initations, part 1.5

 Listen to my soft song of self-abandonment; see it shrink to its specific contours and then swell to larger dimensions. Maybe it’s yours, too? Why drinking? I didn’t drink because I liked the taste or being hungover or spending money. I would have never come to it volitionally if there had been other choices and possibilities. I didn’t try to shrink my body because I liked eating less or because I liked less of myself existing. Our lives and stories are always stories of us as individuals; our lives and stories are always fractals of a larger collective “I”. Our voices, when connected, always make a chorus. To be queer right now is to be connected to every queer person who came before us and all the struggles they strained against and broke wide open. To avoid valorizing or condemning ourselves, we can broaden our perspective, we can look carefully at context, we can gaze at (and love) the particular young woman clutching a bottle of Jägermeister and we can also soften our eyes and see past and around her, the faces and lives and hands connecting her back through the decades, the centuries; we can see so much more than one person’s choices.

I didn’t drink alcohol because I liked drinking alcohol. I drank alcohol to disappear; to save myself. I drank alcohol as one way of many to protect myself—a female-bodied person, moving forward through my own particular life, and through a collective history of other female-bodied and gender nonconforming people, wielding knives, keys, secret love, smiles, and flasks, looking sideways at each other, carefully searching for the way(s) to remain intact, spiritually, emotionally, physically. 

We protect ourselves how we can. Though the means might be dangerous, the end goal is survival, always living. 

In the years following college, whenever I sat down to write directly about my own life, I instead wrote about women being buried, women drowning, women disappearing from sight. And, if you read other works by people raised female, you’ll notice that there’s nothing unusual about that. I have long been fascinated with stories of women and girls disappearing, dying, drowning, being buried, being dismembered, literally and metaphorically, all possible meanings. I especially was drawn to the myth of the Goddess Daphne and the story of the Vestal Virgins, probably due to traveling to and living in Rome in adolescence. I felt a curious alliance with both; their stories stirred my own. Daphne, in a life or death moment, turns into a tree, disappears herself from the outstretched arms of a violent man-God (Apollo) trying to rape her. The Vestal Virgins, actual historical girls and women in ancient Rome, kept a sacred flame ablaze and kept themselves small, beautiful, pure, or else were buried with a loaf of bread, their fingers scratching at dirt, bleeding for air. I too felt like I was charged with guarding something ‘pure’ and narrow about myself, a small licking flame; I too felt essentialized to the beautiful and palatable: white dresses, a certain type of body; I too felt one action away from complete erasure. Nothing surprised me about anything that befell women. I just knew that I needed protection. I knew that I wanted to be like Daphne, to be able to turn into wood at the crucial moment. If I needed to be disappeared, I would be the one to do it; I would turn myself into earth so that I wouldn’t be buried by someone else. 

Here then were strategies; here were ways to protect oneself from what felt like the inevitable. Guard one’s purity, one’s rightness, one's beauty, one’s palatability; turn oneself into wood, vanish thy soft, human body behind a stiff barrier of numbness.

1. Make thyself perfect & beautiful (make thyself desired)

2. Make thyself wooden (make thyself absent)

Here were ways to survive. 

Apollo and Daphne sculpture by Bernini

The Vestal Virgins

It felt clear that survival was the goal, and that it could fall on a spectrum that encompassed every possible definition of ‘alive’. Around me growing up, I heard about real, current-day girls and women dying and disappearing; I watched ones that I knew retreat several inches away from their lives; I saw their own survival strategies emerge during adolescence or earlier, sometimes shockingly different than my own, other times uncomfortably familiar. Drinking was one way of many to disappear, to protect. Being beautiful, desirable, was another. I’d learn how to shoot a beer and how to make men and boys feel good. You can start to se how we abandon ourselves, how we remain uninitiated, unseen, in service of simply staying intact.

No longer protecting myself with desirability or alcohol, I now (re)turn to stories, to connection, for a different sort of survival. Daphne's, yours, mine, all the stories. Myths, histories, narratives, echoes, silences, erasures. We swim in them and don't often speak of them. I have collected these stories, these fragments of lives, assiduously and secretly, since the brink of adolescence. They never surprise me. To honor all these never-alive dead, I became a graveyard filled with screaming trees. That is to say, I willingly became haunted, knowing that the legions of ghosts, if collected and held tight, might be what actually saves me into the range of ‘alive’ that I couldn’t yet understand. Some day.

People raised female (and the many ranks of the beautifully gender non-conforming) are taught, among other things, to look away from themselves, to open every door but their own. 

(To be clear: we will scratch, we will riot, we will tear doors from their hinges, we will do anything to actually live. It's always just a matter of time)