes as I no longer hide behind sunglasses. Look at me straight on, because for all your years of gawking, you've still not seen me."-Eli Claire

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, we can [work] together.” – Lila Watson


PLEASE watch/read these:





So, You Wanna Be An Ally, Huh? - That's What Ze Said

In Solidarity, Rage, and Love.
Tali