No Thanks: A Memoir

I never learned how to say what I mean without saying it in story-format.

I have no intention of developing that skill.

The Practice of Resistance

i took a class about preaching resistance to powers of oppression.

the second half of the semester, we were to start a practice of resistance, and our final project would be a work of art that came out of that practice.

mid-semester, i got top surgery rejection news (again). i was trying very hard not to want to die, but with minimal success.

I wasn't sincerely Christian for very long, but I was sincerely Christian enough that I went to Divinity School.

In retrospect, yeah, that's my bad.

It wasn't all bad, though.

i told my preceptor, megan, that It feels like everyone either thinks that trans people shouldn’t exist, or that our existence is exclusively about suffering. it feels like everyone thinks trans people are better off dead, so by simply not dying, i was resisting oppression. i asked if my practice of resistance could be to keep on not dying.

she said yes, please do that.

I was infuriated.

I told her she shouldn’t let me do that. others were doing real work, resisting and fighting oppression. i can't just... not die, something everyone else is doing all day every day. what a passive, bullshit practice. she shouldn’t let me be so obsessed with myself. she should make me focus on other people, do something active, something useful.

and then i told her that suicide was starting to feel reasonable. that there were not only no good reason not to kill myself, but there were very good reasons to kill myself. she was very worried about me.

i told her i needed someone to argue with me about it. even if i wasn’t convinced by her arguments, i needed to argue it out, because that helps me process my thoughts and feelings. so she argued with me. we met several times over the next few weeks.

i am genuinely not sure how she put up with me. i was occasionally aggressive, extremely moody, and deeply frustrating.

i eventually told her that while i was not entirely convinced that suicide was not the preferable option, i was probably safe for now - i wasn’t actively suicidal anymore.

i kept on not dying as my practice of resistance, but i still had to make some kind of art project out of that. so i started drawing sad little drawings of myself.​

and then i wrote sad little stories about myself - all the reasons it was really hard for me not to die.

​

i ended up taking a medical leave of absence that semester. so i never actually finished or turned in that project. megan did continue to check in on me, making sure i planned to keep on not dying.

two semesters later, i decided to re-enroll as a theological studies student, which meant i would only need to take one more class and write a thesis.

i was still not emotionally stable. I was working mostly full time. i had no ideas for a thesis. i just wanted to do the bare minimum and get the fuck out of there.

i learned that, as an alternative to a traditional thesis, you could create a work of art, with an accompanying twenty pages of writing, including research and some kind of theological explanation for your work of art.

so i sorted my sad little stories into four categories, and called those thesis chapters. i titled them ‘sex/rape’, ‘queer/cishet’, ‘neurodiverse/neurotypical’, and ‘this/that (and everything in between)’. and it just so happened that i’d previously preached sermons that fit into each of those categories, and those sermons altogether totalled right around twenty pages.

​​

Some of the stories here are from my thesis, and some of them have been written in the years since. I'm not very good at writing - I don't have the diligence or the focus or the time.

But I write sometimes, when I can, or it helps.

I keep calling them 'sad little stories', and it's true - most of them are sad, sometimes almost unbearably so, for me.

but the idea - i don't always like to spell things out like this, but it's really important to me that you understand - is that I refuse to let my life be characterized by suffering.

I'm trying so hard not to become disenchanted, to remain joyful, to hold onto my tenderness.

Below is an explanation of how this silly little thing started.

The 'chapters' tab in the header is longer stories

and the 'shorts' tab is not.