september baby/40

Your holiness is gone
Sometimes love will make you sad
Until you know where you belong
You dream of what you never had

I can feel the falling leaves
filling up my vacant mind
as I drop down on my knees
and pray you don’t leave me behind

Summertime is over
I don’t owe you nothing
When you say you’re leaving
I want you to hold on

–Joseph Arthur, “September Baby”

I’m a September baby and it’s September, baby, and ‘til you know where you belong, you most definitely dream of what you never had.

This is actually the September that I turn 40. And turning 40 has a way of making you take stock of things. In her book All About Love, bell hooks writes:

When I was approaching the age of forty and facing the type of cancer scares that have become so commonplace in women’s lives they are practically routine, my first thought as I waited for test results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.

40 scares me. 40 feels like a closing off of opportunities. Things that I’ll just never get to experience, things I have to let go of, but don’t know how. Of course I know that many people connect and find partners and love in their 40s and beyond, but this isn’t usually a phase of their lives that begins in their 40s. It often comes after many failed relationships, connections that don’t work out but that leave you with something, teach you something you take into the next encounter. I still feel like a beginner. Waiting for my life to start. Wanting my life so bad. And this divide only makes it harder to connect with some people. People often don’t know what to do with a 40-year-old with a teenage heart and a lack of experience, who doesn’t understand so much of what passes for modern romance, who falls for people very rarely and very hard. I sense the way it makes them uncomfortable, the way it scares them. Is it possible to be 40 and still begin? To be a beginner? Do we allow room for that?

In All About Love, hooks writes,

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.

It’s an awareness that, like her, I knew as a child, but one that has only become more keen in my adult life. Last night, I read this paragraph in Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band:

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The only long-term relationships I’ve ever had were back before I transitioned, when I was hiding who I was, and when Gordon wonders “whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are,” I would say that there can be real love in such a person’s heart–certainly I loved people then–but it can’t really reach, it can’t connect. I could never feel loved because I could never feel seen or honest; it felt rooted in a false notion of who I was. And I could never feel like the love I had to give was worth much, hiding myself that way.

Yet now in my post-transition life, I feel a different kind of invisibility. I’m keenly aware that the world in general does not really see me as a woman, that I am othered. It gets into my bones, a sense that I’m not clearly visible, that I should hide, make myself small. That being seen is something to be feared. 

I take this everywhere. On a hike last weekend, I was aware that I was on guard around all the couples and families walking along the trail, and no wonder; I was repeatedly misgendered on a backpacking trip I’d gone on last year. There is no real escape from my invisibility; better not to be seen at all than to be mis-seen. So I learn to move through the world invisibly, so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention, yet wanting so badly to be really seen by someone I want to really see. It is difficult to maintain a sense of your own worth in a world that can’t see you.

Walking along Valencia St. in The Mission last night, past all the people sitting together in restaurants and bars, really looking at each other, seeing each other, exploring each other, I envied them. And while I know I had to transition to live an authentic life in which a real connection was possible, sometimes I feel as if I’ve just traded one kind of invisibility for another. I fall asleep and wake up longing for closeness and connection. But I refuse to be a mopey sad sack like Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore in Her. I at least need to engage with my life as it is, to confront it, challenge it, struggle against the aspects of it that I find not just unsatisfactory but unacceptable. That’s what this is.

Sometimes I think that my writing comes out of a need to make myself visible, to myself and to others. To assert the existence of my inner life that otherwise so often goes unwitnessed and unexpressed. I think I’ve learned invisibility so well that often I myself don’t know what I think or how I feel about something until I sit down and write about it. It’s not easy, or fun, that process of teasing out my own thoughts and feelings. But it’s essential. 

Like Violette below, all I can do is keep at it, and treat myself with more kindness and compassion than she treats herself with, believing, as Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City, that part of escaping from loneliness lies in “understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”

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Violette

Violette writes as a means of survival. It is all she can do. But if things in my life were different, if I felt intimately seen and valued by a person or people I intimately saw and valued, if the things that get stuck inside me had somewhere else to go, would I still be a writer? Surely I would be a different person. I know it’s possible. For all the time I spend feeling disconnected, there are people who remind me that I can connect, that I can be present and alive and animated and engaged and funny and empathetic. As Joseph Arthur sings in another one of his songs, “In the Sun,” “When you showed me myself, I became someone else.” Or, to quote a rather more well-known song, “Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case.” 

In her new essay The Rights of Nerves for The White Review, Masha Tupitsyn writes, 

As a writer I often feel like I’m in trouble. This is something a writer should never say or admit to. Not if they want to continue to write, and not if they want others to think of them as writers who know how to write. Writing produces constant dread and anxiety: the feeling that I have to write but can’t. That I don’t know how or never will again. This is how writing starts. This means that writing is not simply what I do, it is also what I cannot do and might never do again.

I was grateful for these words, since I so often feel this deeply myself. To me writing feels at times like both a manifestation of my invisibility and the only viable escape from it. But in a sense I want to escape from the need to escape. I want to feel visible so that there is no longer the invisibility to escape from. Who then would I be and what would I do? I think I might just become a somewhat different writer, just as I would become a somewhat different person. 

For all my longing to escape from writing, I don’t know what alternatives exist. And maybe it’s not really writing I long to escape from at all, but the current circumstances that compel me to write, in spite of the fear and failure I so often find in writing. 

Sometimes the struggle is just to stay vigilant against bitterness, and to maintain an open and yearning heart that still believes, after all these years, that something is possible. 

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from All About Love by bell hooks

The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.