Aggregating: a year in a life

( – promoted by LithiumCola)

We get older.  As we do, it sometimes seems regrettable that we may be running out of time to say what we have to say…need to say…and do what we have to do.  So much effort in life is spent trying to support having the time to do what we deem important, that it often seems that the important stuff doesn’t get done.

There isn’t enough time.

Then, of course, there is the fact that what we may deem important to do to improve the world around us is not something others will see the importance of.  We are each doomed to practice our own brand of insanity.  Or not.

My life has been full of Or not moments.  I may have chosen Or not too many times.  Or not.

In the last quarter of my life there were times when I did not choose Or not.  The Observer in me recorded the words.  I spent much of the past year sharing some of them.

Now available in Orange

Before this one I wrote 113 diaries in the past year.  There were, of course,  52 issues of Teacher’s Lounge in the year.  I hope one link suffices for anyone who would be interested in perusing them.  The Collective, in its wisdom, or not, decided that four of them were worth making the Recommended List:  Back to School, Another Mode of Teaching, Levels of Knowing, and Is it all a waste of time?  A Willing Ear and an Active Protector was rescued, the only time an issue of TL has ever been rescued.

^{[Note:  Throughout, diaries only in bold made the Rec List at Daily Kos.  Diaries only in italics were rescued.]}

Why?  The hope was that sharing some of my writings, past and present, might educate this small segment of the public on issues of gender of extreme importance to a small segment of the world in which you live.  We gender-variant people would like to live in your world as well.  The question is often whether or not you have space for us.

I wrote to you on Martin Luther King Day:

And Martin knew that you can’t even get to The Mountaintop if you are not willing to climb the hills.

Like many of my offerings, often the ones I wish to voice the loudest, it went mostly unread.

I wrote to you again on Mother’s Day, sharing a part of my past:  A letter to my mother.  She was, alas, deceased when I originally wrote it towards the end of 1993.

I addressed you again on Father’s Day, trying to tell you what it was like to be not exactly a father in The Unfather.  And it actually made the Rec List.  Thank you.  Perhaps because of that, I discovered algebrateacher and I were cousins.  I have lived most of my life separated from my family.  This was a change.  I have not yet completely adapted to it.  There is another year ahead of us.  Maybe I will be able to make amends.

In the summer of 2006 I published twelve Gender Workshops.  This past summer I assembled a dozen more:  Social Deceit, Who the hell I am, Changing sex in a small town, Standards of Care, Teen Years, Going Home, Help File, Life in the Passing Lane, The Substance of Style, Reintroduction, Teacher’s Lounge XCII or Gender Workshop XXIII: You Decide, and The Gender Prison.  Perhaps the coming summer will see a dozen more.  One can hope.

Knowing that Richard and his mom and perhaps his sisters might be reading, I decided to attempt to reach out to them by sharing about those crucial years when I was Crossing the Gender Line (had I been more ambitious or had more time, that would be a link to my first performance piece.  It is somewhere on my list of Things to Do to make CTGL available again online.  Some of you have read the poems that are a part of it).  So I published the series Diary: retrospective over the summer in 9 parts and My Wisconsin Adventure in two parts, and followed by a couple of refrains:  Vignettes–late 1994 and Road Trips.  The Rangers rescued a couple of the Diary collections.  Thank you.

And a strange thing happened.  My life swims in a sea of serendipity.  A friend of my younger brother saw some of my offerings and showed them to him.  And we began talking to each other for the first time in too many decades.  And my sister contacted me shortly thereafter.  She’s now a member of both Docudharma and Daily Kos as well.  I need time for another life to make up for the mistakes made in the one I am living.

There were some other diaries along the way:  Human Trafficking: Lend a Hand? was an effort I intended to spend the year on before health and vision problems interfered.  A Gathering of Rainbows was another rather failed attempt to reach out to one of my past communities:  I am an old hippie.  Insurance? For whom? was a forlorn attempt to get the needs of transsexual people included in the universal health care discussions.  

I volunteered to run Feminisms for a couple of weeks while the usual suspects were away at YKos.  Leading up to that and intermingled with Diary: retrospective were some resurrected essays:  The Question of Religion, Controlling Shame, Women-only Space: who belongs?, A Need for Dialogue, Dear Distressed, and Bigotry.  This last one was rescued.

During YKos I published Feminisms: Family about the reconnecting I was…we were…struggling with.  I shared some of my past effort in PFLAG, Inclusion and Me, which got rescued, but everyone seemed to be partying, and Looking back at my future.  And I tried to speak up for the place of transwomen in our culture in Feminisms: Beyond Belonging.

When discussion of whether being gay was a choice or not erupted here, I shared Choices and followed that up a week later with Layers of Why.  I thought it might be helpful if the membership had some idea about whom they might have been discussing.

At the end of the year I was invited to participate in an exciting new adventure:  Docudharma.  I publish a couple of features there, Muse in the Morning and Friday Philosophy.  The latter series is posted on Fridays, obviously, but at 6 pm.  Since the Collective, to its credit, decided to hire Bill in Portland Maine and Bill decided to do a West Coast version every Friday, that means I’m now relegated to a small audience.  I cross-post them at Daily Kos at 7:30 pm, but there has often been little notice in recent weeks.  C’est la vie.  In anyone is interested, the thirteen diaries in the series are:

Nonviolence

The Closet (only at Docudharma)

Death (only at Docudharma)

Learning to Count Past Two (only at Docudharma)

I am a Lesbian

Outness

Getting Real

Love

If only you were gay…

Remembering

Hatred

Altruism

Journey

A Letter and a Response

The Observer

Perfecting my own brand of insanity

There were some other essays from late in the year, like Between the Rock and the Hard Streets and In the Beginning. These were the bad old days… was a prescient story about sexual harassment and discrimination…prescient since it was posted right around the time gender-variant people were deemed not worthy of protecting.  As a response to the removal of protection for us from ENDA, I offered people a chance to tell us how we could correct this in Employment Discrimination: Where do we go from here? and felt a lot of negativity expressed.  So I posted I am a Lesbian and A Wedding to invite people to visit my reality.  As these things so often have happened, the people who I really wanted to take the opportunity to learn didn’t show up.  They seem never to do so.  But they blame us for not educating the public and tell us that’s why we don’t deserve equal rights.

And finally, I also posted Sharing our AIDS Stories II on World AIDS Day.  Someone should provide a place for people to share their stories on such a day.  And someone should listen.  If not me, who?  If not now, when?

113 diaries.  This makes 114.  But the diaries only hint at the story.  Life is like that.  Why were they written?  What happened as a result?

And what happened only in the comments.  Ah…the comments.  Some members of the Collective only know me through the comments and as a result wouldn’t be caught dead reading one of my diaries.  

But I even stashed some smaller pieces in the comments.  There were, of course, the poems (I’m not sure if all 356 of these links have a poem at the other end, but it’s a good bet:  to find my poems, search author = rserven elaine, since every poem has my middle name attached).  But there was also the series Slices.

Someone wrote recently that he would never join Docudharma because any blog with Armando and Robyn Serven on the front page wasn’t a place for him.  I’m honored…I guess.

But I’d much rather that people took a chance at learning.

I am often disappointed.

So that’s my year in retrospect.  It has taken a combination of careful planning and extreme disorganization, of foresight and circumstance.  It is what it is.

(buzzit button added by nlob)