the sounds of not settling
Fuck this weather.
I used to find the rain electrifying. Being cooped up inside while the rain was thrumming on the roof was painful. I’d want to be out in it. Feeling the rain on my skin was like being touched by something alive. And there was almost never nearly enough of that in my life.
There still isn’t, but this rain we’ve been getting feels so cold, and the days are so short. I feel trapped inside by the darkness and the downpour, trapped in my own loneliness. Sometimes it all feels like it’s closing in on me.
I don’t know if it’s the season but there seems to be so much despair about love lately among the people I know. People are let down, hurting, yearning, doubting that love will ever come through for them. One friend talks to me about feelings I understand very well, the feeling that there are so very few people out there worth getting excited about, that the odds of finding and connecting with someone great seem smaller and smaller with every passing year, and the work of taking time to really get to know someone and trust someone is so daunting and scary, it’s hard to want to go through that without knowing it’s going to work out. But of course there is no knowing it’s going to work out. There is only tremendous risk. Another friend wrote to me, “I’m feeling pretty down about the probability of finding someone who will like me, love me, and respect love.” And another wrote, “There is always something missing. They all say they ‘can’t live up to me.’ That they are 'not good enough for me.’ That I 'deserve more.' But who can give that more to me? To you? My heart is so heavy. I feel like I will never have what I want and I don’t know what to do but to shut down and not even hope for it anymore.”
And sometimes people tell me to let go of the things I want, too. To not want them anymore. But I can’t. I spent so long already not really wanting anything. Now I feel so deeply that what matters most is our connections with others. That those are the places in which we can truly discover and come to know ourselves.


(from Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn)
And of course I have connections with people that mean a great deal to me. But there is also a persistent ache, the awareness that something’s missing. And as long as something is missing, the awareness that something is missing will be at the core of my soul. It’s there in my experience of every film I watch, every game I play, every book I read, every song I listen to. It is part of the lens through which I see the world. If I let it go, if I want less, if I feel less, I will be less myself.
I feel myself sometimes teetering on the brink of bitterness and despair, of deciding that I will never find what I’m looking for so I might as well stop hoping. The reality is that I think a lot of people don’t ever find what they’re looking for. And so when friends come to me and I feel like they are looking for reassurance, they are looking for the sense that “everything will be okay,” I sometimes think that I don’t really have that to give them. Maybe everything will be okay and maybe it won’t. Of course I hope it will be, for myself and for all the people I care about. But I don’t know.
I always found this Death Cab for Cutie song, “Someday You Will Be Loved,” so hollow.
You may feel alone when you’re falling asleep
And every time tears roll down your cheeks
But I know your heart belongs to someone you’ve yet to meet
Someday you will be loved

(via the Tumblr of Barry Jenkins)
How can he fucking know that her broken heart will eventually mend? How can he know that someday she will be loved? He can’t. Maybe she won’t. But I think she should keep fucking wanting it and hoping for it and fighting for it anyway.
There was a woman. Someone I thought might have potentially been great. There was an excitement in our discovery of each other that I felt was happening in our early emails and exchanges. But, she said, she didn’t know if she could love me as a woman, because I am trans. She did me the kindness of being honest with me about this. Still, I hoped. I wanted to give her time to come around, if coming around was possible for her. But always I felt it there between us. I felt her walls up. I felt that maybe if only she could have let me in, that maybe if only she could have seen me as a woman, then maybe, maybe we could have been something to each other. But she couldn’t, so we’ll never know. I felt that she would let me hold her hand but that she would never really hold mine.
She misgendered me a few times. And sometimes I think that love has to be a place where I’m truly, truly seen as a woman. Not where someone has to jump through mental hoops and catch themselves and correct themselves until they finally reprogram themselves to refer to me as a woman, but where I am simply, truly seen as a woman like any other. Experiences like this make me worry that maybe this is too much to hope for.
(And love is not the easy thing
The only baggage you can bring is
all that you can’t leave behind)
I know it aches and your heart, it breaks
and you can only take so much
Home, hard to know what it is if you’ve never had one
I’m scared of the possibility of running up against this again and again, scared of taking the risk of reaching out to someone only to encounter the same issue, the same inability to see me as a woman and as a chance. I don’t know how much of it my heart can take.
But I can’t stop hoping. I can’t stop trying. In a world that already will never truly accept me as a woman, I need to be able to expect at least that much from love. They sometimes say that loving a trans person is a radical act. Well, I believe that love is not an easy thing or a casual thing, that love is a thing that can have a radical impact on our lives, but I don’t want to feel like the fact that I’m trans means that someone is doing something particularly extraordinary just by loving me. I want to believe that it would be perfectly normal for a woman who loves women to fall in love with me, because I am a woman. And maybe that’s not the world we live in. But it should be. And I’m not going to stop wanting it.
I think back to the last person who really rattled me and excited me, shook me up and broke my walls down. How rare that is. Why her and not these hundreds of other people? There was something inside her. It’s hard to explain.
And maybe the reason the rain doesn’t feel alive to me anymore is because of how it felt to be in her arms.
The awakening. “Hunger like a storm.” The awareness that I need something more. Someone who can give me that more, who rattles me and is rattled by me, who breaks my walls down and whose walls are broken down by me.
Maybe I’ll find it and maybe I won’t, but I don’t want to stop looking, wanting, yearning.
A friend wrote to me once, “Love is important, no matter what. Whether you 'get it’ or not. Like, even if I never find it, I will remain true to it. Because it helps me live. It’s a compass. It’s how I live.”
Fuck settling.
I’ve still got a hunger, twisting my stomach into knots.
Notes
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