Wild Writer
Darkness is the quiet in which we can understand what was hard to hear in the noise of the light.
Read the latest article by Som Paris, especially written for trans readers.
https://medium.com/gender-from-the-trenches/dysphoria-my-beloved-darkness-49c18d6d53eb
Raven, a trans girl from south London, wakes on a piece of ice floating on a frozen ocean. Adap, who has lived his whole life in a dying village just off the coast, finds her and brings her home. When she is told she must travel to the Golie Mountains, at the center of the world, Adap volunteers to take her. Together they navigate around a resurgent soviet-esque state that is at war with an ancient culture of gender-wild shamans. As they travel, she realizes that there is no one in this magical world who is not black, like her, and that every place they go seems uncannily familiar.
I won’t weep for lost time. I turned thirty eight when I came out as trans and there’s no use swimming in melancholy about the past but I would like to rake the soil of my subconscious for lessons from a late blooming and so I present six lessons a long time coming.
“I woke alone, in the wild. After five years of building a small self-sufficient paradise my partner needed to leave and I was left with foxes and owls for neighbours and it was here alone, beneath the stars, that I gave up trying to be a man.
I’m often asked if being here helped. Did the silence of the hills midwife my waking? Wouldn’t that be a romantic thought — that leaving society behind for the howls of the night creatures crumbles our social artifices, leaving us naked and real. That the wild strips away social shit like fierce wind blasts away stone leaving the core, twistingly beautiful, ferocious and true.”
