I believe everyone must eventually find some way to express themself, to create something that tells their life story as they live it. Some find it in film, in photography; in piano and violin, the sound of their voice; in watercolors and crayons and acrylic paint; in the parts of ourselves that stay here, the parts we leave behind.
It has always been words for me. I have weaved and built my life in and out of words and sentences and essays and paragraphs, debate speeches and whispered confessions, post-it notes and to-do lists and song lyrics, compliments and criticisms and arguments. I rely on words to make sense of everything from politics to relationships to my own identities, and the words that I do not pen down I think of constantly in my head. I love figuring out what is exactly the right word for the right time in the right place in the right sentence in the right paragraph in the right piece—and when I do, an inexplicable euphoric feeling rises in me, the kind that urges me to skip around on the streets.
But how could something I love so dearly fail me, in this case, so utterly? I reach for the dictionary, the encyclopedias, the wikis, the videos and comments and posts, and yet no word specific enough has allowed me to be perfectly comfortable in my own skin. Different terms call to me in my mind, yet as I tentatively strap word after word onto myself, I know that none of them belong to me. It is as if language has abandoned me, or that, perhaps, I have failed it.
Isn’t it funny? I believed that words are my source of courage, the one thing I can rely on to prove myself to the world that I deserve to exist; and yet, when words cannot represent who I am, I become a coward. Even as I rattle my keyboard, I am afraid of the people walking around me reading this and scoffing at someone so ridiculous. I cannot bring myself to correct people when they refer to me wrongly, even when I know that the wrongness I feel is tangible and real, because I am afraid that I will never discover what is right.
It is a heart-jumping, throat-strangling kind of fear. It makes me want to slam close my computer and smash the whole thing on the ground and to pretend, just for once, that I am what these terms say I am, that I fit perfectly into this definition, that I belong to this word and that this word belongs to me.
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“Sometimes it exhausts me, all the head shaking and stumbling around to navigate and negotiate the two-ring circus that is this gender binary, walking pronoun tightropes and balancing between my safety and someone else’s comfort. You are free to call me trans and I am proud to lift this name up and hold it, right there in the sun, and you would not be wrong, but this still feels like I am borrowing a word from someone else, that it is not all the way mine, really, and my friend who lent it to me might need it back, or they might need it more than me, and really, these are just words, and words are always imperfect, words are just sounds we make with our mouths that point our minds to think of things that cannot be fully described in words anyway.
I am a writer, so I know where words fail us.”
Gender Failure, Rae Spoons and Ivan Coyote.
I am a writer. I know where words fail us. But why should I repent for the inadequacy of language? Why should I squeeze myself into existing boxes of language that forces me to renounce certain parts of my identity? I refuse to compartmentalize myself to be good enough for language; language is the party that needs to grow, to change.
I will always be a person of words. For now, however, I let words fail me, because by failing me, it sets me free.