Of Course Her Name Was Isabel
In my first post, I said that other people have already expressed anything that I could, better than I could.
Yesterday I turned 30 years old, I am having... a time, and I'd like to show off some examples of that notion. Things that I've taken comfort in lately, if only because they prove that I'm not alone. What scares me is that these stories are so on the nose that it would be easy to interpret this as my being "influenced" by them, as if I haven't dealt with this shit for nearly three decades. I'm going to dive into a lot of these ideas more, but I need to get this out now.
Because I'm sick of this conversation being danced around, and I need to stop doing it myself, I really am going to get this out now. Call me Isabelle. It isn't just what my name would have been. That's my name now. No subtext here, I'm a transgender woman and I'm going to talk about the same damn shows that every newly hatched trans woman is talking about lately.
So much damn melodrama for some estrogen, a nice sundress and a tea party.
I Don't Want to Go
The Amazing Digital Circus was fine. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, often just awkward, it strained under the pressure of being a marketable saturday morning cartoon for children and a re-interpreation of Sartre, Camus and Ellison, and a very personal warning from it's author, mostly to her own past self. It's that final episode warning that I can't stop thinking about.
Jax here is dead. Jax, in the most family-friendly way possible, committed suicide not long ago. One of the major complaints of the show's (rather young) audience was the lack of spectacle in that. He did not get a dramatic speech. We don't get to see him transform into the odd warbling monster that people become when they "die" in this limbo. One moment he's walking away, another character lamenting that she didn't pry more. The next moment he's gone. The great tragedy of Jax is that he wouldn't allow anyone to see her. Not even himself. He shut the world out and pushed it away. Of course he'd die alone, in the dark.
If Jax is dead, why does she get to have a panic attack about dying?
To hurt the audience, that's why! ...But seriously. It turns out that Jax does get her dramatic speech, but it comes out more like a suicide note. Her "best" "friend" Pomni (brilliant names right) gets to dive into her head like the reverse haunting of a regretful ghost. It's only in these post-final moments, when there's nothing left to lose and no threat of joy or redemption, that Jax allows herself to open up. Only then, when she wants to live as herself, when it is far too late, does she realize that she doesn't want to go.
I've imagined scenarios like this myself. It isn't that I think I'm hurtling towards the grave at thirty years old so much as the knowledge that thirty years are gone. I spent them like a miser. When people say that they aren't afraid of death, I doubt that they've considered those final helpless moments, a climber clinging to a clifface by sweaty fingertips, the animal fear of clinging to life. Of not wanting to go. Perhaps they don't think they'd have any regrets. Maybe that's the difference. Well boy howdy did Jax have some!
Among Jax's split ghostly personas was a boarded up door. The slightest hint of noise from that door would throw them all into a hateful rage. What was behind that door? To quote Gooseworx herself, "Jax if she wasn't an asshole".
Jax was an asshole. In the end, however much that stemmed from childhood trauma and fear, she did it to herself. She didn't need to lock herself away. If her way of coping wasn't to ruin the lives of everyone around her, maybe she would've had some help and realized that a vulnerable heart-to-heart didn't kill her mother. Maybe she wouldn't harassed the openly queer members of the circus in a jealous rage. Maybe she'd have made it.
This sequence ends with a cover of Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely, recontextualized into a celebration of a different sort of minute-old girl, just as she leaves for the big sleep proper. Don't be like Jax. I can't be like Jax.
I Saw the TV Glow
I watched this nightmare of a movie right on my 30th birthday. It was a mistake. Where Jax's story is about the mess you could leave behind, I Saw the TV Glow is about the active horror of dissociation.
In the scene that shot is from, Owen wakes from twelve years of dissociation and panics. He is dying right now. His life is slipping by far too quickly and he needs help before he slips back under. I've had this exact kind of panic attack before. Several times. Becoming far more aware than usual and realizing in a flash how utterly trapped I've been, how much time I've wasted, how impossible getting out seems. I've paced up and down the house I've lived in since I was born, on the phone with the one person I could truly call a close friend, having this converation. I feel like I've been trapped on an island far away from any rescue. I've had the sense, while driving a bus, that my life is a groundhog day nightmare and that I should park on some railroad tracks and wait. I've considered, on quiet winter nights, that I could step out into the woods, take off my clothes and sleep forever. That it would beat watching life slip through my fingers from a distance.
But that's in the moments where I'd woken up. I've had a metaphor in my head, that I buried myself a long time ago. That I killed Isabelle a long time ago, and replaced her with a sort of philisophical zombie. Imagine my horror when life took the gloves off by having this movie about Owen's real alter ego, Isabel, being buried alive, and Owen's entire life existing in the minutes she has until her death, her best friend begging her to wake up.
In the first half of the movie, Owen starts sneaking out to watch The Pink Opaque, a melodramatic (and girly) Monster of the Week show, with the local black sheep. Once again. Can relate. Didn't sneak out, but it was only during those sleepovers that I felt myself almost becoming myself again. Watching cutesy shows "ironically" and feeling, sometimes, like there was more of me in those shows than there ever has been here. Owen eventually gets a chance to run away with the black sheep, a chance to escape his stifling life and be free, and he nearly takes it before panicking and backing out at the last second. I had so many moments where I nearly started breathing after years of holding my breath, only for fear and shame and an ingrained sense of "God knows best" to hold me back.
There is, of course, the dissociation itself. Feeling like you're watching your life from a distance, through a TV set. Like you shrunk back there to protect yourself, but sometimes you start screaming to get your own attention like Matthew McConaughey trapped in the bookshelf dimension in Interstellar. I Saw The TV Glow calls out this exact feeling. The older you get, the more it becomes intermixed with the confusion that time brings, the haziness of memories, the knowledge that we remember the stories we tell ourselves, not what really happened. Right?
I think I remember flipping out about getting the wrong McDonald's toy. Why couldn't I get the one for girls? I definitely remember my utter resentment of Buff Jesus being the role model I was supposed to follow. There's plenty more recent that I remember, but that's for a different blog post. Point is this sense of two lives. Like someone switched the channel.
Wild Geese
Finally, the last thing I've found recently that got me crying, the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. It's 11pm and I'm too tired for it to hit like it did in the morning. I was just hate-reading articles about poetry, frustrated by my lack of connection or undersatnding, only for Oliver to swoop in with some words I needed to hear. I'll talk more about this sentiment later.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praries and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.