How Not to Be Seen

In high school, I learned that I had to be the FBI agent of my own body. That’s because it was perfectly okay to discriminate against me in the late ’90s. We didn’t know what to do with queer kids yet. I actually had both CIA and DIA personnel comment on it, that learning to do intel work first starts with learning that the world is fucked up and I am no different. Being queer and assigned female at birth made me wary of all men, all the time. If they were enlightened around women, I still had to stomach their gay jokes. I still had to put up with southern Baptist rhetoric at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I’ve been made an example of at two schools.

One from a counselor when I was bullied:

Well, what did you do to provoke them?

And one from a teacher on a paper:

I feel that this is too private to share with the class.

I was vindicated when my teacher girlfriend said that my paper was educational and I’d been discriminated against. I was carrying the message about the way I’d been treated at HSPVA to Clements. So, whether I was out of the closet or in, schooling did not fit me.

Culture does not fit me. It moves around me. While everyone else was lost in the movies, I was lost in the art of how they get made. You saw Da Five Bloods on Netflix, I met the guy who composed the score (Terrance Blanchard). You saw Selma, I know the guy who composed the score (Jason Moran). It’s a different way of relating to the world when movie magic is hard, hard work and not handed to you on a silver platter. I’ve played with jazz greats and know that I’m not the best, but I’m a utility player who won’t show up late and that counts for a lot, or it would be if I hadn’t stopped playing trumpet.

People think that it’s all talk, that I want to say I have cool friends because I needed to prove I had a cool friend. That’s the saddest part of all. I had to prove I had a friend. I’ve been thinking a lot about this… why did I need to prove Supergrover was real? I panicked. She gave me no reason not to panic. I wasn’t handling my shit well.

That was a bigger laugh line than intended.

But how does Supergrover relate to my high school experience? She was with me the whole time, or a part of her was. It’s the writing muse inside me that makes art come out. We hadn’t met yet, but the talent was already there. She just molded it so that I feel like I’m a capable enough writer to take a stab from a dagger.

Because now I know she cut me and she meant it, but it was to lance an infection. Supergrover and I had become toxic in both directions. Again:

“I do not think vulnerability solves everything. I AM TIRED.”

My heart shattered. Irreconcilable differences where she denies she hurts me until we’re dead. Nope.

There was never revenge, and there will always be regret. But not for the torrent of writing talent that I had to give someone. Taking all of the love and hope I put into the wrong relationship didn’t mean that picking SG! was also wrong. I’d been searching for a place to put that love my whole life, because my relationship with my mother was broken. She helped reparent me and I think I helped reparent, her, but it did not come without a bit of colonization here and there. It wasn’t always me claiming her in the name of Ireland. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

They thought I wanted people to know them because they are The Doctor, and I wanted people to know John Smith.

It was too much of a torrent that could not be tamed to a trickle; my heart is like that. Wild and reckless and wreck-less because of it. Things bounce off of scar tissue because there’s just so much of it. I’m going through yet another family emergency in which it would be helpful for me to undo the last 10 years so that I could be in my big backyard right now. But I chose her family. And then I was a jackass to them unprovoked. But rule following gets you nowhere in her line of work, so we stayed friends.

But did we?

I don’t think so. I think that I’m not supposed to know what happens next in any area of my life. But if I look back, all the answers are found when I was really too young to understand anything.