A Note About Texas

Sometimes when I write for this blog, I feel like I'm just another noise in an already massive echo chamber. I get discouraged, I feel invisible. I think to myself, 'maybe it's okay to be invisible, maybe you shouldn't have a voice in this.'

I've been writing since I was ten, and as a junior I started a magazine at my high school called The Voice. But I've always been shy about my writing; my poems are all small, crammed into tiny spaces as if someone was going to come and take up the rest of the page. My first chapbook was called Shy Knees. I rarely share my writing with other people, I rarely reach out to publications to ask them if I can write for them. I rarely even post on this blog. Some of it stems from fear. I don't want people to think I'm a bad writer. I don't want to read the mean and cruel comments that can sometimes follow the bottom of a post. I don't want to talk about myself. As a white-presenting middle-class woman living in San Francisco, I'm sometimes the last person in the world who needs to have an opinion on something. It's better for me to step aside and let other people have the floor.

I think, too, it's hard to tell when writing has impact. I've always loved to-do lists and I still have a bucket list I wrote over ten years ago that includes the missive "change someone's life." I wonder if I've ever done that with my writing. I wonder if anyone has ever read something I've put to paper and walked away feeling different, or feeling anything at all. Internally, I wonder if my writing has any impact on me. I've journaled nearly every day for the past three years, all of it introspective and self-analyzing, and I still feel like I miss the forest for the tiny trees; that I've made the biggest mistakes of my life in just the past week, and that while I wrote about being stressed at work or fights with my partner, my journal rarely touches on my sexual assault or my brother's incarceration, two of the most traumatic things that happened to me last year. I wrote about petty fights with my boyfriend, using words to store my bitterness in instead of using them as tools to break apart my outer hardness to find my vulnerability and gentleness inside.

I feel angry with myself. I feel like I've wasted time, or not been productive. I hate that I use the word 'productive' as much as I do. I take stress naps and wake up exhausted, and I check my bank balances every day because I have an anxiety that what I have will be taken from me at any moment. I feel shame, and I don't know for what.

I think this is all called exhaustion. I think this is all called being stressed and overwhelmed and not dealing with grief and taking too much on and ignoring the important things and losing the essential things and turning into the worst part of your parents and then fearing you're not turning into anything worthwhile at all. I want to be more quiet. I want to stare out the window more, I want to read on my couch for hours without worrying that I'm missing something. I want to put my phone in a box and put that box into the closet for the weekend. I feel guilty for not doing any of those things, and no pleasure in the things I am doing.

This is a long intro. This was supposed to be a post about how Texas is shitty and how, since The Voice, I've written about abortion access and rights. I wanted to write about how planned parenthood saved my life twice, by giving me information about my pregnancy that was fair and good and put me forward instead of the conservative agenda my dad put forward, that saw me as a sin and not a person. They saved me too, by giving me access to birth control I couldn't afford. I wanted to write something about all the different ways writing hasn't gotten us any closer to convincing people that maybe women shouldn't have to carry fetuses to term if they don't want to, that they exist as more than just reproductive machines.

But I just feel tired. So I'm keeping this space small, and safe. I am posting below some abortion funds that people can donate to if they feel so inclined, to help people access abortion care if it is no longer safe for them to do so where they live. And I want to hold space for the people who are exhausted and discouraged. It is okay to be like this. It is okay to want to stare at the wall for a little while. Let others take up the mantle when you no longer have the strength to do so. We will be coming back.

Abortion Funds:

• Texas Abortion Funds

• Fund Texas Choice

• Texas Equal Access Fund

• Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project

• National Network of Abortion Funds

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The Whorticulturalist is the mother of this magazine. She is a sex-positive blogger and creative who enjoys rock climbing, dancing, and camping. In her spare time, she’s probably flirting.

This and Other Reasons Why I Don’t Walk Alone At Night

Artwork by Kay Sirianni

This poem was written at a time in my life where my mental health was fraying and I wanted to express my experiences and the experience of those around me. It gets into some deeply personal first-hand experience I have had with people who suffer from PTSD but my true purpose was to talk about the horrors of sexual assault and the mental scars it leaves behind. Sexual violence is a really horrible thing to experience, but the way in which PTSD prolongs victimhood consistently goes unspoken. So I spoke about it, and I hope it helps others understand that this is also a very female problem and many women are dealing with the traumatic aftermath on the daily.

Rape is like all the ‘nice’ guys I have ever met

He forces his way into your head, and then it's your bed

And now you can't rest

But before all of this

I never had this misfortune of meeting the man himself.

But now,

Now - Rape has moved in

Made a home for himself on the bed across the room

He bides his time during the day

Filters into the background

And at night he comes alive in the room

He haunts it

He preys on it

Hell, I think he enjoys it.

Sometimes I want to kick rape out

But I don't know where to start

When I try, he just comes back

He knows just when to show up 

Knows how to wear us down

He makes it hard to keep living here.

Makes it harder to push him out

His shit is all over the place

Now my room is all stains and clutter and pain

Rape is tricky like that.

He comes back just when you think you are safe. 

I wish Rape wasn't my problem anymore,

But he follows me now.

On my way home in the dark

Alone in my home

Around the men on the street

Rape, 

Well he’s like all the nice guys I’ve ever met

Always there at the wrong moment.

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Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley

A Paradise Built in Hell; A Book Review

I've had a lot more time during quarantine for reading, but the stuff that I usually read, such as memoirs by GirlBosses, books about the sex I was definitely not having, and mountains I was not going to be climbing anytime soon, just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was depressing, to say the least, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend another minute in my apartment lying down on the couch reading, which only differed from the other 1439 minutes in the day in that it was a page and not a screen in front of me.

A Paradise Built in Hell was recommended to me by a friend who actually gave me one of her other books, Infinite City, which is about San Francisco. I'm not going to lie and say I've read that one yet, but I'll get around to it, eventually. I finally picked up this book a couple of months into quarantine because I was desperate to break up the monotony, and I was not disappointed. This book was incredibly thoughtful, insightful, and despite the title, a shining light of hope and optimism in this time.

Going through some of the biggest disasters in recent cultural memory such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the San Francisco earthquake and more, Solnit weaves a compelling argument that in times of crisis, rather than descending into chaos, looting and violence like many movies would like us to believe, people instead rallied around each other and fiercely supported their communities. People created systems that quickly and efficiently worked to support everyone they touched, and rather than descend into chaos, people found meaning and purpose in their lives, sometimes for the first time.

One of the most memorable news stories at the beginning of coronavirus were stories of stampedes and fights breaking out to get toilet paper, and long lines around the block to get beans and pasta. Everyone was terrified of the unknown, and wanted to be prepared for the worst possible outcome. But what was less reported about was people reaching out to the vulnerable in their communities. I've lived in my apartment for a year but didn't know a single one of my neighbors. Now, all of us were sharing numbers and resources; people taped notes above the mailboxes listing what supplies they had, and sharing them freely with everyone around them. At street corners, people handed out cloth masks that they had made themselves, and it was beautiful.

As a society, we fall into the trap of Darwinian anthropology, which assumes that we all live in a world that dictates the survival of the fittest, and that if you fall behind, you're going to die. We're obsessed and terrified of the idea that if we make one mistake, we'll get swallowed up by opportunistic and bloodthirsty , and therefore, an act of kindness on our part is a show of weakness that is guaranteed to be taken advantage of.

But this book proves the opposite, that in times of crisis people will come together to help one another out. During the San Francisco earthquake, for example, people gathered in golden gate park with what little they had been able to escape with, and established highly-organized soup kitchens that also became meeting points and centers for communicating news. During hurricane Katrina, locals who had access to boats didn't use them to loot empty houses, but instead spent days and even weeks searching for survivors who were stranded on rooftops, or in tree tops that were above water. People were radical in their dedication to care for their neighbors and their broader community, and time and time again there is evidence that people willingly share what little they may have left in a time of crisis with those around them.

The flip side of that is obviously that criss often subverts or overturns the minority of those in power, who benefit from the status quo. There is a panic when the system that has kept them at the top disappears, and often they will use military or police power to try and enforce a semblance of authority over a community that no longer needs them. Solnit argues that it is these people who actually perpetuate and cause the most violence in disaster, as they try and restore 'order,' a euphemism for their elitist power structures.

This book was insightful as a way to understand what is happening in our country right now as we wrestle with two different pandemics, both of which are hurting the most vulnerable the hardest. While it is slow, there's a slow and steady rise of the majority against the minority, of seeing that those in power do not exist to keep us safe, to protect us or care for us, but rather to keep us low, and keep us isolated.

Even as we shelter in our homes, we are galvanized to be more aware of, and more protective of, our neighbors. Many have measured the risks of large gathering and have decided that protesting and showing up for Black people is worth the risk, that standing up against the corrupt in power is worth the possibility of losing what little we have.

Hell is what we go through to find positive and effective change. It is only through fighting tooth and nail, with blood and tears, do we create paradise. It is through disaster that we build nirvana, hitting bottom can be a great starting place.