At Home with Eliza Carthy

With summer touring schedules on hold and festivals cancelled, songwriters continue to look to their own four walls for inspiration. How are they coping without live audiences? And is this period of restricted movement, stifling or stirring creativity? From her garage studio in Wiltshire, Verity Sharp is dialling up musicians who are rooted in global traditions, exercising their home-recording skills, and asking them to share songs that reflect how they are feeling. In this episode, from her home in Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire, Eliza Carthy sings a timely song. Presented and produced by Verity Sharp. A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

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At Home with Suhail Yusuf Khan

With summer touring schedules on hold and festivals cancelled, musicians continue to look to their own four walls for inspiration. How are they coping without live audiences? And is this period of restricted movement, stifling or stirring creativity? From her garage studio in Wiltshire, Verity Sharp is dialling up musicians who are rooted in global traditions, exercising their home-recording skills, and asking them to share songs that reflect how they are feeling. Indian sarangi player Suhail Yusuf Khan sings an Urdu poem that’s been resonating for him during the pandemic. Presented and produced by Verity Sharp. A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

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This Week in Books: We’ve All Been Briefed

Dear Reader,

“Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day,” writes Laurence Ralph in an excerpt from his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The excerpt is written in the form of a letter to any and all future mayors of Chicago, endeavoring to explain to the mayor—to really explain—police torture in Chicago. “You likely have been briefed about police torture,” Ralph writes to the future mayor, a statement that could just as easily apply to you, or to me. We’ve all been briefed.

“Perhaps you have gotten assurances from the superintendent of the police department. You might have even met with survivors of police torture. But what I have found in studying this issue for more than a decade is that…a strict historical approach, or a policy-oriented approach, doesn’t actually clarify the full extent of the problem. To do that, we need not facts but a metaphor.

“The first thing you must know is that the torture tree is firmly planted in your city. Its roots are deep, its trunk sturdy, its branches spread wide, its leaves casting dark shadows. The torture tree is rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States.”

Ralph goes on to give the mayor the raw numbers; numbers like this have been circulating since the protests began, and they have not lost their power to startle me.

“Police misconduct payouts related to incidents of excessive force have increased substantially since 2004. From 2004 to 2016, Chicago has paid out $662 million in police misconduct settlements, according to city records. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these figures will decrease. Hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit settlements were filed between 2011 and 2016, and they have cost Chicago taxpayers roughly $280 million. When I was writing this letter in July 2018, the city had paid more than $45 million in misconduct settlements thus far, in that year alone. Keep in mind that misconduct payouts are only a fraction of what the city spends on policing. Chicago allocates $1.46 billion annually to policing, or 40 percent of its budget—that’s the second-highest share of a city budget that goes to policing in the nation. It trails only Oakland, which allocates 41 percent.”

Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day. Or as New Yorker Molly Crabapple puts it in her dispatch from the protests, “we, the broke and beaten residents and taxpayers, will be paying for their abuse of us.” In between her accounts of beatings and pepper sprayings and arrests, she recounts similar numbers, nearly the same numbers: “Last year, the city paid out nearly $70 million to settle police misconduct cases, up $30 million on the previous year; that number will swell beyond comprehension in 2020. Yet none of this comes out of the police budget.” These numbers are so malevolent to me; they have a sorcerous energy; when things are unbalanced, it is unnatural and disturbing.

“In the end,” poet Cameron Awkward-Rich writes in his account of a protest he joined up with in Massachusetts, at which chants of “Black Trans Lives Matter!” rang out, “the Northampton cops pepper-sprayed a group of demonstrators who got too close to the station’s doors.”

“The station’s been cleaned. The Black Lives Matter flag no longer flies from its post. The demonstration will recur and this time the station will be barricaded hours in advance. A video has circulated online that depicts the brutal beating of black trans woman Iyanna Dior by a group of black cis women and men. Intracommunity calls to defend black trans life have been met with affirmation, yes, but also derision and accusations of unduly diverting attention away from the present struggle. We only get so much access to the feeling of freedom.

“It’s impossible to know what the other side of this will look like, how this unfolding situation will crystallize into a narratable event. Whether a stretched-out moment of insisting that black trans life matters will, in the end, matter. Whether ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ will ever occupy the simple present tense. In the meanwhile, the Okra Project has begun and funded an enormously ambitious project to connect struggling black trans people with life-sustaining care. In the meanwhile, Dee Dee Watters of Black Transwomen Inc has raised nearly $10,000 to support Iyanna Dior. In the meanwhile, strangers and intimates alike have given Tony McDade’s family more than enough to put him to rest.

“In the meanwhile, the crowd is assembling again outside my window, louder this time, gathering force.”

1. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, The Paris Review

Poet Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch, reflects on the intersection of blackness and transness while he protests outside a police station in Northampton, Massachusetts: “…transness, at minimum, is the insistence on the human capacity for once unimaginable change.”

2. “Letter From Brooklyn: Finding Justice in the Streets” by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Lit Hub

Novelist Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, wonders just how much the now ubiquitous low-flying police helicopters of Brooklyn are recording; but once he joins a protest, it no longer seems to him like the helicopters are the ones doing the watching. “The rebellion…refuses obfuscation. Too many cameras to count—like the one Darnella Frazier tapped on her phone to record Floyd’s last moments—now point at the true sources of violence and brutality. It’s our turn to shoot.”

3. “In New York, Protesters’ Pride Beats Police Brutality” by Molly Crabapple, The New York Review of Books

Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, co-author of Brothers of the Gun, observes the protests in New York, drawing what she witnesses, and recounting stories others have told. “In the Bronx, while boxed in and waiting to be cuffed, former congressional candidate Andom Ghebreghiorgis witnessed a woman going into labor. Another convulsed in seizures. Blood dripped from the baton wounds police left in protesters’ skulls. Ghebregiorghis himself spent at least six hours with his hands agonizingly zip-tied behind his back. On another night, Jason Rosenberg, a programmer for the 92Y, emerged from jail covered in blood, with a broken arm and a head wound that required six staples to close. A source familiar with the situation in the holding cells told me of a woman who had miscarried after being arrested. Another pregnant woman was beaten, left handcuffed, and denied water.”

4. “An Open Letter to All the Future Mayors of Chicago” by Laurence Ralph, The Paris Review

An excerpt from Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Police torture, he writes, is best understood as a metaphor; a torture tree. And the nourishing roots of the tree are “this country’s enduring logic of threat.” Ralphs writes: “Frontier logic…is foundational…to modern-day policing. We can see it at work when one court after another acquits cops who gun down African Americans under the pretext that those cops felt threatened. In such cases, the violence enacted against Black people works to turn the police officers who actually committed the violence into the victims of those Black people. This is how the tangled and twisted logic of fear became rooted in the security apparatus of the United States.”

5. “On Charles Dickens’ Devious, Hypocritical ‘Nice Guy’ Cop” by Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub

Oliva Rutigliano writes that Charles Dickens, despite having little regard for authority or social elites, fell into the narrative trap, common in all sorts of media for decades, that transforms fascination with police detectives and undercover cops into admiration. Rutigliano calls Dickens’ “strangely giddy” account of a police ride-along, called “On Duty with Inspector Field,” shockingly hypocritical because, by his own account, most of what he witnessed was the intimidation of the poor. Rutigliano is echoing George Orwell, who wrote that “the only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.” As Rutigliano puts it, “Dickens runs into what may be the biggest recurring hypocrisy in his career, as well as the history of popular entertainment: the insistence that police officers fighting crime provides exciting content, while avoiding that the vast majority of ‘crime-fighting’ is ultimately the continued oppression and convenient scapegoating of society’s most vulnerable people.” Rutigliano show how the multi-layered, formally complex book Bleak House finally allows Dickens to excavate his own misperceptions; many of the novel’s dizzying number of plotlines are touched by the same undercover agent, and only by gathering together the threads, and seeing the work of the police across many narratives, can one begin to glimpse the faulty machinations of justice.

6. “Look Who’s Watching,” Tracy O’Neill interviewed by Robert Lopez, Bookforum

Robert Lopez talks with Tracy O’Neill about how her new novel Quotients, which is structured around themes of surveillance and communication, relates to the pandemic and police brutality. “In the book I include several real events, one of which is the police slaying of Mark Duggan, a black man. After Duggan’s death, the Tottenham protests lit through social media. More protesters were caught using social media photos than CCTV, supposedly, and BlackBerry’s parent company gave the police information. So on the one hand, we can see how videos of police brutality have helped us in efforts to document police brutality and anti-blackness, yet the same devices that help hold law enforcement to account may be what provides the police with tools to identify and in some cases arrest protesters.”

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7. “‘The Down Days’ Is an Eerily Prescient Pandemic Novel” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

Jennifer Wilson writes that Ilze Hugo’s novel The Down Days is so eerily predictive of even the tiniest aspects of the pandemic—down to funerals taking place on Facebook—that “one can’t help but wonder—if these times are really as unprecedented as the government leaders and insurance companies tell us they are, why was this moment so easy for Hugo to imagine?” Wilson goes on to say that The Down Days has implications for the much-feared inevitable “onslaught of Covid-based fiction”; she writes, “It is a strange thing to have a dystopian work of science fiction suddenly read like a realist novel in the vein of Balzac, but that is what makes The Down Days such a bizarre (but wildly addictive) book. It has the telltale formal qualities of genre fiction…But its content could hardly be called dystopian—since its publication date has rendered it familiar, mundane…It promises an opportunity to see what our response to this moment might have been like if we had never seen it coming, and yet ultimately refuses to give us that satisfaction. Any fiction that accurately captures our so-called new normal, this novel shows, will have to grapple with the old one.”

8. “Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine” by Andrew Durbin, The New York Review of Books

Andrew Durbin writes about novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert, author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, “a stark autobiographical book about his desperate effort to gain access to an experimental ‘AIDS vaccine.’”

“To the Friend made Guibert both wealthy and famous, especially after an appearance on the French TV show Apostrophes. Posters of his handsome face went up around Paris, transforming him into a symbol of the intense suffering of seropositive men and women at the time. Though he promises in the opening section of his book to become “one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady,” he would die the following year, on December 27, 1991, only a few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, author of an additional five extraordinary books, all of which would be published posthumously.”

9. “DREAMer memoirs have their purpose. But that’s not what I set out to write.,” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio interviewed by Lucas Iberico Lozada, Guernica

Lucas Iberico Lozada speaks with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about her book The Undocumented Americans, “a series of dispatches from what we might call undocumented America: a country within a country, one that overlaps and undergirds the other.” Cornejo says she was looking to rebut the DREAMer memoir:

“…I felt like… a crazy person who was able to articulate what her experiences had been would be a pretty good canary in the coal mine to talk about the American Dream. The way I define crazy is not just ‘mentally ill.’ It’s a radical term…When this Administration started comparing us to animals, it coincided with a moment when I started undergoing intravenous ketamine treatment for depression. For the first time in my life, I started noticing my surroundings. I noticed—in a purely unsentimental way—certain plants around me. I developed a relationship with this group of crows that lived in my neighborhood, and I began feeding them. I learned that my brain had had a lot of damage because of the traumas related to migration.

“In my interviews and research, I realized that the stories that came out and had become sort of popular about immigrants, undocumented or not, were stories from people who were pretty grateful to America. It seemed like the point in a lot of these narratives was to change racist white people’s minds about us. And that didn’t feel right with me, so I thought, what would it look like if a crazy person wrote this?”

Cornejo also talks about the insidious “memoirization” of women’s writing, especially women of color’s writing, that came up in the newsletter a few weeks ago. “My book is a serious work of literature. When I’ve done interviews, people don’t ask me about literary things, people don’t ask me about formal things, people don’t often ask me about my influences or whether I have any training in writing or who I studied under or things like that. People just ask me about my parents leaving me in Ecuador, or what I do for self-care, things like that. It’s very clear that I’m being seen through a sociological lens.”

There’s a lot more that’s worth pull-quoting from this interview but I suppose I should stop. Wait, there’s this: “I’ve always felt a telepathic connection to Stephen Miller. I wrote an article once in the New York Times, and immediately afterward I became aware that he became aware of me.”

10. “A Different Civil War in the Southwest” by Sam Kleiner, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Sam Kleiner reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which “explore[s] the undertold story of the war in the deserts and mountains of the New Mexico territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico). The evocative title of her book comes from a soldier’s observation that what was playing out in New Mexico was, in fact, a ‘three-cornered war’ between Union, Confederacy, and Native peoples.” Nelson draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to resurrect the despicable reality of the conflict: that the antislavery forces were also genocidal exterminators.

11. “How Yusuf Idris’s Stories Upended Respectability Politics in Egypt” by Ezzedine C. Fishere, Lit Hub

In his forward to a new Penguin Classics collection of Yusuf Idris’s short stories, The Cheapest Nights, novelist Ezzedine C. Fishere writes that as young reader, his first encounter with a story by Idris “showed me what probably every good story can show: things fall apart for no particular fault of individuals who are just trying—and failing—to keep it together.”

12. “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry” by Jericho Brown, The New York Times

A new poem from Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition. “It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands. / They have washed their hands for you. / And they take the bus home.”

Stay safe out there,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Sinead Gleeson - Pain, Borders and Averting Our Gaze

The annual Arts Over Borders festival reaches into rural and urban communities on both sides of the Irish border. Curated with a strong sense of place and extending across four counties – from Fermanagh to Donegal, Tyrone to Derry/Londonderry- the border itself looms large in the festival. In this series of The Essay, recorded in front of live audiences at the 2019 Arts Over Borders festival in Enniskillen and Derry/Londonderry, five writers explore the theme of boundaries. At the Royal Grammar School, Enniskillen, Irish writer and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson talks about the ways in which pain, inequality and borders can separate us. Producers: Ophelia Byrne & Cathy Moorehead

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Editor’s Roundtable: Fans, ‘Grams and Installment Plans

On our September 20, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.  

This week, the editors discuss stories in Inc., The Cut, and The Baffler.

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6:52 “The Wing Has $118 Million in Funding, Superfans Like Meryl Streep, and Plenty of Skeptics. It’s Just Getting Started.” (Christine Lagorio-Chafkine, October 2019, Inc.)

17:28 “Who Would I Be Without Instagram?” (Tavi Gevinson, September 16, 2019, The Cut)

26:00 “Revolution on the Installment Plan.” (Jessa Crispin, Sept/Oct 2019, The Baffler)

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

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Glasgow School of Art

Author Louise Welsh reflects on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art. 1/5 Louise describes her memories of the building before it was ravaged by two fires. This week's Essays are celebrating British architecture. Each writer has a passionate connection with the building, revealing how our long past and complex present have led to a built environment unlike anywhere else on the planet. Image courtesy of Alan McAteer. Producer Clare Walker

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Alex Wheatle

Having enjoyed it as an eight-year-old boy, Alex Wheatle re-reads Robinson Crusoe and reflects on its themes of imperialism and slavery. In this series of Essays, recorded in front of an audience at the 2019 Hay Festival, five writers respond to the themes of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Often described as the first novel, it's a story which still resonates, three hundred years after it was written, but also preserves the attitudes of its time. Fiona Stafford, Horatio Clare, Alex Wheatle, Alys Conran and Daniel Hahn reflect on the novel as a tale of exotic adventure, a study of isolation and a fantasy of colonial encounter.

from The Essay https://bbc.in/2JKDH0L

To Protect Children from Sexual Abuse, the Catholic Church Must Eliminate the Clergy

In a gripping and contentious cover story for the Atlantic, journalist and ex-Catholic priest James Carroll argues that it’s time for Catholicism to dismantle the priesthood. The fundamental problem, Carroll writes, is that “clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.” The clergy were not created by God or the bible, he explains, but are political units of the Roman empire, and it has corrupted the Church in a way that has made the systematic abuse of children around the world possible.

The Church’s maleness and misogyny became inseparable from its structure. The conceptual underpinnings of clericalism can be laid out simply: Women were subservient to men. Laypeople were subservient to priests, who were defined as having been made “ontologically” superior by the sacrament of holy orders. Removed by celibacy from competing bonds of family and obligation, priests were slotted into a clerical hierarchy that replicated the medieval feudal order. When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishop ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the homage of a vassal to his lord. In my case, the bishop was Terence Cooke, the archbishop of New York. Following this rubric of the sacrament, I gave my loyalty to him, not to a set of principles or ideals, or even to the Church. Should we be surprised that men invited to think of themselves on such a scale of power—even as an alter Christus, “another Christ”—might get lost in a wilderness of self-centeredness? Or that they might find it hard to break from the feudal order that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated status the unordained will never enjoy? Or that Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest? Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself.

While Carroll still extols the many benefits of Catholicism’s vast, global, care-giving network of hospitals and schools, he sees the Church’s hierarchy and exclusionary structures as harming, not serving, its 1 billion believers.

In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless. According to one victim, Cardinal Law, of Boston, before being forced to resign because of his support for predator priests, attempted to silence the man by invoking the sacred seal: “I bind you by the power of the confessional,” Law said, his hands pressing on the man’s head, “not to speak to anyone else about this.”

A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The abuse of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a different order, and not simply because of its global magnitude. For Catholics, priests are the living sacrament of Christ’s presence, delegated above all to consecrate the bread and wine that define the soul of the faith. This symbol of Christ has come to stand for something profoundly wicked. Even as I write that sentence, I think of the good men on whom I have depended for priestly ministry over the years, and how they may well regard my conclusion as a friend’s betrayal. But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that concern, and anguish should be reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent measure of our responses.

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Who Do You Belong To?

Emily Lackey | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,462 words)

When I was a teenager, I didn’t fall in love with boys — I fell in love with their families. In seventh grade, it was Sean’s mother, who came to our classroom every day to help the teacher with whatever needed helping. I loved way she outlined the bubble letters on our art projects and cut pieces of construction paper into perfect circles. I loved how she was always there with her short hair, driving the purple minivan whose license plate I memorized. I liked Sean, too, but I can’t remember why other than the fact that he had hair that got blonder the longer he was in the sun, and that he liked a football team other than the Patriots.

Jason was next. Jason was the best because his parents were divorced, which meant there were two families to love. His father and stepmother invited me to their cocktail parties, took me to a New Year’s Eve dinner in New York City, brought me home when it was too late for Jason to drive, and paid me for painting the side of their house. Their house was where I was introduced to life’s greatest luxuries: gas stoves, hummus, bread that wasn’t white, olives that weren’t black.

“This girl is great,” I remember Jason’s father saying every time I offered to help with dinner, every time I set the table, every time I cleared my own dishes without being asked.

I loved Jason’s mother, too. She took me shopping to find an armchair, went for walks with me around the neighborhood, sat across from me at her kitchen table after September 11th and talked about how everything was terrible. I became best friends with Jason’s brother, too, and — lest there be any doubt about my commitment to his family — when Jason started dating another girl instead of me, I started dating his brother instead of him.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that, when I met Neil at a writing residency last fall, I didn’t fall in love with him, I fell in love with his wife.

Four years before I met Neil, I fell in love with an essay his wife had written about the unrealistic expectations put on women once they become wives and mothers. I sent it to all of my friends at the time. My friends who were, back then, as childless and unmarried as I was. We read the essay and raged about the expectations put on women to behave, to follow the rules, to lose their identities in order to become first perfect wives, then perfect mothers.

By the time I met Neil, my friends had all gotten married, one right after the other, then pregnant, one right after the other.

For a while, these differences didn’t come between us, because, for a while, I was on that same path. I too had wanted those things, and when I met a man in my late 20s who was quiet and kind, I figured I had finally found it. I could picture the life I wanted so clearly: an old house on a dirt road, a kitchen table big enough for the kids to do their homework, a hammock in the shade, this kind and quiet man kissing my neck every morning before heading off to work.

Their house was where I was introduced to life’s greatest luxuries: gas stoves, hummus, bread that wasn’t white, olives that weren’t black.

But then, because these things sometimes happen — a short straw, a joker card pulled from the deck — I found out after five years that this kind and quiet man was not the kind of man I wanted to marry. He was the kind of man who kept secrets, the kind of man who had a hard time being honest, the kind of man who lied about the things he was doing when he wasn’t doing them with me.

In the middle of our breakup, I played bridesmaid to my best friend. Standing beside her as she said her vows, I felt like we were opposites. We had started in the same place — both meeting our boyfriends when we were 27 — so it didn’t seem fair that we ended up in such different places. We had both been good girlfriends. We had both followed the rules.

Standing in front of her wedding guests, I remember thinking for the first time, If being good was what got me here, then I may as well be whatever I want.

What I wanted — I knew almost immediately — was to apply to writing residencies. So I did. I applied to nine and got into four, all of them lining up perfectly without overlap, like a sign. It was meant to be: I would put my things in storage and spend the next year on the road, writing and traveling and doing — for the first time in a long time — whatever I wanted to do.

“Emily’s Heartbreak Tour of America,” my friends called it, and it kind of was. I was a 33-year-old woman, and after spending my entire adult life looking for a man to marry, I committed instead to a year of not trying to find one. It felt bold, freeing, revolutionary even, deciding at that age that any man I met would be temporary, short-term, intended only as a pit stop along the way to my next adventure.

At first my friends were on board, asking for constant updates. Our group texts were slaloms of blue bubbles that bounced happily between topics relevant to our respective lives: teething and sleep training, diaper rash and birth control that was safe to take while breastfeeding, being hungover, being unable to remember the name of the man I had slept with the night before. Kevin, I think. Or was it Keith? For the first few months, we all lived vicariously through each other’s adventures. But when I told my friends I was sleeping with Neil, the husband of the woman whose essay we had discussed in detail, something changed.

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I explained to them how Neil had been the one to bring up his wife’s essay the first night I met him. I told them that he had offered me socks to keep my feet warm, that he had found and followed me on Twitter, and that he had started direct messaging me when we were hanging out with other people, sitting across the room from each other and secretly talking shit about everyone else. I even told them how, when he invited me to his writing studio for the first time, long before anything happened, he had told me his marriage to his wife was an open one, that she had a boyfriend of her own, and that he had already told her he had been flirting with me.

“How do you know he’s telling the truth?” one of my friends asked.

Of course there was no way for me to know for sure that Neil was telling the truth, short of calling his wife and asking her myself. But didn’t we all have to take our partner’s word to some degree? That they’ve been tested. That they’ll pull out. That they won’t hurt us. That their phones are locked for security purposes. That, when they’re out picking up groceries, they’re not calling a woman they slept with two weeks ago and deleting her phone number before they get home.

“I guess I don’t know for sure,” I wrote and waited for them to respond.

A few minutes later, one of my friends finally wrote, “I can totally see why it’s hot to be in your position.” And then, in all caps, “I WOULD NOT WANT TO BE THE WIFE THOUGH.”

“If I were the wife,” another one wrote, “I’d rip his fucking balls off.”

Months later, my friends would tell me that they were worried when I told them I was sleeping with a married man. When it happened, though, it was hard for me to see anything in their texts other than the way the tone changed, the way the enthusiastic back and forth we had maintained for years had come to a standstill.

I couldn’t comprehend how this was different from the things we had done before. These were the friends that I had been single with, all of us tethered to one another for everything that we did: eating meals and drinking beers and dating men and running to the bar in the middle of those Vermont winters wearing nothing but torn jeans and tank tops. Back then, we didn’t care about the marital status of the men we slept with, because, back then, the only people we were loyal to were each other. We created our own form of family, and we had clung tight to that for the past decade. But that night, sitting in my studio trying to think of how to respond, I pictured the new families they had formed — ones with husbands and children and homes in the suburbs. They were wives and mothers now, and I was not. I felt far away from them then, left out and alone, a balloon that had slipped free from the bunch.

A few months later, when I was on my way to another residency, I found out for sure that Neil’s wife knew about me. Neil and I had decided to meet for a drink on my way through Madison, and I was only a few blocks from the bar where we had agreed to meet when he texted me, “Mind if my wife joins us?”

During our time in residency, Neil had told me about what it was like to be in an open marriage, how many of the men his wife met on dating apps were more than happy to sleep with a married woman, while most of the women he talked to were too suspicious of his situation to ever meet. The one woman he had been with since they opened their marriage, Neil said, was weirdly possessive. She had acted as if his wife were her competition. She had incorrectly assumed that he had been the one to open their marriage, and she had incorrectly assumed that his wife must not be giving him what he needed if what he needed was other women.

“It’s not a setup,” Neil texted when I didn’t respond. “I swear. She just wants to make sure you’re not trying to steal her health insurance.”

At the next stoplight, I texted my friend.

“What the fuck?” she wrote. “What even is your life right now?”

For a second I thought about turning around. What was my life right now? But then I thought about all I had done in the past few months that I had never imagined myself doing: traveling around the country, living without a home, writing a book, being alone for long stretches of time. I had thought that so much of this trip would be terrifying, but none of it was. If anything, being on my own made me feel alive again — wild, even — and I was starting to realize how many of my life choices had been made for the wrong reasons. I had done things because they were easy or obvious or the next logical thing, but what I grew to recognize was how infrequently I had stopped along the way to ask myself, Why do I want this? Or, more importantly, Why do I not want this? If I had, I would have seen how many of my decisions were made because I was afraid. Afraid of being uncomfortable. Afraid of being unsure. Afraid — even worse — of being alone.

That night I didn’t respond to my friend. I responded to Neil. I agreed to meet his wife, because, when I really asked myself why I didn’t want to meet her — it was weird, it might be uncomfortable, she might not be nice to me — all of my answers sounded hollow.

‘What the fuck?’ she wrote. ‘What even is your life right now?’

I met Neil at a dive bar down the street from his house, and we sat on the same side of the booth to wait for his wife. She and her boyfriend were both coming, he said. They’d stop by on their way back from dinner.

When Alexis arrived, she slid into the booth across from me, took a sip from Neil’s beer, and exhaled loudly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a little drunk. I was really nervous to meet you.”

Her honesty endeared me to her instantly. From there, the conversation was easy. It wasn’t awkward at all. We were writers, and we bonded in the way that people who have these things in common do. It reminded me of what a friend said when she was the first among us to have children. She had made new friends — a group of young women in her area who all had children — but she had assured us that we were still her favorites. It’s just nice to have people who know what you’re going through, she said, and we had all pretended like we understood.

That night, the four of us didn’t talk for long, but we talked about a lot: writing residencies and freelance jobs, slush piles and waiting to hear back from editors, writing contests and how long it takes for a piece to be published. Alexis was amazing. She was vulnerable and brilliant and quick-witted and kind, and I could see why Neil loved her. After only a few minutes of talking, she confessed to me that her day had been terrible. Her assistant, she said, who was also her best friend, had accessed her email and found a message Alexis had sent to another friend saying that her assistant/best friend sometimes didn’t have her shit together.

“So then she sends me this,” Alexis said, holding her phone out for me to see.

I looked at the text message. I had to scroll down twice to read the whole thing. It signaled, among other things, a clear end to their personal and professional relationship.

“That seems extreme,” I said when I was done. “What you said wasn’t even that bad.”

Neil’s wife folded her upper body in half and brought her mouth to her beer. “I feel terrible about it,” she said. “I do.”

I reassured her. “This says more about her than it does about you,” I said. “If she hadn’t overreacted about this, it would have been something else.”

Alexis looked at Neil with a look that I recognized. It was the way Jason’s father used to look at him every time I stood among their affluent friends and held my own in a conversation about Steinbeck or Sondheim. This girl is great, it seemed to say, and then Alexis reached her hand out and put it on mine. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re so sweet.”

“I really like her,” Alexis texted Neil later that night when Neil and I were in his bed and Alexis and her boyfriend were somewhere else in the city.

“My wife really likes you,” Neil said setting his phone back down.

“What did she say exactly?” I said. “Let me see the texts.” Neil held out his phone, and I read all of the gray bubbles, a neat column of praise and approval. “Ask her if she wants to meet me in the city tomorrow for lunch,” the last text from Alexis said.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Neil said, putting his phone down without replying. “I know it’s kind of awkward.” But it didn’t feel awkward anymore. What was lunch with Neil’s wife when I had already had a drink with her and her boyfriend?

“No, I want to,” I said. I felt like a satellite that had been launched into space. Way out here, free from the persuasive power gravity and friction, I felt like I could go on forever. “Give her my number,” I said.

The next day Alexis and I met for lunch, and, by the end of it, she had invited me to her 40th birthday party a month later, had offered to put me in touch with her editor, had told me that, when I was ready to look for an agent, I should give her a call.

I started a text to my friends, Is it weird that I like Neil’s wife more than I like Neil?, but I didn’t hit send.

A few weeks later I drove back to Madison for Alexis’s birthday, eager to leave my Nebraska residency where I was going entire days holed up alone. When I arrived, Neil put my things in the guest bedroom and introduced me to his kids as “Dad’s residency friend.” Not long after I arrived, Alexis and I left Neil with the kids and drove to Whole Foods to pick up food for dinner: homemade pasta, crushed tomatoes, kalamata olives to snack on, champagne to sip. When we got home, Alexis said her boyfriend would be joining us for dinner. He would come over after the kids went to bed, sometime around eight.

But at eight o’clock, Neil and Alexis’s daughter was still jumping on the mini trampoline in the living room, their son was still watching the cartoons he had been told to turn off three times, and dinner had still not been made.

Alexis was in the kitchen, alternating between washing the dishes that she needed to make dinner, putting together a separate meal that the kids would approve of, and stopping every time someone said “Mom” or “Mommy” or “Alexis” or “Mama.”

“Yes, sweetie,” she answered each time, her voice soft and sweet, as if she had nothing else to do other than be there for them. On our trip to Whole Foods, she had looked glamorous, even in the fluorescent lighting, her long camel coat tied tightly around her waist, her hair vibrant and wild. But now — after a few hours of attending to everyone else’s needs — Alexis looked like a woman on the verge of a meltdown.

At one point she ran her hands through her hair. “Neil,” she said, “Can you take over here? I need to lie down.”

After she went upstairs, Neil and I launched into a comfortable rhythm. He put a pot of water on the stove to boil and simmered garlic in a pan to start the sauce. I opened the champagne and intercepted his daughter who kept asking him what the next letter was in a word she was trying to spell. She was writing a letter to NASA, she said, showing me the piece of plain white paper covered in crayon letters.

“I can help,” I said, and together we looked up the address for NASA and walked through the steps of addressing an envelope. A few minutes later, when Neil said, “Shit, I forgot to walk the dog,” I said, “I got it,” and took him around the block.

An hour later, after the kids were asleep and the dinner was made and Alexis’s boyfriend had arrived, Alexis came down the stairs looking radiant. She had put on lipstick and a and short skirt, but the change was evident in more than just what she wore. I had seen women look like that before. She looked vibrant and alive, like a girlfriend of the quarterback on the sidelines of a high school football game.

What was lunch with Neil’s wife when I had already had a drink with her and her boyfriend?

I wondered then if there was some validity to this life that Alexis and Neil were living. Desire is a biological necessity, and losing that seemed inevitable within a lifetime commitment. Maybe this is the way we are supposed to be living: all of us together, supporting each other and loving each other and stepping in when we are close to losing our minds and needing reinforcement.

The next night, the night of Alexis’s birthday party, I felt even more comfortable lending a hand. I stuffed figs with parmesan cheese and wrapped miniature hot dogs in flaking pastry dough. When the guests started to arrive — a who’s who of the Madison literary scene — Alexis and Neil introduced me to everyone: agents, editors, booksellers, and a book reviewer for the New York Times. By the end of the night, a bookseller told me I had to come to their writers’ breakfast the next morning, I just had to.

At some point in the evening, I realized Neil was nowhere to be found, and I went looking for him. I found him in his bedroom, his arm trapped under his sleeping daughter’s body. She had woken up in the middle of the party and couldn’t go back to sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed and whispered to him about how amazing the night was going, how much I felt like I fit in here.

“You could stay,” he whispered so as not to wake his daughter.

“Yeah right,” I said, waving his offer away.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “Alexis loves you. The kids love you. You can stay if you want.”

I was too drunk to take him seriously, but not too drunk to notice that he hadn’t said that he loved me. He had always been careful not to say that.

The next day, Alexis and I were curled up with her daughter on the couch watching Adventures in Babysitting when she also mentioned me staying with them, too.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “Can you stay forever?”

Could I? I asked myself. Early the next morning, Neil and I woke up before the kids and had sex for the last time before I left. I pretended in the gray light of that morning that this life was mine. I tried it on, seeing what it felt like: what if their kids were mine, their bed was mine, this man who was married to someone else was mine? Could this be where I belonged? It was everything I thought I wanted — a literary life, a kind husband, two cute kids, and a built-in network of smart women — but did what I want actually look like this?

When I was a child, I spent the summers at my father’s house. At the end of every visit, I would feel scared. I didn’t have words for it then — I still don’t — but whatever it was would settle at the bottom of my spine when faced with leaving my father’s home. His was a two-story house in the suburbs, where there was comfort and laughter and always people around. Returning to my mother’s — a cramped single-story home, where my stepfather was always angry and everything was off limits — meant returning to a life spent mostly alone. Thinking about leaving Neil and his family, I felt it again, that fear sinking down into the deepest part of me. Soon this would be over and soon I would have to go home and soon I would be alone.

I tried to picture what it would look like, the five of us forming our own alternative kind of family, and it didn’t seem that terrible. But then I asked myself, Why would I want this? and the answers were the same as they had always been: It would be easy, it would be convenient, it was all right here ready for me. The question Why do I not want this? was harder to answer. It wasn’t the responsibility that I was afraid of. It wasn’t the fear that, a few weeks in, I would end up like Alexis, running my hands through my hair and saying, “Can you take over here? I need a fucking break.”

No, the thing that I was afraid of was how much Neil loved his wife. I could see it in the way he moved around her, trying his best to anticipate her needs. I could see it in the way he seemed to like me even more after Alexis approved of me. That first night after Alexis and I met, Neil had clung to me tighter than he ever had before, had buried his face in my hair and told me how amazing I was, how grateful he was to have me in his life. What scared me the most was how fused to each other Neil and Alexis were, as if all of the forces of their history together — heat and pressure and time — had turned them into one. What scared me was that, if I stayed here with them, I might never have that for myself. And even though years of relationships had taught me that any life spent with anyone other than myself was tenuous, imperfect, unpredictable, and hard, I still wanted that. I wanted to love someone in spite of that. I wanted to love someone aware of that. I wanted to love someone because of that.

When I left in the morning, it was Alexis who saw me off, and we sat in the front room and talked before I headed out.

“I can’t believe you have four more months of residencies,” she said. The night before she had confessed to me that the real reason she loved going to residencies was because they were the only place she could pretend to be herself again. She went so she could feel the feeling of belonging only to herself.

“Take me with you,” she half-joked, and we both laughed.

When my Heartbreak Tour of America was over a few months later, I stopped on the way back to Massachusetts to visit friends in New Jersey. One of them was throwing a BBQ in her backyard and, after a little while, I found myself in a circle of all married women, most of whom I didn’t know. One of the women asked each of us our names.

“I’m so-and-so,” the married women all said in turn, “and that’s my husband, so-and-so, and those are my kids, so-and-so and so-and-so.”

When the woman turned to me, I said, “I’m Emily,” and she shook my hand and waited.

“And,” she said, “who do you belong to?”

All of the other women were appalled. For the rest of the night they talked about how they couldn’t believe what that woman said. They told stories about her troubled marriage. They talked about how terrible her kids were. They did anything they could to make me feel better, it seemed, about being alone. But I didn’t feel bad about it.

“No one,” I said to the woman when she asked. “I belong to myself.”

* * *

Emily Lackey‘s stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and Post Road among others. She lives and writes in Western Massachusetts.

Editor: Katie Kosma
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

from Longreads http://bit.ly/2JKTwnT

Editor’s Roundtable: Cities, And How They Used to be Good (Podcast)

On our May 24, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Editor-in-chief Mike Dang, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The CT Mirror, and Engadget.

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Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.

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00:49 “They Were Conned: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers” (Brian M. Rosenthal, May 19, 2019, The New York Times) 

“There was absolutely no one who was there looking on the side of these low-income drivers.” – Mike Dang

To drive a cab in New York City, you need a taxi medallion. The medallions are valued at over a million dollars, are marketed by lenders as a better investment than the stock market, and represent financial freedom to drivers who want to own their own business. This two-part investigation from Pulitzer-nominated Rosenthal looks at the predatory lenders who entrapped low-income taxi drivers into shady loans.

The team discusses the ethics of loans that overlook how much drivers earn, the complicity of regulators and politicians, and the idea of American greed versus the American dream.  

9:38 “How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart” (Karen Heller, May 21, 2019, The Washington Post)

“I’m really homesick for San Francisco… I feel like it doesn’t exist anymore.” – Kelly Stout

The Post offers another look at the untenable cost of real estate and rising inequality in San Francisco, inspiring the team to discuss whether these stories function to unmask the status quo and inspire readers to question capitalism, or are merely elegies for a way of living that no longer exists.

They talk about the microcosms of late-stage capitalism, the rise of socialist sentiment, and a desire for more regulation, even among some tech capitalists. They also draw a parallel between responses to climate change stories that cause concern without successfully spurring us to change the way we go about our daily lives.

17:00 “Separated by Design: How Some of America’s Richest Towns Fight Affordable Housing” (Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, May 22, 2019, The CT Mirror)

“If you make racism really expensive, it’s one way to help force people’s hands.” – Aaron Gilbreath

It’s basically impossible to get affordable housing built in Westport, Connecticut — home to the highest wealth disparities between rich and poor in the entire country. Co-published with ProPublica, this investigation looks at the dynamics between the residents, developers, lawyers, and law-makers that maintain a system built around keeping black and Hispanic people out of these extremely wealthy white towns.

24:04 “Impossible Foods’ Rising Empire of Almost-Meat” (Chris Ip, May 19, 2019, Engadget)

“The problem is on such a different scale.” – Ethan Chiel

Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and his wife, both long-time vegans, have created Impossible Foods, a tech company looking to disrupt the food system by targeting carnivores and eliminating the meat industry.

The team rates Impossible’s flagship burger, which, according to some, tastes just like the real thing. They touch on the role the meat industry plays in greenhouse gas emissions (it’s responsible for 14.5% of the world’s total) and debate the impact of such a product. They weigh the burger’s health benefits in relation to its environmental benefits, and the strategy of a vegan product that appeals not to morality, but gluttony.

 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

from Longreads http://bit.ly/2wrcVlo

No Surgery Can Fix a Self-Defeating World View

As Alice Hines reports at The Cut, ‘“incels” are going under the knife to reshape their faces, and their dating prospects.’ What they’re discovering after the swelling goes down is that the work they need to get done is on the inside: no plastic surgery can fix a poor self image or a skewed world view that dictates that life’s problems and roadblocks will magically evaporate with a surgically enhanced jawline.

After his first surgery with Eppley, he tells me, he returned to the Netherlands to wait for the swelling to go down. He was happy with his rhinoplasty revision but couldn’t figure out whether his new jaw was too big. Some days the results seemed perfect. Other days one side looked horrifically large. “Just realized my face is slightly too flat,” he wrote one morning. “Should I fly back to the U.S.?” Eppley pressed him to wait. To feel calmer, Truth4lie listened to long videos of rain sounds.

“My self-image fluctuates all the time,” he wrote on the forum as he waited. “I want to live in a plastic surgeon’s office. I just want to have a bed in one of his labs. Just a bed, a small kitchen, and an internet connection. I want to feel pure within my body and self-validate by looking in the mirror and seeing the flawless skull. When detecting a tiny deformity, I call the surgeon and he’ll be there immediately, along with his assistant and a knife in his hand to cut me open.”

He would come back to Indianapolis three more times that year, staying at the same Holiday Inn off the side of the interstate near Eppley’s office for weeks at a time. For the first revision, in January 2017, Eppley shaved off part of the original silicone implant that Truth4lie thought was too big.

The time in his life when Truth4lie remembers being happiest was that spring, after his second surgery. Before he began to notice new flaws, he spent a brief few months when he felt transformed into a new person. He contacted an old friend in a neighboring town and rebuilt his relationship with his parents. When he took pictures of himself or looked in the mirror, he felt calm. People’s reactions to him appeared to change. They seemed to make eye contact more and smile, though Truth4lie couldn’t be sure if it was all in his head.

Read the story

from Longreads http://bit.ly/2Ki0uR5

Oklahoma: A Reading List

A few nights ago I filled my bathtub with blankets and every pillow in my house, set a lantern and four bottles of water beside me, and took shelter. On my laptop, I watched the local news, where weathermen urged drivers to clear the roads and pointed at cloud rotations. The skies, through the screen, looked like oceans inverted: clouds rolled like tidal waves at too fast a pace and swirled like aerial eddies. Usually I love the openness of Oklahoma, the way a sunrise here can tinge the world any number of sherbet hues, but that night, from my tub, the heavens only looked ominous.

For an hour I watched the color-coded markings on the map, scanning for my small city, and only went to bed after the red and green splotched signs of danger had passed north, to Kansas. Even then, I didn’t sleep. I listened to the hail and rain pound my roof. I worried for people, animals, and houses in the storm’s path. I wondered if there would be an undetected storm moving toward me in the night, a tornado that might whip through the cover of dark as one had when I was in college, hitting my home when none of us were inside.

The morning after the storm, robins emerged from hiding and hopped across my yard with spiky hair and tussled feathers. Rain drained across the red clay in rivulets. Gray skies cleared into sun, and a soft summer breeze rustled honeysuckle, stirring the scent. This is Oklahoma in spring: mercurial, dangerous, beautiful. Here, I feel closer to the elements than I ever have before. Watching a bird prey upon a baby snake from my kitchen window, tearing the red inner meat into shreds, or witnessing the sky meld from blue to the shade of a bruise in moments, I have grown attuned to the thin line between awe and fear.

I am leaving this state very soon, and it’s filled me with the kind of ache for understanding that so often accompanies a goodbye, a sense that I can never know quite enough. Though I’ve explored great swaths of the state; learned the habits of starlings that murmur at daybreak and dusk; taught students from a variety of different towns; listened to Dear Oklahoma, a podcast where writers ruminate and examine the way in which Oklahoma is a part of their work; and tried my best to understand the histories of this place, this state still escapes my description. As a way of getting outside my own experience, I have turned to the words of others. I don’t think there’s any way to capture the vastness of this place — and this is by no means a comprehensive list — but below is a collection of stories that offer a glimpse.

1. Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country (Khushbu Shah, October 5, 2017, Thrillist)

With only oil and cattle to rely on as industries, rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma was at risk of becoming a ghost town until Ree Drummond stepped in. Also known as “The Pioneer Woman,” Drummond is a Food Network Star known for her marriage to a cattle-rancher and what fans describe as her “real” food. After Drummond opens a restaurant called “The Mercantile” in Pawhuska, Khushbu Shah flies from New York to better understand Drummond’s influence on Oklahoma’s cultural scene and economy, and why so many visitors flock to a restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Similar sentiments were later echoed by every Pioneer Woman fan I spoke to, the vast majority of whom were white and from the Midwest or the South, like the three tall and husky female friends who told me they’d driven 13 hours from Indiana because Drummond makes ‘real American food’ and ‘the stuff you actually want to eat.’

2. They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants. (Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, October 4, 2017, Reveal)

Given the option between prison and a rehab program called CAAIR (nicknamed “the Chicken Farm”), Brad McGahey chose the latter. Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, in this harrowing piece of investigative journalism, reveal that CAAIR, located in northeastern Oklahoma, relies on unpaid labor from thousands of defendants. Additionally, though marketed as a rehab program, participants receive very little medical care or treatment.

‘They came up with a hell of an idea,’ said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. ‘They’re making a killing off of us.’

3. A Bend in the River (Pamela Colloff, July 2002, Texas Monthly)

Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a ‘sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.’ Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away.

In this riveting, haunting longform piece, Pamela Colloff writes about the murder of Heather Rich, and the impact her death had on the community of Waurika, Oklahoma, as well as the ways in which place and landscape influenced the investigation and subsequent events.

4. Why Black People Own Guns (Julia Craven, December 26, 2017, Huffpost)

Julia Craven interviewed 11 black gun owners in order to better understand their relationships to firearms. Though each of these accounts are important in their own right, RJ Young speaks specifically about his experiences with gun ownership as a black man in Oklahoma.

If I could walk around Oklahoma and not count how many black folks were in the room, I’d probably feel better about firearms as a black man. I’d probably feel safer walking around with one. But the fact is, most people have a narrow view of who I am.

Young’s book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns offers more thorough insight his personal experiences with guns in Oklahoma within the context of a well-researched, larger cultural framework.

5. Spiritual Affliction: A Thank You Note to Oklahoma (Kate Strum, October 1, 2018, Hippocampus)

After moving to Oklahoma for graduate school, Kate Strum becomes fervent to understand the landscape: she travels to various parts of the state, engages politically, experiences the severity of elements, and makes meaningful relationships with people who have been here longer than she. And still, Oklahoma is somewhat elusive, though this essay is a beautiful rumination on Strum’s time spent here.

I am at once furious about what is wrong here and losing patience with the opinions of outsiders. I am home. I am marching at the capitol in the morning and late night on social media I am telling my friends on the coasts that they don’t get it. I shake my head when they read articles about rural America and think they know us.

6. Grace in Broken Arrow (Kiera Feldman, May 23, 2012, This Land)

Rather than taking reports of child molestation to the police or the Department of Human Services, the leaders of Grace Church, a Christian school that featured amenities like a ball pit, soda shoppe, and an antique carousel, instead held meetings to address what they didn’t believe to be that serious of an issue. Kiera Feldman, by interviewing survivors, former employees, and conducting immense amounts of research, brings to light a sickening tale of how Aaron Thompson, a former PE teacher at the school, molested boys there for years.

Grace Church was Oklahoma’s Penn State of 2002. After such things come to light, we always wonder: how on earth did that ever happen?

Here is how it happened.

7. Landlocked Islanders (Krista Langlois, November 16, 2016, Hakai Magazine)

Marshallese citizens, granted indefinite permission to live and work in the U.S. as a result of an agreement made with the U.S. during Marshallese independence, are leaving the Marshall Islands due to factors like climate change and lack of opportunities. As Krista Langlois writes, “by the year 2100, it’s conceivable that climate change will force the entire population of the Marshall Islands to US shores.” Many Marshallese migrants are ending up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Though Enid seems like an improbable place for Pacific Islanders to settle, it is, in a way, familiar. The first Marshallese came here with missionaries about 40 years ago, and wrote home about the jobs that could be had in meat-processing factories, and the public schools their children could attend. Eventually, family joined family.

8. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma (Rivka Galchen, May 28, 2018, The New Yorker)

Oklahoma teachers, rightfully tired of working multiple jobs to provide for their families and paying large sums of money for their own school supplies, walked out of school in April 2018. Some teachers drove to the capitol, where they asked for pay raises and better funding for their schools. Others walked in protest, making their way through “snow, lightning, and an earthquake.” Rivka Galchen examines the unique political composition of Oklahoma and chronicles the events of the two-week teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma in this longform piece.

The state’s license plates once read “Native America,” though almost no tribes are native to the area; they were sent there in the Trail of Tears. And Oklahomans are proud to be called Okies, a term coined by Californians to disparage people who were fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Related read: How Oklahoma’s Low Pay Dashed My Hopes of Teaching in My Tribal Community, March 28, 2018, Education Week

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

from Longreads http://bit.ly/2EBIspa

At Transformation

Jane Demuth | Longreads | May 2019 | 23 minutes (5,756 words)

It’s March 13th 2017, the eve of a late season snow storm that will blanket the Northeast and shut down major cities, and I’m on the ninth floor of a high-rise hotel in downtown Philadelphia chugging bottles of laxatives on a tightly prescribed schedule and making regular trips to the toilet. I am alone. As I count down hours one by one, my mind is reluctant either to focus or to rest. I flip through the TV channels briefly, but none of the broadcasts catch my interest. I talk to my brother on the phone several times; he is also in the city, and wants to know if I need anything or would like his company. It is thoughtful and generous of him to offer, but solitude feels like the right choice for me in this moment. I do not know what moods will strike me in the coming hours, but in the past my fears have sometimes coalesced in a fiery blaze of anger, and I do not wish to subject my brother to this. For an hour or so, I listen to music on my headphones, but the songs toward which I thought I would gravitate on this day are not hitting the emotional sweet spots I’d hoped and expected they would. Mostly I nap, on and off, between bottles of laxatives, prophylactic antibiotics, and urgent visits to the washroom. This morning I awoke at home in the Hudson Valley, feeling calm and clear for the first time in months, but a lengthy run of restless nights and a mounting air of anticipation have taken their toll on me. Tomorrow I will be checking out of the hotel early, and although a pharmaceutically induced period of unconsciousness is on the agenda for later in the day, right now I am grateful for actual sleep in whatever increments it offers itself.

***

I remember my fascination, panic, and excitement when I first learned that people could be surgically altered to transform one set of genitalia into another. I was in middle school and leafing through one of my mother’s psychology textbooks. There was an entry for what was then referred to as sex reassignment surgery, and a grainy black and white photograph of a trans woman. I remember her looking terribly old and terribly sad, gazing out a window at the rain with a vacancy in her eyes. I don’t remember exactly what compelled me to consult my mother’s psychology text, though I was probably looking for information — any information at all — about abnormalities in sex and gender development, and why someone would not feel at home in their body. I wanted to know what was wrong with me, why these shameful urges to wear girls’ clothes (which I’d successfully fought down throughout my childhood) and this complex sense of longing and identification with my female classmates were now returning with puberty. I wanted to know what to do with my white hot terror about the looming apocalypse of a changing body.

I remember my fascination, panic, and excitement when I first learned that people could be surgically altered to transform one set of genitalia into another.

More than anything else, though, I wanted a way to hide. It was 1987. We lived in an enormous and isolated farm house in the middle of the woods, the internet was still a hazy pipe dream in the psychedelic addled minds of computer scientists, and we were not the sort of family to visit either the doctor or the library. What we did have was an extensive and varied collection of books. In the absence of other resources, it was to these that I turned for guidance. Although my parents did as well as they could in teaching my siblings and me that sexuality was healthy, they never delved far into the murkier waters beyond heterosexuality, much less the even more poorly charted territory of gender dysphoria, what was then called transsexualism.

Besides, although they may have been preaching the gospel of open sexuality and gender equality with their words, every interaction of their relationship with each other and their relationships with their children told a radically different story. I learned that to be female was to be lesser and forever scared, and therefore to identify oneself as female in defiance of public consensus to the contrary would be pathological and shameful. The concept of natural, normal, healthy diversity and the possibility of acceptance simply did not exist in my cosmos. There was nowhere for me to turn for help.

My middle school deep dives into psychology texts were entirely clandestine affairs. I did not know what I was, but I knew it was dangerous, and that asking for help was out of the question. Later, when I began to gain a rudimentary and inexact vocabulary to describe my feelings, when the confluence of words on the page and the thoughts in my mind removed the plausibility of denial, secrecy was of utmost importance. If I could have locked these feelings away and never come back to them I would have done so in a heartbeat. I certainly tried. But feelings don’t work that way. Identity doesn’t work that way. The harder I pushed back against what I did not want to be true, the more desperately I wished I could be living a different life.

***

Back in my hotel room, I’m awakened mid afternoon by the hospital calling me with final preparations for tomorrow. Are you fasting? Following the bowel prep protocol? Yes, I answer honestly. And you’ve been off your hormones for six weeks, right? Yes, I lie. For the past four years, daily doses of sublingual estradiol, a form of estrogen, have taken me through a second puberty, slowly but steadily converting the musculature and fat distribution of my body and the neurochemical patterns in my brain into something far more in line with what they should always have been. My body has softened and rounded out. I’ve stopped fighting against my emotions, and they have rebounded to the surface. As part of my preoperative protocol, however, my surgeon has instructed me to cease taking this medication for the past six weeks. Ostensibly, this is meant to prevent embolism during my recovery (a reported risk of hormone replacement therapy which is not well supported by the data, particularly with respect to modern formulations of estrogen and use in trans populations in the absence of other risk factors). My late aunt was responsible for some of this research in the 80’s when she worked as an epidemiologist; unfortunately, she did not live long enough for me to discuss her conclusions with her. My scepticism about the risks of blood clots aside, skipping the hormones would certainly slide my body back towards its pre-transition state, a state to which I have absolutely no desire to return. Like my aunt, I also work in medical research, and have reviewed the published literature thoroughly enough to know that there is no reason for me to stop my hormonal lifeline. Yet I am wholly reliant on medical professionals for what happens next, and I know if I tell them that I have ignored what they, too, must understand to be a frivolous and psychologically damaging instruction, a door will slam shut between me and tomorrow’s surgery. Ignoring their instructions and lying is the best option I can see.

Lying does not come easily to me. The environment in which I grew up was permissive and relatively liberal in some ways, but harsh, unforgiving, and often brutal in others. When I was 3 and disobeyed my father at a playground, he locked me in a hot car to punish me. Later that year at a family gathering, I tried to recite the poem “A Visit From Saint Nick”; when I fumbled some of the words, he was so angry that he picked me up and shook me to make me stop. I do not remember either of these occasions. My sister, my mother, my grandmother — the other women in my family — told me about them many years later, when I was no longer a child. I do remember that when I was 7 and made an uncharitable comment about another child, my father was again so angry that he didn’t talk to me or even look at me for three days, until my mother intervened. I learned to watch my words, never to lie, and never, ever to make a commitment on which I could not follow through. Above all else, I learned that the fires of rage were a powerful weapon, and that it was pointless to petition for leniency or understanding from anyone in a position of power or authority.

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Petitioning a distant and intractable authority for compassion and care was an unavoidable part of my preparation for surgery, though. I knew when I wrote my first letter to my health insurance company requesting coverage for gender confirmation surgery that my request would simply be rejected as a matter of course. I had higher hopes for the second letter I wrote, appealing their decision. I listed the medical organizations that considered this a necessary part of treatment. I referenced the section of the Affordable Care Act, in the narrow window between its adoption and the legal challenge which rendered it impotent, that prohibited health insurance from discriminating on the basis of gender identity. I cited the corresponding New York State law as well, and the executive order preventing such discrimination against federal contractors, both of which applied to me. I wrote about the horrendously high rates of suicide among transgender people, and the fact that this is a life saving surgery for those with gender dysphoria. But none of this swayed their decision in any way. They denied my appeal with the same sort of anonymous form letter they’d used to deny my original petition. It offered no names and no further hope, apart from a tepid suggestion that I could send yet another letter to start the process over again, because they (not I) had assigned the wrong diagnosis and procedure codes to my original request. Even knowing ahead of time that my odds of success were vanishingly slim, even with the advance warnings of medical professional friends that my particular insurance company was especially heinous to deal with, even having set myself up beforehand not to need their help, to be able to pay for this on my own if need be and never be beholden to an organization with no corporate regard for the best interests of its charges if they interfered with the bottom line of its shareholders, it still crushed me to receive their outright refusals.

It was difficult to stay motivated in this fight with no expectation of success. I remember sitting on a pew in the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica on a visit to Ottawa, praying to the two Saints Joan (of Arc, and Jett) for strength and for hope. Later that week, in a park near City Hall, I read these words by Neil Gaiman in his 2016 essay collection, The View from the Cheap Seats: “Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, are not true. They are better than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated.” I did not know if the $200 billion dragon of my insurance company could be defeated, but I knew that if I stopped after my appeal was rejected I’d have accomplished nothing but disappointing myself. As hopeless as it seemed, as demeaning as it felt to continue petitioning a nameless, faceless entity for help, as frightening as it was to feel rising within me all of my kid fears of having no support from on high, I knew I had to keep going. It wasn’t time to quit. Not yet.

But neither did I intend to keep applying methods that were not going to yield results. The rules I’d been following so far were clearly established to prevent anyone from succeeding, so I found a different rule set and followed that instead. Because I purchase my insurance through my employer, I turned to them for help when I could make no progress on my own. They put me in contact with our insurance agent, who helped me navigate the system. She smoothed the way to add gender confirmation surgery to our schedule of benefits. Without her help, without my company’s help, I would have kept spinning on a bureaucratic hamster wheel designed to frustrate rather than facilitate.

Although gender dysphoria is by no means new, the medical process of transition is. Devoid of the rich history of other rites of passage, I’ve struggled to find context in the months leading up to this.

This is not to say that the intercession of my employer and our agent made the process simple or painless, though; they only made it possible. My insurance company continued to throw up every impediment it could devise. I had to reschedule my surgery, as the new benefit would only take effect after my originally planned date. This cost me three months. Even with this additional time, it was only a month prior to my rescheduled date — well after I’d had to pay my surgeon up front for her costs — that I received approval in writing that the procedure would be covered. My agent, who made every effort to help me to whatever extent she could, at one point accidentally forwarded to me an email in which one of her colleagues explained that they would set their usual and customary rate for this procedure, the actual cost of which they had apparently not researched at all, at exactly half of what my surgeon charged. This, despite the fact that all surgeons offering this operation in the US charge roughly the same fee. Because my doctor would not agree to such a miserly payout — indeed, there were no surgeons in network who would perform this surgery at that price — my benefits were reduced further to the out-of-network rate of just 80 percent of that 50 percent, meaning I would be responsible for 60 percent of the cost.

***

By the time I find myself in my Philly hotel room counting down hours, I feel as though I’ve already run a ultramarathon navigating the obtuse logistics of health insurance red tape and begging for the scant mouthful of table scraps they deign to disburse.

I look outside the ninth floor window of my hotel room at the streets below as the sun goes down and the snow begins to fall. I’ve been required to fast all day in preparation for tomorrow, and my stomach has gone through waves of hunger pangs. One of the few permitted foods listed in the thick packet of directions my surgeon gave me is clear chicken broth, which I have brought with me. Because my hotel room has no microwave, though, I am unable to heat it. I take a few sips of thin, cold broth from a paper cup before discarding the rest. I would rather go without. This last supper is meager and disappointing.

Although gender dysphoria is by no means new, the medical process of transition is. Devoid of the rich history of other rites of passage, I’ve struggled to find context in the months leading up to this. Should I celebrate? Grieve? Reflect? Atone? All of the above? None? In my mid 20s, I took an anthropology course on Religion and Culture. I remember my fascination with the section on ritual, and I remember the professor with her thick German accent lamenting the absence of formal rites in modern society. Rites mark transitions, often a rebirth into adulthood. They take place in the liminal, outsider space of cultural tricksters, mediating figures who balance creative and destructive forces. Raven. Loki. Eris. Yoda. Jesus. These are universally marginal characters; if they had been better integrated into society, they would not have had the freedom to question, act, or bring about change. All of this resonates with me as a trans woman on the cusp of major change right now. Transition for me has been a process of both destroying the illusion of who I was and creating from the rubble something new. And it requires no stretch of the imagination to see that society considers us tricksters when the vast majority of states continue to permit the trans panic defence (assaulting or killing an intimate partner upon discovering they are trans). We are among the most marginalized of populations. This is the space from which I am operating. This is the place that I inhabit. All of this reflects my experience, what I have felt and the archetypes that have resonated with me for all of my life.

Prior to surgery, I wondered what rituals I could observe to mark this transition. In the absence of formal, culturally prescribed rites, I did what made the most sense to me. I contacted an ex, the last woman with whom I had been intimate years earlier, and told her that I’d be having this procedure. I’d been open with her throughout our relationship about my plans to transition, so the news came as no surprise. She offered me her support and well wishes. Just before leaving for Philly, I wrote her a brief letter and left it on my kitchen table, to be delivered in the wildly unlikely event of my death in the operating room. I spent months wondering whether to contact my family of origin and tell them of my plans as well. Ultimately, I did. Most were supportive. I took a last yoga class with my favorite teacher, with whom I’d practiced and studied regularly for a decade. And the last thing I did before my best friend picked me up for the drive to Philly was to set up my old, worn sleeping bag on my couch, in preparation for the rest and comfort I anticipated needing upon my return. But none of this felt like ritual, not the way I’d learned about in class — no shamans, no dancing, no trance, no formal and stylized actions. Other aspects of rites of passage — temporary separation from society, enduring considerable pain — I certainly would be experiencing, but these are part and parcel of this experience, not something symbolic of my choosing. What I’ve wished for and sought is an elevated moment of metaphor, of preparing myself through the symbols that hold the most meaning for me.

I think about all of this on the night before surgery as I draw myself a steaming hot bath. While the winter storm unfolds outside, I lower myself into the water and feel my muscles start to relax as sweat beads and drips down my face. There is nothing else for me to do right now; no one to argue with about insurance coverage, no one to contact, no details to manage and no other place to be. Without much in the way of intention or forethought, I begin to thank my body, those parts of it which will undergo radical changes tomorrow, for their service, as one might raise a toast to a comrade before a final battle. And without any conscious thought at all, I close my eyes and begin to sing.

Take my clothes off, one by one

Slowly

Breath on me, hold me close

Whisper, kiss me, kiss me there

You’re so beguiling

You’re so beguiling

Beguiling. The bifurcated sense of both passing effortlessly through time and creating a deception. My time has rarely passed easily, and the only person I have ever really tried to deceive was myself. Those who knew me best were never fooled. They have always known who I am. None of my coven of best friends so much as batted an eye when I told them years ago of my plans to transition. When I first heard and fell in love with Michelle McAdorey’s band the Crash Vegas in the early 90’s, I had no idea what a crucial role their most haunting song would someday play for me.

Perhaps on the other side of the day ahead of me I will finally be able to experience that other, less fraught sense of beguiling.

Singing myself both out of and back into being with a slow, simple, obscure Canadian folk song in the ersatz sweat lodge of a high rise hotel room bathtub in the midst of a snowstorm is, I realize, the moment I have been looking for. This is my ritual.

***

I check out of the hotel before six the next morning. The streets are lifeless, dark, and as quiet as a tomb on my walk to the hospital. This is it. All I want in the world right now is to turn around, take a taxi to the airport, and fly away from here, start over again elsewhere, anywhere, but there are no taxis to be seen and my feet keep carrying me forward through the heavy slush of the storm. What I’m feeling isn’t regret or second guessing. I trust that this decision is the right one for me; perhaps more importantly, I trust the way I made it — slowly, methodically, deliberately. What I am feeling is partly a fear of the unknown, but mostly humility and remorse that it has come to this, that my life and my body couldn’t have been different from the start. Instead, now I am choosing to put things right. For anyone else, this might be a moment of empowerment, but for me, it brings back memories of being too scared to act when I was growing up, when taking a stand or making my needs known was a statement of vulnerability, an invitation for the peg that stands out to be pounded back down. How else could I approach this moment, then, other than with reluctance and trepidation? But I am no longer a child. This is my life. If I wish to inhabit a space that feels right to me, one that I truly own, then I am the one who must make that happen. Failing that, it is difficult to imagine that any life I could live would be anything more than the ghost of the one that I want.

So I don’t find a taxi. I don’t go to the airport. I don’t fly away in the childish hope of a magical new beginning somewhere else. Instead, I take a deep breath, kick the snow off my boots, walk through the patients’ entrance to the hospital, and check myself in for surgery. I have no exit strategy. There is no plan B. This is the only time in my adult life that I have walked into a room without knowing exactly how I will be walking out of it. With every other choice, even my backup plans have had backup plans. Right now, though, there is no other way forward for me without this next step, without making myself this excruciatingly vulnerable. I tell myself over and over to remember my training, in yoga, pranayam, meditation, martial arts, or anything else that will help to keep me calm and trust the process, even if I will not be awake for this next significant portion of it. I am in the barrel, past the point of no return, about to plunge over the falls.

***

Losing consciousness before surgery is less like falling asleep and more like having one’s awareness replaced by pitch darkness and question marks; x’s and y’s in a horrendously complex equation. For me, the simple, quiet, persistent question that equation is attempting to solve is: Why?

As I lie immobile and unaware on the operating room table and my surgeon and her team do their work, the worst snowstorm in years continues to pummel the east coast. It’s March 14th — Pi Day, Taco Tuesday, in the Chinese Year of the Cock. While the campy undertones of that confluence of date, day, and lunar year have allowed me to view my decision to go under the knife with some much needed levity, the severity of the storm outside is underscoring its seriousness.

Beguiling. The bifurcated sense of both passing effortlessly through time and creating a deception. My time has rarely passed easily, and the only person I have ever really tried to deceive was myself.

A year earlier on International Women’s Day, I was sitting in a traffic jam on the 401 in southern Ontario after a weekend of tromping through the Ottawa snow in Doc Martens and multiple layers of sweaters and coats. In the city, province, and country which has always provided me with both an escape and a cradle for my existential questions and doubts, I remember asking myself what came next. After three years on hormones I was wondering about surgery. Was this something I wanted? Was it something I needed? Could I afford it, not just financially, but emotionally — the struggle it would take to arrange, undergo, and recover? A weekend alone filled with long, empty drives and solitary walks through the cold, bright late winter air of my favourite city brought me to the quiet place in my mind where I could hear the answer. Yes, I might be able to be happy without doing this, but I would have a chance at greater happiness if I did. The I Ching of conversation between my prefrontal cortex and my reptilian brain told me to proceed, that it was time, and I trusted that that was enough.

Then, a year later, a week before my surgery, again on International Women’s Day, something unexpected and nearly miraculous happened. A statue entitled “The Fearless Girl” appeared in New York City, staring down the famous Wall Street bull with a graceful look of will and determination. After nearly a year of arguing with insurance, negotiating details, and fighting the cresting wave of my own fear of the unknown, that simple, defiant artistic statement (and the Fearless Girl herself) lent me tremendous strength and relief. And the national conversation that followed her appearance, about the nature and intersection of art and corporate subsidy, reaffirmed for me that whatever shreds of comfort or meaning can be wrested from the clenched fists of corporate personhood are no longer beholden to the thrall of their shareholders or C-level executives.

That was why I decided to do this. Beyond the base judgmentalism of anyone else’s opinion of this procedure (or of gender transition in general), far more profound than the demoralizing and fundamentally mean-spirited hoops through which one must jump to acquire the slightest modicum of medical care in the United States (much less something as vital and sometimes critical as surgical intervention), the act of becoming and all the messiness it entails was ultimately my decision and my responsibility. We are, all of us, not only entitled but obligated to ourselves and to each other to find and create our passion out of fear, beauty out of struggle, and joy out of pain. This is how we continuously give birth to a world that serves us all.

***

Regaining consciousness after surgery is less like waking up from sleep and more like surfacing from the depths of the ocean after surviving a shipwreck.

In the months leading up to this day, I wondered what profound statement I would make immediately afterwards; however, when the time comes, my first words are “May I have some painkillers please?” The post-op nurse provides me with fentanyl and morphine, and when I awaken again an hour later, my brother’s shining face is one of the first that I see.

I spend the next few months engaged in varying states of rest, recovery, and rehabilitation. My brother stays by my side in hospital for as long as I need him before returning home. Friends take shifts staying with me in the surgeon’s clinic for the following week, and after I return to my own home, I entertain visitors daily. Most of them are astonished that I am capable of doing more than lying in bed, moaning and coughing weakly like a 19th century socialite dying of consumption. My father calls to check in on me every day, and brings flowers when he first visits. My mother and sister visit as well. The post-operative pain does not last long, and the subsequent discomfort is not as bad as I’d feared. I watch Bollywood and samurai movies that my yoga teacher has lent me. I cook and bake for my guests. We play music together. When I am alone, I nap on my couch with my radio tuned to the CBC or with a recording of an arctic ice storm playing in the background. I find comfort and relief in the North, in the cold. I heal and return to life, to my life, the one I have chosen for myself.

Despite the struggles, frustrations, and fears I have faced to come to this place, despite the increasingly rare but no less painful misgendering that continues (I am referred to as “he” by a pre-op nurse, a post-op nurse, and a recovery room nurse while in hospital), despite the fight with insurance that, incredibly, lasts another five months after surgery as they drag their feet on reimbursing me, misdirecting my surgeon’s office on where to send forms and pretending to lose my paperwork while settling and paying in less than a week the inexplicable $120,000 bill my hospital charges them for my uneventful two night stay — despite all of this, in the immediate wake of surgery, my overwhelming sense is of amazement and joy. I have a vagina. I write this in my journal over and over. While I never forget the revised contours of my body for an instant, I sometimes wake up in the morning astonished and amazed that I made this commitment to myself and saw it through; that I actually did this. In my adult life, I have often measured my success by how far I have allowed myself to stray from the brutal lessons in self-abnegation I learned as a child. By light years, by a century, this is the farthest I have ever strayed, the biggest commitment I have ever made to a life crafted around my own passion, beauty, and joy.

As the months pass, however, my amazement fades and I begin to feel a different sensation within me, somewhat more disquieting. It takes me some time to recognize that what I am feeling is exhaustion. After a year of constant concrete, definable tasks and a lifetime of discomfort in my body, I feel lost in this new space of accomplishment and triumph, of nothing left to do, nowhere else to go. My ever present companion, the bottomless well of creative tension that gender dysphoria has provided me, has been largely capped and sealed. This is not something I expected. There are many trans people for whom surgery is a necessary step for fulfillment; I never had the courage to think of myself as one of them. It was much easier to view this process in the same terms in which I’ve viewed other complex and scary periods of growth in my life; as a scientific experiment, a mere proof of concept, with the flimsiest, least convincing facade of detachment to downplay its vital importance. It was much easier to pursue surgery sideways, as I’ve approached anything that was too concrete, too permanent, too scary to look at straight on. For most of my life, I’ve focused on what I’ve had to do to survive, and only begrudgingly allowed myself the most parsimonious of opportunities to truly thrive. Many years of regular yoga practice helped me to forge a detente with my body as it was and to find stillness within ambiguity, holding two opposing truths at once. I didn’t realize how accustomed to and dependent on that creative tension I’d become until it was no longer there. Although I underwent this surgery in the pursuit of happiness, a sense of profound calm resulting from a resolution of that ambiguity was something I’d never allowed myself to hope for or even imagine.

Despite the learned helplessness of my childhood, as a grown woman I am not good at being idle. I am always most comfortable when working towards something, and before now, stillness has never brought me peace. After spending decades denying that transitioning genders was something I wanted, and additional years trying not to think about surgery at all, here I am now on the other side of it, my mind still churning out the questions, What next? and Where do I go from here? Without a goal, a deadline, and innumerable details to tend to, I feel my fire beginning to fade, and it scares me. I have not come this far to resign myself to a dulling of my flame. And so I do what I have always done when I have felt lost, afraid, and unsure of what to do next. In the dead of winter almost a year after surgery, I return to Ottawa, to spend a month walking through the icy winter streets, retreating into the quiet of my mind, and listening in the cold stillness for the calm, clear inner voice to guide my way.

What happens when the fire goes out? Do I spend a lifetime grieving its loss, or dive in to the cold of winter and the promise of life starting anew? I have been chasing after a body, a space, a place that feels like home for all of my life. Now, in the coldest capital city on Earth, during a month in which the temperature is often lower than on the surface of Mars, I am tracking my desire in the frozen landscape of a perpetual polar vortex. Without a grasp on my connection to the fire that has sustained me, I am stumbling for direction. What do I want, if not that which I’ve found? Who am I if not my longing? My world has changed — not from any coarse, physical shift, but because I made a decision, then a commitment to myself, and I followed through. I brought to fruition what was first secret and unthinkable, then merely unspoken and impossible. The darkened museum of false attempts I’ve made to find peace with myself is not just closing, it is burning to the ground. I am standing in the smoke-filled gift shop, gazing at the display cases, asking myself what I want to save, or whether it would be best simply to walk away quietly with nothing but memory, close the doors, and let it burn.

In the comforting, brutal cold stillness of this winter city, the answer unfolds and I embrace it. If I can no longer find my fire, then I will take my refuge in the ice.

* * *

Jane Demuth lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and travels frequently to Ottawa. She is a medical researcher, writer, bicyclist, and roller derby skater. Her writing has been published by Longreads, BuzzFeed, Awosting Alchemy, and Chronogram.

Editor: Sari Botton

from Longreads http://bit.ly/2VXrWWe