On the Lookout for What Rings True

How do we explain it when the very air we breathe feels tender and bruised?

This is what I remember: a debate between bamboo and cedar, buzzing lights above me — maybe too much voltage applied to the bulb — and my broken heart. I was shopping for my very first skateboard, at age thirty, in a mall in Phoenix, Arizona. I was heartbroken because a woman I was still in love with had left me abruptly. I had tried so hard to be what I thought she wanted, but that’s a different story. Left alone in the house I bought for us to live happily ever after in, the now single mom of two adopted mutts, I needed to keep trying hard, but this time at something new.

Maybe I’m someone who skateboards, I thought, when I made friends with a group of sober lesbians who rode longboards around town. After I bought one too — cedar with a bright blue wave design on it — we named ourselves the Lesbian Longboard Club, and I named my board Baby Blue. I got my hair cut into a kind of mullet faux hawk and died it blonde, a combination I knew my ex would have hated, and I hit the pavement with my new gang and my Baby Blue.

I’m thinking of that time now because this morning, while my son and I were walking our dog, a man rolled by on a longboard and my son asked, “didn’t you used to ride a skateboard when you were a kid?”

“Not when I was a kid,” I corrected, “but later in life. When I was an adult. A new adult, just figuring things out.”

“So, you were figuring out if you liked skateboarding?”

“Exactly,” I said.

I can see that now, looking back. My urgent search to identify who I was against the measure of how another sees me was typical of a girl poised between childhood and adulthood. My experimenting with haircuts, with intimacy and boundaries, the limits of fearlessness and despair; doing none of it with malice, none of it to deceive. I was conducting deadly serious research into who this was walking around in those clothes, that skin, those ever shifting impulses. I was taking astounded stock of my own enormous range — on the lookout all the while for what rang true, for moments of recognition, for rare moments I would find myself feeling at home. My own failure to understand was nothing but proof of how little I knew myself.

I wonder what my son will see as an adult looking back on this time in his life, in his becoming. I wonder what I might see, another seventeen years in the future, looking at me now from that perspective. What will I be able to see from there that I can’t see now?

As I write this, it’s International Women’s Day, and my heart feels broken again. Not for any romantic reasons this time, but because of the environment I find myself alive in. How the very air that I breathe on this day feels tender and bruised. In lieu of an explanation, I have these anecdotes:

1. A close friend voted for the current federal administration. I have been upset with her and taking it personally, enough to consider parting ways. I admitted as much to her, and she asked me why, given that she didn’t feel that way about me when the tables were turned four years ago. When I ranged over in my mind the myriad grievances I could list on behalf of human decency and humanity, I settled on those most personal to me, including the anti-queer, anti-trans, and frankly, anti-female rhetoric and policies. In fact, it was this final one that solidified as the most egregious. Namely, look at all the women and girls who have accused this person of rape and sexual assault. The only way anyone could, in good conscious, vote for someone like that is if they do not believe those women and girls. Imagine that many boys and men making serious, criminal accusations that were completely dismissed and disregarded by tens of millions of voters?

2. A few weeks ago, I was experiencing flu-like symptoms while also having symptoms of a yeast infection. I had taken a course of antibiotics a while ago and was fighting to rebuild the balanced biosystem of beneficial bacteria to regain homeostasis in my female body. As someone who works in clinical research, I decided to do a video visit with a doctor on a health express app to get two medications: an antiviral called oseltamivir phosphate that would help move the flu virus out of my body more quickly, and a single dose medication that cures yeast infections called fluconazole. Having a family member pick these prescriptions up and bring them to me might even have me feeling human again before the end of that same day. The man who greeted me on the video was a Physician’s Assistant who seemed friendly enough at first, but given my condition, I wasn’t really paying attention. I explained my symptoms and requested the medications. There was a long silence during which I focused on him out of curiosity. The expression on his face was one of mild disgust mixed with skepticism.

“It doesn’t sound like you really know what’s going on,” he said in that clearly misogynistic tone too many of us encounter every day. “I can’t just prescribe things for you without knowing what’s going on. You’ll have to come in and be evaluated. Or go to urgent care.”

I explained patiently that I didn’t feel well enough to go anywhere in person and that was why I opted for the video visit. He continued to resist. I asked him what the risk would be of treating my self-reported symptoms empirically with the medications I was requesting.

He responded, “it could hurt your liver. It would be irresponsible of me to prescribe you something you really don’t need.” I responded that these medications were both safer than an over-the-counter headache medicine would be for my liver. He looked irritated that I seemed to know what I was talking about, blurted angrily that he had made his decision, and disconnected the call.

Recently, I read a memoir by a local San Diego man named James Bennett. The story is about his transition from female to male, and while I felt pangs of sadness reading about the self-hatred he felt in a female body, I read with wonder about how he also struggled with similar feelings after transitioning, but for vastly different reasons. No longer feeling like he was in the wrong body, having solved that discrepancy and being very satisfied with the result, the new anguish came from perceptions newly afforded to him as a cis-passing man in society. Namely, the respect he automatically garnered without earning it, from men and women alike. This shocked him and made him feel uncomfortable. He also despaired at the displeasure he felt in the company of other heterosexual men, realizing he much preferred the company of women and the queer community, while simultaneously no longer feeling the inherent belonging he once had in those circles.

What occurs to me through all of this — the memory of experimenting with skateboarding as a means of self-exploration and self-becoming in adulthood, the reality that I live in a country where most people hate women so much that they would rather have a sub-human megalomaniac criminal rapist male as a president, and the surprising grief I felt in the wake of being told by a misogynist that I don’t know what’s going on with my own body, that he knows more about my vagina than I do — is this: even when we don’t know who we are, we know who we are.

When I bought Baby Blue in Phoenix, I tried her out for the first time on the polished marble floor. I rode it out of the store into the mall. It felt right. When I stepped on the lip at the back of the board to turn around, the board lurched vertical, bucking me off its back and square on my sit bones. The board fled, fast and wild across the hall, into some people who hopped over it, and against the wall where it came to rest. Embarrassed, I stood and trotted after it, feeling the soreness in my ass, where it had put me with such stern and easy authority.

It took practice to be able to ride Baby Blue with the same ease and confidence with which she had thrown me off that first day. In my bones I knew that in that place and at that time who I was had something to do with that haircut and those lesbians and that longboard. So, every night, I surfed the concrete waves of my neighborhood under flickering streetlamps, in and out of the dark. Baby Blue seemed to say to me, each time I fell, “Get back up.” There were more bruises, moments of defeat, but there was assuredness and strength too.

Something about now, how right it feels to be feminist, to know that women are not, in fact, less than men, and how riding this truth at this time and in this place also means falling hard on my metaphorical ass. What if the collective is also figuring itself out? And what does the metaphor of falling and hitting concrete look like at that scale?

Maybe it’s about knowing our own strength, about noticing when the voltage is too high. I’m going to assert that it’s all about practice. That means humility, patience, honesty, and the belief that we need to keep going, to find momentum even after losing our footing. All these years later, I have the opportunity once again to practice, to fall, to be hurt, to breathe deeply, to get back up, and to settle, maybe more completely, into being squarely myself.