Earlier this year two Mormon missionaries found their way to my doorstep.

I rent a second floor walk up with a lofted bedroom and horrific plumbing. I chose this apartment for three main reasons: the location, the space, and the natural light. I have so many windows, glorious huge windows and they keep me sane. I crave the sunlight but I have the constitution of a withering Victorian socialite so heavy direct UV exposure is a no go.

I use the dining room as my work-from-home office and my desk sits against one of those massive windows. It looks directly onto my front porch walkway and the sidewalk below.

So I saw the missionaries coming. I watched them bounce from front door to front door adjusting their shirt collars and wiping sweat from their brows. The two young men looked about 19 or so. I’m 31 now, but I remember being 19 so clearly. I remember how lost I’d been, but I don’t remember feeling as young as these two seemed to me now.

It was blistering outside, the Texas summer in full, nauseating swing, but they seemed determined to hit the whole complex. I put on a bra in anticipation of their arrival.

When they did reach my door, I was ready. I’d practiced my little speech. I do that. Every important conversation I know I need to have? I talk myself through it over and over until I feel I’ve chosen the right words and the right tone. It’s compulsive maybe, but this was important.

They knocked. My cat sprinted from the living room to the dining room in fear. I opened the door with one hand, two water bottles held in the other.

“Hello there!” One of them said — I don’t remember which. One was blond, the other had darker hair.

“Hi!” I was suddenly very conscious of how much skin I was showing. You could see my bra straps and my cropped tank was front tucked into a pair of shorts that I’m sure most people would think were a reasonable length, but who knows. I’d been out of the Christianity game too long.

“We were just wondering if you had a minute to talk,” the blond one said.

I took a deep breath.

“I’m gay, actually”—I didn’t feel like getting into the minutiae of my identity. Gay was all they needed to know—“and not religious, and not interested in changing either of those things, so I don’t really want to chat.”

They nodded.

“But, it’s so hot out there, would you guys like some water?” I held out the water bottles.

There was a moment of hesitation, but they did take the water.

“Thank you so much,” the dark haired one said, before cracking the lid and gulping down a third of the bottle.

“Of course.” I said. “Please be careful and take care of yourselves,”

“We will,” said the blond.

And that was that. I sent them on their way and shut the door behind them.

I am frequently enraged by injustice. My therapist likes to say that anger is my super power. I spent so many years not letting myself be angry at anyone but myself. So now, when I’m able to harness that anger and channel it toward something righteous I am kind of unstoppable.

Anger is important. Rage can be fuel. But there is a time and a place for it. In that moment, faced with two young men I knew would judge me for my appearance and my lifestyle and my non-interest in their god, compassion was the greater weapon. I could not fault them for their indoctrination. I could only offer a separate narrative:

That I, a queer godless woman, didn’t slam the door in their face or tell them to fuck off or confirm what they have been taught to believe about people like me. I wished them well. I gave them water. I offered them kindness. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe I’m naive, but I hope I served as a tiny indicator that the world outside their bubble is not as heartless or cruel as they have been led to believe.

In the coming days there will be a time for anger. We will need this fuel to carry on in the face of tyranny. But there will also be a time for a compassion. There has to be. Softness is not weakness. Small acts of generosity are what community is built on. I want to continue to be kind, even as the world seeks to harden me.

My very first office job (and my third job ever) was as a grunt level employee for a small insurance company in my hometown. I made geographical determinations for them, and I would explain that further, because “making geographical determinations” is an insanely vague job description, but the truth is the logistics of this job were boring and you do not care about them. Just know I spent lots of time looking at maps and searching databases for old land surveys and it was very dull.

But I liked it. It was a great job for a 19 year old kid. I worked part time in a quiet, air-conditioned office building. I never had to deal with customers. I had my own little cubicle and I was left to my own devices. I did a lot of writing during that time. No one cared and no one bothered me.

I was, however, not very good at my job. In my defense, I wasn’t trying to be good at my job. It was a way to pass the time and earn some money while I went to community college. I was devastated to be back in my parents’ house following a disastrous first semester at a state school. I had returned home depressed and disillusioned, tail tucked firmly between my legs.

I was bored and angry and dealing with a level of trauma I wouldn’t fully begin to unpack until I was well into my twenties.

I worked there for about a year, applied to a different university, got in, and quit the insurance job when I moved cities to attend school. A lot of shit happened over the following four years, which I could go into but we’d be here all day. I’ll sum it up thusly: after a number of mental breakdowns and professional failures, I wound up right back at my parent’s house in my hometown and I called up my old insurance gig to see if I could have my job back.

They tried to offer me a different job working in their call center. I gave it a shot for a single shift, had a massive panic attack, and quit the next day. I asked the woman in HR if there was any way I could go back to making determinations like I had in the past. She let me know it wouldn’t be possible as I had been so bad at the job the first time around, they couldn’t justify hiring me in that position again.

At the time, this was so fucking shameful. I felt humiliated and worthless. I sobbed on the way home and told virtually no one. It was a deeply painful experience.

It’s been almost a decade since that happened and just now, while getting ready for bed, I thought about that old insurance job and I laughed. I fucking laughed. Remembering 19 year old me sitting at that dumb little cubicle putting in zero effort and writing short stories on the clock is a joyful memory now, tinted rosy with age. Getting told I couldn’t have that job back because I was such an abysmal employee is hilarious to me in retrospect.

Being a human is equal parts comedic and sorrowful, but it always shocks me how these parts so easily coexist. There was a time in my life when I couldn’t fathom not being shattered by the rejection of that stupid insurance company and now it’s a delightful anecdote I giggle to myself about.

The past is so often painful for me, but it seems important to remember that I will not always feel the same way about that pain. I will still see it and know that it existed, but the pangs themselves will dull over time and someday I may not feel them at all. I am temporary, my experiences fleeting, and there is both heartache and beauty to be found in that.

There's something gutwrenching about parasocial attachment. The deep, endless, human rot in me that longs to be witnessed reaches out to the same rot in another and it finds camaraderie. It does not, however, find reciprocity. I witness and see and feel seen without being visible at all.

It's strange, like a childhood crush. You scrawl their name in a diary over and over again like repeating lines on a chalkboard. You're sick with it, a voyeur, watching and sighing. It's not a dark thing, but it lives in darkness.

The only words to describe it are the ones found in sonnets and poems for lovers, but they aren't adequate. They aren't accurate.

Their hand is your hand. Their troubles are yours. You experience your one and only lives separately, yet your woes cross great distances to mirror each other in this broken, one-sided way.

My body was never designed for this. I was never meant to love someone I'll never know.

I have to scrape a deep layer of freezer burn off the pizza before I can pop it in the oven. I peel off chunks of ice and cheese into my freshly scrubbed sink. There is no garbage disposal so I’ll have to don my rubber gloves later and scrape the half melted cheese out with a paper towel.

But I’m doing it. And I defrost the pizza and I add more cheese and I plop it on a cookie sheet and I slide that in to bake at 400 for exactly 18 minutes. By that time I’m a bit nauseous from the heat of the oven and I have to sit down. This happens now. I get over heated or winded. I’m low on iron. My breaths come in sharp heaves and my heart races and I have to rest. It is frustrating, this entropy of the body. I take supplements, and they’re helping, but I still have to give myself a kind of grace I never did before.

I’m not cooling down and my cheeks are bright red and flushed and hot. I think back to last year at this time. I was living in a house that was foreign to me, sleeping on a thin rubber mattress, crying five times a day in group after group while I tried to find some way to get better. It was so fucking cold outside that the recovery coaches sometimes had trouble making it to the center. A handful of them would blast the heat, and the whole house would begin to sweat. I’d have to take a step outside. I’d lounge out in the frozen air by the smoker’s benches for as long as I could stand it, or pace around the barren garden looking at clusters of painted rocks.

So I go outside of my apartment, the smell of pizza wafting with me, and I sit on the concrete slab that is my porch. It’s been sleeting for two days, but it’s raining now, the crystal sidewalk slick with water and reflecting the night back to me. I’m barefoot. I sit and I inhale air so crisp and clean I feel brand new. I watch rain drip down the icicles hanging from the eves and I have this thought.

I’m so glad I’m alive.

I nearly cry. Because sitting on my porch in the sleet feels like being a part of something bigger than me. Because I know I’ll go inside and make myself a salad and eat pizza and read before I go to bed and set up a second date with the girl I just started seeing. Because the way the lamp light reflects off the frozen ground is so profoundly beautiful I can feel it break my heart, but in a good way, the best way. Because it smells like Christmas somehow, but the Christmas before my mom and I got distant. Because I have that thought and I think of what a beautiful poem it could make.

And I smell ozone. And I’m glad I exist.

I feel restless and anxious. Probably because it’s nearly 3 in the morning - GO TO BED TORI. 

All the same, I gots the anxiety. That gnawing existential feeling. Right now I’m thinking about cognitive dissonance. It’s a concept I think about a lot these days. I have a very hard time with it. Even if I rationally know that it is ok to believe and feel totally different things simultaneously, there’s a part of me chomping at the bit to return to a binary. This or That. Black and White. I know that’s a huge part of my mental illness. Living somewhere in the middle is important. 

But when it comes to lofty concepts like justice or ethics or morals, the middle isn’t always comfortable. The middle isn’t always right. And I feel shame sometimes for not operating as a %100 Guaranteed Good Person. 

I know this is like, the human condition or whatever, but sometimes I just wanna stop being painfully aware of how flawed my quest for perfection is. 

I obsess over perfection. I have always obsessed over perfection. When I stop myself from obsessing over perfecting one thing, I transfer the perfection to another. And it’s just fucking dawned on me that in the same way I used to obsess about having the perfect body or being the perfect student, I obsess about being the perfect moral entity. And like, feeling shameful over a less-than-moral decision isn’t the worst thing in the world, but ALSO humans are known to do bad shit sometimes. That’s fucking living. Everyone does something immoral every now and again. Shaming myself for this to the point where just the potential of doing someone wrong ties my gut in knots isn’t fucking helpful. 

I am flawed. That’s okay. I am going to fuck up. I am going to make mistakes. I am going to hurt someone without meaning to. I am going to hurt someone intentionally. I don’t anticipate any of those circumstances leading to grand or disastrous results. Probably I’ll just feel guilty and apologize. That’s healthy. That’s living. 

Go to bed Tori. Stop freaking out over all the bad things you haven’t even done yet. 

I have epiphanies like Meryl Streep has acting credits. Often times I have to have the same epiphany more than once for it to really sink in. This can be frustrating for those who know me well. They have to put up with my “aha!” moments when they’re fresh and then also have to say “yeah no fucking shit, Tori” the second and third times around.

I have had epiphanies about my relationship with empathy numerous times. On the whole, I consider myself an empathetic person – to a fault at times. It’s hard for me to separate what I feel from what is true. I may feel like the girl who just left the outdoor table beside me was judging me when the lid to my yogurt flew toward her in the wind. I may worry she left because of me or because of something I did. But the truth is, I have no clue why she left her seat. Though, it’s probably because of the aforementioned wind.

Humans like to fill in gaps. It’s how our brains operate on a basic level. But I fill in more than just the logical gaps. I fill in emotional gaps. I try to predict an outcome. I make assumptions about the behavior of others in a backwards attempt at self-preservation. That’s pretty much just what anxiety is, airtight sealing the gaps of reality with the worst case scenarios. In doing this, I at least become focused inward to a degree that some would call self-obsessed. Now, I’m not egotistical. Quite the opposite, actually – but I am inclined to believe that every action others take around me must, in some way, be because of my actions. Usually this skews negative, See: The Girl Who Left Her Table.

Rather than protect me from cruelty, which I imagine is my brain’s goal in its own primitive way, this alienates me. It’s not ALWAYS about me. I’m just not that important, and thank fuck I’m not. In the same way we find vain individuals exhausting to be around, this negative vanity is equally tiresome. It also limits our ability to empathize. If you’re busy demonizing yourself through the false lens of those around you, that doesn’t leave much time to listen and respond to other people.

I’ve understood this for a long time, the inherent selfishness in how my mental illness operates. It’s something to be overcome as much as any other symptom. There’s another way, though, in which my mental health interacts with empathy and this one is harder to deny: Comparison.

This has been a bitch for me in recovery. I have this kneejerk reaction to anyone presenting any sort of positive aspect of their life. I envy them, even if I already have the thing they have. Somehow I am missing out. Somehow I do not have enough, and by association I am not enough. That idea, that I am not enough, is the root of a lot of my issues. It’s certainly where my eating disorder comes from (a combination of “I am not enough” and “I am too much.”) For a long time I lived so steeped in what other people had, what other people were doing, what other people were achieving, that I only functioned from a place of what I lacked. It didn’t matter what I did. It would never be enough. There would always be someone out there doing more and being more. In a lot of ways I am still learning how to operate from a place of what I am instead of what I’m not.

I catch myself – feeling the weight of envy in my gut and not knowing why. There is a disconnect sometimes between what I know to be true and that old reaction. I have to stop and collect myself and remember that envy is a choice. I can choose so many other things instead. I can choose joy and appreciation for others. I can choose to compliment instead of silently resent. Those choices are so much more satisfying. They don’t leave me wallowing in what I fear I can never become. But the feeling itself – of wanting what another has – it isn’t wrong. Shaming myself for feeling it is just as bad as living my life by it. So I try to live somewhere in the middle. It’s a sliding scale most of the time. But it’s working for me. It may take a few more epiphanies, a few more blog entries, to really hit the mark, but that’s okay. That’s enough.

Big Boy: A Tale of Tween Regret

So I was ten or eleven? Somewhere in that range and me and my preteen friends were having some sort of tiff. Someone had said something about someone else behind their back and then word had gotten back to that someone and they were pissed and etc, etc. Typical hormone driven melodrama. I was incredibly upset about the whole thing and so my oldest sister, Sage, invited me over to her apartment to hang and talk. Sage and I haven’t always had the greatest relationship, but this is a moment that stands out for me.

That night we got onto the subject of theatre and acting. I mentioned that I wanted to try it, but was too scared to audition for anything. Sage had done theatre in high school. She was in the first real play I ever saw performed and she was good. Not just passable, but genuinely fucking talented and I was really in awe of her for that. Upon hearing my interest, Sage immediately began looking up local auditions on her laptop. I insisted that I couldn’t do it -- that I would be too scared to get up in front of people -- but she persuaded me to try. We found an audition for the next day at a community theatre. It was a children’s Christmas play, you know the type. Some pastor’s wife had probably written it, clutching desperately to the English degree she never used and taking swigs from the communion wine. The audition was a cold read, so I couldn’t prepare the night before, but Sage talked me through what the process would be like. 

The next day I was T E R R I F I E D. We got up early and swung by my parent’s place to pick out my audition clothes and then Sage drove me to the theatre. I don’t remember much, but I remember Sage getting my sides and reading through them with me. My character was the second eldest child in a group of five siblings. She was practical and intelligent and annoyed with her brothers and sisters - particularly her one older brother. She had a line. God. She had this line making fun of her brother and it ended in with her mockingly calling him “Big Boy.”

So, when Sage and I ran through the scene, I said the line. 

Big Boy

“That was really good, but...” Sage laughed a little “Don’t say ‘Big Boy’ like it’s a sexy thing - he’s your brother!”

OH GOD. I was in a panic. OH DEAR GOD. The last thing I wanted to do as an awkward eleven year old dweeb was get on stage in front of these thespian children - who at the time all seemed to me like haughty, well dressed, Draco Malfoy types, giving me the stink eye and whispering about my hand me down robes - was to IMPLY I wanted to FUCK my onstage BROTHER. 

BIG BOY

I’m sitting in the theatre and I’m shaking in my seat just absolutely losing my goddamn mind and reading the script over and over and practicing that last line in my head “Big BOY? no BIG boy... no BIG BOY.”

BIG BOY BIG BOY BIG BOY BIG BOY

So they finally call me up on stage with the other kids who are gonna be playing my siblings. It’s totally all good. I don’t trip getting up the steps and I line up how they tell me and then -- oh no. Oh. Oh fuck no.

The kid who’s playing my older brother? The Big Boy himself? He was probably 14 or 15 so of course to me he was a distinguished elder gentleman. And poor me. Poor tween me, he’s fucking cute. In my memory he’s like a Shawn Mendes type - as twinkie as twink can be and a regular heartthrob for an eleven year old. It was like Aaron Carter had made his way on stage and I had to call him “Big Boy.” HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO ACT LIKE I DIDN’T WANT TO MAKE OUT WITH MY STAGE BROTHER WHEN I ABSOLUTELY DID?

And of course the directors position me right next to Zac Fucking Efron and I am just. Sweating. My newly developed adult sweat glands are giving it all they’ve got. 

We start the scene. And it’s good. It’s all good. I can’t fucking see anything past the stage lights and I’m dripping sweat, but I say my lines and I refuse to look Justin Timberlake in the eye. If I don’t look at him, he can’t woo me with his boy band face. 

But the line is coming up. It’s coming. And it ARRIVES and I turn to Jesse McCartney and most of the line comes out. Almost the whole line comes out, but he’s CUTE, and when I hit the words in my script BIG BOY BIG BOY BIG BOY --

Nothing comes out. It’s silent. Chad Michael Murray is looking at me like “bitch say the fucking line” but I C A N ‘ T. The pause goes on and and on and then the next kid with a line realizes I’m a fucking broken human being and continues with the scene. 

It ends, the whole ordeal ENDS and I am GONE. Off that stage and in my seat so goddamn fast no one even sees where I go, just the puddle of sweat I’ve left in my wake. Sage gives me a thumbs up and we head for the door into the lobby to wait for callbacks. But they did not want to cast a pre-pubescent sweat goblin, which I understood, so I did not, in the end, not have to go back on stage and face Orlando Bloom.

Sage was still encouraging. And she was right when she told me now that I had done it, had actually auditioned for something, it would be much easier for me to do it in the future if I wanted. 

She did ask me why I didn’t finish the line and I flat out told her I couldn’t figure out a way to say it that didn’t sound like I was hot for my bro. She found this pretty funny. 

“You still should have said it!”

Not a fucking chance. 

When I was 15 I performed at a local V-Day festival celebrating women and feminism, etc. It was a strange venue for the band I was in. We were used to more niche performances with just our fans in attendance. This festival was putting on The Vagina Monologues in the evening after we performed.

I remember being back stage at the theater where the event was being held. A woman was on before us. I don’t remember specifically what she was doing, she might have been giving a talk or even playing music, but I remember in particular one chunk of a speech she gave. She spoke about having gone to the movies the week earlier. A remake of The Last House on The Left had just come out and she’d gone to it. To her shock and horror there had been an incredibly graphic rape scene in the film – one so bad she had to leave the theater and ask to see a different movie instead.

I remembered the rape scene. I’d seen the movie myself and I had been beyond uncomfortable during it. But I had known about the scene going in. The original film is grotesquely famous for its own graphic depiction of rape, so I’d known what to expect. She hadn’t. She asked the manager of the movie theater to allow her to see a different movie instead. She then walked into Watchmen - a tedious three hour Zach Snyder adaption of the legendary Alan Moore comic.

Which just so happens to feature a scene of sexual assault and near rape. Even worse, the character who is almost raped later consensually has sex with her attacker and bears a daughter.

The woman on stage’s voice quivered with anger.

“I walked out and demanded my money back. That we live in a day and age where sexual violence toward women is considered such casual entertainment is abhorrent. That two random films in the same opening weekend feature rape as a plot point is disgusting.”

I remember not understanding the degree of her fury. I remember thinking the scene in Watchmen hadn’t been “that bad.” I thought about it in those terms, the severity of the matter making a difference to me at the time. I remember thinking that she should have looked up content warnings before going to the movies. I stood there, at 15, internally defending a societal norm I didn’t fully comprehended. I didn’t ask myself WHY the abuse of women was so common in media. That was just the way it was to me. I put the responsibility to avoid that content on the woman who had been triggered by it instead of questioning its existence in the first place.

The point that woman was making has always stayed with me, even while I didn’t understand it. And now, nearly a decade later, her words have finally hit me.

It’s not that those depictions exist. It’s HOW they exist. In stories that use them as a cheap way to move along a narrative or characterize a victim. It’s the insistence that we record graphic reproductions of these crimes so readily. It’s the casual attitude of it all. It’s the normalcy of it all.

It’s that at 15 I was already conditioned to defend it.

It’s that trauma is an overreaction. That the woman on that stage, yelling into the mic, is overzealous.

It’s that we should avoid discussing it instead of staring long and hard at the way our media influences real life behavior.

It’s who we voted president.

It’s who we hear on the radio.

It’s who we root for on the field, the court, the ice.

It’s who we see playing those well rounded men up on the bright screens in our cinemas.

It’s how we blame and dismiss and give the benefit of the doubt to those who have done nothing to earn it.

I still think about that woman. I still feel ashamed of my naive reaction to someone I would eventually come to feel kindred towards. A woman whose face I never saw. Whose name I cannot remember.

I hate this feeling. The moment before it all changes again and you realize all those times Old You fought for what now seems fleeting. I used to cry thinking about going back. When my parents suggested it, I felt only fear. The terror of failing. The terror of losing some sort of fated future. And now I’m just tired. There is a life here. I’ve made it. There are things I want to keep, cling desperately to and never let go, but the things I actually get to keep aren’t nearly as appealing. Why shouldn’t I toss it back where it came from? What is stopping me from baiting my hook with a new lure or an old lure or no lure at all? Maybe I don’t want to cast out anymore. Maybe I’m tired and any notions I once had of needing to appear “successful” and “independent” have been swept away in the river. What if I don’t care if I have to tell old high school acquaintances that I’ve moved back in with my parents. Or that I’m taking classes at TCC. I don’t give one flying fuck about my degree plan or starting a fucking career. I don’t care about the Austin night life or queer community or art scene. Everything here is as plastic and manufactured as Los Angeles sunshine and New York spunk. All the quirks are purposefully generated in a fucking lab to sell t-shirts and the new American Dream. I. Am. Tired. Of pretending I want to keep up with it all. Maybe that’s the best way to be. It’s scary. I feel like something in me has broken and I don’t know yet if I’ll come away from it better or worse. All I know is I can’t stay still anymore. I don’t want to anymore.