We Aren’t Finished Naming

In 2020, the year of Coronavirus, the shelter-in-place and come out of the closet year, I tried to keep a journal.  I wrote about the sudden nightmare of not knowing, the unseen, the virus.  I wrote about my sister’s dementia, my own fears of losing my faculties, the difficulty of distance and old hurts.  I wrote about my spouse coming out as trans, her new path toward womanhood, the change in our relationship, our dynamics, the dizzying unsettling nature of her new (really old) nature.  I tried to write about myself, too.  I tried.  I worked on short stories.  I wrote short essays on the divine nature outside my house, an attempt to think like the New England transcendentalists, or Taoists from the East, or the pagans, an attempt to take note of the world beyond the humans. An attempt to make meaning out of the chaos. But by October 2020, I was tired.   

I couldn’t stand being in my head any longer.  I couldn’t stand my own stink.

This is why journal entries on this blog from last year ceased at September 2020.  I had ceased writing all together.  

It wasn’t until I took up writing this blog that I returned to the pen (the keyboard?) in order to express all the chattering that is my monkey mind.

My last blog entry dropped the bombshell about how my adolescence was bookmarked by a gang rape.  That’s heavy stuff for you readers, I know.  But imagine how heavy it was for me, and how heavy it is for all of us who have suffered sex abuse.

This morning I saw a report about a National Hockey League (NHL) player who had been raped by one of the league’s administrator dudes.  The hockey player’s last name was Beach, like mine, so I watched as Beach talked about how hard it was for him to make the rape public, but how necessary it is to tell your story, and how telling your story may help other people heal.   I hope telling my story helps at least one person.

This blog.

This blog is about identity.  My wife’s transition has inspired me to reexamine myself. I’ve called myself a tomboy, prided myself on my androgyny, rebuffed gender roles, and liked to “wear the pants” in my relationships. I’ve been harassed by police, bullied by drunks in bars and people in churches, I’ve been spat on and threatened for not playing by their rules. I’ve been called a bulldyke bitch, a ballbuster, a plow, a lesbo. Until recently, though, I hadn’t considered my gender bending anything but a defiance of gender roles all together. But Natalie’s transition is forcing me to acknowledge that there are indeed different genders, we’re not all game playing man or woman, and that I fall into another camp. It’s not that gender doesn’t exist, it is that I am nonbinary (the language reminds me of my first husband, who introduced me to computers and taught me how ones and zeros contained multitudes). And now that there’s a name for the type of person I have always been but had no words for, I can find my tribe and not feel so alone among my cisgender friends.

I am who I am and have always been but had no words for. 

Now there are words for everything!  Until we realize we aren’t finished naming yet.