I Wake up from anesthesia and a black tide washes me. The world slowly infiltrates. A hospital room. The face of a doctor and two nurses moving something that I don’t understand.
This is not the first time that I woke up after surgery. The first that I had given myself my cochlear implants. The last one I had given myself my chest scars. This time, seven new metal bolts were added to my left arm – I took a fall during bicycle training for a next walk this summer with a group of deaf bikes from San Francisco in Los Angeles in support of San Francisco Aids Foundation and Los Angeles LGBT Center.
My best friend pushes the door and heads for me, with sweet eyes. Looking with heavy lids, I allow myself to collapse. Anesthesia, I learned later, has a way to surface your subconscious and deepest thoughts.
“I have such frightening thoughts”, I continue to say, again and again, between sobs. “You know how I can never seem to imagine my future …” I hesitated. Saying it aloud would make it real. “It is clear now that I never intended to kill myself,” I admitted. “I thought someone else was going to do it.”
We expired together. Her expression remained unchanged, as if she already knew something that I only started to achieve myself.
Having grown up in rural pennsylvania, I spent so many invalidated years to be a deaf and trans person. I spent my last years of high school listening to my peers sing “electrocuting gays” and attaching Trump stickers to each locker during the first administration of Donald Trump. I felt very stuck – I could not vote because I was a minor, and while I was absent, I had not yet realized that I was trans. I certainly did not feel safe enough to share this with my classmates, and I did not know how I could contribute in a tangible way to the fight against hatred that I saw around me. Every day, I was trying to do what I could to keep my soul – to survive.
Now Trump is in office again, but despite his large -scale assault against Trans Lives, something in me is different this time: I have a kind of joy that I only felt like a young child – without conditions.
This concept is a bit new to me – it was not always like that. For so long, I thought that my joy should be resistance to those who want to erase me. Years ago, I had concluded an agreement with myself: I made the choice to give my life to fight for a just world. I wrote, full of love for whom I was and my communities: I am ready to fight until I die against unfathomable injustices that permeate our society. I put forward knowing that I had put a timer for my own life, providing that one day someone would say my name in Memoriam.
It was the only end I could see at the time. Not because of everything I did, but because of whom I was: deaf, trans, Asian, Jews and very visible like these identities. Because people like me do not survive the systems in which we live. I never had a death wish. I thought it was inevitable.
For years after that, I went to protest, I sat on signs and I gave discussions across the country at universities and the brand’s headquarters. At various times, I imagined that someone was standing in the crowd and pulling a pistol on me, making my last day. But I still showed myself because I had made my choice.
In the end, I found myself in situations where my heart broke again and again. I fought so hard, thinking that the world would change. I thought that if I was a martyr – if I gave my life to the cause – it would catalyze the world in which I want to live.
It was the story I told myself. So far. In recent years, I have made room to listen to my grief – which will drop him off in my chest, listening to what he has to say. I got involved in meditation with a relentless discipline. I learned that immobility is a crucial part of our fight for liberation and is the balance that our movements need. I cannot offer authenticity to others if I am not rooted in me first. Presenting yourself for me is not betrayal. This is the only way to really present myself.
By turning inward, I was sifted through thousands of intimate newspapers of the last two decades to jog to my memory of whom I was and who I grew up. I see how much I endured for so many years, in part because I felt like I was in the dark for so long. No person, place or resource held the whole truth of my lived experience. I found fragments of myself in different places. I had to be my own representation, my own model, my own vital resource. I see why I had to fight so hard. I had to cry that so many people did not know how to fight for my freedom, even if they tried. Martyrdom unlearning can be disturbing that way, but necessary.
Now the moments that have the impression that the world is changing is unexpected: when I paint; When I go out a mountain on a bicycle; When I waste track of time in the woods; When I notice that the leaves of the trees applaud me as they would do in sign language, when I harm the people I love; The change is the peace that I feel inside, knowing what I want and where I must be.
The world is shaped, engraved and molded every day by people like me. People who are my neighbors, my peers, my elders. But the real change begins with the world that exists in ourselves, first. On the surface, you may not notice the way things are starting to change. In the morning, for example, when the light crosses the window of my room, I used to immediately slap my cochlear implant. Now silence allows me to connect to my inner voice. There is peace in the welcoming transformation by immobility, knowing that change is inevitable – our life is proof.
In the reverberations of our chaotic political climate, it is worth asking: what is your inner voice that tells you? How do you think for yourself? What do you choose to believe? How can you present yourself for yourself and build towards a culture in which we all meet our needs and therefore our communities?
For me, it means trying to try again for me: my joy of living being was not born from resistance to a system, it doesn’t matter who is in office. My joy does not need to exist. It’s fair. And it must be more than enough.
