Today, my primary care doctor opened my appointment by telling me that he believes I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve survived and/or live with multiple illnesses, including cancer. I live with more than one rare disease, including common variable immunodeficiency, which is serious and life-threatening. I have autoimmune diseases, renal insufficiency, postural orthostatic tachycardia, and arrhythmias. I’ve been treated for atrial fibrillation. I have aortic root and ascending aortic dilations. And I have PTSD and serious, life-threatening, bipolar.
All of this is documented in my medical record at Intermountain, where my primary care doctor works. It’s not in my head. It’s not me imagining health issues that don’t exist. They exist, and I’m attempting to address them. I worked as a medical writer and editor at some of the best institutions in the country for years. When I get a diagnosis or face a health challenge, I do research and have the determination to address the situation however I can.
Today, I was asking about my fasting blood glucose being over 100 for the past two years. That’s diagnostic for prediabetes, but none of my doctors brought the high results to my attention. High blood sugar seems like something I should be able to discuss without being called a hypochondriac. It’s especially important given that my chances of developing diabetes are 3 to 4 times higher because I have bipolar disorder.
I was also at the appointment to discuss my BUN level and (BUN/creatinine ratio). My BUN has doubled in the past 5 months and is above the normal range. Perhaps that’s not an issue, but given my history of renal insufficiency and the fact that lithium, which I started taking at a higher dose 5 months ago, causes kidney disease in about 26 percent of patients, the higher BUN level seems like a valid issue to raise.
Healthcare systems don’t seem to welcome the type of patient I am—one who’s female, has chronic health issues, and has a mental health diagnosis. We wait years or decades before our issues are taken seriously and addressed. By that time, we often have medical trauma because of how the healthcare system has treated us or our conditions have progressed, often irreversibly, because we were gaslit into thinking it must all be in our heads, a point our doctors belabor.
If I can’t approach my doctor for routine care, explanation of test results, or to discuss a health concern—the very things primary care providers are supposed to do with their patients—without the entire encounter being dismissed as evidence of a mental health problem, then why am I even trying so hard.
This isn’t the first time this has happened here in Southern Utah. Another doctor at Intermountain denied the fact that I had atrial fibrillation despite a preponderance of evidence that I had the condition. I was denied the medication I needed because of his insistence that I didn’t have afib. Yet another doctor at Intermountain tried to tell me my diagnosis of common variable immunodeficiency was unfounded despite the fact that I have extensive documentation of that disease from accomplished immunologists who know how to diagnose and treat immune system dysregulation.
I’m tired. I’m tired of this treatment. I’m tired of this sexism, this ableism, this dehumanization. I’m just tired. These attitudes and behaviors on the part of doctors cause unnecessary and severe iatrogenic illness for those of us who are subjected to them. I can’t carry that burden on top of my actual health and mental health issues. I’m tired.
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.
So I’m ill again. The usual with a side of falling to the floor hard this evening when my lower extremities tightened and everything from my toes all the way to the middle of my thighs contorted until I looked like something with gnarled roots—maybe Donne’s mandrake—that had been unearthed and hosed off before being tossed to the ground until it could be transplanted elsewhere or fed to the wood chipper or cut into little slices as part of a fiber-filled culinary adventure.
I mean, I know I’m not fibrous. I’m meat and bone. But I’m doing an extended tree metaphor thing here, so just let me be fibrous for the purposes of this essay.
My floor routine went on for several excruciating minutes and I couldn’t get my legs under me and I couldn’t pull my legs and feet and toes back into their proper shapes and relationships with each other and I couldn’t massage the tension away and the pain was like someone had exposed me to a nerve toxin and I couldn’t reach my phone to call my husband for help and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he’d misplaced his phone and so I had to scream as loud as I could and don’t worry the neighbors never come when I do that and my husband burst into the room and found me splayed and broken like a cow that’s about to be scooped up from the fecal mud and dropped onto a truck headed for the rendering plant because she’s too sick to walk herself to her own death like all respectable—all good—girls should, even ones with spongiform encephalopathy.
I’m just working the cow metaphor with that encephalopathy reference. Don’t worry, I don’t have mad cow disease. My diseases have other names, and so far at least one has eluded naming. That disease is all experience, the way Hellen Keller’s whole world was before water ran over her fingers and forever changed the way her body and mind met the world.
Reuven Tsur talks about Keller in his theory of cognitive poetics. I’m not making baseless statements about her just to illustrate my point, so please don’t get all, You’re being ableist and using Hellen Keller to do your dirty ableist work, Karen. The name’s Dana, and I’m trying to tell you how bodies break and how we live in them anyway. I’m trying to tell you I took a little spill. I’m trying to put that spill in a larger context that some of you may find important. Bear with me. Bear down. Grin and bear it. I’m trying.
My husband panicked the way he does when he has to confront the fact that I’m seriously ill. He got me up off the floor, then went into a fugue state in which he forgot about everything other than his lost phone. He flitted around in flight mode looking for the phone because it’s easier to be upset about the phone than it is to live through more than two years of thinking your wife could die, on top of fifteen years of intermittently thinking your wife could die, let alone this very moment when you’re seeing more evidence of your wife’s potential death on the horizon or at least more data that suggests whatever’s going on with her isn’t going to go away any time soon, if ever. And what do you do with that as a spouse? How do you live with a splintered wife for the rest of your life?
I almost said upper thighs in the first paragraph of this essay, but we don’t have tiered thighs. We just have the one main set, one main set of thighs. It’s the way I also think I have two noses, when I just have the one nose with two nostrils and the way I always think I have two butts because I have two butt cheeks.
The body is confusing. Taking inventory isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At one point in American history, a window was considered a single pane within a larger window. So a window with six panes counted as six windows. Why? Taxes. Taxes were assessed per pane, so each pane became a window. At least I think that’s true. My rhetoric professor, Dan Mahala, told our class that in college. This was in the ’90s, when institutions still taught actual history—or at least tried to—not the ticky-tacky history being peddled today.
If U.S. politics applied to bodies—which of course it does, mainly those of women and trans and nonbinary folks, but bear with me again for the purposes of this essay—we might very well have been taught that we have two noses and two butts, especially if that meant we could be charged more for lugging all that flashy and fleshy gear around. Two butts! Two noses! How indulgent of you. One of each is subject to the luxury tax! You clearly have spares that are purely ornamental. (Don’t tell the tax collectors about the set of kidneys dangling in our trunks or the lungs or whatever else is doubled up in there like sets of animals shuffled onto a dingy for safekeeping during what looked to be the makings of a pretty big storm.)
All that contrived body taxation would be a real pane, wouldn’t it? I mean pain. And trust me, the body is definitely a pain.
But I digress. Who turns to stone? I’m asking because that’s what my body felt like today. Sisyphus, maybe. You could argue that pushing stones turns him into the very thing he’s pushing: Something that moves but that isn’t quite alive; someone whose stony but who isn’t quite mineral.
Demosthenes filled his mouth with stones to learn how to speak clearly. But that’s not the same thing as turning to stone.
Oh, I know, I know! It’s those who gaze into Medusa’s eyes!
Whose stare must I have returned to be cursed this evening? It must have been someone in my dreams. I’d just woken from a nap when the compacting began, soles first, a crushing invisible force making me denser and denser. I felt the hardening creep upward. The stiffening. The molecular tightening. I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching a virus spread through a computer taking out file after file after beloved file and replacing them with junk code.
I realize I can’t make the stone metaphor work alongside my earlier tree metaphor. Adding the computer-virus reference is making things even worse. Let’s just acknowledge all of that and move on. I don’t have time to put the right slant on this truth. (My apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I’m sliding downhill, and everything I write is sliding with me. Besides, wood can turn to stone. I know. I’ve seen it. I have a chunk of opalized palmwood right here that makes my case for me.
That rock is science. It’s fact. And like science and fact, opalized palmwood is beautiful when you place it on a black light in a dark room. It looks like magic and could be passed off as such if your audience doesn’t know any better. A divining rock. A soothsayer’s stone. Not the soft, boring sandstone my body is becoming, the kind of stone miners here tossed to the side when looking for the good stuff like silver and uranium.
But guess what? I tricked you, and you didn’t know any better. Petrified wood isn’t stone. My science wasn’t science, and my facts weren’t facts. Here’s the truth. You ready: Though the phrase petrified wood or petrified tree comes from Ancient Greek πέτρα meaning “rock” or “stone,” literally “wood turned into stone,” petrification doesn’t change organic wood into stone. It merely preserves the wood’s shape and structural elements.
Sometimes language gets things wrong. Sometimes, even the Ancient Greeks got things wrong. Is it so hard to believe that sometimes we get things wrong? That we get things wrong most of the time, actually?
Maybe I’m not turning to stone. Maybe parts of me are just undergoing a change, being preserved. My shape. My structural elements.
My husband found his phone. It was in the garage. He went out there frantically looking for it like a prospector trying to lay claim to a seam of silver in a sandstone reef in a town called Silver City in the 1870s. He cast aside all the piled-up crap garages tend to take on as his world was reduced to two things: phone and not phone.
When he found his phone, the world made sense again. I was in a chair by that time live-tweeting the unfolding disaster. My upper body still worked, which meant I could be a writer and write things down. So I wrote things down just like Richard Siken says we should. What else would you have me do? Come unglued?
This is marriage. This, too, is marriage. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes there’s no diagnosing what’s wrong with it. Sometimes it’s all experience and no name and no remedy. Or maybe no remedy is needed because legs are not roots and flesh is not stone and a phone isn’t something jacked out of the Earth for profit or for prophets.
Sometimes a phone is just a phone, and we can use it to hear the voice of the person we love more than anyone else on the planet. Sometimes we can take that call. Sometimes we can’t no matter how much we want to. We just let it ring through to voicemail and hope the love of our life leaves us a message that we can receive when we’re ready.
Deliver me from the man who ran over a porcupine in broad daylight because of his need to thrust his way forward always forward always faster and always darker, coal smoke billowing from his tailpipe as he hits the gas hard.
Deliver me from that man who saw the porcupine struggling after his back legs were crushed, who didn’t stop, who didn’t take the porcupine to the wildlife rehab on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa, who didn’t care because black smoke because man because manly because grrrrr because move over here I come like it or not because get off of my road and out of my town and I’ll put my foot in your ass and I’ll mow you down I mean it I mean it look at me I really mean it look at my Gadson flag and my Dixie flag can’t you see I mean business look at my neck veins little lady, pretty little lady, lady why’s there a thought in your head a little tinkling thought about love that’s so silly so outdated so childish like a school bell hey little lady listen here it’s not God’s way for you to think or tell a man what to do a big man a strong man a fast man and you damned well know it so stop thinking just stop stop it right now.
Deliver me from what the porcupine must have felt there in the road on the hot asphalt in the heat so close to the soft sage flanking the road’s shoulder. He got so close but not close enough never close enough for speed for thrill for look I killed that varment woohoo hot damn and never enough blood left in the leaking husk never enough life left in the pressured heart and never enough limp left in the body nobody will ever gather for ever.
Deliver me from those who came after and also didn’t stop. The sedans and SUVS and minivans and trucks and semis and hatchbacks and Outbacks and Elements and motorcycles and RVs.
Deliver me from every one of them. Deliver me from my neighbors. They didn’t stop. They didn’t stop. My neighbors didn’t stop. Too busy doing God’s work to do God’s work.
Deliver me from my own absence as the porcupine struggled, for coming behind too late by hours, maybe, or maybe only by minutes which is even more self-hatred to be delivered from.
Deliver me from rewriting the story so I’m there, so I take the limp, quilled creature in my arms and usher him to safety, to people who care, to angels on this earth who spend all day helping the creatures of this earth. I almost typed heart. Heart is earth. Earth is heart. Same letters. How did I never see that before? Grief brings out glimmerings, doesn’t it? This is how and why we survive grief. No glimmering, no future. No heart in earth, no earth in our hearts.
Deliver me from those who have no earth in their hearts, no heart in their earths.
Deliver me from my revisions my impossible revisions my anger that story only takes us so far into the future because it never changes the past. Our stories are cursed that way as we are cursed.
Deliver me from the cursed. Deliver me from myself as one of the cursed. Curs-ed, say it with two syllables. Say it with me. Curs-ed. Clop along to that languid beat, that dirge. The march of what we’ll all be without love and without hope.
Deliver me from revisions existing only in our minds and not actually changing what happened, what really happened. The porcupine is dead. That’s what happened. In broad daylight. Visible on open road. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed his hellbent smoke-infused take that world roll.
Deliver me from this iron-encrusted place whose heart was lost in the creek, in the canyons, up on the cliffs when … years, hours, minutes ago? How long? How long has it been? Since we came, since we named, since we shamed, since we couldn’t leave couldn’t leave couldn’t leave this place alone?
Deliver me from how long we’ve lived like this, baffled and battled and beaten and battered and branded and broken. How long must I writhe, I mean write, before I write my way out of this failing, flailing, hellish heaven on earth? A minute? An hour? A day? An eternity?
Zion—my great nephew, not the place—deliver me from this land whose name you carry in your pocket on your papers in your heart and in your genes. Yours is the real Zion. It lives inside you, little one. Never deliver me from who you are—from you, my kin, my kind, my kindred. [REDACTED] Pin me here to this tree, the only one that’s safe these days with all the fruit trees eaten bare. The family tree. My tree, our everlasting tree.
As for you, Zion—the place, not the great nephew—deliver me from you. Free me from you. Forget me. You don’t even have to forgive me. If you can’t reverse time and bring that porcupine back to life, if you can’t unwind the clocks that are all wound too tight here warping time and space and hearts and minds, then deliver me. I beseech you. Deliver me from what we’ve made you, from what you’ve become. Please deliver me.
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.
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.
Cancer cells can hide inside other types of cells within the body, which is how cancer can evade detection and continue taking up residence inside us even after cancer treatment.
Viruses can mask themselves inside us and avoid being found for years. Hepatitis C does so using FAD, a molecule composed of Vitamin B2 and the energy carrying molecule ATP.
It only takes one B cell turning on our bodies to get all the B cells around them whipped up and make them act the same way, at least for a time. That’s how autoimmune diseases like alopecia areata happen, where an itch or some other benign thing affecting the skin turns into a bald patch that lasts for months or forever because first one, then many, B cells misinterpret the itch as a threat.
My immune system is dysregulated. In addition to having immune deficiency, I have several forms of autoimmunity. My humoral immune system doesn’t always attack invaders such as viruses and bacteria, but it does attack me, my body, routinely. Dysautonomia looks like it’s an autoimmune disease. That tracks with my immune system dysregulation and the way I’ve been developing more and more autoimmune diseases over the course of my adult life.
Many of the health issues I’ve been having over the past two years seem to be my body saying no, the way Gabor Maté discusses such phenomena in his book titled When the Body Says No. My body has been saying no since I was a child, since my trauma started, my familial sex abuse and trafficking. My body keeps saying no and is now in a rhythm of saying no, sometimes quietly and—in a pattern that starts every seven years and resolves in about a year’s time—sometimes piercingly.
I’m at the end of one of those cycles now, but my body isn’t coming back. I’m a rubber band whose elastic has failed, the kind that ultimately break after years of use. I still can’t gain the weight I lost. I’m in pain every day, sometimes extreme pain. My heart gallops and loses its pacing. It would be put down at the track. I’m struck by bouts of exhaustion that come when they please and leave when they please. My TSH absorption continues to be significantly dysregulated despite not even having a thyroid anymore.
I’m fighting, but I’m not coming back. I don’t know if I’ll return this time. The trauma I’ve experienced is severe. My health issues are alarming and serious. Complicated, my doctors say. Your health is complicated. They are somber when they speak to me. They don’t have as much hope as I do, or at least as much as I once had.
The first person Maté writes about in his book dies. She can’t come back from her health issues and ultimately succumbs to them. Cancer, I think. I’d have to look again, and I can’t bear looking. That book is hard for me to read. This life is hard for me to live.
But I want to live. I will live fully as long as I can, whatever that looks like for me and whatever that continues to look like over time.
Haters, especially local haters who think the problem in this community is me because of my gender and sexuality and because of the ways in which I talk about my trauma, especially in and through my poetry: You don’t need to keep me down or hold me back or marginalize me. Stop doing that to me and to others like me. You’re poison. We need the antidote, not more of you. You will be ashamed of yourself someday. You will wish you’d led with love, been flooded with love, exuded love. Trust me. (Dont’ truss me.)
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.
Last fall, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune in response to several Southern Utah politicians speaking at a meeting in which LGBTQ+ folks were repeatedly called evil and satanic. Members of the community left numerous disturbing comments in response to that letter. Seventy percent of the comments were deleted by The Tribune‘s staff because they were threatening or otherwise violated the publication’s comment guidelines. I saw some of those comments before they were deleted. I’ve been terrified ever since.
Similar comments were left on stories in other publications that discussed LGBTQ+ rights, including stories I was quoted in or otherwise participated in. Those comments were also deleted, but that doesn’t change the mindset of those in our community who have the feelings they have and who threaten, defame, harass, dehumanize, and discriminate against those in the LGBTQ+ community for no reason other than the fact that we are LGBTQ+.
These community members are taking their cues from the politicians who have turned their attention to the trans community because being anti-trans is a good political strategy. It gets people whipped up in ways that catalyze people to act, often without thinking, from shadowy places that all humans possess but that don’t need to govern our lives, determine our values, inform our beliefs, or control our behaviors.
What I mean is, fear, disgust, and loathing are all being conjured but not so we can explore those feelings and work through them to gain a better understanding of their origins. Instead, they’re being exploited, and words and actions that stem from these feelings are spreading like wildfire across parched land.
Who’s being destroyed? Not just trans folks. Not just the entire LGBTQ+ community. It’s everyone. Everyone who’s been discriminated against. Everyone who doesn’t have equality. Everyone who’s made gains and is now losing ground.
And everyone who’s harming others.
When our common ground is burned, our shared humanity singed beyond recognition, we all end up having nothing.
Anti-trans legislation will most likely be one of the top agenda items for conservative politicians in 2024. We’re already seeing a wave of anti-trans legislation and anti-trans language and attitudes across the United States, as well as here in Utah. Bills and emergency rules are getting more expansive, more disturbing, and more life-threatening.
At the same time, people are making statements that are more violent, caustic, and harmful than ever.
Earlier this month, a community member in St. George, Utah, stood up and told city officials that it’s not harassment and discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks which is causing us to die by suicide because we’re all mentally ill anyway. The implication is that we can be treated however by whomever because we’re broken, defective, and disposable.
Last month, a local politician who spoke at the meeting I mentioned above shared a cartoon on social media depicting the LGBTQ+ community as being a Trojan Horse full of pedophiles. That’s not about “protecting” children, which is the line these politicians use when they propose anti-trans legislation. It’s literally an elected official characterizing every person who’s LGBTQ+ as a pedophile.
At an event last week, a fellow volunteer approached me and said that “we” are supposed to be boycotting Bud Light because the company has a transgender spokesperson. We? We who? What we? That’s not a we that includes me. That’s not a we that will ever include me. And that’s not a space where I’m welcome or safe.
Where am I welcome or safe these days? Where are any LGBTQ+ folks welcome and safe? We’re running out of spaces that are inclusive.
I was recently told that the solution is for me to conform, adapt, tolerate, or otherwise learn to live compatibly with the very same people in this community who are attacking the LGBTQ+ community, who have attacked me, and who are making it impossible for LGBTQ+ folks to feel and be safe here. I don’t know what the solution is, but that’s not it.
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 