On community

It is a meta experience of life, to read about myself and my living conditions as part of theories in outdated literature. To read that the disabled feels this and this ,will say so and, lives here and there. It seems silly, hard, enraging, and sad, all in one go. To be subject to such ethnographic perspectives on myself and others, on a community I cherish and know are filled with heroes.

Even more so when the structures these theories diminishes into something that rarely happens, when the laws that they so joyful tell me will help me receive autonomy and freedom are the ones that hinder me the most in everyday life right now. It's a foggy life I look into, sometimes too foggy, sometimes a brick wall of discrimination right in front of my eyes. One that I reach out and touch with vainly polished nails. Fearing I will not have courage enough to scratch at it.

And it tells me I am invalid, confined, isolated and lonely. That my struggles will be in vain because it won't matter what I do. What I say, write and create, what kind of community I build for myself. We are bigger than you it says, we who built this, we see you but we don't care.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about small things, the ones that build up to the big one. How I could never just jump on a bus, how I haven't been to the grocery store in weeks since it's too far from my apartment and I would rather just send my PA's instead. How my new apartment will be better than the one I am in now, but how the ludicrous ideas of accessible housing, the way the makers of the brick walls sees it, means that it is okay to just make a huge bathroom and a badly planned out room. But after all the bathroom is where the disabled spent most of its time, isn't it?

I worry I will feel confined there again. That I will curl up and wail until the wallpaper curls on the walls.

I exist under such a matrix of discrimination, I suppose it is true there aren't very many rural-blue collar-Pentecostal-cripfemme-pansexual-kinksters, but that doesn't mean that this isn't the unprivileged reality that I live each and every day.
Recently it worries me, that solidarity has become such a bad word. That the political winds that are blowing here, and not only from the far far right as one would assume, are building an ignorant and frightened society that fears the other – an other such as me.

 

In between all this I struggle with assumptions of myself. I should work better, harder, my work should be effecting more change, I should be asked to do more stuff, I am not versatile enough, I am not strong enough.

I guess that's why I sob when she asks how I am feeling. I do feel isolated, I have gotten so used to being inside, so used to having to consider my energy, so used to pouring over books filled with words of those who have seen others such as me -but still none like me.

 

I have already lived a nightmare. I have already been what I was brought up to believe I would never be, a disabled young woman with limited access and self-determination over my own life, a loner. It's true I came out of it, and it was somewhat quicker than I would have thought. But that doesn't mean those feelings don't resonate within me now. I remember what it was like to not be able to choose, I do.

And I still can't choose like I would like to.

 

Don't think I have got it. Don't think that just because I read, write and perform critically about all that shape and strengthen me that I am somehow above it all now. The truth is I am not, the truth is I am pretty much as deep in the shit as I have always be. The truth is my sense of home is still being invaded by the constant help I can't be without. I cannot choose to be alone for that would be choosing a slow death. Don't think that just because I can formulate articulate academic reasoning on how that affects myself and others I don't live it as much as anyone that can't.

 

However, it is my duty to formulate this reasoning. It is my duty to speak in spaces where others can't, to infiltrate as much as possible a white-urban-atheist-able bodied-academic culture and tell about loss, sadness, confinement, rage and the restrictions placed upon the impaired body.

Do not tell me about freedom, for I have longed for that. Do not tell me about choice, for I very seldom have it. Do not tell me there is no class, when I exist as a lower class person within a lower class.

Do not speak to me about goodwill or charity. Tell me about responsibility and support. Do not try to tell me about equality, for I will show you what is truly unfair.

 

Recently as I have stumbled on this new path I have found great support. I know we share different experiences of illness, disability, and embodiment but I know we often pay a high price and we live to support others and the change we feel is necessary. I am deeply thankful for a shared understanding of complex femininity, sexuality, beauty, weakness, freedom, and force.

Thank you for supporting me, reading what I write and engaging in my work. You are my inspirations, my resorts, my beacons. You show me possibilities when I think there is none. And if this is the way this life is going to be then I am very thankful I will at least get to share it with you.

On dealing with despair

The first dead person I ever saw was my grandmother. She was 89 years old, and she died one month after her birthday. I remember the odd chilliness of her hand as I stroked it one last time. My mother had told me about it.
"It's a strange sensation", she had said. "A living person never gets that cold. I felt it lingering..."

My grandmother had been a widow for more than 40 years when she died. The last years of her life she was madly senile but happy where she was, I was convinced she was with my grandfather who I had never met. My father's father, who had died of a cardiac arrest in the forest behind their house. She had gone out too look for him because he took so long coming back, and she had found him dead. My father was 25, his brother only ten, soon he has outlived his own father by 40 years.

Death has never been a secret where I grew up. In fact it has been talked about openly. My mother's grandmother fell over from another heart related cause of death, my grandmother on my mother's side had constant heart troubles after she retired, but, said my aunts, when she died she stretched her arms out – as if someone was coming to greet her.
My grandfather who's woolen knees would chafe against my bare thighs as I sat in his lap, who called me his little dove, and carried sweets in his pocket (on box each, in each pocket for me and my brother) died in his car. His heart stopped right outside his garage, although he was vainly alive when they found him.
I remember calling his landline right after my mother told me he had died to see if he wasn't home after all. I was seven years old, and I can't remember what number I dialed.
My brother and I got his striped woolen cap and his red scarf, for months it smelled like him, a dark peppery perfume.

 

I wore a black plaited skirt and shiny patent leather shoes to his funeral, my older cousin couldn't stop crying behind me. The golden lettering in an equally golden frame behind the coffin read JESUS, the only altar needed for Pentecostals.
I remember wanting to cry because it would show I was sad. And going home with a friend of the family after the ceremony with my brother and my younger cousin who was only six, to eat Basset's Allsorts and take our Sunday bests off. My aunt wrote the verse in the obituary, about the wind swaying in the trees. A deep green forest that would never end.
The men in my family have been woodsmen, the forest a refuge for heated thoughts.

 

I eat dinner with my father in a noisy urban restaurant and he leans in over his plate and tells me.
"Christine, I have found this spot. Where the forest meets a meadow and a hill, like a triangle... and when it's all done, I'll build a little cottage there, and I'll go lay down, and you know where to find me."
I am not sure my father will ever do this. But I am certain he longs to.

 

My father's mother, who outlived her own husband for longer than they had been married, resonates in me now. I see her in the structure of my cheekbones. My smiles. I see my father and my mother's mother in the shape of my face, and all of them in my curly hair.

 

Perhaps I indulge so much in death and its concepts sorrow, loss and anger, since it has never been hidden from me. And perhaps it is so since I have been brought up believing that death takes us where we are destined to be. That we are called home. That we are greeted and hence reach out to the one coming towards us.

I am a constant subtle reminder of death where ever I go. My body is a reminder that you all will decay, that human life is fragile, hurtful and full of failings.
I was brought up with a notion of having conquered death before I had means to speak about it. My brother made the V for Victory sign in the incubator, it is true, I am not telling lies. I am certain we knew we had survived, but were clueless when it came to living.

 

The reminder of death that my body is is hard to escape. It is a constant weight dragging on behind me, sometimes smaller sometimes larger, but constant. It is a shadow of life lived on the fringe that has nothing to do with what I do, who I love, where I live – only the fact that I am.

I cannot help but be fascinated by the way my body works. I look fairly normal, I am short that true's, but none of me is disfigured. Still I marvel sometimes, and often it takes proof in the form of photography to spark it, at my upper arms, the muscles around my neck, my boney fingers. They are each other's contrasts, the representations of force and stiffness. Movement and confinement.
I marvel at a lot of things when it comes to my physical form. Small stuff, like the dry patches on my hands that come from pressing them down onto the padded handles of my walker in infinity, the slightly more bent joint on my right little finger.

The fact that the tension in my inner thighs can give me full blown orgasms without any other stimulation. If I am really in the mood.

 

One could assume that such a culture that mine has been, with constant reminders of sorrow and death. With a religious context and conversations of life and death as sincere as open windows to the afterlife, would have made for a gloomy childhood. One full of dark clad somber old aunts who sang chorals with shivering voices. But it was one of mad dances in pouring lukewarm summer rains, in our knickers, my aunt me. One of sheep with little golden crowns on their heads for my brother's and mine's birthday. One of constant stories of ecstatic relatives and mad childhood mischief such as painting cows and riding pigs. But with a frankness about mental illness, disability, grief and starvation that taught us.
Memento mori

But most of all
Memento vivente

 

 

My brother's and my body are slowly decaying. As with the half life of nuclear waste, we are withering, you all are - we have just gotten a head start.
My physical composure has landed me a place in a social structure of discrimination that I couldn't choose, but see all so clearly now. I am frightened; I am terrified that it will cage me in.

It is a porcelain white panic, the notion that this is my state, for as long as I live my body will hinder me to live a life free from help. I can be independent perhaps, but never truly autonomous. It is a condition that I cannot fight but musr accept, a notion I bear with me wherever I go, and sometimes it hits me. Bluntly over the head.

 

It is unfair, but life is unfair. I was lucky to be brought up with the lessons of love and bravery, of force. I was lucky to live in a home where nothing was hidden. Where the truth would truly set us free.

 

I was lucky to meet a man, a Norwegian wonder of nature. A talent in the truest sense. A teacher who taught me what no school would ever, a lesson I too often forgot.
He said that I had an eye for detail, that it was good that I sought a career in this, so few women did.
I didn't think of him yesterday shivering between my sheets but I think of him now, when I have come through to the other side of despair.

"Be small he said, be small but never frightened."

So I accept my fragility, I accept decay and I accept death. I accept my smallness as well as my force but I won't accept how structures frighten and rattle me.

 

My father's mother, the only dead person I have touched knew the true meaning of loss. Although as I touched her body her chilly bones knew nothing, had no stories to tell, spoke no language. Showed only, as a map, the trails of life lived.
In my father's photo albums the young woman who I resonate wears a soft flowery cotton dress, she is strong and healthy but she looks shyly into the lens of the camera.

There is something that always draws me into that picture, her hips, underneath her dress they seem to glow, like iron. My father's mother had glowing hips, my mother's mother only one eye and I have shivering thighs that grant me pleasure without touch.

On fear

I live a life of constant intrusion. I lead an existence based on a facet of social facades. My existence here is fragile. I cannot help but feel, again and again, as if I am wasting my time in this town. This is not what I came here for, to lay curled up between sheets in a apartment where the air hurts to inhale and my chest cramps with the notion of isolation. Still. Despite.

Despite taxi cards and PA's, despite good courses at University and despite a growing crip revolution under my hands.

Fall is approaching, fall is here now and I remember just how it was. How I felt that I imposed myself. How it was being stuck in a deep dark hole that opened up under my feet, how I plunged in, head first. And I remember that very clearly now, the hogtying ropes of confinement chafing against my skin, and it makes my chest cramp. With fear.

 

Recently the organization that has been a strong and reliable force of further existence in this town, my PAs, have crumbled and dissolved. In a matter of just physical existence I am indeed fine, someone still buys my groceries and washes my dirty laundry, but they are new and unknown girls.
It's a very odd and hurtful paradox, the one that says that on the surface I meet people all of the time, we talk and all, but I don't know them. We talk of nothing I really would want to talk about. While I see them, I am still alone, 'cause it's not them I want to see.

 

In the midst of this I get truly terrifying reports from media and friends, of people who's physical conditions are worse than mine, who's PA hours have been declined totally or cut drastically. On September 20^th I meet my welfare contact, to speak about my PA services since my contract runs out on the last of September. I hope I have nothing to worry about but it's so much added stress and I am terrified.
There are so many feelings of anxiety in this, so much which hinders me and puts my mind in other places than I want it to be.

It's hard to explain, the lack of autonomy and spontaneity in my life. The feeling of constant intrusion and lack of privacy, my own struggle with being nice and happy and good boss for the PAs who come to work for me now. The feeling of constant assessment by an authoritarian external force.
Who wants to know how long I use the bathroom when I do, if I eat healthy and practice a safe sexual lifestyle…all highly relevant questions, they assume, to determine whether a person in need really needs help.

 

And the hardest part of this being that I can't get out if. I can't tell them to fuck off and go do my thing anyway. My entire existence is built on their assessment of my need of help, and their good will, granting me hours of that help.
Usually when I have these feelings of confinement and worry they are paired with a strong will of fighting back, or carrying on anyhow, proving that success is the greatest form of revenge.
It is true I am driven by passion, obsession and a stubborn drive for self assertion and representation but fear is a marvelous sniper, shootings its bullets in the core of all of that. Shattering my dreams of lime light, good writing, revolution and inspiring studies, making me a shivering victim of coincidences…

I don't speak openly about all this as much as I perhaps should. It's private and personal and hard to phrase right. And I do believe that I refrain from it in order to not get bitter. I don't want it having the upper hand in my life. But today it's been true, the pit has been dark, deep and narrow, and its walls have scraped the back of my shoulders as I have turned in it.

 

On: Catharsis

"I try to call you names… but every time it comes out the same…"

 

I guess I should be happy about the fact that I don't care if you care anymore.
But it annoys me, the revising of our history, the you and me in us, that you must have done somehow to be able to deal with pushing me away so gently.
What was it with you and me and what we did that you could never accept? Don't worry, I know, and I won't tell here… I don't want to embarrass you.

However, you are the only one I have lost, that I have never been able to reconcile with. The only one with whom I couldn't have a promise of betterment and a new commitment. I divorced you and you didn't even know, when I was miserable grieving what we once had you didn't even think of it as being lost. You only thought of how to get your hands on the texts, those that I used to write for you, but didn't anymore.
You said - Oh that's mine, let me do it!
And I thought what the fuck, my words are mine, write your own. And then I grieved you.

 

I still make up foolish hopes. Like how you would show up at my birthday party, all changed and willing and contrite. Bloody fool. Of course you don't, you have no impulse to be contrite, you were never willing unless I was.

What bugs me the most now is the idea that I have let you go, but I can let go of what you made me. There are things that only we did, music only we listened to, texts I only showed you. And you bore into me so deeply I can't let you go. And now and then I miss you, madly. The you I knew. Whoever that was.

 

Yes it is true I loved you, coveted you, and craved you. Perhaps you didn't crave me and that is alright somehow. But I know I meant more than this. And I hate your revisionist approach to the life we lived, the stories we wrote inside each other. It makes me feel fake. A make believe version of myself, with make believe memories and fake ideas of myself, and you. But it doesn't matter that much what my image of you is, I just hate that you terrorized my image of me.

 

I try desperately to regain what you have forced me to connect with you. Although, sometimes I can't.
It's that music, my first ever meeting with you was play backed by it… it was the soundtrack of whatever we did and the theme of me missing you when you were unobtainable. Vainly I put it on the playlist for my party…as a hex, a spell…foolishly hoping still.
And when those dark musky tones starts playing I can't help but feel run over by how hard it is to have lost you, you slipped through my fingers even though I tried everything I knew to keep you. And the hardest part is knowing it isn't something I did, you just didn't want me, did you?

 

We are pissed and giggly and have measured our complexes to the inch to see who had it worse, and that song starts playing again, and she (apart from you) notices the gloom in my eyes…
What is it?, she asks.
And I say it's you.
Do you want me to turn it off?
No! No, I say all of a sudden! Put it on, put the entire record on, I need to overcome this!
And she does…

It's then that I realize, you will never go away, I will never be able to reconcile because you will never be contrite. I will just have to accept that this will hurt for longer than I thought. My foolish softhearted constitution allowed you drill yourself into my bones and I smile wanly at her..

..for I know that constitution I detested so because it let you in and will never let you out, also let her in..and all the others who will never leave like you left.

And I guess I should be happy about that, and about the fact that I won't ever have the opportunity to be disappointed with you..ever..again.

On the Holy Spirit

As a Pentecostal the idea of the Holy Spirit, a swift wind inspiring change and freedom is central to my understanding of myself and my Christian Faith. As this weekend was Whitsun and the time when the Spirit first fell on Peter and the other disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem I will write something about breaking free, like a swift wind, about finding one's own voice even if it's in a language you haven't been told. About speaking and thinking in tongues. This new process is still very vulnerable, but it is forceful and it's happening right next to me. Getting to witness it is a great honor.

There was a time when I would shiver from the cold in my bathroom when I showered, now I place my feet longingly on its chilly tile. My white concrete walls glow from heat and the black floor of terass sizzles, when she shows up, to work.

I watch her in her white t-shirt and black shorts, her boyishly blond hair, those God-given arms, red from yesterdays tanning session on the sizzling terass.
I do a little bit of reading on the concepts of body modifications and the notion of the skin as a closed envelope for the self, freed from imprints caused by roaming postmodern identities of contemporary life. I rant a bit about narrow minded middleclass assumption of femininity and skin, and we end up talking as we usually do – about abilities, scars, clothing, butch, femme, girls, crushes, power, exposure, pain…

We talk about visibility, how she often passes as able-bodied, me often as a little nice girl, we compare scares. I show her the one at my loins (hardly visible she says) and she the one at her shoulder, it is wide and deep and the skin is leather-ey.
I show her the one at my Achilles tendons, bluish, thick and cold.
What does it mean, the skin as an unbroken envelope for the self? Does it mean that our selves slipped out somehow when they cut us up? Must I like the mark of the exit on my body?

We come back to butches and being read as male. I show her pictures of trans-men I know, cinnamon skin, piercings, blue shirts. And she says, all of a sudden, and in effect, with sadness to her cocky tone of voice.
It's UNFAIR!!
What do you mean, I say, why is it unfair?
Well look at them…they are beautiful, hot, strong, well made self-made men…

I take her hand in mine as I giggle.
But they have altered their bodies, they take T…
She interrupts me.
I...I want to look like that.
My smile is wider, I am so happy she would finally say
Oh…tranny boy!
Now she is the one giggling, but she has a fierce spark to her eye.
Boy, she says, yeah –boy!

We talk about identities again, the notion of being forced into a femininity that neither of us could have chosen. How I have used it, how I have known from involuntary changes of my body what it is like to be trapped underneath one's own skins, underneath the sealed envelope that 'protects' the self.

He doesn't understand, she says. That I am offended, when he says he thinks it's annoying that others read me as male. He can't figure out that that is at least partly what I want.
Have you told him? I ask.
No...
Well perhaps you should.

We make our way out on the terrass. I make a silly joke about her carrying the nuts and she calls me boss.
I lean out over the rail and admire the busy street below us, the stout houses with black roofs and royal icing ornaments.

Ze looks at ease beside me, as if ze is finally come all the way out.
We talk about energies, how I knew a long long while ago, what a boy she was…
And I tell hir kindly but sternly that ze mustn't be fooled by the gender binary, or by any false notions of what transitioning is. That it is only import to be comfortable in ones skin. Underneath the safely sealed envelope.

Ze tells me about yet another gay man, insisting "she could carry her baby herself…" hir eyes spark again…
Was he really that clueless? ze fairly shouts.,
But darling boy, I say. You must tell them…."I don't think I'll ever carry any babies and I don't like my tits that much!"
Ze laughs, loud and hir eyes glistens as ze says YEAH, just like that.

Hir shift is over, ze's barley worked, or at least ze doesn't think ze has. You're my gender boot camp ze says and I laugh inside, thinking of the femme, cis-gendered woman I am, how I am always the one who cries: NO FUCK GENDER! I DON'T CARE!

When ze is about to leave I make another silly joke. Ze say something about hir balls, and I point to hir chest and ask, which one?
Ze laughs. Oh, that's not okay, ze says. You don't make jokes about tranny boy's breasts.
My heart swells. Blessed boy, blessed, blessed little boy.

So yes. The wind has struck. The spirit. The wind of change and freedom, and we speak in tongues, we speak the truth. And the wind strikes. Like a paperknife it rips the envelope that confines our true selves.

Walk on tranny boy, walk on into glory and I shall cover your broad back with mine, until it bleeds.

On getting down to the nitty gritty...

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang!

I am sorry but I am getting a bit fed up now. Slightly sick and tired of how incapable people are of seeing what this is really about. The fact that what I do still evoke so many strange feelings. Why is it that there are so many things we handle better than this…
Why is it so hard to respect personal choice, why is it so hard to respect that the consensual choices of others might not be what you like. But, the opportunity for others to make those choices and turn away from lives prescribed to them by gender, class, race, age, size…whatever you would like, is what makes this world worth living in.

I am sorry but we must get personal now. This here world of assumptions of femininity is not big enough for the both of us. I am telling you, dear creators of “open” and “accepting” spaces, do not fuck with me… and beware, cute is a scare!

……

I am in the tackiest of clubs. I have told her to sit up straight to make it is easier to endure the strange feeling of being a zoo animal, little girls don’t come here. Little girls with frames don’t come here. They don’t wear silk blouse. They don’t wear silver crosses. Amongst leather pants and whips hanging from a belt, amongst eyes that measure me as a falsely conscious little girl not yet having found her place at the feet of the patriarchy.

I survive that evening because I cling on to her physically. When they look at us I look at her. There is a fatigue in her eyes the same as mine. A tire of those eyes that invade us, that measure our bodies and what we do.
When she is preoccupied with other things and I roam the vast club on my own I seek the eyes of other Ladies.
A woman with her boi on sofa…the knife slowly caressing hir fingers… She looks at me with that same fatigue, we sigh and I nod at her. I know what it’s like.

That’s when he approaches me. I must confess I didn’t like him that much prior to this either. He is the invasive kind, the exploiting kind, everyone in a space like this are vehicles for lust and that is his lust, he thinks.
I have been waiting for her which I clung to, who I told to sit up straight so that something would be endurable in this place, he looks at me with that icky middle aged man smile.
“Aaaw, little miss…” he says. “How are you?”

I am shocked. I am shocked at how easy he does it. How easy he belittles and ignores me. I am sure he knows what I do. I am sure his partner, who has seen me work stripes into shivering strong backs many a time before, have told him what I do. I am sure he knows that even if I am a girl I am no one’s girl.
I hope my eyes burn with that famous black soot I have been told they have when I tell him that I feel fine although I haven’t been able to play here since I didn’t feel safe.
Yet when I leave I am turned off, furious, hurt and sad. My invisibility was so hard to face. His, the middle aged man’s, part in that so obvious it stung my eyes.

…..

Let’s talk a bit about what he couldn’t cope with. Power. Girls with power. Let’s talk a bit about why the idea of the dominant woman is still scary. What have I done? What are we doing?

I grew up in an environment that respected my femininity, and the power I ascribed to it. I call my upbringing a matriarchy – my mother and her sister, my cousins and me, formed a bond of femininity and power. It stemmed from my grandmother and her sister, from a strong sense of survival and belonging.
I never knew of no patriarchy, I never knew that women were not allowed to have power. I never knew I wasn’t allowed to decide for others if they wanted me to do that.

And I was always just as puzzled when I saw the mindfuck in their eyes. In the eyes of men and women alike, when it didn’t match. When my body didn’t match my mind.

Or that’s not right, I match perfectly find with all my expectations of myself. It’s their expectations that I don’t match.

You see it’s not about exploitation, not about abuse and not about oppression. The way she cooks for me and the man, always a man, peeks in at us and asks me if I shouldn’t do that – as the girlie girl.

I don’t tell him to fuck off. I tell my glorious butch girl to tell the “nice” man that that is not how we do things. And she does because she loves me. She loves me when she squirms under my touch, when she bends her neck for me. And I love her when I do it, I love her the most when she gives all of her to me – I love her the most when we rip that patriarchy up by the roots, when I insert the matriarchy that fed and clothed me into the void that the loss of man-made worlds made in her.

I never understood why this was challenging. I never understood why women, girls, I, couldn’t do this? What prevents me? What would force me to do otherwise?

I am sorry but my mother, the Pentecostal, married, heterosexual mother of two, never taught me any of this. She taught me to hold my head high and give myself with love to others, and they will love me too.

So please, put your assumptions, your false notions of female sexuality and femme identities elsewhere. Please don’t put them in my lap – and mind you, don’t force them down my throat. I don’t really do that shit you see.
Ask the girls who have been mine, butches, femmes, bois and grrls alike what they felt when they were with me. What we did when we shared that love my mother told me to share. How we catered to one another.
Ask the patriarchy if it hurt when we ripped its roots.

…..

I leave that club numb. We agree it was bad night, a really bad night. I give her a quick hug before I get in the cab. I tell her she will pay for dragging me all the way there…. She knows I am more serious about then I look. I giggle as she blushes.
On my way home I write a letter of memories and paths travelled for all the women and men that ever giggled sweetly at me assumed I was nice and humble only because I was cute.

To patriarchy with love, best wishes - little girls of the matriarchy!

On just now...

Alright here I am again, and I have nothing more fabulous crip-femmish to report. But I have realised I shouldn't go around investigating that ambition too much. Rather, I have med the concious choice that whatever I write from now on is by default fabulosly crip-femmian since I have written it.

As I predicted in the previous post I will be deadly poor this spring, it's not fun and I do believe I am quite stressed about it. But I am sure I'll manage... (if I show up on you doorstep hungry and puppy eyed you mustn't refuse to feed me, okay...)
The cough still lingers, which is very tireing and makes me feel odder and odder, I am quite sure it's nothing more than a very slowly developing cold though.

Otherwise, I am quite at piece. However, I have realised a few new and perhaps not so healthy emotional obsession but for once I will not bring them out into the ether, again I think it's best not to investigate that as much.
Certain frustrations are stil growing and the sense that things are still very far away in this city is ever present.

Yesterday though, I attended a great lecture and stayed on to discuss my Pentecoastal upbringing and my intrest on what that environment does to the children and grandchildren of it's inhabitans.
I also bonded extensively with a older man from my course, we talked about all things, crip, political, narrative and access related. So yes, things are happening in this city, however slowly and perhaps not in the areas where I would want them to.

Anyhow, I wasn't supposed to stay long so to speak, I am off to bed to cure this cold off - and worry a bit about my financial under the sheets.

On resistance and success....

I know I said last year that this blog would grow to be less private and more of my comments, on all things femme and crip and fabulous. Yes, I realise that that involves a certain amount of private, but I no longer wished for this space to be the selfabsorbed rant that it was. I wished for my life to get better than it was this fall and winter. And I had great hopes, I really did.

Right now I am not sure though. It could be this cough that I have been draging around with like a wheelbarrow of tiring pain, it could be the fact that I have had to reduce my student loans and that I am financally not safe at all. Or it could be the feeling that there is very little reciprocity in my life. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of it in some places and from some people, and I am hoping to get remarkably more of it from others in my life. And I am grateful nowadays for all that comes without a fight.

However, last night I reduced was to a wailing mess. There was very little understanding and I felt the pit that I had been in for all of winter open up again. Things are so far away here, I never seem to do enough, or be well or focused enough to do enough. And aparently it's my fault. There is very little understanding of what my body and I need in order to form that team that other peoples bodies form everyday, all the time, from birth. And it hurts the most to be less than understood by someone I imagined would be close.

I have only just realised this myself. How much I need rest, how much I need activities that fit me and make me feel good, how much I need activities in my life that work for me instead of againts me. That invigorate me instead of draining me. I have just now begun to realise myself just how hard I have always pushed myself to keep up, and what a rest it has been to be around people who genuinly understand, especially since the people who really do aren't even disabled themselves.
It's uncomprehendably painful then, to be told

Well dont you think you need to get out...?

Especially since I have just been out, especially since I had no need of getting out. And you know what it doesn't matter. I have coughed my heart out, I have an exam next week and I will stay in as much as I would like. You see I don't go for a walk all that much, in fact I don't walk all that much, or well, in case you hadn't noticed.

Lately I have been thinking about a wheelchair. I haven't told anyone, but right now I will tell the ether. I haven't told anyone since it is such a lifechanging descion. It will limit me, limit where I go, where I live, who I see and when, it will limit my sense of my body, of agency and saftey and it's a descision you will never have to make.

I am far too nice, I know. I am far too generous, no I am not generous at the worst of times, I am stupid. It's true I am a died in the wool provider, and I care through giving and put others ahead of myself. And it's truly one the assets that I am most proud of when it comes to myself. However, right now I just wonder whenever I will get back, and why it always comes to this, why I work my providing knees to the bone paving the streets with gold for other until I realise.

I don't really have time to write this post though, eventhough I needed it. I need to hit those books again, because you see, yesterday, bawling between the sheets I realised that true work and progress is the best kind of resistance. Success' the only thing I have got, and it will demand hard work, and it will demand prioritizing - me!

On here and now

I haven’t blogged in ages, and right now I am not wearing my glasses (it’s something about this apartment, I never wear my glasses…)

Anyhow, I have been home in Hälsingland, it was lots of snow and minus 30 degrees Celsius for more than three days. I saw my family which was lovely but slightly turbulent since a lot decided it had to happen in the days between Christmas and New Year ’s Eve, but all is well now.

I struggled with my DI application for the directing course all of the time I was there and as my computer decided it didn’t want to live anymore as I was in the middle of writing I have just now finished it – some of it by hand, oh my God, and sent it in today.

I try not to think about it ‘because when I do, I only come to fear that I fucked up majorly and that they will laugh at me when they read it. Although I have hope, and I hope that they will see what I envision for my directing work in particular, and for theatre in general. And like that.

So now I am back in Stockholm and the heating in my apartment is a little schizophrenic and doesn’t really know if it should be freezing or sickly hot, mostly it’s freezing though. I am really beginning to think that this apartment isn’t doing all that it should be doing for me in a disability access kind of way, and I hope to relocate this spring.

Future-wise I have really no idea what to do if I don’t make the DI course. I guess I will need to get at job, or enroll at University again after summer, even though academia really isn’t my cup of tea. Blood-less pretentious ramblings at most times.

But I should like to be able to work at my monologue seriously again at some point, and write a lot. So I will try and make that happen.

On directing and the process of that, I long to finally get to work with that Death piece this spring. I know that it will be a slightly stressed period of time for my actress, given the finishing time of her PhD. (How awesome is that? That is so awesome! Go girl!)

And I will try to blog frequently about what we do with that text and the things we explore in our bodies as we bring it to flesh. I am so excited sine I know I will be brutally swoon by that glorious muse-actress of mine every minute of that process and I am not sure I will be all sane from having her working my words.

I do hope for this time in the capital to be freer from stress that comes from just plain living as I have had to worry too much about getting around in this city and living here. As I have now got my taxi card I do hope I will be able to create some more of a social life.

So in short for this spring I long to do what I do best, I long to make words into flesh with one of the most beautiful people I have ever met, I long to make personal sense of academic ramblings, I long to write and escape the mundane the way I have always done. I long to make use of all the facet’s of myself on stage at some point and feel the current of the stage as it throbs in my veins.

And of course I long to descend those crazy stairs to the warm belly underground, and I long for bent necks and girls in neat dresses. To be able to put the color back on shivering pale cheeks.

Well that was that then, some kind of report of how have I been, and how I want to be.

Tomorrow I intend to go shopping for birthday gifts and try and see if I can’t get hold of the taxi card people and see what they are up too.

Survival was my theme before Christmas. Now I do hope for a bit more living.

And for this blog again to not be the howls from the darkest of pits but the crip femme contemplation resistance that I wished for it to be.