Dreaming In Monochrome

It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything here.

So many things have happened, I don’t really know where to start. I guess I should keep it simple and do a list.

P moved in with me a year ago. While I have had the occasional nightmare, they have, for all intents and purposes, stopped. Waking up next to her is the best thing ever.

P and I will have been together for two years, this coming September.

I have lost about 100 lbs, and my diabetes is all but gone. I am on a low dose of my medication and my a1c is excellent.

I’m still in school, and I’ve narrowed my focus down to Bioarchaeology.

I am still in therapy, still working on my anxiety and my OCD and working through feelings about my Gramma’s death, my relationship with my father, and other things.

Ernie is still with me, Murphy went to live with SM almost a year ago.

I have three more tattoos, once of which is on my chest.

I had a three month long gallery show with the local library for my photography. It was awesome and terrifying at the same time.

My Dad and I are still talking to each other, and we have a pretty good relationship, all things considered.

I am the happiest I have ever been, despite the curve balls life has thrown at me.

My life has definitely changed for the better in every possible way it could. Even with some of the rough waters we have encountered, this relationship with P is the best one I’ve ever been in. I finally feel healed, and healthy, and safe. I finally feel like my life means something and most importantly, I don’t feel like I’d be better off dead all the time.

I haven’t decided if I want to keep updating this. I may not. Or I might come back to it and start keeping an online journal again. Maybe. Who knows.

It is a bit ironic that I named this blog “Dreaming in Monochrome” because most of my dreams are in vivid, mind altering colors. Horrible, horrible colors.

Most of my dreams are nightmares.

I’ve had nightmares every single night, for as long as I can remember. Some nights aren’t as bad as others – I might only dream that there are spiders crawling on me, rather than dreaming that a giant spider is about to eat my head. Some nights are worse – I dream that there is a man waiting in my closet, waiting for me to fall asleep and be vulnerable, so he can come out and stab me in the throat.

I wake up screaming. I wake up crying. I wake up paralyzed.

Sometimes, I only half wake up, and can’t fully come to the surface, so the reality of where I am mixes with the horror of the dream and then suddenly the spiders are in my bathroom, the killer is a shadow at the foot of the bed.

I cry and whimper, and cower in my sleep. Sometimes, I get up and sleep walk, and cry, and cower, and try to get out.

My lovers learned to deal with it. Sometimes they would wake me up. Sometimes they would just hold me and rock me, and hope that somewhere, their actions were translating into my brain as safety. Sometimes, they just let me cry, and would roll over and try to get back to sleep.

I talked to doctors, who prescribed sleeping pills, sleep aids, and gave advice on how to relax before bed. The pills gave me even worse nightmares (that I couldn’t wake up from), the aids never worked, and relaxation helped me sleep sooner, but didn’t keep the nightmares away. I talked to my therapist, my psychiatrist, and they tried to get to the root of the problem. Was it my father? Was it some chemical imbalance? Nothing worked. I figured this was my life, and I was just going to have to deal with it for the rest of it, as I had for the beginning of it. This is not to say that I didn’t have other dreams too – vivid, beautiful dreams about things that happened before this life, dreams where I’m a rock star, a werewolf, a wolf. Dreams about my Gramma, my Mom, my sister, people I’ve loved. They weren’t all bad, but every night there was at least one bad one.

Sometimes I didn’t remember the bad ones, not completely. I would know I had them because the pillow was wet from my tears, because Murphy and Ernie were looking at me wide eyed and trying to comfort me, because my lover would tell me.

I always hoped, secretly, that eventually I would be with someone who would be able to stop it. That if I finally felt safe in her arms, the nightmares would have to stop. I mean, they would have to, right?

But they never did.

Until one day, this red haired girl became more than just my friend and we slept together. I curled up into her back, my arm around her, and fell asleep.

And I started to have a nightmare. At the time I was reading a book about an anthropologist in Rwanda after the genocide, so the nightmares had been about me excavating bodies and then I look up and there’s a soldier with a gun pointed at my head. I would look into his eyes and he would say something to me in a language I couldn’t understand. I would lift my arms in surrender, and he would shoot me in the face. Apparently I started to whimper in my sleep, and curled into a fetal position. She turned over and put her hand on my shoulder, and woke me up. We’d already discussed my sleeping quirks, because I don’t want anyone to have to experience the “Alicia wakes up screaming” without having some kind of idea that might happen.

I woke up, looked at her, and said, “Hey…what’s wrong? What is it?” She said, “You were having a nightmare.” We talked for a few minutes, then cuddled back up and went back to sleep.

And I dreamed.

Dreams, not nightmares.

I told her, the next morning, that I hadn’t had any more nightmares. She looked at me skeptically, and said something like, “Well you were probably exhausted.” We went about our day, and then went to bed the next night. We kissed, and she settled down into my arms. I put my head against her back, and fell asleep.

And dreamed.

No nightmares.

Again, we discussed the implications of this. She remained doubtful that she was the reason my brain had released me from the nightly prison, but she was open to the idea that something had changed. I talked to my therapist about it, and her only question was, “So when can you start living with her?” Dr. A believed that something in my psyche was calmed by this girl, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. She encouraged us to sleep in the same room more often, to see if it held, or if it was just a temporary thing because the relationship was new.

I talked to other friends. Some of them were very supportive, others cautioned me not to put so much stock into this new love. They needn’t have worried – I was concerned I was putting too much pressure on her. I mean, there really is no way to say to another person, “I have had nightmares for 34 years and now you sleep in the same bed with me and they’re gone and I think you might be saving me.”

That’s heavy for someone to hear, to believe about themselves.

The thing is? It’s holding. When she’s not here, the nightmares come back. In fact, the night after she leaves the nightmares come back worse, as if to say, “Oh we built up, asshole!!” So I call her, in the middle of the night, sometimes, just to hear her voice. I try not to do it often, because I don’t want to interrupt her life (even though she insists it’s okay). And it doesn’t matter what happens before we go to bed – whether we were playing video games, watching a movie, having a really heavy discussion – as soon as we settle in, I sleep. And I dream about beautiful things.

I imagine this is what it is like to be a normal person, with normal dreams.

I have no way of knowing if this will last, or if they will come back, or if I will start dreaming like a “normal” person and have an occasional bad dream. For now, I am enjoying it in the moment, to wake up in the morning and smile at her and when she says, “How did you sleep?” be happy that I can say,

“You know what? Good!”

And mean it.

She was the first person to hold me, after my mother. Family lore says that I looked up at her and grabbed her finger as if to say, “Ah, there you are.” I was about an hour old, and I already knew who my protector would be.

In a childhood filled with violence and emotional wounds, she was my safe place. She is the reason I have happy memories to go along with those awful ones. She protected me whenever she could, even if it meant she put herself in physical danger to do it.

She bought me my first microscope, my first telescope, my first pair of steel toed boots, and my first polo shirt. She never said to me, “But you’re a girl!” Somehow, she knew my path in the world was going to be a hard one, and she did everything she could to stand in front of me and take the brunt of the damage.

She would let me steal sips of her 7-Up while I sat on the kitchen table, watching her mop the floor. She would show me the secret of cooking, how to use your nose to figure out if there’s something missing, how to taste a dish and figure out what it needs to make it better.

She taught me to walk tall and to lay down for no one, especially not a man. She came to every single band concert, every play, every performance I was ever a part of. She would shout from the stands, “THAT’S MY PAL!!” and point at me and wave.

She had grandchildren born before me, and ones born after me, but I was the only one she called Pal.

She let me crawl into her bed in the middle of the night when the nightmares were too much. She believed me when I said I was scared, but never let me say that I was too weak or too stupid to do something. She consoled me when girls broke my heart. She made it better with a touch, a hug, a kiss.

Today is the day I lost her, ten years ago. Since that day I have beaten myself up, I have tortured myself and believed I deserved every single bad thing that happened to me, because I believed that I had let her down when she needed me most. I let a darkness live in me and I stopped feeling anything. I went numb and I shut myself off from everyone else in the world. I was alone.

I’m not the only one who lost her. I know that. I also know that she would not want this for me. She wouldn’t have wanted me to feel this way for ten years.

So today I begin to heal. I am going to celebrate the life she had, the one she shared with me, and the one she had before I ever came along to be her Pal. I’m going to forgive myself, and let Love heal me.

The wound will always be there, a pink scar over my heart that will never full go away, but it won’t be bleeding anymore.

I’m ready.

I love you, Pal. Always.

She’s been gone for almost a week now.

It’s quiet here, without another human knocking about. I can hear the neighbors with much more clarity. Maybe I’m listening harder, or maybe it’s just that much silence in my life now.

It’s weird. Unless I talk to P on the phone, I rarely speak at all. There’s no reason to. Murphy responds to my body language, as does Ernie, except when I am trying to get out of bed and he’s warm against my leg and doesn’t want to move.

I have to keep a “love journal” for one of my classes. I had to stop writing in it because I started to cry. I feel hollow inside, as if the absence of her things in our apartment is mirroring the absence of her presence inside my head.

I went to the store alone for the first time the other night. I had to take two Xanax to just make it to the register. Tonight I’m doing laundry. Just my laundry. It feels strange.

Just before she left we watched “A Single Man” together. Colin Firth plays Dr. Falconer, a man who loses his lover Jim in a car accident while Jim is visiting his family in Denver. Although she did not die, her loss is felt no less acutely, especially at night, when I go to bed alone. The movie was hard for me to watch for several reasons, one of which is an extended scene where Colin’s character is planning on killing himself by shooting himself in the head. I wasn’t expecting the massive trigger that happened.

Murphy’s heart is broken. He doesn’t understand where his Momma is, or why she suddenly (to him) reappears, only to leave again. He’s mopey and depressed, and I can’t comfort him enough.

I say all of this not to paint SM in a bad light or somehow make her the bad guy or whatever. I’m just talking about what my reality is now, in the aftermath of Us.

I miss her.

I play the radio a lot, to try and stave off the silence. When I go to sleep at night I set my alarm clock to “Sleep Time” so it plays for an hour until I fall asleep. But when I wake up, the silence is waiting.

There’s a story I don’t tell about a red haired girl who touched me on the cheek once and said to me, “Hello. I remember you. It’s good to see you again. I’ve missed you.”

I share this part because it makes sense with the next part, where I talk about Michael Stipe and how the first time I heard his voice it felt like I was hearing a long lost brother. To say that R.E.M. changed my life with their music is to both belittle their music and my life, because “change” isn’t enough of a word.

Today is Michael’s birthday, and while I spent the day listening to R.E.M. and looking up old interviews with him on YouTube I realized that three of the people who have changed my life with their music have all hung out together at some point, and it made me wonder if Michael and Maynard would remember me the way she did, or if they just happen to operate on the same wavelength and that’s why they end up together.

It makes me wonder how different my life would have been had I picked up a guitar instead of a trombone. If I had learned to play the drums, or the piano, instead of a brass instrument. If I hadn’t stopped wanting to be a musician because I just didn’t see the point in playing other people’s music all the time, feeling alone because no one else seemed as moved as I was by what we were playing. No one around me took music as seriously as I did, or if they did they didn’t take ALL music as seriously as I did. Jazz snobs, classical music snobs, goth snobs, whatever it was they were into, everything else was shit.

I never believed that.

While I don’t look down on people who don’t understand music (or who only listen to one type of music) I can’t really talk to them about how music talks to me. It would be like trying to describe how it feels to breathe, or how bright colors are to someone who is colorblind. They just can’t relate. So when I run into someone who speaks through music, who understands that sometimes language isn’t enough, when I feel that vibration from another person, I get happy. Certain music hits a chord deep inside of me and there aren’t words to explain it. Humans haven’t invented words heavy enough to carry the weight of the ideas that music can convey.

And the thing is, sometimes the people making the music don’t even understand. I mean, let’s face it, sometimes music is just crap and the person making it isn’t even really trying. They’re just cranking out shit to make money and because it’s poppy or catchy people eat it up. And I’m not saying that every band has to be Elbow or every singer has to be Michael Stipe, but there is a difference and people who “get it” can feel that. I can enjoy some stupid bubblegum pop, but I need that soul in my music for it to stick around in my head and in my heart. R.E.M. has done that.

So I wonder. I wonder if he would feel my vibration too.

Happy Birthday, Michael. Thank you for the awakening all those years ago.

I had an epiphany.

Things around here have been in upheaval for a while, and it’s caused me to really examine myself and what is going on inside of me. As I looked back on my life, I realized that there was a definitive mark through it. A trauma. One that separated my life into Before and After.

Gramma’s death.

February 2011 will mark ten years since she passed on. Ten years I’ve lived without her in my life, ten years since I got that phone call that told me the one person I’d trusted with everything was gone. In those ten years since, I have been alone.

I should say, I have FELT alone. Her death ripped my heart open wide, and left a gaping hole in my chest that has never been filled. Despite being surrounded by people who love me, truly love me and would do anything for me, I have felt detached. Apart. Walled off. I went numb and I stopped allowing anyone to get too close to me.

Sure, I fell in love. Actually, I fell out of love with A1 when she couldn’t handle the darkness that overcame me in the months after Gramma’s death. I drew away from her because she couldn’t fill that hole. She didn’t want to, or maybe she just couldn’t at all, no matter what she did. I came back to Las Vegas and spent the next year carrying around my Mother’s grief, then my sister’s grief. All the while the emptiness grew inside of me, filling my chest and my heart. It got to the point where I stopped even noticing it. It just was. There would always be a hole that nothing could fill, a darkness no one could ever touch.

My lovers would tell me I needed to “get over it”. The only one who really tried to help me with it was SM, but I don’t think she ever knew how deep the hole went, how empty I was inside. Despite her love, their love, the hole remained.

I didn’t realize how much it colored how I interacted with people, how it affected the way I looked at the world around me. This is why I feel broken. This is why I feel unworthy and like an asshole. I am carrying ten years of guilt that I wasn’t there, that when she needed me I wasn’t there, I didn’t come. And it doesn’t matter that other people tell me she wouldn’t want that. It doesn’t make the darkness go away that I know she wouldn’t want that, that she would be upset that I have been operating in “Safe Mode” for the past ten years because something broke inside of me and instead of actively trying to fix it I locked it down and buried it.

While I still had problems Before, they were not like this. I still had panic disorder, I still had OCD, I still had bouts of depression… but in the now, in the After, the empty inside of me has weighted these things down. I still feel emotions, but they are muted. I’m underwater, listening to the rest of the world through ears filled with grief and guilt that I cannot let go of. It seeps into everything, it is the Voice that tells me I’m never good enough because I let down the one person who never let ME down when she needed me the most, and I will never have another chance to make that right. You don’t get do overs with Death. You don’t get a second chance.

I think her death has been slowly killing me for ten years. The hole inside of me, the darkness that lives there, has choked the life out of three relationships, including ending my marriage. All of the other reasons are just surface wounds. I see now that it is this hole, this detachment I have always felt, the fact that even in their arms I felt alone, that ended up killing the love that tried to grow there. I’m not saying that their actions didn’t also contribute (especially A1 and A2), but it had to be hard for them (and now SM) to be faced with a partner who retreats so far into their own head that there is nothing left. The words won’t come. I run out of ways to ask for help, because I could not articulate what, exactly was wrong. “I’m sad,” I would say. “About what?” And I couldn’t make the words express what it was. My language failed me, again and again, even though I kept trying to ask for help.

I’m broken. I’m an asshole. I don’t deserve you. I’m worthless. That is all I could articulate, all I could muster up. That is all that would come. I would say, “I’m alone,” but I couldn’t say why I felt that way. I couldn’t express what she meant to me, I don’t even think I realized it, myself, how entwined our souls were and how her loss damaged me. Is still damaging me. It is worse than anything my father ever did to me. Worse than anything that anyone has ever done to me, ever. It is a wound that refuses to scar over, that just keeps seeping blood.

I am a heavy heart to carry. How can I expect someone else to carry me when the darkness overwhelms me, when I can’t even talk about it? How can I start to fix myself when I’ve had ten years and I am still bleeding? How many more relationships will it choke the life out of? Do I even dare allow someone else to love me, when I know I have this wound inside of me, when I know that it will overwhelm them too. How selfish of me to put someone else through this.

Where do I even start.

I guess with this. With the realization that I am suffering in silence, that I am wounded in a sacred way, that I can finally point to the knife that made the wound.

It feels stupid, to say that my Gramma’s death, ten years ago, is still wounding me today. That I am still in mourning. That when she died it felt like I lost my twin, my arm, a lung. But that is the truth, and when I finally had the courage to say it out loud to someone else, it rang true down in that wound. To actually speak the words, “I’ve been alone in the world since she died,” to someone else and have them hear it… That alone feels like a step toward healing. A small step on a journey that might take me the rest of my life to figure out, but a step.

I don’t know if it will ever heal.

I don’t know if it can.

But I’m going to try.

I spent the day with my father.

He needed help setting up his Christmas tree, and he couldn’t fit it in his car. Sprout to the rescue. Once we got the tree set up he said, “Let’s decorate it!” It was the first time in my entire life I’d ever decorated a tree with my father. We talked about random things, and then he said, “Your sister says you’re in therapy.”

I said, “Yes. I am.” He asked why. I explained I had panic disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. He asked what causes that. I explained that trauma can cause these things. He then asked, “What happened?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. The simple answer was, “You. You happened to me.” But I couldn’t make the words form.

I said, “Sometimes you were hard on me as a kid, and it damaged me.”

He was silent for a moment, and I held my breath as he finished hanging some sparkly ornament. The only sound was the music from the other room, and I thought about how I would always remember this moment, that whenever I heard “Let it Snow!” I would think, “That is the moment I realized my father would always be out of reach for me, that I would never be able to let down my armor with him.” He stepped away from the tree and looked at me hard and said, “I had to be. You were a weird kid and the world was going to hurt you. You were so sensitive to everything, everything hurt you. Your sister, she came out mean and I knew she would be fine, but you… The world was going to hurt you and I wanted to make you hard.”

I stood there as his words entered my heart. A “weird kid”? It didn’t make sense to me, that he would hurt me in order to help me from being hurt. I knew his childhood was a violent one, and I guess that he figures it worked on him to make him hard against the world, so he would help me.

I’ve heard the “mean” thing before. Ask any of my immediate family and they will all tell you that I am the nice one. Over Christmas I met his girlfriend and she said to him later, “Alicia is nicer than you! She must be like her mother!” and he said, “No. Her mother is mean. Her sister is mean. I’m mean. Alicia is the only one who isn’t mean. You have to really hurt her to make her be mean. I don’t know where she came from.” Of course, when my family talks about the times I have been “mean”, it’s always the epic rage moments when someone has hurt Marlena and I lost my control.

That day in his living room he put his hands on his hips and smiled at me. “You’re still too sensitive, but you can deal with it now.” We then talked about OCD and I told him about some of my compulsions and he said, “You always did that!” as if that made it better.

I’m still not sure where this is going, or how I feel about him suddenly being back in my life and so involved. I’m still wary and skittish.

I guess I always will be.

Today in Bones class we were discussing blunt force trauma. Specifically we talked about trauma to the head, and the brain injuries it can cause.

As the TA flipped to the slide with a list of symptoms of brain injuries due to trauma to the head, a few of them jumped out at me and made me wonder.

You see, a lot of the physical punishment I took as a child was to the head. My father hit me hard enough once to leave a hand shaped bruise on my back and my mother threatened him with death if he ever left a mark on me again. He never did, despite subjecting me to abuse for years afterward. My head was a favorite target – he could reach it easily, I couldn’t really move fast enough to avoid it, and he could get me from behind and it caused blinding pain. His favorite thing to do was to slam his palm down on the crown of my head. Sometimes I would bite my tongue and draw blood, sometimes the inside of my cheek, but it always resulted in seeing stars and a good headache for hours afterward. The back of my head was another great target, because he could come up behind me and cuff me as he walked past. Sometimes he did it hard enough to make my neck ache as well.

So there I was, sitting in a darkened room looking at a slide filled with symptoms of brain injury and ticking off things that were “wrong” with me. The big one though, the one that really made me feel a twinge of pain in my chest, was the non-epileptic seizures that can be caused by a blow to the occipital area (the lower/back part of the skull).

I’ve had “tiny seizures” for a long time. The only doctor who actually witnessed one didn’t think it was enough of a problem to investigate further, since they were over in a few seconds. He said, “Well if they get worse, come back, but it shouldn’t affect anything in your life other than looking weird for a minute.” During the seizure I have head twitches and sometimes I convulse for a few seconds, and then it’s over. Most of the time I don’t even notice them, and it’s not until someone else says, “Are you okay??” that it even registers. The only warning I have is a feeling of “static” in my head, like the TV was turned to snow for a few seconds. Sometimes I have a buzzing in my ear, but sometimes it’s just the twitching and then it’s over.

Other symptoms with occipital lobe injuries include: Difficulty performing math problems, difficulty identifying colors, and hallucinations.

I chalked all of these things up to different aspects of my personality. Can’t do math? Okay, it’s just not my thing. Can’t see colors right? Well, once I realized that my color palette was completely different than people around me, I just assumed that I was color blind, which is a rare thing in those of the female sex. (My father would have to be colorblind and my mom a carrier.) Hallucinations? Well, not so much, mostly bad dreams and night terrors.

On one hand, it feels sort of vindicating that there might be a reason for some of the things that are broken in my brain. On the other, it’s just another sad reminder of what I lived through, this awful truth about my “happy childhood” that no one will believe because it wasn’t “severe” enough.

And yeah, I know it could just be that I have a misfire in my brain somewhere, that I really am just colorblind because of genes, that I have nightmares because I was an abused kid and nothing more. I know all of that, but I also know that my head took a lot of damage from when I can remember until I was 16 years old. The last time he hit me, it was a blow to the head that knocked me to the ground.

Coincidence? Maybe.

Probably not. But maybe.

I guess at some point I’ll get an MRI of my head and see if they can see anything. Or I won’t, because I don’t want to know.

“I never get the chance to come out of the closet, because my closet was always made of glass.” – Ivan Coyote

Today is National Coming Out Day. All morning I’ve been reading messages of support and love, and of people telling their coming out story. Some of them are sad, some of them are proud, some of them are humorous – especially when the reaction is “Yeah, we were all waiting for you to figure it out.”

I don’t have a coming out story. I guess the closest thing to it would be when I took my sister out and told her I had to tell her something. While we were in the car I said, “I’m gay.” She said, “And?” I said, “That’s it. That’s what I wanted to tell you.” She said, “Oh! Thank god, I thought you were going to tell me something awful, like you were dying or something.”

I’ve always been the way I am. I’ve always been the “tomboy” – the girl in pants, the one who was climbing trees and doing stupid stunts on her bike to impress the girls in dresses. My Gramma called me “rough and tumble” and bought me things from the “boys” section – clothes, shoes, toys. She bought me my first pair of steel toed boots, and was the first person to call me handsome. “Just like your grandpa,” she’d say, and ruffle my hair.

I asked her once, if she was upset that I was queer. She stared at me a moment and said, “Alicia. I might as well be upset that you’re taller than me, and believe me if there was something to be upset about, that would be it because I hate having to ask you to get things down for me.”

I rarely have to tell people that I’m queer, and the people I do have to tell are usually willfully ignorant of it. That’s a “perk” of being visibly queer in a heteronormative, gender biased world. It always amazes me when someone is blind to it, either to my orientation or my sex, because so many people see me and know who I am. I don’t have to come out again and again like my Femme sisters do, telling people they meet that they aren’t the nice straight girl everyone assumes them to be. To be pretty means you must be straight, to look like me means you must be gay. This comes as a surprise to all of the female farm hands who aren’t in make up and a dress but who love their equally rough hewn husbands just as much as I love my wife.

I endured slurs of “dyke” and “lesbo” long before I knew what those terms meant. I didn’t know that Leslie Feinberg was out there. I didn’t know there were other women who looked like me who loved women, and that it was okay. I was told that “butch” meant “man” and had lovers tell me not to “act so much like a guy” – that is, until we were in bed and then they wanted that masculinity to come through.

There has always been a feeling of Other about me. I have never quite fit in. I have never been mistaken for a straight woman, but I have been mistaken for a straight man many many times over. If you put me in a room full of women, I will always stand out because I am Other. Some of those women will shy away from me, trying to put as much distance between my Other and themselves. Some of those women will be drawn to me, and not know why. I’ve broken a few straight hearts in my time, but believe me when I say that my heart is a patchwork of scars from love I knew could not be returned, either because they were straight, or because they were unable to accept they were queer, too.

I walk this line between genders not because I want attention, or I want to be “weird”, but because this is where I belong. I’m a living embodiment of the Grey Area, the place between, a place of magic. I told Kathy that I’m a Transformer – I morph into the gender that best fits the situation, whether it be to take up more space and look intimidating to keep my girl protected from an encroaching male, or to appear more cuddly and open to be able to interact with children. I do these things without thinking about them, without even realizing that it’s happening. It’s the biggest part of my Other.

I’ve never heard the words “Oh, I didn’t know you were gay!” I’ve never been asked what my husband does for a living. I’ve never had someone tell me that I’m “too pretty” to be queer. Except for one silly errant boy (who I still can’t figure out), no man has ever approached me and thought I would be available to him.

My closet was always made of glass. My queerness is a badge, a mark, as obvious as the nose on my face. To be my lover is to be outed, everywhere, every time we are together, because people see my Other and then they know you are Other, too. When you take my hand, your closet shatters. When you dare to kiss me in public, your closet shatters. When you put your arm around me and smile up at me, your closet becomes glass, just like mine always was.

Maybe one day there won’t be a need for closets, or coming out day. I hope that one day being queer is no different than anything else about you. I hope that if someone comes out to you, that you take them in your arms and hug them, and tell them how much you love them, and promise to protect them. They’re showing you their sacred wound, and giving you a lot of power in that moment when they speak the words.

Don’t let them down.

Don’t make them go back in that closet.

Dear You,

My name is Alicia, and I’m here to tell you that it gets better.

I was you, once. I was an awkward thirteen year old who was different. I liked girls, instead of boys. I thought I was supposed to be a boy. I walked around confused and angry and scared and sad and yet elated because of all of these beautiful girls.

I was you, once. I was outed at school and I was tortured and humiliated on a daily basis. They threw things at me – trash, food, pencils, whatever they could find that could be launched at me in the hallway, they threw it. Once I was walking down the street and someone drove by, screamed “dyke” at me, and threw a Hot Wheels at me. It hit me in the leg and bruised me for weeks. They broke into my locker and stole my books and defaced them. They stole my yearbook and wrote the word “fag” across my face, and wrote hateful, horrible things all over it. I stuffed it into the trash can on my way home and told my Mom I lost it.

I was you, once. I told my teachers, my counselor, my principal, my parents. I gave them the names of the people who were harassing me. I held out hope that they would Do Something, that my friends would Do Something, that someone, anyone, would do something… anything… to help me. None of them did anything. My parents told me to “ignore it”, that they would “get tired of it” and find something else to do. My teachers did nothing. My principal called some of the students in, gave them a talking to, told them who told on them, and painted a huge target on my back.

I know what you’re feeling, right now. I know that feeling of helplessness, of hopelessness and sadness and despair. I laid in my bed, crying for hours, begging God for help, begging anything that would listen, to help me. Change me into a boy, make me feel something for boys, make it go away, take my life in my sleep, just make it stop. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t imagine my life going on like this, every day, every month, every year. I didn’t see any way out. My Mom forced me to go to a therapist who told me I was abnormal, that there was something wrong with me.

I tried to commit suicide when I was 14 years old. I wrote a note to my family, telling them how sorry I was that I wasn’t right in the head. I told them I couldn’t take it anymore, that there wasn’t ever going to be a way out of this. I took my father’s gun, loaded it, and climbed into the bathtub. I climbed back out and hugged my cat and told him how sorry I was. I got back in and slid the shower curtain shut and picked up the gun. It was so heavy in my hand, and it smelled like metal and oil, and I knew all I had to do was pull the trigger and it would all be over.

I didn’t.

I was you, once.

One day, you’re going to be me.

It gets better.

It wasn’t better the next day at school. It wasn’t better the day after that, nor the week after that, not even the month after that.

But it did get better.

I know it hurts. I know you’re in pain and it rips you up inside. I know you feel so, so alone right now. I know.

It gets better.

Someone loves you. Right now. Right now as you’re reading this someone is loving you with all of their heart and they would be devastated if you were gone. Right now someone cherishes you. Right now someone cannot imagine their life without you in it, and if they knew how much pain you were in, they would do anything to make it stop. Right now there is someone who would take you in their arms and hold you, and tell you there is nothing wrong with you.

Let me repeat that. There is NOTHING wrong with you.

You are beautiful. You are magical. You are made of stardust and light, and you are important. You have a place in this world. You have meaning and you are going to do something good. You are the living embodiment of love. God does not hate you. I promise you, more people love you than all of the haters put together. The world will have a hole where you should be, if you cannot make it through this.

And you can make it through this.

It’s going to hurt. You’re going to be forged in fire. But you can make it. And when you do, when you get out of this stupid little fishbowl called high school, called junior high school, when you’re out in the world you will see that you are not alone. You never were. We were always here for you, with our arms open and our hearts ready.

Your life is waiting for you. Don’t erase everything that you have the potential to be, because of the arrows they sling at you. The words will fade, the wounds will heal – but you? You can never be replaced. You can never be remade if you choose to end your life.

If you’re reading this and you need someone to talk to, I’ll talk to you. If you’re reading this and you think you want to end your life, I’ll talk to you. There are so many people who will talk to you, who will be there for you. You are not alone.

You are not alone.

I was you, once. One day, you’ll be here. And it will be better. I promise.

I swear it.

Please, hold on. Please, remember we love you.

Please. Please reach out. There will be a hand waiting to take yours.

I promise.

It gets better.

Love,
Alicia