Fire and Fog: California Burning

For most of the last week, I've been thinking about fire. It's been hard to avoid: I work outside at a summer camp, and everyday I drive the windy roads of Tilden Park in Berkeley, past what should be spectacular, million-dollar views of the Bay Area spread out below me as my car hugs the curves on Grizzly Peak Road. This past week, however, I've had my windows rolled up and still my throat burns. Smoke completely obscures that heart-stopping view, and the radio goes on and on, apocalyptic-style, about the thousand forest fires eating away at the wooded heart of Northern California.

Fire: the ultimate destruction, the brutal regeneration. At Muir Woods - a beautiful Redwood forest across the Golden Gate Bridge - I heard a ranger give a talk a few months ago about the importance of fire to the ecosystem of the forest. He pointed out that a bunch of accumulated dry brush on the forest floor is a dangerous side effect of fire surpression. He told us about the disease spreading between the dead and rotting trees, slowly poisoning the whole wood. He said, "Without fire, this place will be destroyed." He said, "We want to set a controlled fire, but the folks out here with the expensive houses aren't too into that idea." Muir Woods is a dark, cool, expansive sort of a place. I looked up, so far up, at the tops of those trees that were old enough to see things I couldn't even fathom, and I thought, this is where the lessons are.

So, driving down Grizzly Peak, I think about the necessity of fire. Of course, I'm not suggesting that people's homes deserve to burn, or that it's ok that anyone's been displaced or hurt by this really intense, frightening, reminder that - literally - lightening strikes. Wildfires prove, however, that nature handles shit her own way. Native Californians understood this, and respected the fire cycle that's been part of the history here for a long, long time by not surpressing it. Instead, they set regular, prescribed fires that kept the forest healthy and themselves safe.

Obviously, metaphors abound. Destruction can be respected, and renewal is a necessary part of life. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in my new wounded/healing body. The hardening scar tissue on my chest is a badge of regeneration, proof that my body has an intelligence all its own, that life happens in even the most hurt places - in fact, life especially happens there. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia definition of "healing" notes: "Healing, assessed physically, is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair to reduce the size of a damaged or necrotic area. Healing incorporates both the removal of necrotic tissue (demolition), and the replacement of this tissue." This definition is generalizable, I think, to any wound - psychic, spiritual, emotional. What is hurt is possible to heal, but first, always, demolition. There is always a way to regeneration, and I think we often know what it is - whether we like it or not, whether it scares us or not, whether we can verbalize it or not, whether it surprises us or not.

Which leads me to Friday: the last day of my work week. The air had a slightly different quality than the days preceding as I drove to work - a wetter, colder sort of heaviness. As I spun by the still-obliterated view, the smoke looked a little different. Sure enough, a few hours into my day, the kids and I were freezing. We all struggled into extra sweatshirts and thermals, our heads covered in hoods pulled tight. I looked up and saw the famous Bay Area fog spinning across the tree tops. I thought about displaced air, about how this fog formed somewhere way off the coast and has been sucked into my landscape. I thought about witnessing this in Tilden Park, this regeneration of air itself: the smoke-filled stuff that's risen up, the foggy cloud that's swept in to take its place. I thought about the way we're all motivated to heal, each of us, every thing, every single one. And then I gave a five-year-old boy an extra sweatshirt from the lost and found and watched him happily return to playing with the other kids, despite the residual smoke and the cold of the wet and swirling air.

This Is It

It's been a week since my surgery, and the experience since has been a bit like falling out of linear time. Everything shifted, slowed down, became textured. When I got tired of the inane surface-y aspects of the experience (magazines, movies, repeat), I had plenty of time to contemplate the nature of change itself, as well as my relationship with my body.

Change: the ultimate poke at death anxiety, the very thing that (paradoxically, perfectly) alerts us to the fact of being alive. Waking up in a changed body is kind of like waking up in a new home. There's some excitement, some fear, some warped cognitive translation so that the wires get crossed and sometimes the excitement is read as fear. There's a sense of foreign-ness mixed in with a sense of self, which is really the ultimate highlight of impermanence - something that makes most of us wildly uncomfortable; something so rich with potential it should be mined wherever we find it.

I saw my chest for the first time when the drains came out a couple of days ago. At the time, my body and I were having a rough time of it: I spent most of that day knocked out by a relatively mysterious nausea/vomiting/abdominal pain situation that reminded me of how fragile this fortress can be. Before the worst of it, I was in my doctor's office, feeling a little scared as he unwrapped the bandages for the first time. I knew there was a possibility of "deformity" which - of course - is scary as hell, and I waited nervously as he unwrapped me like a present to myself. After he pulled the drains out (really no big deal at all - wasn't on any pain medication at that point and barely felt it) he had me look down at myself before he put on new bandages. Wow, I thought, wow. Is this me? It looked good, the grafts had taken, my chest smooth like a man's. I felt like a myth. I felt like I was bearing a kind of witness I could never have imagined.

So, this is it. I have been reminded of my own freefall through this beautiful thing we call life, and I plan on devoting some time to really becoming familiar with the nature of liminal space. I think a lot of answers can be found here. I'll keep you posted.

Recovery

What I actually remember about yesterday morning: my last shower, the weird calm of a double dose of Klonopin, how the Ipod mix I made for the occasion felt surreal as San Francisco looked, fog-less, as we drove over the very empty Bay Bridge. I remember my friend rubbing my back and telling the nice people at the surgery center to stop referring to me as "male," that they did - but didn't put "m/f" on my wrist ID. I remember my pale-faced girlfriend having to sit alone in the pre-op room with all whirring and buzzing machinery while I changed into a crazy outfit involving a cap and stockings and footies. I remember that the kindest nurse kept calling her my "honeybunny," and that the anesthesiologist was handsome and nice. I remember that my surgeon, Dr. B, showed up in a sportscoat which, for some reason, put me at ease - like he'd just stopped by on his way to Napa.

I remember walking to the surgery room, that it was freezing but the bed was heated somehow, and then I remember suddenly seeing my girlfriend back in the pre-op room with the "honeybunny" nurse. I remember thinking I was dreaming, then trying to jigsaw together my environment, movement, language itself. I remember eating tons of peanut butter crackers so I could go home, and the nurse explaining so much to my girlfriend that I knew was important but it was like when I was younger and I would play this game with myself where I would tune out sort of halfway when adults were talking and words would just cease making sense. I remember wanting to go home, which I felt would be less confusing, and asking them to take the IV out. The nice nurse kept saying, "Only when your eyes stop moving around like that." I guess I looked drunk, I know I felt wasted. I remember getting dressed with my girlfriend's help and being happy that someone knew where my glasses were. I remember everyone getting all excited that I peed, because I guess your bladder and intestines are the last to "wake up." Something about my organs sleeping so deeply seemed funny to me.

I remember something about the drains, about the nurse showing my girlfriend how to work them and me saying "You're paying attention, right?" I wasn't. My cognitive speed was at about 20%. I remember the wheelchair to the car, the binder holding me like a turtle's shell, high noon and back across the bridge and talking to my friend about something or other that was - you guessed it - sentimental. My friend said goodbye I think and then my girlfriend settled me in and went to get me magazines and soup and I passed in and out of sleep and then my girlfriend and I fell asleep watching "Orlando" on two separate couches, holding hands. I woke up and just about fell over myself in excitement, talked to several people, all ecstatic. Then I was all irritable and stir-crazy because I talked to Dr. B and got annoyed because he said I couldn't leave the house. Finally, it was night time and then later at night and my exhausted girlfriend and I watched "The Office" and I slept erratically, cuddled with my cats, read design magazines and GQ at the crack of dawn, and realized that the teaching moments here are plentiful. What I've learned in the last 24 hours:

1. Sometimes people genuinely give their time, energy, emotional strength, more than fair share of house duties, etc. without expecting a single thing in return.
2. To sit still with myself is incredibly difficult, especially when there are "things to do."However, pain is just another feeling - something to track, understand, even appreciate. Same goes for: excitement, anxiety, irritability, restlessness.
3. I can't plan or anticipate my life any better now than I've ever been able to - I'm just more adept at navigating through it.
4. That GQ and Details are too sexist for me to enjoy much anymore (but the seersucker suit spread in GQ this month is pretty sweet).
5. That there is something gorgeous behind every corner, door, woozy draining, lower back pain, forced moment of immobility.
6. That there are moments - wonderful, humbling moments - where I realize that I can't do everything by myself. I wish this experience on everyone. Because these moments - even small ones, like when my girlfriend admonishes me for trying to put on my hoodie alone and then helps me into it - are the point. The point of what? Still working on it. Stay tuned.

Passport

A friend recently called me "sentimental." I was, in fact, drunk at a wedding reception and probably telling said friend something I admired/loved about them. Despite this and other overwhelming evidence, I railed against the whole concept for a few months. "Sentimental" is not as sexy as, say, "mysterious." Like most things we buck against, I, of course, came to accept that it was true. I am, indeed, a sentimentalist. So it goes:

I like geography; and I like geographical metaphors. I like the idea of displacement, the feeling of suspension conjured by the mere idea of travel. I've spent a lot of time setting up camp in border spaces: gender borders and cultural borders; unfortunately, sometimes even rigid physical and emotional borders between myself and others.

When I was young, my father taught me that the world was a fractured, frightening, chaotic place. What I learned from him was how to lose myself entirely, how to see myself through someone else's distorted lens. I learned that borders are dangerous, that it's best to meld quickly and quietly into the nearest, most powerful thing. I've spent a lot of time mapping out the extent of this internal binary. Sometimes I find myself lonely and anxious, holed up on across the border from intimacy in the land of isolation. Mostly I've realized the value of moving between all kinds of space. Though sometimes it's difficult, my entire life is a testament to what it's possible to unlearn.

All of this is to say that people are endlessly surprising. In a crosscultural, crossgenerational, multigendered way, I have been supported in this surgery and in my metamorphosis as a person - just one person on one path, mind you - but I think we're all pretty good reflections of what's possible. At the risk of revealing the depths of my NorCal fruity self, the most stunning aspect of all of this encouragement, praise, offers to help, love, etc. is the wisdom of every person who gives it. From my close friend whose kindness and nonjudgement is unparalleled, and who is taking off work and flying across the country just to spend a week watching movies with me on my couch; to my girlfriend, who deserves more accolades than I can even conceive of, and who will drain my drains and face her own fears and who has taught me that love is a brave and brilliant force; to my sister, who is the best listener I know and whose respect and personal courage and commitment to witnessing others is buoying; to the friend who setting her life aside to come with us to the surgery itself; to my mother, who first told me about my "golden core" and who has always, in her heart, wanted me to be true to myself; to the wellwishers, now and always (who've appeared as ex-girlfriends, co-workers, schoolmates, or acquaintances) and who I've known for minutes or years, who've made it a point to stop a second and tell me that they see me, who've even helped me see me. All of these people and many more, in their sometimes fumbling and always well-intentioned ways, have helped me float.

It's the glimpse of evil - the evil my abusive father embodied - that has also given me an eye for the gradients of beauty each of you are capable of. If I am a sentimentalist, then I am lucky enough to be armed with a sense of gratitude more powerful than the worst harassment, abuse, shame, or prejudice I've been subject to. I guess I am a sentimentalist, and I'd like to think that this is part of what I get: not only a spectacular view of a veritable skyline of kindness, but the ability to name and recognize it. So, here's to you, World. Sometimes you're totally fucked up, but you're ultimately pretty amazing. Keep it up.

The Space Between: Liminality and Surgery

What you need to know: I am not transgender, as far as I can tell. I am, to paraphrase Kate Bornstein, something else entirely.

On Thursday, June 5, 2008, I will have a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction, commonly called "top surgery." I will be up at 5 AM. My girlfriend and friend and I will leave Oakland and drive through the fog and across the Bay Bridge in the cold, quiet morning. We'll exit into the Financial District of San Francisco, and there will already by a bustle of ties and heels and other signs of normalcy. Maybe we will listen to Rogue Wave or something else nostalgic and soothing; maybe the windows will be cracked; maybe they will hold hot coffee cups from Peets. I will not drive. I imagine I will hardly speak.

When we arrive at the medical center, a valet will park our car for free. I will wear sweatpants in public - something I haven't done ever, not even freshman year in college. My plugs will be in the bathroom cabinet, my glasses left in the car. I will carry a gym bag with a button up shirt, an old shirt for my new body. My new body that I will meet in just over 4 hours. We will take the elevator and my armpits will sweat and colors will be blurry, bright, surreal. Maybe I will feel suddenly conscious of the weight of my breasts. Maybe I will remind myself to breathe. Maybe my girlfriend will squeeze my hand. Maybe I will wish for water, though I won't be allowed to drink it.

This is where my imagination screeches to a halt. I don't know what the waiting room will look like, what it will feel like to go under, to lose time, to wake up in a different body. I don't know how much and where it will hurt. I don't know what the nurses will look like. I know I've waited 13 years for this moment, but I have no idea what shape it will take.

Somehow over the course of my overpriced college education, I failed to run across the term liminality. Good thing my sister is such a genius. I called her the other day and we got to talking. She alerted me to the term, which Wikipedia defines (in part) as: "...characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives." Welcome to my life.

I, like you, am a product of massive integration. Every moment I absorb and add to the stacks of moments before it - I categorize when possible, I learn to tolerate what cannot be categorized, and sometimes I even rest easily in an infinite spaciousness and look at what is found there. Often, the largest markers of my identity shed themselves like masks if I just stop and look around for a minute. I am without and within gender. I am androgyny and I am beyond binary. As Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Liminality = the work of integration. Time, space, loss, hope, past, future, present. In these days before, you will meet me as I am and in the days after, you will meet me as I am. My infinity, yours: human to human. I'm broadcasting from the space between, and it's very nice to meet you.