getting real–on the argonauts and inside out

I’ve been reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and it’s one of those books that knocks things loose in me that I then feel a need to pick up and examine and figure out where they belong, not unlike the rolling, rattling memories in the mind of Riley, whose brain is the main setting of Inside Out. which I saw last night.

Nelson’s book is both an example of the personal made public and about the value and purpose of this kind of writing. For the obvious reasons, I quite appreciated this analogy of hers:

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and I feel a similar need to “make form,” but sometimes I’m very aware that while writers like Nelson are writing about the things that have happened, there’s a sense in which I’m always writing about the things that haven’t happened yet, the things I’m still waiting for and looking for. And I wonder, if things change someday and I find the answer to the particular questions that dominate my life right now, will I then need to write about the things that are happening and the questions they raise? Or for me is this writing just functioning as a way of finding meaning in the absence of the things I’m looking for? Will it reveal itself to be something I don’t want or need anymore when I feel like I have a real life that I’m really living?

In The Argonauts, Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge, and the time leading up to Dodge beginning testosterone injections.

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I feel so many things, reading this. I envy Dodge that he has that love in his life. I think about all the resentment and doubt and insecurity that has built up in my own life and how I also often do not feel at home in the world or in my own skin. I feel sorry for Nelson in this moment, having to contend with that, the argument that her love, as treasured and valuable and precious as it might be, cannot eradicate this particular pain. It is a hard lesson many of us are taught many times over that our love cannot take all the pain and suffering out of the lives of the people we love. 

And yet love can do amazing things, and I keep thinking that if I just had a partner who saw me for who I am, it could make it so much easier to accept that most of the world never will. There is sometimes a wall of bitterness around me, and this exchange between Nelson and Dodge reminded me that whoever comes along to love me will have her work cut out for her, that she may run up against obstacles that have been built up brick by brick for decades. But at the same time, one gets the sense that the love Nelson and Dodge share transformed their lives almost immediately, and I often think that my own curse could be broken almost instantly, that the right person’s touch could almost instantly convince me I’m real, if it’s backed up by love.

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I’ve spent a huge amount of my life not feeling entirely real, in the sense that I think Nelson is talking about here. I think it started when I started to understand at a very young age that I was different in ways that I had no way of making sense of or talking about. Back then I had no way of coping with it but dissociating and escaping deep into my own imagination. I became more absent. In a very real sense I was there but not there. I did not smell the freshly cut grass in the same way I had when I’d been too young to understand what it was that set me apart. I did not feel the sun on my skin.

Inside Out is in a way about a period of withdrawal. Riley’s life is changing in dramatic ways and her capacity for joy and sadness aren’t around to help her cope with what’s happening, so Riley herself isn’t really there. She isn’t really herself. She isn’t really real. 

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I’ve been feeling pretty real recently. Aware of the beauty around me. Feeling the sun on my skin. And it’s better than the alternative, except when it isn’t. When I’m withdrawn, my capacity for joy having fled the scene, it doesn’t hurt so much to be reminded of what people sometimes see when they look at me. Yesterday evening, I was feeling more present, more plugged in, more turned on by the beauty around me. But as a result, the two times I was misgendered (called “sir”) within the span of an hour before I went to see the movie hurt that much more. If I’m real, how come they can’t see it? Am I not real?

But for all of us, there are real things about us most people can’t see just by looking at us. I think we just need someone to see them. “I want the you no one else can see,” Nelson says of Dodge in The Argonauts, and this is what I want, too, to have a love where I see the “you” no one else can see and where that you sees the me no one else can see.

I think one thing that has to be true of a person for me to fall in love with her is that being around her has to make me feel real (and as a result make me want to live), or I at least have to feel the possibility of being real with her, and part of that is in her reflecting my sense of myself back at me. When I know that someone sees me and wants me for reasons that don’t mesh with my sense of who I am (people who tell me they want me because they see me as existing between genders, for instance, rather than seeing me as a woman), I just have no use for that love. How can it be love if it doesn’t even see me clearly? If anything, such affections and desires only make me feel less real. 

At Inside Out last night, the voices in my own head were still raging in response to the coffee shop employee and movie theater employee who had both called me “sir.” The anger at a world that keeps seeing me as someone I’m not was still fuming, the sadness and fear at the thought that I might always feel as alone as I did then were still throbbing. Making matters worse, the screening was in an auditorium filled with couches, practically loveseats. A cute lesbian couple sat next to me, holding each other, comforting each other, as I sat there crying alone at the movie, thinking about the journeys my own joy and sadness have been on and how much I wanted to get out of my own head. I want to share those places inside me with someone else but also have her share the places inside herself with me. To not feel like I’m withdrawing into my own little world anymore but like we have a shared world where we can remind each other of who we are when the world tries to make us forget. 

“Thanks for letting us share your couch,” one of the women said to me when the movie ended.

“Oh, no problem.”

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Maybe this solitude was useful to me once. Maybe I needed it. But the time for its puncturing has come.