[Got an anonymous confession or rant you just have to share with the world? Submit it to I, Anonymous HERE!—eds]
I’ve been here for a few years, now, and I’ve grown to love this city. Amazing food, great people, lots of interesting things to do. The longer I’ve been here, the more the city has pushed me out. I feel like I’m a splinter and the city around me is closing in like swollen flesh. The pressures of trying to survive have come to a head, like many others before me have felt. Money for food. Money for rent. Money for medicine. Money for clothes. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, the money runs out and you have to make a lot of choices. Selling your car. Selling your things. Giving your pets away to people who can take care of them more. It’s like you’re taking a pair of scissors and snipping away bits of yourself. A fingertip here. An eyelid there. That’s why they put ridges on the sides of coins – to prevent shavers from pocketing little bits of the silver and making their own free silver bars.
That’s what it feels like, to live in Portland. Like I’m a ghost. And like my personality, especially as a trans person, is nicked and shaved and snipped away by people around me. Pocketed for themselves and I’m left full of holes. I’m being pecked at by scavengers while I’m calling social security and being sent through the same robotic prompts over and over in an attempt to get me to give up. I’m being plucked away by strangers who expect me to perform for them like some sort of dancing turkey. My features are being shaves away by a society that fetishizes people like me and also wants us to just go away because it’s more convenient to pretend that we don’t exist and aren’t suffering.
Being a ghost means I was a whole person, before. Now I’m just spread out all over Portland. Everyone I’ve met has a little piece of me stashed away somewhere. No one knows about or wants to know the whole thing. They just needed the bit that made them feel special while I was still more whole.—Anonymous