2/02/20: CW: Cussing, allusions to transphobia. 

BOOM! CRASH! ZAPPP! I'm a superhero writer. Everything I write should have an origin story, so here's the origin story of this book(?). An introduction, so you know what thing you and I are embarking on. Because oh boy oh baby oh howdy, we are embarking.

I was scouring Barnes & Noble today, because it's not enough for me just to be transgender. I'm a mega-nuts, coconuts, nutz-job; I can't just live, like, my authentic life as a trans person or something wild like that, I have to read everything about it. Digest it in big word form. Read myself into existence. I book, therefore I am. At Barnes & Noble, I wanted to find every book about queerness and the trans experience, I wanted to sink my brain-teeth into some thick philosophy tome about queer theory and the very meaning of being as a man. I wanted to absorb it until my raging transness surged up into my eyeballs and shot blue confetti on to the adjacent wall.

So after 40 minutes of searching, I found RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy. No Queer Theory, no nothing. That's the closest I got. Were RuPaul's Drag Race not popular, I doubt I'd find even that.

Boys, I think at least in bookstores, we really failed in our homosexual agenda to destroy the world. Oops.

And I mean, Wattpad, Kindle Publishing, they're better. They offer a lot of personal, insightful accounts on this platform. There's also a good bit of technical help: binding, clothing tips, etc.

But I, Nutz-job, am hungry for something more existential. And I get it, I'm not the guy who should be writing this. I'm an action-adventure writer,  or I used to be. When I try to create I hit a wall. I used to think writer's block didn't exist, but hon, it does. And for me, I think I've found out why.

In the words of Natalie Wynn, "this is a super fucking vulnerable moment for me." But I need to take you on my journey, my journey of superfuckingvulnerablemoments, of hanging with the boys in Walmarts until the a.m.s and talking at a pub booth two hours after you've finished every scrap of food to convince your mother you are, indeed, a man; uncomfortable conversations with your boss; and the phrase, "I feel like I'm losing my daughter."

I always pushed my identity to the very corners of my thoughts, a shadowy thing I acknowledged but tried to hide to escape some of these superfuckingvulnerablemoments.  "Sure, I'm a man, but no one needs to know." I thought I could go on like that forever, until my life burst this summer, burst for hopefully the final time.

The sparks of that explosion still light tiny fires in my mind. And honestly, writing fiction is just, really, really, hard to do when you're on fire.  They spark a lot of questions. Granted, my writing was always aiming to explore questions: what if destiny doesn't want good things for you? Do fictional roles like 'hero,' 'villain,' and 'damsel in distress' change people's reality? And what are we going to do about the dying journalism industry, anyway? But these are all cool questions to me, ones I can discuss at some kind of distance. And then be so bad at writing that no one even noticed them.

But transness, manhood, g e n d e r? That shit's fucking hot. When I try to make a character to ask these questions with—to write a story, my own hot hot hot pain, joy, and anger sear him and his paper world to crisps. For the first time since I was maybe ten, my own self has taken up more of my brain-space than one of my characters. It's uncomfortable. I don't like it.

But I think all these questions and explanations deserve to be talked about from my voice, from my head. I want to explore my tiny fires in the only way I know how: writing. And I want to do it directly. Put on some gloves and chuck the fire across the room.

What does it mean to be a man? Who am I and who are you? Why am I and why are we the way we are? What is gender? Is it okay that I have to wait for my breakfast cereal to get super soggy before eating it? Am I allowed? Will I be okay?

Were you to ask me to write about a superhero struggling with their identity, my story would start like this:

If you told my coworkers I had superpowers, they'd laugh. Or maybe the nicer ones would squint a little and say they 'saw it all along.' My hair's just a little too static-y, they'd say, my eyes flash just a little too 'dangerously', or my hands twitch like there's electricity in them instead of blood. Tiny, cute things, that don't account for where they've lead me to, here in the smoking remains of a prison I've destroyed. Here, electricity rippling from my fingertips...

Were you to ask me to write about my own struggle?

I'm Damian. That's what my friends call me, anyway. And I'm not a superhero, but I'm not what the world sees me as, either. So there's that.

I'm a Mr.

***

What do y'all think? I'm gonna try to update this regularly, we'll see with my work schedule. It's something pretty different but it's something I felt like I needed to write. I came out about two years ago on this site and then buried it. I didn't want to be thought of any differently and I wasn't ready to discuss myself.  And anyway, I doubted anyone would find it interesting. I still don't think anyone will find it interesting, but I'm almost okay with that.

https://youtu.be/w32XWg14uJI

Want to listen to me awkwardly talk about an unrelated subject? Here's my video about why it's good actually to make things no one will see. Fittingly, no one's seen it. 

Over and out, boys!