Cameron's First Pride

I never met Cameron Langrell. I never had the chance to. Two months ago, he took his own life, because he'd been so relentlessly bullied about trying to explore and understand his own gender.

The story of his suicide came to me the way that most stories of trans suicides and deaths come to me.  I found it on tumblr. The article it linked to opened, "Just days after Racine, Wis., teen Cameron Langrell announced to friends and classmates online that she identified as a transgender girl, switching her Facebook gender identifier to 'female,' the 15-year-old took her own life at home on May 1." But other articles quoted his mother, Jamie Olender, saying things like, "'He was always bullied for being feminine,' Olender told the Journal Times. 'We told him to be who you are.'" It sounded like this poor child was living in a house very much like another trans child who had killed herself, too, just a few months earlier. These words read like the words of a parent who was out of touch with her daughter, because she was calling her a son.

Almost everybody has heard the name Leelah Alcorn by now, and Leelah's story didn't just include rejection from peers, it included rejection from parents. Leelah had already figured out for herself that she was a girl. She had chosen her own new name. But her parents would not accept that. Her parents rejected the new name, they rejected the correct pronouns, they rejected their daughter. Because they wanted their son. A son that never existed.

So when news reports about Leelah Alcorn's suicide started spreading, themselves with their own conflicting information about the name and gender of this child that had killed him- or herself, one thing that became apparent pretty quickly was that Leelah's own parents had really rejected this completely, and that that had been a driving force in her decision to end her life, in a really gruesome and awful way.

When news of Cameron Langrell's suicide started spreading, because interviews with Cameron's mother, Jamie, included quotes of her referring to her son by gender-appropriate pronouns for the gender he'd been designated at birth, there was a backlash within the trans community. Almost immediately, the commentary condemned her for contributing to her child's decision to kill himself. For refusing to accept and acknowledge the finality of his conclusion about his own gender.

But that was not a conclusion he had reached. It was not a conclusion that he had shared with his mother in the way of telling her, "I would like you now to call me by a different name, I would like you now to refer to me with female pronouns, she, her, and hers, instead of he, him, and his." He had changed his Facebook gender marker to "female." But he hadn't told the mother who had encouraged him to be who he was to treat him any differently.

All of this was there in the news articles I found at the time, I didn't need to hear it from Jamie herself. But what I did need to hear from her was that she knew that there was at least one trans person who'd read enough of the story to know that what she was being accused of by the trans community was completely off-base. Someone who would defend her against these allegations, because they were, to put it as mildly as possible, exceptionally counterproductive.

This is a parent who did exactly what anybody would wish that their parent would do. This is a parent who heard her child come to her and say, "I think my gender might be something else." And she said, "okay." When she found out Cameron was being bullied at school, she approached the school district about it, to make it stop. She gave her child the time, and the space, and the love that he needed to figure out his own answer. And it sounds like she was one of very few people who did that.

In the end, there weren't enough people giving Cameron that time and space, and also the love, the surety of acceptance, no matter what conclusion he reached. And when he looked out on a future like that, where so few people would accept him, where so few people would love him and see him as the person that he was, the person that he'd discovered he was, he couldn't bear the thought of it, and he ended his life.

When Caitlyn Jenner was publicly sorting out her own gender identity, in as much secrecy as one can have when they are constantly surrounded by cameras and rumors, there was a lot of confusion as a result of The Interview with Diane Sawyer that she gave while still identifying as Bruce, and asking to be referred to as male until further notice. Even though he'd expressed that he had always been a woman. This confusion is one of the reasons why I am doing what I'm doing, living as loudly and publicly as I can; to try to unconfuse all of this.

When my very good friend and fellow trans blogger, Ramona, sorted out her own gender, she wrestled for years with what it was, with what to call it, so that other people could know. So that she'd have an answer when she was asked, "what are your pronouns?" "What is your name?"

It's Match Day! Go #CrewSC! #BeMassive #ColumbusTilIDie #LickSaltLake

A photo posted by Ramona P. (@dksb17) on Jun 27, 2015 at 3:35pm PDT

When I discovered I was a girl, I came out to my very closest friends privately, one by one, in person, face-to-face. And almost nobody asked me if they should start using different pronouns, or if I had a different name that I wanted to be called by. But one of my friends, Joe (you might remember Joe from a previous post), asked me — after being almost completely ambivalent to my revelation of being the opposite gender, on the other end of the spectrum from what I'd just been assuming I was, and what everyone else was assuming I was, too — Joe asked me if he should refer to me by female pronouns.

He asked because we played League together a lot back then, and were usually using Skype or Curse Voice while we did. Sometimes strangers from the queue would join our voice chats. But he asked me that, he asked me what my pronouns were, essentially, though it wasn't quite in that perfect distilled language of the trans community. And no one close to me had asked me that.

So when Joe asked me what my pronouns were, I kind of stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few seconds, and said, "I don't know." And then I stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few more seconds, and said, "you know what, keep using the same name and pronouns for now, and when it starts to feel weird, I will tell you, I will ask you to change them." And he said, "okay."

And it was that easy. It was that easy because, even though I'm guessing that I was probably one of the first, if not the first, trans person Joe had ever had any real direct contact with in his life, he understood that I was going through some kind of process. That I wasn't coming to him, having reached a goal, saying, "look at this thing that I've done, look at this conclusion I've reached." He understood that I was coming to him saying, "look at this revelation I'm having. Lots of things are going to change." And he asked, "what?" and "when?"

He understood that it was my change, and my process, my transition. He understood that it was my conclusion to draw. So he didn't try to tell me what it was, or what it should be. He just asked. He asked, and whatever answer I had for him, he was fine with it.

When Caitlyn Jenner finally did do the big reveal, after the big interview with Diane Sawyer, she came out, the way that a lot of trans women kind of wish they could come out, minus the paparazzi everywhere for years beforehand, fueling tabloid rumors and bad Photoshopping. I imagine a lot of trans people wish they could just appear, one day, in a body and in a gender presentation that their entire culture accepts completely as being whatever their gender is.

I imagine that a lot of people, not just trans people, also wish that they were worth $100 million. That, to the extent that money can solve problems, they had more than enough to solve all of them. The reality is that very few trans people have access to the smallest percentage of those kinds of resources. The reality is that very few trans women can afford to be Republicans.

The reality is that most trans people go through this transformation over the course of several years in full view of everyone. While they keep going to school, to work, on errands, and back home to their families or friends or roommates. That every minute detail of every embarrassing procedure unfolds in slow-motion all day, every day. It means that the day before electrolysis, if she can even afford to have it done, the trans woman is out without makeup, showing 1/8" of stubble, because she needs to have enough exposed hair for the electrologist to be able to accomplish anything.

right side detail before #electrolysis

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 9, 2015 at 11:50am PDT

It means that her makeup might look reliably relentlessly awful while she tries to teach the hands of a 40-year-old man how to apply it. It means that she takes a cocktail of pills a couple times a day in front of whoever is around to see her do it. It means that she might constantly awkwardly reference her own gender, a pulsing drone to remind everyone what pronouns to use, delivered via such unsubtle phrases as "I need to use the little girls' room" literally every single time she has to pee. It means that her breasts will appear smaller or larger as often as she feels she has to stuff her bra more, or less, or not at all.

It means changing rules around the house, that her door that used to almost always be open to the will and traffic of a dozen cats would be now almost always shut and locked, because everyone else in the house was a guy. Because she now needed the privacy to change clothes. She now needed the privacy to observe the changes her body was undergoing with the influence of Hormone Replacement Therapy.

The point is that everyone's transition happens at different speeds, and everyone's transition ends up at a different point on this spectrum, and that the paths each person takes to get there are all as unique as they themselves. And if you can understand that, it becomes very easy to understand corollaries; that many trans women elect not to have vaginoplasty. That some come to terms with their penis, have reached a place in their own mind where it is not triggering for them, where it does not aggravate their dysphoria. That still others have the means, but feel the risk outweighs the reward. That most have no coverage, and lack the resources otherwise, to get the operation done in the first place, and so never even bother seriously debating the question anyway.

But whatever the reason, it's their decision because it's their gender. It's their choice of how to represent themselves in the ways that they suppose will win them the broadest correct interpretation of that gender. The physical changes are not so much for themselves personally and directly as they are for the broader culture that they live in to correctly interpret their gender, and to correctly understand their gender and engage with them appropriately for their gender in the context of their culture.

When I say that it's not specifically for themselves, I don't mean that it's not for them at all, because we internalize our culture. My ideas of what is feminine and what is beautiful are all determined by modern Western beauty standards, because that's what I've been surrounded by, that's what I've grown up with. I don't personally find body hair attractive. I've never found it attractive on anyone, of any gender. I'm going to great lengths to have most of my body hair permanently removed. I'm starting with my face, because that is one of the most common and visible culturally relevant gender markers.

A step I want to take beyond that, to have the leg hair permanently removed, for example, is a combination of my regard for bare, smooth legs as more feminine than not, and the fact that my skin tolerates all methods of hair removal very poorly. Shaving, depilatory creams, tweezing, sugaring, threading, and electrolysis. Waxing irritates my skin very badly, too. But only once a month. Only for a few days.

That's not just some arbitrary decision that I've made because I've just decided out of nowhere without any context that that expresses femininity. It's because my culture views that as a marker for femininity, and I've internalized that. So when I get it done permanently, and while I keep it up with waxing until then, I'm motivated by the culture that I've internalized, rather than truly by myself. It's so that when I look at myself, I see what I want our culture to see, so that it will understand me and interact with me in ways that are appropriate to my gender: as a more-feminine-than-not woman. Because that's who I am.

This past weekend, I went to my first Pride event, in Seattle. It was my first Pride event anywhere, my first Pride event of any kind. Kim (#girlfriend) was excited to take me, and I was excited to go with her. People kept asking me how many I'd been to, or if this was my first one, and I'd say, "this is my first one. When it was on last year, I didn't know any of it applied to me." Pride happens in June. I hadn't figured out that I was a girl until August. And while I had been supportive of LGBT concerns and problems, and fully on their side, I was also miserably depressed, and so the extent of my work as an ally was tabbing out of League every so often to Like a few pictures from the event.

#relaxitsjustlove #seattlepride2015

A photo posted by Kim (@kiminoa_seattle) on Jun 28, 2015 at 6:03pm PDT

When I went this year, my first time, something that really struck me was how completely on-alert everyone was to look out for each other. Everyone. I saw someone drop his phone, and I and maybe 15 people on either side of me in each direction shouted, "PHONE!!!" Before it hit the ground, this guy turned, and looked, and saw it land. He picked it up, and said "thanks!"

I saw a little girl running by the fountain slip and fall and cut her elbow and bang her head pretty good, and stand up and start crying. This guy in shorts, just shorts, near the fountain ran up to her and made sure she was steady on her feet. He had her direct him to her adult, and he stayed with her the whole way, telling them what had happened before taking off back to where he'd come from.

Early on during the event, during the parade portion, Kim and I were not feeling especially well, so we ducked away from the main parade route, and found somewhere to sit down and have some water and a bite to eat. We got out our phones and started scrolling through Facebook. One of the things that I saw was a post from Jamie, who had added me as a Facebook Friend when I'd first contacted her. It was a picture of Cameron.

Jamie posts pictures of Cameron fairly often. As I imagine anyone would who had lost their child so young, so suddenly, in such a horrific way, for such an awful reason. I know I would. To remember who they were, to remember how they were. I saw her comments elsewhere, that it was coming up on two months to the day from the day he'd died. And I realized that he would never go to a parade like this.

And that devastating sense of loss that had connected me to Cameron, the same way it had connected me to Leelah Alcorn and Taylor Alesana, was brought into really sharp relief. Part of what was so crushingly sad about these girls' deaths to me personally was that I thought that something that might have really helped them would have been to see a trans woman like me. My age. To know that there's a life after high school for girls like us. To know that there are ways to survive for girls like us. And to know from firsthand experience that there are entire major cities that will love girls like us. And I started crying, right there on the spot.

My First Pride came very late in life, because I did not know who I was. Cameron's First Pride never came. Because he never had the chance to figure out who he was.

Boneless, Skinless

I had no plans to write anything for today. Honestly, I don't even know why I'm awake. Sleep has not been coming easily for me. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight last night, and I woke up this morning, spontaneously, just before six. What in the actual fuck.

So, I'm very tired, and I have a lot of things that I actually need to do, but for some reason the compulsion to just... just write and sort things out on "paper" is taking priority. Please bear with me while I fumble towards coherence.

I do not like my mom. She is abrasive. She is myopic. She is politically aligned with people who casually legislate the misery of underserved peoples, with racially-driven drug laws, with grossly restrictive abortion laws, with debate about bodies that they do not understand or care about, with actual, "serious" discussion about which bathroom girls like me can use. She ignored me when I was a child, unless it was to abuse me. Usually verbally, emotionally. Sometimes physically.

My mother saw me then (and now, I imagine) as a mistake. She has always had a plan for every aspect of her life, and to the extent that she's made everyone around her miserable, it's been greatly influenced by her inability to adapt and deviate from plans. To try to force reality to match her plans, rather than adjusting her plans to deal with reality. This is why it does not surprise me that she is relatively far to the right, politically. She kind of is the Republican party, or at least their faux-inclusive version of themselves.

My mother would never acknowledge or admit to it, I don't think, but she carries no small amount of self-loathing. She was born and raised in Japan, and emigrated to America to be with my dad after they'd gotten married. I think. I don't actually know the story, I kind of don't care. She both loves and hates her ethnicity. She clings to the happy things she remembers from her childhood, like the yakimo vendors crying in the streets, and rejects the rest. She never taught us Japanese. It was like she came from nowhere. Her father was an alcoholic, a sort of by-the-numbers model of an alcoholic family man in a strictly defined culture. I had the misfortune of meeting him a couple times.

We were visiting Japan once, when I was in fifth grade or so. It was over winter holidays, so I'd been given some money by friends or relatives of that side of my family (I never did learn which). Being about ten years old, with some money, in a country full of really fantastic robot and sci-fi themed toys when I'd been raised and treated like a boy my entire life left me in a pretty happy place, for once. I bought a little die-cast robot figure, a better quality toy from a more interesting program than what I was used to in the US. He saw me playing with it and chastised me for not saving that money for my future. Me, a ten-year-old child who had few friends, for whom play was a vital escape.

Don't get me wrong, it's reasonable advice. Someone gives you money, maybe you should, I don't know, not go spend it all right away on toys. And to be fair, I still struggle with this. But I don't think that I struggled with it much more than your average ten-year-old struggles with it, at the time, because I was fucking ten.

My mother is not a fan of alcohol. She saw her father getting angry, getting drunk, and beating up his family, and thought, "the real problem with this whole process is the part where he drinks." She seemed philosophically okay with the abuse stuff, though. I mean. She rejected the use of alcohol, but was really pretty completely on board with screaming at and hitting her children because of her absolute inability to cope with life in anything approaching a truly adult fashion.

One of my mother's life plans was to have two children. A son, first (check), and a daughter, next (che— wait, what?). Bearing what she thought was a son when she had decided that nothing but a daughter would do put her in the uncomfortable position of reality not acceding to her wishes, a position she found herself in often. One she has never done well in. The irony, of course, is that if she had actually just accepted her child as they were, she would have found a daughter. Not the daughter she deserved but the daughter she needed. Nothing less than a princess. Shining.

My mother grew up somewhat poor, which filled her with a desperate fear of poverty. The relentlessness with which she pursues all things (even very wrong things, sadly) served her very well in this aspect. She is extraordinarily driven. Precise, mechanical. Extremely intelligent, and yet almost laughably ignorant. She has made a lot of money, and knows nothing about how the world actually is. (God, she really is the Republican party, isn't she.) She thinks a great deal, processes massive volumes of numerical data with really pretty remarkable insight. She devours these problems like a combine built to efficiently dismantle them. But she does not understand how to human.

My mother's relationship with my dad, like her relationship with basically the entire world, was (and by all accounts still is) one of grotesque power dynamics, gaslighting, and manipulation. Like all truly great gaslighters, she is a victim of her own distorted vision of reality. She does not convince other people that reality is one thing, while believing it is actually something else. She legitimately believes that reality is what she says it is, and when faced with the fact that it is not, interesting-slash-fucking-awful things happen. She decides a source is trusted because they tell her things she likes to hear, and reinforce her views of reality; and once she's decided that source is trusted, they are infallible, to her. What they say, is. You get one guess what news channel she prefers.

Conflicts between my parents would boil over and explode, constantly, almost always in the same way. My mother would be angry about god-knows-what. Then something unrelated and trivial would set her off. She would start yelling and screaming, maybe throwing things, swinging a belt at her kids, kicking a bit of dog or what-have-you. She punched down, essentially. She surrounded herself with people who were weaker than her (by design, in the case of her children and husband). Everything was, and probably still is, completely black-and-white to her. Either you are some kind of transcendent being who is far above her, or you are garbage and you are wasting her time.

I spent most of my life believing I was garbage. A waste of everyone's time.

Oh, and a guy.

I think the gender revelation thing is part of why I woke up today and felt this bizarre urge to call my mom. I wanted to have a casual chat. I had no idea why in the hell I would wake up and think or feel anything remotely like that, but on further reflection, I realized that this is the first Mother's Day since I realized I was a girl. I don't know if it's the fact of my gender becoming clear to me, or just the base fact that I now know who I am, at last, or maybe even something else that I am not aware of at all, but I felt like reaching out.

I had had myself convinced, up until recently, that what I felt towards my parents now was ambivalence. That I'd finally won, because I no longer hated them. I just didn't care. I did not feel hate, which, it has been argued, is sometimes just an expression of frustrated or misplaced love. I felt nothing. But that was wrong, of course, because it turns out I feel everything.

I still have old, unpaid student loans from the mid-'90s because I felt so terribly wronged by having been compelled to sign for them. I did not want to go to college right after high school. I was not ready. My closest teacher, I was later told by my brother, had advised my parents that sending me straight to college would be disastrous. That I had to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, and that if they compelled me to go, it would not end well. But my mom viewed him as beneath her. His advice and perspective were meaningless, because she knew best, and I would go to college right after high school, no matter that I did not know who I was (boy, did I not know who I was) or what I wanted to do in life.

I realize that this is self-destructive. I've known that for decades. I know that I'm not hurting my parents by not paying those loans, that they really probably don't even know that I still haven't. But on some level, I'm still waiting for them to notice. I'm still standing here, defiant, angry that they never bothered to learn who their daughter was, that they compelled her do something she was absolutely not equipped to do, stuck her with the bill, and then hid behind the idea that an 18-year-old is an adult who does not answer to their parents in any way, and cannot be meaningfully influenced by them. I don't even want their money, anymore. I mean I do, but it's not the point. I want them to apologize. I want to see that they genuinely regret all of the horrible ways they treated me, which have, to me, come to be symbolized by those old loans. Loans I signed for, so I could fail at trying to be the boy they wanted me to be.

So, I dropped out of college. I met a girl on the internet, which became sort of a sad meme in my life. I guess I did it before it was cool. I mean, I did it really terribly and without any sense of self-awareness, but I did it. A pioneer of awful things.

Anyway, the girl, Tina, was going to school in Los Angeles, while I was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (no relation). We spent hours and hours on IRC with each other, and physically mailed developed photographs back and forth, because it was literally faster than sending them digitally. DCC file transfers were so dodgy that we'd have to reset the transmission over and over. Mailing was slow, but we knew it would work. The first picture she ever sent me is still inside my guitar.

@theafterlifecoach, this still lives inside my guitar. 😊

A video posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 31, 2016 at 7:37pm PDT

Tina came out to visit me in person, and we spent a week eating shitty instant college foods and fucking our brains out. We were both shell-shocked abuse survivors, and neither of us really understood that, so we tried to be together, and, naturally, it did not work out. But since I desperately needed a feminine presence in my life, I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years... even decades, just searching for any girl who would have me.

And, like most miserable, fear-driven ostriches, I was lying to myself. What I meant by "any girl" was "any girl I find pretty enough." I wonder how much happier I could've been if I'd been able to see people, then, the way that I've started to see them now. Surprise, surprise, when someone who is not a man tries to make themselves into one, and their best guide to masculinity is pop culture, they become a pretty shitty man.

My mother had succeeded. She'd done her job. I saw men as spineless idiots who could not be trusted, who needed to be commanded, not just guided, but commanded, at every turn, by a woman. Men were violent cowards, stupid brutes who needed to be saved from themselves. I set out looking for my commander, hating myself every step of the way, setting fire to everything around me. I hated myself very thoroughly. If there was a metric by which to judge me, I judged myself, and found myself wanting. Her parenting colored everything. It colored everything black and white.

One time, I put some jelly on a piece of bread. Okay, to be fair, I've put jelly on a piece of bread lots of times, but the time I'm talking about here, I was probably... eight? Maybe seven? Four? We were still living in Wisconsin, so I was pretty young. Being a child, I made my own food in comically oversized portions. I had not really considered that an adult-sized serving was proportionally much smaller to an adult than it was to me. So this was a pretty big piece of bread. I couldn't finish it.

My mom, continuing her relentless instruction in how to not waste food, demanded that I eat nothing else until I finished that piece of bread with jelly on it. Literally, nothing. It went into the fridge. Over the next several days, it became less and less appetizing. Mold began to grow on parts of it. But I still had to finish it. I could have water, and I could have that shitty, disgusting piece of rotting food. And I could have nothing else.

Eventually, I took what was left of the sad snack that I'd triumphantly made for myself a little less than a week before, and went, sobbing, to my mother with it. I told her I was sorry that I'd wasted so much food. So much! It was a fucking piece of bread, you miserable cunt. You filled your child with a lifelong disdain for grape jelly because you saw some shit on TV about starving kids in Africa, and somehow decided that if we didn't eat every fucking thing in sight, we were really just ungrateful for our bounty.

Another time, also still in Wisconsin, I microwaved soup. In a metal pot. (I haven't done that lots of times, just the one time.) It threw sparks everywhere, made a terrible racket, and lots of noise and smoke. I stopped the microwave as soon as I saw that it was not operating the way I was used to seeing it operate, and it wasn't permanently damaged, but I did have an $0.88 can of soup base just sitting there being gross in some cold water in a pot that now smelled like burning metal.

Yeah, she made me eat that, too.

These were not important lessons being taught in a loving way to a valued child. This was a hurricane who should have never had children slamming her child into trees until they were pulped and lifeless. This was a mother destroying her child's capacity to stand up for itself. It was contributing to her child's constant misery, to the agony of being alive. I was boneless, skinless. A weak and quivering pile of impotent fury that hated itself and everything around it, because sentience meant only one thing: being aware of how awful it was to live.

My brother once told my parents that he had had a startling revelation. He had realized that there were no adults. There were just older kids. That the myth of life stages had fallen apart when he really examined it, because he had come to understand that he was still basically the same person then, at, I don't know, maybe fifteen? as he had been at five. He was still just trying to make sense of the world, and he knew more than he had known when he was younger, but he had given up on the idea of reaching a certain age, and then just "getting it," and being an adult. Or, more correctly, no longer being a child.

My brother is an incredibly brilliant man. And he has probably not said anything more insightful than this in his life since. My parents are still children. In fact, I'm older than them, now, if we are using age as a metaphor for maturity. My father has always been infantilized by my mother, and once they retired, that only got worse. My formerly liberal-leaning, gentle father is now a die-hard Fox News bobblehead, because of my mother's relentless bullying. He probably thinks he grew up and realized how the world really works, and the Koch Brothers™ of the world could not be happier.

My mother still lives in fear of the world. She lives with the same fear of the world that her father had, and that he put into her when he beat the shit out of her mother, his wife, on a regular basis. She sees the world as being full of men who need to be controlled absolutely, because a man free to become his best and truest self might go astray, and start beating up her mom again.

I do not like my mom. To be fair, I do not like much of anybody. But I've come to realize, recently, much to my boundless joy, that I love really pretty much everybody. I love to different degrees, at different intensities, but whether (and how and when) I engage with someone ends up being a matter of priority as a function of how much I like or do not like them. It's not an expression of caring about their welfare, but rather an expression of enjoying their company. This is hard for some people to understand, and it has caused some discomfort when I've told people whom I do not know very well that I love them, because I was not always clear about what I meant.

To like someone is to prefer their company to that of other people's. To feel at ease and in accord with them, to be comfortable. But comfort truly does breed weakness. It breeds complacency. People we feel uncomfortable around are important to us. They help us find the truth. The fact of my existence makes so many people uncomfortable in so many ways. Suffering without purpose has no value. But suffering is not always without purpose.

I do not want people to be uncomfortable around me, but the solution is not for me to vanish. It's for me to gently assert myself in their spaces until they become accustomed to my existence. Until they get used to who I am. They may not ever be comfortable around me, but they can hopefully become, at least, not uncomfortable around me.

Love is caring about the happiness, health, and safety of someone. It could be your child, your sibling, your parent, your classmate, your friend, your best friend, your lover, your cat, that tree in your backyard, the crickets you pass on your way home every night. It could even be yourself. When people are happy, healthy, safe, they are free. They are free to become the best versions of themselves, and to help others do the same. I sometimes think that I'm free. But then I realize that if I only think that I'm free, and I do not use that understanding to help others also be free, then I am not truly free. Something is holding me back. Something is scaring me.

In the end, I love my mom. I do not like her at all. But I do want her to be happy and healthy and safe. I want that for everyone. I know that she is only a misguided and miserable person because she does not know how to be anything else. I know that she is seeking joy and avoiding pain, like every other living thing. I know that living in denial of the kind of fear that she has allowed to become intrinsic to her being cannot be anything but awful.

I love my mom in the same way that I love the man who groped me on the street last December. They cause injury because they do not understand what they are doing. I do not like either of them, but I cannot help them understand how to be better people unless I reach out to them. Because they will never reach out to me.

You better be home. You actual goddamn cow.

P.S.: Tangentially; if you don't have a mom (or don't feel like you do), I'm your mom, now. Sorry, I don't make the rules. I love you. You matter. Please be safe. Let me know if you need anything.