ninaherenorthere.com

The other day I went over to a buddy’s house and used the bathroom. The toilet seat was up, as it probably had been, for the most part, since his wife and children left town. If it were a public toilet, I would’ve squatted, but being inside a person’s house, I decided to put the seat down and actually sit. Afterward, I wondered whether to put the seat back up. Generally speaking, I’m not entirely convinced that down should be the standard position. It’s certainly cleaner, nicer, and more respectable, but should a guy really have to do the work of raising and lowering the seat every time? However, that’s not my point. Down tends to be the default position, and having already spent way too much time in the bathroom thinking about toilet seats, I left it down, the way I used it.

Over dinner, my buddy, who hadn’t seen me in several months, said my voice is way deeper and my jawline has hardened. (I was wearing too many layers for him to see the thickening of my chest.) I was a tiny bit on edge since I don’t see him very often, and even though he was the very first person to call me Nick, based on a personal essay I wrote two years before I adopted it, he tends to get caught up in the moment and relapse on the name thing. But all was smooth on the gender front, until he referred to me as “she” to the waitress. Twice.

I felt myself crumble, my whole body collapsing under the slight he didn’t even notice. The pronoun thing didn’t used to bother me as much, and I think that maybe because I’m more certain of myself than ever before, it’s become even more deflating to see my sense of self go unacknowledged. I feel looked through, invisible, and I shrink. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t always correct people, either at the time or later. Maybe it happens too often, or maybe it’s too painful, exhausting, annoying, frustrating, confrontational, and endless. Maybe I’m too weak to bear it, or strong enough to handle it, or I tend to implode rather than explode. Maybe I’m just tired of explaining what I want to be recognized and am relying on a hormone to, eventually, do the work for me.

After dinner, we went back to my friend’s house. This time when I went into the bathroom, I made sure to leave the toilet seat up. As I raised it, I wondered which was more ridiculous: my actions or the lengths that I have to go to to make others see me.

On Thursday, I had my holiday party for the adult literacy organization where I volunteer as a tutor. The whole thing stressed me out, as most things do. I find socializing with respectable adults challenging, especially when sparkling apple cider is the most exciting beverage served and the event takes place in a painfully well-lit public library conference room. But I realized my concern over my potluck contribution, Safeway cookies, was for naught when I spied the buckets of KFC on the table, and had I known the raffle would take half hour (I won two movie tickets) I would’ve contributed some anxiety to having the patience for that. Had I known there was going to be an ice breaker, prescription pills would’ve been needed.

The icebreaker involved finding the few other people in the room who had the same symbol on their nametags and then sharing answers to a few questions. I hid in the corner, figuring that my learner, S., an incredibly gregarious person, would be too busy chatting up other folks to bother with me. But within minutes, I saw him in the center of the room, towering above everyone, waving his tree trunk arm at me. When I walked over, it turned out that not only did S. and I have the same symbol, but he’d found the one other person with our symbol. In even more of a statistical coincidence, both the other guy and S. had brought bean pies to the potluck.

After the three of us discussed navy beans and bean pie, a favorite subject of S.’s since he’s been bringing bean pies to the holiday potlucks for much of the last 8 years (long before he and I met) we turned to the questions on our ice breaker sheets.

S. read aloud slowly and I let him stumble a bit. “What is the best advice for other learners?” He slapped the line green paper down against his leg and without hesitating said, “Keep coming back.”

“Oh, yeah!” said the other man. “I skipped a week once and it took two years to come back.”

The two of them bonded over that one as if it were the only answer, and I thought about all the times I needed to tell myself, “Keep coming back” to tutoring, writing, yoga, anything for which my first response is flight. When I got to my half of the question, “What is the best advice for other tutors?” the answer came to me instantaneously: listen to your learner.

And that’s what I did for the next five minutes, listened to the two of them talk about their accomplishments with such pride that I thought they might burst from their own expanding self-esteem. At one point, S. told a story about driving and understanding the words on a sign. Alone in his car, he shot his arms into the air and screamed, “I can read!”

Seeing this childlike glee over something I learned to do in elementary school from a sixty-year old man so big he could probably do biceps curls while holding me by my neck and knees never ceases to inspire me, and break my heart a little.

At the end of the party, I reached my hand out for his, ready to shake as we do to conclude most of our sessions. But he hugged me instead, as he had done once in the past, more NBA chest bump than embrace with a final tap of his fist against his chest. “Thanks Nick,” he said. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

I pretend it’s the no-booze, awkward socializing, and environment so outside my element that makes me anxious or stressed out about these types of events. But really it’s that look in S.’s eyes when I see how much I mean to him that terrifies me most.

Last week I had one of those total and complete writing breakdowns. I’d share the trigger, but I really don’t think it matters. Every rejection, criticism, negative word and thought about my writing banged against my skull. I lacked powers of description, I couldn’t find my voice, would I ever learn to use a metaphor, my dialogue was flat filler. I couldn’t come up with anything I could do well other than develop synonyms for failure, inadequacy and shortcoming.

This was about 8 on a weekday morning. I’d been at my computer since 6:30, staring at the screen and trying to convince myself I didn’t suck. Convincing myself required way more strength than I had, so I got in my bed and cried. It was the first time I cried since starting testosterone, and I felt relieved, both because I could still and for the release.

In my torrent of despair, everything swirled. I would never finish my book, which meant I wouldn’t have anything. Like money. This thought almost made me laugh because I hold no hope of making money on writing–not now, not ever. I started thinking about how I wouldn’t be able talk about my writing in public and feel accomplished and proud and important, but it’s been a long time since I cared about those things, since I tried to earn love through my writing.

I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it was that I was really so afraid of losing. The sun streamed through my windows and it was really bright in my room, as it always is around that time. I get up early, so for me, eight feels like noon. Then, I realized what I was afraid of: having nothing to do before going to my job, of getting up and going to my job first thing in the morning, of having my job be the focus of my life. If I didn’t write or didn’t have a reason to write or became too scared to face my writing demons, I would lose my mornings, my time for me, my meditation, my peace, my will to fucking survive, and my consolation for doing so.

I can’t say I picked myself up right away. I basically spent the next two days begging every friend and mentor to tell me what I needed to hear, “Nick, you are a good writer. You can do this.” And although I have boosted myself upon their words in the past week, it is mostly an awareness of why I write that has kept me going, a feeling and place I refuse to give up, a time before I’ve spoken a word aloud. My space heater is on high, the remnants of night still linger outside my window, my desk is bathed in the glow of only a small lamp; I am a dot of light in the dark world, reaching out in calm desperation.