My father had a tiger’s eye bolo that I loved. I wore it in grade school when we reenacted the Oklahoma Land Run. (Yeah, we did that. Also, there was more than one land run, but we only learned about and celebrated—for lack of a better word—the main one for simplicity’s sake.) I wanted to be a cowboy. My teachers protested. They wanted me to do whatever the girls were doing.
I’ve been looking for a bolo that’s like my father’s for a long time, but most of them are turquoise, and my father’s was shades of brown. I found one today tucked into the back corner of a gift shop. It was made of tiger’s eye. As soon as I saw it, I remembered that’s what my father’s was made of, and it’s also why tiger’s eye was my favorite gemstone as a child.
As I held the tie, I thought, “My father was more than the sum of everything terrible that happened to him and everything terrible he did, including what he did to my mother and me.” It was a surprising thought. I want to believe that—that there was an untarnished part of him tied to the traintracks inside his heart. He may have tied that part up. He may have wanted it tied up. But it still existed, whether or not he longed to free it.
I bought the tie to commemorate continuing to be in mental-health recovery after my trauma-induced mania two years ago. As I drove home, 104.1 played “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. The sky was lapis lazuli polished and held to the light. The cliffs in and around Zion looked at once eternal and ephemeral. As much as their presence hints at forever, they are also literally dust in the wind.
I started crying. How could I not? How could anyone spend time with this land, this sky, and not untie the parts of themselves that are immobilized in their hearts?
Let the heart run. Let it rewild. Let it forget suffering. Let there be nothing to suffer from or for. Let us all loosen our ties and help others loosen theirs.
Sexual violations can take time to understand, to come into our consciousness. What is was. What it’s called. Knowing what happened, knowing the name of what happened, can lead to a whole other level of distress that needs attention and healing. Even though nothing about the experience changes, knowing what it is, what a violation it is, changes everything.
I grew up being so violated I didn’t have names for anything. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I really started to understand. I was watching a news story that included the details of a woman’s rape by multiple classmates. I was like, That’s rape? I’d been in a nearly identical situation once with two older classmates, which meant I was raped. That’s the first time I realized what happened, what it was.
Then I went through a list of other incidents in my head and was like, Then what was this, and what was this, and what was this? It turns out it was a combination of rapes and sexual assaults. Also child sex abuse. Also, much later, in 2023, I realized I’d been trafficked. I’d just learned that there was a huge sex-trafficking ring in my hometown and in other parts of the state my father frequented with me. It’s one of the largest in the country. I don’t know that my father was formally part of that or if he just found his way into those spaces because he was drawn to them. But I do know he sexually abused me. And his best friend sexually abused me. And his best friend’s adult son was extremely inappropriate with me in a sexual/grooming way. And his work associate came around the house with his penis sticking out of his short shorts while I was told to sit on the ground in front of him, putting me at eye level with it, while my dad was there watching both of us. And I know that man was also sexually abusing his children. And my father’s former friend was sexually abusing his daughter. And I was in that house a lot, all the time, and it never felt safe there, and it wasn’t because he was hitting her or throwing her down the stairs. It was another kind of unsafe, one she wouldn’t be able to talk about until she was in her fifties.
And I know my father made me talk to truckers on the biggest sex-trafficking highway in Oklahoma. I know I had a CB radio handle. I know the truckers knew the handle. I know they would get on the CB radio and ask for my father by his handle, then ask if I was there and if they could talk to me. And I know I obliged. And I know I thought it was fun. I believe I was on my father’s lap some of the time, but that may just be how it felt emotionally—that closeness and tension. And I know my father stopped once, with me, to meet up with a man who saw me and looked scared and wanted to leave. That’s where what I know ends. I don’t remember the rest.
When I learned that there was a name for all of that and the name was child sex trafficking and abuse, it was too much of a shift, though nothing that happened had changed. What it was had changed. I spent parts of 2023 delusional and terrified. I felt like I’d come to understand something the human mind isn’t meant to understand and that I’d survived something the human body isn’t meant to survive.
So yeah. Maybe fuck [poet’s name redacted] or at least that comment she made and the similar ones other folks made in 2015. What happened with the poet who harmed me was nothing compared with what my own family and namely my father did to me and allowed to be done to me. But it was still sexual assault, and it was still fucking awful, especially because the poet made me talk about my child sexual abuse as he was assaulting me. It turned him on.
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This post was initially a response to a comment on another post on my Facebook page.
My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.
We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.
Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.
Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.
I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.
Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.
This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.
I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.
Utah Senator Dan McCay, who shepherded the bill banning pride flags in Utah’s schools and government buildings through the State Senate, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to attack the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:
Sundance is considering leaving Utah, where it’s been held since its creation in 1978. The ban on pride flags could ensure Sundance’s departure from the state.
This is how Utah’s lawmakers are behaving these days, just a couple of years after cloaking their homophobia and transphobia in purported support for federal protections for same-sex marriage. They wanted to be seen as the good guys back then. Not anymore. What’s infected our government at the highest levels has infected Utah lawmakers and many of those who live in the state.
Almost three years ago, I contacted every LGBTQ+ organization and group in Utah to address the hatred and outright bigotry several Southern Utah lawmakers in places like St. George and Leeds were espousing through far-right groups with militia ties. The only organization that responded—the largest one in the state—told me they had decided not to address the issues with our lawmakers. They thought everything would blow over and wouldn’t amount to anything. They perceived themselves as the leaders of Utah’s queer community. As such, they were encouraging everyone else who was queer to stay quiet, too. Like me. I was told not to talk about what was happening.
I told them they were wrong. I’m from Oklahoma and have lived through this. I lived through the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan years, and more. I lived in Kansas and know the Koch brothers and their playbook, which was being carried out in Washington County, Utah, where I lived and across the country in rural areas with a couple of tweaks: guns and violence and, in the case of Southern Utah, with a post-Mormon hatred that was unbounded. I said what was happening in Southern Utah was going to spread to the rest of the state—and quickly. They didn’t believe me. They were Salt Lake City-centric and didn’t see the power lawmakers in Southern Utah had or understand what they were capable of.
I told them anti-trans legislation was going to hit them like a tsunami, and they had a responsibility to address what was happening before it was too late. Weeks later, they flew the director of the organization down to Ivins, a town just outside St. George. People with power and influence in the queer community were invited to a mansion to discuss what to do, how to move forward. It was a private event. Members of the queer community at large were not invited or even told it was happening. Stay quiet was pretty much what they came up with at that meeting. Several people who attended also discussed the past of one of the alt-right group leaders, which involved extremely inappropriate behavior with her female students. (She’d been a high-school teacher in the area at one point.) The group wasn’t talking about that publicly, either.
In a matter of months, nine anti-trans pieces of legislation were signed into Utah law by Utah’s Governor. More laws have been passed since then. Queer organizations have been hobbled and/or gutted. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enacted more hateful and harmful policies that target queer members and their families. Queer folks are being threatened, disowned, harmed in myriad ways, erased, and more—more than ever. And now lawmakers are telling everyone in the state what they really think, what they thought all along but didn’t feel they could say.
I’m not a seer. I didn’t see into the future. I’ve just seen all of this before. I’ve lived through it, survived it, and been shaped by it as someone who’s nonbinary and queer. I didn’t stay quiet like the queer organization told me to. I wrote two letters that The Salt Lake Tribune published, one of which discussed a column by Pat Buchanan that ran in The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 17, 1990. It was titled “Homosexuals Mainstreaming Satanism.” I compared that piece to what was currently happening at meetings and rallies in the St. George area. I also pitched stories to local reporters and provided background material and comments on several stores. This only served to drive a bigger wedge between me and the queer community who didn’t seem to want me or my voice to exist. Ironic? Yes. It’s ironic.
Even with everything unfolding the way I said it would, only worse than I could have imagined, I’m still not welcome in Utah’s queer circles. Last fall, I attended a Zoom meeting for members of NAMI Utah to discuss changes within the organization. That meeting was comprised primarily of queer participants. They recognized my name from the pieces that ran in the Trib, and they thought I was there to glean information about the organization and report on it in The Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t. I attended the meeting because I’m in training to become a peer specialist here in Arizona through NAMI, because I’m a mental-health advocate who stays informed about issues that affect mental-health care in my communities, and because I live with mental-health issues and am as deserving of support as anyone else in Utah who lives with mental health issues.
The folks in the NAMI group also believed I was a journalist because they apparently don’t understand the distinction between editorial content and letters to the editor. I’m a poet and writer who’s worked as a medical writer and health advocate. I have a degree in journalism but am not working as a journalist. I certainly wouldn’t “inflitrate” a NAMI meeting. (Please.) Or use my full name in my Zoom profile if I was trying to be sneaky.
The group moderator contacted me individually after the meeting through email to admonish me for being unethical, to insinuate I was there to undermine the organization, and to ask what I planned to do with what I learned during the meeting. It was a stunningly inappropriate communication that was never properly addressed by NAMI Utah’s interim director. She passed it off to a lower-level volunteer as opposed to addressing the infraction herself as the organization’s leader. Here were my concerns, in short: You can’t use an email list your organization maintains to gather information about a member and reach out to them to ask probing accusatory questions. Doing so is discriminatory, borders on bullying and intimidation, and jeopardizes the well-being of a fellow NAMI member who’s seeking inclusion and support.
This is where I’m at in Utah. I’m an advocate whose advocacy is unwelcome and unwanted in both the queer and mental-health communities. The fear that permeates Southern Utah and drives folks to paranoia and conspiracy theories is embedded in the state as a whole, even in the very communities many Utah lawmakers want to eradicate. Queer folks and folks with mental-health issues need to learn how to stand up for themselves and each other, how to bring in and welcome outside voices and perspectives, and how to be true advocates and allies who don’t end up doing more harm than good in their respective organizations. Rolling over, fear, othering bordering on shunning, and baseless accusations aren’t going to get us anywhere, nor is silencing queer voices in the name of queer solidarity. We need to start moving mountains more than one spoonful at a time. And we certainly don’t need to be creating more and larger mountains.
Utah has work to do. We have work to do. We need to show up. My voice isn’t going anywhere, as much as I’ve been asked to remove it from the state, even by some folks in Southern Utah’s poetry community who’ve called my work inappropriate, graphic, and pornographic (just like the Sundance Film Festival, apparently). Hell, I’ve been called a pedophile several times by my neighbors up in South Jordan and later in Toquerville, where I still live part of the year. (One of Utahns’ big go-tos is calling anyone they don’t like a “pedophile,” which is sad given all the actual acts of pedophilia in the state.)
I’ve heard it all at this point. I’m surviving it all on my own, outside of any Utah-based communities focused on support and advocacy. I hope Utah can come back from what’s happening right now. I do. I feel for folks who are being crushed by all of this. But when a bulldozer’s coming, you have to warn others and get out of the way until you can dismantle that bulldozer. You’ll get nowhere if you pretend it’s not coming or throw others from your community in its path or tell them you don’t need their help. Communities who are harmed cannot harm others within their communities. That’s just a reframing of the very paradigm that caused those communities harm in the first place.
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.
I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.
I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.
Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.
Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)
I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.
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.
I’m dealing with so much trauma that it’s been destabilizing twice now in the past year. I’ve lived with trauma and the sequelae of trauma my whole life, but learning more about my childhood trauma over the past twelve months has been too much for me to process, cope with, or even understand.
Being in Southern Utah triggered a deeper understanding of my trauma. It’s an extremely traumatized and traumatizing place. Living there was like living in a vivid dream, a scary one, one that showed me more than I could process about my childhood, my family, and my father. An alt-right extremist leader who crossed boundaries with her own students didn’t help. A seventy-year-old who sent me an inappropriate photo of himself didn’t help. A trucker who tried to solicit me for sex at a family restaurant didn’t help.
People’s behaviors were so unreal there that I felt like I was being gaslit all the time. Reality didn’t feel like reality. Things that happened on a daily basis were unfathomable.
Law enforcement being sexist, dismissive, and steeped in LDS beliefs and values didn’t help. The domestic violence center only doing phone intakes and scheduling those intakes three days out didn’t help. Their failure to keep their intake appointment with me didn’t help. Not having anyone believe me about any aspect of my trauma or the unfolding situation with my husband didn’t help.
Nothing helped. Nobody helped. Even my therapist violated ethical boundaries by touching me during sessions, almost like she was laying hands on me to remove trauma from my body. She said she could do so because she was also a licensed massage therapist. That’s not the case. She also proselytized heavily during our sessions, diagnosed my husband without seeing him or treating him as a patient, and told me to leave him. When I needed my therapist, she pushed me deeper into fear and exploited my vulnerable state to foist a religious message on me and to dictate what I should do with my life.
My husband didn’t get support, either. Not really. He was shoehorned into the same theocratic system as me. He got messages about the man being in charge, husbands monitoring what their wives do, and so forth. He got a message about everything I was perceiving being untrue. And that’s just not the case. I have legitimate concerns about my husband’s behaviors, including those that also pushed me deeper into fear.
I ended up having a brief reactive psychosis/mania twice, once in February and again in September. That can happen when current traumas are too much for me to bear and my whole complex PTSD web is activated. I’ve been dealing with far too much medical trauma, community trauma, and domestic trauma for far too long. It’s been more than two years since I developed long COVID and the slew of health diagnoses that followed. Two years since I started writing and speaking publicly about the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community in Southern Utah. Just under two years since so much more of my childhood trauma came to light. More than two years of solid stress with my husband, and before that the destabilization within our relationship that the pandemic caused.
I tried so hard to make things work in Utah, to find a place for my voice, my writing, for me as a person. I tried so hard to fight for others so they could also have a place in the community. I tried so hard to overcome diseases and conditions that leave most people homebound. I tried so hard to fight for my marriage and for my husband. I tried so hard to heal from traumas that I now fear I’ll never be able to heal from.
I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t go back to Utah. I know I’m too physically ill and too emotionally destabilized to make it on my own here in Oklahoma. I know I can’t leave my husband behind because he’ll languish in that environment, which he doesn’t deserve. Despite some of his behaviors, he also deserves a chance to grow and heal. I know major changes need to happen so I don’t panic, dissociate, and have brief psychosis every time something else happens that’s traumatizing.
I’ve really never been more terrified, day by day, moment by moment, second by second. My whole world is gone. My whole life is gone. I’m like the speaker in one of my poems who loses everything a little at a time until there’s nothing, not even hands with which to write or eyes with which to read.
There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns with regard to learning more about a place, a culture, a collective mindset, a community fever.
There’s a point at which it becomes time to pray with your feet. I’m at that point. I’m not an investigative journalist nor do I want to be one. I’m a creator. I want to create. As Richard Siken says, I’m just a writer. I write things down. That’s what I do and what I need to do. I need to create. I need to bring beauty to what’s awful, to what we want to look away from, to what we want to deny and suppress and ignore. But the beauty part is key. Beauty first, beauty always.
I don’t want to be pulled further into what this place is and does and isn’t and doesn’t do. I don’t want to be somewhere that takes and takes and takes everything from me, leaving no me left to love, to grow, to write, to create.
I’m leaving, come hell or high water. There, I said it. It’s time. It’s beyond time. My return to this place in March was necessary because of my health, because of my trauma, because I had issues to resolve with my husband, and because I needed to make sure I’d done all I could possibly do to be part of this community. I’ve done those things now, and I’m done.
I’m going to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri in September. I’m looking at MFA programs in Oklahoma while I’m there. I’m evaluating the healthcare system, housing costs and availability, and employment opportunities. I have family in Oklahoma. My family. My people. Oklahoma, my home, my home, my home.
I’m going to need help to do this in the form of love, support, and understanding. There’s so much more trauma for me to address now after living in Utah for five years and Southern Utah for three years. I’m a strong person, but I’m now a broken person. I can come back. I know I can. I can become who I am again, who I’m losing, who I may have lost.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be fifty-two. One year ago, I was radioactive. I was sitting in a rented tiny home overlooking the Virgin River Gorge because I had to be isolated for several days. I spent hours talking to Jose Faus on the phone after watching the gorge all day. I had just started writing poetry again. I read a short piece to Jose over the phone as he fell asleep. Maybe my words put him to sleep. That’s OK. I always fall asleep reading my own writing, too. Anyone out there with insomnia might consider using my work to help them regulate their sleep.
Seven years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room in Kansas City with my husband, my legs under constant pressure and a breathing device on the table that I had to use every thirty minutes or so—the former to prevent leg clots and the latter, I think, to prevent a pulmonary embolism. I’d just had my thyroid removed to cure my autoimmune thyroiditis. They found tumors during the procedure, but the doctor assured me they wouldn’t be malignant. He came into my room all ego and narcissism and said there was only a one-percent chance the tumors would be cancerous. That’s why he went easy, left a little tissue in sensitive places. That’s why he didn’t remove the lymph nodes. Then he wished me a happy birthday. The pathology report came in a week later. It was cancer, and it hadn’t all been resected.
What will tomorrow bring? My husband and I plan to look at the stars with a telescope we’re borrowing. I plan to visit a bookstore. I plan to play with our dog, Lexi. I plan to write and write and write and read and read and read. That’s the plan. We’ll see what actually happens.
Love to those dealing with health issues, emotional issues, addictions, dependencies, and any form of pain or suffering. Love to those who’ve almost died and managed to survive. Love to those who tried to survive and didn’t manage to do so. Love to you beyond place, beyond time, beyond loss, beyond memory.
Love to you all. All of you, love.
Ad astra per aspera. PrairyErth, we are one.
It’s not Oklahoma’s fault that I was abused in Oklahoma, that I was raped in Oklahoma, that I was trafficked within and beyond Oklahoma. Humans destroy each other. Humans destroy the land. The land never destroys us. The land never trafficks us. The land never rapes us. The land never abuses us. The land never destroys itself.
I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. ― Matsuo Bashō
Insomnia Diary Entry One: The price I’m paying for going to bed at 9:29 p.m. last night is waking to strange dreams and observations at 1:29 a.m. this morning. As if that weren’t bad enough, my weaving room clock is four hours slow for some reason, so when I dragged myself in here to write down my strange dreams and observations, it said it was only 9:29 p.m. I feel like I slept zero minutes, not two-hundred-forty weird, totally off, minutes. What do I do now? Eat? Vomit? I hate waking up like this, being off like this. My ear wax is melting. The light from this pink Himalayan salt lamp is too bright. I think I need to hydrate.
Insomnia Diary Entry Two: Based on my symptoms, I’d say my TSH level is moving around wildly again and that it has been since I started a new dose of thyroid replacement and a new form of the medication, this time an amber liquid that burns my gums. My body no longer knows what to do, how to regulate, its TSH levels. Within a month’s time, I’ll swing from clinically hypothyroid to severely thyrotoxic. This has been happening every month for a year or so.
Heart palpitations are back. Big tears are back, rolling ones like dew drops on iris leaves in Kansas on any given spring morning. Nausea is back. Exhaustion. Word-finding issues.
I forgot my maternal grandmother’s first name two days ago. (It’s Ruth, a word I always see as red, like a ruby. Ruth, my gem of a grandmother, my red velvet cake grandmother, my faceted grandmother throwing off an eerie red light, my film noire grandmother if the lighting was black and red, not black and white. And she, Ruth, surely was all of those things. So how could I forget her name, given all the ways synesthesia allows me to vividly see it?)
I confused trammel and trample yesterday. (I didn’t just make that play on words in a post for fun. I actually forgot the difference between the words, then turned my language-related malady into a wry comment on nature and culture, or something like that. A real poor-me of a post.)
I forgot traffic (n.) and traffick (v.) both exist. I’m still not convinced they’re both real, but the dictionaries seem to think so. I’m pretty sure I’ve been leaving the “k” off the verb form for years, a startling realization that leads me to ruminate about all the other words I must be getting wrong without realizing it. It’s like my late-90s disk and disc meltdown all over again. Floppy? Frisbee? C or K? K or C?
I’m so tired of being dyslexic and having auditory processing disorder and working memory issues and attention deficits with ironic hyperfocus and rumination and neat and tidy OCD and complex PTSD and regular PTSD and other flavors of anxiety on top of my primary immunodeficiency and autoimmune diseases and arrhythmias and dysautonomia and possible kidney issues and whatever the hell is going on with iron overloading and concurrent anemia and TSH issues that come and go without explanation and that cancer I had and may still have and the edema and the asthma and whatever else I can’t even remember at this moment.
It’s a lot, folks. It’s getting old. Y’all, I just want to move around the cabin of life freely and with some assurance that I’m doing an OK job at that. Instead, I end up back by the lavatories when I think I’m heading toward the emergency exit. It’s sheer disorientation much of the time: in my mind, in my body, and at the seams where my mind and body meet the world.
I was trying to make a play on the cabin reference above by following it with the lavatories and emergency exit references, but it didn’t work. It’s too jumbled, the image too burdened. I can’t bring myself to delete the attempt, though, because my body-mind really worked hard at it and I’m so exhuasted and here come the big dewy tears and this water isn’t hydrating me at all because I’m still a walking desert and my GI tract is full of angry fists that feel like a mob is trying to punch its way out of me and I’m so awaketired, so hungrynauseated, so tinglenumb, that the cursed trinity (cabin/lavatories/emergency exit) isn’t going anywhere. It’s staying put. It’s evidence of and a testament to my dysfunction.)
All the hunger all the time and all the eating all the time without moving the needle on the scale at all are back. Parasthesias are back. Maybe some neuropathy, too, which I don’t even want to acknowledge, but the weird stabbing pains in my legs and the sudden feeling of having stepped in water when there is no water aren’t going anywhere, it seems.
Some of this is also from having dysautonomia. Some of this is from having immune system dysregulation and all the diseases and conditions that flow from that dysregulation. Not all of this is because of my TSH dysregulation, and I suspect that dysregulation isn’t a thing on its own, anyway, but instead flows from some combination of my other health issues, as well as from my trauma. Traumas, let’s be honest. It’s traumas, plural. It’s also trauma and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
* Why did Facebook turn my n in parentheses into a thumbs down? I’m too tired to fight you on that, Facebook. Have it your way. You always do. We’re all just here for your profit and pleasure, Facebook. Don’t think we don’t know that’s the case.**
**Oh, I know why. I forgot the periods after the “n” and the “v” on second reference. Fine. My bad, Facebook.
Insomnia Diary Entry Three: I think people count sheep when they can’t sleep because sheep sounds like sleep, so we’re indirectly invoking sleep by using sheep as a kind of mantra, one that allows us to sidle up to sleeping without getting sleep anxiety as we think about how we’re not sleeping.
Oh, no. That’s not it at all. Apparently, shepherds in medieval Britain had to keep a headcount of their sheep each night if they used communal grazing land, so they counted their sheep before going to sleep to ensure they were all there.
Still, I think my thing is also correct: I think sheep works because it’s a stand-in, soundwise, for the thing we’re trying to do, which is sleep.
Insomnia Diary Entry Four: I had two thoughts upon waking at 1:29 a.m. First thought: I’ve reached the age where I can no longer tell if physical exertion is building muscle or destroying muscle. Second thought: The price I pay for whatever I’m doing is having to do more of whatever I’m doing.
Insomnia Diary Entry Five: I am not dovetailed to this world. I’m glued and stapled to it.
Insomnia Diary Entry Six: When someone starts a sentence with the words I’m no conspiracy theorist, you can put money on the fact that a conspiracy theory (technically, a conspiracy hypothesis) will complete that utterance.
Insomnia Diary Entry Seven: I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I don’t trust the water here in Toquerville, Utah. On record, our water management people said at a city council meeting that they sometimes forget to check the water pumps. Then, earlier this year, one of the water pumps broke, and our irrigation water was turned off until a new pump could be ordered.
I just don’t know. You know, govnmnt and whatnot. You never can tell. Never can tell. No, sir. No, siree.
I do know that, without proper filtration, there’s one-thousand-one-hundred times the “safe” amount of arsenic in our water, and that figure isn’t hyperbolic. I looked into it. You know, inurnet and whatnot.
What I’m getting at is this: I drank all my water just now, and I needed more water. My husband and I recently bought a fancy office-level water filter thing that makes cold water, hot water, tea, and coffee. We decided to do it because govnmnt and inurnet and all that, and also because my gums were starting to burn after brushing my teeth with, you guessed it, the local water. (I see a pure D bona fide theory emerging here, not just a measly hypothesis!)
We love the new water filter thing. Just adore it. It’s like the watery baby we never had. We coo at it. We pet it. But it makes this rattling sound whenever it’s used as it pumps more water into whatever parts of the machine need water pumped to them. So I couldn’t fill my water bottle with filtered water just now or else I’d wake my husband up and he’d be all why’d you wake me up you’re ruining my sleep and I’d have no choice but to be all because my own sleep is ruined forever and always and we’re married and this is the for worse part of it which you agreed to in front of that pantheist minister in Eureka Springs Arkansas during a freak March snowstorm back in 1999 so deal with it just deal with it and rub my shoulders while you’re here and get me some filtered water too please and thank you and I love you and don’t leave me and hold me and get away from me and I’m sorry so so sorry I’m just so tired and hurt and tired. And I wouldn’t want to do that, so here I am filling myself with liquid arsenic, folks. The things a good wife does. The things a good wife does.
Insomnia Diary Entry Eight: How do I select my titles? That depends. Sometimes, I write a big thing while I have insomnia, then I look at the thing, my eyes fall to some of the words in the thing, and in my bleary state, I think, Gee whiz, those random words seem like they’d make a good title. Usually, they do. Case in point: Henceforth, the collective title of these insomnia diary entries shall be “Cabin Lavatories Emergency Exit.”
Actually, I think I’ll make the whole series into a poem. But first, I must sheep. I mean sleep. One two three four. Or arrhythmically like my heart: one two (pause) three (longer pause) four.
Insomnia Diary Entry Nine: to sheep, perchance to leme.
Insomnia Diary Epilogue: I slept. Finally. I dressed up like Liza Minnelli after we got back from Jon’s doctor’s appointment, the one about his liver, and I took a hot, stupid, mid-morning nap on top of the covers and with my little dog between my legs, her favorite place to sleep. Was it comfortable? No. I had sequins on and big flashy earrings. All the material from my jeans somehow managed to bunch up between my legs. My dog was bristly like the hairbrush my mother made me use for well over a decade, the pink one that was passed down to me after my sister left the home.
Yes, I had to use my grown sister’s hairbrush when she moved out of the house. If that doesn’t prove to you that I’m the product of Depression- and Dust Bowl-era Oklahomans, nothing will.
See, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl made my mother frugal. I get it. I do. But seriously, who keeps a hairbrush around that long, washing it every month in the sink like it was going to the spa, rescuing it from various dogs’ mouths and returning it to my drawer covered in an ever-lengthening tactile Morse-like Code of tooth marks? (Maybe that would make it Braille-like. Who cares.)
I didn’t even know people could buy hairbrushes until I was seventeen and saw them at the store. Don’t ask how I never saw them before then. I have attention differences, and my mother probably steered me away from the expensive beauty aisles, especially after my father died and we were trying to make it on her income from the state mental hospital, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse for thirty-five years.
Anyway, at the store back in those days, I was always busy taking the empty glass Coke bottles in to get our deposit back or to buy some cigarettes — if you can even call menthol Virginia Slims that — for my mother. I never saw any hairbrushes until the day I did as a teenager and my mind was blown. I bought one on the spot. A Goodie.
I confronted my mother about the decades-long hairbrush ruse when I got home. She just shrugged or something, then probably took a sip of her vodka, then took a drag of her cigarette, and clicked the clicker to watch the news, something she loved to do because she was passionate about politics. She was a feverish democrat who was in the closet about her political opinions until my father died, then she let it all loose. She’d call all her nurse friends when anything remotely of political interest happened, like the time Reagan came to town and two kids sneaked a big protest sign into the rally.
I know the kids who did that. I wasn’t one of them, sadly. I still had a perm and claw bangs and listened to Duran Duran. I had no desire to tape parts of a sign to my body so I could smuggle them into a room full of adults, then assemble the sign once I was inside. I didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t want to be dragged anywhere. I had Guess jeans. I had a Coach purse. I was going places in my jelly shoes.
The point is. I took a shit nap, but it was still a nap, and I’m grateful for it.
I’m still pretty violently ill. I have a five-hour training tomorrow as a substitute teacher with ESS, who recently hired me. ESS handles subs for numerous states, including Utah, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. I might be able to use ESS to claw my way out of this state. (And of course I love teaching.) I may have to reschedule the training if things continue to go the way they’re going now.
Listen, all I want is the ease my childhood hairbrush knew. I want to lie in soapy, hot water whiling away my time staring at the nicotine-stained plaster ceiling, not a thought in my bristles, not a pain in my handle. Is that too much to ask? For a little time like that?
That brush. On brush-washing day, I remember having to comb all my hair out of it as my mother ordered. I remember being told to dry it off with a towel. I remember having to position it so it could air dry in the sun streaming through the bathroom window before it went back into the drawer.
That brush was my mother’s favorite child. It’s so obvious. Coddle, coddle, love, love. Hugs and kisses, little brush.
I want this acute health situation to be about bad spinach, mild food poisoning, but the evidence — shared by me last night in the second installment in this series—suggests something more is going on, as always. Maybe if I just don’t eat between now and tomorrow’s training, I’ll be OK. This is the same approach I’ve used as a workaround in the recent past that’s contributed to my losing more and more and more weight.
Conversely, eating more and more and more when violently ill won’t result in my absorbing any calories or nutrients, as they’ll just … ahem … shoot through me like Big Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine used in Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project. Except it won’t be like Big Bertha at all, because she got stuck for two years starting in 2013 and eventually had to be partially excavated for a repair to solve the issue. Trust me, nothing’s getting stuck inside me and nobody is going to cut into me to bring my body the spare parts it needs to operate properly again.
So to eat, or not to eat, that is the question. To train, or not to train. I guess there are actually two questions at this point.
and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
Dana Henry Martin 