#4 (aka: I feel sucked)

I just made what probably has been the second most nerve-wracking, high-emotion presentation in my entire career as an activist. I gave a speech of sorts to my English class that I never imagined would happen as smoothly as it did. I wrote a paper in which I compared the relationships between two sets of characters in Leslie Feinberg's books Stone Butch Blues and Drag King Dreams, and I gave my presentation based on what I wrote in my paper. Three people went before me -- two guys went on Friday, and then another girl went before me today. Their presentations basically progressed as described by our teacher, meaning they hit all of the requirements on the rubric. I tried to do that, and I thought I was doing pretty well with it until I hit the part where I read quotes from the book in order to truly convey how important the relationships were. I got very "into" what I was reading -- I used vocal inflection and volume to my advantage in order to really show the people in my class how these characters cared for one another.

When my teacher began to speak after I finished reading the quotes, I thought that he was going to reprimand me and basically tell me to just get on with it because I didn't have much time left to present. But he said something surprising; he told me to tell my classmates what I wanted them walk away from my presentation thinking. So I told them that I wanted them to think about how much they valued their friends, because sometimes friends can be more family than our own relatives are. I followed that by saying that, in both Stone Butch Blues and Drag King Dreams, the main characters find the place that they know they really belong with members of their Chosen Family, and, in my personal experience as a Transguy, the same has happened. The Transgender people I have encountered and become friends with have truly become my brothers and sisters, and I feel a connection with them that I have never felt with any of my biological family. When I started this project, and even over the weekend when I was finishing it, I never thought about how I could connect my life to the lives of the characters in Stone Butch Blues and Drag King Dreams. But since my teacher helped me to get to that part of thought today, and since I was given a real opportunity by him in order to speak about it, I love those novels even more. And the growing passion I still feel for those books is the explanation for the title of this post -- when I was making my presentation, I felt powerful and on top of the world. Now, I feel completely drained. I feel sucked. But still good. ^_^