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Dear Tiffany,
You draw great stick figures. You write excellent workshop handouts and other content. You are creative and determined and productive.
You are also super sad a whole lot of the time. And pretty anxious, basically always.
You did a good job today.
Love,
Me
Dear Tiffany,
This was supposed to be an art letter, but your head hurts a lot.
So, instead, it is a love letter to your aching head.
Headaches suck.
You’ve had headaches since you were very small.
You’ve had debilitating headaches so many times in your life.
Consider the fact that this body is such a challenging companion, and you are so consistently committed to finding new ways into acceptance and awareness.
Consider how violently you ejected yourself up out of this body, clawing your way up the ladder of your spine into your brain and up, built a wall between you and you, defended it for years.
Consider how carefully you are pulling that wall down, brick by brick.
Consider how painful that process of brick pulling is, and you’re still in it! You’re in it, you’re committed to it, and you’re also committed to doing it as compassionately and gently as possible.
It was a violent ejection out, into dissociation and distance. And it is a slow and gentle and compassionate return, into connection and integration.
I love you.
You’re hardcore. But, like, gentle hardcore. Soft hardcore. Gloom Fairy hardcore.
– Me
Dear Tiffany,
You should be asleep but you’re binge watching The Good Wife instead because you love tv and it’s been a long two weeks.
You posted earlier about committing to figuring out how to pull your life into more balance. Leave some wicks unlit, hold some time and some energy in reserve. Find more focus. More sustainable self-care. More ritual. More space.
I have no idea how you are going to do that.
Like, none. The very thought of it pushes you reeeeeeally close to a panic attack. Every ball that you have in the air feels vital. Every plate spinning feels critical. Every boulder you’re pushing up this hill feels necessary. Every wick must be lit!!!!
But I know that you will do what you’ve committed to doing. It will take longer than you want it to, and it will be an iterative and irritating process, but you will do it.
You will use every tool in your toolbox, and none of them will be quite right, so you’ll find another tool. You’ll draw a new map. You’ll find a new way forward.
You’ll share (parts of) the process because you know you’re not the only one in this tangle.
You’ll fuck it up and give up and hate yourself for it and then you’ll dust yourself off and keep going.
That is what you do. That is what you are best at. You are so good at being really pretty terrible at meeting your goals, and still going after them anyway.
You’ll get there. It won’t be the ‘there’ you’re picturing right now but it will be where you end up and it will be good. Good enough. Worth the journey. You’ll learn a lot on the way, and you’ll share that with the people around you.
I am proud of you.
I am looking forward to this challenge.
Love,
Me
Dear Tiffany,
Non-binary self, trans but not trans enough to feel the effects of visibility, trans but lucky enough not to feel dysphoria most of the time when walking into a “women’s” washroom, trans but with enough financial privilege to buy reusable menstrual hygiene products and most of the time it doesn’t trip any big Gender Feels, trans but not brave enough to *really* change your pronouns, trans but…
You’re not a traitor to your community, even with all of those buts.
You are trans enough.
I love you in your transness.
The world is a horrible, violent, ugly place.
It is getting worse.
It is getting scarier.
It feels hopeless.
I love you as part of this community that is under so much attack.
I love you, trans self.
We will work – continue to work – for trans visibility and safety, and to try and provide resources for trans folks to develop sustainable-ish self-care in unsustainable contexts, to develop wholehearted narratives in contexts that offer only narratives of loss and lack and less-than. We will keep doing this work.
Do what you do.
Share what you can.
Know that your own narrative is also valid.
Fuck the system, it was built broken and it has stayed broken and it deserves to be broken down.
Community care is self-care, and you are part of this trans community, and you will build, through a subversive network of transgenerosity (thank you, Nathan Fawaz), as many resources to save as many of us as we can.
It won’t work, it won’t be enough, we will lose too many people to the hopelessness and violence of this horrible world and this horrible time we’re in, but it will not be nothing and that is worth the effort.
Dear trans self, dear trans community –
I love you.
– Me
Dear Tiffany,
Your tarot cards are so insistent – sometimes love has to be about receiving.
It can be a powerful act of self-love to let someone else love you, and to see it, and accept it without shame. It’s easy to blow past these love gifts, because they counter the inner narrative of not-enough/too-muchness. They trip the guilt and shame traps. They’re challenging, because accepting them wholeheartedly means allowing your narratives about unlovability to be proven faulty.
Breakfast brought to you while you read is love. You are loved. You are lovable. You can receive love and it doesn’t make you selfish, secretly manipulative, greedy, or a trickster. (Well, you might be a bit of a trickster, but not in a bad way.)
The day slipped sideways into a lot of grumpiness and frustration, but it started with love. That’s worth a lot.
Love,
Me
Dear Tiffany,
The sun is setting behind the mountains, and the sky is soft blue and pink and full of clouds painted with infinitely delicate brush strokes.
You do not have to work right now.
You can sit in this car and watch the sky and not be planning the next Big Thing and not have your laptop open and not be working on a to-do list or a task.
The world is *amazing*.
These trees, this sky, these kids.
Even this road, which feels like so much violence but also feels like so much possibility.
The world is amazing and you are in the world and you are even part of the world, and that is pretty cool and it is worth pausing to appreciate.
I love you.
– Me
Dear Tiffany,
Lately you’ve been daydreaming a lot about a few specific past experiences.
– The round glass-topped patio table in the backyard on 35th Ave. Going outside with a ‘fancy’ breakfast of fresh-picked raspberries and other fruit and juice and, most importantly, your journal.
– The Starbucks on Centre Street, where you ordered a hazelnut steamer once a week for almost a year on your The Artist’s Way dates, again with your journal, and sometimes with a sketchbook. (Yes! Truly!)
– The little fold-down table in your bright-blue bedroom, again with the journal. And also all the rituals down there. New Year’s Eves and birthdays and full moons and new moons and endings and beginnings.
There’s a theme in all this nostalgia. Time alone. Ritualized time. Time to write, in ways and about topics not meant to be shared. Unproductive time. Down time. Creative time. Alone time.
Ritualized solo creative time.
You have been making time for that since you were a teenager.
You have always craved that kind of time, alone with yourself and some blank paper and a warm beverage and maybe some candles and often some magic.
You have been slowly collecting, over the last couple years, what is now a full shelf of books on the topic of ritual. You haven’t read any of them.
You have been daydreaming so much about these lost rituals.
For a long time you’ve framed The Problem as your inability to relax. You need to relax. You need to relearn the art of relaxation. And it’s true, you do.
But I think that maybe also, maybe even more so, you need to get those rituals back.
Ritualized solo creative time.
I have no idea where we will carve out the space for that, but it feels important. It feels like homesickness, this nostalgia. Not for any of those tables but for yourself sitting down to them.
Make some space, make some time, make some magic.
Love,
Me
Dear Tiffany,
You are such a dysfunctional little fuck. Do you remember how to relax? I have no idea. And you’re so afraid of failing at relaxation that you make sure never to be in the position of having to try.
You’re pretty great at the active self-care and the first-aid-emergency self-care and the triage self-care of keeping yourself functioning, and you’re just… like… really actually so bad at slowing down. How many wicks does your candle have? They’re all on fire. Fewer wicks, bb. Less. Less flames.
You have such big dreams. You have so much potential (gosh that word is fraught and dangerous). You have so many big projects on the go, and you’re making actual progress on them! You really do a good job at a big chunk of the many things you’re trying to do a good job doing. All those wicks on fire, look at the light.
Today and tomorrow require hella focus and productivity, despite the fact that family camp was one of the most exhausting things you have ever experienced. (For real, so tired you might cry, so tired you *did* cry, repeatedly.)
I know that it’s time to learn how to relax. To relearn it. To find that stillness that does exist within, to find the ease that is still present. Still possible.
But this weekend is not when we’re going to do that.
This weekend, with deadlines and time-sensitive projects and just more work than is even remotely reasonable.
This weekend, let’s be thankful for that dysfunctional tendency to burn the candle at both ends and in multiple dimensions. If anyone can manage this, while exhausted, while fibro flaring, while headachy, while dealing with a shredded immune system, it’s you. You’re good at this. It’s a maladaptive coping strategy that doesn’t serve you long-term and is not sustainable and is not informed by awareness, compassion, and intentional self-care, but fuck it. Sometimes you just do what you gotta do so that tomorrow (but not actually tomorrow, because not until after Friday) you can do something different.
We all see the brick wall looming, but we’re just hoping we won’t slam into it until *after* the conference in August. Maybe we could schedule in some relaxation time next week?
Fingers crossed!
Onward!
Love,
Me
PS – There’s something about being proud of this kind of dysfunction. There’s something about the glorification of overwork. There’s something slimy here, some internalized grossness. “Look how bad at relaxation I am, ooooooooooo (aren’t I amazing?)” I know. I see it. It’s not nice, this thing. It’s ableist, there’s a TON of internalized ableism in this. It’s part of why you struggle so hard when the body says nooooope.
It’s really counter to your politics and your principles. It’s flavoured with a little bit of bitter bootstrapping. It’s hypocritical. It’s mean.
It’s not wholehearted, or kind, or compassionate towards yourself and it does not put you on the kind of path you want to walk as a coach. “Do as I say, not as I do, put those wicks out, friends!” That’s not how you want to roll.
In the middle of knowing all that, find some forgiveness.
Yes, it’s ableist.
Yes, it’s mean.
Yes, it’s gross.
Yes, it’s dysfunctional.
Yes, it’s hypocritical.
Yes, it’s bad on multiple levels and for many reasons.
Still, I love you.
Still, you’re doing the best that you can.
This is a tool you learned early and mastered well. Of course it’s the one that feels most comfortable in your hand.
Dear herpes virus living in a nerve ending in the left half of my bottom lip,
This is a love letter.
It is a love letter to you as a metaphor for every trauma-enhanced part of my body. You, the metaphor for my fibromyalgia. You, the metaphor for my scoliosis. You, the metaphor for my migraines, for my depression-bent spine, for my anxiety-crushed shoulders, for my stress-shredded immune system.
But if I write only to you, the metaphor, then I am avoiding you, the reality.
You, herpesvirus.
Let’s call you HSV1, based on your location and despite not having a sero test.
Writing about you as a metaphor is relatively easy. My trauma body is easy for me to hate and the pathways to that hate have well-marked signs pointing to other paths. Graffitied onto the trees, ‘this path to shame and self-loathing, turn left ahead to reach compassion point.’
The pain inspires anger and shame and self-hate, and I know it well enough now to also (in the right moment, from the right angle) perceive the pain as an invitation to self-care. Information rather than attack.
The fibro, the migraines, the sore back. Less so the lungs – still work to do mapping new pathways there. And less so you, little virus. Much less so, you.
So writing a love letter to you required some reflection and some research.
I learned that you, herpesvirus, require fusion of your viral membrane with that of your host, me. I had thought of you as a guest, though an uninvited one, but in fact you have become part of me. Not just living in my nerve-ending but actually fused with it.
You are the prototypic species of the subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae, in the larger family of animal pathogens, Herpesviridae.
‘Viruses in this family are comprised of large enveloped DNA viruses of complex structure [26]. A lipid bilayer envelopes an icosahedral capsid that in turn encapsulates a linear, double-stranded DNA genome. The lipid envelope is separated from the capsid by a proteinaceous matrix called the tegument [27]. The HSV1 virion 3D structure was the first pleomorphic enveloped virus structure to be determined by cryoET [28]. The 3D structure revealed that the ∼220-nm-diameter virions are bipolar, with the capsid being positioned eccentrically, thus forming a proximal and a distal pole. The envelope membrane is highly studded with viral glycoproteins with a non-random distribution, viz., being more abundant around the capsid distal pole, with implications for viral entry and assembly.’
You’re kind of cool, actually. Complex and persistent, resilient. The complexity of your structure means that your infection cycle is also complex, and you are transported from your site of entry (where we fuse, my awful beloved) retrogradely down to a sensory neuron where you establish the latent infection that will stay with me permanently, part of me, part of my pain body, part of my trauma body, intersecting with my shame-pain and my physical-pain in moments when your infection becomes markedly less latent.
You have only been part of my body for six or seven years. I don’t know where you came from. I remember our first date, though. You, arriving unannounced. A week later, my mom commenting to Jon that she thought you were going to ‘take over [my] face.’
Awkward all around.
I’ve done all kinds of things to try and keep you at bay. To try and make you go away.
I’ve meditated, imagining a cleansing light burning you out of me.
I’ve avoided chocolate and citrus fruits, despite loving both.
I take Lysine like my life depends on it whenever you show up, and I take it preventatively in that one week of my cycle when you’re most likely to make yourself known.
I’ve mixed vanilla extract with Lysine powder and coated it on, because I read somewhere that it would help.
I’ve tried tea tree oil and various medicated gels and creams and ointments.
I’ve spent hours and hours and hours staring at you in mirrors, horrified and fascinated at how you change my face from something I’ve worked hard to accept into something I find viscerally repellant, in a day! Less than a day, sometimes!
And then you stay, for the whole upsetting 8-12 day cycle, and in that time I can’t kiss anyone or comfortably use a straw, or eat a sandwich, or lick my lips, or touch my lips, or smile comfortably, or laugh without wincing.
You are not the enemy, herpes virus living in a nerve ending in my lip.
You are not the enemy.
You are me. You are part of me.
And I am not the enemy.
I will stop visualizing the light burning you out of me.
I will start visualizing the light soothing you back to sleep.
Welcome to my body, small one.
Join all the other parts that hurt and ache and twinge and flare in response to stress and other factors.
We are an ugly mess, but we are learning, and we can keep learning together.
I’ll try to recognize your invitations to better self-care, to seek more sleep, better nutrition, more mindfulness. I’ll try to be gentle with you, with you-in-me, with myself.
When I look in the mirror, I’ll try to see my own face still present.
Love,
Me
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879625714000091