dear sweet delicious life

why i stay alive despite it all

Note to the Reader: Hello, Dear One! Welcome to the first subscribers-only piece of my newsletter. this essay, “dear sweet delicious life,” is excerpted from an unfinished essay collection I’ve been writing on and off for the past three years, tentatively titled, love grief sex forgiveness. Hopefully this sneak peak feels delectably exclusive!

every day, i wake up surprised to still be alive. when i was a teenager, i read in a magazine that the average life span of a transgender person is 23 years old. as it turns out, this is a false statistic, even for the time it was published, but even though i’ve known that for over a decade now, my body still believes it. my eyes open in the morning, the sun touches my skin, and my body says, how can this be? there is no word for the way my body feels in these moments. it’s something like awe. something like wonder. something like grief, and terror, and guilt, and joy.

dear one, let me take your hands in mine. let’s sit down together at a table with a vase of flowers. let’s drink white wine and put on music. let’s dance to our favorite songs and talk and talk. when the light goes down and the indigo night time blooms, let’s light candles and lie in bed. i promise i will never leave.

the first time i unexpectedly lived was the day i was born. the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, and i emerged silent from the womb, screaming without a voice, my eyes closed, my skin blue. i’m told i was a weak and sickly baby. maybe this is why i grew up to be a storyteller, a poet, a very bad yet enthusiastic singer. maybe there’s always a part of me that’s still screaming without a voice. maybe every woman is. the part in all of us that belongs to dominant culture is always surprised when it hears a woman speaking, a trans woman most of all. that is because, in the dominant culture, we still do not believe that women should have voices. we still do not believe that trans women should exist.

but this is not an essay about identity politics. this is an essay about life, and how i lived. let me tell you what survived: when i was little, i loved dollar-store dresses and plastic gemstones, tea parties with empty teacups and a table full of stuffed toys. they tried to shame and beat it out of me, the girl who lived, who shone like a rhinestone in the sun, from within this body they called a boy’s. they tried to kill the girl in me with shame, and all these years later, i will never fully understand why, because i do not know why it should be shameful to be a girl. my beauty survived, and my softness. they were too strong to kill. the girl in me survived. she wanted too much to live.