“This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

“Without examples, without models
I began to believe voices in my head, 
That I am a freak, that I am broken, 
That there is something wrong with me, 
That I will never lovable. Years later, 
I find the courage to admit that I am transgender, 
And that does not mean that I am unlovable. 
This world that we imagine in this room 
Might be used to gain access to other rooms, 
Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

I’m slightly catatonic, beaten by a really low time, yet equally I can see something crystal clear, something never clear in the low-level panic state of the cold hard realism, down there, below.

I don’t want to come down, down from ‘the tops’, which, however inhospitable and dangerous, always seem to offer a portal to somewhere else.

Nor the night roads which eventually lose their intolerability to walkers, and become astral runways- removed from the flat destinations at every turn off, by every step into the trance.

I’ve kept looking at the photo above, one I took as I scaled the steep inclines of a river source. I wanted to fall in love with the photo, because the photo is of an idea, and idea of place, a place I wish I could remain, a portal to another realm where my physical presence seems to belong, not tangled in the icy chest stabs of ‘wrongness’.

How did I get here?

The photo is of knarled oak trees that cover a river source near the Woodhead Pass area of Dark Peak, a river that eventually goes on to help form the infamous river Mersey.

Living with the physical presence of the Dark Peak hills shapeshifting with the distant clouds, over the pennine foothills, I would walk mile upon mile up to them in a desperate period in early adulthood, with this superstitious need to believe that they would take me away to another place.

This feeling would often carry itself over to the area at the other side of the hills, momentarily second-guessing Greater Manchester and Liverpool as a Post-industrial Yorkshire in an alternative reality: similar, but weirdly Other – “maybe I can find happiness here?”

I used to scoff at the idea of a core self, thinking that we were just an accumulation of external voices and ideas that constructed us (which increased my feelings of hopelessness in trying to change), but when I don’t think through the mind/body separation, so habitually and so religiously defended by the Western Mind, I can see my core self through my body.

It’s in the pain I feel when I get laughed at still; it’s the self that comes to life when there’s brief moments of wondering if I can be in love, and it’s the self that has felt like a dying body within me over my 30s, as I have increasingly watched people live their lives, whilst I have been ever-more destructively trying to chase it from within a cage nobody else can see.

It’s no more a thinking self that a flesh-based feeling self. This is the first time in my life I have been able to see this.

To try to sit with myself, my body; my entire adult life has been an escape from this sensation.

I turned 39 last month, I can’t do another decade like this. Yet, I’ve said this before, in my 20s.

The only problem is that the void, or the space where this ‘core self’ rests, is so horrible to sit with. It’s like a thunderstorm of self-disgust. When the overthinking mind has no actions to overcome this, rather than go back to the same habits, it feels a lot easier than sitting with disgust.

This is why I chose to begin this blog with this Burial sample. It’s by somebody who is transgendered. I couldn’t quite believe how closely I related the the sample on the Burial track,

Although problematic to say, as an outsider who still does not know what to do with his own flesh, I believe ‘trans desire’ is a desire not to only exit and transcend the gender one is born in and thus defined by, but also the type of world in which we all must become, and be a body – a world where there is two types of existential threats ever-closing in, one internal to capitalism, and one external; climate breakdown.

We share desire to escape what we must be.

In this light, it is so brave, to step into the unknown, with only a faint hope of materialising within it.

Suicidal thoughts, as I have experienced them throughout my adult life, have been similar: the desire to take the body beyond the realms of the place in which something seems to prevent it existing.

I wish it was up here, on these walks, that the portal to the world I’ve always wanted to live in can be found. But the other worlds need to be found where I am, if anywhere.