I Guess This Is Me?
Lies Punctuated by Brief Moments of Clarity
Overture in the Key of Screams
I talk about myself a lot. I fucking hate talking about myself. I have this obsession with narrative positioning, with understanding the world in terms of stories and who's telling them. This fixation, at least in my current rendering of self, is a way of coping with the fact I can barely remember most of my own life. But then again, it's debatable whether much of that was my life, or even what the 'my' inflecting life is even in reference towards. Consistent identity isn't exactly my schtick. Endless re-invention, serial creation of aliases, perpetual masking, whatever you want to call it, is my consistent and enduring way of coping with a world that has me so clearly marked out as capital-O Other. Aurelia. Anova. Aeva. Seven Rose. Aemlia. Hecate. Dawning. So many names containing small morsels of myself. There are more morsels in other names that I left in a garbage heap somewhere in Pittsburgh - about 12 if I remember right, more depending on who you ask. I barely know who I am. Maybe that's why I'm so attracted to the Buddhist idea that there is no such thing as a permanent, unchanging self. That it's perfectly fine that there's nothing of substance underneath all the shattered remains and ruins of 30 years of fucking around and finding out. That it's actually Just Fine that I feel like there's a gnawing, supermassive black hole at the centre of my galaxy of self. I do lament how much of a cypher I am as a result. Hard to connect with others when your narrative of your childhood is more about how the Abu Grahib wrecked your ability to ever believe in the righteousness of American foreign policy, rather than your favourite teenage bands. I'm not sure if that's exactly true, but maybe it is.
I've gotten really good at crafting a version of myself that I can talk about at length while saying jack shit about myself. Even my partners say I'm guarded most of the time. Friends have called me an "international woman of mystery". I think I'm telling everyone as much as I know about myself as I can. Screaming it at them, hoping that they can maybe make me feel understood. But, I guess I might also be a habitual liar. Or so ignorant about the truth of myself, if such a thing exists, that whatever statements about myself I make have only the most casual relationship with truth. Like the relationship you have with a Grindr hookup who you see in polite company - you both strenuously deny ever having met as a cold sweat runs down both your necks, because this shit is awkward and you are both on the DL, and you absolutely DO NOT need your coworkers to catch wind of what you do when you're off the clock.
I guess I'm just meandering at this point, but circumspect is specifically my schtick. I've always wanted to put together, for the sake of the people who care about me, which include many of the people who read my digital ramblings, some thumbnail sketch of what the hell has happened in my life. I'm, of course, not included in the set of people who care about me, but it serves some personal utility. At a certain point, after seeing enough mental health professionals, you start to lose track of your narrative in the ear-drum melting din of hearing yourself regurgitating trauma over and over again. I've gagged on my own abuse countless times. So, I guess, I'm just going to piece together, with you, dearest reader, some more complete fiction about who I am. I hope it's entertaining.
Let's fucking party.
The Best, Most Normal, Parents Ever
I was born in Lagos, Nigeria. My family is Yoruba. I don't know much about my parents as people except the following - my dad is a bastard and my mom is a lesbian with a self-hating streak so wide most of the rest of her is covered up. They never really talked much about themselves, but I picked things up about them from their old friends and acquaintances. Dad was raised by my great-grandparents, who were, even for the time, old-school (translator's note : old-school (adj.) - emotionally distant, standoffish, cold, hard-assed) . That explains why he's always been way more anal-retentive and aggro than his siblings, of whom he had 5. Dad was the oldest kid and the first to go to college. Carried that weight heavier than Atlas carried the world. I try not to have too much sympathy for him as a matter of policy - too easy to lapse into making excuses for a guy who beat the shit out of me for most of my childhood, and spent the rest of it dictating my every move with an authoritarian streak that would make Stalin cry out against his obsessive need for control. But, I can tell he was busting his ass for his entire life. The man had the Sigma grindset before those weirdo losers who came up with the term were a sparkle in their grifter sperm donor's eyes.
To speak less like an internet hellion, My dad was a smart guy who was always looking for the next step up the ladder. He was given the mantle of family patriarch and seemed to feel in his bones that he had to take the clan to the next level. Which was hard given his parents already have the street they lived on named after them. My paternal grandparents were local notable types. Vaguely involved in trade. Said mercantile career is why, to this day, one of my aunts has a Cameroonian accent. Dad grew up away from all of his siblings though, not just her. Most of his siblings are British, familial ripples of decolonization; my old man was the only child born before it, the rest born after, at least if my reckoning is correct.
I do have to say, I do respect the man for keeping his composure as well as he did when around self-pitying white folks. I can't imagine how fucking insipid someone complaining about petty Anglo-American family drama must sound when you weren't even born a citizen of a sovereign nation, but just a subject of a globe-spanning empire that wouldn't give a shit if your entire neighbourhood fell into the ocean beyond a footnote in ministerial notes.
Let's refocus and remember my old man is a bastard though. Went to a bougie college (I took after him in that regard), did a bunch of ladder climbing, got a fat stack of degrees, and entered the upper crust of Nigerian society just in time for the floor of the economy to fall out from under him after he had his first and only child, me, with his darling wife, my mom, who he probably cheated on innumerable times, and would continue to do so indefinitely into the future. Interesting guy. Moving on to mom now.
My mom was born to a family of 6. Well, technically a family of 8. To be polite, my grandfather on my mom's side was less than faithful to his wife, my grandmother. More honestly, he was a cheater who abused the shit out of my grandma, constantly overrode her wishes, and stifled her attempts at self-actualization.
Wait, didn't we already play that track? I guess every family tragedy is a remix played by musicians who memorised the hits.
Mom is, in some ways, a hilarious lesbian stereotype. Literally described as 'not being like the other girls' as she grew up. Went to an all-girls school, played volleyball, and then got a career in STEM in whatever way she could - became a nurse not primarily because she likes caring for people, but because it was a way for her to nerd out about biology in a way that was appropriately gendered. She does love caring for others though. Only others though. She was always nicer to me than dad, if far more distant. Hard to get to know your mother when she's :
Always working night-shifts, so she's always leaving for work as you get home from school.
An insomniac with massively disrupted sleep such that her most alert hours during her vacations are between 1 and 4am
Completely buried under hyper zealous religious self-flagellation.
I always knew she loved me though. She was, if anything, too clear about that. She talked about how I was all of her hopes and dreams made manifest. About how she was always, incessantly, praying for me and my success and welfare. Being the torchbearer of someone's hopes and dreams from before you even had object permanence sucks by the way. A Not Good on the Fantano Scale.
I've been trying to live enough life for two people for years because of that. Even now, though in a different way. Every time I have a messy breakdown during a queer kink party, I tell myself that this breakdown is healing family trauma, and that this is a breakdown that my mother deserved to have in some trashy lesbian hot house social scene in 80's San Francisco. Sometimes I feel I owe it to her to be the biggest gay dumpster fire I can be. Not really, but kinda seriously actually.
So, these two very well-adjusted, not-at-all-fucked-up, absolutely regular adults got together and had me, and things took the sort of fortuitous course they would for the rest of my life when I nearly died right out of the womb.
In my darker moments, I think about how unfortunate the nearly part is.
Into the Hellmouth
I don't remember much about growing up in Nigeria. I was reportedly quite precocious. An early reader. I had a dog named Rex. We had 'helpers' in the way that all members of the parasite class of Nigeria do. But, the aforementioned floor fell out from under the Nigerian economy, so my parents picked up stakes and moved to the States with the help of my mom's older sister and said sister’s husband (one of my dad's old and dear friends). Of course, moving to the United States, under duress, a scant 5 years before 9/11, to raise a child would go very well for a struggling pair of Black immigrants from a country that's 50% Muslim. And my status obsessed father wouldn't react poorly to suddenly being a fucking nobody in the belly of the giant world-spanning empire that had replaced the one into which he was born after having just tasted the high life of country clubs and exclusive political access in Nigeria. Definitely wasn't the case that my closet-case mom who was most certainly not masking neurodivergent traits from a young age would struggle mightily to make friends in a deeply racist country.
So, yeah. Things went poorly. My parents adjusted poorly. And if you're noticing a pattern of me talking about other people when I'm nominally talking about myself, you wouldn't be the first to notice. I waste half of my therapy sessions doing this. It's a habit, sorry. I swear I'll talk about myself eventually, if I feel like it! But back on topic, things went so bad that my parents tried to pawn me off on relatives in the US, so they could go back to Nigeria. Unfortunately, that plan failed, and they were stuck with me. Just a weird kid, with no friends, in a foreign land where I had to drop my accent so that people didn't have more reasons to be shitty to me. Sometimes though, when I'm really pissed off, the embers of my Nigerian Pidgin roar back to life. It feels good to know I couldn't completely douse my heritage.
I remember coming to consciousness in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. It sucked. We were pretty poor. The only things I vaguely remember was being friends with some other Nigerian immigrant children with whom I would endlessly rewatch the George Clooney Batman movies, and eat pickles. My mother hated how much I loved pickles. I had pickle-breath not even a mother could love. In the future, she would have far more things she couldn't tolerate and would reminisce about the simple days when my greatest flaw was eating too many pickles. I think I liked my second elementary school, and I know I hated my first one. By first grade I was dropped into a gifted and talented class. The training ground for all future burnouts. I remember taking extra math classes and solving puzzles all day, building the only memories of educational institutions that I have which aren't inflected by pain.
I had a single friend who I cherished, who, in retrospect, was probably the first boy that I had a crush on. I had the usual signs of early onset queerness - occasional crossdressing, a persistent lisp, and a deep, abiding, life-long interest in computers. There's honestly not much to this time I can remember beyond what I've said and hanging out with some family friends, who had old kids who would humour me while babysitting. They were really sweet, and also were the ones who got me interested in video games. This was a thing that my parents would hate. From the moment they got me a copy of Pokemon Yellow, and a teal Gameboy Color, they couldn't stand that I had some sort of escape from the hellish misery in which they stewed, and into which they constantly dragged me. But, as bad as things got, I always had Pikachu, Zidane, Ramza, Bomberman, MegaMan, Sora, and all of the other characters who would be the only attendees of my birthday parties. Fuck birthdays, by the way. I hate how much I still care about them.
Eventually, my father's work moved the family up to Louisville, Kentucky. I remember celebrating the new millennium in a cramped, sparsely-furnished apartment, wondering what the new millennium would bring. I remember hoping for a better tomorrow, a capability I would lose in due course and never fully regain. Catholic school helped make sure of that. I wound up in Catholic school for the same reason many kids do - my parents had a reflexive distrust of public schools because of classist bullshit and decided that the safe bet was throwing me into an almost all-white educational environment despite them never having met a Catholic before in their lives. Going to Catholic school is always an incredible experience in having your sanity and sense of self-worth exorcised from your still living corpse like the demons that they are. Going to a Catholic school that had until very recently been an all-girls school, and is protecting multiple teachers and authority figures, including the campus priest, who have sexually abused children as a budding black trans girl is fucking berserk. It was an experience of being thrust into terra incognita.
Adrift and alienated among people who didn't recognize me as human, let alone worth their time. This was not exactly an affirming experience. I swiftly went from 'gifted and talented' to failing every class in a record-winning amount of time. This is, by the by, why I've never believed in talent as a measurable, discrete, thing distinct from circumstance - yo-yoing between hopeless failure and valedictorian among valedictorians will do that to you. I hated every moment of Catholic school. The insipid ritual, the endless indoctrination, the constant social posturing by parents, - many of whom were local notables, including one Rick Pitino, who if you know anything about his sordid tenure as University of Louisville Men's Basketball Head Coach, should be an indication of the sort of human garbage who patronized the school. It was all fucking intolerable. The only pleasant part of Catholic school was choir. Singing in a mostly girl's choir was blissful. I could blend into the crowd and just feel part of something that felt right. Something I didn't quite have the words for yet. This was despite the fact that the choir director was ... not the best around kids. I still remember the day she threw a VCR across the room during practice. I've never held a rest note so long since.
I was in Catholic school during 9/11, specifically math class on the second floor, on the east wing of the building. I remember 9/11 vividly because I remember every political event of my life vividly. It was easier to landmark my life by what was happening in the world broadly, and how I had to orient myself to ride the tide. I actually lied a bit earlier when I was talking about my memories of living in Georgia. I remember the Clinton impeachment in neon lights and surround sound. I remember, in that moment, realising how utterly useless the truth was in the face of narrative. But as to 9/11, being honest, I just felt ... nothing. The fear, the frenzy, the fetid embrace of rabid xenophobic malice - all of that swept past me because I honestly was more afraid of going home than I ever would be of getting on a plane. Home was where my parents were, and that's where the violence and screaming happened because I was struggling in school, and because my dad was working a dead-end tech job, and my mom was burning out spectacularly in way bespoke to the medical field. 9/11 was in some ways, the real turn of the millennium. A calamitous end of any hope of decency winning out for the near term, and the beginning of an orgy of normalized cruelty both at home and abroad. The dead winds of the future hurried me along to the next day where I knew more pain awaited. I was already an unhappy child, and was certain that the forecast would bring news of more of the same.
A lot of the specifics of elementary school are lost to me. Images of household arguments, frustrating family outings, and embarrassing classroom events flicker briefly into mind, but they're all more or less irrelevant. The simple reality of my life boiled down to trying desperately not to get hit again by my dad, and trying to play enough video games that I could forget who I was. There was nothing else of substance to my life. At some point, my parents had me start Kumon because what a child struggling in an educational environment where they don't belong needs is more pressure and more work. I bring up Kumon because it was the start of the endless creep of school and effortful labour into what tiny spaces of freedom I was allowed as a child. First it was Kumon lessons on Saturday, then it was academic clubs, then it was academic summer camps, then it was enrichment programs over my winter and spring breaks, all part of an accelerating academic arms-race against the inflated rumours that preceded other children. By the time I was in middle school my life had already turned into an endless barrage of work punctuated only by the merciful oblivion of dreamless, exhausted sleep. To this day, I've never worked a job that has had me as busy as I was as a child. Silicon Valley startup life is baby shit comparatively. Endless toil for no point other than to make the uncaring parental gods of my life look upon me with slightly less disdain was my crucible.
Middle Outings
Having already mentioned it, I guess I can move forward to middle school. My parents were advised by one of my teachers at Catholic school that he thought I was brilliant, but just not in the right environment to succeed. He pointed them to the public school magnet program. Because the words of one Canadian immigrant 5th grade Math teacher are more powerful than the endless screaming laments of a terrified child pleading with their parents to let them go to another school, I started middle school in a magnet program located at a school downtown. Nice school. A nightmare of class and social stratification where 'gifted students' were implicitly trained to ignore the plight of those in 'lesser' programs, but still a nice school. 6th grade is mostly lost to me. An interstitial bridging the empty pains of elementary school with the high intensity and emotional rawness of my later childhood. The most notable feature of that year was my dad deciding he would stop hitting me. I don't fully know why. Memory only brings forth that one day, after my maternal grandfather had died, and my mom had been inconsolable in mourning for weeks, my dad took out his frustrations on me after I brought home some less than stellar grades, or made an errant complaint, or otherwise did something he found suitable cause to beat the shit out of me. It's one of the few times I remember blacking out. I think the bruises were visible this time, or maybe I had gone limp, or something happened because, somehow, as if by a miracle, when I talked to my dad after school the next day, he swore he would never hit me again. And, for whatever small amount of credit it's worth, he kept his promise.
7th grade was when I decided to get a personality. I started trying to make friends on my own because I realized I needed some people to talk to about life or my head would fucking explode. It was also the year that I met a boy who introduced me to metal music - Nightwish, System of A Down, Dream Theater, and most importantly, Ayreon. He was my best friend, and like many guys who I spent a ton of time talking to during middle school, someone I had a massive unspoken crush on because I was a tiny little gay boy/future bisexual woman who couldn't process the idea of attraction consciously, but was enthralled, for no reason in particular, by the brooding guy in the back of class listening to esoteric music with a droopy haircut. When he eventually went behind my back to shack up with the girl I was dating sophomore year of high school, I was heartbroken. I never cared much about her, honestly, but my best friend/totally-not-long-time-crush betraying me broke something in me for years.
Ayreon is still my favourite band till this day.
I'm incredibly fortunate for all the women who taught me during middle school. They're probably the only reason I made it out of that hell alive without slitting my wrists. The computing teacher who encouraged me to do public speaking, my 7th grade math teacher who kept it real as fuck about why shit was going down the way it was in New Orleans after Katrina (she is, in some ways, responsible for my modern racial consciousness), my 8th grade English teacher who let me act out just enough to blow off steam but always guided me to useful outlets for my pent up energy, and most importantly my 7th grade social studies teacher who introduced us to Stanley Kubrick, social constructivism, and the fact that anyone who says the Civil War is about "states rights" is a fucking fascist. God bless Jewish New York lesbians.
Slitting my wrists was still a live threat despite that. Middle school was when the idea of dying fully came into focus with all its beautiful allure. The arousing prospect of cavernous abyss. Sleep without waking. Never having to fucking deal with my dad's expectations or the fact my voice was dropping just a bit further every day, or the mandatory, nausea-inducing performance of pretending I gave a shit about dating girls as a guy. Just Nothingness. It was, and still sometimes is, the most appealing future I could imagine for myself. I kept things together because, in retrospect, I was terrified of what a failed suicide attempt would bring from my parents. I was just starting to do well in school again, my dad had switched from hitting me to just screaming at me, so things were on the up-swing and I didn't want to ruin the positive momentum. And, as mentioned, I had friends! Never the folks my parents wanted me to hang out with though. I was always attracted to burnouts, edgy weirdos, the slacker crowd, and the folks who were generally just doing barely enough to get by and not an iota more. I just kept coasting on by though, riding my growing skill at working the academic racket for more and more personal freedom. My parents were eager to find reasons to focus on other things, so once my academics started improving, I had less interactions with my parents. Exactly as desired. I spent my newly found free time reading Nietszche on my graphing calculator and writing bad Python scripts to automate random daily tasks. Programming was becoming more than just a childhood fascination at this point, and had become something of my calling card. It was also my excuse to spend as much time as I wanted unsupervised online, ambling about for spaces to belong, landing me in some of the darkest fucking sewers one could find. I'll talk more about that in another essay, but it suffices to say that cutting my teeth on the edgiest nonsense you could find online has had lasting impacts on my personality.
Middle school came and went in a blur. I don't think 14 year olds should say shit like "Sleep is for the weak", but that's the sort of kid I was. I still don't sleep much. Honestly, though the world is beautiful at 4am when everything is still, I don't mind being awake, alone, and listing towards madness because of sleep deprivation every sunrise. One of the only other notable things about middle school beyond what's been mentioned here is that it's where I began my lifelong habit of holding onto friendships with a vice grip. I never let people go. It's also where my streak always being the person getting broken up with started. These two facts are definitely not related. This all said, my middle school was a feeder school for my high school, and as such my middle school life transitioned seamlessly into high school.
Imperious and Free
Being the 'smart' Black kid in a competitive magnet at a top-ranked school is not, in fact, fun. I would say it sucks cock, but that's actually fun, and I will not disparage it. What being the 'smart' Black kid entails is having to deal with the barely-concealed, roiling contempt of the striving set, and of their parents who are looking for any reason that your accomplishments are only because of an unearned leg up due to your race. Fortunately, I was too oblivious and autistic to consciously grapple with that much during high school. Instead I was failing so hard at understanding high school romantic dynamics of any flavour that I was apparently rumoured to be asexual. Turning down a hookup to play board games with your friends tends to spawn that kind of gossip. I honestly felt free in high school. Not because it was a great environment, I knew plenty of my classmates were shitheads and had enough sense to have contempt for the kids who were eager to become financiers and politicians. It was rather because there was a clear social compact - as long as I kept my then outrageous academic dominance going, I could get away with all the petty mischief my fae heart could desire. Taping a friend to a wall (consensually of course!)? Just fine! Flagrantly using headphones and blasting Linkin Park while skipping the physics class I'm supposed to be taking at the local college? A-Ok! Running a stolen chicken sandwich arbitrage business? Slap on the wrist because competing with the school cafeteria is not ok. Setting up rudimentary malware in a computer lab to play high pitched noises that only other students can hear? No one says shit.
I learned to keep the externally visible theatrics mostly limited to some blanket disregard for policies on headphones and personal computer usage, especially after freshman year. In retrospect, I don't really regret my behaviour beyond the actions that directly annoyed my peers. I never had a chance to act out otherwise, so I was taking what chances I could. My entire sense of personal freedom and safety required never fucking up once at school, so I was always grinding something. I was engaged in just about everything I could be. Quiz Bowl, Science Olympiad, French language competitions, Science Fair, National Honour Society - I was doing everything possible to maintain my primacy because I needed people to stay off my back. My work day began at 7am and typically ended around 9pm. I was enjoying not getting hit at home and only getting screamed at every other day. I enjoyed having some friends and even some younger students who looked up to me. I enjoyed no one asking me why I was wandering around talking to our school's endogenous population of punks and anarchists, or crashing debate team meetings instead of going home. I loved being able to mouth off in World History class because I knew all the material and could banter with the teacher. Things made sense for once. I felt, in some brief moments, vaguely untouchable, actually invincible instead of just faking it. Skulking around in my black patch jacket, I felt like I was actually my own person and not just remotely operated property of my parents.
I met my best friend during high school. I love him to death, and he's still my best friend to this day, partially because he was the first person to see through that air of invincibility and triumphant persona. He was the first person who could get that the actual feeling I was possessed by was pure terror. Terror that the brief interlude of freedom and peace would be shattered. That I would slip and fall and with it all my powers sundered. He got it because he's probably the most frustratingly incisive and clear-sighted person you'll ever meet. Don't make friends with (now, in 2023) professional storytellers if you live off spinning bullshit and are afraid of someone seeing through it. He's a good guy. I love him dearly. He's always made me feel like I had a brother who I got along with and who had my back. I didn't realize how much I loved him until he nearly died during our first year of college. Car accident. We'll get to college later, but, if you end up reading this buddy, I'm glad you're still here with us among the living. You deserve all the good things in life, bud.
One of the tough parts of your personal autonomy, whatever piddling respect you have from your parents, and your entire self-esteem resting on projecting an image of effortless academic fluency and achieving top-dog status at one of the most competitive high schools in the nation is that it actually takes a back-breaking amount of work, almost literally. Lugging an extra duffle-bag full of textbooks to and from school everyday does wonders to your posture, especially if your instinct is already to shrink away when someone tries to make eye contact. I could, even at that time, feel exhaustion become a regular part of my emotional palette. I started sleeping even less so that I could muster time to hang out with friends at the usual 2000s teens hangouts - late night at the park, a friend's basement, and movie theatres. Bleary-eyed but wired was my zen state. I could never sleep in because there was always another standardized test just around the corner, always another Quiz Bowl tournament against doomed opponents, another Science Olympiad tournament where my team were the hated villains that everyone was hoping someone would take down. The price of wearing the #1 headband is endless vigilance. You gotta smash the ants before they gang up on you. No one could ever even get close to my top slot because that would mean potentially getting hit again, and I didn't have time for that anymore. I was starting to carve out mental space to think about the world more in depth. - explore my political conscience, figure out why being an asshole was not my bag (being a giant bitch however ...) , wonder why it was kinda odd that I spent so many private moments reading as much gay fanfic as I could shovel into my tiny laptop, lament how I could never choose my own haircut, feel the dread seep in as my voice continued to drop and hairs started popping up on my chin. I could not ever fail. I would not ever let myself fail. I'd still rather torture myself than be second best, but I've accepted that being second best is its own form of torture and contented myself with the fact that the anguish it causes is sufficient penance for my current laxness.
I started writing a lot around the end of high school, about everything. Bad essays about the War on Terror and how fucked it was that I was getting profiled at the airport for being Nigerian, bad takes about civil liberties, horrible opinions about American hegemony, marginally well-informed but still insufficiently dire apprehension about how bad I thought things were going online and how leaving a bunch of angry young men unsupervised on 4chan wasn't going to turn out well for society at large. Writing brought engagement from my peers. It opened up an ability to shoot the shit with just about anyone at school. There was a joy that came with being able to talk to kids who weren't in my lane and make them feel heard - kids on the football team, musicians, drama nerds, journalist kids. Hearing folks out felt nice. It felt good to see that I wasn't the only person with a messy life and who was running away from some shit. It led to me idolizing journalists - at the time Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were daily reads for me, and damn it's been sad to see them go off the rails in recent years. I got into Dan Carlin's political stuff around then, started digging deeper into American history, started wondering what the hell was going on with the country, and realizing that I was far, far, from the only person having a terrible time out there. I figured that, since I had no real goals with my own life and was plotting to kill myself at the soonest point I could get away with it, I might as well try to help people along the way. Oh yeah, the suicidal impulses hadn't gone away at all. If anything they had ballooned to a size where they eclipsed most of my ability to see the future. Death was always the goal. Everything else was just funeral prep. Elaborate ritual before I could finally punch out and get some sleep.
I kept up the imperious act through all of high school. I graduated top of my class with some ungodly records set in my wake. I pity any kid whose parents tried to make them hit a bar set by someone who felt that their life literally depended on it. I had fallen deeper into metal and games at this point. I was a fairly competent programmer by the time I graduated as well - decent enough that I would do my dad's work for him, uncompensated of course, from time to time. I got into every college I applied to - I only avoided the awful "This kid got into every Ivy League school" feature in the local paper because I thought Princeton and Dartmouth were full of freaks. I wound up at Harvard because, despite desperately wanting to hang out among all the cool freaks at MIT, financial aid packages made my academic decisions for me. To my parents credit, they were willing to take out loans to support my education wherever I wanted to go - all of my options were name-brand enough that my parents would look to their social competition regardless - but I couldn't justify putting them in debt (read: feeling like I owed them a cent more than they already made me feel like I did) so I could go to a different school on Massachusetts Avenue.
The Big Leagues
My regard for my Harvard education is best summarized by the fact it was always my second choice. I didn't want to be there, and many people made it clear they didn't want me there. I initially wanted to be a Computer Science and Philosophy double major, but the far-sighted Harvard Philosophy Department, with the same wisdom that led them to exclude ruffians like Cornel West and W.E.B. DuBois from their vaunted halls declared, in the year 2011, that they could see no meaningful philosophical issues at the intersection of Computer Science and Philosophy. So I took the hint and fucked off, never to return to those vaunted halls for anything more than a required philosophy credit and to make rude gestures at the department head who had shoo'd me away.
The Astrophysicists were nice, but that required physics and Harvard Physics are notorious for being a meat-grinder from which only the truly strong emerge - very rarely is anyone with high levels of melanin or estrogen strong enough to climb their way out of the charnel pit. So, because I thought I was too dumb for any major where I didn't already have a head-start, I stuck to pure Computer Science, and to appease my parents, I set out to get my Master's done during my 4 years at Harvard. I also started working a part-time job because, while I knew it would be a lot of energy on top of my classes, I didn't want to take a dime from my parents that I didn't absolutely need to take. I wanted to carve out what independence I could from the family as soon as possible, which resulted in me immediately refusing to call home unless absolutely necessary.
Harvard is an interesting place. A blend of all the worst people and a few of the best people you'll ever meet. I check in on my graduating class every once in a while to see who has gotten the prestigious honour of being the first person in my graduating year to be cited for being complicit or directly implicated in war crimes. I also keep in contact with some life long friends from there who have been uncommonly empathetic, kind, generous, and loving to me. I've never felt I've deserved their affection, and have always been bewildered by why they, as well as my friends from other times in my life, continue to tolerate my self-indulgent odiousness till this day.
So much of college was a brushfire of overwork and fear. The fear was of no longer being impervious to my parents' ire because my grades were slipping. So I worked even harder. Grinded even more. Pushed myself past my breaking point multiple times. I broke down in tears of exhaustion and frustration more times than I can count. There was always more to be done, a greater mountain to climb, and I had to keep going. My body hurt a lot at this point. I also hated how it felt to be in my body for reasons besides the pain. I grew the world's greatest most well-manicured depression beard, and by the end of college had become a Bald Guy (tm), with all the niche razors and gels that go along with that label.
I handled these feelings maturely - by orbiting vaguely queer spaces and drinking heavily while continuing to burn my candle at both ends, eventually picking up a second job to keep myself even busier - because working 15 hours a week while doing two Ivy League degrees in Computer Science simultaneously wasn't enough to keep the demons at bay. There was also an embarrassing number of late-night gay hookups because my sexuality was pounding at the door and I needed to steer it somewhere I could keep it cordoned off from the world, maintain the veneer of Black 'male' respectability that was critical to me being able to survive in the hostile world around me. The attachment to respectability is funny given how little respect I actually got from the world. I got very good at playing off any worry my peers had for me. There's a way you can take a swig of whiskey during your graduate seminar that looks cool instead of troubled. It's all in the wrist. Being able to lucidly discuss research papers while half-smashed was a pocket skill of mine. I'm pretty sure most of the professors could see right through me though, at least the systems folks who collectively took me under their wing.
For those unfamiliar, systems is the wing of computer science that's not about clever technique or fancy algorithms that no one understands but will make tech demos that get you billions in funding and grant a license to abet crimes against humanity - it's just you trying to get a computer to understand how the hell to allocate memory so someone can build those shitty algorithms in the first place. There are no tricks, there's no genius to it. It's about elegant displays of brute force wisdom and thuggish trickery. There's nothing that can replace just doing the work in systems. It's not glamorous and most of its famous practitioners are ... quirky, often but not always of the lovable variety. So naturally, it's the place where I fell right in because even the most high-handed Ph.D. in the field has been domme'd by a C++ compiler enough that they have some amount of empathy for a struggling 20-something who wants to do the work but, just cannot get shit working despite uncountable hours of effort. There's something deeply human about the field, something levelling. We're all idiots for trying to make a computer learn how to count, so people tend not to have as much ego. Many of the professors I met there are still personal role models and mentors - Stratos Idreos, Radhika Nagpal (I'm co-opting robotics as systems, because fuck it), Margo Seltzer, are among the folks who kept me from completely spinning out into the darkness.
There was still plenty of ego to go around at Harvard. Only place where you'll meet someone who later goes on to be convicted of financial crimes but then turn around and sue the school because his degree was withheld for only several credible allegations of sexual misconduct. I learned a lot about how society works at Harvard. About how good people get sucked into compliance with power structures. About how any idiot with privilege can get to the top of our society. About how academic merit is a dubious concept at best. About how you can gradually warm idealistic teenagers up to the idea that rubbing shoulders with Henry fucking Kissinger is a thing about which they should feel proud. About how the highest ideals can sit next to the most resplendent greed. About how you can have been 'gifted and talented' for your entire life, done everything right, but still get thrown away like so much garbage when you stumble for the first time. One open secret about Harvard is that a lot of kids end up taking a year off, which universally signals 'shit happened and the school wanted to help sweep it under the rug'. Harvard is a school full of open secrets. It trains you for elite society that way, granting you the ability to live silently alongside unpleasant truths. There's a reason every long running scandal or conspiracy has someone involved on a Harvard alumni mailing list. People with whom the school will proudly associate until it becomes too politically inconvenient, at which point they will be swept under a rug like so much else.
There are many nice, old, and very expensive rugs at Harvard.
Never fucking look under them.
I tried not to put anything unnecessary under the rugs at Harvard, though I do feel this led to me causing or accelerating a giant rift in one of my few social safe spaces. I had fallen in with the sci-fi fiction club at Harvard. Awkward but well-meaning folks for the most part. They never judged me and I always felt safe around them. Well, outside of the awkward sexual advance that I would ignore, but college students are horny and clumsy, and none of what I was fielding was out of the norm for that. Being vaguely competent and always present led to me being chosen to run the convention that the org put on every year. It's one of the few achievements I've ever felt genuinely honoured by. I poured my soul into the event. I got to meet so many incredible writers - Ann Leckie, Malka Older, N.K. Jeminsin, Nalo Hopkinson, Saladin Ahmed, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, Ken Liu, Pat Rothfuss, and many others gave us their time, grace, and good humour. It was the highlight of my year, every year. The one thing that I gave a shit about was not because it was an achievement that I needed as armour, but because it was my way of giving back to the community which I loved with all my heart and soul.
During my last run as convention chair, I was greeted with an incident that every event organizer of even moderate tenure has to handle at some point - credible accusations of sexual misconduct against a frequent and prominent event attendee. I kicked them from the convention and sided with the accuser. I think I made the right choice. The sci-fi club and its alumni org were permanently riven in twain by the events. I know it's not my fault. I know I made the best call I could given the information I had. I know I chose safety and morality over sweeping shit under a rug. I also understood why Harvard has so many fucking rugs no one looks under in that moment. I know that the rift, the giant explosive fallings-out, the harsh words that can never be taken back, would have happened regardless of what I did. I still feel like I destroyed a community. I've never been much of a joiner since.
In those waning moments of college, as I was shouldering the weight of 4 years of problem drinking, already countless years of poor sleep, and the gnawing guilt for my perceived responsibility for destroying a community of safety and refuge, I got together with my now ex. It was a bad decision. I had already turned them down once, correctly stating that I was in no place to be in a relationship. We were both queer hot messes. Well, they were hot. I was just a mess. I tried to be good to them. I don't know if I was at all. Honestly, our relationship isn't something I want to belabour besides the fact it was two years of roiling emotional breakdowns punctuated by fleeting moments of genuine human connection. I hope they're doing well now. I tried to be good to them, but I doubt I was. We'll get to it later, but the end of that relationship destroyed me. Kicked out what were the last remaining planks of mental stability that I had and sent me tumbling down to rock bottom. I've never recovered. I still love them a lot. I just hope they don't hate me too much.
Tumbling Down the Valley
I graduated with two fancy pieces of paper and, after endless haranguing from my friends and family who were convinced that going to Silicon Valley was exactly what I needed for my career, despite my insistence that I wanted to live in DC, work at a tiny tech consultancy and focus my energies on the east coast convention circuit, I got a job at a then tiny startup and shipped off to San Francisco. It did help my career, but fuck I wish I had taken the other job and lived in DC. Maybe I’d have been more present for my ex if I lived in a place where I wanted to be present.
I loathe San Francisco. Going back gives me PTSD flashbacks. My hands shake and I feel panic grab my throat and squeeze, in a decidedly unsexy way, whenever I breathe in the thick smog. Even in Lagos, the '3rd world', you never see such cavalier dismissal of those suffering, the poor and marginalized. Tinpot, masculinist, dictators wish they had bravado contained in a single slide of a Valley pitch deck. It was a truly miserable place that shunted me deeper into depression than I had ever been, which is quite an achievement given the aforementioned massively suicidal streak I had been carrying for at least a decade at this point. I genuinely don't have anything nice to say about San Francisco. It smelled like shit. The millennial crowd there ranged from depressed and desperate, to narcissistic and wildly cruel, to somehow so disassociated that they just lived in a stupor ignorant of everything around them. The only two kinds of Black folks to be found in decent numbers were "horrifically poor" or "sold out and engaged fully in Cosby-show bullshit" varieties.
I struggled to make friends my age in Silicon Valley. I was too besieged by the growing number of open secrets spilling out around me. Theranos was a fraud. Uber was a hothouse of sexual abuse where good performance reviews meant you could be as a much of a creep as you wanted without fear of consequence. Zenefits was basically corrupt and people were literally fucking in the stairwells constantly. Most companies were basically a highly funded means for a bunch of shitty 20 to 30-somethings who could sling scripts to endless fuck around and seemingly never find out. My shop was mercifully decent. Professional and boring in a manner that was perfectly my speed. Filled to the brim with pleasant and amiable 40+ folks who hadn't been young enough to be consumed by the hedonism that had swept the Valley in the wake of cheap money flooding into tech after the '08 crash. I kept drinking more than I probably should, but less than I was in college. I was even sober most days. The only problem with working at my shop was my low self-esteem and my imperious bearing were not serving me. It's hard to ask for help when you think that admitting weakness is a sign of insurmountable personal failure. So, instead, I quietly left the company to work at Twitch, a mistake I still regret to this very day. Not for the monetary reasons, but because Twitch was actually the exact sort of barely functional hot house of unprofessionalism and executive mismanagement that was typical in the Valley, and I was mercifully being spared.
Twitch ranged from garbage to barely tolerable. Emmett Shear is the biggest coward and incompetent recalcitrant failure of a man I've ever had the displeasure of indirectly reporting up towards. I was initially on the chat team, and eventually moved onto the trust and safety team. We had minimal resources, minimal budget, no respect, only the tiniest amount of institutional leverage, and lots of heart. We tried our best. We failed constantly. It was demoralizing. Endlessly trying to get basic fixes like mandatory email verification or a single in-house machine learning engineer to help us build moderation algorithms just led constantly getting shot down by Shear's fear of user acquisition slowing down even the slightest bit. There's something so hopeless about toiling - day in and day out - for a goal which you find laudable, but being constantly undercut and never allowed to succeed. I was eventually driven mad for a feeling of absolution for my perceived complicity in this horrible system, and made the idiotic decision to apply to grad school. I had just wanted to make any sort of social difference, while having a career that would keep people off my back, but instead I was part of a giant moral laundering operation, thrown into the fray after each preventable tragedy to make it seem like Twitch cared and was taking action. And to be fair, Twitch, as represented by the median user and the median employee, did care. That was the ultimate tragedy, so many people wanted to make things better at Twitch but were endlessly stifled by the greedy bastards upstairs who somehow couldn't take a massively dominate media platform and make it remotely profitable, so felt they had to cut corners on 'nice to haves' like, 'moderating the platform enough that marginalized people felt safe using it'.
You'll notice that up until the previous paragraph, I've studiously avoided using names for most places outside of entities whose reputation is so overstuffed that there's nothing I could do to influence someone's opinion on them e.g. Harvard. Twitch and Emmett Shear are exceptions because fuck Emmett Shear. The man is a rat bastard coward who is personally responsible for incalculable amounts of human suffering. Gamergate and the subsequent rise of the alt-right as an organized-force globally sits on his doorstep more so than maybe anyone else's in the world besides moot. The man is a bastard whose only qualification for his entire career was being Justin Kan's less competent friend. I hate him more than I hate my own father.
Anyway, the depression and frustration were catalyzing into burnout, and it flared to life just in time for my then-partner of 2.5 years, with whom I had discussed marriage as a near-term prospect, to dump me like a sack of bricks.
I shattered like glass.
Smashing the Pieces
I really didn't have much holding me together in the Valley. My ex was truly my main support mechanism, a fact I held in common with any number of other disassociated Valley shitheads. I had minimal friends, no deep social ties to the area. I was completely unmoored from life there beyond work. It's why most of what I talk about with regard to my experience in the Bay Area is work, and the things I ran into on my commutes. In retrospect, it's funny how a period of time so traumatic as that 2 years in the Valley left so many scars but so few impressions. All I remember is the toil. Arguments with loved ones. Drinking to soothe the pain. Trying to get locs and getting guilted into cutting them off by my parents. Seeing a body on the Caltrain tracks and wondering whether they had made the right choice, and if I was the stupid one for continuing to live on in that arid hell. So, once my ex cut me loose, I drifted away from it all.
I moved back to Georgia, where my parents were living at the time, to recover and support the family. I barely remember those days, the only thing resounding in my ears was my ex's shrugging suggestion that I go to therapy. I did. A flurry of diagnoses came down the pipeline. I was lonely as shit too. I went to a lot of D&D meetups solely so I could interact with other humans in a safe space, as someone other than myself. I tried to date and failed - whatever traits had once made me attractive to my ex made me too effeminate (direct feedback I got), for my would-be romantic targets. I found another black patch jacket after years of wearing endless depression hoodies in college and in Silicon Valley. I started to just roam around and bump into other weirdos. I started noticing I kept drifting into people who were explicitly queer, even when I was just casually getting back into contact with old college friends. I started asking questions. I had, being honest, always known I was at least bisexual. There's only so many times you can make out with another man before even the thickest mental wall gets penetrated. I had just done my damnedest to hide that knowledge from everyone, myself included, especially after getting shut down by my parents when I had awkwardly tried to come out via Facebook in high school.
I'm a terrible liar. I've since found out that my mother had been asking relatives whether they thought I was gay for years. In her slight defense, showing up after a few years in college with baby blue chinos, pierced ears, pressed dress shirts, and a shiny necklace probably put that persistent lisp and disinterest in conventional relationships in a different context. I had already been hiding my first tattoo, just like I have been from you, dear reader. I was a miserable pile of secrets desperately trying to pass as a straight man, or any sort of man really. I had to be the dutiful son. I had to be. I had to be the successful Black professional man. I had to be. I had to be willing to throw myself into the miserable grasp of cisheteronormative bullshit. I couldn't do it again even with all of my summoned will and mental fortitude, and the moment I met my first friend who had socially and medically transitioned, the hope I could stay the same fake person I had tried to be for so long died fully.
As said, everyone knew something was up. But, my parents had made it over 50 years living lies, so why couldn't I? I guess I'm just weak that way. Don't have an upper lip stiff enough to keep my tongue out of another queer person's mouth. I caved to myself, whoever that is, almost immediately, after she first said hello to me. My therapist was recommending I see a gender specialist after a scant few sessions. The specialist was recommending I get on hormones right after our intake session. The doctor had no doubts about prescribing me HRT, and ,if anything, was shocked I had made it this long without figuring it out.
I picked up my first prescription for estradiol on October 11th, 2018. National Coming Out Day. Aurelia Augusta was born that day, ripping her way out of an ill-fitting shell. I had arrived. 25 years of pre-amble finally gave way to the start of my story.
END OF PROLOGUE
Like any trans girl fresh out of the closet, I was dumb and hopeful that things would work out with my family. My hopes were quickly and violently dashed, and within a week I was on a flight out to New York City to couch surf for what turned out to be 6 months, with me roaming from New York, to Pittsburgh, to Boston. I had really thought that I had built up enough good will with my parents that they would be willing to love me for who I am. Turns out when your kid is more of a meal ticket than a person to you, when you child exists to bail you out of financial jams, buy you a nice car you don't need, cover up for you infidelities, fund your ill-conceived business ventures, and otherwise exist as a servant and not an independent person, then asking for even basic regard and recognition is beyond the pale. I've been out long enough now to realize that my story is the standard one. There's a reason going stealth and ghosting everyone you knew was the standard playbook for those of the transsexual era - gambling on acceptance out the gate is a losing bet. Better to deal with phantom pain from prompt amputation than let the gangrene of a rotting family kill you. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the limb grows back on its own too.
Living on a couch in Boston was a blur. My friends were great to me. I wish I could let them know how much their patience and tolerance meant to me. Indulging me as I blabbed about my favourite shows. Spotting me at the gym as I continued my endless fixation on altering my body - a habit supplemented by piercings, evermore extensive tattooing, and as much plastic surgery as I could afford.
I genuinely don't remember what I looked like pre-transition. I deleted all the evidence of it. Thank God. I bet I was ugly as sin.
Boston was literally just a crash-couch though, and I eventually worked my way to Pittsburgh, where I would start a 3 year sojourn in academic hell, a Ph.D. program focused on content moderation. I bought my first house, got some queer roommates, and threw myself into the city. It was ... messy. Bad hookups. Bad breakups. Bad situationships that turned into great friendships. Awkward crushes on the same people every Pittsburgh queer had a crush on because the scene was 2 people wide. Grad school sucked. I hated being back in school, but I felt I was burning off my bad karma from industry, so the pain was worth it, emancipatory even. I felt like things were starting to make sense, that maybe I was going to survive and get my doctorate and actually help people with my knowledge, and do something meaningful with my life. I met one of the loves of my life, who is still with me to this day. She's sitting next to me right now flipping through FFXIV memes. Somehow, I met someone who got me, got the ultra specific experience of being a nerdy, awkward, black trans girl with an obsessive interest in games on an instinctual level. I love her dearly. We were long distance back then though, but things were looking mostly up in my life. My wardrobe was shit - a smattering of vintage and alt fast fashion that I had always wanted to wear but had been out of style since the 2000s and wouldn't be back in style for years to come. But it was my wardrobe, not a wardrobe manicured by my parents to be presentable in Silicon Valley meeting rooms. I kept falling in love with all my friends like an idiot. In my defense, they're all extremely attractive. Navigating the blurry line between intense platonic interest and doe-eyed crush has never been my forte, never had much practice. But, I felt like my hopes and dreams were starting to form into something tangible. Something onto which I could cling for dear life. I felt like maybe -
The Endless Month of March 2020 Begins
Everything went right back to shit. Trapped in a house with roommates who were having breakdowns of their own while I wailed in loneliness. Helping people bail out of abusive situations as relationships melted down around me. Fearing that anyone I knew and cared for might be reported dead at anytime. I fucking lost it entirely. I don't remember surviving. Life just disappeared into an ichorous, dark pit. My partner was one of the few lights that shone through. Friends helped a lot as well. George Floyd's killing didn't. I didn't need to be brought into even more intimate awareness of my own mortality. I was just starting to like life, or the psych meds were doing a good job of convincing me of such. I didn't need to start noticing all the systematic racism and transmisogyny I was dealing with in academia. I didn't want to start feeling how intolerable it was that I was being denied funding and publication because of textually, explicitly racist reviewers. I didn't need this consciousness. I wanted to be a blissfully unaware baby queer who got to be cringe for several years and then sheepishly look back on the mess I made, but be offered ready forgiveness for my misconduct. The white trans girls all seemed to get that, so why was I counting the number of black trans girls who were getting killed in my city. Why was I getting told by friends not to go to protests or memorials because they were terrified of what would happen to me if the cops got their hands on me. I just wanted to slip silently into generic, trashy trans-femininity. I wanted my biggest worries to be concerns about whether I looked a bit clocky that day, I didn't want to be sexually harassed in the back of a Lyft. I wish I could give more details but, like many folks, the pandemic caused me to lose whatever feeble grip I had on time and memory. All I have is the by-products of time ill-spent, piercings I don't quite remember getting, tattoos that just appeared one day, psych prescriptions that I don't remember starting. I grew, I changed, I got stronger somehow. I found a therapist who really understood me, another black queer femme. Started realizing that maybe not all of this shit I've talked about isn't my own fault. On a good day, I mostly believe that notion. Usually, I just wanted a normal second adolescence though.
Well, I didn't get one. That's life. Being Black means you grow up fast, even the second time around. Eventually I gave up on all of it. I threw away the academic career and dropped out. Crashed out of tech entirely with two gloriously infuriating but mercifully brief stints at bad companies. I left the US entirely, realizing that if I wasn't wanted, I could go elsewhere, where I'd still be definitely unwanted, but I would at least not have to worry about catching bullets.
That concern wasn't theoretical. Sometime after my partner moved in with me, we found a bullet hole in the wall. After a lot of plotting and careful maneuvering, we're now in Canada. A short 8 months after we moved, a house on our former block exploded into flames after a gunfight between the police and a heavily armed squatter who had been hoarding gasoline. It was surreal getting text messages asking if I was ok from folks I hadn't told that I was skipping town.
I still miss America though. Sometimes. Less with each passing day.
Here I am
This more or less, brings you up to today. I've left out a lot of details - personal conflicts, some number of lesser breakdowns and existential crises, the twisting arc of my personal philosophy and doctrinaire moralism. I don't have any conclusions about all of this. I don't think there's anything beyond the obvious to be said - don't abuse kids, leave trans people the fuck alone, don't saddle 22-year olds with the responsibility to adjudicate complex issues of sexual assault, racism fucking sucks and America refuses to deal with it seriously, etc. There's also things I want to address in particular such as being a weird black punk girl despite my insistence that was I just a boring normie poseur (I now know that every punk thinks they're a poseur, but that doesn't mean I'm not actually a real poseur), or, worse, society's insistence I was some sort of race traitor for daring to think Gerard Way was cute and Hayley Williams was a genius songwriter. I want to talk about what it feels like to watch parts of your personality that were abject become normalized, or more frequently, fetishized, while the prevailing social issues I struggled against haven't gone away. I have a lot to share about why I'm so attached to my past identity as a bi/gay man despite being happy in my transition. That will come with time. There's always more ink and blood to spill.
Somehow, I'm still alive. There are many moments, even as I edit this essay when I wonder why the hell I kept going on. I want to find whatever demon shackled me with such an unquenchable desire to survive, and waterboard it with holy water. Maybe surviving to see another day is its own twisted reward though. The possibility of joy exists only if we endure through what pain exists now. I've lived long enough to have some good days. I don't feel invincible anymore though. I feel frail. Vulnerable. Even the glances of strangers wound me at this point in my life. I'm not above it all. I can't even convince myself that I am like I used to. I play by the rules maliciously to avoid whatever hellish punishment could be meted out to me. Despite the power and prestige in my legacy, I feel utterly impotent. I've lived a life of striving, and barely left a thumbnail scratch on the wall of existence. I don't know if anyone will even remember me when I'm gone. The fear of finding out the truth of that after I die is one of the reasons I grip so firmly to life now. There are other reasons I cling to life. My partners are good to me, in ways beyond what I could dare ask. My cats are darlings. My friends continue to be compassionate and forbearing. I can eat good food these days, and remember what it tastes like. I have birthday parties I don't spend wandering alone through a mall looking for something to buy as a salve for my bruised heart. Hell, people actively want to show up to celebrate with me these days. I have no idea why, but it's their choice and I'm happy to have people who welcome me into their lives.
I mentioned that I came out on National Coming Out Day. It's corny as fuck to say, but I resolutely and fiercely believe with every fibre of my being that it does get better. The belief in those better days, even though they aren't guaranteed, is the fuel that keeps the fire going on the coldest nights. There can always be more to life than whatever you were given. More than you can imagine. More than anyone could ever possibly pray for you to have. You have to keep reaching, have to keep grasping, have to keep clawing. You have to steal every extra second of breath that you can. Drink deep every pilfered moment. There is always so much more to life than suffering if you take it with greedy hands. Even when it doesn't make any sense, even when your mind screams that there's nothing awaiting you but pain and misery. There's much, much more that can await you, if you just hold on that little bit longer.
Expect more from me.
With Love,
A.