thanksgiving lament

I suck with absolute and tragic finality.

I suck on Thanksgiving, in particularly.

I suck because the streets are empty and it’s a beautiful day.

I suck because I can’t see my therapist.

I suck because she can’t see me.

I suck because I’m not hungry yet I desperately want Swiss cheese, which I won’t allow myself to have.

I suck because the world sucks.

I suck because I am tired of my friends.

I suck because I can’t speak to my mother.

I suck because I’m deathly tired.

I suck because I hang on to life even though there’s nothing to hang on to.

I suck because I make plans for the future.

I suck because I act as if there is a future.

I suck because there is a present and I don’t want to be in it.

I suck with heartbreaking finality.

I suck because the American people are doing all sorts of horrible things to themselves and others.

I suck because we are all too tired to do anything that will stop this descent into madness.

I suck because churches, including mine, hate gay people.

I suck because I can’t take one more day.

I suck because I make plans for the future.

I suck because I spend more money than I take home and if I live past retirement age I’ll have to live at the
poor people’s home.

I suck because there is nothing I can do.

I suck because I have accomplished exactly nothing in the grand total of my life.

I suck because I’ll never accomplish anything.

I suck because I feel alone in the world when I clearly am not.

I suck because I hate other people.

I suck because my house sucks.

I suck because the world oppresses the weak.

I suck because there are bone fide epidemics of rape all over the world, including Belgium (Belgium, for God’s sakes, where the raped people of choice are younger-than-17 girls!).

I suck because my country is being taken over by hate-mongering right wingers.

I suck because the world is trying to patch a tremendous economic collapse without doing anything to cut it at its root, i.e. the unconscionable and unregulated enrichment of few on the shoulders of the rest.

I suck because Haiti, which is just a few miles from me, is the third most neglected place on the planet, and its people count for nothing to anyone.

I suck because my mom took me to a doctor when I was young because she was worried I wasn’t girl enough, and the doctor touched my genitals, and no one told me what it was about, and until yesterday I believed it was about me being too skinny for my height because that was what I was told, and I couldn’t make sense of the sexual molestation because it didn’t fit with the too-skinny narrative, but yesterday, for the first time, I realized that the doctor was checking whether I was a real girl, and now I’m so angry I couldn’t be more angry.

I’m angry because it sort of went okay but it could have gone terribly wrong.

I am angry because no man had touched my genitals since the boys in the basement.

I am angry because, probably, I myself didn’t know whether I was normal, and I was terrified there’d be something wrong with me and I’d be made to change.

I’m angry because boys molested me in the basement, and then a doctor molested me too.

I am angry because no one should lie to children.

I am angry because the world had no place for me the way I was.

I am angry because by the time my mom brought me to this doctor, I had already amply internalized that feeling.

I am angry because I was hugely relieved when the doctor said to my mom in front of me that I was perfectly fine, like I has just escaped an execution.

I am angry because I have lived all my life dodging executions, fighting for my life.

I am angry because I have lived thinking “I need to change” every minute of every hour of my life, and fighting this voice inside me.

I am angry because lots of people have told me I need to change.

I am angry because H., who now doesn’t speak to me any more, went on an all-out campaign to feminize me.

I am angry at all the people who tried to feminize me.

I am so angry I have no room inside me for all the anger and I want to kill everyone.