do non toxic workplaces exist

have humans ever figured out how to get along 

am i ever going to be able to be in stable employment 

which is it: 

i am too hard edged, too forcible about behaving in accordance with values, too upset when other people are pieces of shit 

workplaces are full of people who behave poorly and leaders who create toxic environments because under capitalism, we are all just consuming each other 

white people in particular fucking suck at communicating, connecting, understanding, empathizing, and giving a fuck 

 i dreamed jared and i were in the kitchen at 3165 kensington and he was telling me he had met someone else and she had got some great job in dc and how excited he was to move to the east coast with her 

 I dreamed I was in a college class and the professor kept making sexist comments and then groped one of the other women in front of me and  I started yelling about it and everyone laughed it off and then later he groped me in the classroom and I was screaming about it and the whole rest of the dream was me being enraged and everyone laughing 

  I dreamed that someone was chasing me and I was trying to get away and I barely got out of my house unnoticed and I had lawny with me but didn’t have a chance to grab her leash so we were running between houses to get away and we make it to the uhaul on w 117th and I’m begging the guy to rent me a truck bc I don’t have my wallet w my insurance but I log in to my insurance on his computer and it’s just taking too long and lawny gets loose and runs away so he rents me the truck and gives me the keys and I go running after lawny and she’s like back in the building and it connects to like old houses and I’m crawling thru old dirty houses I can’t get caught in and I can’t yell her name and I can’t find her 

At some point my dad shows up but he can’t find her either 

blyth 6/15/24

 When we were in our 20s and did not know each other yet, neither of us even living in the city where we would eventually meet, neither of us were yet aware of how we were already growing toward each other. 

We began together in the same place where we always began individually: rooted in our trauma, constantly trying to overcome the past. 

Where others might have traced freckles, we draped our love over each others’ scars. 

Where others went to dinner and a movie we went to AA and then the lake. 

We saw ourselves as a matching set: two separate root structures but two mighty attempts to grow out of the same soil of past harm. You brought me so much beauty. 

To have lost you is to have lost the story of who I am. 

Who can I be if not the one who walks with you?

And while that answer is infinite, the infinity still looks like a black hole, and after all that I have walked through, I am exhausted of the darkness. 

Losing you was a loss of family. A loss of community. I cannot bear to participate in either structure any more. 

I can’t watch tv, eat sushi, make silly jokes, visit the lake, or look at my dog without my memory supplying me with my other half. 

You are always with me, still, closer even than the restraining order I still hold. 

Living in memory is the story of who I am. 

For a long time, the distance I have traveled since I lost you meant nothing. No changes in my body or my brain or my nervous system. No changes in my insomnia or desperation. 

But these days the memories I live in of you are more often the happy, earlier ones than the tragedies that came to us in the end. Maybe that is a healing.

I am not angry about living in the past. I could work my whole life on my current trajectory of trauma-born single-focus intensity of tearing systems apart with my bare hands, and be satisfied. I will take my revenge on what hurt both of us most, and many others will live easier for it. 

But I remember when the future felt open. I remember when the present felt present. 

Losing you was a loss of us both. 

*

When you are raised as a conservative Christian girl in a high control religious community, no one has to explain to you that your emotions should not be visible in public, should not impact other people. The equation you constantly balance is whether or not you should be visible in any way, ever. 

While the depth of tragedy that I walked through was the worst possible way to learn the lesson, I have been shorn clean of all that held me inside myself. There are no guardrails I cannot crash through. There are no expectations I cannot fail, loudly, and with glee. 

Our lawyer was old enough to remember the density of AIDS deaths, and young enough to not be scared of fighting for a trans person’s rights. She only met you once, when I brought you in to sign the medical power of attorney. At that point we had already been through so many pink slips, so many police encounters. She pulled me aside after the appointment and warned me about what she saw in your behavior. I said Theresa, when we are shot by the Cleveland cops, put our bodies on the steps of the Cuyahoga County ADAMHS Board. She was silent for a long moment. 

In fact I do hope that my death, when it arrives, is public. When the end of my body, and my voice, and my immediacy on this earth, when the end of my story arrives, it will be because I finally picked a battle I couldn’t win. Young as I am, I still cannot envision losing that battle, but tired as I am, I accept its inevitability. 

As an adult I have lived my grief loudly, with volume and ferocity and shamelessness. I have screamed at cops in motel parking lots and I have screamed at Cleveland City Council. I have sobbed in the lobby of the First Precinct Police Department and I have sobbed while testifying in the Ohio Statehouse. In my grief and my rawness and my intensity, I have walked systems toward changes that would have been otherwise impossible to access. 

I refuse to lie. And nothing tells the truth better than my grief. 

I remember being silent. My first several rounds of trauma, early in my life, are marked by the absolute silence that surrounds them, both other people’s and my own. I did not cry. I did not yell. I swallowed. Breathed. Waited. Digested the pain and metabolized it into chronic health conditions. Breathed. Waited. 

I will never be silent again. If I die quietly alone at home, it will feel like a recapitulation of all the ways I brought my identity and experiences out of the silence of the home I grew up in and gave them voice, gave them volume, gave them gravity. 

It would have made sense to me to have died in 2020. Life the past three years has made no sense at all.

But the volume itself has become a kind of north star. In my loudness there is momentum. In my demand to be heard, there is a solidity of self. Crying in my car, in the grocery store, at the movie theater, at work makes sense to me. I will not allow anyone to deny me my voice, including myself. 

*

I am not sure what death will change about who I am. I do not think it will make me softer or sweeter or quieter. 

When I consider what it means to be among the number of those who are still living, I know I am obligated to hold the sharp edges of those who did die. I hold the stories that cut like knives, i hold the rage that burns like fire, i hold the sadness that tsunamis over entire generations. I hold these in my hands like weapons, and i wield them. 

The privilege that exists in my body or how others perceive me is the costuming that gets me entrance to the spaces where queer rage is not supposed to be allowed to exist. Sounding like I have a college degree walks me in to spaces that have never heard the grief of generational poverty. 

I have been accused of being two-faced, and i have never minded this accusation. It is true. I use one face to enter the halls of power. I use a second face to tear them down. 

I have had my moments of apology toward those who left this life before me. Even when I did not know them i hold them close. When i drove myself across the country alone, from the midwest to the west coast, i stood in so many communities i had no connection to other than knowing the legacy of those who had left it. In Cleveland I think always of Tanisha Anderson, whose murder by cops took the breath out of an entire community, and a few years later, took the breath out of her mother, who drowned in grief. Driving out of Ohio I thought of the so-called westward expansion and all the First Nations people who are bulldozed beneath the strip malls. Driving past post fences in Wyoming brought Matthew Shephard’s face into my mind for several hours. 

Alice Walker said activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet. Activism is the payment of a debt rendered by all those whose deaths were the precursor for my ability to live. 

We who did not die hold a debt, whether we realize it or not. Whether we see the police officer who did not shoot us, the legislator who stopped short of putting our names on a state registration list, the Nazi who postponed our death until the next demonstration, the abusive spouse who picked up another beer instead of the gun, whether we can see the harbingers of death walking toward us or tell them thank you for skipping me this time is not the point. We who did not die may not be skipped over next time, and we have work to do until that time. 

 the magic of hannah gadsby's nanette is that the opening is a soft that seems sharp, and opens the story for her worst trauma

and the ending is a sharp that seems soft, and demonstrates how far that trauma reaches 

i think as a storyteller i have a desire for the stories of my life to have arcs, to have protagonists and antagonists, to categorically belong to one genre or another 

there is nothing, nothing in my life that actually makes sense 

the original gendered harm of my life is the presence of my mother, which does not make sense

the original sexual trauma of my life is access to the desires i acted upon, which does not make sense

who could believe in faith healing? who could believe in a Divine Mind? who could believe in a nuclear family? who could believe in a god? 

i remember kicking my feet beneath the sunday school table and telling myself inside my head all the ways that the stories did not make sense 

i remember witnessing my mother's infighting with other sunday school teachers and telling myself inside my head all the ways their interpersonal behavior did not make sense 

and i am not stupid, and i knew early that i would force myself to become what i first perceived as the opposite of my mother

and what i now know is simply an assertion of self, without requiring definition from my mother as a pole star.

when you are parented by a narcissist, they are the pole star. they are the alpha and omega, the sun and the moon, the day and the night 

and you will rise and fall just as their mood, just as their self-concept, just as the outcomes of their lives. 

i wonder if she never chased stronger employment because she thought she was not worthy?

she would never be able to admit it if so, in any circumstance. it will always be a story about her sacrifice 

of her self for her children, of her adherence to the nuclear family narrative at any cost, of her devotion to having a husband and two children and a single family home.

i am not satisfied.

i am not satisfied by the experience of a spouse and homeownership, i am not satisfied by any single narrative of what i am capable of, i am not satisfied

with the sacrifice of my self for any other human being. movement be damned. i have paid enough. 

the movement is not a religion to demand not just my money or time or health or body, the movement is not a cult to demand my allegiance, the movement is not a gender

to demand my obedience. if the body politic cannot be defined in any one human then i do not break it, even when i leave. 

i have been simmering, brewing in the basting of my worst years, my worst experiences. i have been rising in the heat of my mother's shame for three years,

cocooned in what little security i could curate for myself, wrapped in the plurality of my rages. 

i am angry. oh, i am angry. 

in public settings i write polemics, odes to the great necessity of forwarding the work, incantations to the grinding labor of the movement.

i believe myself, sometimes. 

when abraham agreed to kill his son, was god real then? when my mother inculcated her bodily shame and self-hatred directly into the souls

of two blonde little girls, was god real then? and what is the difference between the two? 

my sister is so absent in my memories. quiet, inactive. i remember her being seen as the sweeter one, more worthy of praise

and i remember how it did not bother me, how narratives of sibling rivalries in sitcoms and fairy tales rang empty for me, so empty

was the way i felt for her. i have never had kindred, i have never truly been in relationship with anyone

which is a new story i tell myself, a new devaluation of how many humans have sat face to face with me over the course of several hours

and several weeks and months and years and confessed to me all of what they most feared, including their self assessments. 

there is no denying that i have loved many people very well, only a denying that any of it meant anything. 

 First i was House sitting or something for my parents they owned like a farm 

And Jared was there and convinced me to have a threesome with someone 

And then my family suddenly came home and they were being f rude to Jared so I kept trying to go out side or be away from them and they kept being rude 

So then I wanted to leave and they took my keys and then parked behind my car 

And I’m screaming and trying to get my keys and someone hands me keys but not for my car 

So I take off and then I realize all my shit is in my car so I go back 

So I finally scream and get my keys and get my car and I’m trying to get out of their dirt Driveay 

My mom flings this card at me “your dad made me write this dear elaschleif you’re a great writer dont leave” but no apology right never any apology 

And I’m driving over their bushes by the mailbox trying to get out 

I drink because I am in a lot of pain 

I drink because I only ever hear my own name in my mothers angriest voice 

I drink because this is my third time starting my life completely over with very little support 

I drink because 2020 was so bad my mom “can’t bear to hear about it” and her reaction makes sense to me 

I drink because I believe I am permanently flawed, soul-deep broken, something I can’t see or change is inherently wrong or misfiring or misfitting 

I drink because when my dog dies I will not have any family at all any more 

I drink because the concepts of safety and love and justice and honesty do not actually exist, do not exist in the natural world, cannot be proven by looking at any person or part of the universe, and are not real 

I drink because I have untreated ptsd that treats my brain violently, and at the same time, doctors who treat me violently 

I drink because I was raised to be perfection, which is also not a real concept or achievable or possible

I drink because god is not real and I am watching millions of people die for a fake shibboleth, a false concept that will never love them back 

I drink because no matter what choices I make about my life I cannot find anyone relatively loving or anywhere relatively safe 

I drink because there is always, permanently, rage churning in my veins and coiled in my chest and pulsing in my hands

I drink because we built systems to kill each other instead of systems that support

I drink because long term employment seems impossible, because I am never calm enough or compliant enough or soft enough, to stay anywhere for any length of time 

 Worse than the pain of feeling as though the beloved collective has abandoned me is the feeling that the beloved collective has never actually existed

Or will never exist 

I see my community organizing skill set showing up in my work life and I have respect for the experiences that have so deeply shaped me 

I am not sure I will ever belong to the beloved collective again, I am not sure I would choose to

Perhaps there are many reasons why my community abandoned me, and perhaps some of those reasons have nothing to do with me, perhaps some are even driven by the extremity of the political and economic and social experience of 2020, perhaps 

Perhaps I always deserved better

Perhaps I have not always known how to seek better than narcissistic partnership and time bound friendships

Perhaps all of this is true 

I am not sure I could have made a different choice at any of the major junctures of my life 

i don't wish her a happy mothers day because i am the one that raised me 

in the face of her inability to see me, support me, or love me, i held me together and pushed forward and picked a new path and learned how to make a set of life decisions she was never even aware could be made 

i owe her only for the opportunity of having learned how not to live 

and by the way, i have always deserved love, and constancy. 

from blyth 2

When COVID hit I was so fortunate to own a single family home that had a little backyard and a nice front porch. That first summer, clinging to a job I had planned to leave before the economy tanked, my anger at the professional situation I was in got beaten into the dirt and yielded tomatos, peppers, peas, corn, squash, and giant sunflowers. Leaving fresh produce on other peoples front porches became my love language.

At one point a photographer friend did a series of socially distanced photos of people on their porches. My ex spouse and I participated, decided we would be true to ourselves and appeared in our bathrobes. We got married over zoom on that same porch a few months later.

Trouble arrived onto that same porch too. First the empty bottles, later I find the tin foil. Trauma come home to roost, and taking up space so publicly. I think so often of how my mother stridently hushed me when I fought with her, so that the sin became not just my rebellion but also my voice. I am not afraid of having screaming fights on the front porch with you. I am not afraid of screaming cops off that porch when they come.

Eventually I force you out the house. I will not die with you or for you. I move all your furniture out of my house, alone, late at night, sweating and swearing and fully present in my body.

Almost exactly three years later I finally get to sell the house. First a dumpster stands in the driveway, me tossing half the contents of the house off the side of the front porch through the whole first night, just like when I moved you. Two days I am standing on the front porch watching the moving van leave. It is a privilege to leave. We are both lucky to be alive.

from blyth 1

 Let us agree for now: or write about a breaking heart: or about a blessing

 

Let us agree for now that time does not heal all wounds. That time is a brute force, to be respected, but not venerated, and it does not treat all of us equally.

That there was a time in my life when my grief made sense to others, and seemed an appropriate reaction in that moment. That time has passed, but my grief has not.

That time keeps marching on is a threat, not a reassurance.

The trajectory of growth I built for myself coming out of a scarred childhood carries me still. I have managed not to stagnate. I did find my next home and my next job and scrape together a new existence out of the rotted remains of my old life.

So I live now in a new place with new people who have no idea what I have walked through, and therefore can’t hold it against me, but also can’t hold it with me. My whole body is still existing in the moment years ago when I first understood that I would lose everything. There is so little of me alive in the moment that everyone else calls “right now.”

Time looking backward is too dense to view clearly, the losses pile up and over one another and none can be separated from the rest. When I look forward, sometimes I feel fearless, because I have proved I can live through the worst things. But many times I feel nothing. I feel sure that the major plot lines of my life are all behind me.

 

ok so i am racking up the hard NOs these days. no i will not get a colposcopy. no i will not settle for a doctor who does not listen to me. no i will not go seeking new friends or partners. it is not too many hard NOs but for someone raised without the ability to ever say no, it feels like a lot. 

no i will not provide self-soothing physical touch. 

because i don't want to cry? because i don't want to deal with the emotional deluge? because softness is a lie? because safety is a lie? so why make myself feel soft or safe? 

deadnaming myself a hundred times a day, especially when lecturing myself. it's clear my internal harangue is a production of my mother, and just as unyielding.

do i think i have to be equally unyielding in order to recover from her?

i'm pretty clear that this is my healing era, that this is my opportunity to clear my head and heart, that i moved across the country for the chance to be in a fresh environment and away from all my triggers, places, people, events. 

i'm also pretty clear that bad medical care, the wrong psych meds, bad therapy will not help. i don't feel i need to reject my instincts around when to say no to those things. 

perhaps like everything else this is all up to me and there will be no support or resources. perhaps like everything else i am left with only the resources of my body, my brain, and what i can provide for myself. this would make sense. perhaps there is no therapy that would help that i can access. 

 what i would say to them if i could

i tried over and over to love you

i gave my time and my energy and my flexibility and my commitment and my patience over and over and over

if the childhood memories weren't enough, if the voice you programmed into my head wasn't enough, if the way you trained other family members to treat me wasn't enough, if having to live through all of your commentary without any opportunity to reply or be heard wasn't enough,

if the way your whole identity was propped on my shoulders wasn't enough

then i know nothing is enough. 

nothing will make you see me as equal, whole, valuable, capable

and i don't have to explain myself 

i don't owe you a letter, an email, a conversation, an opportunity, anything, i don't owe you anything, i have cleared my debt ten thousand times over 

i am not what you are. i am not what you taught me to be. and i am not what you believe i am. 

i am myself. 

you do not get to coast off my achievements if you are not proud of how i have achieved them.

you do not get bragging rights to my life if you do not support my life. 

you do not get access to my life if you do not reciprocate what is being freely given. 

the way that i couldn't even explain to kristin pepera why the memory of you praying over my bad sunburn is trauma. the way i didn't have words to explain what happened to me the first time i was sexually assaulted. the way i sought out intimate relationships with narcissists because that's what felt like home. the way my brain came pre-wired for self harm, substance use disorder, and a strong desire for self sabotage. 

a few years ago i said to myself, i hate myself. and that sentence didn't make me mad or sad because it felt like what i have always been seeking: truth. i hate myself. i understand how to hate myself. i feel comfortable in my self hate. hating myself feels normal and natural. i hate taking care of myself. i hate responding to my own needs. i hate my feelings. i hate my memories. i cannot celebrate myself or my achievements, i cannot even see myself, i do not believe there is anything worth seeing.

i see now. 

i see what i was taught, and its roots in what you believed to be true

about yourself, about family, about the world, about milestones and relationships and what has value,

i have wished for better for you

but i choose myself. i understand now that i must choose myself. i understand now that no one else will or should choose me. i understand that i must be my own confidant, advocate, friend, helper. 

and i choose me because i am worth choosing: i see my immense power, my extreme capacity for overcoming challenges, my ability to move people and projects and rooms into a new state of being, the love and truth and honor that is my actual code of morality.

i don't believe you have any morality. 

i know you would disagree with me. this fact bears no weight in the balance of my certainty. 

i have deserved support that is more than financial. i have deserved being listened to, and the ability to develop as an individual and in relationship with you. i have deserved your authenticity. 

i did not know how to ask for these things as a child

and i am done asking for them as an adult 

 i'm feeling very disrupted. i can't tell if it's new or if it's the million layers of disruption that have happened since 2020. 

i'm very grateful my parents can't find me. i'm very grateful no one sent me something shitty on my birthday. i'm very grateful no one can show up at my door.

i can't believe i am going to allow emily to spend the rest of her life believing that i ended our friendship because i was leaving ohio and feared how much leaving her would hurt. but i am. 

yesterday i felt a real twinge of irritation at loving jared. i love him very deeply. it is annoying to feel that tug every day, to feel pained at having left him every day. it is annoying to think of him first. it is annoying to spend $1500 visiting him. and it is the only thing i have to look forward to. and i am afraid of coming back already because i will be in limbo again of when the next time i could see him would be. i miss being loved very badly. i miss being someone's friend, and laughing with him, and smoking and feeling comfortable saying anything. i may never get to be with him in any real way. that is going to have to be okay. 

i canceled the appointment they made me make for a colposcopy. i don't care if i have cervical cancer. it would not change any of my decisions. and i am not willing to go through the experience of a colposcopy for any of the other million benign reasons why she might have ordered one. i am tired of having panic attacks. i am not going to walk myself into an appointment where one is guaranteed. 

i think about ray a lot. i thought about what it would be like if i had cancer and tried to return lawny to ray. i wonder what ray remembers. i wonder what ray thinks of me. i wonder what ray speaks on about me. i still can't believe what happened. the other day i was rereading the screenshots of the only real last conversation we got to have, and thinking about how whatshername lauren or katie or whoever was like, hey could you stop talking to ray, it's really hard to deal with ray when he's emotional. yeah. yeah it is. 

tammy at work just got her divorced finalized yesterday and she was glowing about it. i am so happy for her. she told me she had been disappointed in the way her mother in law handled it. all i can say is that i understand. ray's mom is just one more person with whom i will never experience honesty, equity, justice, or mutual understanding. it is a long list of people. 

i have tried to do so many self protective things. i am trying to teach myself to say and do affirming things for myself. i protect me. i love me. i care for me, tangibly, with actions. i am very grateful to be far away from so many people who hurt me. 

i keep thinking someday, something would be cathartic. someday, something would help everything that is pent up inside me get loose. someday, something would feel like truth or justice or change or appreciation. i do not believe that day, that thing will ever come. 

 At 36 I have maybe come full circle to a place my 16 year old self might have been able to envision, marooned, abandoned, alone — but powerful 

I think I have made it because I left work when I wanted / at a job I like where I also have power / in a city where no one wants to kill me / to go to a home I own where I am safe / with my dog who is beautiful and loves me / where I take prescription meds I get free thru my health insurance / and no one can find me if I don’t want them to 

 I have been in Portland since New Year’s Eve. 

Somehow I already have plans to go back in may to see mallory and Jared so I guess I must acknowledge that a piece of my heart still lives there. 

I recently posted on Fb more details of how the past few years have gone. That R Strategy won the community engagement money from ADAMHS for care response and how their tiny little fucked up community meetings will be all that is done until and unless we finish this second report. The way so many people abandoned me and that I stood alone. And then I deleted my whole past decade from Facebook. And my goal is to not be active on Facebook any more except for work. And I might not meet that goal but it is not going to be how it was. I will never get the recognition, the acknowledgement, the kind of apologies that I deserve from the people I deserve them from. Only partial understanding from people who weren’t there but see my pain. 

Yesterday Bree asked me for the log ins to the REACH social media and website for Emily. I’ll never give her access to the website. I gave her access to the social medias three months ago. I said “if she’s not even logged in on our shit after three months we should just fire her.”

It is going to have to be enough. I want to start asking the question of what comes next. 

I am amazed how much less angry I am here. The moments of full blaze fury stand out now because they are not constant. There are times when I am able to rest. I have been able to accept some compliments. 

Sometimes I can see coworkers in this behavioral health agency seeing some of my behaviors with clearer eyes than I want. I can see Diane seeing me beg for forgiveness for tiny things. I can see Katy seeing some of my shell and my bluster. It is so foreign to have the sensation of being seen. It is so foreign to have the sensation of being liked or appreciated. They do like me and appreciate me. They make it clear. I am so grateful. 

Working in behavioral health for a CEO who is in recovery is precious to my heart. 

I am trying to be patient and cognizant of building a friendship with Jenna who has been so kind and patient and a good listener and who fills in the gaps where my social skills give out. I am not taking any local connections or recommendations from Ohioans. I am not trying to make friends. I found Jenna on HER and deleted my profile because too many people (maybe seven) were talking to me. I continuously want to cancel plans on Jenna even though I usually feel content after having gone. I hosted Christina on a Thursday night and lived thru that with some happiness that surprised me. She asked if I was open to dating anyone and I said my heart is CLOSED.

Three days after I moved in I had that bleeding episode and went to the ER. Then I had to scream for two days straight to get wifi. Then Lawny got ill and I got in that fight with Banfield. 

I didn’t drink at all for the whole first month that I was here.