The past couple months has been extremely chaotic, so here is a brief summary of what I have been doing and a few highlights along the way.
May 15th I was officially kicked out of my housing at Moody and moved into a storage room here in Boystown not really knowing what to expect. Essentially, the powers that be just kind of put me here and said go. And so I went, wandering to and fro waiting to see what adventures lie in store. Of course not really knowing what to do I was extremely lonely, so I would just go to random things, wandering about without purpose waiting for something to happen. I would talk to the canvassers (those annoying people who try to get you to sign up with your credit card for monthly donations to their activist organization.) That first week I did all the Red Eye crossword puzzles and sat around at the community center having random small talk.
A couple days into things, I found out that the Marin Foundation (I like them) was having their meeting just a few blocks from me at Roscoes. With the catchy title “Being Intersex in the Church,” my curiosity, boredom, and loneliness drove me to attend. There I was reintroduced to the brokenness found by the unanswerable questions here. I met an intersex “man” born both male and female to a genetic birth “defect.” PD was just who God made him to be: physiologically 80% male 20% female. His body was disfigured due to having both male and female organs. Hormones raged through his body causing him to have three times the strength of a normal man. His story was filled with brokenness and pain. In a relentless search for truth which he described more as a dog that would bite his ass if he stopped, he went to church after church and ism after ism. Because of his “condition” (which doctors didn’t know what to do with) he was kicked out of church after church. Yet, this was exactly the way God made him. There was no mistake, no sin in his creation. (I could go on but you get the point.) And so I sat, awkward and alone on the Roscoe’s dance floor made over into this meeting room, listening to his story of pain with several tears held back. Six months prior the truth found him (Calvinism anyone?) and gave him life. His description of God is what I remember most. He said that he would run up to his Father’s throne and touch him quick before scampering back to his corner before he could gain the courage to go back even though part of him knew he was welcome to stay at his Father’s side.
Things progressed and I found myself no longer an outsider to the street, but allowed into a strange new world; a world of brokenness and pain, families formed by choice and not by birth, a place where everyone and everything acceptable, where the supernatural is a present reality and I am learning to show my scars. The prerequisite to interact with this community is pain. Pain is the shared common experience. I have been forced to see my wounds and scars and see the places in my life where I am bleeding in a nonmaterial sense. I have learned that it has never been the better “moral” choices that show forth the light that dwells within, but in how we as children of light unashamedly bear our scars, our weakness, and our pain in a way that groans for our future glory.
My life has been a living chaos. Everything is unstructured and things are messy here. I have stayed out till dawn wandering the streets. I have slept at the lakefront trying to grasp what it is like to not know where you are gonna sleep. It has been the best summer, but also the hardest. I have made more mistakes than I can could and am learning what it is like to be in a place of small beginnings. I have learned how little I have learned. I leap cultures in a matter of minutes, yet am still a stranger to all the worlds I walk in. I say words like “finna” and “shank.” I give random compliments. I have a salon quality haircut. I know what a short is and where drugs can be obtained. I have an entourage who will protect me if I ever get in danger. I talk about organic food and anime. Sometimes I act 5 and others 26 depending who I am around. I’m a regular face to the night life which has created some interesting conversations as well as obstacles.
West Side, South Side, North Side, Gay, Street, Alternative, Black, White, Hispanic, Mixed, Young Urban Professional, Poor all come together here in Lakeview. So much is happening all the time. I’ve got the rhythms down. I see the fingerprints of sovereignty scattered in the hidden places. Something big is going to happen here and I want to play my small part in the grander story when it happens. In forging my own trail here I have found that there are others who have blazed further. I’m at the point where I want to take their shortcuts and finding my path as part of a community rather than going solo.
There are many unanswerable questions I still have and many stories I could tell if they were mine to tell. So that’s me right now in a condensed version.
