Q

1200dinosaurs-blog asked:

When you're at your darkest, Where do you find strength?

A

Hi.

Forgive me, Julia, if this answer goes off the rails a bit, but your question takes me to different places. I wish I felt better about the answer that I had to give you, but of course the only answer I can feel good about giving you is the truth.

And the truth, in case you haven’t noticed this about me already, is that I don’t have anything figured out, and I don’t pretend to. Sometimes when I’m afflicted by gender dysphoria, or haunted by professional insecurities, or aching for love and companionship, I don’t know what to do other than let myself feel those feelings, as painful as they sometimes are.

But I guess I find strength in anything that I feel reflects my own humanity back at me and reminds me that I’m not alone in feeling the things I feel. I know I quote this a lot but for me it’s just so fitting. James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Books have been extremely important to me. Lately, for instance, I’ve had a lot of feelings about the difficulty, sometimes the seeming impossibility, of finding love, and the books All About Love and Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks have offered comfort and hope and valuable perspectives, even as they have acknowledged that, yes, finding love can be extremely difficult. (Yesterday I tweeted at you, “The search for love continues even in the face of great odds,” which is a statement that hooks discusses early on in All About Love.) Here is a post I wrote a few months ago in which I touch on a section in All About Love that I think was particularly important for me, as a transgender woman who has internalized some shame about being transgender.

For me, cinema is also something that I sometimes take solace in. Music, too. And on rare (but increasingly less rare) occasions, even games sometimes help me see my own humanity by helping me better understand my own journey, my own yearnings, or my own values.

Writing is essential for me. Some part of my brain sometimes needs to fashion the things I’ve been reading and watching and playing and listening to and living into something that I can see on the page, that I can step back from and see take on some kind of structure and shape and meaning. I always feel a little better after I’ve written something like that. 

But of course, my greatest source of strength in times when I feel lost or hopeless is my friends. It’s not always easy for me to reach out to friends. I still struggle with even letting the people who know me best glimpse how insecure I sometimes am, or how lonely, or how dysphoric. There is that part of me that feels like it is a shortcoming, a weakness, to be so honest, even with those who love me. But when I do find myself taking that chance and putting my trust in a friend and telling them what I’m feeling, I usually not only end up feeling like my emotions aren’t the strange or shameful things I thought they were, but also feeling more connected to my friends, who can sometimes offer me a new perspective on my feelings, or can just relate to what I’m feeling in some way, or can feel more comfortable in sharing things with me that they might have been afraid to. 

I don’t know. It’s all a journey. I’m in a much different, much better place now than I was, say, five years ago, but I’m also aware that I still have a lot of growing to do. I think that’s okay.