I was writing a post about why I decided to change the name of my substack (again). But I don’t think that’s what you want to read right now, and I don’t think it’s what you need to read right now either. I’m not going to make claims about what you might actually want or need to read in this moment. I will tell you about this essay, and you can decide if you want to read it.
Back in August I collected anonymous survey responses for a project I wanted to write on loneliness. That was a long, long time ago, it feels. That essay is still coming, eventually. This essay, however is not that. Not exactly. This essay is me stumbling my way through writing into something like hope, something like solidarity, something like a way out of loneliness.
Yesterday I attended the kickoff celebration of a partner network in Boston of queer and trans organizations. Celebration though it was deemed, the activity we participated in called attention to the gaps: lack of funding, lack of space, lack of resources, lack of knowledge, lack of relationship. It’s not that these things don’t exist in Boston, but they are increasingly hard to find. At the end we got a chance to share what we had learned in our groups from some brainstorming. We had what was essentially an open mic, and the people, they wanted to talk. To share. We had people of a variety of ages share how good it felt to be in a space where our dignity and humanity was recognized. We had some queer elders share what it means to do it afraid, or to fight fear, because there are queer people who have gone before you and there are queer people who will go after you. There was one impassioned plea to get offline, to organize with just photocopiers and mimeographs, the way it was done in the last decades of the previous century.1 There was a lot of talk about intersectionality and accessibility. A lot of asks for money.
At the end, a person from Pakistan, a migrant, came up. They said that the current political administration makes them fear for their life. If they are to be deported back to Pakistan, they will lose a life where they can be somewhat free, and they likely will lose their life altogether. They spoke earnestly of the people in other places, other than this country (they mocked it by calling it the greatest country in the world), where living a true life means losing your life.
The room got quiet. The proverbial temperature dropped. We agreed deeply with this reminder that we have it better here, that we need to practice solidarity with and protection of migrants. I think we mostly remembered that the current political administration is already removing the rights and dignity of people like us. People whose bodies don’t feel like home to them because the world and circumstances and internal disposition, not to mention dysphoria, scream vastly different things at them in languages too violent to be translated into plain speech, but are nevertheless felt underneath the skin and through the whole self.
I have been stumbling around trying to figure out what to say. I have been stumbling around trying to figure out what to feel. And maybe I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t know what to feel. But I know this: I am not alone in that.
There is an intrinsic connection one feels when one learns that they have shared experiences with another. This is what identity markers do for us. When I tell you my pronouns are they/them, and the people in the zoom room say, “me too!” I can tell that regardless of any other difference, we share something. When I talk in that same zoom room about being as ok as possible, given the circumstances, I know people will understand. That there really is no “ok enough,” not under empire, not in a world where migrants have to fear for the children at school, and for their own lives at work.
The intrinsic connection we feel with each other is more shallow when the shared experiences feel more distant, or when we feel we share no experiences at all. There are people in this country right now who feel more than just ok. They have elected the person they think will solve the country’s woes, and do more than just that. I don’t believe everything is a zero sum game. But I do believe that the way they wish to solve the troubles of our time involves the erasure, potentially violently, of people like me. People whose pronouns are different than what might be expected. I don’t know how to reach up from the depths of despair and terror to find a shallow connection to people who, as far as I can tell, want the people I love to be gone. I’m not sure I want to find that shallow connection.
Why should I? When I have been told time and again that loving who I love, being in queer community, embracing a gender other than the one I was assigned, is sinful.
I am overwhelmed. There is a fire hose of tragedy, a waterfall of hurt and pain. It has existed longer than I have been paying attention, but the span of my attention is dampened now by this stream of painful moisture. Executive order after executive order is released, detailing the destruction of structures that help and sustain so very many people. Detailing the ways in which the people I love need to worry. The ways they need to be afraid.
And maybe fear resides with us, a “faint line in the center of our foreheads,” as Audre Lorde put it because “we were never meant to survive.”
If I know anything, it is this: death comes for us all. We are human creatures, human beings, and at some point, that stops. We can fear for our lives all we want and that still won’t stop the interminable tide of death, of life ending, of time going on and on and on. We were simply not meant to survive.
That’s what we share. That’s our shallow connection. You and I, and anyone reading this, will some day die. Maybe soon. So here’s what I know: I will keep reaching for connection. Keep standing up in solidarity with the people for whom fear is a friend. I may not know what it is to fear for your life the way the migrant at the kickoff celebration does. But I know what it is to fear the end. Death comes for us all, and this administration has increased the chances that my death will come sooner though maybe not by much. But enough that I know what that fear feels like.
So here, here is the work: We talk. We laugh. We eat soup with our friends at birthday parties. We remind ourselves that we exist and we are surviving, at least until we’re not. We say hello to fear, our friend, and we do it afraid. We stand in solidarity with the people for whom fear is closer than a mother’s love. We hold their fear in our hands, let it drop the temperature of the room.
We are not alone. This, I know. So we can sit in the quiet of breathing, the quiet of the fear of death together.
May it be so.
And by that: yes I do mean the 1980s and 1990s. That was a long time ago and we are only getting further from it.
I love death (& the fearof it) as a potential point of connection. When it seems like we have nothing in common, we have our shared mortality, our human vulnerability.