I want to talk about the concentration camp being built in Utah, where I live, that will warehouse people who are unhoused and force treatment on them for real or perceived mental-health issues and substance-use issues. I want to compare it to the Topaz concentration camp that was built here in 1942 and operated until 1945 under Executive Order 9066, whose name I know because I have to know it. To survive. To advocate. To resist. To not repeat the past even as we repeat the past because others don’t know the name Executive Order 9066 or what it did, what it made our country and its people: ugly, cruel, inhumane. Those who don’t (or don’t want to) know about EO 9066 also may not know that another EO made this new concentration camp in Utah possible, the one written July 24, 2025, whose official title I won’t mention because it doesn’t describe what the order does, what it enables. It would be better if it just had a number, not a misleading title. It would be better if it didn’t exist at all.
But I can’t talk about the concentration camp because my language isn’t welcome, especially among those who also have lived experience with mental-health issues. Those I most want to communicate with will attack me for using the diversity model to give context to what I’m conveying. Those of us with lived experience with mental health have different experiences and use varied frameworks for communicating our experiences. We are and should be polyvocal. Yet there’s a growing push for monovocality—for one way of speaking, for one way of perceiving and communicating human experiences. So I’m not talking, not the way I want to be or to the audience I want to talk to. At least I have this loose take on the haibun.
The age of pastures is over. Detention is involuntary.
Your right to exist on your own terms ends now. You belong on outskirts.
Get used to the word stern. Your life is a concrete slab if you’re lucky.
Say no and go to jail. What is this if not jail by another name?
Like a rose. You think you’re like a rose when really you’re a line item
in a multi-million dollar budget. You’re our ticket, our future.
Containing you is business. Here’s a pill. We’re sorry it’s come to this.
Swallow. Concentrate means gather. We gather you today for Holy
Capital, for the bottom line. You’ve lost your right to leave, so don’t try.
“Nothing about us without us.” That’s a guiding principle in the disability-rights movement. It applies to the mental-health justice and recovery movements as well because mental-health issues are often disabilities for those of us who live with them—sometimes because they are truly disabling and sometimes because our cultures disable us, our communities disable us, and those around us disable us because they don’t understand us (or try), don’t include us (or try), discriminate against us (often because of unexamined or dismissed bias), and subject us to their versions of who we are, which happens daily through language and actions and the way real and conceptual spaces are structured.
I bought a clicker, one of those old-fashioned ones that employees at the academic library where I worked in college used to track how many people came in each day. I’m going to use it for two weeks and track how many times I encounter instances of sanism, both in real life and on social media. I started doing something similar last week by making ticks on a piece of paper. But I like the idea of using a clicker in part because it’s an object I can hear and feel as I operate it, in part because it fits in my hand, and in part because it’s a bright color. I have the kind of sensory processing that appreciates those things. The clicker also feels more formal and official, and I can use it even when I don’t have a pen and paper with me, which makes it more practical. I may include notes about each instance, including the context, date, and time.
OK, I actually bought six clickers in an array of colors because they came in a set, but that’s beside the point. You may think that’s too many clickers. I don’t. I’m mildly tachycardic right now just thinking about their arrival. There’s a black one and a green one and a pink one and a red one and a white one and a yellow one. I’m actually trying to humanize myself in this paragraph and the last one because I made some big assertions in my opening paragraph, the kind that make people (in this case me) unlikable mostly because they fall under the information you didn’t ask for that I think you should know category but also because they may apply to you or those you know rather than some far-off “they” that we can all join in both hating and distancing ourselves from together.
“Nothing about us without us.” I take this principle seriously. It’s like no taxation without representation, only it’s like no characterization, no proclamations based on misinformation, no policy decisions, no representations in the arts and the media, no casual or formal conversations, no application of diagnostic labels especially when used in a pejorative manner, and no limited or completely erroneous lay insights without our representation. That means we are centralized, not marginalized. We are present, not absent. We are heard, not talked over, not silenced, not discounted. It means if we say there’s an issue, you listen. You don’t shift in your seat or put up a wall or fail to respond or shift blame to us.
I’m no longer entering rooms where there are frictions only I appear to see and concerns only I appear to discern, one thousand frictions that are invisible to those who are not queer or neuroatypical or living with trauma or serious mental-health issues. That doesn’t mean those frictions don’t exist. It just means they may not exist for you, and if that’s the case, I’m happy for you. I’m glad a room is just a room is just a room. But your inability to see what others see, feel, and experience in those rooms—your failure to cultivate literacy about the things those who are oppressed and marginalized have to see in order to survive every day—is part of why rooms continue to not be the same rooms for you that they are for others.
These rooms are exhausting. Click click click (click click). If in addition to instances of sanism, I count instances of trans erasure (click), ableism (click), neurotypical bias (click), discounting of women and those who are female-bodied (click), jokes about diversity (or the lack thereof) in a space (click), and more,* there will be no end to the clicking in too many rooms, even rooms full of poets.
It’s impossible to know which rooms will be full of frictions. I’m trying to figure out what clues I can look for ahead of time and to develop a matrix I can use so I know when to call any given room quits. I no longer believe I can change hearts and minds with my presence, my words, or my work. I feel like, more than ever, I’m in a box called “crazy” and that terrifies people, no matter how I live, what I accomplish, how I treat others, or how wonderful folks think I am before they learn I have a DSM diagnostic label or that I’m queer or that I’m neuroatypical in numerous ways. I’ve seen that semipermeable membrane more times than I can count: the one where inclusion becomes exclusion and being part of becomes being removed from.
I feel like my attempts to address frictions only lead to more frictions, many of them in the form of irritation, denial, resentment, and even fear and disgust. But I will do what I can until I realize I can’t do any more. Then I’ll leave before I accept my own erasure and even start erasing myself. I can’t abide that or any other form of complicity.
I’ve mainly seen this level of friction in Utah. At least in other places, my experience has been that I become more human when I talk, when I write, when I take part in things. Of course, I was largely in the closet about my bipolar until two years ago. That may be part of why people accepted me as a human being and not as an amalgam of their stereotypes, biases, and misunderstandings about bipolar. Who knows what those places are like now, in this new world that has us all doing the work of marginalizing and dehumanizing others on some level.
The rooms with poets are the ones I must approach with care above all the others because I need to believe in poets, even if that belief is misguided. I’m not ready to let go of that yet. I know better. I think I know better. I want to know better but, more than that, I want to be wrong. I want to believe in poets the way some people want to believe in God. It’s like that for me.
I also can’t help but see something else in those rooms, wherever they’re located: a kind of arts-driven traveling medicine show meets multilevel marketing network. It’s not quite either of those things, but it does feel like a system that created itself and now uses its existence as a way of validating itself, one that enriches the few and relies on the many, and one that’s unhinged from actual oversight or governance by the institutions many of these poets actually work or once worked for, which means those institutions will not act based on anything that happens, up to and including sexual assault, in or near those rooms. It’s hard not to see it like that, especially after some of my personal experiences in such rooms, which makes it even harder to find spaces that are safe and poets who are doing good work in those spaces.
—
* I’m just listing ones I’ve encountered recently.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Our water purifier started making a high-pitched noise a few minutes ago, a steady ewwww like a piece of industrial equipment humming in the distance, at once piercingly but almost inaudibly. I unplugged it, but the sound made me hyperfocused on my tinnitus, so now I’m just a body that screeches and won’t stop.
I took some sleep medicine, something I rarely do. As I wait for it to kick in, night thoughts do their dark work. I don’t ruminate about minor issues like some folks. My waking nightmares are about my father, my family, Oklahoma, me, the ways in which I’ve been purged, and the things I feel like I need to purge that find me at night when I’m closer to my personal unconscious and the collective unconscious than I am during the day.
I had an unthinkable thought that was immediately ushered by my circuitry to every central and distal part of my body. My feet. My hands. My tongue. My scalp. My shoulders. My gut.
What if, I thought. What if it’s true?
This particular thought is a hard one to put on a shelf until I can process it in the light of day. The “what if” feels less like a possibility than a haunting, a visitation declaring what the world is and who I am in it. I don’t like either. I hope I’m seeing an old lady that’s really an owl, like in one of those optical illusions.
The unconscious realms are beautiful and terrifying. I’d prefer a different ratio of beauty to terror right now. I’d rather experience both while asleep, not while sitting in bed awake, my warm dog pressed up against my calf doing what I can’t do: slumber. I feel her breath on my foot. I feel her chest rise and fall. I feel how soft and small and fragile she is. I feel how much I love her and how much I don’t want to be a monster in a monstrous world.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Terror is my second least favorite. Monster is my third least favorite. To be an awake, terrified monster inside of what is monstrous is nothing I’d wish on anyone.
When I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma, a local bank sent toys out to folks in the community as a promotion. The toys didn’t come with instructions. To get them, you had to visit the bank, where they would try to get your business.
The toy was called The Brain. It was a gorgeous thing with a black base, moveable black wedges attached to black pins and transparent layers of clear plastic stacked on top of each other. Each layer had different shapes cut into it. Together, they could either lock or unlock each pin. The goal was to figure out how to move all the pins out and then back in.
It wasn’t easy, but I cracked the code. That’s not what’s important, though. What matters about this toy is that it was the first time I was able to wire up my brain and my muscles and my whole being. I not only cracked the code, I learned how to solve the puzzle in record time. My fingers moved without conscious thought or, rather, so fast my thinking couldn’t get in the way of the movement.
There was a tactile component to the game that was central to the experience. The moving pins clanked like a computer keyboard. To this day, I still look for keyboards that sound like The Brain. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It wasn’t just one sound, either. The components in each layer of the toy rattled slightly alongside the ticking of the main pins. In the right hands, that toy was a tiny, quivering percussion instrument that sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. Its real calling wasn’t being a toy sent out to promote banks. It was being an instrument in an avant orchestra that only performs graphic scores.
The Brain made such an impression on me that, the other day, I noticed I was re-creating its rhythm and sound while taking my vitamins. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. I have a complicated system for retrieving a vitamin bottle, tick, taking a vitamin while retrieving the next bottle, tick-tick, and so forth while also arranging the bottles, tick-tick-tick, in a particular way on the counter and then placing them back on the shelves, tick-tick, following another pattern once I’ve taken them all.
The Brain taught me how to be a better flutist, how to be a writer—how to live in language at all for that matter—and how to process and store information with exceptional efficiency. Runs of notes became compact units that could be compressed in my memory and expanded when I needed to retrieve them. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
Language became something I could enter into because I could type at least as fast as my thoughts. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
Memory in general became something I could store in chunks without taking the time to think the words I was thinking. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
Notice there are eight ticks, one for every pin. The Brain taught me to compress language, music, and thought in packets based in octals, like a computer. The Brain is actually billed as a computer. The side of the box reads, “Can you out-think the computer?” But that’s not what it was about for me. It was about streamlining my thoughts, perfecting my movements, bringing my whole self into unity, into the present, into being-ness, and not having to slow down or get mired in the difficulty of whatever I was performing or creating.
This was profound, and it was my way of making my dyslexia work for me rather than against me. It was an assistive technology that unlocked me as a person. It was an extension of me that led me back into me in ways that had been inaccessible before The Brain. It was a teacher. It was a sage. I will forever be grateful to the bank marketing team who mailed The Brain to my home and to the company that created and sold it.
Someone stole The Brain from me in college. I think it was my friend Terry Holsti. He played the trumpet and had a bag full of teeth and hair and giggled all the time and had a different moral compass from most people. He was fascinated by The Brain. He always asked me to give it to him. I hope it’s making him as happy as it made me. I really do.
O The Brain! It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s mysterious. It’s a see-hear-touch explosion waiting to happen with the patience of a lama. And it’s marked sold because it’s on the way to my house in Utah. I shall not navigate this place alone. I shall have The Brain by my side. Together, we will gleefully tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick who live in this area instead of allowing them to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick run us out of here.
Good morning. What are you all doing today that’s poetry-related or not at all poetry-related? I have some big poetry plans but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.
Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.
I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to allow me to dry it.
I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.
My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.
This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.
I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.
And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)
One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.
My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Reufle. He didn’t even say Mary Reufle or Reufle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.
My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.
I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.
What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Reufle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.
We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.
I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Reufle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Reufle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two shifts. The first was from early evening until sometime in the middle of the night. The second was from early morning until it was time to get up and start the day’s work. The waking period in the middle of the night wasn’t just for reading or sitting by the fire. People played cards, canoodled, had little get-togethers, and more. It was dark and cool and simply a good time to be awake. A romantic time. A playful time. A productive time.
In 2008, when I had one of my bouts of thyrotoxicosis—which made sleep difficult and resulted in severe sleep anxiety—a therapist told me about two-sleeps. She could see my sleep patterns falling into that rhythm and encouraged me to embrace that rather than fighting it. I had charts and graphs and other excessively detailed stuff documenting my personal sleep woes because that’s how I roll. It was a lot, the way my personal wardrobe database, which I maintained for six years, was a lot. (I can be a lot or, as I like to say a lot a lot—think quirky, colorful, dysfunctional.)
Hold up, the therapist said. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being hypervigilant about your sleep, you could try this approach instead. Hers was for sure the better plan. It was hard to let go of my recordkeeping and data management, but I did it at her urging.
The change in perspective and approach got me through those long months until my thyroid function returned to normal. I should note that thyrotoxicosis isn’t like hyperthyroidism in that you can’t treat it. You just have to wait it out. The whole process from thyrotoxicosis (or thyroid storm) to hypothyroidism to a return to a euthyroid state takes about a year.
A long damned year that’s difficult, creatively productive, and hard on a marriage, or at least has been hard on my marriage. It’s not easy to live with someone who has a snack-and-book midden stashed in the bed because they need to eat constantly and must always have reading material ready for those inevitable jolts from sleep. And also a slew of notepads and a handheld recording device so flashes of brilliance can be documented, such as aphorisms that float in on the ether and strange dreams that can’t not be cast in stone or at least scrawled in pencil in feverish, sloppy detail. (Pencil because, while graphite is an inferior writing material, I have a no ink-in-the-bed rule, as should everyone. We have sheets to think about, folks. We don’t need to add fighting ink stains to our list of daily tasks, especially not when we’re thyrotoxic.)
It’s not easy to live with someone who’s in fight or flight for the better part of a year, edgy and jumping at every little sound, balled up at times saying I can’t take it when will I feel normal again, whose OMing her way through moment after excruciating moment, who asks her mother-in-law in Iowa to have a bag packed in case she needs to come take care of her when she’s thirty-six years old and her mother-in-law has better things to do like tending to her gorgeous, gazeboed yard and going to church and keeping her husband from wandering into the back of the garage never to be seen again because he’s finally going to put that classic car together, the one that’s been a tangle of pieces and parts strewn about the property for four decades. In short, someone who’s devolved into a twitchy little miscreant. It wasn’t easy on Jon. I wasn’t easy on Jon. But two-sleeps made a big difference.
I still approach my sleep this way if I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a two-sleep night, I think. Rather than toss and turn in bed, I get up and do what I do, which is read and write and, sometimes, snack. Tonight, I’m up with GI distress and heartburn because of unfortunate but yummy birthday dinner choices yesterday evening. I came home and crashed, accidentally, at 8:40 p.m. and woke a few minutes ago bloated and nauseated, like a puffer fish that didn’t mean to puff and can’t unpuff and whose innards are on fire.
Is this a good time to write? Who knows. Will I produce anything of value during these waking hours? Based on this journal entry, it doesn’t seem like I will. I just know it’s not a good time to be horizontal. It is a good time to take Pepto Bismol and be vertical. So that’s what I’m doing until my second sleep begins. (Technically, since I’m sitting down, I’m vertical then horizontal then vertical again.)
Metadata paralysis is a real phenomenon, and folks like me live the experience every day. If you see someone with obvious symptoms of metadata paralysis, let them know you care. Take interest in their metadata tree. Say things like, “Good work. What a lovely metadata tree you’re working on. So many branches. I can’t wait to see what it grows into.”
Part two of this essay will be redacted in its entirety because it’s boring. Why? It’s self-indulgent and not self-reflective. The metadata here is value: subset one, possesses; subset two, doesn’t possess.
I’m falling asleep sitting up. Hello, theta waves. Bring on the strange brilliance.
I get it. His name is Jack Tripper and he trips all the time as part of his physical comedy. He also trips out on what others are doing and saying, so he’s also a metaphorical tripper.
Quick on the draw isn’t something anyone’s ever called me with regard to understanding plays on words, but they did call me fast fingers in grade school because I learned to count like lightning on my hands during math drills as a workaround for my dyscalculia and working-memory deficits. I won those drills. Laugh away, children, laugh away. What the world needs is a dyscalculia superhero named Fast Fingers.
Dyscalculia is either part of dyslexia or it’s a separate but similar entity. It depends on what metadata you use, that is, how you organize the information pertaining to each phenomenon.
Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. That looks funny. This calculia. Miss Calculia. That’s Ms. Calculia to you. Dana “Ms. Calculia” Martin. Now there’s a name. A Dana by any other name still can’t count to ten without using her fingers.
They gave me a free dessert because it was my birthday. That’s what happened with dinner. And also a plate of fried everything. That part wasn’t free. I paid for the plate of fried everything. My metadata here is dinner: subset one, fried everything; subset two, dessert.
I didn’t have to eat it. I wanted to eat it. Then I didn’t want to eat it but kept eating it. I’m trying hard to eat. I need to eat. My metadata here is health: subset one, presence; subset two, absence. Or is it life: subset one, congruous with; subset two, incongruous with?
My throat is getting dry. The Pepto Bismol is coagulating, if that’s the right word, near my uvula. One time, a big, hard thing traveled from my sinuses down into my throat. I choked on it for a while, then coughed it into a tissue, thereby saving my own life. It was fossilish and had ridges like the roof of a mouth. This incident (or shall I call it an *indecent*) happened in from of my mother-in-law. The metadata here is mother-in-law: subset one, what not to do in front of; subset two, what I did in front of. Additional metadata is bodies: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange.
As with bodies, also with minds: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange. Or is the main category bodymind: one thing, not two? As in, we mine the bodymind when we should be embodying it. As in, why is the bodying of the bodymind something we mind, whether it’s ours, yours or mine? As in, what’s mine is my bodymind and is not to be mined.
This is a real mindfield. Good night. I’m off for part two of my two-sleeps night. May our collective dreams break the bough, rattle the house, and set free a wee mouse who runs the mazes of our minds. Wouldn’t that be amazing.
From grade school forward, I was bullied, harassed, sexually assaulted, and raped by my classmates. The lesser infractions started when I was younger, with the exception of the CCSA I experienced at an older boy’s home where my mother had me go every day after school until she got off work. The more serious incidents occurred when I was an older student.
Things got much worse after my father died when I was thirteen. Most of my peers didn’t even know he was dead. His fatal heart attack occurred the Friday before spring break. My mother made me go to school the week after spring break ended. She didn’t like the way it would have looked for me to have taken any time off.
It was around that time that the orchestrated bullying began rather than the sporadic outbursts that had occurred earlier. It was a sport—I was a sport—for a growing group of students, even other students who were LGBTQ+, who were neuroatypical, who had serious health issues that made them the target of kids who didn’t like weakness, paleness, physical differences and the like, or who were scared, marginalized, and unpopular for other reasons. I was the most unpopular. I was everyone’s target and, for some, a ticket to greater inclusion and popularity if they could demonstrate a shared hatred of and derision for me.
In groups, my classmates would call me names, ridicule me, and more: in the school’s hallways, inside classrooms, on the bus. My neighbor across the street, a student I’d been friends with up until my father died, would even open her door and, alone or with her friends who were over, call me bitch or slut anytime she saw me in the yard or driveway.
What was I to them? Prude. A slut. Stupid. Ugly. A bitch. Slow. Retarded. Flat-chested. Boyish. Easy. Gay. (Only they didn’t use the word gay. They used words that were darker, words that catch in my throat to this day. I lived in terror of them finding evidence to back up that last claim. What would they say—what would they do—to me then?)
They were like plaque, those students, the way they gathered, the way they clumped up like something clogging an artery that would otherwise function properly. After my biology class, I’d go to my locker, which was just outside the classroom. It was a lower locker. JL, a tall, funny, wildly adored boy had the locker above mine. One day, he started ramming my face into his crotch and simulating oral sex, holding the back of my head, forcing it into his genital area over and over as he pretended to orgasm. I thought it was only going to happen once, that someone would stop it. A teacher. Other students. School officials. They didn’t. JL repeated the abuse anytime he caught me at my locker. It became a joke most of the students in that building participated in. They’d linger after class, stand in groups gawking, laughing, as he simulated rape.
Though this wasn’t my first experience with CCSA, it was my most public, on display right there in the bustling, glimmering hallway where the floor tile and walls were all paste white, chalk white, as white as the flour babies the girls in some kind of love and marriage class had to carry around to prove they’d one day be able to take care of a child.
I began leaving class early to go to my locker or lingering after the bell rang so I could switch my heavy books out after class had started. It worked for a while until JL caught on.
I went to the school counselor. She told me boys will be boys. The more I resisted what JL was doing, she said, the more he would do it. It was, in essence, my fault. What happened to me was *my* fault, not JL’s. The counselor didn’t do anything. I asked her if I could be assigned a different locker. She refused. I asked her if she could talk to him. She saw no need. JL continued to force my head into his crotch whenever he could.
I got a large backpack. I put all my books in it. The backpack was tremendously heavy, weighed down by my literature, chemistry, physics, biology, Latin, music, and other books. I’d managed to overcome my learning disabilities, which I’d been bullied for in grade school. I fought my way into language, into mathematics, into all the letters and numbers that confused and frustrated and bewildered me all through grade school and early middle school. I knew being smart was my only way out. Education was my way out. College was my way out.
I knew my classes were more important than anything. I didn’t want to end up like JW, who got pregnant and was never seen again. Or like MW, whose entire family disappeared overnight. Or like RY and KA and LL and LB, all of whom ended up addicted to drugs, some of whom were raped, and one of whom was gang raped. (I failed to avoid being raped, twice, but that’s another story.) I forced myself to learn how to read and do math with no help from anyone and without my learning disabilities being recognized. By junior high, I was in advanced classes. I wasn’t going to let JL or anyone hold me back. My backpack gave me the freedom to avoid my locker. My shoulders and back hurt from lugging it around, but at least I could be mobile and move away from any tangles of students forming in or between the school’s buildings, ready to attack me verbally, physically, sexually, or in some combination of the three.
Years later, I spoke with one of those classmates, a brilliant student named PD. She explained why she and the other students did what they did. You were unflappable, she said. No matter what we did, we could never get a response out of you. So they did more. And more. And more. It was a challenge.
They were trying to break me. They never broke me. I’m still not broken.
They didn’t know what kind of family I’d been born into, what I’d already survived in my own home. What I survived every day.
Unflappable. A challenge. The word is strong. The word is a survivor. The word is fierce. I was fierce, but the body and mind can’t take eighteen years of constant abuse from within the family, from within the school, from within the community, without repercussions. We aren’t designed to withstand that kind of treatment. But we are designed to heal. This is what healing looks like, believe it or not. Right now, it’s me at age fifty-one waking from a nightmare in which I’m a teenager being sexually assaulted poolside, writing this down, and processing these emotions and memories on my own terms all these years later, as I have for many years up until this point. It’s a Mobius strip, healing. It’s a process. There’s no clear beginning and no clear end.
It’s life. It’s the life I’ve had up to this point and the one I fight for every day. It’s the me I fight for, and the others I fight for, and the fight I continue for those I’ve known and loved who have fallen because they could no longer fight. My comrades. My kindreds. The ones who didn’t make it. It’s JW and RY and KA and LB and, most recently, KB. And it’s DG. Dana Guthrie. Dana Lynn Guthrie, the name I was born with, the name I got from my father and the parts of him that I still carry with me. He was a boy, too. Boys who’ll be boys. Men who’ll be men. Fathers who aren’t always fathers.
The birds are singing. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.
Yesterday, The Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States and released a guidebook that includes laws it deems discriminatory in each state, information about LGBTQ+ rights, and resources to help people relocate to states with stronger LGBTQ+ protections. Those who are LGBTQ+ are more likely to experience child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape. We can live with ongoing bullying, harassment, and discrimination all our lives, including during critical developmental years. We’re more likely to be stigmatized and marginalized, to receive less and poorer healthcare (including care that is neither trauma-informed nor LGBTQ-literate), and to receive inaccurate diagnostic labels when we seek mental health care—labels that are biased and don’t account for the relentless, systematic abuse we’ve faced and survived or that shift the blame for those experiences to us. Conversion therapy, which is legal in numerous states, may even be employed.
I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.
This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.
I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.
I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.
My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.
My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.
A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:
Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!
Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.
The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.1 Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.
The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!3 Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.
And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.3
But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?
She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?
Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?
Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?
That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.
The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.
Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.
My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.4
(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)
I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.
Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.
—
Margarine During War
Women keep settling (oleo, factory jobs) though they pine for sex the way they long for butter on their lips.
After war, they dab eye shadow and rouge for men whose war-whores didn’t teach them to kiss.
But the women hoist skirts, drop stockings, for soon the bread they’d break would be kissed with butter (real butter).
Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
I meditated for a couple of hours this morning after reading selections from Essential Zen. At first, there was mostly open space in the meditation, punctuated by thoughts I noticed as they made their way in and out of my mind. If I were to compare this particular meditation to a landscape, it would be the scrubby terrain of Eastern Washington, where there’s not much to speak of, not much to notice, until—suddenly—a tree. And so you notice the tree, then move on.
I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self.
The thoughts that slid past like trees included not taking more than I need, not expecting more than I should, and living in harmony with all the sentience surrounding me.
Then I had another level of experience, not thought-based but rather image-based. In the image, I split off from myself, so that I was two selves. The first self was able to simply be who I am, to feel comfortable and free in my existence. The second self was like the first in all ways, with one distinct difference: She was conscious of herself. This led her to go around apologizing for the first self’s behavior, to loathe the first self—even as she was, in fact, identical to the first self. This means the second self was also engaged in self-loathing.
Self and other have always played a strong role in my life, my thinking and my writing. I never really understood the draw to this duality until I learned I was dyslexic. Dyslexia is not just about reading text—it’s about reading the world. In my opinion, experts and advocates are so focused (with good reason) on teaching dyslexic children and adults to read that they don’t spend enough time focusing on the unique, often dualistic, world those who are dyslexic inhabit off the page.
Dyslexics can perceive the world as differently as we perceive written language. Just as the dyslexic can misread a passage, in turn creating an entirely new text from that passage, we can also read the world in multiple ways, with multiple orientations—some of which others might never perceive or understand. On top of this, we also learn to adopt different minds and bodies depending on the situation. We learn early that we have to be the quiet child, the focused child, the still child—at school, in social situations and often at home as well. But we retain our essence, that other self who never leaves us and is always by our side.
I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self. Just as self and other are both outside me. They are both other. When I think of self and other, I might be thinking of that duality I carry within, or I might be thinking of the dualities that others, in their own ways, carry within them. But I am not always, and I suspect I am rarely, thinking about self and other in the traditional sense of there being a single, inflexible, fixed self and then everything that falls outside that single, inflexible, fixed self.
As I learn to better attend to the self and other I carry inside me, I hope my second self will be more at ease with my first self, and vice versa. Both might learn to understand and respect their respective self/other. In this process, I might come to meet those I once called “other” in a new light, inside the deepening understanding that everything—and in that I include everyone—I label as other really has something to do with me and cannot be disconnected from me, nor me from everything.
To turn on anyone else in judgment, to create a wall between them and me, will come to seem as unreasonable as the self-betrayal illustrated in today’s meditation. I wish I’d had closure on that image, but instead the scene grew fuzzy and dissipated, my two selves across the room from one another, the first sitting on the ground playing, the second scowling and crossing her arms.
As the image moved farther away, my two selves began to resemble trees. I think now about the idea of souls inhabiting trees until they find atonement. Maybe in some other reality that’s where my selves are: inside trees, waiting.
This is what I sit with, what I pay attention to. I am not sure which of my selves is writing this post, or if both selves are working together. For now, I (whoever the communicating “I” is) embrace them both, love them both and hope they will both learn to embrace and love the world in all its non-otherness.
Dana Henry Martin 