The Question That Fucked Me Up
This learning is dedicated to my cousin D, who believed me and left too. Love this work? Support it here: https://www.yourtransfundraiser.com/tipup
“You’re saying mutual aid relies on long term relationships. What do you do if you just lost all your longest term relationships?”
If the question posed was: Who else other than those in your most immediate circle can you ask, the answer would be to move outward in your circles of community. Ask your coworkers, go through your discord chats. Look at your guilds on MMORPGs, old classmates, your favorite barista, your top surgeon. You have a million communities on your phone and all around you.
However, that wasn’t what they asked. The question was: What do you do if you just lost all those closest to you? I heard the edge of pain in their voice and felt the edge of my lane as an educator. I didn’t have an answer other than “I would have to know you better to answer that. I would have to make you dinner and pull tarot for you.” Which I believe is the best one. First because my classes aren’t built to navigate that space. I don’t provide that type of care and I know that makes me stronger in giving what I do. And second, because I both can and can’t remember how I got out of that crisis. Yet this student’s question has inspired me to find the will to speak to it.
As a trans torture and intimate partner violence surivor, I’ve experienced repeated loss of close kin. Both family built of blood and family queer promise-born. It’s true that those who believe in you when you’ve been harmed, who will commit to love in accountability over love made in the oppressor’s image, are rare. Certainly not guaranteed by birth. That truth can kill anyone, especially if you’re trans. It almost did me. I just got secure housing and every day, I look out from my apartment, I see the bridge I almost hit unsubscribe from life on. I’m still here because at some point I accepted a difficult truth. That while it may be incredibly painful and unfair, families when left in their queer and natural state, are iterative by nature. Everything is.
Right before I left the last person who decided to live their pain through me, I got a vision. It came to me while I was awake and in the middle of the day. One of my ancestors was standing in front of a collapsed stone structure, which was on fire along with everything else around it. This ancestor was so burned, they were beyond any kind of recognition, let alone gender. But I could feel their resolve and more, how sorry they felt for me. I was confused. Both by their pity and the boost it gave me to pack up and leave with no plan. I left with my two cats and the budding knowledge that I would get better. I would turn to myself and face why I thought love was when someone lived their pain through me. Four years later, as I teach the same tactics and strategies that helped me rebuild once I cleared that emergency in me, I’m no longer confused about this ancestor’s appearance.
They came to me because they had accepted their life and their death. They had accepted their departure from gender, the pain of the final moments, and the fall of everything they knew. They had come to remind me that it was ok, that I had already both died and lived in this and other realities. That I could be in my broken world and accept the flames of a brutal ending too. That ancestor showed me family connections rise and fall, like all human architecture does over time. Ultimately, the enduring nature of love and long term relationships exists beyond violence, beyond loss, and outside of structure, including time itself. In the years since this ancestors’ appearance, I’ve worked to make my movements an altar for them.
So that is what I did when I lost those closest to me. But when you need to fundraise mutual aid and pay bills, Xcel energy and them ain’t trying to hear all that. So you’ll have to forgive me if rather than teach it in class, I share what I’m still in the process of learning outside of it.
Love this work? Support it here: https://www.yourtransfundraiser.com/tipup
Qamar Yochanan (he/him) is the CEO & Founder-Instructor of Your Trans Fundraiser. He provides practical, mutual aid based fundraising techniques for regular people, human origin tools, backed by data and embodied experience. All taught in a comedic, unapologetically queer fashion. Find out more by clicking here: yourtransfundraiser.com
NOTE: This work is trademarked, copyrighted, ancestral and amulet property of Your Trans Fundraiser LLC. If you steal it, we assume no responsibility to the spiritual and energetic consequences including but not limited to: Unexplained catastrophic financial failure, loss of white proximity or other non-tangible currency in capitalism, and death.
