To recreate us
I love a song about the earnest failings of youth, because these are the years it is safest to fail.
My book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is out NOW. Grab a copy from your local book seller, or direct from the press HERE
For a good long time, my dad never really took a day off. Even when he was home, I got the sense he was always kind of at work. Gone by the time I woke up, barely there when he came home for dinner, and then gone again. Back to the glass shop until his bones were too tired to carry his body a second more. Then he would come home, late in the evening, and hide in the living room under headphones with a book and shrink into a world of comfort.
This is a hard life to understand until it becomes your own.
I’ve been doing a lot of press about my book. Have I talked about this here? I no longer remember what conversations I’ve had. I no longer remember what I have written down. I’ve been journaling a lot lately too, and my journals all say tomorrow I will be better in the margin. My journals are not always true. My journal is often littered with little lies, just for me, written to push me towards the painful truth.
The other I made a playlist for walking Bowie at night. I called it The Dog Walks at Midnight, as if I was a spy, leaving a little code to be deciphered by someone uncovering the artifacts of my life. Sometimes, most of the time, these are just little jokes for an often tired heart. Lysh and I had finally finished the third season of The Bear, wrapping it up long after its place in zeitgeisty conversations has waned. Watching season 3 made me think of the start of all this, and the first song on the playlist I’m still in the process of making for our walks was the demo version of “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens. A song that played over the intro in the 7th episode of season 1, behind vignettes of Chicago, the people who populate its streets. I put 8 songs on the playlist to start, a trial run to get a sense of flow and vibe and where it might need to go as I refine it over time. I prepare to make mental notes on other songs to add, and then we go for a walk and I listen to “Chicago” on repeat for half an hour.
I’m grateful for the press, for the interviews and the questions and the comments on the book now that it’s been out for a few days. The nice emails. The tags on Instagram. The DMs. The excitement. People are finding the book, people want to talk about it with me. This is the dream of the writer, that the audience starts to appear after spending 2 years alone with my anxiety about what will happen when it is done, when the words I can’t take back are stained forever in ink and bound in hardcover. The official release date has passed, and I am blessed with readers. I am very tired, but tomorrow will be better. Thank you to everyone who has read, who has reached out or posted or shared. I may not have responded to all of you, but I have read all of your notes and they have lifted my spirits.
The sky starts to get dark as we walk, up the street, crossing when dogs approach, and then back again when they are on the side we have escaped to. Bowie always looks up at me to confirm we’re good to move when we dip behind cars and work to avoid traffic. I think about his face looking for mine when I close my eyes sometimes. “Chicago” plays as the blue in the sky darkens and dims over our heads, and when it is over I hit back to start it again.
In the summers of my youth the sun never left the sky. I grew up in the Yukon, where the midnight sun is so famous it is part of the marketing gnawing at eager wallets. At night, it can be any time, and it often is. Time eventually means nothing and if you stay up long enough, if you live long enough, days become nothing. I only ever knew the dark as something that accompanies the cold, as a companion to depressive loneliness. Beautiful sometimes, but only just. I will always tell people that they should visit the north in the cold, because that is when you get to feel the truth on your skin, the words written in the margins of itself. The bitter, sharp cold that settles in the dark. How your breath becomes something you can see in front of you, vapour that hangs thick in the cold air, that can become a vision of yourself if you stare into it long enough.
“Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens ends, and I hit back to play it once more. My dad never took vacations because he never felt he had someone he could trust the shop with, not until I became a journeyman glazier myself, and we planned for my successive takeover of his shop. For a few years it was planned that I would become him. I thought this was what he wanted me to do, and I had no idea how to live as myself. I fell into the role, and with relaxed shoulders my dad was able to take a break.
Everyone on The Bear is angry. There is tension and anxiety that filters scenes like sepia, and the anger feels real. It feels tired. The anger of exhaustion, that erupts through fingers worn thin and tender from overwork. I remember the time my dad was away, and I was at the shop alone cutting mirrors for a job that a recently-hired employee had promised the moon on and failed to deliver so much as a star. For hours upon hours I sent him out with a truck of new glass, and every time he returned with a new batch of excuses as to why and how it had broken or been unusable, and I had to work to make replacements. One night, when it hit 8 PM, I realized I had been there since 5 am and broken down. Lined the dregs of failed glass on a rack, screamed a primal lonely scream and smashed them with the blunt end of a wooden broom. Destroying the broom, the glass, the last lingering promise of my sanity. Glass everywhere. On the floor, in my arms. I sighed in relief when it was all destroyed, wrapped the blood on my arms in paper towel and tape, swept up the damage and walked away to sleep for the few hours I could believe in before I had to return and do it all over again. I understand the anger in The Bear because it is the anger of endless labour that piles up and hides behind the pressing realities of being alive, in love, alight with desires. Waits for you to stumble backwards so it can topple you whole to the ground.
My tired is a different kind of tired now, and when “Chicago” plays again Bowie and I look to each other for reassurance before we cross the street and turn the corner to head for home. Sufjan Stevens sings
I made a lot of mistakes/in my mind, in my mind
I love a song about the earnest failings of youth, because these are the years it is safest to fail. Something I thought a lot about writing the book was how much I learned through failure, through tripping over my own hidden anxieties. How much anger there was in me, a fire kept hot and bright by suppressing the questions that might smother it and let the ash settle. I have worked a lot in my life, and lived a lot too, and writing through it was hard but rewarding in its own way.
I made a lot of mistakes
What I have come to accept is that I’m not a failure, it’s just that I have failed. All the times I failed were lessons learned, the things I recalled when writing and collecting ideas into a book. It helped me say goodbye to a vision of myself fading in the mirror, and the idea of who I was becomes a story to tell. I am tired, but grateful for it, and the labour is still here but different now. Less blood, less anger. Harder sometimes, but only because so much is unknown. I never really knew how to write a book I just did it. I don’t really know how to sell a book but I hope I will.
This is all to say thank you to everyone who reads, who writes me to share stories of your own lives. The people who share and comment and do all the things that help a book find its life. It’s hard to do this kind of work right now, hard to be a trans woman from Canada writing a book for an American press. I hope you read it if you get the chance.
I’m tired, and I will close my eyes and see Bowie’s face look for mine, as I hit play on “Chicago” once more and cross the street to go home. This will all be here for us tomorrow, and sometimes that’s enough to keep going.
Want to listen to an episode of my currently-in-hiatus podcast Blue Eyes Crying By The Chips about "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens with comedian/writer Josh Gondelman, you can listen here:
