Home, Body

Trying to be at home inside a body inside a home.

“Our bodies are our homelands.”

—Camila Sosa Villada

An original ink painting.

It’s a strange time to try and communicate with lots of people I’ve never met. I feel much more inclined right now to turn inward, to talk with my friends and families, rather than to try and convey the hodgepodge of feelings and thoughts to those of you Out There. And I’m not just talking about the “times” that drip red from every email and newsletter and article and post in an inadequate grasp at language to describe the tectonic shifts of geopolitics (literally, “earth politics.”) Because within “these times” there are nested personal times that each of us have been navigating. Grieving family members. Struggling to keep a roof over our heads. Navigating byzantine and crumbling health insurance policies to secure medically necessary surgeries. Bail funds and being afraid to go to the grocery store or the food pantry or the humanitarian aid convoy lest you never be seen again by your family. It feels tremendously isolating to deal with any one of these crises against the background of larger catastrophe that seemingly dwarfs our troubles. And so I do want to write about the personal, not because I think it merits attention in this attention-scarce climate, but because it is through thinking and writing about the personal that I learn how I want to show up in the world. It also isn’t something I do very often. I consider myself a fairly private person. But I am a private person whose next book (more on that soon) is nonfiction of the personal-political kind, and so I’d like to get more comfortable with it.

In the fall of 2024, I lost a family member I was very close to. Her death was sudden, albeit on the heels of a number of strokes in the last few years. We lived on opposite coasts, and I wasn’t able to be there when she passed. No services were held, at her request. What I’ve been left with is her home, a farmhouse with a pond and some land, and shelves and shelves of photo albums, closets full of forgotten things, and the general shape of space in which she used to move. Forgive me if this accounting sounds stilted; it was not coy misdirection when I said writing the personal makes me uncomfortable. Each sentence I write here cuts so close to the bone that I write it down, then wait for the blood to show. If it doesn’t, then I know I can keep cutting. It is also a strange time to write about the personal in a public way. I don’t want to be found, and so I’ve left certain details vague on purpose.

I went back in October for the big purge with immediate family. It was sad to see how a home once kept meticulously neat had morphed into a whirlwind of loose papers, hoarded consumer goods, and the detritus that accumulates after parts of the mind take their leave but the urge to produce and consume still remain. The house was less perfectly fitted turtle’s shell and more a manifestation of the anxiety of growing older. I felt a lot of guilt. But then, the shame we feel about fearing death is the one we hide best from others, especially those to whom we’re closest.

Then a few weeks ago I was back again, this time alone, to feel what love echoes I could. There were surprisingly few. Pulling into the driveway I was greeted by long grass ungrazed and unmowed. The barn swallows drew their parabolas as always, but with a new boldness, unafraid to scold me for venturing into their territory. A doe and her fawn made beds in the wilding pasture, and they greeted me most mornings. The place felt as empty as it was full of life, and that contradiction fit inside as well as out. My things stayed where I left them. It was always a house that lived best with lots of people in it, friends and friends of friends. I could feel a bit of the loneliness she felt in those final years by herself in that place, even though I didn’t feel lonely myself. I had a life to return to. It was not the same.

During the long quiet nights when the frog chorus penetrated the windows, I started rearranging the books in the “library.” That’s what we always called the tiny room behind the bathroom with a large shelf covering one wall; it’s where I slept for two weeks recovering after top surgery almost 15 years ago. Bookshelves are the mind of a home. They hold the thoughts and dreams and wishes and secrets of the inhabitants. Books from college courses soft with underlining. Knitting books for an abandoned hobby. Reference books—a staple in the years before the internet, and one I’ve become increasingly passionate about—on animal husbandry and fire places and quilts and antiques. But also ephemera, odd bits of paper stuck in pages or between spines: letters, phone numbers, travel plans, recipes. I kept the poets I knew, the ones who still resonate, the books by family members, the books on minutiae of country life that still felt relevant. But the many mysteries I boxed up and donated to the used bookstore where she purchased them originally. I made space for new stories on the shelves, ones that haven’t been written yet.

When I finished with the library, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I had concluded that I didn’t want to live in a museum. Some might want to keep things exactly as they were, as they remembered them. A historic preservation behind velvet ropes that visitors can look at but not touch. There are many such houses on main streets and in “historic” districts taking up valuable living space with their fussy docents and Victorian curtains. But I’ve realized through this process that for me, a home is something I make myself. That’s why I moved from one coast to another. That’s why I’ve made changes to my body over the years. An unedited, inherited body is not one I can call home. It’s not just about laying claim. It’s about getting to decide how I want to live and living it, even if it makes no sense to anyone else. The same goes for a house.

The “parents’ rights” movement is much on my mind lately. I’ve been listening to a podcast on Munchausen syndrome by proxy and the sick parents who think they know their children’s bodies better than doctors, or even than the children themselves. And now, when it comes to trans children, judges have weighed in, saying that these children cannot start building a home of their own in their body at least until they turn eighteen. But a place where you can belong, without proof, must be a place you make your own. Otherwise it’s a prison.

These days, in my body, I have been making a concerted effort to engage with the parts I can’t see. Disconnects between my mind and my body that couldn’t be bound or removed, and so they lingered. I’ve been working on bringing messages more frequently between my mind and my body; letting things percolate more easily in both directions. Do I wish that my self wasn’t so neatly cleaved in two, mental and physical, mind and matter? I’m not sure, actually. Wholesale integration doesn’t feel possible or even desirable. Having a little separation is what let me imagine different possibilities for my trans body in the first place. The fiction of the whole subject is just as mythical and exploitable as Cartesian dualism. Who can be whole, especially now? Who wants to be?

I don’t know what’s in store for the farm moving forward. I’ve only shared with you a fraction of the interests and considerations going into it. I still live and love my life in Portland, and for now I travel back and forth infrequently, wastefully. I’m taking things one day at a time, as I know all of you are, too. Be safe, friends Out There; be kind and be mad. I’m here if you need me.

Upcoming

On Monday, June 30, you’re invited to join workshop participants in a celebratory Speculative Shorts Reading, from 5-7:30pm PDT. I’m very proud of all these students have accomplished and the space they’ve held over the last ten weeks. Find the link here and register if you’d like a day-of email reminder.

On July 20th, I’m teaching a class with the inimitable LA Warman of Warman School through Workshops4Gaza. Pedagogy of the Dysphoric is for teachers, writers, and artists who have been depleted of connection to their bodies, imaginations, and voices. How to embody learning when the ground, the body, is dysphoric? When it resists embodiment? How can sensuality and connection encourage learning when the present moment is unbearable? To register, follow the instructions for donating to the Sameer Project, a group doing vital work on the ground in Gaza to bring people food, medicine, and water.