In My Own Words – …on the B.L.

Houston, In My Own Words, Lifestyle, On the Town

Musings in a Storm; Hurricane Beryl

July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 RaeAnna

One Week Later…

On Sunday, July 7, 2024, I started taking pictures as the bands of Hurricane Beryl started to sweep over Houston. Alone in my house, I went to bed wondering what condition my world would be in when I woke. The power went out while I was on the phone with my fiancée (who lives in Australia) at seven in the morning on Monday, July 8, 2024. She went to bed for the night, and my weather watch began. Two hours later, I lost cell reception and internet. As an avid read, writer, picture taker with literally nothing to do, I decided to document the storm. I’ve been through my fair share of hurricanes, storms, tornados, and derechos at this point in my life. But, for the first time, I was bored during it.

I spent Sunday night and Monday taking pictures. The following pieces I wrote over three days in a notebook; then transcribed on my tablet in a note that I, later, turned into a .doc, which is now my first post in months. Each piece stands alone; though there are likely themes to be found. Some bring levity, and some are quite dark. They’re all very much me. The photos separate piece from piece. So, enjoy.

Open front door of Pearl Bar onto Washington Avenue as the bands of Hurricane Beryl begin. — Pearl Bar’s front door opens onto Washington Avenue as the bands of Hurricane Beryl begin.

Laying, clothed in very little, with the windows open: I’m hot. The kind of hot that feels like it’ll never get better. The kind of hot that makes air heavy in the lungs. If this isn’t nostalgic, it would be misery.
Laying on a sheet-covered couch—because cotton is cooler than brushed velvet—my underwear and bra stick to me. I’m glistening with sweat. I’ve read three-quarters of one of the best novels I’ve ever consumed. I realize: I’d be working if it weren’t for Hurricane Beryl shutting down the fourth largest city in the United States. A category one. No internet. No power. No communication with the outside world. It took a natural disaster for me to have my first real day off since the day after I put my dog to sleep… three months ago. There’s literally nothing to be done but pick up sticks and read. And I’m not about to go pick up sticks.
Laying on the couch, the only breeze I can feel is the hot breath from the dogs who love me so much they can’t find another spot to lay except my lap in all 3,000 square feet of this damn house. My day was spent reading and writing, the old-fashioned way. I love days like these. Ones where I lay by an open window, reading, drinking tea, and listening to nature. Today, doing just that, Instead of the birds, beach, breeze, city, leaves, I’d normally find lulling, I’m currently being serenaded by my much too nice neighbors’ generator. I hate them. But they’re too nice to hate, even in this heat.

A friend walking her dog as the storm started to roll in Sunday, July 7, 2024.

I have so many unanswered questions. | Does my mother believe in heaven? | What is the worst lie I’ve ever told? | Why do fascia confuse scientists so much? | Does Beau resent me for rescuing Tessa and the Puppies? | Why didn’t he protect me? | What will I regret when I lay dying? | Will she still think I’m beautiful in 50 years when she walks into our room after brushing her teeth to find me reading on the same side of the bed I’ve slept in for the majority of our lives? | Why did that question make me cry? | How did performing on stage go from being my whole life to a place I haven’t been in a decade? | Does he know he’s the villain in my story? | Why do I like Peach Rings but peaches not so much? | Do my dogs know how much I love them? | There are happy-sad people and sad-happy people and sad-sad people, but are there happy-happy people? | What’s even the point? | Why do I think I’m interesting enough to be a writer? | Can she remember the smell of the space between my shoulder blades the way I remember her? | When we leave the house, do our pets think we’re going for pupcups and dog walks and pet stores and beach adventures because that’s all they do with us? | Do they feel abandoned? | Am I capable of writing a book? | When does it get better?

As I drive through my neighborhood, there is a ton of damage. Trees felled. Roofs in streets. Families raking yards. Neighbors calling on each other. Hands being lended. Bayous overflowing.

The general post-natural disaster mahem and comradery.

Beau’s head hangs out the passenger window. Soaking up the breeze as much as the sun. She’s always loved a car ride. I drive slowly as much out of safety as curiosity.

As we slowly creep down the street, the decimation of homes, trees, and fences allows us a public viewing into private moments. On the main road, a backyard fence lays half across the sidewalk, half across the street. A multi-generational Asian family sits around a table on their back patio. Mom, dad, and grandma stare with a mixture of defeat and exhaustion. Martini in every hand. All the while, their ten[ish?] year-old son flits around the backyard with the joy of a kid in a world devoid of technology.

Using the dictionaries I loved so much in college to look up the gender of a noun. #old #nerd

Sometimes, I feel like Pyoter, my robot vacuum—named because a) I like men who clean b) I can yell at a man when it fucks up c) I speak Russian d) it just felt right—who is currently sat, wheels run-up a dog toy, in the corner where the hearth meets the wall.

Pyotr does a great job. A real go-getter. He’s aged, but his battery isn’t suffering. With the right care, he does as well as he ever did. His years show in the collection of dust and scuffs. He’s reliable and beloved. But he’s stuck. He’s not out of battery. He’s not full either. Nor is he empty. He’s kind of in the middle phase of vaccing the floors: where enough progress has been made, it seems like things could be done. Nowhere near perfect, but definitely above the expectation people have when I tell them, “I have five dogs.” Pyotr has the capability to do a great job, not just the average state my floors exist in now.

But he’s stuck.

I’m sitting on the couch engrossed in a book about a rich, lesbian writer who’s suffering from severe depression, childhood trauma, depersonalization, derealization, some delusions, and can’t finish her novel—that’s actually a memoir—which has put her in a trust funded [see what I did there] psychiatrists’ office not to feel and do better but to write again. Same. But I’m too poor for a psychiatrist to help me finish my damn book. Also the protagonist(antagonist?) is younger and further in her book than me. Fuck her. Now, I’m realizing, I am genuinely jealous of a genuinely ill and equally fictional woman. Then, again, I’m also (mostly undiagnosed) mentally ill. I mentioned I’m too poor for a psychiatrist? yes. This tracks.

Anyway.

I promise these two are related as to why, sometimes, I feel like Pyotr.

He’s stuck.

I’m stuck.

He needs me to get up, move him, push the button so he can be unstoppable. The problem therein lies: I won’t get up.

My brain is home to: CPTSD, childhood trauma, rape, violence, audhd, stripping, and more. At 33, like my floors, I’m doing better than you’d assume. To the outside world, I’m doing great. But I have so much energy. My mind is only getting more interesting. I know there’s potential. Somewhere. What’s been done is good enough; it really is.

It’s not good enough for me.

I’m wheels up on my own metaphorical dog toy. Therefore, I have no—completely devoid of metaphor here—no ability to stand up and press Pyotr’s button so he can go do great things for my mental health through dog glitter confiscation.

Which is a symptom of my own being stuck.

I need a me to come in and unstick me, so I can unstick Pyotr. So, he can finish the floors. So, I can finish my bestselling book. So, I can afford my wife’s dream job of being a rockstar. Then, I’ll be unstoppable. And maybe, but probably not, have a little more money. (I plan on my wife’s first tour eating up the $37 advance I get from that “bestseller.”)

But, I’m going to go back to reading.

I know I dated men for so, so, so many reasons. It’s something I’ve written about loads. Thought about far more. Why did I spend a whole lot of years dating a gender I have literally zero attraction to? There’s a bit to it I hate and don’t admit to often. But it’s also true and part of it.

Dating men is inherently traumatic. (For all women, yes. They are our natural predators. I’d choose the bear, but no one is asking me.) But for me. As a gay woman with years of sexual Trauma with a capital t. Sex, every single consensual time, was traumatic. Some more. Some less. I was walking a tightrope above a flowing lava river of memories I am deeply afraid of and equally curious about. I have an entire lived-life that I don’t really remember so well. It’s there. But not. I know I can. But do I want to?

With the right circumstances, those memories come back. Do I want them? Nope. Do I need them? Healing is a long, painful journey. I quickly realized… The easiest way to remember the memories living in my body and not so much my mind was sex with men. With the force of a freight train going down a hill with no brakes or conductor, every new rememberance would chug right over my mental health.

To be clear, this was all done consensually and unconsciously. It took me a long time to figure out what I was doing. Eventually, sex with men didn’t bring back memories. I think I’d collected all the Trauma I could the old fashioned way.

I took all the puzzle pieces and put them together. My puzzle was definitely found at a rummage sale because pieces are missing. I have enough of them to have a really clear understanding of who I am and where I come from. Then I took the time to heal. Like really heal. I’m not healed. Clearly. But I’m better.

Then I came out. Not because I hadn’t known I was gay before. But I needed to reTraumatize myself over and over and over again to uncover the hardest truths I needed to know so I could get to a place where I wasn’t so actively trying to die.

Too many years into an already full life. I’m out, I’m proud, I’m a functional calamity. At 33, I’m really fucking happily engaged to the most incredible woman. And I think… deep down, I might actively want to live.

The anxious ones were kept in their safe spaces.

With generators and chainsaws and bugs and children and dogs and sirens and storms, the world has never seemed louder. More intrusive. More in my space.

So, I put in earplugs to drown out the noise. I try to find sleep laying on the couch with all the windows open in a breezeless night in July. There’s still a ringing. A haunting that won’t go away. It’s louder in my brain than any of the aforementioned noises could ever be loud in real life.

I wish this were just tinnitus. But no.

Not new, but particularly jarring tonight. As a little girl, I used to think of it as an alarm sounding. That voice my mom told me about. It told me when I was doing something wrong. When I was being bad. It didn’t take me long to learn: that alarm never relented.

So, it didn’t take long to know: I was just bad. Most of the time, I still believe it. That I deserved it all. Every malintent, violence, shame.

But some days, more than there used to be, I think: maybe it’s all the alarms I didn’t listen to, warning me of all the people I believed.

Sometimes, it hurts being alone in my own head.

So, I take the earplugs out. Letting the sound of crickets and generators drown out the alarms I didn’t know how to listen to.

A lot of sniffing and following me around the house.

Stuck in a house with no electricity, no air conditioning, no reception, no internet, and no help at the height of southern Texas summer is a lot like camping. Except terrible.

If I tell you it was a first. I’m probably lying to you.

When I think about the unedited version of my whole life. The one common thread has been lying. Changing the narrative of my history. Sometimes, as it’s happening.

I tell firsts as if they’re not really seconds or thirds of fiftieths because they are more palatable. Cleaner. Easy.

Because, the thing is, the first time… well, that’s the first time I’ll write about.

But

To friends who know me, there’s the first time I talk about like it was a passing thing because looking at the threads that wove my Trauma, it hardly even feels like it matters.

Then

There’s the first time that felt like the first time. Only three people have seen that pain.

However

There’s the first time that was the real first time. I’ve never spoken it out loud. To even think of it pulls all the air that ever was from my lungs. Even writing—admitting to it here—scares me so much. I want to run. I want to hide. There is pain I so instinctively don’t want to be true that if I never speak it, never share it, maybe it’s not. But lately, in traffic, on walks, alone, in the moments where my mind wanders… I keep being led there. I’ve had to stop writing three times so my eyes could see the spelling errors I’ll edit out through tears sometime between me writing and you reading this. If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t edit this one out. This is hard. This is brave. This feels like dying.

Telling firsts which weren’t actually firsts, I’m lying to you. I’m not lying to myself. I was there. I know the truth. I always have. I just wish I didn’t. So I tell the firsts I’m comfortable with. Because I’m better. But I’m not fucking healed.

My love for you is a very well tended garden.

It’s an allegory I like because I like gardens. Not a perfect one since I don’t like gardening. In this figurative garden, I have no problems being a figurative gardener. Although, my darling dearest, the literal garden is your literal responsibility.

When a garden is planted, watered, tended, weeded, watered, tended, weeded, planted, so on and so forth, it will grow and thrive. New things will come. Some things will wither. Sometimes, it doesn’t *seem* to be doing so well because of winter or drought or too much rain or not enough sun, but a very well tended garden always survives, coming back stronger and more beautiful each time because the soil keeps getting richer. It is always growing and changing because it was never not well tended.

My love for you is that. A bit simplistic, but you get the idea.

Ludicrous! Not the rapper. The idea!!!!

The idea! at one point in time… a very, much too long point in time in my life, I thought it was important to carry a small suitcase on my shoulder everywhere I went.

They’re known as purses.

Highly helpful for the ladyfolk in a world where the ladyfolk are legally not allowed functional pockets [if pockets at all—depending on your state and county legislation]. Not really, but that’s how it feels shopping.

Anyway. I carried a large purse because I deemed it necessary to carry every single item anyone could need in events ranging from a wedding to a natural disaster. True fact. The pouch-thing I carried inside my purse was so well stocked with all sorts of odds and ends, it really did come in handy at both weddings (two friends) and a natural disaster (hurricane Florence). It was hefty! Lifting the damn thing, which sits utterly-and-quite-suddenly-forsaken, dusty, and on the top shelf in my entryway, put down never to be picked up again until… now, when it feels like something between training for an Iron Man and giving up completely.

I had purses—yes plural—big enough to carry the well-stocked pouch-thing, wallet, phone, a tiny tripod, book, pen, tablet, all my friends’ things, and a brush every single time I left the house.

It is baffling to me.

I don’t even brush my hair anymore.

I don’t like my body.

I don’t think I see what other people see.

All I see is endurance. Not the long-distance running kind. The servived kind.

I look at my body and see every flaw. Every dimple. Every stretch mark. Every varicose vein. Every lump. Every wrinkle. Every sag. Every scar. I’m vain. Sure. But…

I see pain. I see a body I didn’t think belonged to me, had control over, a right to. I see a body that I think of as not me. What happens and happened to this body… that’s not me. It’s just a body. Because if they did that to my body and I am my body, they did that to me. And they knew me. And they still did it. Then looked me in the eye and called it love.

I don’t want to look at my body and see that.

I don’t.

But, I take beautiful pictures of my body in beautiful places. They call the place beautiful. They call the body beautiful. But I just want to keep a record. I want proof. I want to know that I was there. I did it. This body did enough to get to those places.

But also…

I hope one day I look back on all the pictures I’ve taken in beautiful clothes in beautiful places with beautiful people and think, maybe, ‘I was beautiful once.’ I guess, that’s how I’ve always—well, not always—known to not give up yet. That’s hope, an emotion I’m rarely accused of. I haven’t lost it. So, maybe, one day, I will look back at all the art I made with eyes that somehow found enough self-love (it hurt me far more to write than for you to read) to think: ‘As much as I hated it every singe time, I deserved to be called beautiful.’

But I guess that’s healing from being treated like an ugly thing for so very long.

Life is an exhausting to do list.

In My Own Words, Lifestyle

Sappho to Shakespeare to Sparks; We Write of Love

February 16, 2024February 16, 2024 RaeAnna

The interesting thing about writing on love is everyone does it.

Sitting and contemplating if I’m going to be a great writer or not.

From Sappho to Steel, Shakespeare to Sparks.

Love comes in as many forms as people. My love differs intensely from person to person because how can I love one person as they are in the same way I love an entirely different person as they are? It’s one of the most fascinating aspects. It’s not one size fits all but tailored like haute couture. Which is likely the reason us artists are so very obsessed with it.

My words are love letters to lovers and friends and family and even those who hurt me. Love is expansive and difficult to pin down. Putting that feeling into a tangible for public consumption is the greatest challenge an artist faces. How do I show every intricacy and depth of love I have for my fiancée? How do I tell the vastness and unconditionality of love I have for my best friend? How do I adequately portray the shame of still loving the man who hurt me violently? How do I illustrate the grief of loving parents I cannot include in my life but will always include in my heart? I could spend a lifetime writing about the love I feel for a singular person, but I don’t just love one person, so how do I choose what stories to tell? I can’t. I write the best I can.

We’re all trying to figure it out and create some art along the way and just maybe immortalize ourselves with just how much we love someone. At the end of the day, very few of us are Emily Dickinson… We kind of like the idea of our names being known for eternity, and even better if we can give our love an eternity we aren’t lucky enough to possess as mortals. Although, Emily found her way into everlasting fame without even trying. I wonder what it’s like to be so unrelentingly talented?

Writing about something so profoundly personal without sounding clichéed or falling into trope is hard. Like, really hard. I want to do it well. I want to say what I feel without sounding cloyingly obnoxious. I’m just trying to figure out how to infuse a love-soaked anything with the giggles of smiling into an intimate moment. Because love is joyful and fun. It doesn’t and shouldn’t be all yearning and pining and devastating. The best sex is the kind you dip your head into her hip bone with giggles because it’s fun and funny, yet never losing momentum or passion. The best friendships are the ones where sadness and grief and anger and all those big feelings we turn to them with can be validated yet poked fun at enough to give perspective and levity. Those moments are not prevalently portrayed in art. The simplicity of existing in love with others.

Beaches are romantic. I might be a romantic… shhhhh, that comes later.

Some storytellers’ love lasts the test of time and so many disappear within mere years. What makes it good? Who is our generation’s Austen and Tolstoy? So often, books and art about love and loving feel redundant. The same thing over and over with varying details. Lovers whisper the words of Neruda. We binge watch yet decry Hallmark movies as cringey. Whether it’s critically acclaimed or a guilty pleasure, we consume love stories with a veracity large enough to sustain a multi-billion dollar industry—romance novels alone made $1.44 billion in 2021, and it’s only a growing market.

I want to write about love well. I want to explain all love is meaningful and has its place. Not all love is happily ever after. Most of us have loves before “I do.” Some have love after “I do.” Some friendships last the test of time. I have best friends I don’t talk to anymore but could write about the love I have for them for the rest of my life. Sometimes the happiest ending is a break up. And not all breakups are romantic. Not all love stories are forever, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as important. Love is vast.

Sometimes, I write things I like but then immediately hope are not the most uncomfortable thing in the world. Like, “Not being able to wake up, tuck my head into the space between your neck and shoulder, breathe you in, and feel you snuggle into me is the greatest displeasure of my life.” I cringe a little reading that, but I think I would love it if someone felt that about me, and I also mean it like crazy. I know why I wrote that. But the context of it changes the meaning and varietal of love so drastically. This love could be so many kinds of love. Love that is grief of knowing you’ll never have that moment again with a death. Love that is yearning for someone after a breakup, which is an entirely different kind of grief. Love that is desire in a long distance relationship. Love that is parenthood. Love that is wanting the dog on the floor to be snuggled in bed instead… because ‘I feed you dammit!’ I love putting love in context. But also, you’ll read that and you’ll be the narrator with someone in mind. Or you’ll want to be the one being missed.

That’s the most fun about writing on love… We feel it in our bodies because it’s something we have experience with and chase and romanticize and hate. Writing about love is fun because it’s hard and yet the most relatable thing in the world. It spans culture and color and socio-economic background and religion and sexual orientation. It is universal. Love connects us.

Romantic is a label I have fought and, for years, easily avoided. I am not known as a sentimental woman. As a woman who writes from a feminist lens in a world beholden to the patriarchy, writing about love feels prescriptive. Expected. I want to be a serious writer, and serious writers don’t write about silly things like love. I’m sure Dante has something to say on that. But he was a man not burdened by the weight of provoking a society actively keeping women’s things in the women’s thing area. Love is often spoken of as if it’s a silly thing women titter over in our beribboned alcoves to diminish it by making it a target of women’s admiration. No one is forcing men to propose. Though not all marriages are love matches, I have a sneaking suspicion, a whole lot of those very serious, down-to-business men are pretty excited to bend the knee. We’re all fools in love. But also, writing about love is always equated to romantic love, and that’s just not true. I write about how much I love my dogs all the time.

This bath house at Brighton Beach felt really lesbian, and my favorite love stories are queer.

I have written about so many topics throughout the eras of my life thus far. From international business to social justice to tech to weed to natural disasters to coffee. I have always written about love. I cannot figure that bitch out. Going through my writing, love is the motivating undercurrent in every piece. Love for country, love for humanity, love for family, love for justice, love for people. Through my work as a lens of introspection, it’s hard to not think of myself as a massive romantic. Instead of turning from that, I’ll carry it like a banner. It’s my challenge to write about love and do it well.

So, will I be a Brontë?

Experiences, In My Own Words, Lifestyle, Travel

Flying with the Window Open

November 21, 2023November 21, 2023 RaeAnna

I will never understand people who fly with the blinds shut. Let alone people who don’t point out the window so their children can feel the awe of a vast world below. [But that’s an entirely different opinion, I think.]

There are so many who will never see the world like this. It’s a way of transportation, sure, but it’s also an immense privilege.

We live in a time like no other. The Wright Brothers only just took flight in 1903.

Planes have fascinated me for much longer than my memory serves. To this day, I love being at the airport. For just about every reason you can think of from the scientific to the sociological to the engineering to the sheer joy of flying off on an adventure. They’re fascinating.

We spend so much money flying. It’s expensive and oftentimes the fastest if not only way to get some places. Whether it’s work or travel, it’s an incredible feat of humanity to be in the sky. Strip all the possibilities away down to one: you’re paying a lot of money for that view. Also… going through security/customs deserves a good view.

The world is stunning.

Clouds and topography, I clammer for window seats and spend the majority of my flight daydreaming out the window. Of the far off majestic places I know exist somewhere over the horizon. Of the people and stories to hear in abundance too great for any one person to know all the stories of just one person. A planet as fertile as it is ravaged. A civilization as generous as it is greedy. I’m an idealist at heart, but shhhh don’t tell anyone. Looking at the lands I know and don’t, I can’t help but think: This world is beyond words, and yet, we’re collectively destroying it.

How can one look out the window of an airplane and not be left a little in reverence of its abundance and desolation? Maybe if more people did, the world would be a bit of a better place.

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

In My Own Words, Lifestyle

Anxiety Is A Fickle Bitch

October 2, 2023October 3, 2023 RaeAnna

Anxiety is a fickle bitch.

But so am I.

Anxious has pretty much been the main component of my internal personality since the moment my mother decided she wanted to be a mom, making my existence an inevitability within the reality I occupy. Though, it took me 29 years to be able to admit and name it.

Posting pictures like this is a vulnerability and therefore anxiety in and of itself.

I kind of had this belief everyone lived in a perpetual state of trepidation that something horrific would happen for the simple act of daring to breathe when they don’t deserve that air let alone a roof let alone *gasp* joy. Mmmm… apparently, a healthy percentage of the population doesn’t wake up thinking, ‘huh, again?’ Wild. Mentally stable people are real and live among us. I’ve even met one or two.

I, as a human, am not completely devoid of intelligence—though, there is loads of proof to the contrary. I’m also incredibly rational. Anxiety could not possibly compete with my capabilities for logic and analysis. Jk lol smiley face. My anxiety also possesses a finesse for semantics and strong predilection for emotional manipulation.

Even as I write this, I keep thinking, “Is this too dark? Will anyone read this? Am I being relatable or psycho? Am I funny? Is this even well written? Do I need to quit my job and live in a tent beneath an overpass?” The reality is. I’m not writing this for you. I’m not writing this for her. I’m not writing this for them. I’m not writing this for anyone. I’m writing this for me. For whatever fucking reason, some people read this and send messages saying pretty words just frequently enough for me to know putting my inside thoughts not just outside but on the internet—of all places—is doing some good. I’ve turned my deepest shames and anxieties and fears and guilts and traumas into a little, tiny career for myself.

Some days, it feels like writing and publishing helps. A lot of days, it feels like it’s a facade of a sacred act to waterboard myself with all the pain I’m already drowning in. Why the fuck do I keep doing this to myself? Is it fucking worth it? Is feeling like this helpful to me, myself, and I? Am I better off because I look my most painful moments in the eye every goddamn day?

Anxiety says: no. You just like the attention.

Logic says: Yeah… super fun being known as the girl who got raped over and over and over again. I know how many hugs I’ve given. I know how many tear stained shirts I’ve washed. I know how many stories I’ve been the first person in the world to hear from someone who had felt as alone as I did so many years ago. I know I’m not alone anymore. I know the joy of celebrating justice for another. I know the joy of holding space for people to break and put themselves back together again. I know that I am living a life I could not have dreamed to hope I would live to see. I know if I hadn’t spent the last thirteen years writing, I would not be okay enough to be where I’m at, let alone really chasing the joy I’m chasing.

Which is exactly why I post them. Exposure therapy.

My best friend is also a frenetic ball of anxiety. One day, we were going back and forth with the things creating anxiety in our souls. I typed, “My brain…” and autocorrect changed it to, “My Brian…” Honestly, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that myself. Personifying and gendering objects and feelings male with basic bitch names has been something I do for a long time. It’s really easy to tell a frustrating appliance or ill-founded anxiety/depression to fuck right off. Pyoter, the Rumba, is yelled at quite often around the house. Being the raging lesbian woman I am… women are rational, while men are testosterone, I mean, aggression. So, I followed the autocorrect miss-send with a “From now on our anxiety brains are Brian.” Oh boy, we talk shit about Brian.

Dealing with anxiety has gotten easier. Not really because life has gotten easier or the anxiety has lessened. At 32, I know, I’m going to be okay. Because I am going to be okay. I’ve been through quite a lot. It hasn’t always been good, but I’ve gotten through. I’m not great, but I’m doing okay. I’m in a really good place. I have people who love me and I love in return. Not a single person in my life gives me a single brick of foundation for anxiety. I just got back from Australia and Cambodia, and I’m heading down under again a lot sooner than expected. My bills are paid. I have food in my fridge. My dogs are safe and happy and healthy. My credit score went up last month. I haven’t had a serious suicidal ideation in over a year. I’ve made some really amazing new friends in the last year, nine months, even three months. Every day, I have some real, tangible joy. So, when the anxieties about life, love, people, money, travel, health pop up, I have a lot of anecdotal analysis to prove: It is getting better, and I might actually like this life. Maybe, one day, I’ll even deserve it.

So, Fuck Brian. That dude sucks.

In My Own Words, Lifestyle

11… Memories We’ve Made Over Seven Years

May 8, 2023May 8, 2023 RaeAnna

Seven years ago today, Dylan leaned against my car and asked me to be his girlfriend. I said yes, thinking we’d have a summer fling. We did, but the fling just kept on flinging. I don’t think we could look back on our relationship and call it a fling. We’ve for sure progressed into pawtner territory, which is what we call each other because we are partners in parenting our doggos and in life because that’s just what happens when you build a home with someone.

There is no way I could have known that “yes” would involve moving cross country, starting a new career, adopting a dog, then fourteen whittled down to five more dogs, buying a house, and so many more things. Seven years is such a long time to intertwine lives with someone. It’s been a giant roller coaster. There have been good years and bad years and in between years. We’ve built a life and a family together. We’ve gone through so very much from traveling to moving three times to deaths to COVID to quarantine to not getting paid by the government for months to friend breakups to figuring out who we are to my health issues to so many fucking things, and I don’t hate him. Pretty sure he doesn’t hate me yet either. That’s a win.

Our family is about as far from traditional as we could possibly be, and yet we’re still here making it work every day. It’s not always easy, but we do our best, and most days, that’s good enough. After seven years, there’s not much I don’t know about him and vice versa. He knows me about as well as any human can. And on the bad days, he is the one I come home to and look to for comfort. He’s my best friend, support system, and pawtner.

We’d known each other fourteen days… I thought he was crazy and a saint.

People have never been something I take for granted. I tend to not believe people love me or want me in their life. It’s something I will probably always struggle with. One of the few things in my life I do not question: Dylan’s love for me and my love for him. It’s a choice that we continue to make. We choose to love each other, and that means more because I know his capacity for good and bad and he knows mine. He has had every opportunity to stop loving me, to stop choosing me, and he never has. In my life, that is a gift I do not receive lightly. It is a gift I will forever be grateful for.

Today, I’m looking back at some of my favorite memories we’ve shared. From the ridiculous to the sweet. We’ve lived a life together. I genuinely love our home and family; it means everything to me.

Thirteen days into knowing each other, we went out for my friend’s 21st birthday. I voluntold Dylan to drive. I got so trashed, I ended up peeing my pants and throwing up in his truck. The actual story is far funnier. I lost my underwear in his truck for seven months. I got cocky and mean and an overall shit-show. I woke up thinking I would never hear from this man ever again… I woke up to a text telling me how much he adored me and was grateful I wanted to be with him. So then I thought something was wrong with him… There is, but luckily for me, it’s thinking I’m great.
He loves race cars. It’s why we moved to Houston, but we always had so much fun going to the racetrack together that first summer. I loved watching him race and nerd out on all the things.
We moved to Houston with my clothes, his clothes, my mattress, my kitchen stuff, and that’s really it. The first month in our apartment we sat on a blanket in the middle of the living room. We moved with two weeks notice and almost no money. We were so poor, and we had a blast. (Holy fuck, look at us now. We have too much stuff.)
Adopting Beau was a huge step for us, and one of the best decisions he pressured me into. No regrets. Six and a half years later, she’s still our best girl.
He started cutting my hair when we moved to Houston because I’m too lazy to find a new hairstylist and make an appointment… He still does.
No one is as enthusiastic or supportive of my love of carousels. He hops on with me every time, so we can enjoy it together. Then he lets me ride it alone so he can make sure I get a picture.
During our 2018 trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, he let me get him up at 4:30 in the morning so we could watch the hot air balloon festival and the sun rise. It’s still one of my favorite memories.
We moved out of our one bedroom apartment into a bigger apartment in 2019, which allowed me the space to have my first office. Game changer. He pushed for the move, so that I could have the space since I work from home and have no escape.
He didn’t even bat an eye when he walked in the door one day in February 2020 to find a new and very pregnant dog in the house. He just kinda looked at me and went, “So we’re doing this?” And I was like… “It’s up to you!” So now we have six dogs instead of the one.
We bought a house. For the dogs. And ourselves. Mostly for the dogs.
How much he has loved and supported me as best as he can while I navigated my career, my dreams, my travel, my friends, my coming out story. At the end of the day, he is by my side and asks me to just be me because it’s enough.

Bonus

12. He made our home a safe space for me to be me and write what I want to write and feel all of my feelings. He has given me the gift of time. Time to heal and grow and discover and exist. He has shared my pain and joys and burdens and fears. He’s not perfect. Sometimes, he’s a real asshat. But he loves me fiercely, and all he wants is for me to be safe and happy and healthy. And we’re learning how to navigate what that looks like. We’re no longer 23 and 25. We’re in our 30s. We’re entirely different people, and we have found a way to love each other for who we were and who we’ve become. I hope to continue finding ways to love each other in all our variations to come. Because I can’t see my life without the man I thought I’d have a fling with.

Our first picture in our first apartment together.

This was the announcement picture when we rescued the puppies.

We had to announce buying a house with some Pride. I wasn’t an out lesbian yet, but I was a proud pansexual!

A month into dating… We were weird and still are.

In My Own Words, Lifestyle

For Ocho

May 7, 2023July 30, 2023 RaeAnna

Cats have never been my animal of choice. I grew up with them; I love them; I am very allergic to them; I need my animals to follow me around the house and never leave me alone; I have never had a cat of my own.

He was the most handsome cat and so loved.

The only tattoo I have solely in honor of another being—at this point—is for a cat. A year ago today, Ocho, one of my closest friend’s cat died suddenly. At just under a year, he was still just a little kitten. Meghan and I had spent a lot of time together over the end of 2021 and the first five months of 2022, so I was well acquainted with Ocho. We were buddies. We played aggressively. To the point of bleeding. His murder mittens got me every time. He’d come running at me with no warning, latching onto my ankles, knowing that I’d pick him up and play with him in a way no one else did. Although, maybe, he just hated me and was trying to ankle bite me right out of the house. I’ve never loved a cat more.

Loving someone who doesn’t belong to you and grieving them is a wild thing. I grew up with cats who’ve been kittens grown into old ladies. I spent years loving and playing with them. It’s not that I didn’t love them, I did, but Ocho was different. Grief is sadder when they die young and out of the blue. He didn’t suffer, but everyone who loved him did.

My relationship with Ocho was so much deeper than even his mom knew. Meghan and I met at a really weird time for both of us, and our lives collapsed into one another. For more than a few reasons, I spent a lot of nights at her house. Her home and she herself became my safe haven, and that has never really gone away. I have never felt peace the way I do with her in her home; she is just that kind of human, and her pets are just like her.

I have a history of night terrors combined with sleep walking. They had never plagued me in adulthood. I thought I’d left them at my parents’ house. I think the combination of coming into myself truly, feeling peace and safety for the first time, starting to deeply heal, and the amount of stress I was under created the perfect storm. The night terrors came back.

I don’t like to think of myself as a dangerous person, but I grew up in violence. It’s hard to leave that behind. On more than a few occasions, I’ve had to choose violence to survive. Unfortunately, under certain circumstances, violence is my body’s natural reaction. My brain moves fast and has always stopped myself before doing what I do not want it to do. None of these had been tested when another person was involved and I was asleep.

For the first time in twelve years, I started having night terrors. In Meghan’s house. Really bad ones. They were memories of moments I actively try to forget, and if you know me, you know I don’t shy away from much.

He gets to be with his dog brother forever.

Meghan is strong and capable and intelligent, but she is also kind and gentle and sensitive, though most don’t see it. Her strength is rooted in a quiet self-assuredness, coming from a foundation of stability and love she’s known her entire life. My strength comes from the complete opposite. Listening to her talk about anything has always filled me with such hope because she’s proof that goodness exists. We are so very similar in so many ways, yet we couldn’t be more dissimilar. When I look at her in her life, I see the possibility of what could have been for me if everything had been different. I’m not jealous; I’m fiercely protective. For some reason, she has deemed me worthy of existing in it with her. All of this to say, I have loved her from the moment I met her, and all I’ve ever wanted to do was shelter her peace and safety and sense of hopeful optimism. It’s not my job. It’s my privilege as her friend. My greatest hope for her is that everyone treats her better than I ever could because the world needs her and people like her, and I don’t want anything jading her heart.

Nothing is scarier than wanting to protect someone from everything, but the only threat to their safety is you. That’s where I was at. I was the danger.

I will never know when they started or ended, but I know the first time I realized what was happening. The night terrors had returned. Except at 30, I had more memories to be scared of than I did at 17.

This story is one of my greatest shames. I would love to never tell it. I will because I love Ocho and his memory deserves it.

One night, I couldn’t tell you which night, but it was deep into the night. Houston had fallen silent. The house creaked in the way old houses do. Nigel was asleep at Meghan’s feet. Ocho slept on the pillow next to her. The winter air blew outside. It was the kind of night perfect for deep sleeping, and all four of us were. Then, I wasn’t.

I woke standing over her with a fist raised and my other clenched at my side. I don’t know what I was going to do if I was going to do anything. But I knew there were two tiny paws kneading my chest and a kitten shaped head rubbing against my chin. I immediately knew. My body seized up. I breathed in and couldn’t let it out. I started shaking as tears dripped from my jaw. I looked at her peacefully not snoring, laying on her back, completely unaware of the danger I had just posed to her. Nigel didn’t even raise his head, but he was looking at me in his soulful way.

Ocho bit my collarbone hard.

I breathed out.

I stepped back and looked down at him. He gave my hand a little bite and lick before he curled up by his mom’s head. Her hand reached for him, and they snuggled in closer. I backed out of her room, turned around, walked into the kitchen, grabbed the garage keys. I walked out the back door, down the stairs, and into the garage. I didn’t even turn on the lights when I shut the door behind me. I laid down in the middle of her garage workshop and sobbed. The full self, feel it in your body, pure grief kind of sob. I had almost hurt the one person in the world I would have gone to the ends of the world to protect. She had the perfect life, and I had arrived to ruin it. I was the thing she should worry about, and I had done nothing to protect her from me. The what ifs flooded my mind. I know what great harm I am capable of conscious by choice. Asleep by guttural reaction? That had never been tested, and I was horrified for her. I was also selfish: fearful she would hate me, and I would lose someone who I’d come to need, and I don’t need people.

Eventually, I stopped sobbing when the first bird sang. I sat up, realizing I’d left a me-shaped sawdust angel in the middle of her garage. I grabbed the broom, sweeping the sawdust into chaos again. I took a shower in the garage shower because I’d taken some sawdust with me, and it would be weird having to explain sawdust in the sheets. I crawled back in bed and stared at the ceiling until my alarm went off and it was time to make coffee.

One of the first things Meghan said to me that morning was my hair looked curlier than it had when I went to bed. The day began like every other day I spent the night. Except Ocho was a bit cuddlier with me than usual. Not a single ankle bite.

I was distant for a few days and found my evenings too busy to spend the night. But when I did see her, I started telling stories about what I have done in moments where I’ve chosen violence. I told her I had bad nightmares and sometimes my PTSD makes it hard for my body and mind to communicate, and that has historically led to unpleasantness. I didn’t sugar coat anything, but I also left out quite a bit. She met stories of some of my worst moments with the same grace and compassion she always has. She told me to just be me and not be afraid for her. She kept telling me she’s very strong and tough, which I already knew, and she could take care of herself, which I already knew. But I never wanted her to have to around me, and I really never wanted her to have to protect herself from me.

Eventually, I spent the night again. The first three times, I didn’t sleep at all. I stared at the ceiling the entire time. The fourth night, Ocho curled up on the pillow touching my shoulder and face, so I drifted off to sleep. I went a week without a night terror. The second time I remember having one, Ocho nibbled my ear until I woke up. He did it every time. He kept his mom safe. He gave me enough security to fall asleep, hopeful that I wouldn’t be a threat. I never have been since. To Meghan or anyone else.

This past winter, the night terrors started colliding with insomnia and tactile hallucinations. Oh, it was a rough few months. I wasn’t sleeping. When I would I’d have horrendous night terrors. When I’d wake from them, I would physically feel whatever traumatic event I’d had to watch in my sleep. I was losing my goddamn mind. Ocho had long been gone, and all the reasons I spent so many nights at Meghan’s were no more. Then one night, the worst night, laying in my own bed, I felt like I was dying in a prison of my own body unable to move or escape what was one of the worst tactile hallucinations of my life. Ocho walked across my chest and curled up on my pillow on my shoulder. He nibbled my ear. He broke me out of my prison, put me back into my body. The tactile hallucinations disappeared all at once, but he got up and I felt him walk away.

The nights I can feel their hands start touching my body and their breath on my skin and the pain bloom like Moonflower planted in my soul, Ocho walks across my chest. Every time, he curls up and nibbles my ear, staying with me until every touch and breath is gone. Then I feel him walk away. The Moonflower wilts in my soul as Ocho takes the darkness my pain needs to bloom with him.

I don’t believe in God or ghosts or an afterlife. I believe my brain is fucked up because of trauma, and it’s doing its best to servive. I also believe Ocho knew what he was doing, and my soul has decided to keep him alive on the nights I still need him.

Ocho was such an asshole. I have scars on my ankles from where he bit me. He gave Meghan and I so many heart attacks when he’d find newer and cleverer ways to escape the prison we call a house. I hate bugs, and yet I’ve crawled under her house so many times to pull him out. I would wake up to him biting me in the middle of my back at night to play with him. But he gave the best snuggles. He was always full of vim and vigor, triggering laughing fits. He just knew. Every time. He knew when I needed him. He knew when his mom needed him. He was perfect, and I miss him every day.

I tattooed his name in the place he just loved to bite as a reminder of all that he had done for me. I had no idea what he would go on to do. He saved his mom from me. He has saved me from me so many more times.