Sans Seraph

Tag: life

  • Magic with a k

    I went to my first rave in February of 2009. I had a cursory interest in electronic music, but was never very close to the pulse of it to like anything beyond what I occasionally heard on the radio. Finding new music, especially something so underground (at the time) was hard back then.

    A person I was in the dorms with in college, contacted me out of the blue one day and asked if I wanted to go with him to a rave in San Francisco. He also asked if I wanted to try MDMA. Up until that point I had only ever drank and smoked pot, but I was definitely open to trying more. Afterall, I styled myself, at the time, as a burgeoning gonzo journalist, and I felt it was time to jump down the rabbit hole.

    To this day there is no single event in my life that I can point to that changed me so much. After that night, where I danced with abandon for the first time, heard music that I really connected with, and talked to strangers without a care in the world, I was forever changed. What followed was a decade and a half of learning about myself, about others, and truly becoming a better person.

    What was, in the beginning, just a thing I loved to do on weekends, where I’d see people I only met in the dark and on drugs, eventually became a career. After getting my journalism degree in 2012, I decided to pivot into doing event lighting. My roommate at the time (who I met through raving) was tired of seeing me struggle to find work as a writer, and decided to show me the ropes as a stagehand. After that, it was nothing but concerts and festivals for a very long time.

    Life, as it does, got in the way eventually. I stopped working shows after the pandemic. I was incredibly burned out, and having a few years to sit with myself, realized I couldn’t handle the stress anymore. I was drinking too much, was suicidal, and needed a change. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you know what that change was, but even that took a few years to come about after formally leaving the event industry.

    Last weekend I went to a rave in the woods that was attended by mostly trans people. I haven’t been to a proper rave, and especially not a renegade, in a long time, and it was one of the things I was very excited to do since I started transition and was really feeling better about myself. In very me fashion, I showed up being rather curmudgeon-y. As the night wore on I started to get into it, and, mid-conversation with my friend, I stopped.

    “Did you suddenly realize this is what it’s all about?” She asked.

    I had. There is something magical, and not card magic, but magick, with a k, about being in a place like that. You’re all together, dancing, enjoying your life, surrounded by nature, and you truly feel like what you’re doing matters.

    On the surface, you’re just a bunch of people in the woods, or in a warehouse, or an arena, listening to a bunch of computer music with bright lights, but there is an intention to something like that. It doesn’t always happen. I’ve certainly been to electronic shows that felt more like a concert, especially some of the larger ones, but the intimacy of a bunch of people sweating together in a warehouse, or doing a bunch of drugs in the woods, becomes a sort of synergistic feeling that vibrates outward like the gravity waves from a collapsing star.

    So that’s why I do it. That’s why I make art, that’s why I love people, and make space, and why I get so mad at the world when it doesn’t see things the way I do. We as a species are at our best when we’re together. We are all parts of a greater whole, and all I hope is that one day we figure it out. Until then, as long as there are trans people dancing in the woods to bleeps and bloops, that hope will remain.

  • Searching for a former clarity

    I don’t think I’ll ever get used to winter in Seattle. I am beginning to see the fleeting light of my fourth spring here, and, though normally I am ecstatic this time of year for the return of the light and warmth, this year it seems like that same feeling of rebirth and energy is missing.

    Spring really is a beautiful time here. There is just so much green; green that wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t such a wet place. Every year around April the dark lessens, the air warms, and the rain slowly retreats, ever warmer and less frequent, into the most beautiful summer you can imagine before once again running away for nine months.

    Once the flowers start to bloom and life returns to the land, it has always felt like life is also breathed back into me. I have terrible seasonal affective disorder, or, I did. I was really hoping that this winter would be different, because I am different, and, it was, but not in the way I was hoping.

    My life seems to have taken on a path of extremes. Where before starting my transition I existed in a state of constant melancholy, reaching down to despair, I now fluctuate between extreme happiness and extreme agitation. On one hand I have the endless sea of love and care that is my relationship with my partner, who continues to surprise me with the depth of her love for me, and on the other I am bearing witness to the destruction of my homeland as it is gutted and resold to the highest bidder.

    Being trans in America in 2025, or, honestly, being a person with a lick of sense in America in 2025, has become akin to watching a car crash in molasses. The die is cast, the stage is set, we all know where this is going, but the process into fascism seems inexorably slow. With the blanket tariffs, and the elimination of wealth with a speed and magnitude which has never been seen before, I think no one that isn’t caught up in the cult thinks that this ends any other way. At least the orange rectal fissure got one thing right, he is going to run this country like a business, which is to say, burn it down and sell it off to the highest bidder.

    The April 5th protests were the largest ones yet, and somehow the sycophants think that it’s all a ruse. The protesters were paid, the images were AI generated, whatever mental gymnastics they have to do to make it seem like the path they are on is the righteous one. History will not look fondly on this time, yet the outcome will not be a return to American greatness.

    If the twentieth century was the century of pax americana, then the twenty-first will be the century of American despair. We are no longer “the good guys,” hell, we probably never were. John Wayne isn’t coming in to save the day. In fact, like John Wayne, who made a name for himself playing a soldier on the silver screen while other men gave their lives in war, yet never went to war himself, America has become that which it originally opposed, a bloated tyrant inflicting its personality on distant shores.

    A lack of equality and fairness is the problem here. As long as one group, one country, one person, holds more power than another, there can never truly be peace. For a long time I thought we were moving in the right direction. I harbored the light of hope in my heart for so long, yet like the dull spring in Seattle I now face, that light has dwindled and the magic seems to be fleeting. I loved this country. This is my home, but I do not feel at home here. I have no intention of leaving, but my duty is not to this land, but to those who dwell in it. I do not know if I any longer wish to identify myself as American. I simply exist as a citizen of humanity, who hopes that with each action going forward that I am on the side of goodness and love.

    The wheels of history will continue to turn, and just as how a dreary spring will give way to the light and energy of summer, this will pass. The house divided will fall, and the survivors will build a new house, one with its walls made to include all, and it’s foundation built on the weary packed earth of history.

    Let us hope that next time we remember.

  • Things have changed

    The first time I ever did hallucinogens was at San Francisco Pride in 2009. I consumed what I at the time didn’t know was a rather large dose of mushrooms. Within an hour I began to lose myself as the roar of the crowds and general chaos and over-stimulation consumed me. I remember saying to my friends that “things have changed” as what was already an incredibly over active mind and socially awkward person began to unravel.

    Then something beautiful happened. I let go.

    It wasn’t a conscious decision, but as the psylocibin coursed through my synapses, I let go. I had crossed the abyss of what has been termed “ego death,” and while the drug fueled search for self of my twenties is the topic of another post, the important part to focus on here is that when I let go, things got better.

    One major lesson I’ve kept learning in my life is that attachment is the root of suffering. Yes, that’s very Buddhist of me, but it stands. Even in the past year, as I keep navigating the choppy waters of transition, I keep realizing that holding onto the past is really not doing me any favors.

    Last night I attempted to do something that the old me loved. I got all dressed up, grabbed my beautiful girlfriend, and we drug ourselves out to a bar to go see some local punk bands, and support a charity for trans youth. Yet about fifteen minutes into being there, I was ready to leave. Between knowing I couldn’t have more than one drink, since I had work the next day, and just generally not being a fan of crowds after spending a decade in the event industry, I realized that a lot of the things I was looking forward to doing from the past as the old me aren’t really part of the new me.

    I’ve done this four times now in the past year. It is the very definition of insanity.

    Things have changed. I have changed, to which you say “of course you have.” Which makes sense. My body is changing, my mind certainly has, but what is astounding is just how much all of those hormone driven changes really do change who I am. I’m still me, in that I’m still him, in a lot of ways, but more and more I realize that a lot of him was just bits of personalities strung together to cope with the depression, and dysphoria, and anxiety.

    I’ve said a lot in the past year that I finally feel like a real person, and that before transition I was basically just waiting around to die. A person doing that isn’t really a person, they’re a shell. Even though I never had a real strong sense of “being a woman in a man’s body” I certainly wasn’t okay with being a man. I was so against it, in fact, that I operated like some cheap children’s restaurant automaton. Faded from age and neglect, the face smiles and the song plays while there is an audience and the lights are on, but then when the doors are locked for the day the false life fades and the body slumps. That’s what it felt like for me.

    I took my old ID and put it into the temple at Burning Man last year. It wasn’t something I had planned to do, but it felt right. I felt like I had to honor the pain and suffering he went through, but also draw a line in the dust saying that “this is where he ends and I begin.” It was one of the most defining personal moments of my transition so far. Yet last night I found myself still trying to pretend that I’m the same person that I let go in that conflagration.

    So from now on, I’m going to push myself to try new things. To accept that I need to figure myself out all over. I’m older now, I have a day job. I don’t drink as much. I prefer a small gathering of friends over being squeezed into a room with loud music and strangers. That’s okay. I can be a different person, because, in a lot of ways, I am.

    Give yourself a little bit of grace, girl.

  • No contact

    I’ve been dealing with an interesting emotion recently.

    My childhood was not what you could call “good.” Sure, on the surface things seemed to be fine. Sure, there was the slow financial decline, that saw me continually sheltered in smaller and more modest dwellings the longer my childhood ran on. There was also the crusade of isolation from any sort of extended family, either due to my mother’s machinations, or my father’s lack of care and alcoholism. Then the emotional abuse and turmoil that extended to both me and my grandmother perpetrated by my mom. Also my absent father’s complete lack of interest in any real part of my life beyond obligation. However I was “given anything I ever wanted.”

    What I wanted though, was a home that didn’t feel like a warzone, or some sort of free range prison. I wanted a father that showed some interest in my life beyond when I was young and cute. I wanted a mother that wasn’t so obsessed with me that she stunted any sort of self discovery I had to force me to stay on the “right path.” It was never about what I wanted. It was about the status quo.

    An interesting thing happens after your egg cracks, where you start noticing all of the signs. I didn’t think I had a lot of signs that I was trans, but it’s so obvious now that I carry significant regret that I didn’t figure things out sooner. I think the original thoughts that there might be something different about me starting forming in high school. They would then rear their head again in waves until I finally cracked in early 2024.

    When I finally came out to my parents, they treated it exactly how I expected them to. I had hoped that there would be some sort of understanding, if not an acceptance. I was met not with love and willingness to understand, but hatred. So poisoned by the rhetoric of hating the “other” were they that I suddenly went from their child to something subhuman.

    Nine days after I gave them the news, on the day of my name change hearing, my father texted me from my mother’s phone. He informed me that my mom seemed to be suffering from a stroke, and he was taking her to the hospital. I tried to contact him to get any information, but to no avail. In late February I received a text from my mother, full of errors and jumbled words, informing me that she had been home for three days. The text was essentially lamenting how I now hated her.

    It was never about me. I was never expected to be my own person. It was never their desire that I forge my own path, or be happy. All that was required of me was that I fell in line and continue the crusade; of capitalism, progress, genocide, whatever our fearless white leaders told us was our god given path.

    As one might guess, that went over well.

    So I chose not to respond to her message. I will probably never speak to my parents again. I feel relieved by that. To know that I can finally heal from all of that. From the emotional pain, the fear, the bitterness. I am very sure had I not been so marked by them I would have accepted myself as I was far earlier. I’d be in a better place now, not that I have regrets. This is my karma, after all.

    This speaks to an interesting parallel in the soul of our country right now. The people in charge are mostly the people that are of my parent’s generation. This country is going through changes. The world as we know it is entering a new era, and much like my adolescence, the ones in charge are fighting tooth and nail to do what they think is best, with no regard to the flow of time and progress. We as a nation are being gripped by the cold, dead hand of the past and are being pulled into the graves of our forebearers.

    So afraid of their world changing in ways they don’t approve of, our leaders seek to freeze our lives into a form that never actually existed. Blinded by the fog of nostalgia for a time where it was only good to be white, Christian, and male, those in power will hold us fast and sink to the depths as they breath their last. One final send off from the me generation.

    So we “go no contact.” We must no longer let those who refuse to work for the future keep us in the past. If they see fit to ignore the laws, we should too. Keeping working the National Parks, and keep paying those park workers too. Refuse to clean their houses. Boycott their products. Approve that trans person’s passport. “Playing dirty” doesn’t have to mean throwing bricks and torching teslas.

    You can be your own person. We have spent far too much time doing what we’ve been told. If they refuse to see us, then we should refuse to listen to them.

    What of those that are listening to their parents, then? Those who are happy in their clouded misery? It’s okay, we all have to figure it out in our own time. It took me until I was 35 to figure out I was trans, and one day you’ll figure out that all of this hate isn’t who you are too.

    And you’ll be better for it.