Good Friday Reflections: Depression and Redemption

Spider-Man 3 is not a very good film, but there's a scene that resonates with me on an almost primal level. Peter Parker is struggling to divest himself of the alien symbiote Venom, which takes the form of a black version of his Spider-Man suit. It wraps itself around him, dark and sticky and inescapable, corrupting him as it leaches him of his conscience. He only gets rid of it with the help of church bells: the toll of music, liturgy, call to worship.

I recognize that thing, I said to myself the first time I saw Venom tightening its grip around Peter even as he fought to be free. It's inside me.

“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15)

When I was little, I didn't know depression could happen to me. In my mind, I called it “sticky black sludge”: the inexplicable but overwhelming sense of worthlessness, the despicable inability to do or think or feel anything good. As I grew older, I reconceptualized the sticky black sludge as the sin that dwells within me. Only after a friend suggested that I'd probably been mildly depressed my whole life did it occur to me that there could be another explanation, and maybe I should seek diagnosis.

Sometimes I wonder if depression makes me especially susceptible to a narrative of salvation and redemption. This acute sense of my brokenness, the engulfing and inescapable sin in which I am swallowed, the feeling that I am nothing but ungodly wretchedness – is it, as a powerful strand of Christian thought would have it, a reflection of the objective reality of a fallen world that can only be saved by God's grace? Or is it just the darkness of mental illness, a chemical imbalance in my brain that has to be treated with medications and therapy?

Can it be both?

“Save me, O God, for the waters have risen up to my neck. I am sinking in deep mire, and there is no firm ground for my feet.” (Psalm 69:1-2)

The part of prep school Easter services that stays with me is the Good Friday portion. The hymn “O Sacred Head” and the Pergolesi “Stabat Mater” are two pieces that gave me chills and tears even as a theologically unsophisticated child. Something about the death of Jesus, his torture and agony on the cross, always called to me, powerfully and awfully. But can a theology that centers on Christ's death ever be other than morbid, scapegoating, cosmic child abuse?

I'm taking a theology class on new materialism this semester, and some of my classmates have been pretty resistant to theory that moves agency and subjectivity away from the human individual. It makes good sense to me, though. I am so used to feeling powerless, to feeling shaped and buffeted by forces far beyond my control, to a feeling of absolute dependence straight out of Schleiermacher, that I honestly find it a little relieving to surrender some agency. Maybe that makes me pathetic.

“I am a worm and no man … I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint; my heart within my breast is melting wax.” (Psalm 22:6, 14)

In my academic work, I do everything right. I deconstruct foundations and resist absolutism. I challenge orthodoxy and interrogate the taken-for-granted. I am well-versed in the theological and ethical problems with satisfaction atonement theory, and I know and espouse the alternatives.

And yet, in my lowest moments, when I am in the grip of agony, crushed and breathless from the total unbearableness of being me – that's when I return to satisfaction atonement. That's when I cling to the blood of Christ. It's all I can do.

I recoil from the death of Jesus. But I need it.

A Little Lower Than The Laity

The best ordination I ever went to was the one when the ordinand started breastfeeding her baby during the sermon. Gene Robinson was preaching, and he was a little taken aback. He stopped in the middle of his sermon and jestingly invited the congregation to discuss to the finer point of the Trinity until little Alice was full.

Even without that incident (and I adore unexpected eventualities in church: little mishaps that disrupt the high-church events of Episcopalianism with a congregational giggle are extremely theologically important to me), it was still a kick-ass sermon. Bishop Robinson's description of the role of the clergy has stayed with me and has become incorporated into my ecclesiology. Clergy, he said, are not closer to God or holier or better than any other Christian; if anything, they are beneath the laity, because they are servants of both God and the Church.

(This is why I think of Church hierarchy as lowerarchy.)

The ordination I attended today has given my ecclesiology another dimension of theological thought, which I think is a necessary supplement to the piece Bish Robinson gave me.

Because I now live in a wealthy 'burb town in the tri-state area, and because Anglo-Catholicism is really gay, today's preacher used an analogy from Broadway. Just as, when the famous actor you came to see is taking a break, your Broadway playbill has a slip of paper in it stating that "The part of Scarlett Johanssen will be played by [unheard-of actress]" (yes, that is actually the example he used), so -- metaphorically, theologically -- ordination is a slip of paper stating that "The part of Jesus will be played by [ordinand]."

My hackles shot up. This sounded suspiciously like elevating clergy over the laity. If this means that clergy are -- inherently, ontologically, by virtue of being clergy -- more Christ-like than the laity, then my most Reformation instincts respond with incoherent yelling about the priesthood of all believers.

When I think about it a little more, though, it's much more interesting than that.

Clergy are the religious establishment par excellence. The Pharisees, if you like. Jesus was frequently at loggerheads with the religious establishment; so how are clergy to be both the religious establishment and playing the part of Jesus? How do you "play Jesus" within the Church?

I believe the logical answer is that clergy (and, modestycough, theologians) have a duty of dissent and challenge toward the institution they (we) are a part of. By definition. Our inherently contradictory position has built into it the necessity of protesting the very institution that gives us the power to speak our protest.

That is how we are to act as good citizens of the Kingdom. It's not about submitting unilaterally to monarchical power. It never was.

Surprised By Love

It seems ridiculous now, but before my godchild was born, I was genuinely worried that I would hate him.

He wasn't my godchild then, of course. He was the imminent spawn of two of my best friends, and while I was legitimately excited for them, I also had a lot of concerns. I'd never been around babies much before, and what I knew about them didn't sound promising. They cried a lot. They pooped a lot. They consumed their parents' time, thoughts, and lives. One time when I was nine I held my neighbor's newborn and accidentally hit her head against the edge of the dining room table, and I was terrified of ever holding a baby again in case I broke it. My friends would be obsessed with their youngling, and I would be unable to participate. Was this tiny human going to ruin two of the best friendships I've ever had?

A week or two before the baby's birth, I was a jerk to my friends. It wasn't premeditated jerkiness – it was just thoughtlessly being a shitty friend – but it's the last thing you need when you're freaking out about your first child's impending entrance to the world. Subconsciously, I think it was a preemptive strike against the baby: you're going to ruin my friendship? Screw you, I'll ruin it on my terms. I'd also had more than enough of being around pregnant people, which is a massive dysphoria trigger for me. Regardless of my reasons, it was a lousy thing to do.

So I was doubly nervous as I made my way to the hospital on December 11^th. Not only was I going to meet a day-old newborn who, as far as I could tell from the Facebook pictures, looked and smelled and sounded exactly as bad as any other day-old newborn, but there was also the lingering tension of my as-yet-unatoned-for shitty behavior.

I was lucky. I got two reconciliations that day. The first was apology and forgiveness over lunch with the baby's father. The second was the moment I took that tiny, sleeping person in my arms.

I hate to be such a cliché, but meeting the person who would be my godchild really did change everything. Leaving the hospital, I felt as though the whole world was a little sparklier, a little more special, a little more awe-inspiring. Before long, I was doing all the things I swore I'd never do: changing diapers, shrugging off spit-up, talking incessantly about the wondrousness of the baby. The most amazing thing to me is just how much I love him.

I've spent much of the past year contemplating this love. It's incredible, and it's frightening. I would throw myself under a bus for my godchild in a heartbeat. I would wrestle spiders for him. I would forgive him if he murdered my whole family in front of my eyes. My love for him is vast, and it is unconditional, and it makes no sense. Why do I love him so? What has he done to merit such love? The answer: nothing, and because he has done nothing to earn my love, there is nothing in all of creation that can separate him from it.

I believe strongly that, in the words of Les Mis, “to love another person is to see the face of God.” I believe that anyone who teaches you a new way to love is revealing to you another glimpse, another facet, of the divine. My godchild has taught me something I didn't know about grace: love that is unearned, unconditional, yet in no way cheap.

I had no idea I was capable of a love like this, and I believe that it is the work of God within me. My love for my godchild has opened me to new loves I had thought beyond me, manifest most recently in romantic love and in the first steps of self-reconciliation. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have denied that I had the capacity for godparental love, romantic love, or self-reconciliation, but all of these loves are or will be part of the ever-expanding, dizzyingly vast cosmic Love I have only just begun to explore.

Happy birthday, Jay. I love you with all the love God has graced me to give.

CONTEXT: Postmodernism's Material Benefit to Society

When I tell people I'm a doctoral student in theology, with a particular interest in poststructuralism and queer theory, they have an inevitable follow-up question.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Sometimes it's asked with a detectable sneer, an undisguised contempt for the waste of a good brain in such an arcane discipline. Sometimes it's asked quizzically, with genuine puzzlement on the part of my interlocutor. Never is it something I want to be asked.

I mean, there are only three possible answers, right?

1. Ordination (and that one is clearly out, if you've known me for five minutes).
2. Academia.
3. "No idea. HAHA oh god you're right, I'm wasting my life, let me switch to STEM despite not having studied any science since the age of 15."

It's the people who seem to be hoping for answer 3 who really bug me. There's a broad cultural trend here in the US toward the devaluing of humanities and especially of anything with a postmodern bent. I think it's part of a depressing economism undergirding US society (even more so than UK society, in my experience): if something doesn't have an immediately apparent material benefit, people genuinely can't comprehend why you would do it.

But the fact is, postmodernism does have a material benefit, if we would only apply it. The primary lesson of postmodernism is still what it was in 1967: il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Detractors use Derrida's words to dismiss deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the whole project of postmodernism as sophistry, caricaturing our work as immaterial language games; but the point is not "there is nothing outside the text," but "there is nothing outside context."

(Yes, there's a not inconsiderable irony in the fact that a statement about the supreme importance of context is so often taken out of context.)

The lesson of postmodernism is: Everything we do, say, and think is historically and contextually contingent -- profoundly, radically so. Is that the same thing modernism was trying to say? Kind of yes; but we're trying to say it in ever new ways, because clearly the lesson hasn't stuck.

For example, I woke up yesterday to this infuriating story: "Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" The BBC, of all things, recites a new iteration of the same tired neurosexist hogwash that was so comprehensively debunked in Cordelia Fine's wonderful book Delusions of Gender. It's terrible science and terrible reporting on science. It's cissexist, it's reductionist, and it's just utter BS.

My criticisms are ideological, of course. That's a term lobbed at postmodernists by detractors who like to think of themselves as unbiased viewing subjects who coolly take in all the scientific evidence before forming a judgment based on the facts. What these small-o objectivists don't realize is that this is an ideology too. It's more insidious, because it's an ideology that disguises itself as an objective view-from-nowhere. Feminists have long been aware that there is no view-from-nowhere, and to claim otherwise is an at best disingenuous, at worst nakedly malicious perpetuation of oppression.

The gift of postmodernism is epistemological self-awareness. Everything we think we know as an objective, timeless truth is radically contextual, and postmodernism is the practice of constant vigilance, of consistent suspicion of truth-claims.

"Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" There are so many profoundly contextual assumptions packed into that short headline: that "men" and "women" are clearly definable, discrete categories; that there is meaningful difference between men and women, rather than wide variation among all people; that the wiring of the brain tells us anything useful about human personalities; that brain wiring is predetermined and perhaps immutable; that there's a "right" way to be a man or a woman; etc. etc.

And there are so many real-world injustices that are perpetuated by the uncritical parroting of this ideology. The murder of trans women, the wage gap, the war on reproductive freedom -- none of this takes place in a void. It's all a part of the context within which it's seen as acceptable to report cognitive bias as scientific fact.

Postmodernism is not a disconnected, immaterial, ivory-tower discipline that's all about proving how clever you are. It's a tool for justice, and it matters.

Yes, He Is A God: A Black Theology of Kanye West

Making fun of Kanye West for having a ginormous ego is a national pastime in the United States. Everyone's been at it lately, from Jimmy Kimmel to President Obama. Because I'm an inveterate contrarian and a consummate overthinker, I want to weigh in on this, spurred by insights from Ayesha A. Siddiqi's marvelous series of tweets on racism's role in responses to Kanye. I argue that not only is “I am a God” theologically defensible, it's a critical moment in Kanye's black theology – a black theology that white America really needs to heed and learn from.

“I am a God” is theologically defensible

In my WASP-y context, we don't usually say this out loud, but if your Christology is as high as mine it's true. In Christ, we are made divine; so as a believer, as part of the Church which is the body of Christ, Kanye is (a) God. For the dominant groups in society, that's not really something to brag about, because it ends up conflating church and empire into idolatry – I have no time at all for John Lennon's claim to be bigger than Jesus – but for marginalized people, it is a powerful way to reclaim agency and pride in the face of systemic forces that try to strip you of both. Kanye is quite open about the fact that the inflated West ego is a construct that helps him battle depression and self-loathing, demons that for him are entangled with and exacerbated by the systemic racism he faces daily as a black man in the United States.

Posing as the face of Jesus is an audacious statement, and – contrary to the kneejerk denunciations of blasphemy – is deeply rooted in Kanye's self-identification as a Christian. The Christian's ontology is a constant oscillation between the power to do all things through Christ (Philippians 4:13), and the fact that this power is sourced in and only in Jesus. This ongoing, dynamic destabilization is found in Kanye's career and public face, between the empowerment of “I Am A God” and the cry de profundis of “Jesus Walks” (my favorite Kanye song, and, IMO, some of the best theology you will ever hear in three minutes of popular culture).

Kanye's Black theology

Kanye's reclamation of the face of Jesus from a white supremacist society is a statement of a black theology in the vein of James Cone. Cone's Black Jesus is squarely on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor, redeeming both Jesus and blackness from a white supremacy that has distorted both. The black theological tradition of which Kanye is a part also includes the womanist theology of Kelly Brown Douglas, who rejects the theology of submission as more harmful than useful to black women today, and instead proudly affirms the subaltern

Kanye's is also a deeply embodied black theology, squarely embedded in the physicality of being a black man and how that challenges white supremacy: most especially when it comes to sexuality, so often a source of terror for white people (especially white women). Sexuality and (black liberationist) spirituality are entwined throughout Kanye's oeuvre, as in “Hell of a Life” – “No more drugs for me / Pussy and religion is all I need” – or the controversial “Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign” line from “I'm In It.” Or consider the couplet “I wanna fuck you hard on the sink / After that, give you something to drink” in “Bound 2,” which carries certain Eucharistic resonances in the midst of a verse that mentions Christmas, church steps, and the wonderful line, “After all these long-ass verses / I'm tired, you tired, Jesus wept.”

Of course, there's an incredibly problematic reduction of women to sex objects in a lot of this, but white guys calling out black guys for sexism is all too often at best paternalistic and at worst straight-up racist, so I'll direct your attention to this wonderful roundtable of insights by seven women. For now, let's focus on the upside: he's affirming his right as a black man to exist in a white supremacist society, to take up physical space in the world, to be a fully realized human being who is proudly sexual (in the face of centuries of demonizing black men's sexuality), proudly rich and famous (in the face of systemic material oppression), justly proud of his talent (in the face of a white entertainment industry that seeks to belittle him while simultaneously elevating white men of far less talent who have done despicable things).

And make no mistake, Kanye is a transcendentally talented human being. I truly believe he is the premier artiste of our time, a man whose boundless creativity speaks to the spirit of the age, whose gloriously eclectic taste in samples shatters all the walls we try to erect between “original” and “derivative” work.

Kanye is a public theologian

Kanye doesn't just rap his theology, he lives it. Whether declaring on live TV that the president doesn't care about black people, or taking the mic from the person most emblematic of US whiteness in order to speak up for a similarly godlike black musician, Kanye's not afraid to speak truth to power, and what does he get for it? White America's ridicule.

Instead of mocking this impossibly talented, awesomely provocative artist, we should be analyzing why exactly we find his theology so challenging. When we find ourselves calling him arrogant, he reminds us: For a black man in a racist society, what's the difference between humility and servility? 

Source.

One of Kanye's outstanding analytical talents is his connection of the personal with the systemic. As much as modern US society tries to maintain the public-private split, Kanye unveils the untenability of that distinction and the ways in which it functions to maintain an oppressive status quo. This makes him the foremost public theologian of the early twenty-first century, and on some level it truly does make him (a) God.

Animorphs Revisited: #4 - The Message

In which Cassie's rad psychic powers lead the gang to their best morph yet, and thence to a super awesome new character, hooray and cheers cheers cheers.

I heart Cassie. I love all of these characters (except Jake, yawn snooze), and I relate to Ax and Tobias the most, but I have an especial soft spot for Cassie – partly because I was in love with her as a child, partly because she is so desperately, heart-wrenchingly concerned with acting morally in an impossible situation.

(Side note: It's really weird to return as an adult to childhood crushes. I happened to see a snippet of Billy Elliot the other day, and was reminded that when the movie came out I thought Billy extremely dreamy. Which was fine when I was eleven, but is a hard memory to process as a grown-ass man.)

Cassie is excellent at character analysis: “Marco is never happy unless he's complaining about something. Just like Rachel is never happy unless she has something to fight against. And Tobias is never happy, period. He thinks if he's ever happy, someone will just come along and take his happiness away.” Notice how she doesn't have one for Jake. (Hint: It's because he doesn't have a character.) She's also super intuitive of subtle ways to make people feel better, like when she notices Marco being uncharacteristically quiet and compliments his haircut in a kind but unshowy way. Cassie is absolutely the Hufflepuff of the group and I love her for it.

Clockwise from top left: Rachel, Marco, Tobias, Cassie. Not pictured: Jake (squib).

I'm not exactly Ms. Fashion. Mostly, if you want to know what I look like, picture a girl in overalls and leather work gloves, biting her lip as she concentrates on trying to force a pill down the throat of a badger. Jake once took a picture of me doing exactly that. He has it next to his computer in his room. Don't ask me why. I would be glad to give him a picture of me in a dress or something. Rachel could loan me the dress. But Jake says he likes the picture he has.

As you know, Bob, I am hardly a Cassie/Jake shipper – Cassie is the most lesbian lesbian that ever lesbianed, and Jake is the human equivalent of the World Watching Paint Dry Championships – but this is super freakin' cute. Cassie opines that “Marco is kind of cute, too, although he's not my type.” NEITHER. IS. JAKE. YOU. ARE. GAY.

Oh yeah, this is the part where I'm supposed to talk about the plot. So Cassie is having psychic dreams – we know they're psychic 'cause Tobias has them too – but it's not because she's ingested demon blood, but because she's the best at morphing, which makes her particularly attuned to Andalite telepathy. (I don't know, just go with it). The dreams lead her and the other Animorphs to a crashed Andalite ship deep in the ocean, but to get there they need a new morph: dolphins.

It's a long time since I was either eight years old or a girl, but once I was both, and this is never clearer to me than when I read about people morphing dolphins. I WANT TO MORPH A DOLPHIN, DAMMIT. 

I am man enough to admit that, around the time this book was published, I thought this was the greatest fucking thing on the planet. And also that, if someone gave one to me today, I would write all of my doctoral seminar notes in it.

They have hecka fun being dolphins, obvi, and even better, they rescue Ax. Ax is the younger brother of Elfangor, the Andalite prince who gave the kids their morphing powers on his deathbed, and Ax is the actual best. He's the source of some of the best comedy and poignancy in this whole frequently funny, often poignant series. According to Rachel, he's also cute. Rachel, you minx. Of course, we already knew she was into the interspecies romance thing (what will Hawkboy think if you leave him for a shape-shifting space centaur??).

Actually, I think Rachel's attraction to differently-bodied persons is consistent with her general attitude toward her human body now that she can morph. Compare Marco's opinion: “I used to want to get all pumped up. Then I morphed into a gorilla, and it was like, why bother lifting weights? I can just become a gorilla and bench press a truck.” Rachel, on the other hand: “Being a cat made me more interested in gymnastics. I mean, as a cat I was just so totally, totally in control and graceful. Ever since then I've been trying to use that feeling. When I'm on the balance beam I try and remember that cat confidence.” For Marco, morphing is something you use when you have to, kept separate from daily life. Rachel, however, is interested in consciously maintaining continuity between her morphed self and her human self, even on a bodily level. It makes sense that she's more open-minded about non-human bodies than the others.

So cute! [source]

One of Ax's functions throughout the series is to provide extraterrestrial exposition, and here he offers a cosmic perspective on the evil the gang is fighting: “Yeerks are killers of worlds. Murderers of all life. Hated and feared throughout the galaxy. They are a plague that spreads from world to world, leaving nothing but desolation and slavery and misery in their wake.” I guess all good fantasy includes some really chilling incarnation of pure evil.

(Though Taxxons still freak me out the most on a purely visceral level. Human words really can't describe how much I loathe Taxxons.)

Despite a close run-in with our old friend V3, our intrepid heroes live to fight another day, thanks to the intervention of that most beloved of specfic dei ex, the (Space?) Whale. Cassie, who knows that every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name, is profoundly spiritually moved by her encounter with Free Willy (90s reference!): “even though I don't really know what a soul is, I know this – if humans have them, then so do whales.” Well, I'm convinced.

Moral Quandaries

As our resident animal-lover slash overthinker, Cassie has qualms about morphing that the others haven't considered: “How is doing this any different than what the Yeerks do?” As Rachel points out, morphing's not identical to Yeerk infestation, but it's still controlling another creature, and Cassie is deeply uncomfortably with it. Her conscience is a crucial agitator in the dynamic of the group. These kids are fighting a war. They might be on the side of the angels, but what they are doing is horrible, and they all need Cassie's scruples to keep them aware of their humanity.

In some ways, Cassie has the hardest time of them all, because she has the deepest understanding of the terrible predicament they are in. Resistance as a whole is the moral course, but nearly every individual action goes against Cassie's conscience. Having to temporarily take up the leadership role for which she is in no way suited forces her to wonder, for the first time of many, whether she is a hypocrite.

“You could have been killed. It would have been my fault. This whole mission was my idea. Jake asked me if we should do it and I said yes.” …

“Oh, I get it. You don't like responsibility?”

I winced. Was that it? Was I afraid of taking responsibility? …

“If someone gets hurt. . . killed . . . just because I have these dreams - I can't make that kind of decision.”

“Yes, but can you decide to do nothing? That's a decision, too.”

 Marco, much like Neil Peart, is a smart cookie, and he pushes Cassie when she needs to be pushed. Whenever she is so torn up with moral decision-making that she risks total inaction, he speaks the uncomfortable truths she needs to hear. Well, she needs to hear them from the ruthless perspective of the war needing to be fought, but her goodness as a person will suffer severely. “I had lived my entire life without feeling hatred. It is a sickening feeling. It burns and burns, and sometimes you think it's a fire that will never go out.” MY HEART. Cassie is such a truly good person, and this war is destroying her.

Trans* Moments

In true 90s kid fashion, Tobias is learning to deal with his trauma through the use of humor.

<You know how it is. It's a hawk-eat-mouse world out there.>

I laughed, pleased to hear that Tobias was learning to be at peace with the fact that, at least for a while, he was as much a hawk as he was a boy.

Until Tobias' arc takes another interesting turn, in a number of books' time, he's likely to take a backseat in our analysis of trans* moments to a character even more unusual than he is. Ax is a true fish out of water, a young alien who knows next to nothing about Earth and humanity. He'll live in the woods most of the time, but whenever he needs to be out in public he morphs a human – a composite made up of DNA from all the Animorphs. I'm 85% sure it's canon that all of the Animorphs find human!Ax confusingly attractive (and it is 110% my headcanon), because he's a pretty boy who bears eerie ghosts of resemblance to all of them. “I chose to be-be-be-be-be male,” he says, stuttering over sounds that are fun to make with his unaccustomed mouth, “because I am male.” You and me both, Ax.

Hey, It's 1996! Pop Culture Reference Log

• Marco's dreams are hilarious. “I've had weird dreams about falling from way up high and when I finally land I'm in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood talking to King Friday.” “I've had weird dreams about that woman on Baywatch.”

• “are we getting some kind of psychic message from the Little Mermaid?”

• Psychic Friends

• “Well, as you know, we have six dolphins here. Joey, whom you've met, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Rachel.” AHAHAHAHA.

• “Didn't you ever see The Hunt for Red October? Great movie.”

Next time: Marco blesses us with his first full-length snarkfest, Ax loses his shit over Cinnabon, and we are dealt a soul-crushing revelation.

Animorphs Revisited: #3 - The Encounter

In which I dispense entirely with the usual format of these posts and instead develop the “hawk!Tobias as trans* metaphor” theme in detail. 

 

My name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.

This book complicates the reading of hawk!Tobias as a trans* person, but in a way I find really personally resonant. I kind of wish I'd reread it back when I was first wrestling with the decision to transition, because I think there's a painful honesty here that would have meant a lot to me. In this children's book. About kids who turn into animals to fight brain-controlling alien slugs. No, really. Transitioning has, I think, made me a better and happier person, but it's painful and difficult: I truly believe it's the best decision I've ever made, but I still wish I didn't have to do it, and I don't like it and I wish it wasn't part of who I am. It's vastly more complicated than those simplistic, outmoded “trapped in the wrong body” narratives suggest. I can't help but have an ambivalent relationship with my transition. After all, on a purely logistical level, my life was easier when I was living as a woman. I didn't have to feel like I was disappointing and hurting everyone who loved me just by existing; I didn't have to stare down bartenders and airport security officials who can see the mismatch between my gender presentation and the name on my ID; I didn't have to despair over medical bills I can't afford (admittedly, that last wouldn't be a problem if I'd stayed in the UK). I have hated my transgender identity and I have hated my trans body. Even though being a man makes me feel fully alive in a way I couldn't have imagined before, I still have days when I wish I could return to the cocoon of denial and live a “normal” life.

Let me clarify upfront that I am not mapping “male/female” directly onto “hawk/human.” Rather, I am suggesting that Tobias' journey toward accepting and making the best of a body that does not adequately reflect who he is, or who he wants to be, can be read as loosely analogous to the process – which begins as you start to really question your gender, and may continue as transition – of learning to live fully in your trans* body, even though that body is not and may never be precisely the way you feel it should be.

Tobias is undergoing the fragmentation of identity that can sometimes happen during the early stages of transition, when you're struggling to reconcile your past self with the self you want to be. He talks about “the human in my head” and “the hawk in me,” refers to them in the third person, and seems to envision them as conflicting entities, neither of which is his true self. It distinctly reminds me of my pre-transition gender struggles, when I was beginning to accept that I couldn't be a woman, but felt as though I somehow hadn't earned the right to consider myself not a woman. It's incoherent, but it's emotionally truthful to my experience.

He has talked in the past about loving the hawk morph, and he certainly still recognizes the practical upsides: Flying, free entry to concerts and sports events, freedom from routine. “There were millions of things I could do as a bird that I couldn't do as a human.” On the other hand, “It's strange the things you miss when you lose your human body. Like showers. Like really sleeping, all the way, totally passed out. Or like knowing what time it is.” There are pros and cons to being both human and hawk, both trivially and in the broadest sense of one's self-conception; but Tobias will never be simply and unambiguously one or the other. In the same way, at this relatively early stage of transition I struggle to feel simply and unambiguously male, just as, before transition, I never felt simply or unambiguously female. (Of course, many trans people do feel their gender simply and unambiguously. I don't completely rule out the possibility that maybe one day I will too, but right now it's still an ongoing battle.) I am a person complicated by a knotty history of maleness and femaleness, which means that I do not fit the societal norm of either and I have had to wrestle with the expectations and experiences of both. Saying “I am and have always been a man trapped in a woman's body” would, I feel, elide the very real experiences that have formed my past and present self. (Though, again, that is how I personally feel. Other trans* people may and do feel differently.)

Just so, saying “Tobias is a boy trapped in the body of a hawk” is an oversimplification that elides the lived realities of what he is going through. And, since – unlike with medical gender transition – there really isn't anything he can do about it, it's not a narrative that helps him come to any useful sense of self-understanding. If he understands himself solely as a human trapped in the body of a hawk, all he can do is hate himself and be miserable. Indeed, he fairly explicitly attempts suicide in the text, at the lowest point of his struggle for self-actualization, but it is his friends who save him.

Friends – community, people who sympathize and are willing to listen, people who can ground you and support you – are, in my estimation, the single most crucial component of any major life event. If you're going through a big change, though, you will have a lot of complicated feelings about the friends you nonetheless rely on. That's okay. It's legitimate to feel those things, and you simply need to process and work through them. Tobias couldn't do without the other Animorphs, but he still feels both envy of their “normalcy” and resentment of their pity. It hurts to be around them, and yet they offer him the support and love he desperately needs. It's painfully relatable.

“I hated the way they all felt sorry for me.”

“I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.”

“'Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart,' [Rachel] said with sudden passion. 'A person isn't his body. A person isn't what's on the outside.'” (WHAT? NO, OF COURSE I'M NOT CRYING. SHUT UP. YOU'RE CRYING.)

Tobias' dysphoria tilts him toward the twin fears of (i) losing himself and (ii) being forced to be what his body seems to be. If you focus too much on the externals of who you are, do you not risk losing your internal sense of self? But if you deny those physical externals completely, do you not risk living only half a life?

I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! … I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests.

But part of me kept saying, 'It's a lie. It's a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead.'

I'm reminded of a point that Gayle Salamon makes in her essay “Transfeminism and the Future of Gender”: “Transition is framed as if it is akin to a death or as if the post-transition subject will, with hir emergence, enact the death of the pretransition subject.” Salamon rightly critiques this framing for its image of violence committed against the self, when in reality transition is a radical act of self-love and a healing of the psyche rather than the fragmentation thereof. And yet it is an image I have, I admit, found myself using sometimes. Horrible thoughts and terrible feelings are part and parcel of the agonies of self-discovery.

Suddenly I desperately didn't want to be there. I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped. Trapped. Forever! I looked at my talons. They would never be feet again. I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything . . . anyone . . . again.

Tobias swings to both extremes before being able to find a way to reconcile the different parts of himself. He tries succumbing to the worst, most hopeless agonies of irremediable dysphoria, and he tries denying his inner human entirely and living solely as a hawk. Neither option suffices to fulfill him as a truly actualized self. His redemption lies in his recognition of the analogy of his situation with that of the Yeerk-infested humans, trapped and powerless in bodies they can't escape, and his pledge to strive for their freedom. He may not ever gain freedom for himself, but he can sure as hell fight for the freedom of others.

In its own way, this decision enables him to reach a new, performative self-understanding: <I am a human, yes. But I am also a hawk. I'm a predator who kills for food. And I'm also a human being who. . . who grieves, over death.> “Human” and “hawk” are rough blueprints, not discrete prescriptive categories, and Tobias belongs to both insofar as he is and does them.

I am Tobias. A boy. A hawk. Some strange mix of the two. … Be happy for me, and for all who fly free.

Next time: Cassie goes all Sam Winchester on us, the gang acts out a real live Lisa Frank design, and we meet my most favorite character.