ruidoso pt v
ruidoso pt v
Lately, so much has changed for me, I am trying to find a new way of being, of navigating my life in a new body with a new style and a new way of signifying to others.
Have you ever seen that little saussurian diagram of sign/signified?
Hopefully the language nerds will bear with me while I explain something they already know, but the idea is that every word we say, every utterance, conjures a concept. When we say “tree,” for example, our minds retrieve some amorphous idea of a tree, green, stalky, smells like dirt and wood. We can be more specific or less, and the words we say make manifest in our brainheads new concepts with each. This was a huge awakening for me with regards to my music and lyric making, but it has also come back to mean something completely new for me these days.
Changing the way I look has made me realize that I signify, apart from the things I say. Now, to a queer person I might signify comfort, camaraderie, or similarity. To a southern evangelical good-ole-boy, I might signify idealogical differences, rebelliousness, or perversion. This came as a big shock to me as, internally, I am the same person I’ve always been, only now maybe a smidge happier, more patient, and more genuinely interested in being kind.
In fact, not two years ago I was 205 lbs with a beard down to my chest. I sometimes forget that this isn’t the way I look now, so when I revert to my default-setting-of-interaction, I find certain jokes not landing, certain gestures being perceived incorrectly, and even certain vocal inflections being reflected back with unease.
It’s a lot to keep in mind all the time, so, if I seem stilted, please forgive me for some time?
Like, here’s a good example…
We eat at a nearby restaurant after a long day of recording and decide to get a drink after at an adjacent bar. We walk in and I realize my outfit is such that that nobody notices me. Score.
Brendan buys me, him, and Tara a mule, and Sean a non-alcoholic beer. We usually refrain from drinking in solidarity, but tonight we’re being bad.
We sit around a little bar-height table and start talking deep. Tara is becoming a real friend. For the first time, I see her kind of loosen up, and she starts gesticulating as she talks, her shiny dark hair bobbing behind her ears with each increasingly-confident phrase.
I like seeing this version of her. She’s been through so much. She deserves to be like this, confident, excited, happy.
We continue to talk, about her past marriage, about our last year, and, eventually, about the particulars of her surgery. At some point she admits that she feels unloveable because of the physical toll her surgery took.
I think of how wrong she is. She is beautiful, and such a wonderful person—uniquely funny and curious and generous, with her time, with her heart. How can I tell her this, though, in a way that doesn’t feel, on one end of the spectrum, trite, and on the other end, too much?
Then, all of a sudden, I feel a hand on my back. I turn around to find a drunk man, pointing sloppily at the TV on the wall, which is displaying a tacky, computer-generated scene of a tropical beach.
“Do you like this?” He asks, slurring.
I look at him, confused. Why is this man touching me?
“If you were on this beach, where would you be?” He begins pointing around the monitor, moving his hand with each new location.
“Here?” He asks, pointing at the sand. “Or here, maybe?” He points at a beach chair. “Or maybe here?” He says, finally, pointing at the water.
It hits me: he sees me as a woman, and this is what it is like being a woman.
I swallow my initial reaction and try to let him know that we’re having a conversation. My speaking voice is low. He recoils and makes conversation with the rest of the table before making his exit.
I am a new sign, signifying in directions of which I am not even aware!
That bear vs man question is gonna hit you differently now 🥹
Tara, you are loved so much by each and every one of us 💛
Men have too often felt access to women and our bodies. I am both sorry you experienced that but also glad. Trial by fire, as it were.
you are a woman and deserve all the autonomy that we all do.
i love you so, so much my deareast.