During college I picked up a copy of Adrianne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence at a Borders bookstore (remember those?) in Portland, ME. I used to meet up there with my boyfriend who worked full time at a factory making rubber seals for car doors. We could spend an entire Sunday pouring over books, magazines, and CDs despite the miles and life trajectories that were already pulling us apart.

The words in the title — lies, secrets, silence — struck something within me: someone was writing about what is not supposed to be uttered, what she has been told she should not say. The book felt important, bold, and expressive of my deep cynicism of humanity, which I mostly kept to myself. I felt like the world was keeping a secret from me, that there was some joke about gender and sex and love that I was not getting. Everything felt uncanny and inverted; I felt I was the only one who saw it.

In college and graduate school I tried to tackle issues of gender and sexuality on an intellectual and political level while avoiding them personally. But even academic writing was hard. I would hit a wall and hit it again. Writing about men and masculinity could break the writer’s block, but I was still constructing a voice based on an idea I had about how a woman’s critique of men was supposed to look, feel, and sound. I was still voiceless on matters I desperately needed to speak, write, and understand.

And here was Rich, writing about how language makes certain things unspeakable, and poetry makes them speakable again: “The victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language and structures of thought. They will go on being tapped and explored by poets…We can neither deny them, nor will they rest there.” She writes of the possibility linguistically and culturally, of women shedding a male consciousness, or false lens upon themselves, and creating an entirely new expression of subjectivity.

I read Rich’s chapter “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)” with great interest because it was about rewriting, revision, and redefinition: “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing disorienting, and painful.” I wanted that consciousness, to use language in a new way to undo the lies secrets and silences around me. The chapter analyzes how women writers have used detached tones, male subject positions, or reaffirmed men as sources of fascinating power and women as suffering from Love. I set about a mission: adopt an alternative subjectivity, as a woman who loves women, as a way out of this gender trouble and to cut through the repression and suppression that was suffocating me.

I made friends with some queer women, started playing in grrl punk bands, and eventually had my first crush on a woman. As I was writing songs about these experiences I found it was very hard to write about women, and I didn’t even approach trying to write about myself. I caught myself using heteronormative language that objectified and pacified women as objects of the male gaze. As remedy, in my early 20s I wrote a song Your Release, which was a self-conscious attempt to write love and desire for women differently, or at least to call myself out about the ways I had been writing about women as “a dream and a terror.”

empty and fragile my love
a dream and a terror you are
you fight in your chains I’ll come free you
with my words I’ll trap you back again
you are more than a dream
you’re a real and possible being (but I always found myself singing it as “real impossible“)

Rich’s essay opened my mind to the possibility that certain subjectivities (women) have not had a language with which to express themselves authentically, because as writers they had internalized (strategically and by enculturation) some other subjectivity’s ideas about the world and about themselves. I didn’t get very far creatively or personally in my attempts to find an authentic voice as a woman, but this crucial concept stuck: a class of persons can create a new language, new forms of expression, and new genres as a practice of liberation. I apply it now as a transman, as a person who has had to remain silent about my identity and my experiences, and as a person who has deeply internalized transphobia and self-doubt about my own memories.

I reconnected with Rich’s writing recently in my attempt to reconcile my lesbian feminist identity with coming home to my queer transgender male identity. My therapist suggested I read Rich’s Diving in the Wreck as a metaphor for my dive into a history of past sexual trauma that was happening in tandem with a rediscovery of myself as transgender. This time I found inspiration in Rich the poet, where gender is more fluid, multiple, and fraught, than in essays that address the political and cultural formation of a distinctive female consciousness.

I came to explore the wreck
The words are purposes
The words are maps
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that will prevail
…
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
…
I am she : I am he

I think my About page is probably the clearest expression of Rich’s impact on my writing process. The Markov Chains to me are the beginning of a journey, the deconstruction of language, the reversion to a child-like mind, in order to create the objects (silver, rot, fouled compass, and drowned faces) that I can mold into the voice of a subjectivity that is just now fully coming alive within me.