I say this not to exceptionalize myself-as if acknowledgment of affect were a way toward escape-but to say these experiences are typical of trans women, and, more broadly, how the academy is structured, unemployment, grief. A time that, like a gate or rack, keeps one just before a visible open. I was in the thicket of a kind of time that is very proximate to death. I was “depressed” and “suicidal,” in a kind of pathological way I still can’t grant myself. One evening I saw a post on Facebook about the life expectancy of a trans woman being 27-which I doubted, still doubt-but I had turned 27, and, I don’t know, it felt impossible not to shut the world off. I am not ashamed of what I was writing or had written, but across those months in the winter and early spring of 2016 when I graduated my MFA, I was unemployed, lost my healthcare, my cohort moved back home with their families (which for various reasons typical to many, but especially trans women, was not available for me at that time), I was turned down for work across a spectrum of legality, two of my immediate friends were hospitalized (trans women who were assaulted), and three friends died (all trans women, two who died by their own hands and one who was murdered). Writing was, for me, like a gate, or slab beneath a charred, dripping piece of a thing, collecting remains. Read the poem, listed as “III” at Poetry Foundation, and listed as “LVII” in the collection. Feeld, by Jos Charles (Milkweed Editions, 2018).
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