TransVentures

I’ve been writing this post for over a year now. There are at least 3 drafts that I never finished. I just couldn’t find my words, a case of writer’s block secondary to heart break.

Ask pretty much anyone and they’ll tell you that 2020 has been terrible for a myriad reasons. COVID-19 has stolen much from us and we’ve struggled to adapt to this new normal. However for me, the bad year started almost a month prior. It was a Monday morning and I had just worked an overnight shift at the hospital, sitting 1:1 with a patient who was on an involuntary hold. As I was ensuring the safety of a stranger, my lover was lying dead on her kitchen floor, another one lost to their demons and to the blight that is depression.

I remember sending her a selfie at about 5am. A message she’d never see. I didn’t expect her to be awake at 5am, but I thought maybe a picture would make her smile if she happened to check her phone on the way back from the bathroom or when she woke up in the morning. I had no expectation that I’d never get the chance to say something morning profound.

Nicole and I met after matching with each other on OkCupid in April of 2017, only about a week or two after Laurel had left to move back to Rhode Island. I suppose it was that my emotions were so raw but I sent the first message, something that I hardly ever do. We made some pleasant conversation and she told me that she was engaged to be married later that year. We didn’t meet in person, but we exchanged some a few texts here and there for a couple of weeks and then sort of lost track of each other. A couple of days before her wedding, I had sent a message asking if she was still getting married but never got a reply.

Fast forward into spring of 2018 and I get a facebook friend request from this woman, but I don’t recognize the name, and we don’t share any mutual friends. So I did what any mature person would do, I ignored it. A couple weeks later, as I was scrolling through my contacts looking for a phone number, I scrolled past an entry for Nicole and a light bulb went off in my brain.

We picked up where we left off and before I knew it, she was at my house with her wife, Rachel, getting drunk. I’d met her face-to-face less than three hours earlier and she was passed out drunk on my bathroom floor. I remember standing on the patio with Rachel as she chain smoked cigarettes. She mused that Nicole would probably try to have sex with me if we kept hanging out. I was a bit taken back with this level of frankness.  At this point, I wasn’t sure where all this was going and I told Rachel that if she asked me not to talk to her wife anymore, I would stop right there. But she didn’t.

Looking back, knowing how quickly I become attached, that was the only chance I had for a clean break. Less than a month later, in a hotel room in Canada, I would tell her that I loved her for the first time over a bottle of 94 proof rum. I tried to take it back immediately, but I could no more take it back than I could dismiss the fact that I had grown very fond of her in a short time. I knew that I wanted to be with her, despite the complications of our situation.

She had come into my life when I felt like I was at the absolute rock bottom of my existence. I had been actively planning my own suicide and had gone so far as to write a series of letters to various loved ones. I had a plan in place, but I didn’t have a time. She had given me something that I needed, an escape from that thought process and ultimately a reason to live. Within a couple weeks I was on my way to enrolling in nursing school with her giving me the final push that I needed to get started. She saved my life but I couldn’t save hers.

The friction between Rachel and I was odd. We’d go through periods where she acted as if she wanted to be my friend and then the next thing I knew, she was ranting, screaming, crying, and texting me non-stop. I continued to try and get Nicole to leave her as I didn’t think it was a healthy or safe environment for either of them. I felt like they needed a clean break and to admit that the marriage should have never happened.

There were times where it looked like it might happen. At one point, Rachel said she had found a roommate and was leaving. Another time she texted me and told me that it was over that I could have (Nicole.) In the end, they never could find their way apart. Rolling into my second quarter of nursing school at Galen, I was trying to balance a full time job at the hospital along with a 16 credit hour class load. My work schedule was identical to Rachel’s, meaning it was difficult to visit and I was trying to not cause any undue friction.

I knew Nicole was massively depressed and I knew that she was ideating. She and I basically had the same mental health diagnoses and the fact that she was ideating wasn’t terribly out of the ordinary. What was concerning was that she had stopped taking her medications and I had been urging her to get back on them. She claimed that the antidepressant was making her manic, but without the mood stabilizer the pendulum swung wildly back the other direction, plunging her into a major depressive phase. Still, I thought she would crawl out of the hole soon. As we headed into December, I knew that I would have a couple weeks off school and I’d be able to visit and boost her spirits up.

But on that Monday morning I received a call, not from Nicole but from Rachel. It was mid-morning and I was winding down from work with a beer and some television, planning to fall asleep on the couch. When the phone rang, I didn’t answer it. I hadn’t spoken with Rachel in a couple months and I had been trying to keep the peace. I figured she was mad about something, so I ignored the call. My curiosity got the better of me, so I responded with a text asking if she needed something.

She told me that Nicole was gone. And it was then that 2020 truly began for me.

I’ve long talked about moving away from Kentucky. To some far away place with great civil rights, lots of lesbians, and maybe some awesome seafood. I talk about how terrible Kentucky is and this Commonwealth is in a tight race with Indiana for the coveted title of “Worst EvAr.”

But do I really hate Louisville, or even Kentucky at-large? Or do I just hate Fern Creek? It’s probably not that simple, but it still deserves a moment of pause and consideration. Because why move one thousand miles away, when you really just need like eight miles, right?

I should explain how this thought appeared on my radar. As a side note, continuing that radar metaphor, I suspect if my brain was illustrated it would look like an ATC screen on the day before Thanksgiving. Very cluttered and busy. Hard to say.

Anyway, I got up and decided to go out and try to find an undershirt before clinicals. Something light, long-sleeve, and clingy to go under my scrubs. After Marshall’s was closed, and Target didn’t have anything to fit the bill, I thought that I would go eat breakfast. Which is my first mistake, being that it was 11:00 on a Sunday morning which means Church crowds. I rode by First Watch, but they looked busy and their food isn’t really my favorite. So I rode down to ZEGGZ in Middletown. As I’m creeping along on the motorcycle looking for a place to park, I notice the crowd demo. Mostly older, white, straight people. All I could think was, “Could we not?”

So I rode on and on and on, and eventually I ended up at North End Cafe on Frankfort. I ended up foregoing breakfast altogether in favor of their Bacon Cheeseburger, cooked medium, with some sort of decadent white cheddar. It was really good. The atmosphere was better too. Sure, it was mostly white people, but that’s to be expected, because gentrification is Louisville’s fourth favorite pastime. Right behind Basketball, Bourbon, and Horse Racing. In no particular order.

I had tweeted recently that for the most part, the closer a restaurant is to my house, the more out of place I’m going to feel. This is about the same with bars. This is not me saying that I’m better than the other patrons. I mean I am, but I digress. However, as a queer trans woman, I just don’t fit. There’s no where in my zip code for me. I went to Outback the other night, because it was near-by. I was the youngest person at the bar by like a couple decades. It was odd.

Everywhere I’ve lived, with the exception of the two years I spent in Texas, has been along the Southern Jefferson county border or beyond, out in Bullitt county. I’ve never lived anywhere that one would charitably describe as “fun” and/or “hip.” It’s with a certain amount of longing that I stare off into the good time daydreams of places like New England or California. Forgetting about things like shit tons of snow and buying heating oil in bulk, or the horror stories of housing prices in the Bay Area.  Which leads me back to my original question. Do I hate Kentucky and, by extension, Louisville because they’re terrible? Or do I just think that because living in Fern Creek is so bland?

When I posed the question on Twitter, Liz responded to my question with a question, asking, “Why not both?”

I know what she’s getting at, and she’s probably close to the truth, regardless of what I’d like to admit. Instead of answers, I’m left with yet another question: What do I do with this information?

I was sitting in the car at a stop light earlier this morning and Sum 41’s “With Me” came on the radio, courtesy of my old iPod that hasn’t been updated since probably 2010. Instantly, the song took me back in time and I nearly teared up. It made me think back to a month or so ago, when something similar happened, but this time with Less Than Jake’s “The Rest Of My Life.” At the time, I was in a severely depressed state and was fighting with suicidal ideation. The song came on about 4:30 in the morning, as I was pulling into the parking lot of my office. I probably hadn’t heard the song in five or more years, but I knew the words. And those words hit me like a ton of bricks. 

I started crying in a parking spot outside work. Luckily at 4:30 in the morning, there’s not a lot of people to notice. Plus it’s dark. But I started thinking that it would be the song I wanted people to hear when I was dead. As the course played and rolled into the second verse, I wept uncontrollably. Thinking of all my mistakes, all the wasted times, all the words I never said, and just everything that had been bringing me down over the last year or two. Depression loves a person like me who can’t let go of the past. That way it can fester and build upon all those events that you play over and over in your head. Depression loves that you can’t seem to let go of feelings for someone who has moved on. Depression is always looking for an in. A crack in the dam. A window left unlatched. Depression doesn’t mind waiting, and all I could hear was it shouting at me, over those lyrics being played through dry-rotted car speakers. 

[Chorus]
It’s gonna kill me the rest of my life
Let me apologize while I’m still alive
I know it’s time to face, all of my past mistakes
It’s gonna kill me for the rest of my life

[Verse 2]
This is my all time low
Somehow it feels so familiar
Somehow it seems so familiar
I feel like letting go
And every second that goes by
I’m screaming out for a second try
Said goodbye, to my best friend
Sometimes there’s no one left to tell you the truth

I wanted to die, or at the very least lay in the warm embrace of the shambles of my life. In those situations, I go back to blaming myself for transitioning. As if *not* transitioning wouldn’t have killed me by now. But that’s not what I think about. Depression tells me that I’m here because I decided to transition. It’s partly true, but not 100% accurate. There are elements of truth in there, but it’s so much more than that. In any event, I didn’t die. I didn’t wallow. I dried my eyes and trudged into work, begrudgingly. 

Flashback to today. I’m sitting in the car, thinking about that and simultaneously thinking about how much better my outlook is at the moment. The problems are all the same. I’m still all the things I said up a couple of paragraphs, but my mental health has improved. Nothing in my life changed, except that I finally got treatment for my ADD. When I can focus on tasks, I don’t have time to obsess over shit that I can’t fix. Sure, many of those things still run through my brain about as many times as a 14 year old boy thinks about sex in an hour, but I can not let it paralyze my day and my life. It’s been about three weeks since I started taking Adderall and it’s not without its own drawbacks, but the pros outweigh the cons. I’m happier, I’m struggling less at school and I’m getting more done at work. 

I still haven’t found an antidepressant that works for me. My treating psychiatrist has had me gene tested to determine a treatment course, but I’ve not been able to see the results yet. I am thinking that with the combination of ADD treatment and an effective antidepressant, I might be able to get a hold on everything and be in a much better place. Even from where I am right now, which is not so terrible. 

Note: Title comes from The Early November’s track of the same name. 

(This is a piece I wrote for my ENG 101 class. I thought I might share it here.)

Minutes To Memories

When I was a small child, my father and I were as close as close could be. While we didn’t spend much time together, as he only had custody of me every other weekend, the time that we did spend together was great. In a lot of ways, during those years, he was a better parent to me than I am to my own children. While not the most eloquent, he would often tell me, “Suck it up, tough it out, and be the best you can.”

It was my father who took me to my first real concert. Sure, we had been to concerts in the park, usually with whatever woman he was dating at the time. But this was different. This was a major concert in what I considered to be a huge venue. Freedom Hall. At five years old, just the name alone inspired awe in my mind.

We saw John Cougar Mellencamp, as he was known at the time. Mr. Mellencamp had completed three fourths of his journey from his humble beginnings as Johnny Cougar to John Mellencamp. His 1986 tour found him and his bandmates playing in support of his latest LP, Scarecrow. It was an oft played album in our house, with verses telling tales of love, rock-n-roll, and the downtrodden times of farmers struggling to make ends meet in middle America. It was from one of the songs that my dad co-opted that line to he’d frequently share with me, and even going so far as to write it in letters and postcards. Dad would tell me, “You are young, and you are the future, so suck it up and tough it out, and be the best you can.”

Some thirty plus years have passed since that concert on a cold night in February of 1986. I still remember that concert but not as much for the music, not so much for the venue, but more for the memory of my father. Our seats were on the upper level, but my dad convinced the security guard to allow us down on to the lower level. Sometimes the memories when no one speaks, and everyone listens paint the best memories, decades later.

Most of the memories of my father in years since were not of the warm and fuzzy variety. We often found ourselves at each other’s throats, metaphorically speaking. We both knew which of our respective buttons to push and rarely was there a holiday or family event that didn’t end with one of us mad. I recall wondering if I was just that much of a disappointment to him or that he just couldn’t derive joy from anything other than someone else’s misery. 

Yet for all the vitriol that we spat, I still think about the good times. He’s been gone for over five years now and I often find myself lamenting our relationship and how things could have been different. More than that, I consider how he might feel about the woman I’ve become. In many ways, I’m a person he never knew. But that’s another story altogether.

My father was a complicated person. For the life of me, I have never been able to figure out what brought him joy in life. Born in 1954, he was the middle child of Leroy and Deloris Newton. He started dating my mother when they were both teenagers. Of five pregnancies, I was the only child that they would have together and although he would go one to have another daughter with his second wife, my mother never had any other children.

It seems that the vast span of years that my parents were together were punctuated by his alcoholism. While he was at the bottom of a bottle, my mother was often left to deal with the aftermath. This included his inability to maintain gainful employment, the numerous wrecked cars, and other things she’ll never tell. All of this while caring for an infant child. Having finally had her fill of that life, she filed for divorce when I was just two years old.

Three more years would pass before he would embrace sobriety and I can still remember the fights they had prior to him putting down the drink. One such incident would be permanently singed into my memory, with him caving in the door of my mother’s Volkswagen as I sat in the back seat. The metal of the poor car groaned and creaked as he dispatched the kind of savage punishment most people only see in a gang movie. This was in the driveway of my grandmother’s house on a cold, wintery Sunday night. This was a place I considered to be my safe haven. And while he spent the next 27 years of his life sober, those memories never real fade away.

My father owned his sobriety. Through A.A., he sponsored numerous other people who like him were struggling to get clean. Professionally, he worked hard trying to make up for the lost time in his career. In 1992, he started a home repair business and made an honest living for himself and my sister. He dealt with a fair share of setbacks, including another bitter divorce, but he seemed to live by those words that he’d said to me so often. “Suck it up, tough it out, and be the best you can.” He saw us as the young and the future.

I don’t feel as young as I once did, yet I know I am still young in comparison to my parents. Personally, I’ve have weathered some very rough seas in my life and they’ve become more tumultuous in recent years. Most days, I fear that I have still not seen the worst of what life has in store for me. Nevertheless, even when I’ve wanted to quite literally give up on life, I’ve somehow managed to suck it up and tough it out. Every day, I try to be the best I can. However, by my own estimation, I come up short most days.

Throughout it all, we persevere. I know that no matter the complicated circumstances that surrounded our relationship, he wanted nothing but the best for his children. I do my best to bestow that mindset upon my own children, as they are the young and they are the future and I want them to be the best that they can. Passing that idea on from generation to generation is the narrative of the song from which that line is borrowed. I hope that when I’m gone, their memories are less littered with pain and hurt feelings that the one my father left me. In the end, memories are all we leave behind.

“Days turn to minutes and minutes to memories.”

Title comes from “One Year Later” by The Get Up Kids. Interestingly, not the first time I’ve used a line from that song as a blog title. See also: “This is not a swan song, but it goes”

I did want to follow-up on my Thanksgiving post and thank Jordan for reaching out to me. It meant a lot, as we’d not really spoken before. I suppose that I struck a chord with Kayla, as she blocked me on Instagram. That reaction seemed odd, as I didn’t reply or interact with the post. I just took a screenshot. In my mind, I would think blocking me on Twitter and/or Facebook would be more productive, but what do I know?

I worked today. 174 stops, 209 packages. It was a long day. I was struggling with the severity of my situation and really just in crisis. I’m not sure what happened, but I managed to slip out of it for a couple hours, bust out the work. But as soon as I was in my car, off the clock, the sadness crept back in, though not as dire as it was this morning.

Despite what I tweet and blog, I actually spend most of my time worrying about money. I’ve looted everything that I had and then some. I work a lot, but I don’t make enough to cover my expenses. I’m moving towards eliminating as many bills as possible with the skoolie conversion, but it’s not happening fast enough. Nor do I have the budget to really complete the build. That instability is really what’s had me on the rails for the last few months. The heartbreak is just more romantic to talk about.

It’s all sort of intertwined, when you think about it. My financial situation and the heartache. They are joined together at the hip. I explained the financial stuff to some friends over tacos the other night. Just the broad strokes. Their response was somewhere between bewildered and “are you fucking kidding me” and “Why?”

That’s an easy question to answer though. It’s that you (I) do stupid things when you’re (I’m) in love. Allow me to be your cautionary tale. It is entirely possible that my only purpose on earth is to be cautionary tale for others. “Look what she did, don’t do any of these things,” the tour guide says, as they walk by my exhibit in the freak show.

I should go to bed. Another 200 packages await me in the morning. Capitalism never sleeps, but I should.