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with-love-from-love · 10 months

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the desire jellyfish

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”

(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven)

Here I am once more, flooding your inbox with my deranged ramblings. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of myself, and I know that is an exercise in self obsession. I need to learn how to simultaneously listen to myself more, and learn how to disregard my internal darkness, my selfish desires of flesh. What would it even mean to be perfect, to be flawless, would anyone even want that. I think in our constant unchanging effort to achieve “good” and “happy” lives, we miss the fact that pain is not our enemy, in fact, she is our dear friend. Time makes absolutely no sense to me, how could I possibly forget all the lessons that I taught myself already? That instead of looking for answers, I should look for more questions. The question, the answer, you who are reading this, and me, writing this, we are all dreams, dreamt by something old, something long ago, yet also sometime in the future, sometime outside this place we inhabit. I constantly feel just like that jellyfish, encapsulating the dark and the light, moved by the whim of the ocean, our mother. I went to the beach this month, I teared up, tears for that reclamation of lost girlhood. I let the ocean pull me, breathe me in, and I felt so safe, knowing that she could take me back, without cause, without effort.

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they? To Kirsty this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn’t blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”

(Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart)

Desire is inherently brimming with shame. Desire should not be shameful, so much of it comes from our humanity, our joy of connection, our dark love of pain and degradation. Shame is a prison, a terrible box we are placed in by people who are supposed to love us. I think that shame is inflicted on us, often by people in our own communities. In my experience, we, the dolls, love to cringe at each other, we revel in it. I think, like all things, this originates because of many nuanced factors, but at the end of the day, we all have that darkness, that desire to be accepted, to be a part of the in-group, pointing and laughing at those whose behavior we deem unacceptable. I am, without a doubt, very guilty of this. God this “newsletter” is just turning into a way for me to process my various sins. I'm trying not to engage in too much self hatred or self love, both are tipping the scales of narcissism, and I need to focus more on where these things meet.

Why is it considered “cringe” for a trans woman to just talk about her experiences, her life. I think often we intentionally avoid being the trans girl who talks about trans girl stuff, so as not to make the cis world uncomfortable or alienated. In my mind, this is pointless. You could really get down and dirty, and just say everything we do is cringe, because everything we do is fueled by desire, and I would argue that desire is inherently cringe. We’re so unbelievably cucked by cynicism. The act of showing genuine care, genuine excitement, genuine curiosity, has somehow been twisted by anti-intellectualism. And yeah, taste is pretty inextricably linked to class, but it’s the ruling class that has decided art should be literal and uncomplicated, that complex ideas, emotions, themes, are merely an inconvenience to you, and you should focus on serious things. The life of a doll, how I see my life, the life of anyone really, should be like a poem, an abstract painting, a song that makes you joyful, just as easily as it makes you cry. After all, it is cold in the water, there is no sense in abandoning that reality.

I’m reminded of the second truth of Buddhism. In college I took a bunch of classes on Buddhism, (cringe) and I’m reminiscing on the various ways in which those philosophies affected my life. The second truth seeks to determine the route of human suffering, Buddhists believe it lies in desire and ignorance. Desire, meaning the craving of pleasure, material goods, and immortality, and ignorance being the dissonance of seeing the world not as it truly is, thus breeding envy, greed, hatred, and anger. Now, obviously I am not a scholar of any kind, I am a trashy, transsexual weirdo with a neck tattoo, but I do have an issue with this philosophy. On the part of ignorance, I agree, but I think the denial of desire is rooted in a denial of the self, and of course, the self is a selfish attachment in the tenants of Buddhism. So yes, desire does bring about suffering, but I would argue that suffering, pain, sadness, are not necessarily bad. In fact I would argue that the pursuit of a life with no suffering is pointless and foolish.

And did you know desire's a terrible thing

The worst that I could find

And did you know desire's a terrible thing

But I rely on mine

Did you know desire's a terrible thing

It makes the world go blind

But if desire, desire's a terrible thing

You know that I really don't mind

And it's my life

And though I can't be sure what I want any more

It will come to me later

Well it's my life, and it's my life

And though I can't be sure if I want any more

It will come to me later, ah, yeah

(The Sundays, Can’t Be Sure)

Having sexual proclivities, unconventional interests, or really any deviation from what the straight cis world defines as “normal” is central to our experiences. I don’t want to feel shame, I don’t want to cringe at myself, but my mind has been irrevocably scarred by friends, family, media, art, and fucking Maury Povich. So much of my early understanding of trans identity centered around pity, disgust, humiliation, and fear. I heard this term recently, “humilitainment,” and I can’t lie and say I don’t have this innate fear, that the only reason anyone engages with my work is because, secretly, they are laughing at me. I must conquer this fear however, because it is founded in self obsession. After all, making art is a journey of self reflection, of self refraction. I am not the same person I was yesterday, I am not the same person I was when I started writing this journal, we must all be in a constant state of metamorphosis.

“Sometimes a person starts out resistant but then opens up, or realizes that they are confusing their past with their present, or that they are simply afraid of change. Sometimes one party can see clearly into the future while the other’s vision is obscured by unresolved but ancient experiences. Sometimes someone needs to be courted. Sometimes one party has the wrong impression of the other person, cannot see their gifts”

“While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love.”

(Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse)

I rewatched a couple of movies that have always been very impactful to me this month, and I noticed that these two movies are somewhat a reflection of each other. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, and Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation. Both movies are so steeped in metaphor, and I think they both reflect our desire to understand what is ultimately incomprehensible. How can we ever hope to really grasp our trauma? Why do we spend so much time running from our pain, being suffocated by our mistakes? What do we lose when we refuse to submit to nature, the natural process of all things? Immortality is plastic, it is hard and unchanging, it is the companion of death, her strange relative.

“I didn’t know what going back meant, why would it be safer than going forward?”

(Annihilation)

(Stalker)

“I knew there’d be a lot of sorrow, but I’d rather know bittersweet happiness…than a gray uneventful life. Perhaps I invented all this later, but when he came up to me and said ‘come with me’ I went. And I’ve never regretted it. Never. There was a lot of grief, and fear and pain, but I’ve never regretted it, nor envied anyone. It’s just fate. It’s life. It’s us. And if there were no sorrow in our lives, it wouldn’t be better. It would be worse. Because then there would be no happiness either. And there’d be no hope. So…”

(Stalker)

“The mutations were subtle at first. More extreme as we grew closer to the lighthouse. Corruptions of form. Duplicates of form. Echoes.”

“Is it possible these were hallucinations?”

“I wondered that myself. But they were shared among all of us. It was dreamlike.”

“Nightmarish?”

“Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.”

(Annihilation)

Our refusal to submit, to be pliable and ever changing, will be our death. We can never return to the people we once were, in fact, it is vital that we don’t. We must be ourselves refracted, light through a prism, that becomes something new, something equally as terrifying as it is beautiful.

I really want to share a poem I wrote this month, but I want to make it clear that it features some very triggering imagery. I normally wouldn’t include a warning like this, but my intention is not to shock or cause pain to anyone.

Let me be insect

Am I human? Am I insect? Am I fragile bone and delicious flesh? Am I chrysalis? Crystal, glistening exoskeleton. I am woman, by ancient, eldritch design. I am desiccated, disintegrating. I am wrapped in every golden web. I am dinner for every spider, I am fodder for every knife held by my sisters. I am debris, seaweed, broken sand dollar. I am penance. I am forgiveness. I am self flagellation, I am selfish. I am hungry, attention seeking whore! A ripe candidate for the devil. A fruit tree in her garden. Pluck me! Pluck me! I will scream, pluck me, devour me, it’s what I’m here for isn’t it, I say through my tears. I look up at goddess. Did you put me here simply to rot on this branch, to fall, to bruise, to be deemed a sunken cost. To melt into the earth, to give in to her strong hands, to give in to strangulation. Please, please, tell me I’m worthless, tell me I’m nothing. Tell me I am just yours to play with. Yours to use how you see fit. Make me fucking beg. I can be chameleon, I can be change. I can be what you want, your desire, your darkness. Your cutting board. I can be your mother, your teacher, the attention you believe the world owes you, your outlet for misery and dissatisfaction. I promise I love it. I promise I love it. We can let the stagnation of summer give way to the yearning of fall, the ache of winter, the titillation of springtime. You could kiss me in the rain, then tell me you never want to kiss me again. I could fall on your sword, tip piercing my breast, and I could pull myself closer. It’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Oh please tell me, don’t leave me in stasis. Don’t freeze my cocoon, forced to stew forever in my plasma. Let me refract, let me be prism, shifting light to color, to energy. I can be butterfly, wings with painted skulls. Let me be ugly, I know it’s truth. Let me be perfect, I know it’s fallacy, it’s supremacy is shattered, like glass rubbed against my softening skin. Let me fucking bleed out on the dirty carpet, don’t help me, the only way you could help me, is if you watched, and enjoyed it. Am I human? Am I insect? Am I to be used, or to use. Am I to kill? Am I to take away? Am I to give? To grow seeds in my belly. To succumb to plastic. To be nothing but mirror. A mirror I am trapped behind, my lungs hoarse from unheard screams.

For those of you that didn’t feel the desire to read this poem, I weirdly found a meme after I wrote it that pretty much sums it up perfectly, a moment of digital synchronicity, a strange message from the algorithms that control my life.

I have been writing so much more, more than I have since I was small. A month or so ago, I found some old notebooks of mine from elementary and middle school. I was so surprised to see all the ways I expressed myself creatively when I was young and how, the older I got, the stories and the drawings, the beauty, gave way to a terrible darkness, a refusal of myself. Page after page of uncertainty. I want to understand the benefits of pain, of desire, but I have to recognize my own failings to understand joy.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?”

(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas)

So, I don’t want to lose hold, I want to hold on, and I think the best way for me to hold on is to continue creating, to not fall into the trap of blindly embracing the company of despair. I started writing a story, I’m so fucking excited about it, I don’t have much yet, and I’m still very much learning who the characters are, and how the narrative will progress, but it has filled me with so much joy. The story has a lot of darkness, a reflection of my own feelings, but creating a world, a place, that is only accessible through a little doorway in my mind is honestly a fucking trip. I started taking a writing course this month. I got to hear from an author whose work I really admire. I am filled with so many ideas, thoughts of talking bugs and cats that know your future.

Exploring mediums has always been my favorite way of engaging with my heart, and creating art has always represented my future, a way for me to make sense of the bizarre places I find myself in. Not only that, but a way for me to connect, to share myself with other people, I got to do a bunch of tattoos this month and I’m so happy with all of them. The best part was that they were all trades I did with my friends, except for one, but that one was still done on an old friend, so I’d consider it to be just as sentimental. It just makes me so happy, to stimulate creativity in a way that joins people, that brings me closer to people I care for. Obviously you could argue this will lead to a hedgehog's dilemma, the closer we get, the more capable we are of hurting each other, but I think that intimacy is worth more than that, it’s worth more than the fear of potential heartache. After all, heartache lets us know we are alive, that we are capable of opening our hearts to someone, even with the potential of breaking it. Human intimacy is like the Milky Way colliding with the Andromeda galaxy, it’s inevitable, and once it happens, neither will exist as they once were, they will both be scattered echoes of the other.

And of course, there are all different kinds of desires. I spend my life talking to a lot of people, and yet I am always looking for those very few with whom I really want to be in conversation. Such occasions are rare, but when it happens, it is a special kind of love.”

(Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse)

To end things this month, I’m thinking of a piece of advice a friend once gave me. We were standing in my living room and I was pouring myself a cup of coffee, probably my 5th or 6th cup of the day. She looked at me and, authoritatively said, “Sasha, coffee is not food.” Not with anger, not patronizing, but out of care. And obviously she meant it in the literal sense, but now I’m seeing its deeper meaning. It can’t be all pleasure, it can’t be all stimulation, we must allow ourselves moments of quiet, moments of reflection, moments of just being with our thoughts and feelings. We must be kind to ourselves, but honest. We can engage in contempt, but we must recognize when the scale has tipped to hatred. Coffee is not and can never fucking be food. Desire is wonderful, but it is just as intoxicating, and we cannot live on intoxication alone.

With love from love

Sasha Love

Please donate to FOR THE GWORLS, a collective providing mutual aid and support to black trans people. https://www.forthegworls.party/home <3

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with-love-from-love · 11 months

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as above

I’m back, and surprisingly, in a much better mood than last month, and I hope I can communicate why that is, but I also think, why be mad at a good thing? I’ve come to know through my life that mental health crises are pretty much unavoidable, but even more common is people explaining my mental illness to me. What’re you gonna do? At the end of the day you can’t avoid other people’s projections of their emotions onto your life, and I think that always chalking things up to projection from another party can be a bit reductive. Everyone, whether they love you or hate you, has a perspective that you can learn from, and only by getting close, can you hope to ever empathize. So we get to the main philosophy I’ve been employing in my life this month, as above so below, the answer is always both.

I find myself falling into envy spirals quite regularly, and more and more I come to understand envy as a question of morality. By creating new moralities, we can change our negative envious feelings, into those that are much more ego flattering, and I am very very guilty of this sin, and envy is truly the only sin that gives no pleasure. So instead of realizing that we are rejecting ourselves, instead of realizing we are denying ourselves of pleasure, we flip the script, we say no. So I’ve been trying to say yes to myself, yes to good decisions, yes to bad decisions, because whose to say which is which.

In the fairly iconic 1996 film The Craft, we see a group of young women who are all, in some way, being rejected by society, finding immense love in their collective strife, and not only that, immense power. Yet envy still rears its ugly head, and the hierarchy that follows power, tears the girls apart. Morality is such a fickle thing, so often in human history has the value “good” been defined by the ruling class. That is not to say that power is not valuable, and without a doubt, necessary, in any struggle for liberation, but it must always be accompanied by love.

I truly don’t think that actions should only be valued for their utility, after all, as a trans woman, much of what I do can be labeled as “not useful,” and that is to do with many factors. I think however, the biggest factor is misogyny. In our world, we choose to view nothing that women do as “useful,” we choose to view femininity as frivolous and unserious, and this not only results in men hating us, but also in us hating each other. And if not hating, then certainly envying each other, trans girls especially. I have seen the cycle over and over again, a woman voices her pain to the world, only to be met with not only doubt and unkindness, but vitriol, contempt, and bile. And when you’re a trans woman, sometimes that pain just echoes out to the world, your sisters the only ones resonating, your sisters the only ones able to hold you, to understand. But sometimes your sisters are screaming too, and sometimes it feels like we are running around in the thick fog, only able to see the trees a moment before we run right into them.

(City of Lost Souls, 1983, dir. Rosa Von Praunheim)

This movie is on YouTube in its entirety and I really recommend you watch it. It’s incredible, funny, sad, and extremely prescient. It follows a group of people all living in the same apartment in Berlin, with discussions of fascism, queerness, transness, and Reagan era capitalism front and center. I suppose that’s why it resonates with me so much today, time continues to be a flat circle, and even 40 years later we can’t escape. The shot pictured above is the end of a conversation between two trans women, and all I could think while I watched was, we have always been the same, we have always sat together, getting ready to go out, while having complex and beautiful arguments about the nature and meaning of gender, the scene even begins with the voice of the narrator, she says, Angie and Tara always have the same discussion. The older doll, Angie, feels resentful of how happy the younger doll, Tara, is with her life and her body. Angie explains that she’s had it hard, her life was illegal, she pumped the hormones, so these younger dolls could grow their hair out and get tits, and she’s not wrong to feel this way. She is envious though, she is pained by the good fortune of her sister, and Tara is not as appreciative of what Angie went through as she should be. Still, she has every right to be happy with her body as it is. I wish I could go back in time, and tell these two, my elders, that the answer is always both. Every step Angie took is hallowed ground, she made the path for us, she deserves the utmost love and respect. Her envy, however, is not sacred, it was hard for me so it should be hard for you! This is not a valid reason to shame another woman for loving her own body. I find myself feeling envious of many dolls, younger girls especially, and I want to always recognize this feeling, rather than endorse my sins. I want to love my sisters, every single one of us, because being angry over their good fortune will never liberate any of us, it will only drag us down.

“Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river’s edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects—but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one—will become all of what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself.”

(Toni Morrison, Beloved)

Reflecting on my last letter, I am seeing the fragility of life all around me, I am seeing how quickly and viciously things can be broken, things can be taken away. Something we, and really any marginalized community can understand. It terrifies me, but I am also learning that fear is a master manipulator, and we may never be free from her terrible grasp, so we must learn to live with her. I will say yes, yes to what scares me, yes to what makes me happy, yes to what makes me feel alive. And I think to feel alive, for me at least, requires balance, a willingness to sacrifice, to let flowers die, so that grass may grow.

This month I said yes to many things, and not all of them were necessarily positive. In one instance I lashed out angrily at someone who didn’t deserve it, and I feel terribly embarrassed and upset at my choice. I can’t take it back however, so I must just keep forging my path. In the moment I felt patronized, talked down to, and I chose to engage with my first feeling, instead of working through my feelings. I want to affirm myself, I want to be confident, I want to defend myself, but I also must realize that, again, the answer is always both, and not only that, the answer is too complicated for one mind to conquer, it requires all of us, it requires community, and communication, and in this moment, I truly failed to take my own advice, I hurt someone for whom I care deeply, and I’m fucking sorry. I wrote in my notebook by myself after this happened, I tried to write down my emotions, I’d like to share that page.

as above

so below

how could I be so foolish

I see

now

what I was missing

what I had already found

time after time

should it be of class

taste

sophistication?

should it be violent

delightful

sexual?

should there be order or chaos?

that isn’t the question

there is no question unanswered

by the realization

that the answer is always both

not good or evil

life sprouts before my tired eyes

just as quickly

as lady death carries me away

If you’ve gotten this far, take my hand, I’ll lead you a little farther, I promise we’re going somewhere, I promise we’ll find something down this rabbit hole, we’ll find it together, I promise.

In art news, I played two DJ sets this month, one at my fav dyke bar gingers, and one at the pride parade in Manhattan. Both were wonderful, and if you were at either I love you. I want to talk about the pride parade though, because I know I was very sour on it in my last letter. I don’t think I was out of pocket though, standing in the hot sun and watching corporations like Target and MasterCard, march in a parade for us, penned in by metal fences and pigs at every corner, it was hard to feel like I was playing at a radical event celebrating queerness and liberation. Still I found myself dancing, smiling, and kissing the woman I love, still I found joy in what was happening, the answer is always both. Do I think that it would have been better if there were no cops or corps, yes. Do I think that being out in the street, out for the straight world to see, out and proud and making noise, loud enough that no one can ignore that we exist, do I think that is bad, no. I want to always be proud, the world doesn’t need another white trans woman complaining about the nuances of pride. What we do need is more joy, more love, more community, less envy, less cringing, less anger at each other, and more anger at the system, at the upholders of the status quo. At the end of the day whether you love pride or hate pride, we can’t abandon pride, because we clearly all care deeply about it, otherwise we would be indifferent.

I got the chance to do 3 tattoos this month, and I’m so happy with all of them. One I did on my girlfriend, and the other two I did on some good friends of mine. It felt so wonderful and freeing, to be given the chance to practice my art, and I hope I am given more chances someday soon.

I posted these on the dreaded instagram, and I want to talk about that too. I have done some more thinking, and I’ve decided that, as much as it would give me a sense of superiority, I can’t vilify something so meaningless. It’s true, social media is a Petri dish for some of the worst aspects of human non-communication, and it certainly doesn’t help the envy dilemma. Social media is objectively problematic for many reasons, but I can’t lie, there is an aspect of it that I do appreciate, and I think removing its presence in my life didn’t make me any happier, it only sometimes gave me the peace of solitude, yet I still find myself lost in the ocean that is loneliness. I want to be able to share, not just my art, but my life, with people who I love. I've made so many wonderful friends just through a silly little button on my phone, and I don’t think that’s meaningless. I made friends with a bunch of girls on the internet when I first started my transition just by proximity, and so many of these amazing women gave me all the strength that I have today, sometimes just through a short message, a message saying, above all else, I see you. I certainly need to use it in extreme moderation, but how could I consider myself strong if I let something so small break me.

"It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects."

(Anita Sarkeesian)

I really enjoyed writing this month's letter. I was really excited, gathering all my thoughts, sectioning them with memes, and writing passages from beautiful stories. It almost turned into a little essay, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the prospect of making video essays. I know, it’s a pretty cliche tgirl activity, and I’m sure if you’re smart you can tell I’ve watched a good deal of contrapoints, but I do think that It would be a great medium for me to explore. I certainly have a lot of thoughts, and I’m willing to let random people on the internet hear them and potentially get mad at me about them, but hey, like I said, I’m in a much better mood, and I think I should ride that wave. I’ll say what I like, I’ll try my hardest to be honest. You know, it’s funny when a girl will call you out for having been at the sacrifice in the woods, it begs the question, were you there too girl? Did you dance under the moonlight, cloaked around the fire, did you dance with us and we didn’t know? I think I should continue to say yes, and not just a small feeble yes, but a big, booming, resonating yes. A yes that wakes me up, and maybe if I’m lucky, wakes up someone else.

And I liked you for 24 hours

In your house

And now the time has come to

Live again

I shall

I liked you but that was before

Why me?

I never knew then

And I don’t know now

O the things you do

All come back to you

That’s why I hung back but I’ll

Say what I like now

(The Sundays, 24 hours)

so below

With love from love

Sasha Love

Please donate to FOR THE GWORLS, a collective providing mutual aid and support to black trans people. https://www.forthegworls.party/home <3

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