Just Let Me Be the Fucking Rain

On Love & Being Too Much

“So let them thunder, for I am lightning.” – Storm, X-Men 97

It’s been years since I last wrote freeform prose in a torrent of intense feeling. Even as I type this, I’m not sure I still can, not sure that I still know how to swim in the waters of that depth of unselfconscious express. Strange, for a transsexual who used to write poetry about her broken heart every day and post it on the internet for hundreds of strangers to see, unedited. She was so brave, that ferocious girl, and so full of crackling rage.

She was uncouth, unconquerable, terrifyingly unpredictable, and somewhere between publishing my first book and living through some unspeakable things and going through a pandemic and getting married and becoming a sort-of grown-up woman, I think I lost her. Lost the register of her voice, lost that unapologetically incantatory cadence full of thunderstorms. It was necessary to lose her, in a way. It is a trans girl’s birthright to be crazy in the blossoming of her miraculous, against-all-odds aliveness, but craziness has killed and disappeared many a trans woman. A trans woman who lives and prospers must, above all things, be steady. Be refined. Even the wateriest and fieriest and windstormiest of trans girls must learn to be as steady as the bedrock if she is to live into her womanhood.

And yet I feel her still, that crazy girl full of water and wind and jagged fire. She’s somewhere inside me, singing wordlessly about the time when she knew nothing except pain and the fight towards freedom. That kaleidoscopic girl always caught in her own hurricane.

Recently, I have been in love – or perhaps more accurately, in obsession. The crazy girl in me knows love as obsession. For so long, that’s the only kind of love I ever knew. Love like the wind howling in the face of bolted windows. Love hard and violent enough to shatter glass. The kind of love that texts you thirty times in a row, begging to know why you won’t answer. Love so all-consuming, so fierce and so frightening that it threatens to swallow you whole. Do you know how long I spent learning how to be a woman who is sane in love? Do you know many books I read, how storm drains I burrowed into the landscape of my mind, how many dams and walls I built to make myself into – to borrow a phrase from the inimitable Casey Plett – a safe girl to love?

So maybe that’s the real reason I “lost” my crazy girl. Maybe the truth is that I didn’t lose her, but rather locked her up. Put her away for the good of society. I will tell you a secret: I was mentally ill for years and years before I found any kind of healer or therapist who could help me. I had to heal myself if I wanted to live. I did it through force of will. I commanded myself to be sane like an ancient sorcerer commanding the ocean to part, and yes, I know mental health doesn’t really work that way (I have 3 degrees in mental health for god’s sake), but here is the thing: It did work for me, in my own way. My crazy girl, with all her wild rage and terrifying love, faded away like a lake drying up in the sun.

Yet recently, I have found myself overflowing again. Full to bursting with wild impulses and electric sensation. Frothing so intensely with feeling that it scares me, threatens to break all those walls and drive me screaming into the streets. Those very streets where I’ve watched all the crazy broken dolls disappear. Like that ancient sorcerer, I commanded the weather inside me to be still. This time, the weather refused to listen.

A few days ago, I misread the sky and got stuck on a long walk without any cover in the middle of a summer storm. I had no umbrella, no boots, just a silly little fashionwear “raincoat” that got soaked through in the first thirty seconds.

I’ve always hated the feeling of being wet inside my clothes – hated it with a writhing, squirming, sensory-overload kind of disgust. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, though. My only options were to try to find somewhere to take shelter (there wasn’t any), to try and run home in a dead sprint (it still would have taken me at least twenty minutes and I was wearing heels), or to suck it up and walk through a full downpour. So of course, I chose the latter.

Have you ever noticed how people tend to clench up their bodies in the rain? How they scrunch their faces, squint their eyes, try and make themselves small, as though trying to fit between the raindrops? My body did all that immediately – contracting and squeezing and trying to shrink. At the same time, I felt myself reflexively going rigid, trying as much as possible to hold a posture that would minimize the wet fabric of my clothing from touching my skin. And in that moment of embodied self-awareness, I realized how absurd it was to try to walk through a rainstorm without getting wet – and how absurd it is that I have been trying to cultivate a version of myself who is not allowed to be or feel like myself.

I’m not sure exactly when I internalized the idea that I was supposed to be a woman in love without feeling or expressing love, but I suspect that this is notion, a norm, an unspoken law that has haunted many women across time. The demand is always to feel less, to need less, to be deeply vulnerable and fully authentic, but without inconveniencing anyone.

But the rain is inconvenient. It comes when it comes. It is life-giving and powerful, awe-inspiring and terrifying. As I walked in the storm, I had no choice to practice letting go, giving in, letting the water touch every part of me. I had to surrender to rain, and as I did, my body opened to the pleasure of its embrace.

My obsession, my insanity, and my rage are all a part of me whether or not I claim them – but when I claim them and love them the way the earth claims and loves the rain, they become a part of me and give me power instead of driving me to act out of impulse. I have lived for so long in fear of myself, because to be a trans woman is to be the embodiment of this culture’s fear of what dwells in its shadow. But at last I understand that it is when I shame and deny and restrict my inner monstress, when I live in a constant state of begging forgiveness for her existence that I become most dangerous to myself and those I love.

There is so much pain in who I am and what I feel, and inside of the pain, there is pleasure and wisdom too. The intensity of that crazy transsexual girl inside me is a part of what allows me to know I am alive, and after so many years of wishing to die, I can finally say with certainty that I want to live.

Susan Stryker said I am a transsexual and therefore I am a monster. Like all transsexual women who survived their girlhoods, I am a woman grown and a woman crowned. I gave birth to myself and I built my own body out of fire and clay. My flesh is full of hurricanes, and my voice is full of lightning. I will always be too loud, too much, too crazy, too enamored with magic and miracles. To anyone who has ever wanted or ever will want to love me, this is my truth and my confession and my promise: I can be the earth for you, but I am also the rain. I will always be everything that I am. I will always be the rain.