I suppose I spent so long worrying about being a real man, or even a real trans man, that I haven’t found much time to worry about being a real writer.
I am a man who doesn’t have a cock. In fact, I am a man who has written, repeatedly, in public, about his menstrual cycle.
Sometimes, walking down the street, someone hurls the word “faggot” at me as though this is supposed to shame me. But it calls me into my power. It reminds me how wildly successful I’ve been at believing in myself and living into my darkest, most secret, scariest dream.
If I can be a man without a cock, I can be a real writer who doesn’t publish much, or at all, or publishes only on my own terms.
Realness is a gift you give to yourself.
An excerpt I read to my writing class on Wednesday ended just as I was about to try going to a naked party for gay men, where I wouldn’t have to tell anyone I was trans because we’d all be naked anyway.
I’ll tell you what happened at that party. Some people ignored me, some people made small talk, some people asked slightly weird questions about my “journey.”
One man said, “I’m sorry for you, it must be hard for you to find anyone to be with.”
Another man said, “I think you’re very attractive, would you like to go out sometime?”
Same me. Two different stories. Which one was I going to believe?
For the record, I swiftly forgot about the first man, dredging him up reluctantly only to make the occasional point like this one, and had lots of great sex with the second. But this was a choice I had to make—and, I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t do it. It took me a week to text the second man because I thought he was “too normal” and “too attractive for me.”
Sometimes it’s hard to reach out and grab what’s right in front of us.
It feels like there’s always a “too.” Too young, too old, too queer, too privileged, too angry, too afraid. Too something. Always too something.
My friend Shea in the Catskills says, “Whenever we feel bad about ourselves, someone is making a lot of money.”
Realness is a gift we give ourselves.
Being enough is a decision we make for ourselves. It is not something anyone can bestow on us—not through a dollar amount, an award, accolades, or likes. Once I met a man with a C-suite job who told me he felt he never had enough money. Enoughness can’t come from the outside.
We have to grab it for ourselves.
But that means we don’t have to wait for anyone or anything.
Believing myself that I was a man, when this was not apparent to anyone else, saved my life in my twenties.
Believing myself that I am a writer, when this was also not so apparent to anyone else, may have saved my life in my thirties.
Realness is a gift you give yourself, though it is not always easy.
Please give yourself this gift. Give it to yourself a little bit each day. Be patient. Giving yourself the gift of realness is a practice, a ritual, a journey of many steps. Please do it. The world needs your voice, your writing, your art.
You are a real writer.
Thank you for this MEDICINE
I’m intrigued by the zigs and the zags of your story. This one resonated for me, it took me years to be able to call myself a writer even though I’ve written my whole life. Still emerging. As they say…