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.

Beginning in a Time of Corona

Photo credit to @cottonbro

The weekend before shelter-in-place, I went on four different dates with four different men. If sexual interactions could be saved up like water in a camel's hump, I wanted to make sure I was full up. I dated like I was going to be shot into space the next day. I kissed like I was getting shipped to war, and I had the feeling that, as I said goodbye to each man, I was obliged to light a candle in the window.

Living in San Francisco is like being a third grader at a school designed by drag queens. The city is obsessed with its own culture of work hard play harder. There are putt-putt golf courses featuring holeside bottle service, bowling alleys hidden underneath concert venues, and underground raves that take place in hastily rearranged WeWork spaces. At 29, the city made me feel ancient and out of touch. I was already falling behind in every aspect of my life, and my weekends had begun to revolve around avoiding missing out on the “Next Big Thing.” This desperation extended to the men in my life, who, while on dates with me, would always look over my right ear as if a slightly better, more successful or better-networked woman would appear out of nowhere that would be more worthwhile of their time. Dating was less about personal connection and romance as it was an algorithm that needed to be optimized. And I had fully bought into the system with a devil-may-care, volume-focused approach to tindering that would've put Mae West to shame.

There was a desperation and strange nostalgia that tinged my last four dates. Meeting up at bars felt tender and fragile. My boys and I would spend long silent minutes observing the chaos and camaraderie of people crowding in for their drink orders like we were watching black and white films of our grandparents dancing. Things used to be so good, we thought to ourselves, while still living it. We clutched at each other and squeezed hands like we'd just struck the iceberg, and later on in the night when we were in bed, we would face each other and cuddle, pretending we could feel the icy black water lap around our ankles.

The following Monday I opened the windows at midnight to listen to the city shut down. The streets had already been empty for hours, and for the first time since moving to the city, I could hear the birds. I went to bed alone, thinking that it would be a good time to masturbate, but not having the emotional energy to give myself that small reprieve.

The next weeks were strange ones. I started having incredibly vivid sex dreams about people I went to highschool with, but was too dorky to talk to. I started sexting with a guy I had hooked up with three years previously. I brutishly and forcefully sent unsolicited nudes to the guys I had been seeing, with varying levels of joy at one end of the scale to one guy on the other end telling me, 'I know you meant to cheer me up, but this is just more depressing.' I started to fantasize about elaborate rituals for washing hands in which men I couldn't see would come over and shower immediately, changing into sterilized robes that I had someho prepared. We would rub soap over our hands for hours on end and squirt purell into each others palms, gazing iris to iris while we rubbed it in and waited for it to dry. We would then carefully, delicately intertwine our fingers.

I started going for walks late at night so I could avoid as many people as possible, but walking past all the shuttered and boarded up restaurants and bars made me cry. I pictured the neighbors starting to refer to me as the weird sobbing girl. The highlight of the second week was starting to communicate with my neighbors across the street with post-it note missives and incredibly detailed drawings. I started to chat with the woman on the third floor, and found out her cat was named Oliver. One night at the end of one of my walks I stood under her window to feel a little closer to her and looked at my own dark apartment. I saw that my neighbors above and below me had all also been communicating with Oliver's owner, and I felt a deep sense of betrayal that could only be equaled by my childhood trauma of watching the Sonics move to Oklahoma City. A different neighbor across the street with a penchant for wandering around his apartment shirtless also caught my attention. He asked for my number via paper towel and permanent marker taped to his window, and we've been flirting ever since. I rearranged my desk for a better view, my apartment being higher than his I suddenly feel protective over him. I start doing my hair and posting more on instagram. I started walking around my apartment naked.

It's week three and I find myself unspooling gently. I feel constantly high, although it's been four days since my last edible. I've started to get to know my neighbors so intimately that now I feel like I can trust them with their own privacy again. They will be safe without my care, without my vigilent watching. I'm texting the boys less, and masturbating more. I've taken up painting more, and reading the books I always said I would read later. I started to write without irony about setting boundaries with men. And I started to gather little dust bunnies of courage from under all the responsibilities I had been ignoring and started planning this magazine.

This magazine was something I had wanted to do for a long time, and I had even had the name treasured since childhood, when my dad would let me read chain letters outloud to him while I spun around in his office chair. "You can lead a whorticulture," one read, "but you can't make her think." In another email, my dad chuckles as I say aloud, "a good cowgirl always keeps her calves together." It took me a long time to understand these jokes, to read these as ideals or cautionary tales, and I carefully grafted them onto my personality as a form of performative chasteness. It took me longer to shed that mantle in exchange for a short skirt and a pair of Docs. I think about feminist labor, and consider the pros and cons of charging my boyfriend for every time he has to ask when our anniversary is. I think about how much I spend on shampoo and then look up projected earnings for girls on onlyfans.com. I think about how I used to write but I've been too scared, and too traumatized, to write for years now. I think maybe this is the time to take the plunge. When the world is falling apart, the space is created for radical change. In this space, perhaps it is the time in which we can tend to and cultivate the cultural institutions we live under, and perhaps grow something a little more beautiful.