I Don’t Wanna Sing That.

I was in a private singing lesson, working on my audition book. The teacher was wonderful and we made much progress despite everything being on Zoom, but there had been some blocks that we could not quite resolve. She felt like I was not taking her feedback as well as before. Singing lessons can be like therapy for me. It touches the tender part of my heart… and my heart was filled with sadness and anger for a couple weeks while singing. I did not know why. Maybe cabin fever from lockdown!? 

There was a moment in a lesson that I realized I did not want to sing these songs anymore because I was not a man. I was singing “Something Is Coming” from West Side Story. Many songs are gendered binarily. Of course, we all can interpret any song in any ways we want, but it was critical for me to stop and reassess what I was perpetuating in my psyche by keeping singing those songs. Those songs — plus dance, aesthetic, people I know, age, acting — would get a job and make a living. I’ve done it for over 15 years. Now, should I just be singing “I Feel Pretty” instead?

I realized that I had much to unpack.

I broke up with the teacher, and started to see another teacher whose research was on transgender voice. I even broke up with my therapist of 5 years to seek therapist who was transgender. This sounds liberating or abrupt, and yes, it was. I had a realization of who I was and made decisions that align with my truth! Sounds great and courageous but it’s not like that.

Deeper truth was that liberation is scary. I did not realize how much of my identity was solidified around binary gender. Making all those moves for transition made my life groundless and unstable, which is actually closer to the falling away nature of everything, anica. I had known a small taste of that in my practice. Also how vulnerable I really was, dukkha. It’s overwhelming. It is still overwhelming and unpleasant, but I can navigate — if necessary crawling — somehow to take care of myself, laughing a little that there was no core identity anywhere to be found, anata. This notion of “not me, not mine, not I” in Buddhism and mindfulness is known as “non-self.” Practice actually has started to deconstruct my identity as it does.

What might be different particularly as a transgender person is that there was no sense of core self to begin with. It was hollow because I kept pretending most of my life to be a man. The shell was hard but once that was broken it was a gooey mess.

Then how does the process of liberation happen with the gooey instability? I don’t know how cis people are but I’d imagine they would have a core identity that’s a little more solid. Working with solid things and gooey things are very different. Don’t get me wrong. There are many other identities for me: dancer, partner, friend, artist… but the crack was big enough to shake all of them. I needed to reclaim my identity after the insights deconstructed it.

I am still in the process of cultivating womanhood that is not based on white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy which is homophobic and transphobic. I’d say this is a lifetime project along with liberation practice. 

Transcendent Time 

I thought I was almost 40, 

still playing a high school kid on stage. 

I’m taking time travel pills. 

My body says tick tock. 

Taking me neither forward nor backward… 

just upward, downward, and scribbles. 

Taking me to my birth, 4, 10, 14, 18 years old. 

The time has been blur 

since I compromised as a boy as a gay man.

I wonder if trauma keeps your appearance frozen, 

held in the prison of pain. 

That might be my skincare.

Thick walls not to feel the pain. 

Crack crack crack. 

Water seeping out. 

I miss my uncracked wall. 

Wasn’t it so comfortable? 

Not really, 

but it sure felt like it.

Accidentally I came out of the wall with my time travel. 

Only for a second. 

The second was long enough to see it through. 

What I was told. 

What I became afraid of. 

What they told me to be. 

I was back, 

but the wall had already started to crack 

because I understood. 

The wall crumbles. 

Sadness, grief, disappointment, joy, all came out together. 

They came and went, came and went.

Again here they come. 

Can I travel with you? 

Can I fade into the deep dark sky?