I read an essay on The Establishment by a non-binary person explaining why they quit testosterone. There’s so much in it about race, the ways race and gender build on each other, and then feeling condescended to and feeling unseen, so there were experiences in it I could relate to and experiences I couldn’t.
So much deep stuff in there. But there’s just one part I want to talk about, and it is maybe the least deep part. They write, “I’m a black, trans, anti-colonialist, pretty boy, flower-child, alien from outer space.”
I’m just going to talk about the “alien from outer space” part.
Gender non-conformity and alien stuff are popular themes to link. Bowie and his Space Oddity stuff. And oh gosh, don’t so many of us who find performing in the gender competitions impossible feel like we’re on the wrong planet?
That’s a lonely, hard way to feel over and over. So many kids feel that way, and then we grow up into adults who feel that way, like everyone else knows the secret handshakes and customs and somehow no one told us how to wear these human suits correctly.
I’m not an alien. I’m a white woman in her thirties, born on a numbered street (home birth, actually) in a mid-size midwestern city on a great lake. I got a specific set of genetics, so that my body specifically looks like the body of a long lineage of women in my family. My parents named me a name whose popularity spiked in the three year period I was born.
I feel strange and alien. To other people I am painfully ordinary- not rich, not desperately poor, I earn my money running people’s food from a restaurant kitchen to their tables, I’m pretty but I wouldn’t be pretty on a tv screen, I’m smart but other people generally want me to know I’m not as smart as I think I am. My student debt load sure makes me look dumb.
It’s hard to be an ordinary person. It’s painful. For some reason being ordinary can feel like your pain doesn’t matter. Every day I meet people who are more successful than me. Every day I meet people who are more special than me- in every way. More soulful, more strategic, more unique, more attractive.
This person who wrote this essay was born somewhere- at some specific hospital, to a specific mother, who earned her money in a specific way, who fed them specific food (mine wouldn’t let us have sugary cereals in the house, and for some thought she could get a 5 year old to eat fried liver).
The specifics of my life remain scary to me. Because the specifics are where real judgment can come. You say the number of the street you were born on and people can think to themselves, “Ugh, that trashy street.” You say the college you went to and people can think to themselves, “Ugh, not smart enough to go to a good school.” You say how your mother earned her money and people can say, “Just another secretary’s kid.”
Just another ordinary person. No reason to listen to an ordinary person telling us what life is like. No reason to think an ordinary person has an important thing to say.
Except if you don’t own your life, talk about the street you were born on, how your mother raised you, what people do that makes you feel strange, how the people on your street celebrate and what makes them crumple, no one else will. You have to be the one to declare your ordinary life worthy of note. You have to be the one to say, I was born here, at this longitude and latitude, when the stars were in these specific positions, and this is the body I live in and this is how this body is treated in this world.
I’ve been thinking about worship. I’ve been thinking about this body as a temporary loan. Built and ordered by my mother’s body, from the food she ate and the water she drank, metabolized by her blood. My mother was a hippie when she was having babies. She worked at a food coop. I’m built from a lot of yogurt.
I’ve been thinking about sacredness. I’ve been thinking about it because I’ve felt estranged from it. A friend of mine is getting famous and there’s nothing like someone who know leaving you behind in ordinary life to make you feel like so much nothing. That’s the great myth of our age- that some people are more interesting than others, that some people are more important than others.
My friend is special, but increasingly, as he gets farther away, I feel like it’s hard for me to judge whether I know that specialness. I know how my boss is special. I know how the guys who work in the kitchen at my work are special. I know how my mother and father are special. It’s hard to judge whether you had any special insight into someone who can make strangers love them. Maybe you only felt what the strangers feel?
We aren’t aliens. We were planted where we were planted, and I think it’s because God wanted us to see exactly the views She/He/They/However you want to refer to the Divine had planned to unfold for our eyes. The Divine wanted you to watch your mother trying so hard to keep it together when you were young, keeping the sugary cereals out of the house, rolling her eyes at her coworkers at the coop. The Divine wanted you to hear the neighbors you heard fighting in the street, hear the salsa music blaring at top volume out of cars, be terrified of the pit bull next door and not as terrified as you should have been of the long haired chihauhua across the street who liked to bite.
It is so hard to live a specific life. It is so hard to worship your neighborhood, your family, your workplace, your body. It is so scary, these things the magazines tell us are boring/nothing/dirt, to look closely, to breathe in deeply, to write down all the details.
You are an alien, in that you are a soul, and you didn’t choose any aspect of the circumstances of your birth. That distance, that strangeness, the feeling that you are out of place and looking for your real home- I can’t call it an illusion, it greets me every morning before I open my eyes. Choosing to cross it, to close the distance, to embrace this life that is not shiny or interesting enough to be shown on tv or what you would have made up if you were running the show, that’s a spiritual choice to make. It’s a choice I learned about, and then recently forgot about. The awe of this life is all around me but it’s not on the tv or in the magazines, so it’s hard to remember it is amazing.
I saw a cliche I loved immediately. It was, “trust the author of your blessings.” That can feel like stepping off the edge of a building.
I feel like an alien everyday. If aliens landed here, do you think they’d be struck dumb, overwhelmed by the strangeness/beauty/violence of this place? Do you think they’d cry? Do you think they’d laugh? What would they write down about being here?