Skirting the Issue

A story I wrote for Rebellious Mag’s “What’s in a Name?” Issue. Obviously, it takes an immense amount of bravery for anyone to come out as transgender, but it requires bravery from their friends and family, too.

 

A meditation…

I’m so excited for my first story for the Atlantic! Why the word “panties is so awful”

i’ve been an enormous fan of the Atlantic for years and years. I hope it’s the first of many.

Forgive Me: David Sedaris

I remember a conversation I had with my friend John once about how writers sometimes feel like parasites. Journalists, I said, don’t necessarily create anything of note; we just act as intellectual leeches, living off the sweet blood of other people’s experiences and ideas. If everyone were a writer, we would just sit around all day, shifty-eyed behind our macbooks, waiting for someone to say something preposterous at a press conference or invent a cocktail made from gin and tumeric, or whatever.

I share this inferiority complex. However, unlike John, who’s decided to go into politics after he gets his MSJ, I have no other discernible skill. I’m that intellectual leech: if I don’t crawl up your leg and suck out everything I can, I will most certainly perish.

I was touched, then, when I read the David Sedaris essay, “Repeat After Me”, in which the author writes about his sister, Lisa, and her pet parrot, Henry.

…I’m like a friendly junk man building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there. But my family started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up. And they’re sick of it.

Conversations now start with the words, you have to swear you will never repeat this. I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word is no better than Henry’s.

In Sedaris’ mind, he’s no better than his sister’s silly bird, parroting voices and the sound of the blender but never actually creating an original thought. Joan Didion said “writers are always selling someone out,” but to most of us, we don’t know what other option we have.

One late night, after making his sister cry, the author goes downstairs to converse, parrot-to-parrot, with Henry, hoping that somehow, both their voices will cut through the static and create something real:

From his own mouth the words are meaningless and so he pulls up a chair. The clock reads 3:00 AM, then 4:00, then 5:00 as he sits before the brilliant bird, repeating slowly and clearly the words forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

A recording of Sedaris reading the essay on This American Life is available online here.