why can’t you see me?

“When you get informed, that’s when the real loving starts. Now I’d have to explain myself to someone all over again." 

-from After Delores by Sarah Schulman

I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?

(I cannot stop listening to this cover.)

Lately I keep thinking that love is about seeing and being seen, about knowing and being known. I keep thinking that these are some of the things that are missing.

I think that when you go for so long with something missing in your life, you start to see it differently. It takes on a different kind of importance. You either convince yourself that it doesn’t matter at all–I did that for a long time–or you acknowledge that it really, really matters. 

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(from The Devil, Probably, as posted yesterday by Masha Tupitsyn)

For me, the stakes are high. Like bell hooks says in All About Love, "When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered." 

When people ask me about the past year and I tell them about the challenges I’ve faced, everyone reacts as if the hardest thing must be the loss of my job. And of course that was and is challenging, but it is not the thing that weighs on me most. What weighs on me most is the loneliness and the yearning and the lack of love in my life. That’s what makes everything else–losing the job–so much harder. But most people don’t know how to talk about this with me. They gloss it over. The topic makes them uncomfortable. Again, bell hooks in All About Love: 

When I talked of love with my generation, I found it made everyone nervous or scared, especially when I spoke about not feeling loved enough. On several occasions as I talked about love with friends, I was told I should consider seeing a therapist. I understood that a few friends were simply weary of my bringing up the topic of love and felt that if I saw a therapist it would give them a break. But most folks were just frightened of what might be revealed in any exploration of the meaning of love in our lives.

Or as my friend Masha Tupitsyn wrote in her post Mourning After

So much of love—and mourning—is about language. The way we handle love and loss in words. The way we get talked into and out of love. The way we say things we don’t mean and don’t say the things we do. What we say and don’t say about love and what we let others say about it. But if it can’t come out, where does mourning go—happen? This silence and internalization only further isolates us and privatizes our suffering. Maybe that’s how and why replacement works, is so reassuring. There is simply no place for real, and therefore radical, heartache in this culture. No time and no place.

I want to see and be seen, to know and be known, but the truth is that I often walk down the street not making eye contact with people because I know that so many of them will not-see me. (The other day on BART, a jerk said to me, "Are you a man or are you both?”) Sometimes I stay in rather than go out because often when I do go out I’m treated as invisible or treated as something other. It’s hard, after a while, to not let experiences like this change how you engage with the world.

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(from Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn, via karaj)

And of course there are so few people I meet who I want to love, to really see and really know in that way. I certainly don’t believe that there is a “one” (no cosmic lover preassigned) but I do believe that people are not interchangeable at all, that only some people (very few in my case) can open us up from the inside, and that the me I’d become in a “we” with one person is not the same as the me I’d become in a “we” with another person. My love is not exactly the same as another person’s. 

(Tommy sees and knows Hedwig for the first time)

Forgive me for I did not know
‘cause I was just a boy
And you were so much more
Than any god could ever plan
More than a woman or a man
And now I understand
How much I took from you
That when everything starts breaking down
You take the pieces off the ground
And show this wicked town
Something beautiful and new 


And there’s no mystical design
No cosmic lover preassigned
There’s nothing you can find
That cannot be found
'cause, with all the changes you’ve been through
It seems the stranger’s always you
Alone again in some new
Wicked little town

Maybe the lessons you learn about love by seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, are no more or less true than those you learn by not having love, maybe they’re just different, but I do think that maybe I have some things to unlearn. When people come into my life and tell me, you are a desirable woman, it can feel life-changing but also leaves me unsure of just what to do with this information, when so much of the world tells me again and again that this is not the case.

I want to be confident. I know that I am a thing worth having, that my love is worth something. I don’t want to let bad lessons, or the possibility of getting hurt, or the fact that some people can’t see trans women as women, dictate how I live my life. Of course not. But when I want to love someone and they don’t see me as a chance, I can’t conduct myself as if, hey, it’s your loss. I can’t be that blasé about it, as if I have so many chances left, because the truth is that this isn’t a casual thing, the truth is that I need this in order to really live…

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(from Love Dog)

and that time’s wasting.

In life everything is timing. In movies everything is timed. Emotional deadlines set up the urgency to actually act for time. You can’t take too long because We don’t have that long.

(posted by Masha five days ago)

I listen to this again, the way he puts a bit of Bonnie Raitt’s song “Nick of Time” at the end of her song “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and I think, when is the nick of time when it comes to love? For me, it’s always right now. Whether I “find” love tomorrow or twenty years from now, it will feel like it happened just in the nick of time.