Essays

Faltering

In a place that’s lacking in diversity, one that doesn’t cultivate an inclusive mindset at the individual and collective levels, broad-based cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy will falter. That’s what it comes down to for me as I look at Southern Utah through the lens of systems theory.

The cultural literacy here is concentrated in teachings and the culture of the LDS church and influences everything and everyone, even those outside the church. That focus leaves those who aren’t members out of social events and social support systems while tending to reinforce small-minded and small-hearted views, at least in this part of the state, about those whose identities aren’t accepted, aren’t represented, or have been historically misrepresented in and by the church. If you don’t believe that, ask me when slave day stopped being celebrated at the local schools. Ask my why it ever existed here in an area folks still insist on calling Dixie. Ask me about the Confederate flags folks fly and display on their trucks.

The selective cultural literacy here is why I experienced no fewer than twenty-seven frictions when attempting to participate in a local literary event, from five different folks centrally and peripherally involved in that event, on seventeen different occasions. Those frictions rose to the level of discrimination in eight cases. The others involved invasive questions about my gender and sexuality, othering, negating, trans erasure, and trauma erasure. The forms of discrimination included ableism, sanism, and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination.

Nobody here can see what happened. They literally can’t see it. The lack of cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy is what allows folks to feel entitled to probing about my gender and sexuality as if I owe them an explanation, to treat me like I’m scary because I have bipolar, to tell me talking about my trauma isn’t appropriate, and more. These attitudes and behaviors also have the effect of expunging me and folks like me from local events, from the local university, and from the area as a whole.

But they really don’t see it. They have no idea. To them, I’m a troublemaker, a problem, someone who’s just hastily making assumptions, not responding to a suite of valid experiences and real erasures that have been occurring for eight months and, outside this event, for five years, which is when my husband and I moved to Southern Utah.

It won’t change. This place won’t change. But what’s happening here underscores why we need more understanding, not less. More inclusivity, not less. More cultural literacy outside of one specific culture, not more of the same. We need these things across the country, but Southern Utah is where their effects are felt earlier than in other places and more painfully and more deeply and more consistently, all outside of a larger supportive community. There is no larger supportive community here unless you believe those intent on gaslighting you into thinking there is or that there is no issue here that isn’t all in your head.

Walks Close to Whining

In this collection you are saying something that needs to be said and you are saying it in language that cannot be ignored or hidden from. The truth told with a very sharp knife. Yet part of this truth is that women allow this shit to go on. Do we not allow men to have the power you describe? It seems to me that as you rip men a new one—the same needs to happen to women. What in the hell are we doing—why do we let our power go? Without this emotional component the collection walks close to whining (in my opinion) which always occurs from a place of weakness. Yet this collection would seem to be aiming at a recognition of the power imbalance between men and women and the way men frequently force their will on us—and then a turn toward a new balance. But the only way that will happen is if women acknowledge their complicity in the imbalance.

The publisher of one of my collections, which dealt with CSA, including my own experiences and those of my best friend when I was young, made the comment above about it in 2011 after soliciting the work from me. I never should have allowed them to proceed with publishing the collection. I just came across the comment again while searching for something else in my email. That publisher was a woman, and it wasn’t Juliet Cook or Margaret Bashaar. It speaks to myriad ways in which some women and female-bodied poets who believe they’re empowering themselves and others can be misguided and do harm. It’s not just men in poetry who harm others and the community as a whole.

Through her lens, my work about CSA walked close to whining and needed to discuss power dynamics that don’t apply to children who are being harmed, including dynamics forced into the strict binary of male and female, one that’s oppositional, not dialectical. The speaker and others who inhabit the poems aren’t even male or female. That isn’t called out ever. As a nonbinary person (who was publicly identifying as trans at the time), it’s not how I envisioned them.*

And this was from someone who wanted to publish and ultimately did publish my collection. Again, I should have yanked it. She ended up quietly removing the collection at some point without telling me or preserving the files in any way. It was a digital collection with custom artwork. I would have liked to have had it, even just for myself. I believe I know why that happened. In any case, it was another form of erasure of me and my work.

Also, to those who say things like, Your work just isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK, please see that this assessment isn’t about the work, nor was that the case with the poet I just had the dreadful, unwanted interactions with. It’s fine for work to not be right for someone. These kinds of interactions go deeper than that, so please quit uncoupling literary assessment (which isn’t even what this kind of thing is) from personal attacks and assessments that go far afield of the work.

* The word nonbinary wasn’t yet in use, and trans felt like a better fit than saying I was bisexual. I knew gender was involved, not just sexuality, and the binary nature of the word bisexual wasn’t a good fit for me anymore, either. I knew both gender and sexuality were on a continuum. I was trying to find the language for my place on those continua as language was evolving to be more inclusive and less oppositional. Also, people can move around on these continua over the course of their lives. For instance, I’m asexual at this point, which used to be the last letter in LGBTQIA+, though it has largely been truncated away, along with the interior T, which has disappeared for political reasons. I never would have identified as asexual in my 20s or 30s. But bodies change, minds change, and age changes, which changes a lot of things about body and mind—in my case sexuality, hence my move to the term queer, which covers the waterfront where gender and sexuality are concerned. More specifically, thanks to a friend, I’ve started using the term neuroqueer because it’s not only inclusive of all my forms of neuroatypicality, it also suggests a relationship between my neuroatypicality and my sexuality and gender. For me, that relationship is real and meaningful.

The one thing I agree with in this publisher’s assessment is that I should not have allowed her to frame my work the way she did. It was a great publishing company. I didn’t think I’d ever get an opportunity like that again. I sold myself, my work, and my values, and I fawned at her the way I learned to in order to survival the unthinkable as a child. That will never happen again. I’d rather live in one of DT’s camps than live a life that’s bought and sold, one in which I’ve been bought and sold.

I will add this one last thought: I recognize that some of the same forces that shaped me in my life may have shaped this publisher in her life. I realize she’s been through it, probably for decades now, the way women, those who are female-bodied, and other oppressed and marginalized groups have been and continue to go through it. But she was still wrong in this instance. She foisted a huge thing on me and my work. Anyone can be misguided. I understand that more when someone isn’t coming from a place of completely (or at least largely) unexamined privilege. That means I do have empathy for her. I still shouldn’t have published with her.

Ashfall and a Window Strike

It rained ash on and around our home last night. I haven’t experienced anything like that since 2011 in Walla Walla, Washington, when a flaming tumbleweed breached a controlled burn line and set a field, then more than just the field, ablaze. Even then, the ash-rain never reached our home. We just ended up in it one day when we went walking in a nearby town. Ash-rain isn’t real rain—of course not—we’re in a drought. It’s just rain in the sense of raining down, the way water does but isn’t.

The smoke is affecting wildlife, including a juvenile Bullock’s oriole who hit a clerestory window this morning on the north side of our house, despite our following the method David Sibley uses at his home for protecting birds from window strikes. We have custom screens on all the large windows to protect the birds, but we draw vertical lines every four inches on the outside of the clerestory windows with a Sharpie. (As of this writing, those lines are now two inches apart.) This allows birds to see the windows and thereby realize they aren’t passable. They also interpret the vertical lines as branches, so they tend to steer clear of them. This method works for us, or at least it did until this morning when the young oriole, perhaps disoriented or otherwise weakened from the smoke, tried to fly between two of the Sharpie lines.

It was a hard hit. We heard it throughout the house. We have a protocol we follow when wildlife is in distress. Within minutes, the nearest wildlife rescue had been called, the bird had been placed in a special container we use for transport, and I was on my way to Wild Friends, a subset of Best Friends, over in Kanab, Utah, so the bird could get medication to prevent brain swelling and gabapentin for pain management—that is, if they survived the eighty-minute drive.

I would never drive to Kanab, especially not this time of year, because the only roads there and back are festooned with wildlife who rest on the asphalt, cross the asphalt, fly over the asphalt, and otherwise end up in harm’s way with every passing vehicle. Right now, many of these critters are young, or littles, as I call them. They’ve never seen cars before and don’t know the danger they pose. Juvenile birds don’t fly well and haven’t learned to stay above the cars. Baby squirrels think the roadways, which are cool in the morning, are a great place to hang out and socialize. The roads to Kanab are human intrusions into lands that belong to critters. We don’t belong there. I didn’t belong there. But I knew the oriole, who lives in my yard and fledged recently, would die without help. So I took the risk and drove carefully and stopped when animals were sitting in the road and slowed down and veered this way and that as needed and even slowed nearly to a crawl at one point with my hazard lights on because there were too many animals for higher rates of speed to be safe.

I nearly hit half a dozen animals. I navigated around, beside, and under another hundred or so. Then, right where Arizona turns back into Utah and the speed limit jumps from 25 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour, I saw what I thought was a rock squirrel sitting up in the middle of the oncoming lane. I slowed but couldn’t stop because the guy in the truck behind me was following me too closely. As I approached, I assessed the situation. The squirrel didn’t move. I thought I could continue, slowly, in my lane, and everything would be OK. It wasn’t. The squirrel darted in front of my car just as I passed, and just in time to be hit by both my front and back left tires. I heard it. I felt it.

I stopped to collect the squirrel and take them to Wild Friends with me if there were signs of life. There weren’t. And it wasn’t a rock squirrel. It was a stoat, a kit at that. Not even an adult. I killed a tiny, beautiful stoat, one of my favorite animals on Earth, whom I’ve never seen in the wild until today, when one was lying in the road where I hit them.

I should say lying in the road lifeless. The kit was dead. Body trauma, head trauma. I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark,” only this was daytime, and it was a stoat, not a deer, and I’m the one who hit them, not just the one who came across the body. I also thought about how every being that lives causes other living beings to die. Today, that fact was laid bare. I, a living being, helped an oriole live, but in doing so, I caused a stoat to die.

I moved the stoat off the road so ravens and vultures wouldn’t end up getting hit while trying to feed on the body and so people wouldn’t swerve trying to avoid ravens and vultures because to swerve might make more dead, as Stafford says. I also didn’t want the stoat’s body to be hit over and over again. That sort of thing makes me sad.

I apologized to the kit and said a small prayer before returning to the oriole, who needed to get to the rescue for treatment.

About eleven minutes from the rescue, the oriole roused and wanted nothing to do with being inside a box inside a car with me. It was a good sign. The rescue staff said the bird was old enough to get a full dose of all their medicines and that, based on how they were acting, they would most likely make a full recovery. I said Jon and I could come back for the bird and release them at our house. Wild Friends likes to make sure that happens whenever possible. I’ve known that bird since they fledged. I know their whole family. The wildfire here may make coming back impossible, which I understand. Fresh air is important, and we don’t have that right now. But I hope they recover and can come home.

May the fire stop burning. May the smoke clear. May ash-rain be replaced with real rain. May the oriole survive and come home to Toquerville. May the stoat rest in peace. May love restore what we fear we’ve lost forever in our lands, our hearts, and our minds.

—

The birds who sound like they’re laughing at funny jokes are actually Western kingbirds, not Bullock’s orioles. My bad for providing inaccurate information about that in earlier posts. Bullock’s orioles sound kind of like they’re saying, Oh, no! I dropped all my marbles or Look, my marbles! Right here. They are here, here, here.

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The drive back from Kanab, Utah, through Arizona after dropping off the injured juvenile Bullock’s oriole and hitting a stoat. Highway 237. Outside Pink Coral Sand Dunes, July 11, 2025.

[Add Images]

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I found out there’s another way to get to the wildlife rescue in Kanab, one that doesn’t require driving through the area that’s so densely populated with wildlife. I didn’t know about the other way. I should have known. Friday would have gone very differently. I wouldn’t have hit and killed the stoat. I also found out that another wildlife rescue has opened in Enoch, which is much closer to my home. I don’t know if they take small birds or if they have the medicines needed after a window strike, but I’ll call them and find out tomorrow. It’s hard to be the reason another living being is no longer living.

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Some deaths hit me hard. Andrea Gibson’s is one of them. I didn’t know Andrea, but I knew their work and their heart and the spaces they created for others in this world. I haven’t really moved since I learned Andrea died. I want the world to be kinder than it is, as kind as Andrea was. My heart is with all living beings and the Earth we share, which means it’s with Andrea, who is everywhere now.

In the morning, I’m bringing the Bullock’s oriole home from the wildlife rescue so she can join her family and the other orioles who are summering along our creek. Jon is coming with me. We’re taking the long way, the one that avoids the most sensitive wildlife habitats between our home and Kanab, Utah.

The oriole made a full recovery thanks to the rehabilitators who cared for her. She’s enough to get me moving again. Life is motion. Love is motion. Everything is motion.

—

We just got back from the wildlife rescue in Kanab and released the Bullock’s oriole. She flew right into the tree where her family has been hanging out. It might be the tree she was born in. The other orioles were in that tree yesterday evening singing their comical tune as the sun set. Orioles always sound like they’re recounting funny stories to one another, then laughing hysterically. It feels like they’re making fun of humans, which is fine by me.

The orioles didn’t know they’d soon be reunited with the juvenile female they thought they’d lost. They didn’t know she’d return at all. Five days is a long time to be gone and then appear again seemingly out of nowhere. She’ll never be able to explain what happened, and they wouldn’t believe her if she could.

When we got close to the tree and she could hear the other birds, the oriole started to dart around in her enclosure, eager to fly free. Then she did. All I saw were her spread tail feathers as she flew away, her body a noisy propeller trilling through the air.

I’m actually not certain the oriole is female or a juvenile. That’s what the rescue believes, but it’s difficult to tell immature males, immature females, and mature females apart. She’s duller than I would expect a mature female to be, and she lacks the eyeliner I would expect to see on an immature male. There’s no hint of black on her throat, which immature males can have, though probably not birds as young as I believe she is. She had the same clumsy flying behavior I’d seen the fledgling orioles, presumably her and her littermates, exhibiting a few days earlier. Taking all these factors into account, a juvenile female is also my best guess.

Her age matters because she needs to get back to learning how to be a bird and gain as much experience as possible before migration this fall. Five days is a lot of time to lose when you’re new to the world and need to get everything figured out pretty quickly in order to survive. She also needs to decompress from the stressful experience she’s had. I hope she has the time she needs to recover, learn, grow, and thrive.

We have bird-collision film approved by the American Bird Conservancy on order for our clerestory windows since the lines we drew on them didn’t prevent this strike. In the meantime, we’ve covered each window with a thick layer of soapy film. We can’t really see out of them, but that’s fine. I will wrap my entire house in blankets if it keeps birds like this oriole from being injured or dying.

—

Two Bullock’s orioles, a male and a female, just landed in the shrub in front of my window. I think the female is the one I took to the wildlife rescue for treatment after a window strike and later released here at our home, which is also her home. If you felt the ground shake a little wherever you are, it was from my heart exploding with love and joy. The epicenter of that seismic activity was Toquerville, Utah, latitude 37.2310016, longitude -113.2756992.

What I Do

I want to understand the origins of the universe, but right now understanding the origins of hate is more pressing.

I want to write a poem about this, but I have so many windows open on my computer that I have a practical universe of knowledge crowding my screen or maybe crowning my screen, trying to break free.

If I don’t close these windows, my computer is going to crash. Typing has already slowed to a crawl, like time does when we’re in danger and every second counts.

I don’t have time to wrap my head around a birth inside a massive black hole that itself was situated inside a larger parent universe than the one we know, barely know, want to know, can never know.

How much more, I think, could go wrong inside an even larger universe? While physicists try to rewrite the laws of physics, I don’t even have time to write a poem because that’s not what I’m doing today. I’m closing windows. I’m reading things later or never. I’m skimming poems on various pages and either being born again inside them or throwing up my hands and yelling, I don’t like this poem at all before clicking the little x at the top of the page.

What is born from collapse can never not know collapse, can never not return to collapse, I want to say to the nearest physicist while wagging my finger. We had one here in Toquerville three years ago. A particle physicist. She lived in the house next to ours. She and her husband, an assistant attorney general here in Utah, made a killing off the house during the pandemic, bought low and sold high, then left all us Southern Utah townies drought dry.

I tried to tell her wild birds were going to die because she’d placed her feeder in the kill range, which is between 3 and 30 feet of her home’s windows. She asked my husband what he did for a living but not me, all while making sure we both asked her daughter what she liked to do so girls wouldn’t be left out of conversations about how people pass their time.

Later, I watched a Ted Talk the physicist gave in which she said she was discriminated against in science because she was a woman. She never did move her feeder. I trilled when she and her husband sold their place. She made fun of my husband for not understanding her joke about the Large Hadron Collider. It was a bad joke. She erased me in her conversation about girls, women, and erasure. Jon and I were like lower-dimensional objects being absorbed and dissolved by a higher-dimenstional one. That’s a thing, apparently, that physicists have observed. Or believe they’ve observed. Or theorized. Or hypothesized. Or something. Ask our no-longer neighbor.

I want the physicist to see this post. I want her to know how she othered Jon and me even as she spoke publicly about being othered. She and her faculty appointment. She and her dull humor. She and her dark matter.

Not all collapse ends with a singularity, I gather as I glance at the window that contains the story I’m trying not to read or understand. Sometimes, there’s a rebound and expansion occurs. In this model, the force is gravity. Purely gravity. No speculative forces or particles needed. No dark energy or dark matter. Imagine wasting your whole professional life on something that may not even be there at all. I think that’s what it’s like to be a poet, too. To create anything. Hell, just to exist.

If expansion is our future, so be it. Let this all begin again. I hope in that future, whatever me-like energy exists has the guts to be a stronger force than that of a physicist who weaponizes casual conversations so she can feel exponentially larger than those around her.

Oh, look. I feel something like hatred. Let me understand that, universe. Let me explore that energy until I can release it or until we are all released from this, whatever this is, this thing we barely know, want to know, can never know.

By the way, physicist. I’m a writer. I write about folks like you. That’s what I do.

Excerpts from My Marginalia in Anne Sexton’s The Complete Poems

Written while hospitalized in KU Medical Center’s psychiatric unit in June 2015. It’s nothing super interesting, but it’s part of my life and my experience. It’s pretty cogent, all things considered. I left out all the parts where I said my father was the devil.

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A psychopath is simply one who structures the world in such a way that control and containment and order and binaries and easy answers prevail. An empath is simply one who for whom prevailing universal ideas of love dominate.

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Use words people understand.

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Explosive and dysfunctional families are the ones in which tension and brilliance come together in such a way that empaths can be created.

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Take breaks. Hydrate. Move slowly.

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Names and faces are hard to remember.

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Every iteration is true but distinct as a dual-state metaphor. Examples: Love is love. Is = Is = Is. People who talk in tongues are actually the ones waking up between these two states.

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Empaths are everywhere. They get activated in situations by other empaths but also by psychopaths.

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Use plain language during activated periods.

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Knowing how to meet someone on their own level is how to keep them safe.

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Are you infinite? Still, the same journey.

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Take whatever you can in the process of becoming and you will get what you need. Ask for what you need and you will get something different.

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Waves of empaths = people get charged up all at once while things are moving in the right direction in the world.

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False prophets in poetry are not empaths.

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All speech is code. The erratic voice is the always-seeking voice iterating over a larger sense.

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You can be an empath and do great harm. Both the empaths who harm and the ones who are harmed are bringing about change.

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Call-out / call-in culture. Bring all voices in.

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True speech parts seas.

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Know your empath legacy.

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Strife. There will always be lots of it. Talk through it. Write through it. Trust when to stop engaging and when to reengage.

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Avoid people who call themselves healer or shaman.

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Poems and where they go are a test of the testimony.

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You will confuse any traditional workplace.

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Hate is the false avatar of love.

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In other cultures, to be means to emerge.

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A word is a word when a word is needed.

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The difficulties, all of them, are important to the journey.

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Do before thinking everything you need to do to get where you are going.

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What encourages a crisis is part of the path presented.

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Strong times of need require strong signals.

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What words emerge from journey, crisis, sojourn?

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Revelations close to death

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A condition by any other name is still a condition.

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Withhold

Crisis of God / of whole

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We become the core crisis of our family, the tension that wants to resolve.

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The book of poems is the breath.

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People will say definitely do something.

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Pain is necessary for our suffering parts to come into alignment.

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What leads to love: hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, but also support, forgiveness, and acceptance of impermanence.

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Even those who harm deserve forgiveness because we all harm each other and heal each other in the same moment. I love Jon even though he harmed me some of the time and healed me other times. I love Jon especially because he loved me through the ways I harmed him. Neither of us wanted to stand beyond good and evil, but we do. I stand at the lips of my maker and breathe and wish him the best in this life and the next. Holy. Holy. I love you, Jon.

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The world is five times our size.

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Every life is equal. Everyone, even your greatest enemy, is also an angel. I have already met my enemy and can call him my best friend. I thank him for showing me the beauty of the world. Sacrifices are worth it. I love everyone now equally. I would love to spend the second half of my life inside this love, with the friends I have never known as well as I know them today.

The Devolution Will Not Be Televised

Oh, wait. The devolution. Yeah. The devolution will totally be televised. The devolution willl be all over the socials. The devolution will be on your phones and watches and all up in your earbuds.

There will be pictures of ICE cubes knocking down your fellow humans on a seven-second loop.

There will be stories of brain-dead women carrying their babies to term in respected hospitals.

There will be slow-mos of fists pumping the air, of Confederate flags entering the U.S. Capitol.

There will be queerfolk being stripped of their humanity daily, hourly, by the minute, by the second, by the millisecond, by the microsecond, by the nanosecond, by the picosecond, by the femtosecond, by the attosecond.

There will be rooms packed with people nobody wants to see as people. Also hospitals. Also boats, planes, trucks, camps, tents, cages, jails, places of torture, places of death, places of death, places of death.

Money will flow up and up like single-use plastic bags carried by a strong wind. You’ll think they’re birds. They aren’t birds. They’re bills, and they’re yours, and there goes another one, into the sky, into the white, white sky that somehow has white hands, that somehow has white eyes and a white mouth and a white mind.

Brother, the revolution has already been televised and streamed and downloaded and bootlegged and AI’d and exported and framed and staged and played and played all the way out. It went down like a sport, a sport that required sacrifice.

Brother, it started long ago. In our home state. In our hometown. In our family. In our ancestry. In our lack of reckoning. In the balls of time click-clacking away on the desk while we’re in another room pretending today is yesterday and tomorrow will be another yesterday.

Brother, the devolution was live. You missed it. We’re already living inside it.

Brother, the devolution was live. We are already the living dead.

—

In homage to Gil Scott-Heron, who wrote the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Plagiarus

I’m not making a case for plagiarism, but I am about to say it’s socially constructed and, like anything else, doesn’t exist outside of a specific context or suite of contexts. It wasn’t a concept until it was a concept, and then it took 1600 years or so to not only become a fully formed concept with a label attached to it but also to be addressed, though indirectly, through newly created copyright laws.

In other cultures and in other periods during Western culture, plagiarism didn’t exist, either as a word or as a concept. Writing something original meant writing something steeped in origins. Poets and writers shared lines and themes routinely, though too much imitation could lead to criticism. In one early case in Rome, in which a poet (Fidentinus) recited another poet’s work (Martial) as if it were his own, Martial wasn’t upset about his work being used without attribution. He was concerned about not being paid. He wanted the poet to buy the poems if he was going to perform them as if they were his. That’s not a bad idea. If I could sell my poems to another poet for a profit—well, of course I wouldn’t. (Or would I?)

What did Martial do in response to Fidentinus? He wrote a bunch of unflattering poems about the guy, in which he characterized him as a kidnapper—a plagiarus (ah!)—which Ben Johnson picked up on about 1500 years later in 1601 when he coined the term plagiary to denote someone who was guilty of literary theft. Copyright laws followed in England and the United States in the 1700s, which accompanied a shift in the concept of originality from something with origins to something wholly new, as well as greater distribution of mass-produced books, a larger body of folks who were profiting from creative works, and a desire for academicians to protect their writing.

Again, I’m not making the case for plagiarism, but I am interested in removing it from an ahistorical context and situating it in history because it’s something we came to, collectively, not something that simply exists and has always existed—just as mental-health diagnostic labels are something we’ve come to, collectively and often with great harm as a result, as opposed to things that exist and have always existed.

Our consciousness about things changes. We will things into being, and we’re sometimes wrong about what we think we see (and perceive as immutable and everlasting). The intersection between plagiarism and the assumption that someone who plagiarized must be mentally ill, particularly with one or more personality disorders, interests me because both the concept of plagiarism and the concept of personality disorders are socially constructed, have come into existence at different points in our history, and will continue to shift over time.

In the case of plagiarism, AI is causing such a shift right now. We’re coming into consciousness about that intersection and what it means for writing and writers. In the case of personality disorders, there are shifts as well, as there should be. They were almost removed from the DSM-5 because of the ongoing debate about whether they’re even mental illnesses. Borderline personality disorder in particular has come under much deserved scrutiny because it’s so broadly defined as to be unhelpful as a diagnostic framework, it’s fettered with gender-based bias, it’s dismissive of trauma, and it disregards the fact that borderline traits appear to be a form of delayed social development, not a personality disorder or form of mental illness.

Someone can plagiarize without being mentally ill. Someone can be a piece of shit without being mentally ill. We can talk about beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors without adding a diagnostic label, especially one we’re not qualified to use because we’re not licensed mental-health professionals. The DSM-5 has innumerable flaws and has always been the product of a colonized mindset, one that situates issues solely within individuals while ignoring larger factors such as institutionalized discrimination. It’s also led a not insignificant number of lay folks to label anyone whose behavior they don’t like with clinical terms they themselves don’t understand and outside of their historical and contemporary contexts, which in turn ends up harming everyone who embraces, lives with, or has had those diagnostic labels foisted on them, as well as perpetuating ignorance, fear, and stigma at all levels in our society.

Said another way, some things about being human are a feature, not a bug. We are kind of pieces of shit who do piece of shit stuff all the time. It’s not all Buddha nature up inside us. There’s some of that, but it’s not the whole thing. We are dark, and that darkness extends beyond mental illness. Bless our collective hearts.

Another Poet Mindfuck

Someone just left this comment on one of my pieces on Facebook:

This kind of writing has poetry and genius and many legit things to say but, I have to say, that while it may be therapeutic for you, it’s deeply disturbing for me and I don’t need that at this point in my life. Maybe you should think about that. If you see your writing as a struggle against emotional/ mental issues, maybe you should keep in mind our struggles as well and what you’re saying to us. Some kinds of therapy should be gone through with a professional trained to deal with personal hells. Rather than FB. It’s not too late to find a way of writing that’s healthier for all of us. I hope you will take this for what it is and not take it the wrong way. I feel it has to be said.

Well, he said it.

I’ve blocked him, since he doesn’t have the agency to stop reading what he states he doesn’t want to be reading.

The odd thing is, he recently solicited my work for a chapbook. He said my writing was lyrical and eloquent, and he’d love to showcase excellent work like mine in a collection he curated. What a mindfuck.

The piece he was responding to in his comment above wasn’t about death or dying. It was about life and living, and it was based on a dream, which is where a lot of my creative work originates. The piece wasn’t therapy, nor is any of my writing. It wasn’t me foisting anything on anyone or trying to make anyone uncomfortable. But I do talk about things in my poetry and prose, even in my discussion of political issues that are important to me, that aren’t always easy.

Nobody has to friend me or follow me or read me. This is my writing space, my discovery space, and a space that’s important because it allows me to connect with other people who are creative, insightful, compassionate, complicated, interesting, delightful, and more.

I don’t need anyone telling me what I should think about, write about, say, or do in this world, certainly not someone I don’t know who appears to be projecting his own issues onto me, my writing, and whatever dynamic he thinks exists between us. (There is none.)

And the mandate that I find a way of writing that’s healthier FOR ALL OF US? Please. That would be a misguided, Sisyphean task, and that’s assuming there’s an all of us who’s reading my work. (There isn’t, and he doesn’t speak for the few who do.)

T4 Centers

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s language about people with autism in some ways parallels what Nazis said about Germans with physical disabilities and mental-health issues in 1939. Useless eaters was how the Nazis referred to this group. More than 70,000 asylum patients were killed in gas chambers called T4 centers before the death camps were in operation. These centers served as a model for the camps that were built later. Though the T4 program, as it was known, formally ended in 1941, the murders directed at this group didn’t stop. By the end of the war, 230,000 people with physical disabilities and mental-health issues had been killed between the T4 centers and the death camps.

Their gold teeth were extracted. Their brains were removed and sent to German physicians to study their “congenital idiocy.” Their ashes were sent to family members without regard for whose ashes were whose, along with notes that covered up what had happened. Murder was never the cause of death. Being gassed, often by one’s own doctor, was never the cause of death. Families were told the cause of death was something physical, unavoidable, like pneumonia or pulmonary tuberculosis. Some families weren’t notified at all and continued sending money to pay for their loved one’s expenses.

One of the main factors in deciding who lived and who died was how many hours a patient was capable of working each week. Think about that as you consider Kennedy’s comments about those with autism never holding a job or paying taxes. Think about that when you consider the implications of a database that’s tracking those with autism and potentially using information those patients and their families haven’t provided consent to use. Think about that when you decide if he’s really trying to help those who have autism or if he has darker motives, not just misguided ones.

The Nazis kept a record called The Hartheim Statistics as part of their T4 program. It was an account of the money saved by killing those 70,000 patients as opposed to maintaining their lives for one decade.

Think about that. Think about how much money this country would save if people like me didn’t exist and how little concern some people would have about our no longer existing.

Am I saying that’s where we’re headed today in America? Extermination? No. But I am saying we’re seeing the same dangerous collective mindset now, here in the United States, that we saw in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany.

People are not worthless if they don’t work or work enough or do the right work in this world. (I would argue that much of the right work to be done in this world is unpaid, and that those with physical disabilities and mental-health issues do that work in spades every day. The healing work. The loving work. The accepting work. The teaching work. The work of helping people see what it means to be human, which allows everyone to be more humane.)

People are not entries on a balance sheet or a way of saving money. We should not have treatment forced on us or be refused treatments we need. We are not things to be catalogued and monitored and followed and corralled into health camps (i.e., institutions we may never emerge from) or whatever else Kennedy conceives of. We are not participants in one big experiment that we didn’t even ask to be part of.

Kenney’s language is dangerous. His ideas are dangerous. His actions are dangerous. His power is dangerous.

The first people killed in the T4 centers were children. A father wrote to Hitler asking him to kill his deformed infant. That’s what inspired Hitler to start T4. I’ll repeat: He started with children.

We must protect our children. We must protect our adolescents. We must protect our adults. We must protect our seniors.

We must all protect each other. We must not look away.

Dana for Mayor

My day hasn’t gone as planned. I went to get lab work done early this morning only to find out the orders were never placed, which means I won’t have results in time for my appointment with the specialist who (should have) ordered them. This is the doctor who, in part, is following my cancer status, so the labs are important.

I came home to an attempted identity-theft scam that Jon and I both had to deal with immediately. Things like this are happening more frequently, and they’re harder to identify. Someone tried to hack one of my online shopping accounts just three days ago.

I commented on a story in The Salt Lake Tribune in support of a gay mayor in one of Utah’s cities. Someone else in the queer community, another Utahn, saw my comment and thought I was saying the opposite of what I was saying. Their response was to tell me that I’m attacking the mayor based on his sexuality, that I’m not being Christlike, and that I’m so ugly-looking that they’d never live in a city where I was the mayor. Humph. I have many grumpies around that set of assertions.

My Fitbit died. I have no data whatsoever, and I rely on that data for my health and mental health.

I drove half an hour each way to see my therapist, where I hoped to talk about the parts involved in my strong feelings about the SLT commenter calling me an unattractive, unkind homophobe, but the therapist forgot my appointment, which means I drove for an hour for no reason and have three exiles I need to deal with on my own now rather than in therapy. (Exiles are a type of part in the Internal Family Systems framework. It’s not ideal to be exploring them alone.)

These are all small problems in the larger scheme of things, and they’re counterbalanced by an incredible conversation and connection I had with a fellow poet today. We talked about organization, one of my favorite topics, and poetry and community and dogs and mountains. I mean, it was good stuff.

Also on the plus side, there’s my sweet dog. And my relative ability to handle all these relatively small problems. And my view of the laccolith, which I can see now that the clouds have started to dissipate or move on or whatever clouds do.

Oh, and someone ran over a raccoon in our neighborhood, so there’s also that sad occurrence. That’s another item for the negative side of today’s +/- list. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been making that fruitless round-trip drive to see the therapist.

You can file this under grumpy with a lower-case g or grumpy with a capital g or dumpy if you also think I’m so unattractive you would never live in a city where I’m the mayor. The last part of that sentence was written by one of the exiles. She was called ugly by her classmates almost every day of her life from preschool until she was well into puberty. We’re working through it.