all you can do is keep at it





Violette
I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, where I’ll be having my SRS tomorrow. I don’t in any way believe that SRS is necessary or that it will make me “more” of a woman than I already am; it just happens to be something I want for myself.
I am still often misgendered, even by people who have only ever known me as Carolyn; a constant series of reminders that no matter what I do, no matter how deeply I feel and know that I am a woman or how truly and authentically I simply am one, many people may think of me as one but will never truly see me as one. Which sometimes makes me wonder what the whole point of it is. But I know that I have to live the truth that is available to me, even if other people can’t see it. I know that this, like everything about my transition, has to be something I’m doing not because it will make anyone else see me more clearly as the woman I am, but because it might make me feel more comfortable with myself, and thus more capable of connecting with them as the woman I am, whether they can see me as a woman or not. All I can do is keep at it.
Nobody actually questions that Violette is a woman. Rather, she lacks the conventional, culturally prized sort of physical beauty that might make her sought after by people who only see beauty in conventional things, and she pays the price for it.



And she refuses to perform the role in society of the conventional, agreeable, gentle woman. She feels things too deeply and refuses to pretend that she doesn’t. In expressing herself, she is sometimes difficult and selfish and cruel to others. That comes with a cost, too.

I think that, to one degree or another, I have these things in common with her.
I first wrote and posted the text below months ago, after seeing the film Violette. I liked the film very much, and although, as portrayed in the film, Violette Leduc is not always likable (“Mr. Provost and Ms. Devos don’t try to make you like Violette and you don’t, necessarily, even when you feel for her.” — Manohla Dargis in the New York Times), her acknowledgment and expression of her own heartache and yearning is, I think, brave and radical, and crucial to what made her writing so important.

I need to fashion my own life into stories sometimes, as a way of processing things, the things that happen to me and the connections between my experiences and the books I read and the films I see and the songs I hear and the games I play. I know that in some ways I’m telling the same story again and again, because the same story keeps happening to me. That’s just the reality I’m living with right now. I took this post down at one point because it wasn’t sitting right with me. I felt like it was too revealing of my pettiness, too honest where it shouldn’t be honest and too compromising where it should be uncompromising. I still don’t think it’s good writing. But I think part of what I’m doing here is giving myself permission to write bad things, and to reveal and accept the flawed, ugly, petty parts of myself. So here it is again, with updated text and with some images from the film.

The writer Maurice Sachs tells Violette Leduc this after reading her early work in the terrific new biopic Violette. She has poured her pain into her writing. He can’t give her the love she wants from him. All he can do is tell her to keep writing, knowing that through her work, her love for him will take on value, will serve a purpose, perhaps a greater purpose than it would have served if he’d loved her in return. This dynamic repeats itself throughout the film, later with Simone de Beauvoir…





and she keeps pouring her unfulfilled yearning into her work. And love outlasts the lover.
*****
On Friday morning I woke up with my heart heavy within me. I often wake up this way.
On the way in to work, I read the preface to Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks. She writes, “The communion in love our souls seek is the most heroic and divine quest any human can take.” And it is a quest.
On Friday afternoon, a man taking my lunch order said “What’s your name, sir?” Immediately I recoiled, and seeing my displeasure, he said, simply, “What’s your name?” On some days, I think I’m strong enough for anything. On others, a moment like this can still send me plummeting backwards into myself, when all I want to do is be in the moment with other people. I expect that I will never fully come to terms with the fact that my face tells people stories I wish it didn’t. I expect that it will always feel like something of a betrayal.
But as I try to get as free from these feelings inside myself as I can, to see past myself and into others, I also believe that, as hooks writes in Communion, the quest for freedom and the quest for love are closely linked. “I began to see,” she writes, “that the proper place for love in a woman’s life was not relational love as the source but love generated in the quest for self-realization.”

Sometimes I’m appalled at my own capacity for bitterness. I struggle with the fear that I will always be alone and never be loved. Sometimes I’m so full of hope. Sometimes I think I’m beautiful, and that even if the city is something like a circus or a sewer, someone doesn’t need peculiar tastes to love me, that I’m as human as anyone else, even if “normal” things are hard for me sometimes, even if the course of my life has left me feeling inexperienced and ignorant and unprepared for all the things that I want. At other times, like Violette in the film…

I feel like my looks have come between me and love; I even sometimes feel like it would be peculiar for someone to love me. I have so much of so many feelings inside me.
On Friday night I was hanging around with people I don’t really know. I don’t usually do that sort of thing. I’m usually very particular about the people I spend time with, and not comfortable with throwing myself into situations where I don’t really know anyone. But I’m starting to think that maybe my approach isn’t working, that maybe I’m more likely to meet someone great who wants to be with me while being among people whose company I don’t care for than while being alone in my apartment.
They’re good people but being around them was a bit draining. Being around the right people—who are rare—isn’t draining to me in that way.
The night ended with a hug, a kiss on the cheek, a very casual “Love you, darlin’,” and me thinking that we can’t just give love away to everyone like that, or at least I can’t.
*****
On Saturday, I saw some of those same people again. I caught myself saying “Totally” a lot in response to things because I didn’t have much else to say. It was pointed out to me that I was standing at a bit of a remove with my arms crossed, observing. “Synthesizing,” she said, before she suggested that the experience might show up in my writing. Well, here it is. I can’t force a feeling of connection with people. Some people make a kind of sense to me—they make me feel like communion is possible—and others leave me feeling lost.
I then went (alone) to see Violette.
Violette Leduc’s first published book was L’Asphyxie, which in Violette‘s English subtitles is translated into the book’s English-language title, In the Prison of Her Skin, a title that resonates with me for all the obvious reasons.
She falls in love with Simone de Beauvoir who, like Maurice before her, cannot love her in return, and only encourages her to pour her passion and her pain into her writing.


Again and again, Leduc gives Beauvoir the uncompromising truth of herself. She seems to know no other way to be.


Leduc does not short-circuit her own despair. She does not refuse to suffer. “Find yourself someone,” her mother says. “For that, I’d need to be different than I am,” she says. “Be a woman,” her mother replies, even as Leduc’s work was challenging notions of what it meant to be a woman, notions of what a woman could think and feel and desire. She is a woman regardless of what her mother says, and I’m a woman, no matter what anyone says. She constantly laments her own loneliness, but does not compromise her truth, which could have helped her find companionship, but how real would that companionship be if Violette were pretending to be something different than what she is?
*****
I’m thinking a lot about writing, here, as I prepare for the surgery tomorrow. In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis says that storytelling, for Leduc, is “a means of survival.”

Because what fucking choice do we have. Because even if writing can’t give us the love we thought we were looking for, it can give us something. It can help us on that path toward self-realization, where a kind of love is attainable.





Notes
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Reblogging so my lady can see
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I feel I can relate to everything being said here. Beautiful, raw, and human.
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