06-24-26 07:00 PM

00.

Hello, future readers. This is Xavier from the past. Usually I post my diary entries as soon as I finish writing them, but I’m currently without internet at my new apartment. So I’ll be posting this as soon as I get wi-fi again, whenever that will be.¹

Another disclaimer: I like a lot of what I wrote in this post. Some of it I might work into poetry.² Such text will be highlighted like so for easy reference.

01.

I haven’t been that active online recently. I was busy having a mental breakdown. After living under stress conditions for so long, sometimes you have to break in order to start mending.

It only lasted a weekend, but the buildup took two months.

02.

Everything started in May when I got my new job as a janitor at my old high school.

As a trans person with a history of mental illness, it goes without saying that I had a tough time in high school. The second half wasn’t too bad, but my freshman and sophomore years were the darkest time of my life, wherein I struggled with gender dysphoria, depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.

Returning to a place of emotional trauma probably did a lot of stuff to my brain that I don’t have the capacity to correlate. I got hired on three weeks before the school year ended and disassociated through most of it. Revisiting sites of decade-old anxiety attacks, depressive episodes, and generic teenage angst took a lot of juice. Memories upon memories cascaded over me; I could only let them roll off my back.

The ironic context of my reason for return wasn’t lost on me. I was back to clean the school, but I wondered if I could clean up my own head, too. I felt haunted by my troubled past: every other corner I turned, my fifteen year old self would approach unbidden.

Summer hours kicked off at the end of May. I went from five eight-hour shifts on seconds to four ten-hour shifts on first. I wake up at five in the morning, clock in at six, and clock out at four in the afternoon. I’m still not totally used to it, and I don’t think I’ll ever become a proper morning bird, but it’s nice being finished with work and having the rest of the day to myself, rather than having finite blocks of personal time interrupted by work.³

I’d never given thought to what goes on in a school over the summer. As a kid I imagined the entire campus frozen in stasis. The reality is that the whole place is gutted—for renovations, remodeling, and, as far as my job is concerned, redoing the floors.

The first week of summer I helped empty out classrooms. Pretty much anything that wasn’t fastened to the floor got exhumed into the hall. The school took on a weird, inside-out appearance. I had never seen a totally empty classroom before. It was the kind of liminal space that only appears in dreams.

The weirdness helped disassociate my environment from that of my past. I’m not in fifteen year old Xavier’s high school anymore, but a conceptual abstraction that twenty-eight year old me has been tasked with sorting out.

03.

I could write more on that but I’ve run out of steam on the whole “reexamining childhood trauma as an adult” thing. I think that when I have time, I’ll expand the above into its own blog post. For now let’s move on.

My next update is that I’ve finally moved out of my mom’s house. I had been living there since last summer, after moving out of a rental home I could no longer afford. My mom offered to let me move back home to get a steep discount on rent while I saved up for my own place.

I said I wouldn’t reexamine childhood trauma anymore and I meant it. To spare both of us, I’ll keep things short.

My mother is a hoarder. And an addict of select substances and other vices.⁴

Until now, I haven’t written about this much because it was too close to home, literally. Living in a hoarding environment is indescribably difficult. To my limited knowledge, it is the most externalized manifestation of mental illness.

Other mental illnesses that exhibit outward symptoms are usually confined to an individual and their immediate surroundings or realm of influence. Hoarding is different. It expands beyond the boundaries of the individual self. It subsumes everything within its radius like a black hole, but excreting matter instead of ingesting it. It is a fount of disorder.

Those who come into contact with it become disordered themselves. The environment plays a key role in how we live, feel, think, and act. In Buddhism, the mind and the environment are directly correlated. Our environment is literally the product of our own mental habits.

This is common sense. Good habits create good environments, and bad habits create bad environments. But what if our environment has been influenced by habits other than our own? It’s like shoring up against a torrential flood—all we can do is stem the flow.

For most of the past year I only had my childhood bedroom and half of a semi-functional bathroom. No real kitchen to speak of. No shower in the bathroom—my mom tore it out. I made all of my food with a hot plate, kettle, and a microwave oven. I did my dishes in the bathroom sink. All of my groceries were crammed in a minifridge. The only working shower was two floors down in the basement: literally just a showerhead above a hole in the floor that my mom had covered with three two-by-fours. And my bedroom ceiling leaked every time it rained.

I made it work. But this tenuous living standard only deteriorated as time went on. The state of the house closed in on me, no matter how hard I tried to bolster my little fortress. Even cleaning out the bedroom next to mine and utilizing the extra space couldn’t postpone the inevitable decline; it only served to broaden its influence.

That’s the thing with hoarding. No matter what you do, you cannot stop it. For most of March and April I lacked reliable running water; in May, I found my first bed bug, then another in the middle of June.

I’d spent hundreds of dollars to facilitate my basic needs and even more hours convincing myself I could make it through, but none of it was enough. I was trapped and at my limit. I could no longer live there—even if it would’ve meant paying off my debt by the end of the year.⁵

I got a $1,000 tax return this year, which I put aside to move. After three paychecks from my new job I was able to match it. Last week I applied for an apartment, got approved, and moved in, all within the span of four days.

It ended up costing more then the two grand I had set aside, which means that I am now living on credit until I get paid again, but it was worth it. I told my wife that it feels like I’ve had a rubber band wrapped around my brain and it finally got cut loose.

04.

Bag lady, you ‘gon hurt your back
Draggin’ all them bags like that

I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold on to is you
Is you
Is you

One day all them bags
’Gon get in your way

I said one day
All them bags
’Gon get in your way

So…
Pack light
Pack light
Pack light

— “Bag Lady” from Mama’s Gun, by Erykah Badu

So here I am in my new apartment. Listening to Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu⁶ on my CD stereo. It’s one of my favorite albums. Whenever I want to chill I start off on track ten (Orange Moon) and let it spin. The last four songs are such a mellow sequence; I think my favorite off the album is Time’s a Wastin’.

Bag Lady is another favorite. Obviously pertinent here. It’s a great reminder to let go of baggage, both literal and figurative.