CLEAN
The paper-shredder bay
Rips up sunset
And spills it on the horizon
A severed worm still wriggling
I am lacerated by love
20 sailboats slice across the Duwamish
her face miraculously unscarred
On the rocks nearby
A man washes himself
Naked in the brine
animated by alien gestures
He foams up soap
Dropped into the deep
He perches to dry, singing
His skin fresh and brown
I want to join him in nakedness
I want to be clean, too.
The word immunity comes from the Latin root immunis which means: "Freed from public service or charge.” This is the true immunity lost by the human immunodeficiency virus, the ability to live a life without being an educator, an activist, and a carrier of painful knowledge. This could also be said about my current identity as a transwoman. I am constantly educating people on gender, pharmaceuticals, the tenets of transmission, and teaching people that it’s normal to be trans-attracted, that murdering us won’t make those feelings go away. I am an educator in order to survive physically and to endure spiritually, but this isn’t my only method of survival.
To live with the psychological effects of chronic illness, specifically HIV, I have experimented with a variety of Coping mechanisms. Tattooing, Rope bondage, Art Therapy, and specific substances, namely ketamine, are ways that I combat alexithymia. Basically, that’s a fancy word for a collection of dissociative behaviors in adults or children. To make matters more complex, dissociation is a coping mechanism in and of itself, one we employ to protect our psyche during states of brief or sustained stress. As you can imagine, the longer the duration of stress, the more nuanced will be the dissociative cycle and thereby the more thorough and holistic should be the approaches to alleviate it. All of that to say, coping doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be fun!
My legs are inked with a depiction of poisonous creatures, flora and fauna to serve as protection and warning against curious lovers. When it comes to HIV, it’s easier to conceptualize myself as venomous and thereby dangerous, than as dirty. In my mind this dark beautification is a reminder and testament of the things I have endured. The ink soaks in a talismanic effect especially under benefic planetary alignments.
Rope bondage, also known as Shibari or Kinbaku in Japan, serves as a deep pressure therapy for a small subset of anxious perverts. Though I myself am not autistic, I liken this mental health approach to Temple Grandin, who pioneered the use of compression therapies among humans and animals undergoing different states of anxiety or hyperarousal. Rope bondage isn’t your only choice: there are several types of deep pressure therapy including weighted garments, swaddling, cuddling, squeezing, and therapeutic brushing. None of these interest me as they are too intimate or infantilizing during moments of psychological duress. I prefer the brutal and rough integrity of the unyielding fibers against my bruising skin. Again, the ultimate goal of Shibari is to place my center of awareness back into my body.
Art has long been studied for its healing effects on integrating painful memories and flashbacks deep within the traumatized mind. I primarily paint and play piano to find out how I’m feeling. I borrow my friends pianos or I paint naked in abandoned houses as a cheap thrill. In those moments I can allow myself to enjoy a sense of autopilot as my hands fly across the canvas or keys respectively. In some ways, though, art is just another form of dissociation no matter which medium I am currently obsessed with, so I cycle between them a bit manically. But all these methods aside, the one thing that helped me most on my mental health journey was a chemical. Indeed, I joke that my transition has been sponsored by ketamine.
To use ketamine for depression and anxiety is a bit of a paradox. How does a dissociative veterinary sedative allow for integration of difficult emotions or traumatic memories and perhaps even repattern neural networks? Fancifully, I like to describe my brain on ketamine as my mermaid consciousness. I can instantly meld myself into a variety of creatures to illicit new sensual responses. I deal with the pain of being human by shapeshifting into things inhuman and ketamine facilitates this paradigm shift. I believe the mechanism has something to do with giving yourself a good step back from cognitive patterns and loops, to step into what is basic and fundamental and animal to you. It resets your sense of ego and self by first pushing you out of yourself. It has been shown to be “robustly” effective in people with anxious bi-polar disorder where traditionally treatment has proven ineffective (a.k.a yours truly).
I am so preoccupied with the effects of Trauma because it has had a major impact on my life. It has delayed my debut with Hormone Replacement Therapy, with beginning my transformation, with feeling alive. In the end, the ultimate truth is I am a woman and I deserve a chance at feminine work, at feminine joy. I am worth the struggle it takes to live an honest life; my mental health is work but it’s a labor of love. I want to make the world aware of the psychosocial effects of oppression, and to use that knowledge to perform radical compassion. In showing self-kindness and tending to our emotional needs we are performing a radical act of resistance. By finding the strength of spirit to stop hiding and sharing my journey and pains, maybe a version of transcendent love will begin to find me, and I will find a home in my body, where HIV doesn’t rule the roost. Perhaps with patience and gentleness I can summon the family I’ve always wanted and finally resolve that I don’t really need to be clean to be free.