I drew the pencil lines for an illustration at a small, tucked-away coffee shop near Jane’s house, before she and I planned to meet up. I walked to her house and she gathered her things, and fed me some homemade chocolate.

She walked by me in a narrow hallway and touched my shoulder to let me know she was coming by.

“Please don’t touch me if I don’t see you,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s a server thing, because you always ask people to move and they just don’t listen to you.”

Jane and I walked through the snow towards my house. I told her about my fucked up date with S., and I lamented that I had looked to other trans women to date, seeing other trans women as a space free from transmisogyny.

“But that’s where it’s most alive.” Jane paused. “I feel like I’ve broken your boundaries a bunch of times. You’ve always said so when I did.”

“You have,” I said, “and it’s stressed me out. But occasional slip-ups are different to me than something so shitty and out of the blue like the thing S. did, or repeatedly ignoring boundaries I set.”

Jane said she’d felt weird about having told me that she didn’t think she’d be a lesbian if she hadn’t been abused. She felt overwhelmed by the idea that she was living some gay shame cliché, but that it didn’t tell the whole truth.

***

My intuitions are pretty much always right, though I don’t always know what they mean, and I sometimes have a hard time following them. In college, I intuited an off feeling from a fairly normal-seeming new friend who turned out to be a literal sociopath, and I got an overwhelmingly weird feeling as I walked towards a party where I ended up losing my virginity in a hella awkward way.

I walked up to my room, and drew the purple Tarot cards that I had found used for 50 cents at a library booksale.

“What if I go to this Priests show at the First Unitarian Church?”

I pulled The Devil, an image of people being held in chains, overset by powers that bind them to negativity.

“What if I don’t go to the show?”

I got The Tower, an image of total and terrible upheaval, with people throwing themselves from a fiery tower rather than being burned alive. The last time I got that card, it said that I’d have a Tower experience if I went to Chicago as planned to read comics at a queer and trans punk fest. I ignored the sinking feeling in my gut as I prepped to leave. On the drive over, we got pulled over and fucked with by a cop in Gary, Indiana, just an hour from Chicago. Two days later, my wallet got stolen from my bag. After that, Tarot cards became a religion for me.

I decided I’d later ask my witchy friend and chosen sis, Jess; her knowledge of the cards, and her knowledge of me, always helped me interpret the cards. In the wake of all the turmoil I felt about dating, I asked Jess to pull some cards for me about romance.

She pulled cards, and we Vulcan mind-melded over the internet to collaborate on these answers:

My brain outthinks itself, goes from mental conceptions of what I think a good partner should be, so I can miss good things that may be options for me (Ace of Swords). There might not be a lot of good options available for me right now (Six of Pentacles, an image of men begging). I feel desperate, stuck, with no options, so I’m grasping at straws (The Devil). I’ve ignored the possibility of true romance, of being happy with a partner who’s good for me (Two of Cups), because I’d never created a conception of that feeling like a possibility. All this leads me towards an image of me as the Page of Pentacles: a peppy, charming, career-oriented leader.
Jess looked at me and said, “You need to do you and love yourself and your friends and your work, because your work is going to take you everywhere, and lead you to better love. But keep the dream alive. Don’t forget about the Two of Cups. Because you, Annie Mok, can have it all.”

***

I came off that reading feeling amped. I felt relaxed and confident, like nothing could go wrong. While 90 percent of my bipolar disorder receded with coping strategies, 10 percent or so remains. I still get little glimpses of mania, feeling like a flying Supergirl when I’m really hurtling towards the ground. But mania, almost always, soon swings the other way.

I found myself crying all the time on my bed for no reason I could tell. I felt a ghost sensation on my hand where S. had touched me, as I had dealt with for years in the aftermath of getting away from my childhood-through-early adulthood assailant.

Recurring nightmares, where I was trapped in my childhood home and trying to gather my stuff to go, but couldn’t, returned to me.

I slowly admitted to myself that I didn’t feel OK, and the bad date with S. had affected me a lot more than I had wanted to admit.

***

The next morning, Katie walked over from her friends’ place. I told her about what had happened with me and S., and we talked about how fears of ignoring intuition play into this book that we’re reading for our online book club, Women Who Run With the Wolves. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, drawing from Jung and many other sources, writes about the archetype of the Wild Woman. She likens women to wolves, saying that wolves are naturally communicative, intelligent, protective, and intuitive. It is when modern culture denounces feminine intuition and creativity, she argues, that women become stifled and self-doubting.

“The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature,” she writes, “is not a religion but a practice. It is a psychology in the truest sense: psukhē / psych, soul; ology or logos, a knowing of the soul. Without her, women are without ears to hear their soultalk or register the chiming of their own inner rhythms.”

***

In the past, I chided myself for having to re-learn lessons. But I try to think of how I’d like to treat my friends, and how my friends treat me: I need to reflect that care for a loved friend onto myself.

I thought about the lamplight that had been cast on me by Jane, Janice, Katie, and Jess. We are each of us tributaries, and our rivers flow into and through one another.

Maya Angelou wrote, “There are many incidents which can eviscerate the stalwart and bring the mighty down. In order to survive, the ample soul needs refreshment and reminders daily of its right to be and to be wherever it finds itself.”

I jotted down some lyrics: “If the curse needs lifting every day / that’s OK / that’s OK.” ♦