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10 years

The 28th marks both my golden birthday and my 10th escape-versary. I’ve felt the amount of introspection and existential questioning I feel like most people reserve for their 30th, but this year feels more significant somehow.

Ten years feels both like an eternity and also yesterday. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about where I came from and how I escaped. I haven’t really talked about what spurs me forward – all those things I told myself I’d never forget as a child.

The other day I was taking stock of where I am now, the choices I made to get here, and how they line up with the promises I made to myself when I was young and powerless:

When I was about 12, burnt out by losing myself to yet another pregnancy and overwhelmed by everything it meant to be the oldest daughter in a large family, I promised myself I wouldn’t forget what that felt like.
I promised myself that I would never inflict that feeling on other children and I’d stop it from happening if I could.

In 2013 I helped found the Coalition for Responsible Home Education to raise awareness about educational neglect and abuse in homeschooling environments and create protections for homeschooled students. We’re making progress.

When I was 17 I promised myself I would never birth kids, and that I would somehow become sterile before age 30. Last July, almost exactly a decade later I did that.

After I worked through the trauma of being told as a toddler, adolescent, and teenager that expressing anything but joy was wrong, I promised myself that I would stop hiding from my feelings and accept all of myself.

In 2013, I came out (publicly) as bi, nonbinary, and agnostic which was only the start of this journey. In 2016 I started seeing an actual therapist and started HRT. I’ve written and continue to write extensively (mostly on social media) about the battles in my brain because of this promise.

I don’t remember when, but I remember getting fed up with people I was surrounded by being resistant to personal change and growth. I promised myself I would always evolve and not become stagnant as I age.

I’ve torn my world down and rebuilt it from the ground up more times than I can count. I’ve gone from sheltered homeschooled girl who got married immediately after leaving home, to….a divorced, polyamorous, transmasc enby with…actual confidence. In 10 years.

When I was 17 and my parents pulled my college application out from under me, I promised myself I would at least try school someday.

In 2015 I stuck my toes in the water with Seattle’s ABE program, and in 2017 I enrolled full-time at Laney College. Now I’m just-shy-of-full-time in the Labor Studies program, creating institutional queer-supportive infrastructure, running for student senate, and working as a (paid) Student Organizer.

I don’t believe there’s a point at which I will be completely and fully healed from my childhood trauma. But 10 years of distance has brought a lot of growth in more ways than I thought possible. Life is really hard sometimes, but right now I’m appreciating exactly how far I’ve come.

I take it for granted that I have done a 180 in every way imaginable from the world I come from. I forget that’s not an experience many people have the impetus to go through. I see how far I have yet still to go, I see how much more I have to learn, and how many ways I could be better, and I know I’m not there yet.

But damn.

I decided to live the life I imagined.
I believed that I could, so I did.
I replaced my fear of the unknown with curiosity
And when I looked around?
Life was pretty amazing.

ETA: if you want to celebrate this milestone with me, you can help me meet my $1k/mo goal on patreon http://patreon.com/kiery, send a present http://a.co/7w9xQgD, or buy me a drink https://cash.me/$kieryn!

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Taking Good Care of Myself Means Not Starving

I’ve been trying to take good care of myself over break, which has also meant trying to get my health situation in order. I’ve been dealing with chronic pain directly related to chronic stress since…for ever. We don’t know what it is, just that something is there.

Additionally, I haven’t stopped losing weight since starting testosterone. So I went to talk to my PCP about why my cholesterol is so high when I keep losing weight and don’t eat meat and the working theory is that my body is in starvation mode since HRT has made my metabolism skyrocket but my diet and eating habits haven’t changed to match. Pair that with being unable to eat when I’m stressed and forgetting to eat because of untreated ADHD and we have….where I am today.

The soonest time I could see a nutritionist is March so my therapist helped me come up with some plans, and then today my family took me to CostCo and now I have a drawer of snacks for the semester, and extra staples that I can freeze so there’s always a backup.

I realized while talking to my therapist how many layers of complicated my relationship to food is.

The Problems

First, there’s resentment. A lot of resentment. As the surrogate mom I was eventually the cooker of all meals and I hated the feeling of how my entire existence revolved around preparing meals, serving meals, and cleaning up after meals, for.ev.er. When I feel like I always have to cook or think about meals I start feeling trapped again, like I’m in a wheel I will never escape and I can never escape because for some reason bodies need food even when I get bored.

(I’m realizing now that I read this back that a lot of this is also similar to the ADHD thing of not being able to do things that aren’t interesting. This also explains why my desire to bake bread has come back with a vengeance but the thought of cooking 3 meals a day 7 days a week makes me hate life.)

Second, is fear of scarcity. My family gave so much to the church that we were often in short supply of food, especially as the family grew. As the eldest and the one with responsibility to make sure all the other children had their needs met, I always ate last, often after I’d dished out seconds to the other kids. When food was tight I ate less than I wanted or should have because it was more important that the younger kids ate (they were growing but somehow I was not). It got to the point where when the fridge was empty I would stop going into the kitchen because I couldn’t deal with the anxiety. I still do this.

To this day I have to always have ingredients for peanut butter and jelly available, and when I don’t I turn into a huge anxious ball until that’s fixed.

I also do this thing where, when I start getting low on something I’ll stop eating it so I don’t run out. I do this because I never felt secure in knowing there would be more later. The part where this gets me is that it’s often still my reality. I’ve spent a lot of time this semester trying to grapple with the fact that since getting bumped off CalFresh (which I’m re-applying for now) I have been food insecure and that’s contributed heavily to my lack of actually eating. Feeling like if I run out of something I can’t replace it means I will try not to run out of it, even if it means rationing or saving it until I’m at a place where I can replace it.

When you’re poor as fuck and your bills take 80% of your income, not eating seems like a smart, money saving choice. It’s just a really really bad one.

I think the food scarcity fear is the hardest obstacle because it’s escalated significantly by the reality of being poor. I know people have my back and will not let me starve (this is literally why my kitchen is stocked to the brim right now) but that anxiety, paired with the capitalist pressure to not spend money, and the lack of funds to even buy food anyway, just converges into a mess that fuels and justifies this eating disorder, and reinforces that I deserve this (I don’t).

Third, it’s self harm. It’s a way to take out anger or disappointment that doesn’t negatively impact anyone except myself (or that’s what I tell myself anyway). This is also often paired with the Scarcity Implosion, but sometimes I’m just angry, and when I’m angry or disappointed at myself (because I don’t know how to be angry at other people) I take that out on myself by not eating, because it’s somehow what I deserve for fucking up or not being good enough already. I also know this is bullshit but tell that to my brain when it’s livid.

Lastly, I just get distracted or don’t have the executive function to stay on top of it. Making food is boring when I’m working on literally anything else. Sometimes I’m just exhausted and I need food but I don’t have the actual capacity to choose a food to make or put into my face. When I get back from a day of having new information dumped into my brain, I’m not…in a state to prepare or even think about cooking a meal. I’m just exhausted.

What happens most often of course, is that all of these intermix and collide in a bunch of really exciting ways at any given point throughout the day, so all I really know is that I need help, but I can’t actually give much direction on how that isn’t “please move inside my brain, thanks, the galley is downstairs.”

The Plan

My therapist suggested I get “more food than I’ll think I’ll need”, and one of my friends shared the idea of having a backup stash, so I always have that backup and don’t have to worry about getting low. Something I also have a hard time with when I’m low spoons and tired is just coming up with something to eat, so the other day I sat down and made two lists: one for meals, and one for snacks. All things that are really low spoons or easy to make in bulk for heating and taking to school later.

I’ve also set reminders on my phone to eat every day at 9am and noon, I downloaded the Streaks app just so I can check off eating meals (because my brain loves getting points for shit, so if I can gamify something it will help). I also downloaded a food-diary app that also has a health/meds/activities log called mySymptoms. Because my Raynaud’s has been in a flare since May I added a Cold level to the symptom options and that’s been helpful. This doesn’t work super great because I suck at remembering to log things in the apps, but knowing that there is a log helps me remember to do things?

I’m also gonna try to make a sensical description of my income/expenses and apply for CalFresh again this week. If I can afford groceries without worrying a lot of the other things will be less intense.

(If you wanna be part of the Kieryn Doesn’t Starve Or Freeze Club, you can join me on patreon or just donate towards snacks on paypal or square)

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2019 is for Self Compassion

Something my therapist has been encouraging me to remind myself of is that I deserve to take good care of myself.

So I’ve decided that in 2019 I’m going to take everything I’ve learned from this year and try to take good care of myself. I’m emphasizing good because if I just take care of myself I get what I’ve been doing all year which is giving myself enough love and sustenance to survive but nothing more than that. I’m here to tell you that was a terrible decision and it sucks and I deserve better from myself, so I’m going to try to do better next year.

For the first time in a while I actually have Specific Things I Want To Accomplish next year, that fall under my larger goal of taking good care of myself.

I want need to be able to pay rent.
Financial instability sucks and since I lost my contracting gig last January this year has been incredibly hard with being in school full time. I’ve been getting by between my patreon, side-gigs, and school scholarships, but none of those combined have been enough to cover more than my bills, groceries if I’m lucky. I’m stressed to the point of sickness and I haven’t been eating to save on going shopping, so that has to change this year.

Some of it already is, I have a part-time minimum-wage ($13.23/hr) job on campus doing organizing work, and I have another long-term side gig lined up, but neither of those are going to be enough to contribute to rent so I have to come up with something to do in between to make ends meet (while also in school).

My goal is to get my patreon to at least $1k/mo this year (in addition to working multiple jobs while in school and organizing). I don’t currently offer many perks besides warm fuzzies of knowing that I won’t die while working for social justice through art/writing/podcasts/on the ground activism, but my patreon is the reason I’ve been able to manage at all this year so the help really goes a long way (and I super appreciate it).

I want to stop being consumed entirely by school.
I feel like I lose myself and stop existing and being a person when school starts and all I can do is think about homework and worry. It’s exhausting and I don’t like it. I’ve worked so hard to get here and I have to climb so many mountains and I’d really like not to sacrifice my humanity for education, you know?

I’m laying a lot of groundwork for that with on-campus organizing, to make being there less stressful (bathrooms should be ready as soon as Peralta finds money for a locksmith), but I think what’s more important is what I’m doing around school, so my vague plans are these:

  • Have a bedtime routine – skin care, teeth, read something fun (not homework), unwind
  • Have a morning routine – Actually Make Breakfast while the coffee brews, have a lunch plan
  • Block out a time for homework on my calendar – then it will happen and I won’t stress about having time to do it? maybe? we’ll find out.

Along that vein my goal is to eat and rest better.
My sleep has been fucked all year and so has my eating (for various and somewhat entirely self-inflicted reasons) so I talked to my doctor about getting a nutritionist and doing a sleep study this year. I don’t know if I’m just stressed and that’s all or if there’s something bigger at play. I’m also not eating enough to keep up with my apparently skyrocketing metabolism and I’ve been losing more weight without even trying (I weigh the same as I did 12 years ago now and I’m not here for it). I’m hoping a nutritionist can help me figure out what I need to eat so I don’t inadvertently starve because my body thinks it’s a pubescent boy.

I feel like if I can get my sleeping and eating sorted that a lot of the other things will be able to get better from there?

I want to have more sex with more people.
I’ve been in a weird headspace all year with it and also with dating and I had an epiphany a bit back that none of that actually really mattered. I want to unpack more of that in a post of its own but the synopsis is: it’s a mindfuck going from being perceived straight, to lesbian, to straight again but this time it’s you who’s getting the checks, and also like, NONE OF THOSE PERCEPTIONS ARE TRUE (bi erasure ftw). But that’s not even the point really, the point is that it’s a weird mental place to be, between being socialized one way and perceived another – neither being correct -, and I talk over people because I’ve been shouted over for so long and it’s so weird being suddenly assigned a male space when that isn’t…. anyway.

I miss having fulfilling romantic relationships with more than one person and the people who I would want to date are the kind of people who already understand me. I don’t have to date someone I need to handhold through my transness. it’s fine.

Additionally, I can sex people and not have to date them???? This is something I want to also…try..more.

I haven’t started anything this year because I was eaten too much by school to have the time and spoons to invest in another relationship the way I would want to. This year my goal is to intentionally make room for that to happen.

I told my therapist about some of this earlier today, especially about how what I really need is rest. My homework this week is to spend the next 3-4 days doing nothing but resting and learning how to ask for help.

In 2019 my goal is to learn to be compassionate to myself in the same way that I am for other people.

And also maybe look into a metoidioplasty.

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One Year of School

I have survived an entire year of college. This semester has been especially challenging, in more ways than the previous two were. I learned a lot about my limits and that just because it only takes 6 weeks to heal your stitches does not mean that you are better 6 weeks later.

I am currently exhausted, sick with some kind of respiratory virus that my doctor hypothesizes is likely from the push-crash of finals (apparently pushing = immuno-compromised and it happens a lot with people in school :P). But I’m also really fucking proud. I’ll write later about all the things I learned this year and what’s next and all that, but right now I want to talk about some of the things I’m really proud of.

  • The Lavender Project – this is the group on campus that consists of student(s – me, mostly), faculty, and staff that is dedicated to institutionalizing queer support structures at Laney. We planned Coming Out Week this year, where we had a ton of events and basically launched the Queer Brunch. We’re working on changing the bathrooms (just need to pay the locksmiths?), and I help by offering suggestions of things that are easy but super helpful (maps, for example).
  • The Laney Queers – I started the queer club this semester! Right now we basically just do brunches and trips to the museum. But we have a code of conduct, the constitution for our doocratic consensus based club is on the website for other clubs to borrow from, and I am compiling a list of counselors that are LGBT affirming.
  • The Social Justice Cohort – Laney announced a Labor Studies track (to learn organizing) and a Student Organizer job with the Student Justice Center. I’m one of the people in the cohort now! We are going to be focusing on ways to lower the barriers to education for undocumented students and will be going to workshops on DACA and AB540. We’ll hold educational workshops too and probably partner with the Laney Queers and The Lavender Project on events! The other cool thing is, this is a paid student worker position so I will get (more) job experience doing that thing I always do! I’m also working with an amazing group of people who appreciate my pup accessories so we’re obviously going to be great friends.
  • I’m building a coalition on campus. In some ways it feels like I’m starting something big. I’ve made friends with culinary, facilities, and the nurses. Everyone on campus is tired of how communication within peralta sucks and we all want to work together. I’m part of making that happen. It feels really good.
  • I’ve figured out how to navigate the bureaucracy and where some of the levers of power are. Mostly by running into walls like a roomba. I learned how to use DSPS this semester, so now I know I need to get a NEW accommodation letter before next semester. 😛
  • I’m proud of myself for leaning in to that thing that I am driven to do instead of trying to force something else to happen (Labor Studies AA instead of Machine Tech AS). I feel a little insecure about it still, but it also feels right.

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Scared

I am fucking terrified. 

This week has done a number on me emotionally, psychologically, and physically. I’m so tired of thinking about it that I barely want to talk about it. But it’s the background radiation of my life and I am having FEELINGS right now and it’s frustrating because it feels so isolating. 

Reynaud’s apparently flares with stress so I’ve been freezing and while I have done zero strenuous activities all week, my body feels like I’ve been fighting bears and climbing mountains. 

I feel awkward and sheepish for being (what I imagine is perceived as) alarmist when I look at everything that’s happened this week and tell people it’s only going to get worse from here so we need to start preparing. Not awkward enough not to say it because the worst part about it is I know I’m right. I’ve read history. I grew up on Pence’s side of the aisle, I know how to read the writing on the wall, I can hear the dogwhistles in their approaches. I know what to look for and I know where they want to end up. I can’t know the future, but I sure as hell know the direction we’re going right now. 

And I am fucking terrified. I haven’t been able to bring myself to admit it out loud but I am scared. My body has not stopped being tense for a week, I find myself holding my breath and not realizing it. 

I’ve thrown myself into campus organizing. I worry a little bit that I seem like a conspiracy theorist but at the same time, IT’S ALL FUCKING HAPPENING. That’s what I hate about everything; and that more than anything is what gnaws at me in the night. 

I KNOW. I KNOW because I was there. I was trained to be part of the movement that made this happen. This feels personal to me in a way it is not personal for most people and I’m having a really hard time handling those feelings. I wasn’t important, I left before I got to play a role, but I was being groomed. I knew the rhetoric, and the strategy, and the hopes. When I left I hoped all that would stay behind too. Like somehow it would disappear because it left my conscious and surely the majority of America wouldn’t let that happen.

But it didn’t. They started winning. A lot. And now we’re here. 

And I’m scared.

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Future.

Since the last post I’ve been able to sit with myself for a few minutes and think about where I go from here. 

I’ve decided that I am definitely going to focus on Labor Studies since Coming Out Week went so well and I got an email about the Student Organizing Cohort that the Ethnic Studies Department is doing at school (I have an interview for that this week). 

I have a meeting this week with Disability services to see about getting a medical withdrawal from shop so my incomplete does not give me an F for just not being physically capable to machine safely. As it turns out, losing an entire reproductive system takes a lot out of you even after your stitches are healed. Mixed with stress disorders and trauma it’s just…not happening.

I met with a counselor about changing majors, and ever since I decided to act on it, I’ve felt more at peace and in alignment with myself. I feel like this is the thing I should be doing, and I feel centered when I think about it. 

I also feel a bit nervous because I think it will be really challenging in good and frustrating ways, but hopefully in ways that I’m a little more equipped for.

Honestly after the news this week, going to school for an organizing AA, organizing on campus and in the East Bay, and doing the work to at least make this portion of the world less hostile is how I’m keeping myself from melting into despair.

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Future?

My therapist asked me what it would look like if just asked myself what I had spoons to do each day and did that, instead of running myself into the ground trying to do everything. We talked about how when I started school I was set on finishing everything on time and thought I’d be able to do everything, but that isn’t actually how school works. It’s a series of choices of what you can and can’t get to, what you lose points on, and what you make extra pushes for.  

We talked about approaches – maybe instead of telling myself “if I get everything done I can do X” because it’s unrealistic and just cements the feeling of inadequacy, I start by taking stock of my bandwidth and asking what I need to do to lift myself up so then I can do whatever homework I need to get done.

English class has been more like a sociology course than anything else for me. As the token trans I take up the middle space in the classroom where everyone assumes I’m a dude, but I talk from the perspective of someone who was raised to be a woman. My voice gets heard by the cis dudes when I explain the ramifications of the oppression not-dudes face on a day to day basis, how that informs our lives, and how that informed Elaine Brown’s life. It’s frustrating because none of what I’m saying is new, it’s only being absorbed because my voice is deep and booming, if any of my femme counterparts made the same arguments they would be written off.

IT’S SO INFURIATING. But this is the power I have so I’m going to fucking wield it because apparently cis dudes only listen to people with deep voices and cis dudes aren’t doing the work of educating each other. But, as my therapist reminded me today, that isn’t my job.

So today the choice I’m making is to skip english class, because I know if I go to the class I won’t have the spoons to write the paper that’s overdue. I already know that english class is going to step on a bunch of triggers that are already exacerbated by the Kavanaugh confirmation, and I wouldn’t be able to recover.

I’m contemplating skipping all of school today, and sitting under this tree on the UC Berkeley campus until my laptop dies.

My body is reacting to the complete overwhelm of stress and anxiety with nausea and exhaustion. I am numb and tired. I am depleted. I have nothing to offer and no energy to take anything in. I am just going through the motions trying to get things done right now.

What’s haunting me that I haven’t gotten to in therapy yet, (because it’s buried under immediate problems) is that I don’t see a future for myself. I don’t feel like I have one. I can’t picture anything beyond the end of next year. So I’m having a hard time finding the motivation to finish my certificate, or find a job, or do anything besides sitting under this tree.

I feel like if I had somewhere I wanted to be, or something I wanted to have done, in like 10 years or so, that would help. I could make decisions based on things that brought me closer to it instead of just wandering aimlessly. But we don’t even have a functioning country right now. Even if we managed to survive (or overcome) the Christofascist takeover and the impending spread of fascism all over the world, our planet is dying.

I don’t know if there will be more than this dust sheet of a democracy existing in 2020, let alone if the planet will even make it to 2040 with all the efforts we tried to make with EPA standards and whatnot getting rolled back. How do I even gather enough hope to plan for a future when it seems like I’m going to be swallowed whole by the planet itself if the nazis don’t get me first?

I don’t know.

I don’t know and that’s why I’m under this tree unable to think. Trying to sit with myself in the uncomfortably familiar terror and dread. I remember this feeling when my parents told me that I was meant to follow in their footsteps. To make all the same mistakes they did. When they said I’d get married and have kids and homeschool and live as a reflection of them. There was no hope, no escape, no out, it was as god intended. If I was lucky enough, I would live to see the start of the end times, when the world catches on fire right before Jesus came back to save us with the rapture.

Right now, it feels a lot like that’s happening. It feels a lot like what my parents spent years of reading Revelations predicting and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t fucking with me. Not in the “The Bible Was Right And I Am A Christian Again Now!” way, but in the self-fulfilling prophecy that the Christian right has organized against climate change just like they’ve spent the last several decades gathering political power for this moment. We are several steps closer to their utopia, which looks an awful lot like hell for everyone else.

I’ve done a lot for one person in one lifetime.
All I want to do is be held and cry.
But the tears aren’t coming and all I can muster is numbness.
As grounding as it is to be sitting in dry grass, pushing the stress knots in my back against the roots of my tree friend, I can’t climb out of my head.

I don’t have answers, this is just where I’m at.

In the immediate future, I guess, I come to life when I organize, and when I talk about organizing to my therapist she notes that my demeanor changes and I stop being wracked with anxiety.

Organizing on campus is why I haven’t dropped out. It’s grounding, I’m great at it, and it’s fulfilling. I feel energized and empowered when I organize and I can channel a lot of emotion that otherwise lives in my body.

After this semester I’m gonna follow that. I’ll look into the labor studies program at Laney maybe. I could be a Union Organizer, which I recently learned is A Thing and it’s apparently not the same as “you are a machinist who organizes on the side”, as far as I can tell?

When I think about that, hope flickers again. So maybe that’s where I should go.

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School is for Healing

I’ve been coming to grips with some stuff about what I’m studying lately, which is largely that 1: I really enjoy machining, but 2: I do not believe that I am capable of being a manual machinist in a traditional shop and I don’t see that as my future. 

It’s a weird sentence to write, sitting at a table in the student center waiting for my next class, but I haven’t been able to convince myself otherwise. I don’t have the physical stamina to operate heavy machinery, or the emotional stamina to be the only trans person in a shop. It’s hard enough being the only trans person in my english class. 

I’ve stopped and asked myself a lot over the last three semesters What am I even doing here? Why am I doing this to myself? What’s the point?  

I asked these questions before therapy today and then talked about it a bit at the end. Why do I keep going if all it seems to be doing is dredging up pain and trauma I haven’t dealt with and didn’t know about?  

And the answer is because the only way I can heal from the lies I was told about my worth, my abilities, about college and school, about learning, and teachers is to expose myself to it.

The only way I can recover is to face the terror every day and learn through experience that everything I was told for so long is bullshit.

I’m at school to learn what school is like, to learn how to learn, to learn how to navigate organized education, to learn that not every teacher is my mom reincarnated. I’m here to force myself to face a field of unknown mines and survive it. 

If I’m lucky I’ll finish my certificate, I’ll get an associates in something eventually, a nice perk would be placating capitalism. 

But I’m here to heal myself through exposure. Apparently. 

Maybe that’s valid too. 

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Laney Queers

Tabling at Club Rush

This time last year I was on campus feeling very alone. I learned that there wasn’t a queer club before I started and decided that I wanted to make it happen. 

Right before I got on the plane home from YIMBYtown on Tuesday, I got an email from the club advisor saying that the Laney Queers has been officially chartered! 

Bathrooms are going to be in my building on campus very soon, and we’re going to have 4 dedicated all gender bathrooms in trades department buildings by the end of the semester. 

I have a list of almost 50 people on campus who want to be part of building something and making it better. I’m working on bridging the gap in communication between faculty staff and students and when I stop to breathe and look around for a second, I’m really proud of myself.

I honestly don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never been part of a school club. I don’t know what you can and can’t do with them. I don’t know. I’m just a trans boi who wants to make campus feel less hostile.

Apparently I’m doing something right? 

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English 1A

I keep coming back to that part in the Prisoner of Azkaban where Harry asks why the Dementors seem to affect him more than other people, and Lupin explains that the Dementors feed on every good memory until all that’s left is trauma, they affect Harry the most because he has actual horrors in his life, things his classmates have never experienced. 

This is resonating with me a lot lately. I’m taking an English class which I was really excited about because I miss writing. Our teacher is having us read A Taste of Power and Gather Together In My Name, and our research essays are one of 6 topics that have to do with current social issues (prison industrial complex, healthcare, war on drugs, military industrial complex, electoral college, and the Berlin Conference of 1885 for “something different”). 

On one hand, I love this. I appreciate that he’s using this class as a way to get people to think more deeply about what’s happening in the world around us and how we’re impacted. 

On the other hand, this class has drudged up and revealed so much trauma. Every class has brought something to the surface, reading A Taste of Power reminds me of growing up in fundamentalism, and reading healthcare papers that dehumanize my existence is its own beast. 

I got a C+ on my first essay which was supposed to be a scene from something that happened in elementary school. I turned in, essentially, an unfinished draft. Trying to find something to write about that happened as part of school between the ages of 6 and 11 was not easy. I wrote about the day we started homeschooling, when I was 5 or whatever. I was devastated when I saw the grade. I re-read my paper and it objectively wasn’t great, I was upset because it was so much work to write.

While I was supposed to be working on that essay we were also watching The House I Live In and Sicko in class which both dredged up a lot of trauma and feelings that I wasn’t ready for, and made it impossible to finish by the time I needed to.

So last week I emailed asking for an extension on my research paper because between dredging up trauma in class, reading A Taste Of Power, and trying to research, I just could not write. 

Asking for the extension felt harder than writing, but I needed to do it. I needed to get over myself and ask for the accommodations I need to get through school with CPTSD and as-of-yet-untreated/diagnosed ADHD. I didn’t get the extension until we met during office hours and I vaguely explained my trauma and how my background being homeschooled makes navigating this infrastructure really difficult. 

He told me he’d never thought about how homeschooling affected college experiences and basically implied I’m the first student he’s had with all of these intersections, so he’ll work with me. It was an exhausting conversation even though it ended well. 

I’ve spent the better half of the month trying to cope with the feelings of inadequacy and failure because the class that was supposed to be fun and easy turned out to be the opposite. I’m frustrated because this is the class I wasn’t supposed to need help with. This was supposed to be the one that I did fine at because writing is like breathing to me. But no, instead this class steps on every mine and reveals new ones. Instead, we are doing so many things at once that tackle so many of the intersections I’m hyper-aware of that I don’t have the emotional stamina to keep up and make it to my other classes.

The class I was supposed to ace I’m getting C’s in, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t fucking with me. 

I feel very alone in my class in this way. My classmates know I’m a good writer, that I’ve spent the better part of my life writing, and they seek me out for feedback, which I really enjoy. Meanwhile, I’m falling behind everyone because of mental health issues that are making the pacing of this class feel like breakneck speed and I’m not doing as well as I thought I would be able to. My expectation of myself (and what I know I’m capable of) and what I am actually doing are two drastically different things and I’m honestly not taking that super well. 

I know that how I’m preforming in a class (that steps on all my triggers and thus impacts me differently than my classmates without CPTSD) has no bearing on how good of a writer I am, but it doesn’t really feel that way.

I know I’m better than what I’m managing to write, I just need time to work through all the trauma it’s bringing up. Which is why I went in, and why I talked to my teacher about it, and why I am now fucking exhausted.