the imposter syndrome of being alive

I find video of me to be strange and disorienting. For the last video I made, I filmed over 100 takes and kept finding so many reasons I didn’t like each one. If I am being really honest — the “fault” was less about my mishaps and more about...me. Video has always been the most difficult medium for me. With photos I can have some semblance of control, but video feels positively reckless. All of my being on full display, vibrating defiantly as if it has a life of its own.

For much of my life the way that I survived harassment was disassociating myself from myself. that way when people hurt me they weren’t actually hurting *me*, just some ‘thing’ separate from me. It made it less painful. I refused to listen or watch any recordings of myself because I didn’t want to see/hear how feminine I was. I didn’t want that evidence in the world. I didn’t want “me” in the world — I wanted their me, not mine.

I suppose it’s hard for me to remember that I still have a body sometimes. When I see myself on camera there’s this sense of shock like — that’s me? I am alive? That’s what other people see when they see me? I don’t know how else to describe it but...imposter syndrome for...being? This overwhelming sense of both disgust and delight that I can be a body that speaks, gestures, moves. But — I posted the video. I did it. I keep watching it - relearning the cartography of me. The work that I put out in the world is not just for other people, it’s also for me. To remind myself I exist. To figure out — how to view myself from my own eyes again.

patriarchal beauty

When I first started to express my gender I tended to wear more “modest” clothes because I didn’t want to bring more attention to myself. This is something I learned early on— that what I wear has a direct correlation between how much I’m harassed. The more skin I show, the more that I fear for my life.

I began to use social media as a way to re-learn my autonomy, to wear the things that I couldn’t wear outside because of the ambient and pervasive fear of being assaulted. When I got this outfit I kept it at the back of the closet until I finally felt comfortable to wear it. I took a photo as an act of self-reclamation: the reason you don’t see bodies like mine is not because we aren’t here, but because you make it impossible for us to be in public.

 At first when I read this comment I felt deflated: this is one of the only spaces where I have some semblance of control and you’re going to take that, too? Then I remembered the power of being an artist: I can reclaim everything that seeks to erase me.

Patriarchy makes our appearance the problem, never their criteria and policing of it. It redirects responsibility on us to make ourselves palatable and not on them to stop consuming us like we are food. It foregrounds our appearances as a deliberate strategy to disappear the systems of discrimination. Patriarchal beauty is not just about what we look like, it’s about how we are supposed to act.

This man professes to be concerned about my appearance, but really he is telling me what I am allowed to do. Patriarchal beauty instructs us: how we should allocate our time, what and where we are allowed to go, work, say, do. It’s so insidious because it disguises itself as aesthetic, when it’s actually about action. What we look like is MADE to determine our actions. not today! I am totally uninterested in sacrificing my mobility, my integrity, my expression (let alone my fashion darling!) for cis male validation. If that means I am insulted for it, so be it. I would rather have my dignity than your approval. (👁 by @corinneelyseo )

the physicality of poetry

A few days after this photo was taken by I was bashed in public. I was 25 years old selling out my poetry tour in New Zealand & Australia and I felt invincible. I wrote frequently and had so much confidence in my words. I was attacked right after delivering a keynote performance. On the outside I immediately bounced back: but I lost something profound in me that day and I am still trying to figure out what.

I felt like a fool: my words felt futile, metaphor seemed so far from the world of materiality which maimed me. I had decorated my life with stanza, but on the outside I was still seen and treated as a tranny. That inevitability devastated me: that for the rest of my life I would be reduced to my appearance no matter the tomes I wrote. I began to find it impossible to write poetry. I was angry at how it wasn’t physical, didn’t seem real as the violence I was experiencing.

Poetry had long been the way I accessed my interiority, the questions behind my declarations, my deep, deep felt. I didn’t want to go there — it felt too difficult to access my pain and still maintain a public life. I spent the next few years performing old work across the world, feeling like a charlatan. My embarrassment congealed like a hairball. The blank page became a site of terror, a mirror reflecting my own ineptitude. My friends kept telling me to “try,” but I would deliberately pack my schedule so that I never had time.

During quarantine for the first time in years I have time. For Poetry Month I am writing a poem every day. It’s been excruciatingly difficult, an emotional root canal. I am staying up until the early hours of the morning crying, but goddamn I am doing it — slowly. I am remembering why I wrote/write: in a world that says that people like me deserve to die, my poetry reminds me that I am real, capable, eternal. That man who bashed me took so many years of my he(art) from me, but I refuse to let him win.

I’d like to re-introduce myself: my name is ALOK and I am a writer. Certainly, I am beautiful, but wait until you read my words

the sound of a hand waving goodbye

My earliest memories of my grandfather involve his voice. He had this deep register, tinged with cigars and whiskey. It had this drone to it like an engine. Words were offered sparingly, so when they were there it was like a luxury good. I coveted the ability to hear him cough on the phone all the way from Delhi. Like all great artists: his reading voice and his speaking voice were one in the same. He didn’t have to pretend to perform, he just was.

Before I could understand him as my “grandfather,” I experienced him as safety. He used to read me bed time stories as a little kid. His voice rang like a God, so he became an omniscient narrator — a disembodied voice that guided me everywhere I went.

After grandpa’s stroke last year, we invited some actors to read one of his plays. He was supposed to read the narrator. But he couldn’t do it. So he asked me to. I had been preparing for this role my entire life. The play was long, but he remained attentive. The way he smiled — no words.

As his cognitive abilities declined, he lost one of his final loves — the ability to read. He would hold his books like orphans. It was the closest I saw to him crying.

So, I would read his books to him. I knew he couldn’t really understand what I was saying because I would skip around just to check. It mattered more that it was my voice, that it was me. Sometimes — I would weep while reading. At this point, he was so far gone he didn’t even notice I was crying.

I cried because when I looked at him — so small, so meek — he looked like a child. He felt like my child. And here we were 25 years later with the tables turned — me reading to him on his bed. I’d like to think that my voice offered him the same comfort he offered me: that its melody and din reached him in a place beyond comprehension.

The doctors said the final thing to go would be his hearing. So at the hospital I whispered into his ear: “good bye” the same way he used to tell me “good night.”

nothing more real than fiction

For my grandfather, there was nothing more real than fiction.

His geography was never static, his genre, never fixed, his politics too mischievous to be monolithic, his language — a polyamorous medley of Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, English, his friends scattered across continents: Ginsberg, Sontag, Verma, Sobti. Facing profound loss early on during Partition, he learned that while you can’t necessarily control the whims of the world, you can control your own word.

I remember, when I was a kid, how he used to sit with his glass of Johnny Walker Black Label, writing furiously with quill and ink. We weren’t to disturb him: the room became “Grandpa’s Study” as if his very presence redefined the space. I remember him learning how to type one key at a time. He would write these elegant long form emails to his friends in India, accidentally delete them, and then compose anew. His books were his greatest joys: when I brought friends over he would take them to the shelf and introduce them to his friends.

After my grandmother died he told me he was too depressed to write. Then, he got a stroke and lost the ability to read. As he aged, I saw him not only lose the people he loved, but the things he loved doing most. When he finally lost the ability to speak he would get so frustrated, shake the hospital bed.

One of the last things he said to me was that his last wish was that I would change the world. I asked for more clarification. He wrote me a letter with a shaky hand right there on the spot. He said he knew I would face many obstacles, but I knew what was to be done. During one of his final surgeries the doctor asked him what mattered most in his life (passing now or living in pain), my grandpa who had not spoken in days thought for a second and replied: “a writer’s integrity.”

In his final days he kept communicating with all he had left: that somber look of his luminous eyes, the tight vise-grip of his cold hands, that flash of a smile to every nurse. He told me once that his biggest fears was that he would be forgotten. But he published almost 50 works — no, 51 including me — to ensure that he never would. And in that way, his word, became my world.

the work of an artist

I wore a dress to my grandfather’s funeral. It was the first time in my life I was able to come to a family ceremony as my full self. So many of us as trans people have our personhood compromised while grieving and while being grieved. Let’s be clear this is not just about our “appearances,” our “names,” our “pronouns” but about our dignity.

I do not take this lightly — in being here in my full self I get to access my full grief. Of course there was some confusion and misrecognition, but I had conviction knowing that my grandfather would have wanted me here in this form.

When I told him I was trans years ago grandpa said it made complete sense because “all great artists aspire toward androgyny.” He was always supportive and inquisitive about my work for trans justice. He came and saw me perform back in 2015 and sat on the front row with the biggest smile. After the 2016 election he told me that he was really worried about me and the trans community, and he would always tell me when he read about trans issues in the news or saw them on TV.

When he moved to New York with me at the end of his life we would take walks together all over downtown. I would come wearing the wildest looks and he would give his distinctive chuckle, smile, say nothing. When other people would stare at me on the street he would look at me with the most sweet and innocent ideas “Does this happen to you all the time?” “What is wrong with them?”

In his 90s he tried his best to use my gender-neutral pronouns. He would explain to visiting doctors and nurses at every hospital and rehab center that I was an accomplished artist he was so proud of who happened to be “a transgender.” At a fundamental level his acceptance of me mattered more than anyone else in the world. He was one of the first people to see me when I was born and I was one of the last to see him before he died. I’d like to believe that we saw each other for what we were, not what we had been told. I’d like to believe that’s the work of an artist — to see and feel beyond the surface.

RIP Krishna Vaid. I will always love you because in the most profound sense — I am you.

lolsob

These past few weeks on the west coast have been blissful. I officially believe in photosynthesis: my soul newly reborn in the sun. There were so many moments of self-intimacy — going to cafes and leisurely diving into hot chocolates, spending all day reading every essay James Baldwin ever wrote. So many deeply felt conversations like — this is the person I have been waiting to meet forever, like anything is possible when we are together. There were so many dance floors, so many failed attempts at finding good lighting, mostly — so much laughter. I don’t think I have laughed so much in ages.

We are told to wait for joy, told to regulate our pleasure, made to feel like everything has to be instrumentalized and oriented toward the future. But the future is now is the past is time, it becomes irrelevant, when you are with the people you love, just laughing. And in that way — we humans have developed time travel through laughter. We are here, but we are there, and we are going somewhere together. So here is to moments without reason, to unbridled and reckless joy making, to smiles that bloom in the most desolate places.

There is a new emoji coming out soon with a smiley face and one tear, the “lolsob.” You can’t tell if it’s smiling so hard it’s crying or crying so hard it’s smiling to try to stop it. That’s my mood board for this year: to welcome my sadness alongside my mirth. To refuse their bifurcation. To exist in tandem outside of these oppositions.

We can still have levity with gravity and gravity with levity. We can exist in two places at the same time.

superficial survival

I had the delight of lecturing on fashion design and the politics of style at Stanford this week. For so long I harbored shame about caring about self-adornment. I internalized the myth that style and cosmetics were merely “superficial” and that the real art/work was elsewhere. Now I recognize this as femmephobia. It is precisely the things that are dismissed as superficial that are so often the substance of survival.

Self-styling is how I cultivate life in the face of persecution. My commitment to glamor — rambunctious and relentless glamor — is what keeps me afloat. If I am going to get degraded — might as well look divine!

The uniform is not just a garment, it is a worldview. So many people are wearing it and don’t even know. Aesthetic resistance is a reclamation of the self from the uniform. A celebration of our profound inferiority — our delightfully impossible aspiration to stage what is within, externally.

Style has always been a modality of resistance for me — both a mechanism to critique  gender/race norms as well a method to template the world that I want. It’s one thing to write “gender is a social construct” it is another to show it, to bring it with you everywhere you go, to turn the galaxy into a gallery, to proliferate creative expression all over.

People often ask me: “How do you put together your outfits?” Yes of course it’s about color, textile, composition, but mostly it’s about feeling. I relish in the ability to combine things that have been dismissed as dissonant and incongruous, bring them together, show the poetic harmony in everything. Our outcome is greater and more transcendent than its parts.

Powers that be devalue style because it brings art out of the galleries into the public. This is a society that attempts to sequester art from the public because if people had the space and encouragement to be creative, what new ways of living and loving could we manifest? Reality, then, might be seen as the costume that it is. Yesterday’s unambitious politics, calcified.

My friends – it is time for an outfit change!

our precarious joy

feeling is dangerous because
it requires us to dwell in anguish,
rather than anesthetize it
(as if it never happened).

so many fear joy because they fear losing it.

they hate us because we live here — in this precarious joy —
and we have found preciousness, still.

it is far easier to desensitize ourselves to the world.
but what about the romance of living?
the tundra of grief, of striving, of becoming like
every breath is an invitation to another way of being?

what about the dignity of being?
i won’t settle for anything less.

i would rather weep than pretend.
i would rather be hated than be digestible.
i would rather be mirthful than meander around like
happiness is some rare ray of light piercing through my window.

it’s not that we are extra,
it’s that we are feeling
and you are not
(or rather, you refuse).

support the author

care over courage

i don’t see strangers, i see potential friends. i don’t see random people i see smiles on the street, friendly baristas, compassionate educators, fierce librarians. i see helpful agents, generous students, empathetic healers. i see captivating artists, strategic lawyers, powerful advocates. i see style, grace, dignity, wit, and a deep + resonate love. i feel it. so deeply.

every day when i prepare to go outside i have a jolt of fear: “is today going to be the day i _____?” for so long it was always the worst case scenario. but increasingly, with your gentleness, i begin to think: “today is going to be the day i....encounter warmth, recognition, communion.” courage has always struck me as misleading — rather, it is community that allows me to keep going. i believe one of the foundational traumas of the world is that our souls are split apart + scattered everywhere. but what i have learned is that trauma is an invitation to another way to live. it’s not that i am lost, it’s that i am actively seeking. so many of you make me feel like i have found me/us/them. it’s part of the reason i relish in the singularity / multiplicity of “they/them,” a short hand way to say: “i am because we are.”

which goes to say thank you to all of you for your continued support! for dreaming beyond the binary. for pushing for self expression against stringent repression. for holding space for infinity + complexity in yourselves & one another. when i am feeling impossible i think about the every day kindness you extend to me. it feels like the opposite of harassment. it feels like a return to what once was, and what will be again.

i have been tormented for my appearance since before i can remember. but — what feels different now is that i don’t have to endure it alone. love & need you, ALOK x

i don't see trolls

i don’t see trolls. i see neighbors, lawyers, politicians, news anchors. I don’t see trolls i see relatives, teachers, business people. i don’t see trolls i see engineers, students, architects. i don’t see trolls i see shopkeepers, journalists, curators. i don’t see trolls i see “feminists,” gay men, conservatives, liberals. i don’t see trolls i see terror. i feel terror. there is an ongoing state of emergency against gender non-conforming people. at every level — judicially, legislatively, socially, politically, culturally, economically, epistemologically, ontologically — we are being targeted. do not diminish the persecution we face as “a few bad apples,” it is, rather, the roots of the tree itself. violence against us is the foundation of modern gender. i do not deserve this wrath. no one does. it’s not that i am inadequate, it’s that they are indoctrinated. it’s not that i am brave, it’s that they are complicit. there’s a difference.