I had a dream about Alex last night.

Alex is someone I met briefly when I was 20, when I was visiting my girlfriend Djuna in Paris, and who had a really outsized effect on me. He was someone that Djuna and I immediately recognized as part of our scene, the queer and femme end of the punk spectrum. He was shockingly beautiful with pinky-orangy-purply hair dark eyes, and Slavic cheekbones. He wanted to be a writer and had worked at a college radio station and had done some informal sex-work and had a history of drug use and messy relationships. Which described half the people Djuna and I knew back home.

But Alex was the first drug user activist I’d ever met. He introduced me to the concept of needle exchange, to the idea that you could take the activist ideology (and aesthetics) of ACT-UP and apply it to drug users. That you could have a messy, destructive, complicated relationship with drugs, and still fight against stigma. He was the first person who told me about Hepatitis C, which had only been identified 5 years before. Everything I learned from him, in five days of bumming around Paris, is probably the single most important factor in my use of safer injection practices, and the fact that I made it through five years of injecting heroin and speed without contracting HIV, HBV, or HCV.

The complicated part is that meeting Alex probably also contributed to my trying heroin nine months later. I knew a lot of people in Berkeley who were more or less open about the speed use, but I really didn’t know anyone who had used heroin. Unlike heroin and crack, speed did not yet have the reputation of being “instantly addictive” and so there seemed to be more room for people to admit their history with it, even if their use had been chaotic or destructive. But Alex was the first person I met (outside of a 12-step speakers bureau context) who was open about his history of heroin use. And he made it seem less scary and more like speed which was something I’d been around for years, even if I hadn’t tried it myself. It was about 4 months after the first time I’d tried acid, which was also something I’d been around for years, and which was supposed to be super scary, but wasn’t.

And then to make it even more complicated, when I flew home from Paris, Djuna moved to Barcelona with Alex. Djuna and I had an open relationship with very poor boundaries and communication. And I had spent the first two years of our relationship thinking I could handle it. But I had taken a semester off of school specifically to live with Djuna, and she ran off with this beautiful man who had had this incredibly intense impact on me, and it was, at least on my end, the beginning of the end of our relationship.

So Alex is this person who shows up in my dreams a couple times a year and is tied to all of the decisions in my life that I am most conflicted about.

In my dream last night, I had been googling Alex, and had figured out he was a marine biologist, and my friend Carmen who is, in real life, a marine biology professor, had reached out to him and they had been talking to each other online for a while. And Carmen had relayed all that to me, and I had gone to the group house where the marine biologists lived to go try and find Alex. I recognized him immediately when I saw him — he was a little skinnier and his face was weathered with crowfeet and laugh lines, and his long curly hair was shot through with grey, but he looked just the same. I knew immediately that he was still injecting drugs. He was wearing two or three faded black long sleeve T-shirts which were frayed and bleach-stained and a little oversized, so the sleeves completely covered his wrists and part of his hands. He didn’t recognize me right away and I had a moment of thinking about how I must look. I was wearing the clothes I wear to work — a cotton dress shirt and black slacks — with my current haircut, which is undercut and can look pretty queer if I take the time to gel it up, but when it doesn’t have any product in it, it just looks like a sensible middle-age woman short haircut. I wondered if I had changed too much, and if he wouldn’t want to talk to me. But when he figured out who I was, he seemed genuinely happy to see me. He introduced me to his friends, including a woman who in the dream he had already been dating when I first met him. I offered to make her a copy of my favorite 90s mixtape (a CD I made for my friend Lila when she went home to lick her wounds after quitting heroin, the time it actually stuck) and she seemed excited by the retro-ness of it.

When I woke up, I piece back together what is true. Alex died four years ago, when he was 45 (my age now). He had gotten married, had a daughter, had gone back to school, gotten his MD, become a psychiatrist. He had cut his hair short and was starting to get the burly build of someone who gains fat and muscle in middle age. He was still involved with harm reduction, as a clinician instead of an activist. I had gotten back in touch with him via Facebook in 2009, when I was on maternity leave, and desperate to connect with other adults. And then in 2013, when I was really struggling (postpartum depression, grief over a stillbirth, off of Zoloft while I tried to get pregnant again, on a diet that was making everything more stressful). I had so many unresolved issues around drugs. No language to talk about them beyond 12-step language. Afraid to admit that, however maladaptive of a coping mechanism they had been, drugs had been doing something for me that I was unable to admit I needed and didn’t have the tools to access in other ways. And 14 years later I was haunted by all those unresolved issues. I dreampt about drugs all the time and the dreams threw me into a spiral of cravings, exacerbated by the stress of dieting.

I sent Alex a piece I had written about meeting him in Paris in 1994. We had talked once on Skype. I had tried to sum up the weird path my life had taken in the previous 15 years. That I was a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical science still trying to come to terms with the overdose death of my boyfriend during myself second year in graduate school. While also trying to seem cool and jaded. To not let on how deep the ruptures in my life went.

My life started to get better not long after that. I told my postdoc advisor that I was leaving the academic track, and it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I went back on Zoloft and stopped dieting. The drug cravings and drug dreams subsided.

Alex’s life started to fall apart a year or so later, in ways that were hard to figure out via Facebook. He separated from his wife, became estranged form is teenage daughter, went back to stay with his parents. I didn’t really know how to reach out. And then he died.

I just finished Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I had been avoiding the book, because I heard him speak last year at Muse & the Marketplace about autobiographical novels and he spent too much time talking about archiving your emails in case you need them for research.

But the book was amazing. And actually articulated for me what autobiographical fiction can do that memoir can’t. Which is to say things you don’t know how to talk about from you own life. Also what plot can do to make the underlying issues legible.

There were two essays about ACT UP San Francisco in the late 80s, and they so viscerally put me back in that time and place. I am 6 years younger than Chee, so when he was 22 and just out of college, I was 16 and not out to anyone yet. But the ACT-UP look that he describes: leather jackets, floppy hair with the front dyed pink or blue or green, colorful scarves, earrings, combat boots. I had totally forgotten that that was a coherent and recognizable style, but it absolutely was. And it was one that I imprinted on. I had one friend, from the Pacific Center queer youth group, who actually dressed like that. But mostly those guys were so much older than me, all I could do was look on in awe. How did I forget about that style? It made such a deep impression on me but I didn’t have the distance to understand it as a distinct thing.

And so it hit me that the reason I was having problems articulating what Michael looked like when I first met him, and what seemed so attractive about him, was that he had that ACT UP/ Queer Nation look, even though he was my age. I went back and looked at the 30 second video clip I have of him from an SFNet documentary, and he has a black inverted triangle on his leather jacket. And I am wracking my brain to remember what it meant to him. I think mental illness? Disability? I had totally forgotten about it.

And so now I have a way of articulating what he looked like, to translate the message of his fashion choices for readers (for myself?)

I am working on rewriting the first page of my manuscript for a workshop next month, and I put in the Queer Nation reference. But when I was talking to one of the women in my workshopping group, she was like, You’re confusing the reader by bringing up Queer Nation because he’s not queer. I was taken aback that somehow all the times I talk about him being bi, and the incredibly destructive crush he had in his straight best friend are not making an impression on readers.

I think it is only with 20 years distance that I have been able to see the ways that stigma (around disability, mental illness, drug use, and queerness) played a role in the tragedy of Michael’s death.

But because there is no scene of Michael kissing a man, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I say he was bi.

I organized a women, trans, and NB event for the LGBTQ+ alumni group I’m on the board of. It was a tour of the Boston MFA focusing on women and LBGTQ themes in the museum collection. I was all dressed up in tight jeans, big boots, a flannel shirt, black eyeliner, and a lot of hair product.

I’ve been experimenting with my presentation lately, trying to reconnect to a lot of the questions about gender that I more or less packed away when I quit heroin almost 20 years ago. Basically all these things that I was trying to explore — gender, sexuality, different subcultures — seemed irrevocably intertwined with drugs. It seemed safer to just bury myself in graduate school and rediscover the joys of being a socially awkward nerd. It is maybe not a coincidence that my first serious relationship with a straight man started 5 days after the last time I got high. So 19ish years later, I’m trying to make sense of what it means to be bi and gender-nonconforming while also being a suburban mom.

So, to make a long story not so long, I was looking pretty queer.

Attendance for our event was pretty low to begin with, and then it was snowing and 3 people who had bought tickets for the tour didn’t show up. I said I would go look around for people who looked like they were looking for us, and who looked gay. I felt super awkward saying that. Like, who am I to judge who’s queer? But one of the other women on the tour just laughed and said, “No, that makes sense. I saw you waiting in the rotunda and immediately knew I was in the right place.” So, like, confirmed, I looked gay.

I had a great time on the tour. I got to ask an art history professor about intercrural sex in classical Greece. And learned that the person at the center of Gaugin’s “D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous” is thought by some art historians to be Māhū (a traditional third gender in Tahiti).

And the woman who had clocked me as queer in the rotunda is interested in getting more involved in the alumni group. So it was also productive, in a kind of retail politics way of reaching out to potential members.

But afterwards I was thinking about the distance between the part of being bi that I feel comfortable with — a deep interest in LGBTQ+ history, the joy of being recognized, the pleasure of a semi-flirtatious conversation with another queer person even when everyone knows it’s not going to go anywhere — and the problem of belonging or not belonging within a community.

Because the other thing is that there was an older butch/femme couple who seemed to be not at all interested in learning more about the alumni group or meeting the other people or even the tour — they walked away before the tour even started, even though they had bought tickets. And my immediate fear was that they were pissed off that the tour guide was a man, or that they didn’t like the cut of our jibs — 3 people in their early 30s plus me, 3 of whom were dressed in various degrees of performative gender nonconformingness, and the black femme bi woman who is the president of the alumni board. And it was such a familiar feeling — that I was being dismissed by older lesbians. I immediately felt like I was 17 again, and trying so hard to find community, and always being told in one way or another, "Come back when your 40 and still a lesbian." Which obviously didn’t happen, because I’m bi, and when I was in my early 20s I felt so viscerally that it was shape-up-or-ship-out, that I stopped trying to find a community in queer women’s spaces.

I’m sure the people who left the tour had their own things they were dealing with — as I told the president of the board, I feel like older lesbians, particularly butch/femme couples have been through so much that everyone is always already on probation. And I guess we failed whatever that test was, and they decided that wasting the money spent on the tour was better than spending another minute with us, or even saying goodbye to us.

I definitely feel like even on the alumni board, I am more of an ally than a full community member. But I’m not afraid of elbow grease, and I honestly do want to be useful, and so it’s a way of helping the community even if I feel very ambivalent about whether is it _my_ community.

My mother’s basement flooded on Friday, and I drove up to help her yesterday.

Sometimes, I think I am at my best in a crisis. I was laying out tarp, moving boxing, saving precariously balanced plastic bins full of antique paper mâché doll bodies, directing a pair of teenage boys on which boxes to save first and where to put them. Telling my mother that even though her hot water heater was out of commission, her dishwasher would heat its own water. Talking to the plumber because I knew my mother was overwhelmed.

But I knew even as I was driving up to her house that what she wanted was a shoulder to cry on. That she wanted me to join her in mourning the loss of her precious objects. But I couldn’t do it.

I always feel a flash of resentment when my mother needs me to be her emotional support. So many years of being the first person she turned to for everything wrong with her life, including all the ways that I myself was disappointing her. All the years of feeling like I had to be the adult and to parent myself, because neither of my actual parents were able to do it. And, then, more recently, all the years of therapy trying to unlearn everything I had to do to look after myself.

So when I dug down looking for empathy, there wasn’t much there.

And, so, yesterday, after three hours of moving boxes, and slipping on icy steps, and getting zapped by wet extension cords, I knew that she wanted more from me. And so I told her that I wasn’t sure that I could support her in the way she wanted me to. That I was better when there was something tangible that needed doing. And she seemed to accept that.

It was an exhausting day.

I threw out a lot of clothes that I had been holding onto for some reason. But faced with tipped over boxes of clothes that will never fit me again, cold and wet and unmanageably heavy, it was very freeing to just send them to the dump.

I drove home in the snow, unable to see out my rear windshield. The back of the car filled with the stuff of mine I’d been able to salvage from my mother’s basement. Wedding china I’m not sure I want, rescued from disintegrating cardboard boxes and stuffed into heavy black garbage bags. Singing along to High as Hope and trying to avoid having to change lanes.

I have a new therapist, at least for six months, because my regular therapist is on maternity leave. Part of me is jealous of six months of maternity leave, which felt like something I could never do if I wanted to stay on my career track, and then I ended up leaving academia anyway, in part because of not being able to take a leave of absence after the stillbirth, and having my maternity leave dicked with, and then  getting marked down on my annual evaluation for not getting enough done the year my younger daughter was born. But anyway, I have a new therapist.

He’s Swedish and really into guided meditation and told me he was very impressed by how I’d started sobbing in his office on the first day. And I’m like, whatever, just don’t pity me and don’t try to to create some big narrative about me and we’ll be fine.

But in that first session when I was trying to explain how overwhelmed I’ve been feeling lately, and struggling for how to describe what it felt like, he suggested the word “unraveling” which struck me as the perfect word, and I’ve been having a lot of fiber arts based thoughts.

I’ve also been trying to write about Brigit. An agent I had an informational interview with told me I needed to publish more essays, and in better journals, and he suggested I write about the bad old days in San Francisco, and try to capitalize on GenX nostalgia.

But the women in my writing group are all baffled by my essay about Brigit, and I think they feel like I’m not really reacting right to what was going on when I was 20 (being in a totally dysfunctional polyamorous relationship, dating a trans woman who was ten years older than me and deeply depressed, us almost getting kicked out of our apartment because she was trans, performing at a BDSM club and getting heckled by straight dudes). And they want me to be really judgemental and shocked. But for me I look back on it as this sort of Edenic time, because it was before I started doing heroin, and before I knew Lila was doing heroin. And I feel like my outlook was, “Things are tough all over, and you just have to keep going.”

I look back on just pushing through all this crazy shit around housing, and being harassed on the street, including strangers threatening to kill me because they couldn’t figure out my gender, and all of Michael’s overdoses and then finding him dead, and being convinced that there was no one who I could safely turn to for help without being institutionalized for being bisexual, gender-something, promiscuous, druggy, etc. etc. And I think maybe the reason I’m unraveling now is that it feels like it’s safe to. Especially because I’m still really good in a crisis, as long as it’s a crisis I can actually do something about, and not like someone being disappointed in me or whatever.

But, like, it feels very hard to pin down what was really so bad back then that it would feel so crippling now

“Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false” -Robert McKee, “Story”

This is why so much of what I read is memoirs by women and gay men.

Because this relationship both to secrets and to what you can assume the reader will know does not in any way reflect my experience as a human or my experience in writers’ groups.

The vast majority of stuff that I would consider common knowledge (or at least would expect of someone who reads the newspaper) about sex, drugs, and various subcultures is totally baffling to a group of Boston area women age 50-70.

Also think of the amazing meet ugly between Wade and Vanessa in Deadpool, where it becomes a competition of trauma and gallows humor. Though I would agree that these are not the kind of secrets that drive plots. In Deadpool, the secret that drives the plot is Wade’s inability to face the vulnerability of someone caring for him while he is dying.

Or the boyfriend I met when I was 23 who when I told him I used to shoot heroin was like, yeah, I pretty much assumed that. But he was shocked when he saw how nice my father’s apartment was, because I was trying so hard to survive without my parents that I didn’t act like a rich girl.

I love characters who are trying to pretend that everything’s fine while it is really clear to the reader and most of the other characters that they’re a fucking mess. And those characters often have secrets that they wield in various ways and secrets that they try desperately to keep but that are obvious or mundane to people around them.

So, yeah, experiment with telling as little as you can get away with. But also you need to have a piece workshopped or betaed to actually figure out what is confusing people. And then write a really long version and keep rewriting it until it’s one or two amazing sentences. Show don’t tell doesn’t work for othered groups the way it works for straight white men.

I also love the idea (which I haven’t tried) of squeezing exposition in in the form of mansplaining.