Do you feel defeated?

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

“I’d appreciate it if you kept this stuff to yourself. What I said, I mean.” I asked this favor of someone who messaged me out of fear that if my true feelings about my work were known it would undercut everything I tried to do.

Every day, I wake up and I take on the problems of my trans siblings and their families and the people who have suffered rapes and abuses and had nobody to talk to. I draw upon a vast knowledge nobody should have: what it feels like to drown while being sexually assaulted by a few teen boys and to grow up in a home where you never knew whether a staged “accident” might kill you or if they’d even bother making it look accidental.

I was defeated long, long ago.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt cloud the air of my life like the sick sweet smell of a rotting animal’s carcass just out of view, a warning that predators and accidents alike could take me at any time. And I, having grown up around that smell, have learned to almost thrive under it.

I deal in a world of extremes and the truths hidden behind them.

I know that most people who hate trans people have no qualms with me or anyone like me. Whatever brought them to their disgust with me conceptually happened long, long ago to them and was never healed. They, too, live with the sick sweet smell of fear lingering in their lives and it poisons their every waking thought tricking them into believing it whenever someone points at trans people to say we are the cause of that odor.

I know we’re not. And on some level, so do they. It’s why I can talk to them and help them. I know that scent and I know how to find the sources in their lives just like I know it can never be removed from mine.

Because of how extreme the people I work with tend to be, working with people towards the middle to help them find the sources of that smell in their own lives is a simple matter. What works for the most extreme cases works for those closest to “normal,” just as well if not better. I can help them before the smell overtakes them and drives them mad with disgust and its evolved form: hatred.

And even I have to admit, the world seems absolutely pungent right now with that odor — far more than usual.

I skipped a step.

You see this entire letter comes from a follower of my page on Facebook asking me if I felt defeated, like what I do is pointless right now. I’m not a terribly good liar, especially when faced with such an earnest question. I wanted to say, “No, never.” Of course I’m not defeated, I am the eternal optimist am I not? This is where I’d put the hero laughing in the face of danger sound if I had one! But instead of pretending everything would be fine because I put on a smile, I did the scariest thing and told the truth. Of course I feel defeated.

I don’t know what it would mean for me to not feel defeated. I am greeted each morning by a large cup of knowledge that the people closest to me are the most likely to try to kill me. That’s not just my personal experience, it’s statistics. I know that one of my abusers from my childhood has a brand new, never fired gun with my name etched into the side of it. When I sleep, it is a rare night that I don’t dream of being trapped, hunted, and abused. I will never escape this, not in my sleep and not in my waking hours.

I am, and will always be, thoroughly beaten to my core. That is why I can do this work, because nothing that happens to me matters from my perspective. It’s all just another day in my world. The seeds we plant in this work: optimism, personal growth, and perspective — they’re not for me to enjoy. I will never have the fruit of those trees or the shade they offer in my world. The best I can hope is that my suffering can be made to give some meaning and hope to other people. There’s power in that.

It’s ok to feel defeated right now by what’s going on. It’s only natural. Who you choose to be in the face of defeat is often a lot more revealing than who you are when you are doing fine.

I’m crushed seeing the suffering of my trans siblings. I’m afraid of being kidnapped and not allowed to die on my own terms (an outcome my work makes even more likely). In times like these, we have to try even harder to put up structures and ideas that can support people knowing we will never know if it worked or not because we’ll likely be dead before the results are in. On that, I am optimistic.

I’ve survived enough, suffered enough, to know that that it’s never the last page of the story and that the sun rises again the next day. It’ll be the same with this, too. We can have faith in that and keep planting seeds and laying the groundwork for beautiful gardens of human rights and fairness for a world our children’s children will see.

I hope their lives are filled with the sweetest scents of the flowers and fruit trees we planted during our darkest, most uncertain times. I know I’ll be ground into the dirt and I hope my body serves as good fertilizer for the days to come. Yes, I’m defeated, but I’m not the one who matters to me and I never have been.

All the backsliding is evidence of how much work wasn’t done before, so we have to do it better. Nothing is over or settled. If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll put my name on a park bench next to a tree of hope. That would be nice.

Let’s keep working towards healing this world together. Mettā.

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