Our potential

desirability, generational gaps, and a note about my novel(s)

I wrote a novel this week.

It wasn’t the novel the Rubys funded me to write. It was, however, necessary. I have been experiencing what I can only describe as “performance anxiety” around No One Gets Out of Here Alive, in part due to the very good advice my old English teacher, Professor Decker, gave us back at TC3. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said “your first book isn’t gonna be the one. Your first book exists to prove you can write a book in the first place.”

No One Gets Out of Here Alive would have been my first book, but it is not a first book story. I needed to pour the batter out on my skillet, make that first pancake before I could go any further on a project that has taken me over, made a home out of my life.

The novel I wrote instead, my real “first book,” is my pancake. I put everything I don’t want to have in the Rubys project. All my gripes, all my selfishness, all my peculiarities. All my weird ideological idiosyncrasies.

When I started the novel, a CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s body was cooling on the ground in Manhattan in broad daylight, the dead-eyed clown that is Mayor Adams blustering about the might and the muster of the NYPD, and the killer was nowhere to be found. As I drew my story to a close, Luigi Mangione became my side of the internet’s new white boy du jour, churning out smarter and dumber discourse than I’d ever seen before. Meanwhile, up on the hill, the exit wound of US v. Skirmetti, a historic trans rights case, brought all the latent trans hatred this country’s been choking on to the surface like bile after a night out.

TransLash Media, a transgender news outlet working hard to tell trans stories in an accessible way, has been covering the Skirmetti case better than I ever could. This is me directing you to them, by the way, because I’m about to get so self-centered and navel gazey. As in, this is the last you’ll hear me allude to current events with Googleable specifics in this particular post. You know. Business as usual.

Lately, I’ve been wanting to go back.

Not back to some rosy, fictitious period of human history where everything was great and men were men and God was real, but back in my own personal timeline. I’m sure we’ve all been there. The late night oh, I should have said this, or where might I be if I’d simply done that instead. Gotten in that person’s car, not gotten in that person’s car, called that one guy back, sent that one email, auditioned more, tried harder.

For me, it stems from a sense of lost potential. Not my potential, necessarily, but our potential, in a weird, grotesque, messianic way that many of us are familiar with, this idea that we could maybe be the One. Neo or Katniss Everdeen. We could be the one who does the thing, the face of a movement, the one with the right words at the right time. Maybe this is a new, extremely narrow thought pattern, brought on by those impressionable years when we were all inundated with teenage hero dystopian novels and then, right as we were graduating high school or going into college, all the creepy book-fair liberals tweeting at us obsessively about how we’re gonna be the ones to take down Trump, that they raised us on a drip-feed of Harry Potter and the Hunger Games so therefore we’re magically equipped for the Resistance. Go forth, children. Save us from ourselves.

But those children, our child-selves, they grew up. We grew up. We grew up slowly, our adolescences encased in the amber of our wildly immature social milieu. Shout out to my besties who don’t identify with “social anxiety,” we are truly the few and the proud. Introverts, go play with a ball of yarn or something. Kidding! Come back.

When I was trying to tell my family about how the group chats I’m in with my Baltimore friends caught fire after Luigi’s apprehension, I had to force myself to keep from calling us “kids.” We’re not kids. He’s not a kid. Our brains, slurried by years of Trumpism and a global pandemic notwithstanding, we are the adults now. There is no one coming to save us. There never was. Gen X signed off back in 2016, Millennials heckin puppered and dissociated their way off a building, now it feels like zoomers versus boomers in the series finale of America.

This is, of course, reductive. I’m trying to go back to my whole scratch-pad intention, with this blog, even though my last post was such a heavy hitter. I’m trying to save writing of that caliber for, like, real institutional publications who can pay me or at least get my name out there.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. My life.

Man. I wish I hadn’t shut up about being trans. Do you remember those guys who like, built a whole platform off of being absolutely ripped and unclockable and their whole schtick was like, ooh but I was born female! Uh oh! I used to hate those guys bad. They annoyed the shit out of me. When I was having my first, aborted come-up, I refused to talk about being trans. I dodged it at every opportunity. It felt like admitting my transness would be the weapon forged against me and honestly, it was, and it did prosper. I still remember the look of shock and dismay on the designers’ faces at Indigenous Fashion Week, Toronto, now called Indigenous Fashion Arts, when their all-female cast was sullied by my presence due to a clerical error. And I have to call it a clerical error or I’ll drive myself crazy wondering who made that choice and why.

During that time and others, because there were many, many other instances where I was misgendered or my body was cross-examined for the sin of, I don’t know, my transition, I would text whoever I was dating at the time and they’d always tell me to give up.

You know how they say, well behaved women seldom make history?

I am a very well behaved woman.

I gave up.

But I wish, so badly sometimes, that I hadn’t. I wish, looking at the way the public opinion is being shaped by the most eerie, condescending, uncanny valley ideas, by the sheer boogeyman of transness, I wish I had the kind of platform I once eschewed. I wish, though I know, beyond my silly, fantastical wishing, that it does not work this way, I could be one of those guys, jacked and shirtless, making myself into a walking Transgender 101 for whatever cis person sees me for my presentation and comes to trust me.

But thank God it doesn’t. Work that way, I mean. Thank God there’s no savior.

A couple years back, before the pandemic, I attended Christmas Eve Mass at the Episcopal church here in Hayward, my tiny Northwoods hometown, where I’m writing you from. My mother’s deacon told us about an agnostic friend of his who, late one night, sent him an email. No subject line. No greeting or sign-off. All it said was, “When will God change the ungodliness of the world?”

The deacon repeated himself. “When will God change the ungodliness of the world?”

There, in the tiny church my mother got married in, I looked up at the top of the chapel, where Deacon Marlene placed an eagle feather given by the Native community in honor of this church’s organizing work with neechies in the area, fighting, constantly fighting, the onslaught of extractive fossil fuel industries and open-pit mining. The deacon looked at all of us, carefully, before saying, “We are the instruments of God’s change.”

Whenever I feel helpless, hopeless, utterly unmoored, I remember that. We—not me, not I, but we are the instruments of God’s change. We are not the One. There will never be just One. The One is a metaphor, a face, a shorthand. We can follow the One’s example, if we’d like, but we do it our way, interdependent and relationally.

There is a line I wrote in my novel. I’m going to be very annoying and I’m going to quote it, here, because I think it has a lot to do with the generational tensions I’ve alluded to.

	“Don’t,” I say, my voice thin with grief. “Don’t make me wait to outlive you.”
	At his tilted head, I press on.
	“Change with us. There has to be a better way. This can’t be all there is. We’re better—you’re better than this.”

Yeah, the Millennials quirked their way into oblivion just as the Boomers betrayed us, but it’s also not that simple. My enemy is not my grandpa. My enemy is your enemy is this empire, on autopilot, and the wonderful news about our empire being on autopilot is that we can turn it off. We can shut it down. The old families are dead. The legacy is over. We have obliterated our past, for better and for worse.

So I stop myself. I stop myself from wishing I could have kept down that path I diverted from so long ago. I look at where I am now, a body among bodies, one among many, and I see our potential never really went away. Our potential is already being realized, expanded, it could never be subsumed within a flashpoint or a New York Times bestseller, no franchise can hold it, it is alive. We are alive.