Misha The Poet Laureate

I didn’t get the job I thought would save me. Then I remembered that no job will save you, and that you will have to settle with something that will feed you, and that’s all. And I think that’s such a pessimistic way to live. And I wonder if I have been drained of a lot of hope in the last 4 years.

pent the last hour reviewing the poems written this year so far, and deciding if I want to send them out in publication packets in the fall. I love this kind of work. 🙂

Learning to swallow how anticlimactic it turns out absolutely everything is has got to be the secretely hardest part of growing up.

Learning that anticlimactic is often the better outcome is maybe harder.

-Sara Orb-Weaver (Never Angeline North)

This day feels like it is a lot about failure. Reminders of failures past. Jobs I have lost. Jobs I will continue to lose, If I’m not careful with my big mouth. Failures at being a man. Failures at being perceived as a woman. Failure of body and spirit. Failure failure failure.

There is an ideal world where writing just magically gives me money. But I see the misery of the folks I know who are trying to get by on writing alone. The horrible day jobs. The editorships. The professing that they do but aren’t passionate about. It’s all there.

Not everyone get the be the visiting professor of writing and drinking at Rutgers. Most of us have to have a job, or have to creep our cost of living lower and lower. Remove the pleasures from our life so we can survive.

The thing that makes me a good person often makes me a terrible employee. I have a profound sense of justice. And that sense of justice gets in the way of my ability to bullshit. And bullshit is what employers want. That you are happy. That you have never wanted to do anything else.

Lie lie lie at work. Lie forever. My yes should never be a yes. My no should never be a no. It should all be a thousand coats of maybe.

Don’t share who you are inside. No one wants it. They want you to do the useless thing that they hired you to do. Give you money, and call it a reward. “That’s what the money is!”

There is nothing to staying employed. You give up, and you stay given up. Be the happy prol.

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

— Fred Rogers

Also people who do live meetings loudly in a coffee shop deserve some kind of retribution.

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.

John Maxwell

We have become the tool of our tools. (Henry David Thoreau)

Call me out, Hank, why dontcha

Thinking about passing today. Came up in the discord server, and I was thinking about what I wrote. “I’ve been out since 2016. I realized recently that to some people, in some contexts, I pass. That was NEVER a goal, and I sometimes wish I wasn’t invisible to some younger trans people who only see a fat old lady. Passing, for me, is a nice treat. But because I went so long being gate kept from surgeries and stuff because of my size and weight, I think I did a lot of work to give up on passing as a goal, of surgeries as a goal, and had to learn to love myself in my configuration. All of the things that have happened since I have come out have felt like such a treasure. I just want people to be generous to me regardless of if I pass or not. I want a world where visibly queer ass people are just, I don’t know, other people. Anyway, I’m just glad to be here 10 years into this, surrounded by awesome people, moving through a world that is scary and delightful, a horror show and a treasure.”

I think the gatekeeping that happened around starting hormones late, and being told I couldn’t have surgeries because of my weight, really made me do a lot of work that I wouldn’t have done. That some girls now don’t have to do because they get on waiting lists and in line for surgeries so early. That’s not a bad thing…I’m glad the waiting isn’t necessary anymore. But it does mean I’m a little more gristly than some of them. And that’s ok.

We have comparison and we have compassion. We have delirium and we have delight. We have delusion and we have art, where we live as trans women.

Surgeries won’t fix you. They may make things easier, but they won’t fix you. There is no fixing you. There is accepting you, and finding you. There is bravery, and there is drudgery, and there is acceptance, and there is movement. In the end, you find yourself by being yourself.