just stories (or, a eulogy for bojack horseman)

“I got into this business because I love stories. They comfort us, they inspire us, they create a context for how we experience the world. But also, you have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it's not.”

— Princess Carolyn, “What Time Is It Right Now”

BoJack Horseman finished this month. I watched through the entire back half of its final season in a night, in a weird little echo of how I watched the first three seasons — back to back, preparing for a trip that I knew was going to be rough, trying to shake loose all the sadness before I had to put on a brave face. It’s hard to explain what this show has meant to me without that kind of anecdote, which I recognise does not say much for my critical objectivity. I promise I am capable of being smart and articulate about media, albeit only when it matters to me less.

Immensely relatable.

I remember disintegrating in the final moments of the first season, when BoJack says “I really wanted you to like me, Diane,” and Diane responds only with a quiet “I know.” I remember pausing to sob into my knees when BoJack finally answered the phone for his mother, only to have her tell him that he was born broken; that’s his birthright, and there isn’t any cure. When a series I’d relied on for comfort became fraught and complicated, I went right to BoJack, because I knew it would understand why all the reassurances felt hollow to me. Starting to think critically about restorative justice and the hope of redemption, I tore through season five in a fit of desperation, unable to tolerate the thought of stopping without knowing what happened in the end. I have been ride or die, for want of a better turn of phrase, for this show from the beginning. It’s strange knowing that there won’t be any more.

All of this to say that I was surprised by the tone of a lot of the discussion I saw around the show. Specifically, I was completely thrown by the total confidence with which people announced that BoJack was meant to be a unilaterally bad character — that the only people who sympathised with him were shitty men, and that his function in the story was to facilitate suffering and (therefore) growth for characters like Diane and Princess Carolyn.

To be clear: I love both Diane and Princess Carolyn. But I love BoJack, too. Call this my apologia, if you like.

BoJack sucks. This much is on the record, and reasonably so, as fact. He’s careless even with the people he professes to love; he’s an outright asshole to everyone else. His reckless, self-destructive behaviour puts everyone around him at risk. He’s emotionally unavailable; he’s unreliable; he pretty much never has anyone’s back when it matters. The show is forthright about this. A late episode in the most recent season goes directly in on all of BoJack’s flaws, setting them all out one by one in a clear and measured tone; he gets defensive, he tries to clap back, but ultimately even he accepts it. Yeah, he admits, at the end of the episode. Confronted by his worst self, he can’t deny it: that’s him.

There are two ways to respond to a character who sucks, when you love them anyway. Here’s the first: I suck, too. You heard me! I am pretty terrible. I frequently neglect to think my shit through. I throw myself into stupid plans and cross my fingers that I won’t break my neck in the landing. I’ve literally been broken up with for being unreliable and emotionally unavailable; half the time, I know I’m doing it, and I do it anyway. Why would I not sympathise with this bad horse man?

Also kind of horrifyingly relatable.

And here’s the second: BoJack’s journey toward sucking as hard as he does is also pretty fucking clearly delineated. Because the show is not exclusively about how men hurt women; it’s not setting out to be polemical about that one specific form of harm. It’s about the horrors of living in public. It’s about addiction, and intergenerational trauma, and how childhood abuse can shape the adults who survive it. It’s about the limits of emotional support between friends. It’s about a black tar pit of an industry, swallowing everything good it ever touched. It’s about how a cute kid in a sailor suit can age into a grown man who can only barely function in the world. It’s about all of these things, in the person of one character who tries (sometimes) and fails (often) to be better than the people and places he came from.

Most characters in BoJack’s orbit are forced to deal with his shittiness, one way or another. Princess Carolyn thanklessly does her best to wrangle his career into shape, only to be held at arm’s length whenever she pushes for care or support in return — and guess what? I’ve been there, too. Diane’s association with BoJack variously threatens her career, her marriage, and her mental health, right up to the end of the show; there is no easy way for her to be around him without either enabling him or being enabled in her own worst foibles, which is also a whole-ass mood. Todd’s good nature and enthusiasm are exploited, undermined and wounded almost every time he shares a storyline with BoJack. Kelsey Jannings faces severe professional consequences for BoJack’s stubbornness; Herb Kazzaz faces the same, for BoJack’s unwillingness to hold his ground. Sarah Lynn spirals until she dies. Charlotte and Penny are clearly shown to never be the same again. The list goes on. All these characters — a majority of them women — are vivid and real portraits of what it means to be around someone like BoJack; it isn’t a show that shies away from showing its audience his fallout.

But I still have beef with the notion that to be sympathetic to BoJack is, by default, to be unsympathetic to everyone he hurts. Specifically… you do know it’s possible to extend sympathy to multiple places, right? Sometimes you can even do so simultaneously. That’s the fun and cool thing about media content, and also — dare I say it — about being a person in a morally complicated world.

“You come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you.”

I love BoJack the way I do because it not only acknowledges that complexity; it leans into it, actively, to tell a story that’s hard to sum up by way of any one moral position. It asks big, bleak questions about what warrants forgiveness, and who warrants forgiveness, and how often forgiveness is possible before a line has to be drawn. It doesn’t always answer them. Sometimes it answers them more than once, showing a different set of workings every time, and allows both answers scope to be true together. I can see as much of myself in a careless, self-absorbed, traumatised mess of a (horse)man as I can see in a brutally efficient career (cat)woman who’s convinced she’s going to die alone, or a depressed and neurotic writer clinging to her own inability to compromise — because it’s good, actually, to have the space to acknowledge the broken parts of myself. It’s good to see them and acknowledge them, every once in a while; it’s good to have fiction out there that facilitates that acknowledgement, and provides a safe way to go about it.

Life isn’t just stories. Stories aren’t life. And I suppose what I am saying is that it’s good to have stories that resist being mapped straightforwardly onto life, the way BoJack does. I will miss it. I hope it lives on in more stories that try to do the same.

introducing CATASTERISM

I wrote a text-based mental breakdown simulator game! Obviously!

You are Merope, a PhD candidate at the University of Atlas. It’s Tuesday. Before the day is over you need to pick up a shift at work; survive a meeting with your thesis advisor; and have a difficult conversation with your dearest friend in the world. Your task is simple: get through the goddamn day.

Oh, and be careful of the river.

CATASTERISM is written and coded by me, Waverly. It features logo art by Crumb and music by Merraine (both of whom are mind-blowingly talented), and it is free to download and play. You can get it HERE. Enjoy!

a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore

When I was active on Tumblr, back in the day (like, in 2012), it was at the height of the craze for The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut, based heavily on her own time at Bennington College, follows a group of classicists at an elite academic institution, who murder one of their friends and end up disintegrating around the shared secret of his death. It had everything that 2012 Tumblr ate up: tragically beautiful young men! Pithy quotes about the philosophy of beauty! A kind of blood-soaked aspirational aesthetic that lent itself well to desaturated photos of marble!

The Secret History is a really good story. I like it a lot. As a story about the darkness attendant to academia, it is wildly and deliberately off the mark. Its main character confesses in its opening paragraph his fatal flaw, which colours his narration throughout: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. Dude is not telling the story he actually lived; he’s telling the story the way he prefers to recall it. His unreliability saves the book from being a straightforward encomium to cruel and violent elitism, which makes it all the more extraordinary that so many readers seem to miss it.

I studied for a three-year undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. I applied because, at a formative age, I was told by a teacher that I should be aspiring to Oxford or Cambridge, please. I had very little sense of the class divide that separated me from the Oxbridge institution; I had been told what was expected of me, and I’d read His Dark Materials early enough to solidify the instruction. I threw myself into my studies until I arrived in Cambridge on an unseasonably sunny October morning, my life packed into the boot of the family car. The three years that followed were impossible. I remember very little of them; I don’t remember how I survived.

100% haunted.

People who study at Oxford or Cambridge for three years are signing up for nine intensive eight-week terms. There aren’t any pauses mid-term, and the workload is unrelenting. The atmosphere is one of neurotic, anxious hypercompetition. Put hundreds of people who were the smartest kids in high school into the same city; they will lose their minds trying to be the biggest fish in a very deep pond, or they will drown. There’s a lot to be said for it, if you can cope with the pressure. Problems arise when you can’t. In Cambridge, at least, the support systems in place for undergraduates were limited at best and inaccessible at worst.

People buy into the Oxbridge ideal: there are baby clothes for sale in the tourist-tat shops in Oxford that say ‘born to go to Oxford,’ like that’s not an insane and cruel expectation to put on an infant child. People buy into the Oxbridge aesthetic: though the last thing I want is to direct more vitriol her way, look at Caroline Calloway, who built her brand on an idealised version of Cambridge, right down to producing merch for an imaginary Cambridge college. (I honestly can’t fault that, as a business decision; if Harry Potter taught us anything, it’s that people love a good House.) Calloway has since spoken about the addiction she struggled with while studying at Cambridge. What does it say about the actual, material horror of elite academia, that it surprises me less when people almost overdose than when they claim to have had a good time?

Here’s the actual dark academia vibe: I helped lead a campaign to recruit a college counsellor, and went to speak to the senior tutor armed with evidence to support that request. I had barely gotten out a sentence when the senior tutor blithely said, “Well, we could sack the college nurse, if you really want to hire someone new.”

Another example: I went into my third year acutely aware of my ongoing mental health crisis, and tried to tell my dissertation supervisor at our first meeting that I had spent much of the previous year suicidally depressed. She nodded, passed no comment, and pressed on. Months later, when my depression was bad enough that it started to affect my work, she asked me whether I was making an effort at all, and whether there was any point in her talking through the feedback she had given. I was too ashamed, too convinced that I was in the wrong, to report any of this to my Director of Studies. I stopped contacting my supervisor; a generous friend studying for a PhD helped me to edit and refine my dissertation. My supervisor did not at any point reach out.

Another: A kid with autism and a series of physical disabilities came up to college while I was there, and asked for the heavy fire doors to be made operable with wheelchair-height buttons — which, according to UK disability law, they already should have been. The college had kicked that can down the road, promising to fix it when someone who needed button-operable doors was admitted. Not only did they not fix it; they continually threatened this student with eviction from her lift-accessible room, and when she sought assistance from the disability advisory service, they put pressure on her to take a year out (with the implicit threat that, once she had left, she would not be given leave to return). She was one of the smartest, most capable mathematicians I ever met. I don’t know whether she graduated, in the end.

One more for the road: my college hosted its first ever Alumni Ball in 2013. In the interest of security, they advised all the students resident on-site that we would be required to vacate our rooms until 3am the morning after the ball. We were expected to leave our homes, throw ourselves on the mercy of friends at other colleges, and continue paying our termly rent as though there had been no interruption. Whether or not we had anywhere to go was not their concern. No provisions were made for students at risk of being made homeless for a night.

The most beautiful room I ever lived in.

Asking me if I regret going to Cambridge is like asking me if I regret being alive. I can’t conceive of an alternative anymore. I got out with my life and a 2:1 degree; after a couple of years working retail, squandering all my much-vaunted Potential (tm) and disappointing my mother, I now have a literary agent and a full-time job I enjoy. (I live in Oxford, where I work for a college within the university, as part of the office that tries to support students in difficulty while on course. I couldn’t have been persuaded not to go to Cambridge, when I was seventeen; I am trying to do what I can for the current generation of kids who won’t be told, and can report from the ground that there are slightly better systems, now.)

But I don’t look back on my time there with fondness. In my third year, I lived in the most beautiful room I think I’ll ever live in, and I wasted all the time I had there lying in bed and crying. My enduring memory of second year is a memory of playing an internet flash game in pyjamas in the middle of the day, unshowered and unhappy and acutely aware that I was failing the person I had it in me to become. I drank too much. I didn’t eat enough. I saw my friends for supervisions, or for exhausted evenings spent on our separate studies. We weren’t murdering each other in elaborate orgiastic frenzies; the students who vanished at Cambridge vanished quietly and alone, into their rooms and into intrusive thoughts of world-ending failure. Sometimes, we resurfaced for graduation.

The History Boys gives Hector, the eccentric and pitiable schoolmaster, a line that should have warned me away. “I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone,” he says, reflecting on his own Oxford years. I learned. I learned a lot, even. But I don’t know how much of it was what I was meant to learn.

Don’t get me wrong: like I said, I love The Secret History, and I genuinely think we’re fortunate that Donna Tartt saw fit to turn her completely deranged college experience into art. (You’ve read the oral history, right? We’ve all read the oral history?) But I’m thankful for the caveat that Richard Papen offers on the novel’s opening page. Underneath that morbid longing for beauty (which is terror), the true terror is the ugly banality of it all. Death is still death, even dressed up in stately old buildings and ancient tradition; the loss of the illusion is its own kind of knife in the gut.

the surface of our warm lonely planet

Rugby Cement Works, on the way out of town.

I realised that I’ve become a climate writer by mistake.

My short story, “The Last Good Time to be Alive,” appeared in Reckoning 4 this week (check her out, I hear she’s pretty good). I’ve described it as a short story about internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, though it actually emerged from an idea I had for a larger project: it was still set in the near future, but the flood was incidental, and the heart of the concept was Marlo’s ‘cancellation’ by her audience online. I’m sort of relieved I didn’t end up writing that iteration, not least because I worry that it would have been contentious in a way that diverted attention from what I wanted to say.

I got distracted from the cancellation idea, because I thought too hard about what the future might look like. For a writer looking at near futures, trying to keep it terrestrial, there is no way to think about the future without taking into account the present — and at present, we are in a state of emergency. Extrapolate from there and the conflict the narrative requires is already baked in. The weather’s broken. The sea is creeping further and further inland. God only knows what the political landscape will look like, as the climate crisis displaces more and more of the global south, and the higher ground becomes a precious, lifesaving commodity.

“The Last Good Time to be Alive” does not try to encompass the world at large, because I’m a comparatively sheltered white person, and I know better than to overreach. It’s set in my hometown, Rugby; you wouldn’t know it, but it’s secretly set in my parents’ house, on a sharp street corner at the foot of a small hill. There really was a brook at the back of our house, running parallel to the garden, and it really would threaten to burst its banks after rain.

The town centre on market day.

Rugby is a singularly unremarkable place. It’s a boarding school with a tired industrial town grafted on; it’s a rail freight terminal with a dead and joyless heart. I left as soon as I could. I think of it all the time, because the world is changing and Rugby is changing with it. I’ve seen it cited as a place for working Londoners to retreat to, with its direct line to Euston and its desperately low cost of housing. I drove back with my dad for a school friend’s wedding, and he pointed out all the new warehouses hunched at the edge of town.

Zuri, the protagonist of the short story, lives an isolated, increasingly dangerous life in Rugby. She’s offered the chance to leave. Despite everything, it’s harder than anyone expects for her to take it.

Home is difficult and complicated, but it never leaves you behind. You mourn, and you move forward. I wanted to write a story about that — about home, but about that duality, as well. About the living and the grieving and the growing that our world demands of us all.

Arkady Martine, who guest-edited Reckoning 4, has written with characteristic power about withstanding the temptation of apocalyptic despair:

“I reject it because the apocalyptic is itself a form of denial. It is a place to hide within. It is also a kind of violence, inflicted on us—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately by agents—whether they are fossil fuel companies or simply people who cannot imagine a future different from the one which gives them some power and some control—to push us away from the work.”

I don’t always know how to reject it. Mired in my early teens, I was horrified at what I read in the news about global warming, the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone layer. My dad would drive us up the motorway to visit family further north, and I would look at the sky, anxious that our car would be the one to exhale that fatal, tipping-point breath of carbon fumes. I couldn’t cope. The terrible scale of the world and the damage done overpowered me in every quiet moment. I had to shove it to the back of my mind just to get through the day without panicking.

We used to get our hair cut here.

I’m older now, and the world is more complicated than one car journey or one apocalyptic instant. I have to balance the pull toward hopelessness with the need to keep being, and with the need to cling to what joy there is to be found.

A friend of mine, like Marlo, makes videos on the internet. I borrowed the title of my story from him, though I haven’t told him yet (if you’re reading this: surprise, bitch). We weren’t talking about the climate, exactly; we were talking about how strange it was to be able to listen to the same song together, at the same time, continents apart. “This is absolutely the best time to be alive,” he said, “and probably the last good time to be alive.” I don’t know to what extent I agree, but at the time it resonated hard. We live in the future, and it is climate catastrophe burning down California and driving indigenous communities off the melting ice of their homes, but it is also listening to an album you love with strangers on the internet. It’s forging a connection you didn’t expect to forge, in a place where you didn’t expect to be. It’s internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, holding space for one another in the midst of a devouring storm.

I became a climate writer by mistake, but not by accident. We know what’s happening. We’ve known for a while. I am trying to live with that knowledge, and to respond to it the only way I know how; I am gathering the things I will take with me into the future, fear enough to keep me moving forward, joy enough to see me through the dark. If this is the last good time to be alive, then I want to approach it with purpose. I hope you enjoy the story, and I hope you at least feel prepared as we face down 2020.

about scripts

I’m writing this post rather than writing a lengthy Twitter thread, fragments of which would be shareable out of context, and the whole of which would probably be much less coherent. There’s been a lot of chat over the past month about scripts — the kind you use when you have to broach something difficult and you’re not sure how to do it. The catalyst is embedded below, just in case you missed it (I envy you your life and your choices) or you need a refresher on what everybody is yelling about this week.

I want to chat briefly about this text that I received from a friend last week: pic.twitter.com/cfwYx3tJQB

— Melissa A. Fabello, PhD (@fyeahmfabello) November 18, 2019

A quick glance into the replies will show that responses have been mixed. A quick glance at your timeline will show that the original tweet has morphed into a really easy joke.

It’s going to sound disingenuous when I’m literally in an anthology of writing about autism (coming in spring, watch this space), but I actually don’t talk all that much about being autistic. My diagnostic history is complicated and it’s hard to feel as though I have a seat at that table. More than that, it’s extremely easy to get hung up on the ways in which my autism makes me… well, inconvenient. I burn out easily on human interaction, which makes me pretty unreliable as a partner or friend. I put so much effort into seeming neurotypical in professional settings — which is itself a response to being mistreated in previous jobs for my autism — that in personal settings I miss cues, or I say careless things, the second I stop paying close and careful attention. I fixate. I find it hard to be in crowded public spaces. I become history’s shittiest control freak the second you put me in an airport. And a lifetime of being treated like an inconvenience for these things — which I try to control, because the people I spend time with deserve that from me, but which I physically cannot always keep a lid on under pressure — has made me abjectly fucking horrible at setting a boundary.

(It’s not the only factor. Nothing is ever the only factor. But it’s major.)

The hallmark of a sociopath.

The thing is that you have to exist in the world. It is a matter of my continued survival as someone who can participate in human life to be able to say that no, I can’t talk right now; or no, I can’t stay late tonight; or no, I need you to stop trying to hug me when you say hello. But equally, I’ve witnessed enough petty internet bullshit, all of which has found its way ill-advisedly onto some kind of public record, to know that it’s smart to think carefully about how you phrase your shit. I’m not trying to bend over backwards to the point where my spine breaks in half. I’m also not trying to be berated at length for being a bad friend, or for being insufficiently nice, or for not using the exact unwritten-rule language that’s considered acceptable this week when I ask for a little breathing space.

Hence scripts. And I’m not alone; it’s not even just fellow autism havers. Captain Awkward, a screenwriter turned advice blogger, has had massive success in laying out clear, coherent how-to guides for her readers, explicitly drawing on her experience of screenwriting to do so — and at the professional end of things, Ask a Manager provides (much looser, but nevertheless) ways to approach common workplace problems with colleagues, supervisors, and HR. You could make a case for any given advice column, honestly, and I know for a fact that there are people out there grousing at the principle of scripts who at least read Dear Prudence.

If the Fabello script tweets seem clunky, that’s because you’re not meant to say them verbatim (you fools; you clowns; you amateurs). By Fabello’s own admission, they’re templates, and you’re meant to use them as guiding principles rather than reel them off verbatim to your unhappy friends. Equally, though — sit with your knee-jerk misgivings about sounding ‘robotic’ or ‘unnatural,’ because that’s how a lot of my fellow autism-havers genuinely speak. I’ve been in appointments with medical professionals, trying to set out the extent of my mental health difficulties, and been told that I’m not convincing because I don’t sound distressed — and I’ve been in a position to work on communicating the way I’m expected to communicate. What hope for everybody else?

I’ve seen people calling the scripts everything from selfish to sociopathic. I’m over it. Sure, not all of them are good — there was one about initiating sexting that made my eyeballs crawl right back into my brain stem, and another one about how to share difficult information that simply didn’t understand how anxiety works. But I’m going to defend the principle of them anyway, because I need them. You probably didn’t notice me using them with you, the last time we talked. And if your bad-faith assumption, on hearing that, is that I was using them to mask my inherent contempt for interpersonal relationships… right. Sure. Because people who don’t care about friendship or partnership put this much effort and care into negotiating everyone’s needs and limitations, all the time.

If you think that people, neurodivergent or otherwise, having useful tools for boundary-setting is a bad or cruel thing, then I question your respect for boundaries — not only in these cases, but more generally. I challenge you to listen, to reflect, and to prove me wrong. And that’s all I have to say about that.

you know i just got done reading JUDITH BUTLER

This one goes out to all my cisgender friends, comrades, colleagues — all of you. It’s a weird one, because I’m absolutely confident that there will be non-binary people (trans people in general, honestly) who disagree with me, or who think I’m making a big deal out of nothing. And that’s fair! But I want to say it, for myself.

A very accurate depiction of me at work (by me, at work).

I’ve been navigating the world of work for about two years as an out non-binary person. When I say ‘out,’ I mean that I’m out to my immediate coworkers and I don’t feel uneasy wearing a pronoun pin, or referring to myself as ‘they.’ (I do a lot more talking about myself in the third person than most people, which is a side effect of being deeply obnoxious.) I’m not in the habit of, say, announcing my pronouns at the beginning of every meeting, or introducing myself as non-binary to every new person I have to work with. My mindset is very much that I’m there to do a job, not to relitigate the question of my identity with everyone around me; my pronouns matter to me, but they are the absolute least of it when it comes to being treated with respect at work, and I’ve been in enough bad work environments to recognise that.

In my current workplace, at interview, I asked whether using they/them at work would be a problem, and was met with the most professional, practical response I could have wished for. Yes, it would be okay; yes, my new manager would let the team know; yes, I could put my pronouns in my email signature; yes, if anyone got shitty with me about it then HR would back me up. My immediate coworkers refer to me as they, and correct themselves with minimal fuss if they slip. I work in an academic environment, and the students I have email contact with are very astute about my pronouns — occasionally I get a ‘Dear Mx M____,’ and though I’m a first-name-basis email user, it always makes me happy. I’m not even the only non-binary person in my workplace! Right now, I’m incredibly lucky.

That’s why it stands out to me, at this point, whenever I have the following interaction with people who know about my gender:

cis colleague: “Hello ladies! Or oh wait actually it’s very binary to say ladies isn’t it, I’m so sorry”
me, Waverly: “It’s genuinely fine”
cis colleague: [looks intently at me] “you know I just got done reading Judith Butler”

Or this one:

cis meeting chair: “This is obviously a real issue facing women in the workplace.”
meeting: [continues for like ten minutes]
cis meeting chair: [looks intently at me] “I should say that I’m sorry to have said women in the workplace when what I meant was parents in the workplace, of whatever gender, that the parent is or is not”
me, Waverly: [grim silence]
cis meeting chair: “there’s more than two genders everybody”

Like… the intent is there, and I truly do believe that intent is important. Not everything, but it matters, especially in environments where not everyone has the same awareness of sensitive social issues. I’m tough enough to speak up when someone is being a bona-fide asshole about gender situations, but I’m hardly going to berate a coworker for a well-meaning but poorly-phrased statement about biological sex, when I could talk to them about it or (crucially) get on with my dang job instead.

But the extremely public apology, extremely directed at the sole trans person in the room, extremely dragged out well past its natural end point, is a performance, and it is not for the benefit of anyone who is trans. It’s awesome that you’re reading Judith Butler; it’s great that you know there’s more than two genders. But both these scenarios build those get-out-of-transphobia-free cards into an apology that’s really just prolonging the moment of frustration for the trans person listening. I literally just want to move past it, every time. I’m tired, okay?

Don’t do this.

But Waverly, you ask. Wav. Pal. What are we supposed to do instead? You can’t tell me you just want us to ignore it when we fuck up.

Correct! Here are some alternatives you might wish to try, if you have ever hit me with the wrong pronoun and felt the urge to tell me in self-defence how much you love Janet Mock:

• Email me after the fact. A colleague did this recently — he got my pronoun wrong during a casual chat with the team in my office, went away, and sent me an email later that afternoon apologising. This was cool, because it didn’t put me on the spot, it didn’t call undue attention to me, and it meant we could have a secluded, text-based chat about pronouns more generally, without at any point derailing my actual work. Score!

• Correct yourself quickly, and move on. “Waverly said she was going to — sorry, they were going to make a phone call. After that we can catch up!” (This is an unlikely scenario, in that I hate a phone call, but work with me.) It keeps us on task, it shows me you care, and again, it doesn’t turn the entire focus of the interaction to me. Love that for us!

• Honestly? You don’t even have to correct yourself, or apologise. Just move on, and use the right pronoun next time. I’ll notice, and I’ll appreciate it.

I know for an absolute fact that I don’t speak for every trans person here. That being said, I’m usually very open to taking questions about my gender, at least with people who I know are in good faith. When I first came out as agender at work, I had a conversation with a colleague who knew almost nothing about gender identity, and who had a lot of questions about how I experienced my identity. So I answered them! It was good for me to have space to articulate my gender situation in depth; it was good for her to have someone to ask, rather than to risk making recourse to the internet; it was good for us both to have a kind, respectful conversation, and it brought us closer as colleagues and friends. I’m never mad at curiosity. Ask me on a lunch break, sure — but do ask me, even if you’re worried I’ll take umbrage at your questions. The worst I’ll say is ‘can we reschedule.’

Gender is weird! I’ll be the first to admit it. It is okay to have questions and it is understandable to trip over it sometimes. Just don’t trip into a deep hole of performative allyship and then try to race everyone else in the room to the bottom. Surely we all have better things to be doing.

review: VERY AUTHENTIC PERSON by Kat Sinclair

There’s a blog post on Poetry Foundation that I think about whenever I sit down to write. Hannah Gamble, who worked with young children while in graduate school, shares some of the more extraordinary turns of phrase she found in the barely-legible poetry of her fourth-grade students. (Even if you have no investment at all in this review, I highly recommend reading the baby poetry. I first read it in 2014, and I have never forgotten ‘But it lives where I live.’)

Gamble compares the work of the fourth-graders to poetry by middle- and high-school students, and observes that

“By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.”

My copy, chilling out on my desk.

Reading Very Authentic Person, it is evident that its author has rediscovered how to overwhelm. This is by no means to suggest that it’s undersocialised; it’s wired-in to the world, returning repeatedly to social media, citing ultra-specific modernities from David Davis to highest ever grossing film Avatar (2009). Even the title of the collection has a very online wryness to it. I mean to say that Kat Sinclair has found strikingly fresh and affecting ways to treat her own life. The result is a thesis on alienation and exhaustion that is world-weary, and that belongs to the world that has worn it down, but is no less compelling or substantial for it.

It lingers over specifics, though never for too long; each poem runs its fingers, cherishing, over life’s precious mundanities one at a time. A car show, or a spider hanging from the ceiling, or an ice lolly as a gesture of forgiving comfort. Perhaps it lingers where it can afford to linger because it is always, one way or another, in motion. It is quivering on the bus, or it is reading and rereading on a platform, or it is walking down a hill to the station. The body is home, because the body, at least, is always present. The body is a house (“Can we queer the structure of the house please,” asks ‘Body Quadratics,’ “I want to be a door and ajar both at once”), or a clothes-horse, or some other object that can be arranged to the most pleasing effect.

But the body is also fallible, and a site of spiralling dread. The collection circles back to guts, to the uterus, to memory and to death; it dwells on the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife, trying to look back, ultimately became. It worries over a mole — “the mysterious screaming orb on my shoulder” — as a grim omen, even as it insists that it’s fine, really, the presence of the mole can be tolerated because it’s kind of a whole-ass mood. It’s like reading someone’s trip down the anxiety rabbit-hole by way of a long-distance bus. (It is hard to read Very Authentic Person without thinking of the X5 bus between Oxford and Cambridge, which meanders through the Midlands for more than three hours, and which bore witness to a new existential crisis every time it circled back around to the Grafton Centre in 2014.)

Hyper-aware of the meaning contained in every day-to-day tableau, every photograph, every threadbare Twitter opinion, Very Authentic Person interrogates its own authenticity at length. “There is nothing new in me now all that I am growing is / regurgitated and beautiful,” writes Sinclair in ‘In .avi Format,’ and she’s not wrong: the regurgitations, which Gamble identified in her middle-schoolers as safe and thoroughly-socialised, are stunning. Recollected details accrue and layer and crystallise. It’s a lens that affords an arresting perspective on well-worn subjects — which are well-worn, in a sense, because we keep turning them over and over in our minds. Examined from the right perspective, they still have the power to devastate.

Very Authentic Person will be released on 13 November 2019 from the 87 Press. (You should totally pick up a copy.)

larger than the usual romantic love

I guess this is the second in a series of posts I’m going to call ‘Why I Write’ — sort of a follow-up to the one I wrote about redemption arcs and Steven Universe. This one’s about love and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Specifically it’s about a comment that an early reader (hi, Livali!) made on an early draft of Last Testament. ‘I love how you write attraction as something terrifying,’ they said, and my gut reaction was — well, isn’t it?

(For a sneak preview of Attraction Being Terrifying, by the way, you can witness me reading aloud from Last Testament’s opening scene at the West Hollywood Library! Thanks to Lambda Literary for the opportunity; it was my first major public reading and I had a great time.)

Phoebe gets it.

And I guess it’s not as terrifying as all that, to most people. Other people seem to manage the process of having crushes, or feeling attracted to a person, without the kind of standing-on-the-edge-of-a-skyscraper-rooftop terror I always seem to feel at the prospect. I have friends who are married; they seem okay. Insofar as I have a role model for relationship-having, it’s my aunt and uncle, who are staunchly practical and almost unimpeachably fearless — they each married their best friend and business partner, knowing they could communicate effectively and work together well.

Meanwhile, I’m out here experiencing an emotion I can best describe as existential vertigo whenever I find myself liking another person. There is no reasoning behind it, the way there’s no reasoning behind looking down from a great height and feeling your organs lurch sideways.

Maybe it’s a queer thing; those unhelpfully formative crushes on straight girls will do a number on anyone. Maybe it’s a mentally-ill thing; regulating emotions is both nightmare and necessity at the best of times, and all the more so when those emotions have a cause and a target. Maybe it’s just that sincerity is excruciating and the prospect of rejection is a uniquely awful threat. Frustrating as it is to concede, that quote about submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known is inescapable for a reason.

In Last Testament, Ethel and Ama meet for the first time in an airport, and their mortifying ordeal immediately begins. Ethel’s first, horrified thought is — to paraphrase — oh no, she’s hot. It’s not a particularly happy realisation. Ethel is unconvinced that someone like Ama, who is smart and creative and driven, would ever voluntarily give them the time of day. Whatever happiness they feel at having found a friend and an ally is tempered, for a long time, by their conviction that they have to suppress their big inconvenient feelings in order to keep her around.

I met my first partner for the first time in an airport, too. I was twenty years old and I’d spent the past twelve hours or more in transit; I’d nearly fought with my dad at London Heathrow; I’d spent an eight-hour flight to Detroit in what I can only describe as an anxiety daze, then fumbled my way across the US border and waited out a connection delay, totally alone. Even before that, I’d spent months at a time worrying and waiting, packing and repacking, researching kissing on WikiHow (I profoundly wish I were joking). Reality felt larger and sharper and more visceral than I’d ever known it to feel before. I might as well have been walking through a story, following the action as it rose.

I’ve mellowed out a bit, in the years since — at least, I have mellowed enough that meeting someone I like is less likely to give me conniptions at fifty thousand feet. The basic anxiety remains. What if I’ve invested too much? What if I’ve misunderstood? What if I’m wrong?

The difficulty is that in their own right those worries are exhausting and off-putting. The title of this post is from Richard Siken, who, as usual, managed to nail me directly to the floor:

Dennis also gets it, horrifyingly enough.

“Actually you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.”

But it could just as easily have come from Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the show that took a genuinely appalling character and made me feel for him. Like every character in Sunny, Dennis is a wildly exaggerated presentation of human failings and bad behaviours; he’s a serial predator whose security in his own body oscillates wildly between zero and ‘I am a god,’ and whose childhood sexual trauma he is determined not to confront. His monstrosity cohabits with his vulnerability and trauma in a way that the show never makes it easy to evaluate; he’s both pitiable and cruel, at the mercy of his own damage even as he turns it outward onto others. He hurts your heart, but he’s terrible. No one, per Siken, will ever want to sleep with him.

Of course I worry that I’m too much. Why wouldn’t I? Doesn’t everyone? That’s what makes attraction and terror such easy bedfellows. Big feelings burst out in messy, unattractive ways; anxieties and self-loathings emerge with their teeth bared, ready to bite anyone who gets too close. That’s why I write about it. Not only is it a compelling source of conflict, it’s one that I feel very deeply, and one that I know I’m not alone in feeling.

Conflicts resolve, or they don’t. Either I get to write my way through the fear and into a hopeful ending, or I get to write my way into the fear, and put it into words for someone else to take heart in. A true story, in closing: this year, I misjudged someone’s feelings for me, and it sucked. But crucially, it did not and will not suck forever. Even if terror doesn’t resolve the way you hope, it will fade, given space enough and time. The world doesn’t end. The people need to know.

top 4 photos taken directly before the apocalypse

I commissioned my very cool and talented friend Livali Wyle to draw portraits of the cast of my book, THE LAST TESTAMENT OF ETHEL ZHAO, currently undergoing extensive prose surgery ahead of submission round one! These are the results, which you can click to see character names and flower symbolism. Enjoy my horrible children!!!

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get the look: queer oceanic wretch

I’m afraid I’m going to be that guy who prefaces their delicious recipe with a bunch of personal maundering, so bear with me a moment:

The ideal gender presentation is ‘winged monstrosity,’ really.

The thing people notice about me first is my hair. This is by design. This is because I am trans, and more dysphoric than I tend to give myself credit for, and I have a deeply uneasy relationship with being perceived by others. (Who doesn’t? It’s 2019.) I have stuck with my blue hair even though it’s stopped being cool and started being a slightly awkward throwback to internet-activist Tumblr in 2015, because it’s one of very few things that makes me feel okay about being physically manifest. I try to make up for the vintage keyboard-warrior energy of it all by being really grouchy and ambivalent online, and also by actually donating money to causes when I can.

Bright blue hair is a fun distraction from the concept of gender, or gender presentation. I can be wearing a dress and a practical heel on my walk to work, because I love comfort and hate overheating, and still get double-takes because I look in some capacity unexpected. I try to emphasise this where I can by wearing a lot of black, so the hair stands out more (and the feminine ‘dress’ silhouette gets offset by the absence of pattern or colour). I do not even think of myself as someone who cares about fashion! But then I think about how much consideration goes into the way I present myself to the world. Does ‘caring about fashion’ have to look like caring about fashion labels, or fashion trends? Increasingly I am dubious.

It is all a huge compromise because trans healthcare is absolutely impenetrable in the UK for people transitioning across the binary — I don’t know even remotely what our gender identity clinics would do with the concept of low-dose T — and my body feels wrong even in a binder and the way I am built is fundamentally, universally incompatible with the way I want to be seen. But we get by! As I tell my friends whenever I make an objectively terrible choice: nobody’s died yet.

Maybe you are also having gender presentation difficulties, and you want a colourful way to circumvent them. Maybe you just want to read a hair dye tutorial! Who am I to say? Regardless, I hope you enjoy this guide to dyeing your hair at home, and I hope you will share any results with me (on Twitter, perhaps?) in due time.

(Nota bene: it works best if, like me, you have short hair. If you have long hair, you’re going to want a more structured approach to putting colours on it, probably — or at least a second pair of hands to help you out.)

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You will need:

• Semi-permanent hair dye. This is important. Because I am on that next-level shit at this point, I use a mix of Manic Panic’s After Midnight and Atomic Turquoise shades, and I tend to find that their stuff lasts pretty well over time; I usually top up my colour every two months or so. Do some research, talk to friends, read some product reviews, and pick a colour that speaks to you.

• Bleached hair. Full disclosure: I get my hair bleached professionally, because my manual dexterity is abysmal and I love to not have scalp burns. If you have the means to go to a salon for this, I recommend it. It is also possible to pick up a home bleaching kit and do it yourself, though I strongly advise having a more experienced friend help you out if it’s your first time.

• Disposable gloves. Nothing fancy; you can buy them in quantity for low prices online.

• Vaseline.

• An old shirt that you don’t care about too much.

• A plastic container (if your dye is in a squeezy tube).

• A plastic bag or a disposable shower cap.

Let’s begin:

1. You’ve bleached your hair, right? And you’re wearing your old shirt? Good.

2. Smear Vaseline around your hairline and onto the tips of your ears. This makes it exponentially easier to remove any accidental smears of dye from the most common splash zones! You will thank yourself later.

3. Dispense dye into your plastic container. If you’re mixing colours, you can do that at this stage, or you can use two containers and kind of smear the colours together on your head for that fun and whimsical ‘two-tone’ look. (Don’t do that yet, obviously.)

4. Put on a pair of disposable gloves.

5. Scoop up some dye and start smearing! You want to cover your gloved fingers with the dye, and then comb your fingers through your hair, rubbing in the dye as you go. I prefer to start at the back of my head and work forward, as the back of my head is the place where I invariably put too little dye; I’m more attentive to it if I start there.

6. If you can avoid getting dye all over your scalp, that’s probably a good idea — try to minimise finger-scalp contact where possible! But stains do wash out, and the scalp is maybe the best place to conceal them in the meantime.

7. As your head gets more covered in dye, try to gather your hair on top of your head as you go. Think of how you lather your hair with shampoo, and work on that kind of basis! The dye may start to lather up a little as you go; this is normal and fine.

8. When all your hair is covered in dye and piled up on your head, take the plastic bag (or shower cap, if you have one) and cover your hair with it. If you’ve got a plastic bag, you’ll need to tie it off around your head — make sure it’s covering all your hair before you do this! This step is twofold: it stops you getting dye everywhere as you wait for it to cook, but it also traps heat around your scalp, facilitating the cooking process.

9. Give it some time. Per most packaging for box dye, you don’t need more than half an hour. My experience has been that the longer you can leave the dye on your head, the better. I go for two hours minimum (that’s either two episodes of a TV show or an afternoon nap, depending on how weary I am). Other people prefer to go longer! If it’s your first time dyeing, err on the side of caution and give it a couple of hours; you can adjust the process as you repeat it. (Put an old towel down on your pillow if you want to nap.)

10. Take off the old shirt before you unbag your hair! Then rinse it through over a tub, sink or shower with cool water. It may take some rinsing, depending on the length of your hair and the quantity of dye you used, so take your time and don’t be afraid to comb it out with your fingers. When the water’s running clear, or almost clear, then stop rinsing and dry your hair. (I make sure I have a towel around my shoulders for this bit, so I can get the worst of the water out of my hair right away without dripping all over my bathroom.

11. Blow dry for fastest results — and voila! You have colourful hair now, or you should do. If you can see any patches you didn’t quite cover with dye, it’s totally fine to take another crack at it — just apply the dye as needed, make sure it’s bundled up into a bag or shower cap, give it some time, and rinse.

Aftercare:

• You are going to want to avoid washing your hair for a few days. If you do a full shampoo wash too quickly after dyeing, then the colour will wash out much faster, which is probably not the desired effect. If you need to wet your hair in order to style it, then do wet it, but try to keep the water as cool as you can!

• When you do wash your hair, the colour will run. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Use an old towel to dry it, and soap off your hands after washing your hair so they don’t emerge from your shower in technicolour.

• Make peace with the fact that you’re going to get some colour on your pillowcase. I have a plain, dark-coloured pillowcase for right after I redye my hair (and for taking with me to visit friends, as a courtesy).

• Find a good colour-safe shampoo, and use small baby quantities of it whenever you wash your hair. I can recommend Timotei and Herbal Essences as brands with good colour-safe products, personally!

• Be super kind to your hair after bleaching it! Get out your conditioner, or apply a hair mask. One thing I like about Manic Panic is that it contains conditioner, so the process of dyeing my hair also nourishes it after bleaching.

Congratulations! Your hair is excellent now. Go forth and make the people double-take.