Conversations with the worst type of men I know

It’s a bit of a survival skill, I think,

to sit with someone who presumes no competence of your own.

Based, supremely, yes, on my body, on my face.

A sort of listening skill? It’s sort of like

hearing someone talk about life experiences they can’t imagine you might ever understand.

We all learn things, somehow, but

but I don’t know.

Sometimes I feel like most people think most things go right over my head,

but I’ve grown accustomed to internalizing my experiences in the way I log information, like new foods I try (the first time I realized I could convince myself to genuinely enjoy blueberries or green tea, if I only tried hard enough for long enough.)

I don’t want you to think that all of my experiences are melancholy, or that I am supremely unhappy with the way my life seems meant to be lived in multiple worlds at once. What I want you to think about

is the way that sometimes people ask me questions, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes

sometimes I feel alone for the way I have done many tremendous things all by myself. and for how sometimes (sometimes often) I don’t get to talk about these things.

Am I upset about grad school (not getting into Emory this year) for the way I keep getting emails with updates about the Haitian migrant crisis (among all the other Haitian crises) and now know I do not have the time or the money to study and more deeply understand them or for the way I now have to tackle the difficult task of getting myself fluent in Spanish without a specific deadline (purpose) to use it or for the way I still (again) don’t have much opportunity or community to talk about the research and the books and the writings that have kept me feeling alive and floating high through the last few years?

I don’t know, do you? Does anyone?

Conversations with men are difficult for me because I have a lot more bad ones than good.

You see, I want desperately to have the opportunity to argue about the way we should address criminality of drugs and sex work because I have lived these things, have lived alongside these things, but the last time I got passionate (rather than simply descriptive, explanatory) the guy I was talking to got a little worried because we weren’t supposed to get upset, we were supposed to be getting to know each other

Do you know what I mean?

I won’t lie, I have big ideas, and sometimes I don’t quite know how to use my life and the experiences I have held to carry them out. It’s strange, because I just got an email today about the edited version of an article that is getting published in a peer-reviewed academic journal but it’s tinged with the weird feeling of not being able to be affiliated with a university.

What is talking with me like? Because sometimes (on my end) it feels like I spend a good bit of time organizing myself and the facts of my life (not lying) to represent a specific type of picture that the person listening will be most pleased by, most intrigued by, most interested in. Do you feel that way?

I’m a storyteller, and so it is often difficult for me to not recognize the events of my life as non-linear, as pieces that can be organized in a thousand different ways in order to tell

a

story.