It wasn’t supposed to start this way.
“In light of the shooting, I’ll be working from home today.”
This is not how I planned to start this substack. I had a whole post written about designs that have fascinated me since I was a child. It was weird and (I thought) funny. But then one hour before I had scheduled it to post, I got a message on a work slack channel that there had been a school shooting just down the road and everyone was in lockdown mode. I unscheduled my post immediately. Self promotion in the face of tragedy seemed to be in the worst taste. More news came out. The shooter had died. The roads were closed down. Victims were being rerouted to Vanderbilt Medical Center. Students were being bussed to a nearby church. 3 had died. I DMed the marketing manager: “In light of the shooting, I’ll be working from home today.” At the time, I thought this was the most dystopian message I have ever typed.
Writing about my weird design obsessions seemed so incredibly hollow. Everything felt incredibly hollow. It was an elementary school. These kids were about the same age as I was when I was developing my design hyperfixations. When my concerns revolved around the strangeness of the plaid bit at the start of a new role of Scotch tape.
Then, on a phone call with my brother, I found out the shooter was a trans person and a graphic designer. My brother wanted to know if I knew him. “I mean, I know not all graphic designers know each other,” he said. Which is true: I didn’t know the shooter.
My mother texted me the next day to see how I was doing. I responded with what is actually the most dystopian text I’ve ever sent. “I'm processing,” I said, “With the rhetoric that's been going around about trans people, I'm honestly very scared on top of being mad at the government and grieved for the families. I think that things are gonna get really bad for people like me.”
She still hasn’t responded. I know my mom. I know she probably cried when she read that. Maybe I should have made a joke about us designers having targets on their backs. You know, lightened the mood a little.
But I was scared. My first thought after my brother told me was “Thank God I haven’t made that appointment for testosterone.” See, I have been scared for a long time. The clinic I would go to has been receiving national attention and death threats. The state legislature is working to ban people like me from public existence. Since coming out, caring for my physical and mental health is a gamble. I feel like I am never weighing a good option versus a bad option; I am weighing which bad option will make day-to-day existence more or less bearable. Do I continue to ghost through life or do I live with a target on my back? I have had very public anxiety attacks in response to fears surrounding every step of my transition. And with this shooting, national attention is focused on a person who looks like me and, weirdly, shares my profession. Or, shared, rather.
When I planned out this substack, I very purposefully wanted to stay away from politics. On top of that, I wanted to only mention gender anecdotally, as it applied to my particular thoughts and attitudes creating and consuming specific works of art and design. My coming out process is occurring later in life. I am 35 years old and only came out at work last June. I told my family over Thanksgiving. I don’t always know how to navigate this new pressure I feel to be an activist and an expert on queer issues. My therapist told me that it is perfectly okay, but the number of people who seem to expect some kind of #ownvoices narrative from me suggests otherwise. I don’t know how to parse my actual lived experience with the narratives I feel like I have to fit into to be a “good” queer. It feels too much like the pressure I used to feel to be a “good” Christian. At this moment, I would rather keep this part of my life private.
I’d much rather talk about early 90’s Vertigo comics and Epoch Korea plate design and Mark Rothko. I’d rather do any social justice work the way that I was taught to give money in church: “The right hand does not know what the left hand does”. I am afraid of falling into the trap of identifying as a good person like so many TERFs do. As I’ve done in my most toxic moments. I’d rather build my little corner of the internet into a colorful, eccentric oasis.
In 1946, french filmmaker Jean Cocteau released La Belle et la Bête. This retelling of Beauty and the Beast was shot immediately after Nazi occupation when the filmmakers were still living on rations. I watched it with some friends not that long after the 2016 election. The content of the film itself is not particularly political. It is a pretty straightforward telling of Beauty and the Beast with beautiful, surreal imagery. But the fact that it was made by an openly gay filmmaker and starred his lover struck me as defiant and profound. It told me that sometimes just living can be a powerful resistance in and of itself. And after living through so many “once in a generation” catastrophes over the past few years, this film has wormed itself deeper and deeper into my psyche. Its fantastical oasis has become my reason to create in the face of a world that wants to destroy.
And yet, in the immediate aftermath of another “once in a generation” catastrophe, I find myself in this same place: All of my hyper-fixations feel hollow. Art seems more like an opiate than a balm. I question my choice of profession. I question my decision to come out at all.
I remember when I was 7 and I wanted to play the blue Power Ranger at recess. I remember when I was 9 and dressed up like Orville Wright for a school project because he was the one with a mustache. I remember when I was 12 and I saw racecar-driving, boy’s-uniform-wearing Haruka in Sailor Moon and started wearing ties in the privacy of my bedroom. I remember how I can trace my queerness back as far as preschool, when I wondered why I had to be a girl when I didn’t feel like it fit me much at all. I didn’t have language for these feelings back then. The words I use to describe myself now didn’t even exist. I was just a kid. My parents’ child. Just like every other kid learning how to live.
You’re doing great. Tell us about your hyper-fixations. Talk about art. We all need it.