2022 is Insight

Kwe’ nitap
Mid-writing this entry, we found omicron in our home.
While thankfully BB and I did not catch it as we helped to care for the two friends we are staying with, I was saddened to see our friends here, as well as across the country be hounded by their places of business to be healthier faster.
As we continue slowly to recover and take on new relations, and to work with previous relations to help them through stress, trauma, and violence, the behavior we have seen used to scare people back to work, and into choices that harm them and under irreparably, continues to serve as a model that we refuse to be part of.
Thankfully, these things continue to change.

Despite this, societies rushing to force those in their care to be capable and healthy before they are healed, and centering governmental means to aid relations in their care on money over compassion, are why we globally had the biggest covid spike to date. It was a spike predicted upon those behaviors long before it hit. I do believe that everyone will continue to learn from this, and continue to stand up for themselves, and their relations.

Hopefully y’all can expect a “proper” update soon, full of notes on
+ redirective status seeking [when a relation reacts “inappropriately” due to fear and anxiety, typically due to social oppression]
+ affirming consent and mutual boundaries, leading to personal confidence, calmness, and clarity despite anything that gets thrown your way
+ and of course, how our foster kitty Rho is doing as he continues to heal and learn what it means to be safe, warm, and healthy

In the meantime, as always take care of yourselves y’all, and remember to support
Freedom of All Relations
Indigenous Sovereignty
Black Liberation
Empowerment of the Marginalize

Nmultis ✌️😹🤟

—-
Original entry:
As we come up on two years of Covid, we continue to be some of the only people we know personally that have not contracted the virus. This is not a fluke, but instead the results of a nearly unwavering resolve BB and I have shared since Covid hit, and while it is a cause for celebration, it also continues to bring waves of saddness.

We have lost folks in Covid, both through death or madness to the disease, but also through our respecting our own boundaries to keep ourselves safe.

In doing so, we (and two other nonbinary trans folk, making 4 total, a number with a lot of meaning for a 2spirit like me) lost our home in Jersey City in 2020, after months of staying inside on lock down in an extremely unhealthy space. We left that space with everything we could fit in our car, and headed to the mountains of Appalachia.

Since then we have house-hopped with folks, all of which we are thankful to. In some cases we were met with a safe space that allowed us to attempt to recover. In other cases we were engulfed in racism, oppression, death, and horrors I will not be writing here. To those relations I could not help in stopping their [noncovid related] deaths, I can never say I am sorry enough.

This journey has, and is still, teaching us all that we can not control one another. That freedom does mean having to say goodbye to those that would put themselves in harm’s way, because that harm ripples out in waves.

Where Have We Been Going, & Who Is Rho?

After Rho's previous situation, I would purrfer he be in a home where he is the only baby. He deserves that.

We will be screening prospective homes for this purrfect senior lap kitty shortly.

Stay tuned to hear about our last year and a half of displacement in covid, and how it led us to rehabilitating Rho from his own displacement in RVA.

I'll be reaching out to relations from JC to check in and say wela’lin again for all the help, and then taking on 2 more digital sessions a week as we secure our own home, after a stressful year and a half without a safe, secure place.
This has been by no means an easy feat - but we’ll make it.
Trans* and indigenous life has given us the toolkit to be emotionally aware of these social horrors, and as we’ve survived them thus far, continuing to do so means following the paths set for us.

To gift directly to our house fund [bus fund is going directly to it] as we secure a space to continue to empower all relations, please follow to cashapp .

Ride My Righteous Wave

So life goes in cycles, but it also goes in waves.

Therefore we are not only recognizing that life functions naturally in a non-linear (and therefore inherently non-binary) manner.

We could go even further and dig into the fact that by this day and age we typically exist in a 2D, 3D, and 4D state simultaneously, but we’ll ride that wave when we meet it.

Say your cyclic pattern is like mine: Morning has been socialized as high stress from an early age. You feel automatic need to avoid stress in the morning by procrastinating. This is like knowing you have to surf or kayak to work (bear with me, you land lovers).

To my fellow JC and NYC folks, picture this:

The Hudson and East rivers have been gently helped to regain their nontoxic, god intended state by means of us backing off and letting it.

Because of this, you gain the option of enjoying a ride to work of your own means. No ferry (kesalul, ferry), no commute charge (kesalul, transit workers), just you and the river.

You wake up and look at your wave and weather app. You’ve already gotten good at feeling weather again, because it has become a more tangible part of your life. You see the skies are going to be clear but (shock of all shocks to we JC folk) it’s windy. The waves are rolling in, which means you’re going to have recreational wave riders in addition to the standard commute crowd. There will be interference from waves makes by other people all over the place. Their ripples will inherently interact with your’s.

Are you stressed yet?

If so, why?

Part of how we as a domesticated species (and yes, dogs do this too) deal with excessive stimuli is we block it out. Dissociate. And while dissociation (the ability to shut down so we can flow without force) is a healthy coping mechanism, like anything else too much is detrimental to our ability to function in a healthy society.

As our society in the US is not a healthy one due to colonistic imperialism, aka in our case white supremicist tyranny, and it’s need to deny that life naturally goes in cycles and waves, we are taught dissociation is our only course of action while shaming us for it (tv/internet/phone esp). In turn, we block out the shaming of reality by dissociating more, and while present, finding ways to self shame into further dissociation.

“Tyber this is way too heavy and you already stressed me out.”

I understand ya’ll, and I’m sorry. But without replicating through story the reason for the story at all, there’s no story. Stress allows us to learn.

Each ripple is a trigger, and each trigger can aid you in just flowing along. The key is to not overthink it from your own lense. Go with the flow.

So if stress allows us to learn, how do we differentiate between healthy and unhealthy stress?

Our waves and cycles.

If I know my cycle is to wake up in the morning dreading what’s to come, I instead let it do the work.

If I begrudge brushing my teeth, washing my face, doing my qigong, and showering, I will not follow through.

But if I remove my pre-existing notions, trained in by decades of unhealthy stress, and open my eyes to my day, then I find I am no longer pre-triggered.

Now don’t get me wrong: being Mi’kmaq, two spirit, trans, disabled, nonbinary, the list goes on, in a world that tells me I can not have an ID with my gender, a land without colonistic rule, infostructures that are designed to aid my health, safety from (and the dismantling of a system where) a large percentage of the population views me as an exotic object (or an evil monster out to corrupt the minds of your children), well..

It can be hard to get out the bed in the morning.

And I am extremely light skinned.

That’s is a direct shout out to you POC who deal with this.

This is also a shout out to all my trans & nb folk, esp my AMAB siblings.

Wela’lin for waking up today.

“Ty this is still stressful!”

Life is stress. But you’re learning something:

I wake up everyday and I tell mntu, life, god, to handle it.

After all that’s what I’m here for. To follow that wave.

The less dissociated from stress I am, the less difficult it is.

If I go to kyack off the beautiful pier at Liberty or Marin or Exchange, and I go into it seeing every ripple as a threat, then they are.

I have made them threats.

I’m not saying there aren’t people that make those ripples that aren’t automatically hating on me. They all got up with their preconceived notions too.

But if I’ve learned anything in my long (for a trans ndn) life it’s that worrying for those waves, those ripples, do not help me.

They in fact, help no one.

Because when those ripples happen, they are there to steer you on your kyack.

They take away your effort.

They allow you to coast

Surf

Sail your way into harbor.

Next time we’ll touch on nonbinaryism of triggers (triggers are not negative vs positive, they are both at the same time), and with it we’ll have some fun little graphs and charts of relative frequency overlaying with variable intensity.