joelle snowe

Tag: personalblog

  • Lack of Agency -or- “Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign*”

    (*the sign reads: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination” ((thanks, Diane Di Prima)))

    Right now I’m trying to think of something to write but I keep circling around the topic and it comes out wrong. I have deleted the first couple sentences of this post at least five times. There’s a feeling I am experiencing that is difficult to communicate. I saw something that upset me earlier, that made me feel called out. The content of this thing is not super important. It forced me to confront a feeling of powerlessness that I have felt for most of my life. Of having very little agency. For years, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. There was clearly something that set me apart from the other kids around me. They could smell it on me and I was bullied from the time I entered preschool. Some kids just didn’t like me, and I don’t think even they knew why at first. Eventually, they started to assume I was queer. I didn’t even know at the time that that’s what was going on with me. I knew I liked women, I knew I found some men attractive. But the idea of doing pretty much anything sexual was foreign to me, so the accusations and such were baffling.

    I didn’t know what being transgender meant until I was in my mid 20s and I started to know some trans people in real life. I lived my life off of social media entirely until then as well. It was something I had decided to opt out of since the early days of Facebook and MySpace. I did use LiveJournal somewhat and Deviant Art here and there. Message boards related to my interests. The internet was different, blah blah blah. Skipping the coming out story, being trans was a surprise to me in many ways. I saw myself as eventually being a father and husband, until I didn’t. Until the other option felt easier despite being harder in every measurable way. Being a trans woman was the only way for me to continue living my life – I was unable to establish myself before making this change. Some trans people will go out and try to live a life as the gender they are assumed to be. Only finding out that they can’t continue doing it. For me, I couldn’t get started for real until this issue was resolved. Call it selective mutism if you want, but I simply could not talk to most humans. I could write and I could talk to a small handful of people, but mostly I found myself cut off from humanity. Not by choice.

    This powerlessness was intrinsic to who I was then. It manifested in all areas of my life. Coming out as trans was the only way for me to claim any sort of power or agency over my life that I could see. Suddenly, the version of myself that used to exist pre-puberty was allowed to grow into an adult. I could start dropping the mask. But it hasn’t been easy to establish a life from scratch starting at 30. I began this renewed life with a bachelor’s degree in English and about ten years of work experience mostly in warehouse. I moved out of my hometown and found a home most of the way across the country. It was comforting to be a stranger from a far away place that almost nobody knows. It was also terrifying. But this is the fundamental difference between Joelle and [deadname]. He was too afraid to move out of his mom’s house. Joelle took over and made the choice to make a clean break and start fresh, redefining everything that I had taken for granted. I was no longer content to wallow in obscurity, I wanted to be someone that people know.

    Wanting and achieving are two different things. I still struggle with putting myself out there and being confident. In fact, that was the main issue I had in beauty school. Lack of confidence. Part of me is still that bullied preschool kid who was scared into timidity. When Big political things happen and I feel threatened, it sends me right back there. Sure, in some ways I am small and weak. I bend and give way for people. I struggle to hold firm boundaries at times. People have referred to me as a doormat, a minion, and a jellyfish. Spineless. To that I would say that I have withstood more than some and come out the other side. I endure, and survive. But also I help others. I do not act in my own self interest to the detriment of the people around me. I have ghosted people because I don’t know how to navigate communication with them in order to make myself heard. When I have done this, it is because all of the methods I’ve tried have failed and there is no clear path forward. Things that slip away so easily were not ever going to last without significant effort from myself. The effort I put into interpersonal relationships is often greater than the benefit I receive from being involved in them. This is why I now forge relationships and build rapport with people in order to provide care for them as my job. “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”.

    At the beginning of my medical transition, I worked with a therapist who helped me use my words more. She helped me make the transition from someone who is afraid to communicate, especially with regard to boundaries, to someone who can protect myself without becoming kind of feral. I would describe my pre-transition self as a wounded animal. Jumping at everyone and everything, afraid to trust anyone. I stayed in isolation because it was “safe”. Incubating. Watching. Seeing the world go to shit even more without being able to do anything about it. The idea of joining or starting a movement was ludicrous. I couldn’t even leave my bedroom. Those years taught me that loneliness is something I never want to allow myself to be okay with. Being alone at times is fine and good, even healthy. But being alone against your will for years at a time is catastrophic to mental health. It is soul crushing to yearn for a conversation with someone and not be able to access it. To have no one to call, and nothing to look forward to. I would try things like dating apps, going to events, things like that. It never went anywhere. The problem was stemming from how I was perceived, and many years of habit.

    The past few years since I’ve moved out to New Mexico, the theme has been “Taking My Power Back”. It’s a phrase that gets bandied about on Instagram sometimes. In popular psychology and spirituality. But what does that look like for someone in my position? What kind of power would I be taking “back”? It was news to me that I had any to begin with. I started to realize back in Boston when I worked at Starbucks what was going on here. You give away power unconsciously. Playing by the rules is all well and good. But when you are a reliable employee in a high turnover position where people frequently don’t show up…you can get away with a lot. We had a rule at Starbucks that you couldn’t have a drink at your station while working. One day I made myself a drink and loudly said next to my manager, “I’m going to keep this right next to me so I can drink it while I work. Who’s gonna stop me?” My manager, a gay man at least five years younger than me, simply laughed and kept working. I realized that nobody could stop me from doing what I want to do, within reason. Free will exists. My next move was across the country.

    Maybe our generation is meant to realize that we can simply take the power we need in order to make the changes we want to see. Millennials have had to eat a lot of shit sandwiches in order to get a single piece of avocado toast. At the end of the day, I don’t care if someone disapproves of how I live my life. Whether it’s someone older, younger, cis, trans, whatever – it isn’t their life. We all have our own lives to live. We can decide to accept each other for who we are, flaws and all, or we can nitpick each other to pieces and fight over things that ultimately don’t matter. The only thing that really matters is that there are those with a vested interest in keeping us from imagining a better world. Especially in keeping us from bringing said better world to fruition. People who benefit from us dooming and pessimistic, at each other’s throats. I’d rather they didn’t get their way.

  • Running on a Deficit

    I went to the doctor last month and got a physical for the first time in almost a decade. They did a blood draw and tested me for all the things. When I got the results back I felt like a fool. My iron and B12 deficiencies were still an issue. I’d known about these since childhood. My mom used to harass me and tell me to take my iron and B12 all the time. I refused constantly and eventually forgot it had ever been a thing. After my mom passed, all of that faded to the background.

    As an adult, I’ve had a hard time breaking the energy drink addiction. Coffee was never enough for me, I needed the full suite of energy stuff. My dependency got so bad this year that I had a full on caffeine overdose at work one night and had to go home early. I got nauseous and my heart was racing. This happened a few times in the past year since I’ve gone back to work full time. I never realized that I was covering for an actual medical condition until I got this blood test. At 37 years old, I feel like I’m finally Figuring Shit Out.

    At this point, I’ve been on iron + B12 supplements (and a bunch of others) for almost two weeks. I feel like a new person is being born, someone who doesn’t need that extra boost from the chemical sludge those energy companies are peddling. The whole thing reminds me of a song by Deerhunter which goes, “take your handicaps, channel them and feed them back, until they become your strength – hollowed out it’s all the same”. This has become a kind of mantra for me in adulthood. I spent most of my early life feeling inadequate for this or that reason. Getting older has led me to handling those perceived inadequacies one by one until I become the best version of myself.

    Everyone used to tell me that my caffeine addiction probably meant that I had underlying ADHD. I don’t believe I have that at all. I have my suspicions about my potential diagnoses, but I’d rather not disclose them here. ADHD never felt like it fit. I tried a few different medications and every stimulant felt like I was getting high on something. To my understanding, people with ADHD don’t feel high when they take those stimulants. In my case the solution was vitamin deficiency. I was operating on a deficit. Take my situation as a word of caution to get checked out by all the doctors before making assumptions about what is causing your caffeine/stimulant addiction.

  • Family Ties

    I am having a rough time this morning, friends. My mom died six years ago, and afterwards my sisters and I had a falling out. I don’t fully understand my oldest sister’s behavior but she had her reasons for cutting contact with us at the time. The thing that baffles me is why the no contact still continues. There is a growing sentiment in our culture that if a relationship becomes too toxic or painful, the best solution is to break it off. In some situations this might be the right call, but in others it leads to more hurt and grief than is necessary.

    No-contact should be a temporary solution in most cases. When things get strained, sometimes you need a break from someone to regroup. Recovering and focusing on your own life is good and healthy. But if you truly love someone and want to fix the relationship, you owe it to yourself and them to reconnect down the line and give it another shot. There are limits to this of course, but generally it is not a bad thing to give someone multiple chances. I hate this attitude of treating people we love as disposable or irredeemable.

    In my line of work I see a lot of ugliness, some of the more disheartening aspects of humanity. Parents who fail their kids, grandparents who are ill equipped to take over. I see the results of drug abuse and its effect on the next generation. It has given me a certain perspective on my own family situation. My family never went through the wringer in the same way these families I work with have. We had our fair share of drug abuse, but I have worked very hard to improve myself. I am currently drug/alcohol free and living a vegan lifestyle. I moved across the country and committed to my mental and physical health in a way I had never done before. I told myself that I was going to figure things out, become the person I was always capable of being. Away from the distractions and family ties of the east. Despite all this, when I reached out to my oldest sister last year I got no response.

    Today, I looked her up on a whim. I saw that she is running for office in the town she lives in. She is aligned with me politically, and has a website up that details her life and agenda. Reading through it brought up a lot of big feelings for me. This person who on paper should be accepting of a transgender sister, has cut me out of her life for no good reason. The last time we spoke, she talked down to me and insinuated that I don’t know what’s best for me or who is safe for me to have a relationship with. After I began my transition and we tried reconnecting once, she treated me like a curiosity. Asking me questions about my life with the clinical coldness of an anthropologist. Then she finally decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to keep trying to rebuild because I have a forgiving nature and give people a lot of chances.

    Despite this treatment, I still miss her and her kids. I want to be a part of their life. I am being denied this opportunity and it sucks. My actions haven’t always been perfect, but my intentions have always been pure. I am the youngest sister of three, and transgender, which comes with a lot of infantilization and disregarding of my opinion. Part of the reason that I haven’t tried harder to get published is because of having my voice and perspective ignored and dismissed all my life. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say growing up. Nobody listened. It’s why I love doing what I do now. It is literally my job to listen to queer teenagers and be a safe adult for them. I never had someone like that in my life as a kid. Even now I have been stonewalled and cut off from some of my last bit of family because I dare to have opinions on things.

    I am so sick of my family’s bullshit and there aren’t even that many of us left. Any time I have tried to reconnect with any of them (aside from my other sister) I have been met with such a lack of empathy and the expectation that I will always bend to their wishes. Fuck all of that. I am promising to myself that I will never bend for these people again. I am done with tapdancing around their feelings because I’m afraid of sabotaging the relationship. It’s not worth keeping alive if so many compromises are necessary. I want to be around people who are safe for me and who I can be unfiltered around. Who don’t hover too much and expect me to take care of their feelings. I will provide some of the best support you can ask for, but I won’t coddle you anymore. Sometimes people need to hear harsh truths. Just say the thing that you’re worried will break the relationship. If it does, it’s not worth keeping alive.

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  • Federation Test Post

    This post by my Admin is meant to serve as a test to see if I’m properly federating out into the ATmosphere and into the Fediverse.

    If you can see this, please drop a like, comment, or heck even a subscription to let me know things are working properly.

    Thank you,
    Nora (Admin: snowebell.cc)

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  • This Genderqueer Person is Still Trans

    As much as it felt good in the moment to push the metaphorical “I want to be a girl” button back in 2017, I have come to the realization that the question of my gender is more complicated than that. The past six years I have gotten by telling myself and others that I am a trans woman. This is still fundamentally close to the truth, but it is not the whole truth. Seeing others around me getting surgeries and going to great lengths to “pass”, I have felt a growing uncertainty around my desire to be perceived as a woman. I don’t get the same gender euphoria from being seen as a woman that I did early on. In an increasing way I have pulled away from the strict gender binary that governs society.

    Last year I started considering detransition, albeit not in a serious way. It was more of a thought experiment. What would happen if I simply stopped taking my HRT and started dressing more androgynously in general? Following the thought experiment to its conclusion led me to where I started. A prisoner of “testosterone brain”. Hormones effect a lot of things and I don’t think I could function the same way if my body was left to its own devices.

    Where does this leave me, then? I don’t want to medically detransition (or socially, to be honest. Dresses and women’s clothes generally just suit me better and look better on me. I am predisposed to spending time around women and doing things that are more feminine coded). The issue is that I still feel like a mix of both masculine and feminine in a very genderfluid/genderqueer kind of way. Some days I feel more of one than the other, and I channel different energies at different times in order to express myself. In this regard, I am seeking freedom from the gender binary while still embracing it as a tool for self expression.

    The ways in which I feel distanced from the trans feminine community are the same things that are likely being exploited by bad actors at times. There have been a number of detransitioners who feel like they were lied to or indoctrinated by the trans community, then go out and tell their story to conservatives on social media. I want to be clear that I do not feel this way. There was no indoctrination and I have taken every step with a clear head. The issue for me six years into this, is that I still don’t feel like a woman. Not only that, but I don’t even want to fully feel like a woman. Estrogen feels great and I never want to stop taking it (for health reasons). However, I feel most euphoric when I’m mixing up the gender stuff and playing with different combinations. This is still a viewpoint and identity that falls into the broad umbrella of “transgender”. I would not want to go back to trying to fit into the cisgender man mold, it is a restrictive and awful place to be.

    People like to say “gender is a social construct” so much that the phrase has lost its usefulness. If Woke 1.0 is actually over like some are saying, we need something new for Woke 2.0. I would like to put forth something along the lines of “gender is your own personal make-up palette and toolbox”. The first phrase is negative and devoid of personal meaning. “Gender is a social construct”, we say. “And…..?” is the only reasonable follow up. Do we need to destroy it? Abolish gender? Construct something else to take its place? I don’t know what to do with that information. By stating that gender is a make-up palette and/or toolbox, we are giving power to anyone who wants to use it that way.

    What is gender? Whatever I goddamn well say it is, because I’m an American goddamn it.

  • Writing for Pleasure

    She told me to write so I started writing. Sometimes we need a little bit of encouragement from the people we love to do something for ourselves. Writing has been a thing that I have struggled to do of my own volition for most of my life. Why would I write for myself? It makes little sense to grab a keyboard or pen and start vomiting out words for an audience of one. People tell me they like my writing and that’s great. I like it too. The problem is that I have spent most of my life waiting for permission to do the things I like most. It has felt easier to prioritize other things (like videogames) that don’t satisfy my need to be creative but still provide a sense of accomplishment. I set myself little goals and my brain rewards me with dopamine. Still, at the end of the day my running practice has fallen to the wayside and I’ve written very little this year so far.

    It is easy to say that work gets in the way. It does. I have a job that requires a lot of emotional energy and staying on late hours (I do my best writing in the evening). It does leave me with little. But that’s the thing I have been missing: writing isn’t a draining activity. It is rejuvenating. Social media is a time sink, so are videogames. They require little to no effort to engage with. The rewards for doing so match that effort. After playing a long videogame session I feel anxious and burnt out, in need of more rest. It isn’t filling me with energy, it is taking the little reserves I have left.

    I have learned once again that writing is different. It is an activity that engages parts of my brain that nothing else can touch. It starts with a blank page and then I decide what to fill it with. There’s no game design or algorithms or flashy graphics competing for my attention. Just a screen or a page and my thoughts.

    My partner and I were talking last night and they asked me what I wanted to write, what my goals are. I told them that I want to write things that are interesting to me, not to chase trends or focus on selling something. If I am going to write in my free time, it should be for me. If the focus is on selling, it will be a compromised work before even starting. That is all I am going to say about it here because I don’t like talking about things while they are still in progress.

    Reading and writing rewire your brain to work in a more linear and structured way. The flow of words and sentences reinforce a kind of logic and also a dreamlike state of thinking where thoughts can run through your head. It clears the blockage. This is what I’ve been experiencing for the past month or so. It feels like I am in the process of detoxing my brain from things that are taking up too much of my free time. All the time spent reading is good. But getting in the writing time is also of equal importance. You can’t be all about inputs, you need to output as well. Even if a person isn’t a creative type this is of utmost importance. Find a way to put your energy out there and externalize some of your thoughts and feelings. It is therapeutic.

  • My American Backstory

    I am an American, and that comes with a certain amount of baggage these days. It has been a source of great conflict in me since my early years that I feel like a fish out of water in this culture. As a preteen, I saw my country go to war in the middle east. The people around me became bloodthirsty and vicious. Calling for violence against Muslims, distrusting our neighbors. My boss at the first real job I had was an immigrant from Guyana. She was often mistaken for having African heritage and resented it. This person became bitter and racist, calling for an end to birthright citizenship and decrying people who are “lazy” or “complainers”. I stopped talking to her when I left that place but I guarantee she voted for Trump all three times.

    My experience of living in this country has been full of negatives. From the church I grew up in to the school that judged me a problem. A small town in Northern Westchester that was full of hypocrisy, I blamed my parents for raising me there. They weren’t the problem, they were trying to be a part of the solution in their own way.

    My father grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He was raised Catholic and never forgave his parents for that – becoming more agnostic as an adult. A nerd for radio and gadgets, he spent his life balancing his hobbies with his work. The man started out as a DJ before moving into non-profit work and fighting the oligarchs. Dad always said “we need to get the money out of politics”. He worked for a non-profit organization that fought big tobacco and won a number of concessions that are still in force today. No more Joe Camel type advertising or smoking in restaurants in New York. I don’t want to oversell how “Important” my dad was. But when he died, his funeral was attended by so many people. They came up to me and said, “your father was a special guy, he really cared”. After all the Hell he put me and my sister through, that was tough to hear. He had a lot of anger and psych problems that went unaddressed for his whole life. Still, he had an impact on the world around him. I can only hope to have a similar impact on those I meet and work for before my time comes. The man was flawed, but he continues to inspire me and the work I do every day.

    On the other hand, my mom had a smaller splash. She was a true small town American. Growing up in the upper peninsula of Michigan, moving to Lansing and meeting my dad. She was a career woman. Somehow she managed to balance working full time jobs in PR with raising a family and providing emotional support to all of us (especially my father). Mom lived for us, she was always helping others. The doctors she worked with relied on her to get their message to people. We relied on her to keep us (a bunch of free thinking rebellious kids) from going insane in a conservative small town. Her strength was enormous, but it had limits. She suffered from depression, had a suicide attempt in ’05. Gave up on her fight with cancer in 2020 and we lost her. It was impossible for her to keep living without my father, despite our efforts to keep her going.

    I am writing about this to provide some context for my identity as an American. Both sides of my family came her with nothing. One grandparent was a coal miner, the other a Firestone Tire factory worker. We were not a part of the founding of this country, but we were able to make a go of it here. I am the only member of my family to make it this far west, and I’ve got the sunburns to show for it. This is not the land of my heritage. I am a guest here and try to acknowledge that in my work and my life. With everything happening right now it would be easy for me to cast off my American identity and try to reclaim some sort of European identity. My partner and I even considered moving back there last year.

    However, this is my country. Like it or not, I am a warm blooded American and that comes with all the ugly baggage. But it also comes with a lot of good. People like my parents. People I consider inspirational like writers, activists, movie directors. America isn’t all bad any more than other countries. It has long been held captive by monied interests. That’s why it’s so important for people like us to stick around and keep all of that in check.

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