Star

This year, I have been using an Intuitive Writing deck that my friend, Three, gifted me. Each card has a word or shape on it, and you use that word or shape to prompt a piece of creative writing. I'm going to post a series of entries from my Intuitive Writing practice here, just for fun. 

The card has a picture of a star on it. Here is my response, which was just the first thing that came to my head when I saw the card, which I randomly chose out of the deck:

“We are all stars!” Gao Min, my Chinese friend in Nanjing, used to say all the time, while laughing his face off. He was joking about how everybody thinks of themselves as little unique stars, little celebrities, little princes and princesses, special and somehow entitled and deserving of some kind of reward or recognition. Indeed, we are all stardust in the end..

Yes, we all have our unique light. So how do you balance that TRUTH with the fact that it’s not all about YOU? 

The Earth revolves around the Sun, which is one star. The other stars we can see in the sky are all important and unique and the Milky Way galaxy is made up of them but everything doesn’t revolve around them. They have gravity but not so much as to change or move the galaxy. Each star has enough gravity to change or move the few planets around it. But outside of that force field, there’s nothing. And so it is with life, isn’t it? We do have energy, a type of gravitational push and pull that does affect the people around us, but not enough to change the world. Some stars are bigger than others. The question is, what kind of star are you? 

What did I do in my childhood that pointed to who I really am, who I really am and want to be, and what my vocation–as a gift not a calling–is?

I liked playing house. Choreographing movies and dance moves. Hide and seek. Kickball. Reading. Basketball and running. Dogs. Cleaning. Organizing. Cooking. Playing. Helping. Sitting with Jimmy. Befriending Courtney. Hanging out with Hali. Helping mom in the garden. Guinea pigs. Learning. 

What kind of star am I? What kind of star was I born to be? What kind of star will I become?  

Dread and Addiction to the High

I was dreading facing my emotions. They felt like a dark cloud over my head and a heavy weight on my chest.

My throat and mouth were full of bile, my heart full of acid, my body full of stress, my mind full of anger and resentment, my chest full of a burning sense of jealousy, self-righteousness, loneliness and pain. 

I was riding my bike home from Crossfit and my hands were stinging from the cold. The sun was just starting to rise over the horizon. The brown and sandy mountains were still in shadow with a soft yellow light painted over them. I realized that I was free. There was nobody holding me accountable, nobody asking me to do anything, nobody watching. I had no Higher Power in that moment, and I was reduced to my selfish and material desires. Why not? I was hungry, I was emotional, I was bruised, and I was craving anything to pull me out of the muck of human misery.

So, I stopped at Vance’s cafe and had breakfast. I was so happy to be there. I got a bacon burrito and a chocolate chip pancake, betraying everything that I stood for at the time: vegetarian, sugar-free, saving money on a budget, intermittent fasting. I threw it all out the window and the thrill of indulging in all of my addictions gave me so much adrenaline that it was worth it. I was so angry, so pissed off, I had lost my connection to my higher power completely and I was reduced to my ego, my self-righteous and self-centered Self, my greedy and not caring Dr. Jekyll.

I have no regrets. I enjoyed every bite of the burrito, every grain of sugar in that pancake, and every sip of the coffee. I needed that moment to feel like I had taken back sovereignty of my body.

Instead of surrendering to a higher power, I surrendered to my ego and IT FELT SO GOOD. There is a crucial difference between feeling like you are in control of your own destiny–in control of your own time and space–and the feeling of surrendering to a higher power. When you feel like you are in control, there is an adrenaline-high to it. You feel powerful, calm, and self-righteous. You feel smart, you feel like you are in the driver’s seat (and indeed, your ego, the part of your Self that you have identified with for most of your life is in the driver’s seat during those moments) and you feel a giddy kind of excitement and POWER. You are your own higher power. This is true. But sometimes, when there is an adrenaline high to it especially, instead of it being your Wise Self, it is your ego instead. You worship your ego like a god. You believe that this ego self has the power to make you feel good. 

And it does make you feel good. 

For a time. 

Eventually, the effect wears off.

There’s no food that can make you feel better; no gadget, no relationship, no drug. Not even an "experience," like a vacation, is the ticket or key to make things feel better, to fix your life or yourself. It’s just not how it works. 

Because whatever it is, its effect will wear off and you’ll be back to where you started.

Instead, life is about surrender. It's also about love and connection and creativity. But it’s also recognizing and accepting the pain and boredom as an equally important and valuable part of life. Life is pretty boring, not that exciting, and difficult.

To be in control of your life is an illusion. 

Feeling like you are in control vis-a-vis your ego's demands is such a different feeling from surrendering control to a higher power. When you surrender to a higher power, you do give up a feeling of control, freedom and sovereignty over your own body, life, time and space. It’s not just yours anymore. Your life and your body is the community’s, the marriage, the organization, the program, the Universe’s. Because what you do affects everything you come in contact with. It’s not all about you. And you’re not in control of your own time and space. There is so much with so much more power than you controlling your life, your time and space. Your marriage, your relationships, your community, your nation and your world all have control over how you are able to move in the world. You can’t pretend like you have control. That is a nice way to calm anxiety but it’s only an illusion. The more you can surrender to giving up control of your life, the better.

Life

Warm, rainy fall day 

He/him 

They/them

She/her

Why does it matter?

Why do I care so much?

Why is gender so beautiful?

It is such a beautiful creative expression of self.

Of beauty

Of diversity 

Of love 

Of body

I am taking back the narrative

I am the author of my life

Or, am I helpless with no agency?

No!

Even in the worst of circumstances, 

People express themselves 

This is the most beautiful thing 

To say, 

"Fuck you 

Fuck everything 

This is me 

This is who I am 

Take it or leave it 

I make mistakes 

I can learn." 

What is my value? 

My perspective from a marginalized gender minority 

YES!

This is me

This is who I am 

I have a unique subjectivity 

From this point of view, 

I see things differently. 

When you live your whole life outside of your body, 

You are constantly floating 

Eager to feel anything 

Addicted to drugs 

Craving sex 

Wanting to cut your wrists 

To feel anything is better than nothing at all

When you live your whole life outside your identity, 

You look for ways to come back into your body. 

When you live your life outside of your body, 

Coming back into it is like a drink of cool water 

A breath of fresh air

A liberation 

A freedom 

It’s not a choice 

It’s a human instinct 

Body is a territory of 

Power 

Self 

Expression 

Value 

Sexuality

Spirituality 

Identity 

Subjectivity 

At the margins of the margins 

You have nowhere to turn 

So you turn to the god inside of you 

What to do? 

What would Jesus do?

What would God do? 

What would you do? 

The god inside you, inside all of us, 

Says

Whispers 

Sings 

"You were created in gods image"

So be a god 

Be a god with your body 

Create your body the way god created it

God wants you to create 

What better way to create than in your body 

Reclaim the sovereignty 

Over the one thing that is yours

That is your god-given right 

Body

Downward Dog

 This year, I have been using an Intuitive Writing deck that my friend, Three, gifted me. Each card has a word or shape on it, and you use that word or shape to prompt a piece of creative writing. I'm going to post a series of entries from my Intuitive Writing practice here, just for fun. 

The card has the word "DOWN" on it. Here is my response, which was just the first thing that came to my head when I say the card, which I randomly chose out of the deck:

Downward dog. 

Downward dog points my butt toward the sky. The posture is a way to lift the root chakra and loosen the neck and shoulders by hanging the head. "You don’t always have to be upright," it reminds me, "you can be in different ways." Downward dog gives the neck and shoulders a break from all that work they’re doing all the time to keep us upright. Walking upright on two feet is something that most other animals don’t know how to do. 

The downward dog posture reminds me of dogs. They are so good with their bodies; shaking when they get up, stretching when they can, jumping and running around just about whenever they feel like it. They are programmed to please and to serve humans. Unconditional love is their default mode. And yet... they still find ways to ask for and get their own needs met. They do not have a lot of needs, but still, dogs can be demanding. They need walks (for the bathroom and exploration), food, water, and play. It’s pretty basic, it’s pretty simple. 

And humans are not that different. We don’t need a lot. We don’t need to change the world, to be rich and famous, to be admired, to bring groundbreaking knowledge into the world. We just need to eat, sleep, exercise, and play. 

Life is pretty boring at the end of the day. And difficult. Suffering is inevitable. There isn’t some candy at the end of the rainbow, no promised land where everything will be fine. There’s no food that can make it better, no gadget, no relationship, no drug that can make everything feel better. There is not even an experience, like a vacation, that is the ticket to make things feel better, to fix your life or yourself. It’s just not how it works. 

Because whatever it is, it’s effect will wear off and you’ll be back to where you started. The ticket to a satisfying life is more about love and connection and creativity, but also recognizing and accepting the pain and boredom as an equally important and valuable part of life. 

It’s just not about you and your comfort. 

You are one drop in an ocean. Nothing you do will change anything drastically. Nothing you create will change any one person’s life or make huge waves in the ocean. And that’s not the point. The point of life is not to feel good, to experience pleasure, to accomplish, to be famous or rich. That’s not the point. 

We were given the gift of creativity, and if you can spend as much of your time connecting, flowing, and playing, then that’s great. But ultimately nothing you did, are doing, or will do is going to make one bit of a difference. It’s just not. You are too small and the world is too big. 

But, you can enjoy your life while you’re here. And that doesn’t mean blow your mind with experience and pleasure and accomplishments every single day. I mean, enjoying the boring and the mundane, the painful and the heartbreak, the grief and the stress, the joy and the excitement in equal measure. 

And sometimes what that means is just enjoying that moment in downward dog when your shoulders and neck don’t have to support that big old head of yours anymore, and you can relax into being instead of thinking and doing. 

2022 Birthday Post

 Okay, Okay, I know I'm a little late. I wrote this on March 30, 2022, and here it is: 

“You’re one year older, one year wiser. What is one thing that you learned this year?” 

Trust the process, enjoy the process, and surrender to the process. 

Over the past year, a lot has happened. I came out as trans and started hormones. I read Ken Wilbur's integral theory and practiced meditation. I went skiing in Colorado and helped move Brie to Phoenix. I got the COVID vaccine–thrice. I finished the first draft of my book. I lived a Bachelor lifestyle in Prague, enjoying my studio apartment and hanging out on my balcony on the cool summer nights, letting dirty dishes pile up in my sink, watching movies and eating ice cream, taking naps and practicing Czech, working on my writing and reading lots of books. I did an unstructured month and started working on an autobiographical book project. I did yoga daily and connected with my body. Baby Sam was born. I went to Kyrgyzstan for a month, trained jiujitsu, stayed at a hostel, hiked, and worked with the LGBT community. I proposed and got engaged. I got a tattoo in Berlin. I hung out with my sister and Jeff in Vienna. I presented my work at a conference in the UK. I realized that I didn’t want to be an academic anymore and started to reach the integral level. I went to Opio at Red Rocks in Colorado and backpacking in Arizona. I connected with the Schwandt siblings. I fell in love with Bruno, an 80 lb pit bull. I finished the second draft of my book. I went to my sister’s wedding in Spain and spent Christmas and New Year’s in Prague. I got COVID. I said goodbye to the community I had built and started building a new community in Phoenix. 

In Phoenix in 2022, I joined the Like-Minded jiujitsu community. I did a dopamine fast by doing intermittent fasting and giving up sugar, ALL media (including Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and audiobooks), and alcohol for 30 days. I competed four times as a male in jiujitsu. I went skiing in Arizona and Colorado. I connected with my cousin, Bella. I started rock climbing. I wrote in my blog. I started planning our wedding. I lost contact with my mother and one of my best friends, both of whom ghosted me without giving me a reason. I read a lot of books about sex, transness, developmental psychology, spirituality, being true to yourself, and academic writing. I published a few articles about Uyghurs, as well as a few articles about jiujitsu and transness. I quit my job.

It was kind of intense–all the traveling, moving, meeting new people, coming out, transitioning, getting engaged, writing, competing in jiujitsu. It was all very chaotic and dramatic, and yet at the same time, I was more grounded this year than I’d been in most previous years of my life. 

A few of the things that stand out as the biggest milestones/changes/growth points of the last year are: 

-coming out as trans and changing my name and pronouns

-getting engaged and moving to Phoenix

-quitting my job and saying goodbye to academia 

These were the moments where I felt a lot of grief for the loss and passing of an old life and an old self–the moments where I felt like a breakdown was happening in my life and my self, where everything was dissolving and falling apart before my eyes and I knew that it was going to be a lot of hard work to pick up the pieces and start to build anew from the ashes (I guess “Phoenix” is a good place to do that then!). It was saying goodbye to Sarah, saying goodbye to singledom and bachelorhood and Prague, and saying goodbye to academia and the ego trip of power and fame that it was inducing on me. 

There was a lot of grief in saying goodbye to those things. Sometimes it felt like everything was falling apart and breaking down. But they were also the biggest points of growth, the moments where I was fully present and able to be mindful about looking at myself and my life objectively, from a third eye or third person perspective, seeing myself from outside and inside of myself all at the same time, and able to make decisions that felt authentic to my heart, spirit and body. 

Those were the moments when I really felt like I was taking back agency over my life and sovereignty over my own body, the moments when I felt like I was starting to design and create my own life, being the architect of my own life and my own experience, lucid dreaming instead of watching the show, lucid dreaming instead of sleeping, driving the car instead of being in the passenger seat. In this way, it was incredibly empowering but also incredibly scary. It was not only about driving the car, but it was also about driving the car and learning to explore and trust where the road was taking me, rather than constantly looking at Google maps. Instead of constantly worrying about where I was going, or constantly trying to build a new road or drive off the road, I also let the road take me where I was meant to be. 

Slowly, I have been embracing and actively trying to surrender to that which is larger than myself–the Universe, jiujitsu, partnerships, friendships, and even the larger academic and writing community, reminding myself that it’s not all about me, it’s not all about my pleasure and my fulfillment and what I want or need or what I’m doing with my life and if I’m happy and satisfied. It’s more about surrendering to the will of the higher power, whether that be marriage, jiujitsu, academia, Spirit, Universe, God, community, friendship, or even just my Higher Self. 

It’s not about me anymore. It’s about being part of something greater, something that I could never build or do on my own. I think maybe, ultimately, that is what I learned the most this year in terms of trusting the process. Rather than trying to control the process and attaching to the outcome, in the end I learned to surrender to a higher will for me and myself, and only then could I become who I was always meant to be, become who I was born to be, become who the world needs me to be, which is not the next Judith Butler or Michele Foucault, but perhaps just a drop in the ocean, the petal on a flower, a leaf on the tree branch. One more particle, one more atom, one more molecule that fits together with the larger cell to eventually create a living, breathing and functioning organism. It’s still important even if it’s invisible to the naked eye. It all comes together in the end to form beings of value and worth. 

I feel like the traveling back and forth from Prague, the traveling to Kyrgyzstan and Germany and Spain, the drama of the book and my coming out, the drama of my relationship with Brie, it was all very difficult and dramatic. At the time it felt like too much, like my heart was going to overflow with emotions. But in the end, looking back on it, it was really fun. The drama itself was a kind of fun, a kind of play. 

Life is hard, but in the suffering, there is joy to be found in the ups and downs of life. The drama of life itself is a kind of play, a kind of exploration, an ocean to explore and play around in. The waves will knock you over sometimes but otherwise it's the waves that make it kind of fun. 

Scarcity

Cracked teeth

A red jersey

Orange pulp stuck in her teeth,

Juice dripping down her chin

Orange peels on the seat. 

“Don’t ever drink,” she says to me. 

“My brother was murdered and I can’t stop drinking.”

I gave her some chocolate that I was going to throw out. 

She said it was her birthday

And asked God to bless me. 

The destitute camped out underneath the overhang of the building. 

An old man 

A young woman. 

Plastic tarps set up for privacy. 

Stringy white hair. 

Tan, crusted skin. 

Pink gums and missing teeth. 

A toddler crying on the bus. 

A tattooed man offers his orange and granola bar. 

It’s rejected. 

Four kids. 

Utter chaos. 

This is Phoenix. 

There’s nothing glamorous here. 

It’s not about money, it’s not about rednecks. 

It’s about survival in the desert. 

Cold at night, 

Hot in summer. 

There is no such thing as a nicer place to be homeless. 

That day.

I felt right at home. 

I felt so comfortable. 

I felt so free. 

I felt so authentic. 

I was out of my bubble

My bubble of patio furniture, Mac computers, and organic food. 

I was out of my bubble of biking and climbing, 

I was in my bubble of pain and fear, poverty and vulnerability. 

This is humanity. 

This is real life. 

This is survival. 

This is what I have known in my life and research. 

Pain, poverty, survival, fear, hope. 

It’s not about material possessions or money. 

It’s about being real. 

Being real is

Accepting illness and insanity, 

Accepting difference and struggle, 

Accepting precarity and knowing death. 

Trans

Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

A poem by Andrea Gibson

"Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

...

Means: 

You lived five times harder than you should have had to 

To still have a body when you graduated high school. 

…

Means: 

When your mother asked what was wrong, 

You were five times more likely to believe you’d lose 

Her if you spoke the truth. 

Means: 

You were told five times more often 

You’d go to hell when you died. 

…

Means: 

You were five times more inclined 

To triple-padlock your diary. 

Means:

You were five times more likely

To stop writing your story down."

Write a poem or essay that raises awareness for a cause you support: Trans rights. 

Trapped.

Suffocating

Living

Breathing

Dying. 

A pebble in the shoe. 

I don't know what to do.

Hiding behind a mask. 

My hands are tied behind my back. 

Dysphoria. 

Discomfort in the body. 

Disassociation during sex. 

If you don’t know, now you know. 

You can’t unsee what you just saw. 

Liberation. 

Truth. 

Beauty. 

Re-birth. 

Empathy might be impossible. 

The say, If you’re not trans, you just can’t know what it’s like. 

Or, can you? 

Has anyone made assumptions about your identity without asking you? 

Has anyone put you into a box? 

Has someone ever mistaken you for a different ethnicity? 

Has someone ever made assumptions about you based on what they could see?

Do you have an invisible disability?

Do you have an invisible truth? 

Coming out 

Caterpillar to butterfly

Baby to adolescent to adult. 

Teenager to grown up. 

Expansion. 

New me. 

Old me. 

Trauma. 

You lose friends.

You lose family. 

You lose community.

You lose social support. 

You experience rejection. 

You feel confused. 

You feel out of your body. 

You’re scared. 

You’re at risk. 

You’re a target. 

Every pronoun.

Every name. 

Every event. 

Every interaction. 

Is laced with fear and rejection. 

Trauma.

Sometimes it feels like de-transition is the only option. 

To just turn back the clock. 

To pretend that it never happened. 

To go back to the way things were. 

Nostalgia at its most toxic. 

Memory at its most warped. 

Wishing, hoping, wanting, desiring. 

Feeling like everything is just too hard. 

The only other option is suicide. 

To end it all in one stroke. 

Why not?

Life is meaningless anyway. 

Life is pointless anyway. 

Nothing means anything. 

There is no point. 

This moment? It means nothing. 

You’re going to die anyway. 

Why does it matter if it’s now or later? 

You are being invited to participate. 

It’s your choice to say yes or no. 

You are consenting to it. 

Trans kids. Trans people. 

Maybe we’re all crazy. 

Maybe we’re all brainwashed. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to get attention. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to be cool. 

Who cares what the reason is? 

Why does it matter? 

Maybe we are all just trying to be cool. Then, let us try to be cool. Accept and love us for that. We’re not hurting anyone. 

Nobody is asking you to understand. 

We are just asking to exist. 

Please don’t murder us. 

Just allow us to live.