We’re waiting on test results and I have so much more to say about this, but in the meantime, I know a lot of folks have followed my journey and supported me (many of you for YEARS 🥹). It felt weird and hard to not share what’s going on, so here I am.

And guess who got FOUR IRON INFUSIONS last fall before I knew any of this?

🥴

Anyway I am, understandably, not feeling well!

(Understatement.)

It’s a long story but after making the connection that iron supplementation makes my symptoms and my blood values really bad, we might have unmasked a chronic form of blood cancer called polycythemia vera, or I have some kind of rare genetic mutation around how my body deals with iron.

(I also know this is fraught bc there are marginalized folks who cannot disappear themselves in these sorts of ways, because of how they are racialized, disabled, fat — I understand and I’m holding that too.)

That’s why I think it’s important for us to commit to being relentlessly affirming of one another, knowing that this is the climate. And for allies to interrogate how their understanding of gender may make this feel harder to internalize.

You may think I’m just talking about trans folks… I’m not! There are cis folks who may not neatly conform who are choosing to present differently under this level of scrutiny, too, and who may feel certain aspects of their queerness or gender expression are being erased for the sake of their safety.

🙋🏼

I am in this process / will be forever.

I would invite folks who are bewildered by advocates who are wildly out of touch with the harm they’re enacting to choose what they won’t or can’t choose for themselves.

Which is to say, choose to be in the mess. Find the armor within yourself; dismantle it.

We need to be with the discomfort that survivors are not innocents immune to harming others, and abusers are not contextless and inherently poisoned.

We need to forsake the part of us that needs to be Good to survive, and embrace the part of us that is brave enough to be vulnerable.

To be truly and truthfully in the mess of it all, we have to grapple with the fact that perpetrator and victim, survivor and abuser, even supporter and grifter are not opposites in the ways we wish they were.

And yes, all of this is… IMO.

I don’t want to talk about specific individuals who are engaging in this, so much as focusing on what we can collectively learn from it, and how to resist the urge to recast survivors who “fail” as having been secret perpetrators all along.

Too many folks step into advocacy work and take on a survivor identity without examining what it even means to them to be a survivor, and how these stories of “us versus them” are rooted in systems of oppression that seal their fate — to repeat the cycle — long before they gain a following.

If you’ve chosen to make survivor advocacy a part of your life’s work, you must have the courage to dissolve the binary and the separateness you’ve constructed between survivors and abusers, while tending to the younger and hurting part of you that will absolutely feel betrayed when you try to.

And some of us were more empowered and resourced than others to face ourselves.

That doesn’t make us better than. It simply makes us able and willing (and almost certainly in community with folks who have taught us how it’s done).

THIS is how cycles repeat.

Not with bad people scheming and determined to do bad things.

But with fragile, armored, defensive, reactive, scared, ashamed people protecting the story they have about themselves above all else.

We have to reckon with how deriving our sense of worth from being Good and Not Them sets us up to be unwilling and unable to offer others the same accountability WE deserved when we were harmed.

As survivors, at some point we have to go beyond this dichotomy and realize that we are not Uniquely Good in ways that guarantee we will never harm someone else.

Otherwise we won’t be able to receive feedback — no matter how loving, gentle, righteous, and valid it is — that we’ve harmed someone else.

We will just keep pushing others who challenge us into some adjacent category of Bad, Abuser, Narcissist, Toxic… whatever keeps our survivor identity in tact.

To create a world in which we no longer expect “perfect” from victims, we have to be willing to confront the parts of ourselves that aren’t perfect.

Including parts of us that are capable of harm. And parts of us that, under different circumstances, have more in common with our abusers than not.