Maybe a lot of you are too young or too straight to remember the AIDS crisis. I’m not.
It took my cousin, whom I loved deeply.
He was one of the few people in my life that I felt really understood me. It wasn’t until after he was dead from a horrible disease that I knew why. I named my daughter after him. He meant that much to me. And it took a long time for her to come to terms with being named after a gay man who died from the HIV virus in the 90’s, since we lived for many of her formative years in a small, conservative town in rural Iowa.
You see, a lot of people there didn’t much care that my cousin was dead. Many of them thought that he deserved that horrific end—it wasn’t a pretty one. He didn’t even want us to visit. He didn’t want us to remember him in that state, but to remember him full of life and color and joy. And people thought he deserved to die in such a violent way because he was gay.
Tonight I heard a neighbor outside my window saying some bullshit about more people dying in chihuahua attacks than will from the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. I’m certain that isn’t a true statistic. First, because those are some tiny dogs you could just kick into oblivion. Second, because we have no idea what the ramifications of this illness will be in the end. That is why it is called “novel”. It’s new. We don’t have data that is reliable at this point. We do not understand this virus fully, and we don’t know how many people will lose their lives because of it.
But one thing that I have noticed about the response to this virus, much like the one that took my cousin’s life, is that there are many who don’t seem to care what life is lost, as long as the right people die.
Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the old and infirm. Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the ones with preexisting conditions. Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the ones who are already in the categories that our current society—this consumerist machine we pretend is a democracy—does not value. The right people are dying, for the most part. And as long as that is the case, those that do not value them will not make the changes necessary to safeguard the society as a whole.
It is history repeated, but a different set of people are now waiting for the spin of the barrel, and the fated shot, and the moment to reveal itself. Will they live or will they die?
The lesson, if there is one to be learned, would be that all that death didn’t stop the LGBTQ+ community from thriving. In fact, in some ways, it helped inspire us to rally and organize and become stronger. And that illness didn’t just take gay men. It spread far and wide, becoming a leading cause of death for some time. It is still considered pandemic in some countries, where medications that are easily obtained here are not available. I
t still takes lives, even with all the advances we have made and our current ability to make it undetectable in some. It still frightens us. It is still a threat and a life-altering diagnosis and an automatic disability.
It stopped killing the right people. It started killing everyone.
You might not be a high risk individual. You might not know a high risk individual. You might not care about a high risk individual. But know this: you cannot control this novel thing. It might decide that it kills Tom Hanks as quickly as it kills a homeless diabetic. It might decide that getting it once doesn’t make you immune, but makes you more susceptible to reinfection. It might decide that it gives no care to malaria drugs that Trump likes, or to the economy, or to race, or gender, or age, or preexisting anything. It might mutate again and again, creating countless cycles of death on a yearly basis. It might never leave. We may never find a treatment or a cure or develop a vaccine. We may be at its mercy forever. We simply don’t know.
And if you are counting on this being fine because the right people are dying, then you are a monster who deserves not one death, but a thousand. To decide that you are more valuable than another human—that your pleasure or freedom or agency is more important than their life—is the worst possible thing I can imagine. The most heinous of crimes is to imagine yourself a person of greater importance than another, and to sacrifice them in your service.
I remember when I found out that my cousin was dying. I was grieving and distraught. The few people I told about his contracting the virus all asked the same question first thing, “Is he gay?”
Why did that matter? What was their fascination with his sexuality?
I didn’t really understand the question until today.
I saw the man who lives out behind my apartment complex and he asked if I had anything to eat. I told him to wait while I went inside and bagged up some breakfast bars and crackers and bottles of water—whatever I had around that he could easily transport and keep relatively fresh for a bit. I brought it out and handed it to him. I didn’t hug him like I usually do, because of social distancing, but after I went back inside I cried for the first time since this pandemic began. He is the type of person that so many others are unconcerned with. He is the expendable extraneous drain on society that we can let go.
And so am I.
So was Terry.
So were millions of men and women just a couple decades ago.
And yet, somehow, we have already forgotten that our callous hatred then is a blight on our history that we should not be repeating. We are going out to Spring Break or to see cherry blossoms while we let the right people die.
People asked if my cousin was gay because it justified his death, in their minds. It made it reasonable and righteous that an out of control, unknown virus was ravaging his body. They didn’t need to be afraid of AIDS if it was still letting the right people die.
I was taught to believe in a god by people who don’t care if he lets me live or die, so I’m not sure I am a believer in that, exactly, anymore. But I do have a system of belief that includes a Divine. These days I pray often. But I don’t request what you might imagine—health and for my loved ones to make it through this unscathed. Obviously, I want those things. But I find that I am begging that the Divine have mercy upon us, for allowing this lack of empathy and this sociopathy and selfishness and self-aggrandizement to go on, unchecked, for so many generations. I beg forgiveness that we continue to choose races and classes and groups that we deem expendable, as long as our own needs are met.
There is no person that should be sacrificed for our comfort. We should never be comfortable while others around us are losing their lives or freedom or resources. We should be fighting for their lives as if they were our own.
We are all human and we are all equal.
It is time to start treating one another as such, before there are none of us left to watch the others perish, because our greed has swallowed us all.
LGBT
Silence
The news tells me to take a moment of silence at 6:00 pm.
And I will do so, in honor of the 50 people dead, and the others still fighting for life.
But I can’t remain in silence. Not this day. Not in this moment and after this event.
I need to cry. I need to scream. I need to freak the fuck out!
And so do you.
This cannot happen anymore. It needs to end. Gun control vs. protecting yourself needs to be seen as what it is: Complete Bullshit! 50 people died, with an officer on site … apparently after the officer already fired shots at the gunman. That gunman bought guns, legally, after being considered a possible terrorist on multiple occasions, according to NPR, and only days before this terrible event. And that should not have happened. That should not be able to happen. That should never have been possible and it should never be considered acceptable.
Look, you can argue all you want, but that won’t make it necessary for anyone in the United States of America to own an assault rifle—EVER. And your excuses of hunting or protecting your family are not valid. No research shows that you are safer with a gun. All of it says you are more likely to die from a gun if you own a gun. Some studies say four times more likely. And hunting I have done. You need no more than a shotgun to make one hell of a dead beast. And a shotgun is actually preferable if you hunt different sorts of game. If you can’t manage it with a shotgun, you are a shitty hunter anyway, and should probably just give it up. And, for that matter, you don’t need a gun at all. If you wanted to remain true to the hunting roots of the country, then you would fashion yourself a bow and some arrows. If you are hunting for meat, great—as long as you are doing so legally and as safely as possible. If you are hunting for sport, you are a disgusting excuse for a human in the first place.
Yep. I said it. Said it all.
And I am going to keep on saying it forever.
But the thing I need to say even more loudly than the gun control things. (And that shocks even me, because I am a champion of gun laws and constantly telling you that my neighborhood needs you to care about people being shot here, not about hunting or protecting from imaginary threats somewhere else.) What I need to scream and cry over is that this happened at a gay club just days before my own city begins to celebrate Pride.
And there has been no official connection made at this time between the gunman and the gayness. There is not, it would seem, any information to state that this was anything but a randomly chosen Latin Night packed with people who may identify in some gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, asexual, queer, gender-queer, pansexual, sapiosexual, intersex, or other than strictly heterosexual way. (Feel free to add your identifiers in the comments if I missed you. I’ll make sure you have representation next time I approach the subject.) But the fact that there is no known connection doesn’t mean it isn’t connected for me.
It is connected for me.
It is connected for me, because while I am not an “out and proud” anything, since I have yet to fully define what my sexuality might be, I identify as something other than strictly heterosexual. I identify with this group and this cause and this marginalization and this struggle and this attack whether the gunman intended to target me or no. Because how can you not see violence against a group you identify with or as in a way that makes you feel like a target?
My first real “introduction” to gayness came in a sad form. My cousin had contracted HIV, and he was dying of AIDS. I’m not sure if having AIDS gave him the strength to come out, or if coming out was legitimized by him having AIDS. But I don’t think that in the early 90’s he would have come out to his hyper-religious, right-wing relatives without the HIV being part of the equation. I can’t imagine a scenario where he would be treated with anything but disdain if he didn’t have the added “bonus” of being near to death. You can’t be mad at somebody while they are dying. You don’t scream at people who are dying and accuse them and call them names. The dying part outweighs the gay part.
But the fact is, when I was a sophomore in college and would tell people at my Christian liberal arts college that my cousin was dying of AIDS, the ONLY response that I ever heard leave their lips upon hearing that news was, “Is he gay?” Nobody who didn’t know the man seemed to give a crap about the dying part. They wanted to know if he was disgustingly, salaciously gay.
And he was.
And I loved him no less at any moment because he was gay.
He still holds the title for favorite cousin on that side of the family. And my daughter was named in his honor.
At that time in my life, sexuality was not the only way that my religious leanings and my life were crashing into one another in annoying and disturbing ways, so the situation with my cousin wasn’t something that I would dwell on. But it wouldn’t be many years later that I started to wonder what the heck was wrong with me, because I felt in love with women. And that couldn’t be right.
I’m not sure why I thought it couldn’t be right. I didn’t mean that in a good vs. evil kind of right, but just in the sense that I didn’t find it believable. I liked men. I liked sex with men. I had lots of sex with men. And yet, I fell deeply in love with a young woman. She is still counted among the most loved and most influential and most important people in my life’s history. She was everything. She was amazing. She still is, I think. And until/unless she reads these words, she might have no idea that she was my first and truest love to date. We never had a sexual relationship, but I was never afraid to curl up next to her and be held, or to kiss her lovely round face and rub my hands over her bald head and feel all the good feelings that could ever be had. She meant the world to me. I sacrificed much for her, and I would do it again a thousand times over. And I never knew that I was in love with her until many years later. And I never voiced it until now.
Because it seems wrong to not say it. It seems wrong not to tell you this story of my life and my development and my movement from straight to queer after what happened in the early moments of this day in history. It seems wrong not to align myself openly, distinctly, and deeply with every person who has other than the heteronormative standards our society espouses as correct and righteous and good. Because any society that can still hold on to judgment against love and hold on to personal safety over and above the safety of all others, is shit. And I want no part in it.
But this is the society I live in. I can’t leave—I haven’t got the means to get to Canada or the Netherlands, much less take up residency there. So, if I can’t leave it, I must change it. And I start by ending my own silence.
I have alluded to the fact that I am queer on several occasions, but I have never been overt in claiming the queer as my tribe. I have deliberately been vague at times, because there are places and people who are not open to a lifestyle that isn’t heteronormative. And because I pass as heteronormative VERY easily (some would even call me a hedonistic, man-devouring, slut!), I don’t need to be out. I don’t need to use the word “partner” and make you question my sexuality. I don’t need to hold hands with a woman, or get married to a woman, or even date a woman, ever. And that is because I have the choice. I’m not a lesbian. I’m not gay. I love men AND I love women. So, I could live my whole life without ever expressing any interest in women.
Except I can’t not express it today. I can’t pretend that I am “normal” and go on living while 50 people die while others celebrate Pride. I can’t stand by and watch that happen and not be broken into shards and weep. I can’t stay in a closet of convenience while my best friends in the world come out to me, because they don’t have the choice I have. They don’t love both men and women. And in the eyes of the religious or the right-wing or the tea partiers or the whatever, they love the wrong gender.
So, I am taking a stand today. I am voicing it. I am making my public declaration and letting the world know, in no uncertain terms, that I am NOT strictly heterosexual. And whether I am pansexual, or bisexual, or sapiosexual, or something entirely new and different doesn’t really need to be flushed out and finalized for me to take this stand and make this declaration. All you need to know for now is that I don’t stand with the LGBTQIA+ community because I am empathetic, though I am. And I don’t stand with this community because I am committed to equal rights and human rights, though I am. But I stand with this community because I am a PROUD part of this community.
My darling Kaytebug, I was in love with you. Rachel, I spent half of yoga class lusting after you. Kate, your brain made me want to hold on to you and kiss you for a lifetime. Jess, I would marry you.
And I didn’t know all of that at the time.
There weren’t any models for lesbianism around in my sphere until Ellen. Willow came along too late for me to have had a teenage breakthrough based on her love life (though many of my friends loved that Buffy character best primarily because they could identify with her love life). And I am not a lesbian, so there was no reason for me to consider why I only liked women, because I could just spend my time dating, marrying, procreating with, divorcing, living with, and having sex with men. I still can (excepting the procreation part—I’m almost 42 and haven’t a uterus). But I am to the point where I won’t.
Not that I won’t be with men. I absolutely will. But I will also allow myself the freedom to be with women. Or smart people. Or dog lovers. Or whatever qualifying aspects I might wish to place upon my sexual preference at some time.
But the thing that I needed to say today—the thing that ached to be said—was that I am one of you/them (depending on where you place yourself on the Kinsey scale). I am one of you, LGBTQIA+ community. And I am not one of you, hating-upon-people-and-judging-love-as-sin community.
I am queer and proud.
And I will not keep it hidden and will not be silent. I will speak my truth in solidarity and strength.
And I will mourn and rage and fight against attacks like the one today with my full voice. I will chant and sing and march and yell and I will refuse to stop until change comes and lives are protected and the NRA is not. I will refuse to stop until it is no longer shocking or disappointing or strange for anyone to come out—and coming out won’t be a thing, because we will all be able to live in our truth, and see models of our sexuality, and accept ourselves as we are without being questioned and without being attacked.
I won’t be silent until my friend can bring the love of his life to weddings. I won’t be silent until everyone I know has safe access to the bathroom of their choosing. I won’t be silent until the disabled and queer intersection is recognized. I won’t be silent until people accept my sexuality as equally normal with heterosexuality—because it is normal. It isn’t weird or wrong. And you cannot find an argument strong enough to discount what I know in the core of my being and experience every day—that gender and sexuality are fluid for many of us, and fixed for some of us, but never a reason to hate or berate or discount or deny the rights of others.
I won’t be silent until my society is safe from both bigotry and gun violence.
And you shouldn’t either. Because you should be empathetic, and you should be committed to equal rights and human rights. Everyone should.
Make some noise for a good reason.
Stand in silence and solidarity for a moment, but then scream your solidarity from the rooftops. And don’t stop until change happens, and we live in a society of equals, devoid of senseless attacks upon one another, and supportive and loving and caring and kind … and potentially hoarse, because we will have been screaming our solidarity and our identity and our passionate pleas for justice from the rooftops.
In the Mood
I can’t seem to stop listening to Rachmaninoff. I’m just in that mood. Or so I thought when I first turned my Spotify account in his direction a day or two ago. But the more I listen, the more I wonder: What mood is that exactly? Because one thing I am noticing about his music is that it has a thousand moods, not just across the entirety of his compositions, but in one work there can be angry and playful and lilting and intensity and struggle and peace and fun and frustration…the list goes on. There isn’t usually one space where your mind and heart remain while listening to this diverse and divine music.
I think, at present, I am drawn to the urgency and the drive of many of the pieces to which I have been listening. Life feels like that lately—like there is more urgency. Urgency for or toward what has yet to be determined, but I suspect that it may be tied to the death of my mother.
Life just seems like it needs to be lived, and I feel as though I might not be making enough of my moments.
The other possibility is that the angry parts of me are connecting with the angst-filled phrases of the movements Rachmaninoff has written. It lets me feel anger, without acting upon anger. It is easy to be angry, and easy to displace anger, but it isn’t very easy to cope with angry thoughts and feelings. Of course, I know that anger is always a secondary emotion. It isn’t actually anger that you experience, but hurt or fear or rejection or some other thing, which then comes out as anger. And usually my anger is from hurt or abandonment or betrayal or fear. Lately, I have been wanting to tell myself that frustration is what makes me angry. But frustration is not an emotion, per se. You get frustrated, but you don’t really feel frustrated. My frustration is a result of anger, which is the result of hurts and betrayals and fears that I don’t wish to acknowledge. This is not surprising.
Few of us want to acknowledge our hurts and fears. Few of us want to be vulnerable in that manner. Few of us want to accept what really goes on inside our heart and mind and spirit.
But in order to stop feeling that angst-filled frustrated feeling, I need to acknowledge that it comes from pain. Lots and lots and lots of pain.
No one could know the depth of that pain, because not one single person has ever heard the entire story, or all the little stories pieced together into a lifetime, I suppose. Not even my therapist of the past one and a half years has managed to root out all the moments and combine them into a reliable accounting of all of the pain that my body and mind and heart and spirit have suffered. There are ways, however, to notice what ties those experiences together, and what struggles trigger the strongest reactions. And this week, many of those triggers were set off, and I (like any good PTSD sufferer) went on high alert, and began to tie all of that pain together and swing it around like a sword, desperate for a sensation of, or even the illusion of, safety. And then, once the sword of hyper vigilance fails you, you shut down.
I am an expert at shutting down. My body and mind have found ways to disconnect that I stand in awe of, and my whole person is very capable of shutting out the world through isolation or through what I, for lack of a better term, might call “pretending”—the sense of being physically present without connecting in any real or meaningful way with your surroundings. I can act like I care, or act like I don’t care, or both, depending on the situation. I can adhere to social expectations without being the least bit engaged.
But Rachmaninoff makes you feel. He is turning me back on—giving me the ability to engage with something that resembles human connectivity and emotion, before I can connect with my actual emotion and engage meaningfully with actual humans. He gives me a mood, when I cannot find one on my own.
Eventually, I connected with what I feel, and the reasons I turned off. I was triggered by an idiot employee at a sandwich shop yelling angrily and calling out “HAM AND TURKEY” when I was distracted by an older man with a walker who dropped his change and didn’t notice that the employee now wanted to know whether lettuce was required to meet my sandwich’s completion. He reduced me to my sandwich toppings when he treated them as though they were my name, which reminded me of the times I was called “woman” or “my old lady” or “bitch” or “dumb cunt” or “crack whore” or any number of marginalizing terms that refused to acknowledge my complex identity, but reduced me to an action or a gender or a role. That hurts. Being marginalized always hurts.
I was triggered by the knowledge of the divide between rich and poor, and the continued struggle with accepting that my career has been ended by my illness, and that I may always be poor. This trigger happened in the waiting area of the dentist’s office, when I was waiting to have my teeth cleaned for the first time in five years, since my state-managed insurance plan just began to pay for such services. And, while I was thrilled to be able to have a dental exam and cleaning, I knew that the exam might result in the determination that I must lose my last molar on the lower right side, because this dental care came far too late, and it can be taken away again with a pen stroke–resulting in a face of gaps and gum recession that will make it impossible for me to pass as a person of means, or get a decent job, or be taken seriously by many. I am poor. I don’t want to look poor. I want to continue to pass for someone who isn’t poor. And it hurts that poverty is my situation. And it hurts that I feel continually shamed and sometimes attacked and often trivialized or marginalized because of that poverty. It hurts that poverty is considered downright criminal in the minds of many, including lots of my Facebook “friends” and those whom I once believed I could trust with my story. And it hurts that I recognize all of this and that I know I am complicit in the shaming by desperately wanting to pass more than working harder to end the stigma and embrace myself, even if my self has no money and no teeth. But that work is difficult, and the stigma I carry is already a heavy burden.
I was triggered by the feigned “concern” of others. It is gaslighting that was truly happening, and not any sort of true concerned care for my wellbeing (unless you count the worry over my eternal soul not being allowed into heaven because I am evil and misguided as care … and I don’t). In this particular case, a person misinterpreted and misrepresented the information in my previous post, and expressed that they didn’t sleep well and spent time in prayer and god apparently gave them a “devotion” in reply, which basically said that uneducated people know more than me about god…so I am evil and misguided (but apparently considered very educated, which is true and complementary). It would seem I am meant to be shamed by the person who mangled my ideas and misquoted my post and to recognize that my views are wrong, thereby causing concern for my soul. This feigned concern and this gaslighting have been ever-present for me, starting with childhood sexual molestation, and making stops at domestic violence, victim blaming after sexual assault and rape, shame for pursuing education rather than work as a single parent, blame for the infidelity of a partner, and expressions that discount my sexual identity, before ending once again at the church and its deep concern over my soul (which has appeared many times along this journey). I am not insane or misguided. I need to tell myself this repeatedly in an attempt at self-compassion, because the idea that I don’t know what is right, but another does and will tell me how to be or act or think, was deeply engrained in my psyche after years and years of abuse. When people I once counted as friends begin to use this very abusive tactic, I am deeply hurt. We rarely consider moral, church-going ladies as abusers, but perhaps we should—they are often the worst offenders when it comes to gaslighting. Gaslighting hurts.
So, yes, I am connecting with Rachmaninoff because I am working at getting back to feeling, and because the secondary anger comes out in his music, but so does the calm and peaceful, and the joyful and playful, and the anguish of the pain that is truly behind the way that I am feeling deep down, in a place with which I am still unable to fully connect.
It is difficult to connect with our brokenness.
It is difficult to acknowledge pain. Our society tends to mask or cover or hide or control pain. And it certainly doesn’t want to take ownership of the pain that is caused, personally or societally. We have been taught that pain is owned by the one who suffers, and not the one who causes the suffering. We refuse to admit or confess that we hurt others, either by our active oppression or by our passive inaction to correct situations that produce suffering.
However, if the first step to solution is recognition of the problem, we need to face that hurt head on, and look at the ways we are causing pain. I often think this begins by accepting that we, ourselves, are wounded. The most broken among my friends have become the strongest advocates for others. My own passion for justice was borne from the injustice I felt as I journeyed through forty years of struggle and pain and abuse. This isn’t uncommon. This is the way to bettering ourselves and becoming a better society—this recognition of our own wounds fuels our desire to spare all others from similar wounding.
I think that this connection between my wounds and my areas of passion is key to how I have been struggling the past couple of days. When someone begins to attack those areas about which I am passionate, they are, in a sense, also attacking my wounds.
I fight for the rights of women because my rights to choose what happened to my body and in my life were stripped from me. I fight for reproductive rights because I suffered a lack of care and compassion when dealing with the loss of a pregnancy and a lack of care and compassion as a single parent, and also experienced the failures of birth control and unintended pregnancy. I fight for LGBT+ rights because I know and love many who don’t conform to the standards and structures that the gender binary and the heteronormative patriarchy deem correct and good, and because it took many years for me to even consider my own sexuality, and even more to admit to people that I don’t fit that heteronormative mold. I fight for the end of mass incarceration and for racial reconciliation because I love and live among black men and women who are being violently abused by not only our stereotypes and individual assessment of race, but by the laws of our country and the limits of our compassion to those who look and act and speak and live in ways identical to our own. I fight for a limitation or prohibition of firearms because I see the bodies of boys and girls and men and women who needn’t have died and wouldn’t have died if it weren’t for ridiculous access to what nobody, outside of law enforcement or the military in most cases, should need. I fight for the homeless, because I spent years of my life as a homeless woman, and some as a homeless mother, and I ate from dumpsters and had sex with people just to sleep in a bed for a few safe hours and stole food and toiletries in order to survive, and nobody should ever have to live under those conditions, no matter what else they may have done or not done in life.
I fight for those who are experiencing what I have suffered (and in some cases still suffer).
Saying my fight for these causes is evil and misguided is saying that I am evil and misguided, because these are not just some nameless and faceless people whom you can criminalize and marginalize and oppress. These people are me. And saying that these causes don’t matter, in essence, says that I also do not matter. (But apparently my soul does…just not the rest of me.) That hurts.
So, today my goal is to allow emotion. I intend to acknowledge these feelings, and to connect with these feelings or to let these feelings go, as I choose.
Because we cannot control what we feel, we can only choose how to react or interact with what we feel.
Mindfulness practice has taught me much about how to let the oppressive and hurtful things that others say and do affect me less, or sometimes not at all. I’m learning, slowly and surely, how to leave behind what harms me, and to embrace what loves and holds and builds me. I am the only constant, and even though everything around me changes, I can choose to remain as I am. I am the mountain, as Jon Kabat-Zinn and my therapist are teaching me to remember. So I choose whom I wish to be and to become. Gaslighting church ladies, and poor public policy, and abusers and offenders of all sorts, and the money in my bank account (or the lack of, more truly) do not define me. I define myself, so I am free to acknowledge the comments of others about who I am, or I can let them float away. They need not hurt me anymore.
So, Rachmaninoff, thank you for all the feeling that you have offered me, and for the connections that you allow me to make. Your thousand moods have reminded me that I only need to be in one mood, and that is one that I choose—no one else may choose it for me. And I choose self-compassion and love and grace and peace and truth, as always. I choose to embrace my poor, disabled, non-hetero, non-religious, highly educated, thick and sexy, fighting for equal/human rights continually and with passion self. And I choose to embrace the person I am becoming as well, and know that I will continue to grow in grace and in truth and in love, because that is what I will accept and allow into my life.
I am now in a great mood. 🙂
Learning To Be Whole 