ninaherenorthere.com

It is way harder than writing a blog. And don’t get me started on writing memoir, which is perhaps the hardest kind of book, maybe not to write, but to live with writing. We’ll save that dumb move of mine for another day. But writing a book is harder than writing blog posts because I have to think about things like characters, description, narrative, plot, scene. Not just once, but like, in every chapter, for many, many chapters. Then, there are the words themselves, approximately 65,000. And I fondle all of them, even the little ones—conjunctions and articles–and I’m not talking one-night stand fondle either—I have full-on relationships with each word. My brain feels like mush, like split pea soup. And I can’t tell if that’s a metaphor or a cliche. Because I’ve lost all perspective. Which is why I’m deleting the next five paragraphs or random incoherency I spewed in the past couple days and ending this post. Apparently writing a book is so hard, I can’t even blog. At least not right now.

***Part I: Obstacles***

There are thoughts that always seem to spring up during my yoga practice:

“I bet I look ridiculous right now, like a monkey doing an arabesque”; “I was pretty good at basketball, and soccer. Tennis, too. Boy, those were the days”; “Why, oh why, is my right hip so tight? What is in there? Daddy, are you in there? I know you’re in there. Get out of my hip!”; “How thankful am I to have a body that works. Okay, fine, how thankful I should be to have this body. I am thankful for my body, right?”; “If only I was still with that last girl, or the one before that, then I could think about hot sex while stuck in this stupid room balancing on one foot with my legs and arms crossed”; “That second paragraph in chapter six, maybe I should use ‘patio’ instead of ‘deck.’ No, no, deck. Or patio. Deck. Fuck!”

I expected those thoughts and so was truly surprised when the one I hadn’t anticipated trumped them all, lodged itself into a huge ball in my forebrain: I am transgender. I am DIFFERENT.

I guess I don’t have to think about that as much in San Francisco, or in the Castro where even if I’m the only trans person in my yoga class, my ego is at least comforted by the knowledge that in the distance between my studio to my home, I have received both a girl’s phone number and a guy’s tongue in my mouth.

But the second I arrived in Guatemala, I felt my difference: I laughed uncomfortably when the hotel concierge said, “That’s not your real name right, you don’t strike me as a Nina,” and I quaked in my zip-off pants when a uniformed officer with a gun said, “Good afternoon, sir” while staring at my open passport with the big letter “F,” and I panicked for a moment at a bar in San Pedro when I was directed to the “bathroom,” a cement hole with only a bare bones partition blocking it off from the center of a crowded courtyard.

And the second I arrived on my retreat, I felt my difference: When I met my new roommate, who was upset to have been matched with a guy, me, I took on the burden of the situation, as if I had solely caused the problem, as if my being was an irreconcilable problem. And when I removed my shirt, I realized that even though top surgery was without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt stigmatized, a tiny bit ugly, when my scars were acknowledged: The mom who asked, “Are you okay?”; The child who asked, “What are those lines?”; The massage therapist who asked, “Are those tribal markings?” And every time I heard someone address the woman named “Mina,” I felt my entire stomach drop before I’d realize that nobody knew my birth name, that the present incarnation of myself was safe.

At this point in my life, I find it easier to out myself instead of biting my tongue when I’m about to tell a girl I used to play sports against her all-girls school, or explicate that I played in the Sydney Gay Games as a dyke not a gay dude, even though I’m at least kinda gay-ish now. It’s also easy to out myself because I’m writing a transgender memoir and since writing is what I’m most passionate, it’s often the first thing I want to share with new friends.

Within the first few days, I’d told several folks I was trans (although I always said the full “transgender” and tried not to wonder if they had any sense of what I meant by a word that I believe holds a great deal of diversity). If I didn’t tell someone, I assumed they either heard or figured it out, and then, once everyone knew, I developed it into a new worry: I am only a Trans Person, that’s all I do, all I am, all I have to offer.

Different may have been the word I used to describe myself initially, but separation, isolation, and loneliness were the blocks that I turned it into inside my head.

*** Part II: Intention ***

On Tuesday, when I had settled into the retreat enough and still knew I’d have enough time to relax when done, I pulled out my manuscript. It took me a day-and-a-half to get through, and I read it as planned, in a hammock without a pen in my hand and without an eye towards revision. But I also read it with an intention I would not have considered had I not had a brief exchange at breakfast with my teacher who framed my upcoming task as a “nod to the work done.”

Four years of my life, a great deal of pain and triumph, and hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing and revising went into those pages. Some of those paragraphs had been sentences that became chapters that became words that moved from chapter 3 to chapter 5 before finally finding a home. I nodded in acknowledgment, in awe really, of the journey my words had taken. When I bumped into my teacher later, she said I looked clear. She wasn’t aware that I’d read my manuscript, and that after four years, I believed, for the very first time, that I may actually have a book on my hands.

But perhaps the clarity came from the experience of reading a story about a narrator who just happens to have been me, and the new perspective this gave me. For I’d just read a “book” that at its core is a queer coming out story about a person afraid of becoming an outsider, of not being “normal.” And there I was now, a person so comfortable in the Castro as a queer and outsider that “normal” people scared me. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, at the circularity of my course.

***Part III: Yoga***

We practiced yoga every morning and every afternoon, except for the one morning when a few folks climbed a volcano, an adventure I didn’t even consider after focusing on this concept of intention and setting my own for the week: not to go anywhere or do anything; to banish “should” from my head, to let go of any notion of achieving anything.

Yoga can be a complicated endeavor. It can be about trying to get my leg behind my head (I’m not even close). It can be about learning that my pelvis has a floor and if I can just convince it to feel like its holding onto a tampon for dear life, I might be able to do a handstand. It can be about discovering that there are words like kapalabhati and uddiyana bandha that I cannot physically understand, nor even pronounce.

Yoga can also be profoundly simple. It can be about being compassion to oneself and being compassionate to others. It can be about learning what happens when a handful of people who do not know each other take off work, leave behind children and husbands, drop some cash, shed their defenses, and connect. It can be about discovering that my experiences, my story, may be different from that of others, but that a good story, a real story, is universal—that we all experience joy, worry, pain, sadness, anxiety, passion, loss, grief, pressure, fear, loneliness, and if we’re lucky, some gratitude.

***Part IV:Transformation***

In the end, I didn’t leave the retreat property for six days. I’d wanted to see what would happen if I stopped moving, what would move inside of me if I stayed still. I’m not sure when it happened, or how it did, but I visualized the change in a ritual, an image, my separation going up in flames, and in the experience of diving into the icy volcanic lake every morning and sloughing off my coat of isolation

What took its place shocked me: the words of a friend who said I seem “really happy” and another who said I’m “magnetic” and exude the sense of someone who knows it; a friend on the mat by my side, stabilizing me with her steady strong breath; the pale blue eyes of a friend locking her drishti onto my heart every time I opened my mouth; the ease of skinny-dipping in the womb-warm watsu pool under a swollen moon; the cohesiveness of a circle, undulating, and the flickers of light that powered us from our center.

***Part V: Return***

I went to yoga class on Monday night, the first day I was back. I’d told myself I didn’t *have* to go, but after practicing daily, it seemed easier to go than not to, to stick with a good habit rather than force myself into a bad one. And besides, it was less than a five minute walk to the studio from my house, only a few minutes longer than the walk from my retreat room to the yoga palapa. I’d just spent a week with people who flew to Guatemala from NY, Minnesota, and Colorado to practice with my teacher, and now, back in San Francisco, the distance to her seemed even shorter.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was happy to see me, for she is human and not immune to the retreat withdrawal I was experiencing; she too had to let go of the community we’d created; she too had to acclimate back into the urban chaos.

After class, she was excited, telling me that she could see it, that my practice had shifted. Although I downplayed it, as I do, I would agree. I’m a little stronger, a little less self-conscious, a little more aware of my body, able to breath a little deeper. But it is off the the mat where I’ve noticed the shift the most. I waited for the panic to hit when my travel plans went awry after I left the retreat property, and I waited for my job annoyance to hit when I went back to work, and I waited for the overwhelm to hit when I got back to my manuscript and realized I have less than five months to finalize this book. But nothing hit, at least not as hard as it used to, not hard enough to knock me over.

After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

This weekend I interviewed a trans artist friend of mine. We spoke about his music, dance, writing, as well as my writing, about our identities, trans experience, activism, being “out” in the public eye, and the intersection of it all. Before we met, I’d found myself oddly interested in a fact about him and his work for a reason I couldn’t explain. He’d recorded a song, “Little Girl,” that for the first time in music history had a transman sing alongside his former voice.

I understood that the song was groundbreaking, but when I heard him speak so emotionally about how personally definitive this song was, it got my thinking about something that was already on my mind a lot, the working title of my manuscript in-progress (or the “book” or “memoir,” as I also call it, though those words are really too far ahead of where I am).

My manuscript is tentatively titled, “Nina Here Nor There,” a phrase I don’t say aloud very often though I type and read the phrase all the time, consider its unspokenness between me and new friends who discover my blog and now know my former name. So, it felt a bit weird when I actually said the title during the interview, as if I were breaking the seal on something I could potentially see for the rest of my life. Some of my trepidation comes from that, the title of my first book is simply, in and of itself, a huge deal, but there’s also the concern over making my birth name so visible.

I recently read S. Bear Bergman’s collection of essays, “The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You“–most of them about being a former dyke, queer, Jewish, tranny with faggy tendencies. Let’s just say I had a love/hate relationship with the book, as can only be the case when faced with a writer and person so similar and yet so so so so different from me. (I also had complete respect and admiration for hir and hir work.) Bear, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, is very open in hir essay, “What’s in a Name?” about stating hir birth name. Ze makes it clear that certainly family members, airline personnel, and other people with special privileges, can refer to hir birth name.

Reading the essay as a trans person, I completely understood the underlying message, or at least my interpretation of it: There’s a time and a place for given, birth or legal names. This doesn’t make them real names (that’s Bear’s main point) or names to be used at the discretion of others (that’s my point). After Bear published the book, ze pointed out on hir blog that the media included hir given name in reviews–as if it would be remiss to forget this “fact” the “real” truth. I wondered how these reviewers had missed the whole point of that crucial essay.

Ever since then, I’d been profoundly afraid of what the media, the greater public, will do with my former name on my book, how they will abuse it. Until recently, I’d been saying one of my reasons for wanting “Nina” on the cover of my book was to commemorate it, memorialize it, give it a sort of gravestone. In my book, the characters refer to the narrator as “Nina” a handful of times, and each time I write those moments, I hold this name close to my heart.

The reality is, I see “Nina” more often than others probably realize, almost daily. It’s on mail, my taxes, my driver’s license, passport and any piece of important paperwork. I hear it at the doctor, dentist, library, and occasionally the gym. It’s on the bottom, my signage, of very old strings of emails at work, and on all my travel bookings. The super cute woman who cleans our house (and whom I have a crush on) says, “Hello, Nina” when she calls once a month. It took me six months to figure out why I couldn’t tell her my new name. I love the way she says “Nina.” It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful to tell her the truth and have it disappear from her mouth.

Sometimes, I miss “Nina.” Not as my name, but as the name that was once mine. Sometimes, when I meet new people, when I get over my fear that they’re not  seeing me in a way resonates with how I see myself–the trauma of a many years being seen as a woman–I want to pull them aside, whisper in their ear, “For thirty years of my life, my name was Nina. Thirty years of my life. That was me. How I was known. Nina.” Sometimes, when I’m with trans folk and we don’t have to protect ourselves so fiercely, we drop our guards and remind each other, again and again, to mourn.

This weekend, when my trans friend spoke about the combination of his voices on one track, he captured the fear he felt on the cusp of potentially losing his voice (or whatever the uncertain results would be to his vocal chords), the fear of losing everything, of letting it all go. Another thing he said, one of the many that I’m sure I’ll be thinking on for days, was how trans stories are really human stories, striking at something that’s often hard to see in the shock-and-awe factor of gender transition–the universality of the trans experience, of the way people change. My book, while also being an alternative transgender narrative, is, in more general terms, a story about a person finding the courage to let go of who she was.

Hearing my friend speak of his definitive song made me think, at least for the time being, it would be cathartic, empowering, triumphant to have both my names on the cover of my book. How often do any of us get to hold who we once we were and who we are in one place, or have such a defining way to mark the journey, both the fear and the reward. For him, it was through music, his voice. For me, a writer, it is through my words.

Nina. Nick.

There’s a lifetime between those words. Or at least a book.

Don’t get me wrong–I couldn’t be any happier to be writing a book and have a book deal. But I also have fantasies and dreams of the things I will be able to do when I am done:

1. Find a random travel deal online for an upcoming weekend and fly away on a whim.
2. Snowboard, hike, camp, or do any outdoor activity that requires a full day, or even better, two days.
3. Start my day with yoga for a week.
4. Write an essay, fiction, or something not about gender.
5. Read in bed until the morning becomes the afternoon.
6. Go dancing on a Wednesday night, or even a Saturday night.
7. Enjoy the leisurely life of allowing my second job, also known as my “real” job, to be my only job.
8. Take or teach a class–it’s a toss-up.
9. Keep a journal.
10. Consider 8am “getting up early” instead of “sleeping-in.”

I’ve been trying to announce my book deal on this blog for at least 5 months. I have two finished posts on the subject, saved in my drafts folder, but that I refuse to publish. I don’t know what my problem is. I’m not superstitious enough to worry about jinxing anything. However, it’s possible that I’m putting even more pressure on myself to make this a grand announcement than I’m putting on myself to write the perfect manuscript. That’s where I’ve been for the last couple of months — working on the first few chapters. And that’s where I am now, working on the next few chapters.

My book (deal) is for a memoir. I hesitate to call it a book, or even a manuscript, because technically speaking, it’s not finished. That’s the thing with non-fiction, you can sell it on a proposal, which I spent the better part of 2008 writing. (The other part I spent crying on public transportation over my break-up.) My memoir is tentatively titled, Nina Here Nor There. Now you know why I haven’t changed this blog to Nick Here Nor There, other than the sounding stupid factor.

My publisher is Beacon Press. They rule. No joke. Not only did they publish James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which places me in the best company ever, but they have quite a list of serious and diverse fiction and non-fiction; they’re all about social justice, freedom, equality, progress, excellent writing. Check them out.

My book is slated to come out in spring 2011. Which means I have some time to write it, and then some time to beg you (and your ten best friends to buy it). I’m hoping to chronicle some of the process here. As a former writing instructor told me, you only get to write your first book once, which I took to mean it’s special, as opposed to, don’t fuck it up. I’m also hoping to post more often. And shorter. You’d think if I’m going to get 200 book pages, I could learn to be brief here.

So, I bet you want to know what my memoir is about. Yeah, me too. I have a 25-word “elevator pitch,” a temporary back cover blurb, and a marketing-y hook. But you’re not getting any of that; there’s a reason publishers print the actual book, not the proposal. For now, I’ll say it’s a queer coming-of-age story (and as any queer knows, we don’t really come of age until our late twenties), an alternative transgender narrative and an exploration of gender-variant identities. Or, simply put: my memoir has tits, sex, and tears; the main character is neurotic, occasionally funny; it’s like my blog, but with pages. And it’ll be in paperback, which means you’ll be able to afford it. Sweet, huh.

The day that Beacon Press made an offer was pretty much the best day of my life. Although it doesn’t excuse looking like a huge dork in the picture taken that night, my cheeks flushed from a yoga class, celebrating with my “Project Happiness” wine. From now on, I’ll be protecting my image; you’re only going to see cool promo pics and many versions of my “buy my book” face. Besides, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to recreate the pure bliss shown below. Well, maybe when I’ve got my book in hand instead of a bottle.