september 15, 2021
the sudden change is a dominant theme in a lot of my storytelling: everything shifts, and my (or my character's) reality must play catch-up to the world around it. This is a natural story for any trans woman to tell, because we get a very definitive "before" and "after" and those periods are dominated by very different kinds of hardship and experiences and joy and sorrow. Plus, it makes it easier to tell the story to an audience that probably will never truly understand if you can segment it up in a way they recognize.
This method of storytelling feels simplistic to me, but sometimes it's just truly what happened. While I don't even know anymore if I would consider transition to be the light-switch that I have made it out to be - at least not right on the day I took my first dose of estradiol - what is obvious to me is there was actually one day that drastically changed how I make art and what stories I thought myself capable of telling, and it was this day.
a dear photographer friend of mine let me stay with them in the North Bay area of California. In the morning, I read The Electric State by Simon Stalenhag, a fictional apocalypse story rendered in his signature realer-than-real painting style that covers a woman taking a roadtrip through the crumbling ruins of Nevada and California, ending at the beaches of Point Reyes.
In the afternoon after I finished the book, we loaded up their Volvo wagon, blasted through the fog shrouding the winding roads of the coast, and headed to Point Reyes. We walked on the beach until it was pitch black. Point Reyes is a deeply inspiring, slightly unsettling place that does not feel as though it exists on the same plane as the rest of the world we live in; visiting it five hours after I read a masterful apocalypse story set in it was life-changing. The end of the world is there, I can feel it, and it is not entirely sorrowful; it only reflects what you bring to it. Once I felt it there, though, I felt like the veil slipped - it feels like everything is decaying or being reborn at every corner, and I can just see it more clearly.
And now, 15 months later, I'm waiting for the first crate of books of my apocalypse story to arrive at my house so I can sign and mail them out.