August 29th, 2005.

August 29th, 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans nine years ago today. Luckily, it was the one hurricane I ever evacuated for (and even early, beating the traffic - I had a bad feeling), because my apartment got six feet of water. I lost nearly everything. I did go back to New Orleans in January of 2006. I left at the end of that July, ending my seven years in New Orleans. I know things have changed dramatically in the last eight years, but, what things were like those few months back is still burnt into my brain. If you want someone who can tell you about how deeply the Hurricane affected various communities in New Orleans or New Orleans in the last nine years, you are looking for someone else. I'm really only qualified to give a "this is what a natural disaster means to the emotional life of one person who lived through it" story.

This is a tough day every year. This year it feels...harder? more emotional? than the last few. Some years I don't remark on it on the day, and it sneaks up on me as I can feel summer ending, and I take just a little bit of time to sit with the loss. But, today, it feels like some of the things that the hurricane set off have come full circle. This was the year that multiple strands in my life made "I need to see New Orleans again" go from an occasional thought to something a little more definite. I still don't have a plane ticket or definite plans, but there's an acknowledgment that that is part of the healing process.

I don't know and can't know what it was like for someone for whom New Orleans is where they are from; I had done "the college student who then continued onto grad school so I live here now but I don't have the roots from here" thing, and it was still devastating. I didn't have to stick around to really dig into rebuilding or deal with the community I expected to have for a lifetime now being scattered all over the place - I didn't end up somewhere else when I thought I never would. And that space itself is kind of liminal - it adds an additional layer of connected enough to have trauma, not connected enough to quite fit into that narrative or to really feel like one can own that trauma.

(It's at this point that this gets hard to write - which means something when one is a dyke who has lived on the West Coast and has a plethora of identities that point to Gold Medalist in the Lesbian Processing Olympics. Hell, I was a queer spoken word performer - verbalizing my emotional life in detail to people is A Thing I Do.)

But this was the first year that I let myself have anything that didn't have a definitive endpoint or an immediate exit strategy. It was the first time I had something hard that I could easily run away from rather than figure out, and I didn't run away. Everyone who stayed close in my life before this year is because they put out a continual effort to do so. This is the year where Hurricane Katrina and "let's do everything to not experience that degree of loss again" went to "Hurricane Katrina is this shitty thing I lived through. It sucks. I will not let it run my life." And that, gentlepeople who actually read this, is Some Scary Shit. It's also August 29th Is No Longer A Major Excuse For Problems In My Life Day, which is letting go of the scratchy, uncomfortable yet warm blanket of a defense mechanism.

Butch

One of the advantages of attending Expensive Nursing Graduate School at Very Prestigious University is that on the rare occasion that the stars are right and an event fits in my schedule, I'm not completely exhausted, and I actually find out about something before it happens, I get the opportunity to see people speak I otherwise would never have the opportunity to see. Back in September, I saw Cherríe Moraga talk, and it was a pretty incredible experience. One thing that struck me was how vulnerable she made herself, talking in front of what was a room of mostly much younger queers than her - who have entirely different experiences of queerness. There were a few times when she started to say something that sounded transphobic, and then it immediately turned into her own personal struggles with gender and how to best support queer youth who have very different options and experiences than her.

Hearing how she struggled with gender was like a lightbulb turning on in my head that let me stop overanalyzing my gender and realized that, for years, I had insisted on gender neutral pronouns, not because I was trying to assert a positive non-binary identity, but because I felt like I flunked out of womanhood. This started to lead to a lot more uncomfortable internal conflict when my niece (who turns three in less than a month, so this was a long time coming) was born, and as she's gotten older and has a much more verbal view of the world, I worried about what sort of message I was sending if she saw that someone like me felt they had failed at gender.

Being constantly questioned as to my lesbian credentials made it more irritating, I admit.

I want everyone to find an identity and embodiment that feels comfortable for them, and that's not something that comes out of feeling one isn't good enough to be one thing, so one has to default to something else - it's about finding something that speaks to your heart and soul in a positive way.

I've spent time in multi-generational butch/femme communities (and Goddess knows there are problems, but I miss them, because never have I felt more like I was coming home), and, ultimately, the problem was not the older members - it was the younger members who fetishized the 50s. I got tired of hiding the fact that enforcement of an intricate gender fetish on one hand, and patriarchal messages on the other were fucking me up behind an intricate wall of overly academic queer theory justifications. Who someone is isn't primarily about what's in their head - that's how we figure out how to articulate it - but what's in their heart. And ultimately, my butch heart is that of a women-loving-woman whose masculinity is not a caveat to her womanhood, but an expression of it. And that's a fucking hard thing in this world, and no amount of over-intellectualizing to blame myself is going to change that.

At least when I was in my early and mid-20s, we would have all benefited from reading less academic queer theory while working shitty service industry jobs and instead doing a hell of a lot more listening to our elders, but maybe I'm just old and cantankerous at this point. But, instead, we had to separate ourselves from our elders and pretend we were smarter than them, better than them, and obviously we had it all figured out. Not shocking given the age range, and something that has been true of every generation since the Paleolithic, most likely.

It helps worlds that I'm with someone who cares about and wants to be with who I am. It helps that she's so incredibly strong that I can put aside the "butch armor" and that I can remember I'm strong, when so much of the time the outside world makes me feel spent, battered, and drained. Given how I was treated in some of my past relationships, this is even more of a blessing. I'm really glad I figured it out before getting close with her, and I'm really glad that I was in a healthy place on my own, but it's refreshing to be in a relationship that makes me healthier, not worse. And it's nice to just be understood, for a change.

Speaking of the butch armor, the older I get, the more the straight world grates on me. Partly, when I was young, I did shit jobs, could mostly pick whom I was around, and in general could fade into the woodwork. Now, I feel like I have no choice but to constantly explain myself to a world that no longer believes I exist. I'm not talking about butch flight - if I have to debunk the idea that "all the butches are becoming trans men" ever again, it'll be too soon - I'm talking about how the mainstream LGBT movement has systemically erased all but the "straight-acting" (and I'm not saying femme here - femme is anything but straight-acting), shoved trans people, when visible at all, into neatly contained gender normative boxes, and thrown everyone else under the bus. Straight people can think of me as a man (or, in their eyes, "someone who wants to be a man") - only if they can criticize all the ways I fail at it - but not as a butch woman, because our herstory has literally been erased in a quest for some semblance of acceptance. A lesbian who doesn't look like one you'd see on TV no longer exists in the minds of most of the world. And this isn't being misread, but an impossibility of looking at a body known to be female, seeing gender being performed a certain way, and not stripping away the womanhood. But, hell, we can get married now, so everything is great.

Returning to Cherríe Moraga, the question becomes not only how do we resist that, but, and this may be a "get off my lawn" moment, how do we get masculine of center queer youth to stop disrespecting femmes and other feminine people, get them to realize how incredibly hard and dangerous it is to be feminine in this world, and get them to stop fetishizing the "butch armor" as some sort of badge of toughness - because it's not. It's the accumulated weight of the constant micro and macroaggressions, and it sucks. It sucks to have an enormous amount of trouble trusting. It sucks to always be distant, to not let people in, to be stoic when all you want to do is cry and let people know you're hurt, and to always try to pretend that you're not human and don't have emotional needs. I remember being young, and being jealous of the older butches (and I'm talking 30-something and 40-something - there's something about being butch that makes you age fast, in this way) who never seemed to be upset, who never seemed to be sad, who never seemed to let the world get to them. And I wasn't that at the time, and I don't know how lucky I was when I was young.

I don't think I would have really gotten this then, but now that I'm in my 30s, I understand that reserve, that unreadableness, that lack of outward show of emotion was not a mark of their butchness, but rather a mark of everything the world had done to them and everything they had done to survive. And I couldn't really understand until I was there, and every day I try to not build that armor up more, but try to learn to take risks and put a little bit of it aside. And it's hard, and I don't want the generation after me to grow up believing that's what it means to be butch - that something born out of hurt, and pain, and fear is a mark of strength. And believing that is a mark of strength is part of what makes masculine of center queers think femmes are their caretakers, that they're responsible for their well-being, because mimicking decades of hurt without understanding involves cutting oneself off from one's own emotional life - and displacing it onto feminine people (who, of course, "naturally" get emotions and do caregiving work. Of course). Mix that with the fratboy culture too many twenty-something MOC queers have going on these days and you have a recipe for a bunch of misogyny and a bunch of fetishized emotional immaturity.

Nursing Diagnosis: Disturbed Body Image

I'm struggling with body image - I know, at this point, I'm well into the "athlete" range for leanness...and I've lost 9 inches off my waist - my waist is now the size it was when I was in high school, and I was thirty or so pounds lighter, then. I'm all thighs and butt and back...I look like I do the physical activities I do.

Even my mother doesn't think I'm fat (the last time she thought that I wasn't fat was when I was starving myself in high school). I'm down over thirty-three pounds, and I still think of myself as fat. Part of it is having internalized the stupid BMI - which just doesn't work for someone who is an athlete in a sport based around strength and rate of force development, and who is a martial artist - but I think part of it is a really fucked up body image.

Even when I was starving myself, couldn't regulate my body temperature, and would collapse if I stood up too fast, I thought of myself as fat. That was high school. After high school, I went to college, got depressed, and ate my feelings, literally, and used being fat as armor for well over a decade. I could act like I didn't care and used food to feel better. Getting healthy, fit, and lean, in some way, has made it harder - because now I care, and no matter how much someone compliments me on improvements to my health, on my strength, or on my looks - I dismiss it and minimize it. I'm tired of watching every bite of food that goes into my mouth - like, I need, very soon, to say "my body's good" and let myself relax about it sometimes. Drinking a glass of wine or eating a couple squares of *gasp* only 75% cacao dark chocolate and feeling guilty about it is no way to live.

So much of what I have to work on right now is mental - I need better body image, I need to not be afraid to pull myself under the bar (which is seriously holding me back - as soon as the weights get heavy, I stop pulling under the bar fast), I need to be realistic in that...I'm 32. Even if I had the potential to ever be competitive in a serious way as an olympic lifter (and I'm talking "qualify for nationals" competitive, not "olympian competitive"), I should have started over 15 years ago, more like 20. Now it needs to be about personal fulfillment and personal improvement - so I need to not give so much of a fuck about finding the best weight class for me, or finding how absolutely little fat I can carry before I fall apart as an athlete. I need to just eat healthy most of the time, lift, do Aikido, and enjoy the athlete and non-athlete parts of my life.

Thanksgiving, Food, and Not Feeling Like A Huge Jerk

It's weird - I spent 20 years dealing with serious illness, only to learn that it was caused by gluten all along. Even though I have access to care, I don't trust the healthcare providers I have access to to have gotten the testing done promptly enough to distinguish between non-celiac and celiac gluten sensitivity, as I've likely mentioned. Also unfortunately for the timing of the realization, I couldn't yet be foolish and order lab work on myself (board certification as an NP is still a year and a half or so away). And it's not worth being seriously ill for a couple of months to determine something that will have the same outcome.

I bring up this detail again just because not having a lab test makes me feel like a huge jerk when I have to turn down things, even though, ultimately, the test is "does gluten exposure make you sick after long-term avoidance?"

Thanksgiving is frustrating in that it revolves around food. As an ex-vegan, I'm used to this level of frustration, but I think it's a little easier for people to get "I don't eat animal products because of an ethical stance" than "I can't eat anything that is contaminated by gluten because I'll get really sick". Thus far, I've experienced pretty decent respiratory symptoms from being in the same room as flour being mixed into dough (yes, that sensitive), fortunately learned the turkey had had flour put on it before roasting, and then had to explain several times that no, I can't just eat around the skin, and then saw the leftover pie I made put in the same container as the gluten-y desserts, which has the side benefit of sparing me from binging on more pie.

It doesn't help that two people in my family are "avoiding gluten" as a diet, but will still drink beer, have small amounts of gluten-containing foods, and not worry about contamination. It also doesn't help that family sees me not as a healthcare provider, who knows enough to say "intestinal biopsy would have been ideal, but the obvious dx is severe gluten sensitivity of some type", and who consulted with other healthcare providers who concurred.

I'm really fortunate in that two of my three housemates also avoid gluten, and the third is super good at cleaning...because I could, obviously, be getting glutened all the time. 

So, yeah, Thanksgiving was hard, and frustrating, and I felt like a jerk for making people feel like they made stuff wrong, or asking questions about the exact ingredients of everything...and it's not like I don't have enough issues around food (and weight, and body image) to begin with (the "I still think I'm fat when even my mother doesn't" post goes into the queue with "more talk about gender"). Just, even with people who have seen how sick I was from the age of twelve or so on - twenty years shaped by chronic illness - it's almost possible to get them to understand that "gluten contamination" is way less of a concentration than what would be visible to the eye. It makes me worried about a) how do I explain it to people who didn't see how sick I was - and see a fit and healthy thirty-something who has a weird diet and b) how do I support my patients who have celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity (which is incredibly common), and give themselves the tools to help themselves remain healthy?

As a personal aside, it turns out my prior issues with dairy were due to my gut being damaged at the time - I don't have cross reactivity to casein, which is a huge mercy. This opens the door for paleo being a template or a method that I make work for me.

Updates

I'm horrible at keeping up with this but...

1. I finally accepted that food was the root cause of my health problems - I had gotten sicker being vegan (again, it's been a pattern - being veg*n relies on foods I can't handle, especially when one is short on time), but this time my bloodwork was near immediate crisis. I knew that I got sicker every time I went veg*n (especially vegan), and I knew I had some level of problems with gluten and soy - I just hadn't been strict enough to find out how much. After some experimentation, I have a severe gluten intolerance (to the extent that going back on to determine whether it's celiac or non-celiac isn't worth it - even a very small amount of gluten would have me sick for days - so it's 100% avoidance) - what looked like fibromyalgia, chronic complex migraines, chronic sinusitis, horrible skin, IBS, and even the bouts of what looked like systemic inflammatory arthritis were all gluten, and all were gone within a week. There's a moderate soy intolerance in there as well, and a bit to corn. My GI system definitely didn't like any legumes at the time, but who knows what would happen if I tried them again (I'm not eager to). 
2. I was becoming pretty rapidly insulin resistant on a vegan diet (blood glucose was fine, but triglycerides through the roof and energy fluctuations all over the place), so I pretty much had to break the carb addiction. Needless to say, with all that going on, to even get in the ballpark with a healthy diet, I'm eating animals. Six months into that, and three months into cutting out all grains, legumes, and (except on exceedingly rare occasions) dairy, I'm still dealing with eating them everyday on some level.
3. This is the healthiest I've been in about two decades.
4. I finished the RN portion of my program the end of July, and took and passed the NCLEX in early September.
5. I'm now in the MSN portion of my program. This semester is brutal, as in the family specialty, we have almost no clinical (6 hours of newborn assessment, and 6 hours of geriatric assessment), just endless hours of class. We make up for it by overloading on clinical in the spring and next year.
6. I'm also TAing Medical-Surgical Nursing. I feel like I'm making positive contributions to my school, but it's stressful.
7. Weight started to melt off with the change in diet, and being not in constant pain and not dealing with a various degree of debilitation everyday for the first time in two decades, I'm back in the gym. I took up Aikido (specifically Yoseikan Budo). Rather than having to constantly work around my body for what I can do with weights, I'm able to really work on getting good at the full olympic lifts. I can also do a lot of mixed modality workouts. It's pretty great.
8. I realized, gender-wise, I was hiding a lot behind the weight - being that heavy made my body look more genderless. Also, even if my body was still viewed as female, being butch didn't offend as much because I was "unattractive", anyway. And there's a certain harder edge to my body now. There's a whole post on gender to be made.
9. I also realized that I was hiding my internalized shit with my own gender non-conformance behind "they"- clearly, with butch as the central part of my gender, I'm never going to move through the world unnoticed...in a way that is always genderqueer. But to steal how Kelli Dunham talks about it, it's more "woman or whatever". In other words, "she" stopped hurting when I accepted I wasn't a failure at being a woman.

Time Moves Fast...

I get home from my trip, and I blink, and I'm three weeks back in school, and already getting to the middle of April. Hard to believe that in about three and a half months, I'll be an RN. We're in the home stretch for the year - a lot of clinical time, and not nearly as much class time. I've seen a birth, and I've held, soothed, and fed newborns who came into the world in a rough way.

Still, my mind keeps wandering back to the West Coast - Portland and the Bay both went far better than I expected, and I miss it. I miss living somewhere where I make sense to people. And I keep contrasting the puritanical coldness and busyness of New England with the laid-back openness of the West Coast. At least spring is here - we've already had a couple of warm days, even if now the weather wants to trudge along in that not-quite-warm-enough-but-not-deathly-cold spring chill.

In Portland and in the Bay, what struck me was how fondly so many people had missed me. It turns out that a lot of what I thought would be the case was just my paranoia. People out there helped me realize I haven't become a different person, I'm just a more grounded, more even-keeled version of myself. A me with an actual longterm plan that is in motion, which, sad to say, is a new thing I'm doing in my thirties. I guess I'm finally getting really responsible, rather than living hand-to-mouth, day-to-day.

What keeps me going here are the crew of people I'm around. My class, we've all formed various bonds with each other. Some I'm close with, some we mainly just have the connection of going through this intense rollercoaster of a journey together. I can feel myself letting my guard down, bit by bit, as time goes on, learning to trust, learning that I can have a place in the world that isn't so damn marginal all the time. It's terrifying, but it feels good.

On the Bus.

So, I'm on a bus between Seattle and Portland. Seattle was magical: friends new and old, lots of amazing food, and the happy coincidence of running into old friends (also on tour) due to the statue of Lenin, which led to friends realizing I was within a couple of blocks. It was a few awesome days capped off by singing at karaoke night at a vegan metal bar (Highline in Capitol Hill. Get the poutine and the High on Fire off the cocktail menu. Trust me).

It was good to start somewhere I was a bit familiar with, but hadn't lived. All my past memories of Seattle have been good. I'm a little worried about what Portland might drag up for me - I was really a hot mess when I lived there a few years back. There's definitely stuff from my past I haven't dealt with, and a couple people I wasn't on the greatest terms with.

Anyway, we're there less than 48 hours, so it will there'll be even more to see and do that I won't get to. Hopefully the book event tomorrow evening will be as positive as the Seattle event was.