No one is coming to save you

a reality in which we all feel, but must accept, in all its piercing ways.

Exactly one year ago is when it set in for me,

No one is coming to save you.

It was a phrase I think we all hear from elders, that in our most trying times, truly the only person who can save you is well…You.

We are all told that, I know I had that expression burned into me too. But with that,

How do I save someone, myself for that matter. When not even I know myself, the one that needs the saving.

All those expressions billowed up in me, festered in the darkest parts of what it meant to be me. Who is me? For all that.

If there was a lord, I do not think even he had an answer for an anomaly such as myself,and maybe you too. To certain degrees we are all just that, an anomaly.

We do things through nature, through feeling, and often times we can never truly explain why we do those things, we love.

Why do we enjoy the esoteric music we love? Why do I love the screeching sounds of noise music and how it brings me a certain comfort that not even I can describe. When I hear a tape machine run through a distortion pedal, returning a feedback loop that would cause most people to shield their ears. Instead, I lock into a trance where I can truly feel what it means to be in the moment.

But even with that, we have two extreme responses to it, mine and others. Both can be considered ‘Valid’.

And it always will be up to you to decide where you land on that.

What is me, however?

A year to date, I began what’s known as Hormone Replacement Therapy, HRT.

And while I do fully believe you do not need to go through the medical world, to be encompassed as Trans. We come in all shapes and sizes. I’m truly honored to be peers, friends, and partners in art with so many of those people. Those who subscribe to the binary and those who do not. They exist, and always have for that matter. And as the noise of the radical critical theorists become louder and louder. My fellow peers, they will continue to persist. As will I. But those friends are the strongest beings I think I will ever have the grace of knowing.

For myself, I find my identity in more of the binary, I am on feminizing hormones, in which I draw them from a vial, and inject them into my thigh. Every week. It’s become a ritual for me, in the same way I know it is the same for my trans-femme friends.

With all that said, I’m truly one of the lucky ones to be able to celebrate an anniversary in this way. Most of us do not, myself included have lost beautiful souls in their pursuit to being themselves, and living comfortable in their skin. It is the innate like mindedness we all want for each other. And what I would want for you, whether how your environment brought your mind to become comfortable with your body, skin, thoughts, and everything that encompasses, you.

It has not brought me any solace. And everyday I am working to get to a point where I can not only reach for the stars but touch them, grab them, and insert them in the sacred place I call my heart.

My softness has became my strength throughout this year,

With my new found voice, and articulated mind.

I’m truly ready to weaponize it, and to be something ‘more’ in that sense.

But the contradiction lies in my softness and righteousness, I have found I have the sharpest of blades, a blade in which I can cut the toughest of flesh and drive it to bone. Twisting and turning it, continuing a generational pain and more so trauma to whomever I see as a target.

As much as I want that, in my feeble righteous way, it’s the easy thing to do.

With those weapons, the sharp blade. There is no way for it to be hard, to drive to bone, to kill, to harm, to persecute even with it’s mere presence.

I found an even higher strength and respect in having that weapon, the sharpest of them. And doing nothing more but staying it. Sheathing it. Maybe sometimes hiding it, but not in a way to betray those around you when it comes time to pull it out.

That time will come when you will need to use the sharpest of your weapons, maybe as an act of survival.

I still would implore you to lay it down,

Yes, the blade in which that can drive right into your enemy.

I would choose to do nothing more but to lay it down, for I cannot continue the process of driving to bone with it. I’ve twisted the sharpest of them in myself. I know the pain in which I inflicted upon myself, what am I? To do it to another.

I am choosing to not continue the generational trauma, pain, agony that I have seen take so many of those who shaped my words, even in this writing.

With that, I wouldn’t even say that’s the right thing to do. Myself included may feel the repercussions of those actions at a later date. But I feel like that’s the point. So once again I’ll change the question now that I think you know a bit more about me.

Be well, be safe,

Make some art,

and then share it,

then do it again.

love.

-freya

What is, you?