Wait five minutes, it will change

A preview of my good old-fashioned ‘zine on paper, about being a trans midwestern writer with depression and lots of other feelings

Today I’m trying something different on this blog, and letting you see a bit of a project I’ve been working on for a long time but was nervous about publishing when I still had a big visible job in public radio. Now that I’m a freewheelin’ writer at large, I’ve decided to share a bit of Issue #2 of my ‘zine, which is called Wait Five Minutes, It Will Change. The following is the introduction, and I’ll post some other excerpts, but if you want it to be yours, you’ll have to (gasp!) get it via snail mail (gasp!) by ordering here.

Wait five minutes, it will change…

Twelve years ago I had a surgery to remove both my breasts. I loved them, but I hated living with them. Maybe it was the drugs, but I still remember the days after my operation as some of the happiest days of my life. I laid in bed in a motel in Plano, Texas, next to an altar covered with beautiful items from my friends. My love and best friend was there. We went to the mall and walked around in the air conditioning and I got a pink hat with rhinestones on it; my dad came down from Michigan and we went to the Cheesecake Factory twice. I read Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and it was 104 degrees out, the driest heat I’d ever felt.

It is easy to feel now in retrospect that many, many things in my life had just been leading up to that point. All this pain, disassociation and running away — from where I was, from people I’d known and loved — so much of it seemed to have been about sex and gender, about the urgency of living in a body more true to me, a desperate desire to be seen, a desire that cut through everything, kept so much out of focus.

Suddenly I had this body that felt more like mine, and I could turn my heart to other things. I remember feeling its beat through my now-thin chest. It freaked me out, but this pared-down person, this suddenly more exposed person, felt like me.

After that I did a lot of things I never thought I would do: I went to college, I had jobs and eventually a “career,” I was able over time to reconcile some of the gender stuff with my family, I fell in love multiple miserable times and a couple of really great ones, I found ways to do work that really mattered to me. People I loved had psychological breaks, became monogamous or got married, disappeared and came back, came out as trans, had kids, died. People stopped talking to me; others magically appeared in my life. I wrote and walked and obsessed about things and learned a new instrument and stopped dressing punk and had a hundred lovers and quit smoking and moved a lot. I broke up with people, left places, started things over again. I got a lot of gorgeous gray hair.

But through all of it there was something I’d been looking for, and maybe more importantly, something I expected would happen.

I thought eventually I would be happy.

I thought there would be some kind of calm in my life, something like those strange, spiritual days in Texas, and happiness would flow into that opening in me. I thought this would happen if I took better care of myself; if I had a spiritual practice; if I broke up with so-and-so; if I quit that job; if I moved to the country, walked to a waterfall every day, worked out, was more honest with myself and others, was less honest with myself and others, wrote more, played music, had time alone, was never alone, did just the right work, was always busy, was less busy.

Instead I’ve been on a slow, deep descent, from being a person with highs and lows to being a mostly unhappy person. Finally I’ve given a name to this descent: Depression. That’s what this ‘zine is mostly about.

One of the reasons I had a hard time naming it until recently is that I feel like giving a name this inner psychological state forgives the world for being depressing. I have always looked at the world and thought, all this comes from you, you terrible place with wars and presidents and families who put their kids out on the street, with white supremacists in fancy houses, with factory farms and filthy rivers and signs admonishing tourists not to give money to homeless people. It’s the world that brings us police killing kids and structural inequality and debt restructuring, open pit mines, a billion eyeballs flickering over screens, fad diets, golf courses in deserts, lies about what’s in the water we drink.

When I’m depressed I hate this world, and I blame it. I feel there is no escape. You can’t go down to the river, because you know that in the river the algae levels are high from the runoff, that this used to be a sacred native place and that the Shawnee or the Iroquois or the Cherokees were driven out by genocide and war. You know that it took only 150 years to destroy a balance that had lasted thousands. You know your ideas about balance are idealistic and sad. You walk in the forest knowing that bird migration patterns have been messed up by invasive trees, you watch a beautiful sunset knowing it’s the smog, you admire the fall leaves hanging onto the trees late into the year and blame climate change for your only flicker of joy in a day. Forests are a ticking clock; waterways are a grave.

You can’t have distractions like television or the internet because you’re just a target market, a loser millennial.

You can’t go to the bar, too full of sexual harassers and transphobes, and of course when I’m drunk enough I just spend the night chewing out racists and giving guys who seem rapey the watchful eye, batting back hands.

I seek refuge in my work, which is about listening to other people’s stories. I seek refuge in music. But depression, the deepest kind, means sometimes feeling that I can’t find refuge in anything at all. I’m overwhelmed by the destruction and denial, the cheapening of life. There is no way to take it all in, and yet I feel like I should.

Then another disabled black person is shot by police, another bomb tears through Syria or Iraq, another white teenager walks into a church or a school and opens fire, another trans woman is murdered in the street. Empathy melts into an ocean of anger at the world, and you can’t seek refuge in the ocean because it’s heating up, decalcifying, coming for us all. The end of the coral reefs is one of the worst thoughts, and it’s true. All this is happening.

When I’m depressed the whole world looks like this to me, a nightmare scenario in which I’m constantly complicit, eating my fruit shipped halfway across the globe, booking airplane flights, driving to buy dog food. There’s no escaping this body and so I tack on hating myself, too.

I am also profoundly lonely. My main state becomes yearning. I want to be known, loved. I get text messages and they underwhelm, postcards are like magic, a letter is the best thing: a tangible, touchable way that I connect to another human. But this desire to be seen overwhelms and crushes me, makes me angry at the people who only sort of get it, distrustful of the people who disappear. A lot of people love me, and I feel like a sink drain, like they are pouring love into me and it just goes down the pipe. What can I do to hold it? What can I do to feel it?

It’s been eight years since I last made a ‘zine. My last one was also about depression, even if I wasn’t calling it that. These ‘zines are also about the privileges of movement and body that come with being a white person, the realities of trying to do right in a way that’s about solidarity not charity, the pain of witnessing and responding to violence, particularly as it plays out behind the terrifying walls of U.S. prisons. George W. Bush was president when I wrote the last one; today, I have no comment on who exactly the president is. I also want to say, I work as a news reporter, and this was possibly the worst year ever for news. But it was also the year I quit drinking and started taking meds and re-entered my life after what felt like a long absence.

This new ‘zine was actually written over four or five years, and over the span of a move from Chicago to Ohio to New York City, where I live now. Much of it was written from the quiet humid corner of southwest Ohio where I spent a few years making radio, in a remarkable and strange community called Yellow Springs, outside of Dayton. But I’ve collapsed time for practical reasons and because that’s how time is anyhow: seasonal, cyclical, all one.

The world has and has not changed, but I know I have, and I guess that’s where my power lies now. What I’m trying to do these days is look at these same feelings from a different place, believing that the sadness and spiraling is neither my fault nor the responsibility of others. It’s just the way I’m living, and what I want more than anything is to connect with and love people who are striving to truly live, no matter how fucking hard that has been.

This ‘zine is one way to do that — to reach you and say that I love you and I’m striving, too.

That’s the introduction. Like what you’ve read so far? You can order a paper copy (yes! a copy on paper!) with a hand-printed cover (printed by me!) for just $5-$10 by clicking here.