QUEER as not being about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

bell hooks

Welcome to our first episode! So happy to have you along in our Queer Circle where a queer healer steps up to the mic to share their journey with us. Our first guest you may recognize from the podcast Healing with Raymond and Billy. Raymond (he/they) is a queer, trans southerner in North Carolina/Occupied Cherokee land. He holds a BA in Environmental Science from Northwestern University, MFA in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles, graduate of Zen Shiatsu Chicago and licensed shiatsu practitioner. Raymond is a shiatsu therapist (currently on pandemic hiatus), writer, sound producer, and keyboardist.  
Contact Raymond at MountainZenShiatsu.com and listen to his music at PurpleFluorite.bandcamp.com 

Listen to this episode HERE

Music by Purple Fluorite (Bandcamp // or all the streaming platforms)

Transcript:

Ep. 1 Raymond Johnson

[Lo-fi ambient music plays]

[0:10]

 Billy: Welcome to a Queer Circle Podcast. I’m your host, Billy Janes. I want to share a little bit about the podcast, since this is our first episode. This is a queer circle, so we’re asking queer healers within the community to step up to the mic and share their story. We start off with the early days of their childhood and all the way to where they are now. I’m especially interested in what they have to share with their younger selves about navigating their healing journey. Our first guest tonight is Raymond Johnson. Raymond is a queer, trans, southerner. His education is in environmental science from Northwestern, a master of fine arts in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles and he’s a graduate of Zen Shiatsu Chicago and a licensed Shiatsu practitioner. Currently, he’s a shiatsu therapist, a writer, a sound producer, and keyboardist. You may also recognize him from the podcast that we did together, Healing with Raymond and Billy and all the music, actually, from this episode and future ones are from his band, Purple Fluorite. I’m excited to introduce Raymond to share his story with us. 

[1:39]

[Music Amplifies]

[1:57]

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Actually, we’ll start with day negative of when I was conceived. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: I think I mentioned that I learned as a young adult, my mom told me that I was actually an accident, her pregnancy was not planned per se. I’m the second child, so I guess they had my older brother and they weren’t necessarily looking to have a second kid per se, but then my mom got pregnant and when she told me this, it was actually told in a really loving and beautiful way. It was just sort of like “You were the best surprise I could’ve ever imagined.”, you know? In a very sweet way. But sometimes when I tell the story, like if I don’t set it up, it feels a little bit weird like “My mom told me I wasn’t planned.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: You know what I mean? It’s like “Oh! How do you feel about that?” and I feel fine about it. I feel like it probably makes a lot of sense. I think that there are a lot of ways that I am a surprise and sort of different from my family, even though the more that I get to know my history and my ancestors, I also see exactly where I came from. I told you the story that I had heard this aversion of a creation myth, which says to be born on this planet, you have to have your spirit who wants to have a life here, so there’s a spirit in me that originated somewhere out in the universe that said “Hey, I want to take a turn doing a life on that planet.”, so you need that energetic spirit. You need the two parents, or the two genetic donors, who decide “We’re gonna put our DNA with the spirit to make it happen.” and then you also need to have a Deity God or Goddess on the planet that sponsors you, that sort of sponsors your arrival on this planet. So I was raised in a southern, United Methodist home, so for most of my childhood I was very active in church, I was very methodist. I identified Christian, I identified a very monotheistic God. I always had sort of a very liberal bend and angle on him, but still very like, even saying “him” in that sense I really had this conception of God the “Father” and whatnot. And I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how that was so important to me, the structure, and the community, and the spirituality, and then when I went to college it fell away pretty quickly. And not so much the spiritual practice, like I was still interested in thinking and talking and praying, it started moving more towards meditating versus praying at that point, but I very quickly realized that the community of christians on my college campus was very different from the community of my church growing up and that I was maybe just more into the community of people…

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: than I was the methodist per se, right. I mean, I was able to make peace with methodism, because of the love of activities and things that I did, and our church was sort of a big community center with theater and there were sports and people sang in the choir and things like that, so a lot of my artistic experience came from the church community as well. So it was all very tied up together. I always sang in the choir, did Sunday school, did volunteer stuff, I did youth group, it was very much a community and a spiritual home for much of my upbringing. And I don’t really know, going back to that story, now I feel like I’m on the market to find out who is my sponsoring deity, like who is the god or goddess that decided that “Yeah, okay, I’ll be responsible for that sprite that wants to come down here.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Or whatever. So it’s just something I’ve been ruminating on for a few years, because  I feel a little bit like the answers going to come to me. I think at one point, I would’ve sat down and been like “Is there an encyclopedia of gods and goddesses? Maybe I’ll peruse and see which one jumps out at me.”, but I kinda feel like I think it’s going to be a little bit more mysterious and organic, I should say. So that part of the origin story I’ve been thinking about a lot and especially as far as like, because I moved back to a small town in the south that’s very christian, that’s very culturally christian. So I’m surrounded by a lot of things that I grew up with that were once familiar to me, but have kinda gotten defamiliarized over the years and my partner, my wife, she grew up in New England, not raised religious at all. So many times she just has these cultural things like “What does that mean?”. So it’s interesting to have some sort of  translation moments, being back in the south. But she also grew up in smaller towns, whereas I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, so there are also some small town cultural moments that she also kinda does translations as well. So it’s been interesting to kind of be on this adventure with her in this part of my life, thinking about some of those origins and those going back. My parents are from southern Mississippi and they both are from the same small town, Hattiesburg. I had never actually lived in Mississippi. I spent a lot of time there as a kid going like summers, and holidays, and things like that. So I have a lot of really fond memories and a lot of experiences from being there, especially up to age 18. When I went away to college, I moved up to Chicago and then after going to college, I decided to stay there in my 20s and that’s when I came out. I came out in college as queer. I started to build a queer community. After college is when I decided, actually, I’m not a butch dyke, I want to transition and I’m trans-identified. So in 2000, is when I first went to a therapist, because back then there was this whole thing called the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Which were these weird protocols that doctors would sort of follow in order if you wanted to medically transition. So there’s basically all of these like hoops and things you kinda had to jump through. So I found a therapist and kinda, I was extremely online, very early, so it was definitely on the internet even then, I found some rainbow, LGBT therapist list that has like 12 people on it and this one woman, I was like “Ooh she does art therapy, I want her.”. So I started to go see her and she was amazing, shoutout to my very first therapist and my very first session. At the time, a lot of times the recommended thing was that you had to see a therapist for a certain number of sessions, between 3-6, and then they give you a letter etc. So at the first session, she basically said “Well, I’ll write you a letter anytime, that’s fine. But we need to talk about your family.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: So she was like, “Your gender’s fine I don’t need to sign off on your gender, but I’m not ready to sign off on your dynamic with your parents.” So luckily I had her during that period to walk me through, because it is a really stressful time period to be coming out to like everyone you know and having to do all that education. It’s hard on a trans person now, it’s hard on a trans person now. I don’t want to discount that it’s like easy, but the environment 20 years ago was such that … I think there’s always going to be repetitive conversations that happen when you’re coming out, like you’re going to be telling sort of the same story about yourself over and over. I think that’s just a little bit of human nature, that’s a little bit of this. But in certain categories and when you’re in a certain group like especially marginalized groups and there’s always the power imbalance and there’s just the sheer repetition of it, it just becomes very taxing. So I think what I was sort of dancing around the thing before I started talking about the thing, but transitioning 20 years ago, I had a really amazing group of people who all wanted to get it and a lot of people worked really hard to get it and I’m so grateful so many of those people are still friends of mine today, they’re still in my queer family and I love them. But there were also people who maybe said weird, terrible, icky things and I just kinda never talked to them again. It just was a lot of work. It was a lot of effort and at the time it was like the price you paid in order to live in the body you wanted. I was like “This is what I got to do is I have to fucking sit down.” Can you swear on your show? I’m sorry, let me redo that with a non swear word. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Is your show for the kids? I’m sorry.

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Anyway, it was just a lot of conversations. I think what I was saying was that I felt like it was the price to pay to live in the body I wanted and I was happy to pay it, because that’s what I wanted. I wanted to live in this body I wanted and I never felt … I kind of identify as a nonbinary trans man or I just identify sometimes as queer trans. Just because I feel like my sexuality is queer, my gender is kind of queer, I tend to be attracted to queer people like I tend to be attracted to queer men and queer women, you know? So it’s not so much about I’m attracted to all women or all men or all nonbinary people or all fems or anything like that, like it tends to be a little bit more … blurry, I guess, which is what I’ve always sort of liked, not having the rigidity of categories. Because I felt like my gender stuff as a kid was very rarely about how I felt about my body. So when I came out as trans, when I’m talking about 2003, I was actually turning 23 that year. So I waited until after college, because I kind of was scared that my parents might pull support from me. So they supported me through college, they helped me through college. I went to school. I did work, but they did pay for a lot of that. And I was just kinda like “I don’t think they would do that.” like it was nothing they had ever threatened, it didn’t really seem like their style, but also you just never know, you never know how people are going to respond. So I kind of waited and I think I also had this idea of like I wanted to kind of be like a year out on my own and figure it out, I don’t know it was just sort of an arbitrary thing I gave myself. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: I guess when you’re surrounded by a lot of like gatekeeping messages, like “Is this real? Are you sure? Are you sure that you’re trans? Are you positive you’re trans?” and I was like I just don’t think that non trans people spend hours and hours a day reading trans stories and trans message boards and Yahoo groups and all that stuff that I was doing to take it in. I had sort of a sweet and tender full circle moment. My birthday was recently and I decided to … I’ve kind of been pulling back a lot on social media just because it’s so embarrassing to say, but it gives me anxiety, and I think the reason it’s embarrassing for me to say is, like I said, I’ve been on the internet for 20 years like I’ve been extremely online for a very long time, so it’s kind of strange to suddenly have lost your capacity to kind of something or to take something that for a long time like I’ve been in that space, I’ve been in that space of media and I see it and I know what to do. It’s not that it doesn’t affect me, but I just was always able to manage it and at some point I had to sort of admit like, I’m not managing it well, you know. And I do think that a shift has happened in the last couple of years as far as really ramping up advertising and the algorithm and all that stuff trying to pull it in or whatever. So I’m trying to kind of renegotiate my relationship with that, while also like I love the internet and I have friends on the internet, I love connecting with a community. I live in a small town, like I said, 10,000 people, there’s not a lot of trans people here, there’s not a lot of queer people here. I need to be online to see my friends and see my community, but also need to really kind of make sure that I’m doing that in conscientious ways that are feeding me and making sure that my feeds are 80% joy and only 20% death and not the other way around. So going back to the Facebook thing, I decided … I almost was just going to take my birthday just off of my Facebook profile, I was just all like I don’t want any attention for my birthday, just everything goes to the movement, just take care of COVID and take care of police brutality and I don’t want any attention for my birthday and then I was all like, okay Raymond, I don’t think it works that way. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Maybe just don’t visit the page that day if you’re not feeling it or whatever and so I ended up like the next day, it was kind of nice, the day after my birthday, to just kind of sit and read all of these really lovely messages, because I have gorgeous and beautiful friends and family on my facebook who leave these really loving messages, so I’m glad I let myself receive it. But it’s always funny to me what random people will wish you happy birthday and you maybe aren’t that close to them, right? Like you’re always like it’s sweet, but I’m also like huh, right? But one of the people that at first I didn’t recognize the name, I was like “Who’s this person?” and then I clicked on it and I realized it was someone from one of the FTM trans groups that I’m in. So I’m in a couple groups for like trans guys, trans men, especially ones that are geared to those of us who have been on hormones for like 10, 15, 20 years, things like that. It’s kind of nice just to be able to talk about medical things or just how our bodies are shifting and whatnot and aging and things like that. But he was from one of those groups and actually, his name is Andy, I’m just gonna say that, I think that’s fine, but he had this webpage called “Andy’s Passing Tips”, which I know this is sort of dated language, but it was a very simple sort of HTML website of just like … it was almost all just like text, black text, like no images, things like that, but it was essentially a guide for like here’s what men traditionally do if you want to masculinize your appearance and help pass as a man more, here are things to look for. I know that’s kind of very strange language, it feels strange coming out of my mouth now, because that’s so not how I am now like whenever somebody’s talking about like “Real men do this.” or whatever. I’m like oh god, resist all binaries.

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: You know, things like that. But again, please keep in mind that this was over 20 years ago and there are a group of trans men that they feel like “I am a man” like they feel very strong internally that “I am a man and it really hurts me, physically hurts me, that my outside body doesn’t look like what it looks like in my head.” I didn’t really have that exact experience, but I definitely was not in my body. I think I just was super pragmatic, I think I was just like “Everybody’s talking to me weird about my body and giving me strange attention as a young woman, young girl’s body.” Literally the first time I remember having a creepy dude say something to me, I was five years old. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: That shit is fucked. It’s deep and it’s wide and it’s an ocean that we’re just starting to like dip into the surface of as far as the intensity of misogyny and patriarchy and sort of all that kind of comes up. So I’ve always been in this sort of way where I’ve never felt connected to my female body per se or any sort of idea of femininity or masculinity as it was just given to me in the suburbs of Atlanta in the 80s and 90s by some southern christian influence or whatever. Once I got out in the world and I saw that there were different ways of living, I started to see my feelings and my ideas about the world reflected in other people and that sort of connection of familiarity within queer and trans people. 

[19:49]

[Music Plays]

[20:01]

Raymond: I was definitely always … like I was an overachiever as a kid and as a teenager and I think I’ve always felt kind of like I didn’t … I didn’t connect with most anyone. So in some ways, gender was the least of it, well not the least of it but it was just one of many things that I didn’t necessarily feel like I didn’t always get why other people did the things they did or why things happened the way they did. But I’ve always been very interested in that sort of how things work way of looking at the world, I’ve always been sort of a naturalist and interested in biological and nature and figuring things out and that even applies to human beings. So I think I always … It was very much about sort of what I was seeing and also what I was experiencing, so it wasn’t like I saw it on TV so it must be real. But I mean, like everything I took in. I was watching things on TV, but I was looking out the window, I was listening to how the adults talked, I was watching around. I was always like closely paying attention and I think that’s a little bit just my skill set and that’s my nature of who I am is being able to pay attention to the full environment and knowing what little parts to kind of focus on. I do think that’s probably also tied up into my experience of being different. So even if I didn’t necessarily know, like I didn’t even really know that I was different, even though, it’s so funny, I think about this very often recently because like I’ve been going in the past few years, I’ve had a lot of like unofficial diagnoses or pre diagnosis like someone would diagnose me and then say “Go get tested.”, you know, like about all these different things. So PTSD actually came first, so when I started to look at unhealed trauma as sort of uncovering for depression and anxiety I was experiencing in my 20s and 30s, I realized I was like “Okay, I’m gonna start digging towards that sort of root.” and when I was learning about PTSD is when I started to learn about executive function, which was something that I was also dealing with and struggling with my brain, which that then led me to like ADHD and I was like “Oh my gosh, those are my people.” and that’s in my family, like I could see it all this stuff. When you’re in those spaces and when you’re in those spaces nowadays, there’s a lot of overlap with just neurodivergence in general and in more recent research that I’ve been doing, I’ve had a moment where I was like someone suggested “Hey, have you ever been tested for autism?” and I was like “Son of a biscuit!”

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: And it’s just one of those things where like you’re studying something and you’re like “Wait, no, me? No, wait, huh?”. So I think it’s one of those things where it… and I’ve had this story for a while. The reason why I bring up these kind of western diagnoses is because they also kind of fit into these other stories that I carry with me. So if you like at my story through like an astrology lens, I am a cancer with an aries rising, so I have the sort of sensitive gooey inside, the sensitive poet that has this sense of home and family and taking care of things, but I have this outer persona that’s fiery, confident, stubborn, beautiful, aries fire sign on my outside. I think a lot of people can see that, they see me as someone who is an animated storyteller, who teaches workshops, who tells a lot of funny jokes well I contend I’ve never told a joke in my life. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: I think that I just really feel like I’m very literal. I’m extremely literal. But I find realism funny, so I just say something and then that makes me laugh, so then people think it’s a joke, but I’m like “I’m just describing how things are.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Which goes back to this is why people are suggesting that I might want to look into autism spectrum things. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: But because I had acting training, so I’ve been an actor for a very long time and I think it was a survival technique, I also just think it’s something I have. I have the ability to look at people to pick up things, to undulate things, to copy, you know, all that. So I have long had a very fuzzy sense of self in that way, because I’m someone who learns by watching and it’s hard not to feel like you’re a copycat, you get called being a copycat or “Are you doing this just because your friend is doing it?” and that’s definitely something that I felt like I got called out for occasionally as a kid. You know, and then you get older and you realize that’s just what we do as human beings, we just copy each other like that’s a very just sort of social skill, learning that and whatnot. And I also think it really hindered a lot of my creative life, or delayed it, I should say. I mean I feel like I’m a very creative, artistic person now, but as I untangle my relationship to my process, I think about so much of art making is really just like “Pick something that you like and make a thousand of them.” and the easiest thing to do is just to pick something someone else made and make a thousand copies of it and that process of copying it is when you start to develop your voice. But no one really explained that process to me, so if no one told me that that’s how art works and really the main message I had was like “Don’t be a copycat. Be original.”, you know, whatever. So for a long time, I had all this sort of really intense sort of stress on my writing and perfectionism and anything creative I wanted to do, because I just had a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process and how it kind of worked. Also, I think I went to grad school too early.

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Because it was like, I got my MFA! But it wasn’t until like 5 years after I graduated that I was like “I think I can call myself a writer now.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: But I kind of just, I had access and the ability to jump in and go and I had a manuscript and they were like “Oh yeah, great.” and I was like “Okay, I’ll be a writer. That sounds good.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: So young kids listening today, when Billy says “What advice do you want to give the young people?”, don’t get too much credit card debt … 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Don’t collect too much student loans …

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: But yeah, it’s also, that’s also life, like I had amazing experiences, I met amazing people who are, you know, part of my friends forever. We all have debts to pay in various ways, some of them more literal than others. 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: But going back to the sort of sense of self peace and the “What it means?”. So I also laugh, because I feel like my whole life my mom sort of described me as being a little bit special and sometimes my dad would describe me as being a little bit sensitive and now I’m like “Oh, ADHD and autism. Is that what you meant? That’s what you meant.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: But because I was one of those kids that got good grades and I did everything right and I followed the rules, but no one ever stopped to ask me if I was okay and I kind of very rarely was like I was always just very kind of like tightly wound and nervous and hypervigilant in a way, you know? So for me now as an adult, going back, I think for a while … for awhile I see things as my special skill because that’s a way to kind of empower myself and to rewrite the story, but sometimes I would go too fast to those stories and I wouldn’t feel the pain and that’s kind of the peace that I’ve been doing a lot of with myself now. The work I’m doing now is not so much about the pain in my microcosm life because I’m very safe right now, I have a very wonderful safe home life, I have food, I’m not sick, all of those things, and it’s provided me now this opportunity to kind of like freak out and feel all these feelings that we’ve been putting in a drawer for the first few decades of my life. So some of that stuff I was alluding to in the beginning, you know, coming out as a tran person 20 years ago and often being the only trans person in the room or the first trans person that a lot of people knew and even though I feel pretty lucky that I didn’t have too many negative experiences still just having to kind of walk through that. I’m grateful for the few queer elders I had that were kind of around me, because I felt like they got it a little bit in a different way. So often I would be pleasantly surprised that me as a 23 year old kind of butch dyke turned trans guy would be, you know, at a party with dykes in their 40s or 50s, who maybe didn’t know… they didn’t make the same decision that I did and they didn’t want to make it for themselves but they understood having to walk through the world and answer those questions and have those conversations at such a young age, so I feel really happy for that. So I feel like whenever I can be in space with younger queer people, you know, I’m always thinking about like what did the mentors offer me, what are those kind of like random things that kind of stayed with me and how can I sort of give it back to them in that sense. Because I never want to be like one of those people that’s like “I had it so hard and you kids don’t know.” like that’s not what I mean at all by any stretch of the imagination. I just want it to keep getting easier and easier for queer and trans kids to live and be in this world, because we still have so much room to grow as far as like making this a space for them to feel like they can survive and they can thrive her, yeah. Something kind of happened to me, I mean there’s been different stages that I’ve been radicalized in different ways around different issues and at different levels. Four years ago in 2016, this is before the election, when the Pulse Massacre happened there was something that happened to me that unlocked a lot of anger, I realized that I had a lot of anger and a lot of rage from stuff in my 20s and early 30s, but it was interesting because it also was kind of a new sense of energy like I was like “Oh I am gonna stay alive out of spite, because I’m gonna tell everyone what you did here.”

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: “I’m gonna live another 50 years, because I am not letting the record show like I was there and I heard y’all and I saw your dumb comments and I know what you thought.” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: So don’t be afraid of queer spite.

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: I mean love and light. Love and light and queer spite. 

[Raymond Laughs]

[32:06]

[Music Plays]

[32:17]

Raymond: I would tell my younger self to trust my brain more and to acknowledge that I need to get to know it and get to know how to use it, but that that is different than  it being wrong or bad. I think that there are a lot of messages I’ve internalized around being a certain way and fitting in a certain way. I think I was also definitely, you know, I was raised in the military, my father was in the military, so military household and so there was a lot of following orders and a lot of really intense strictness and a lot of really intense respect for authority. So I did learn how to … it’s good to learn how to follow the rules, because in some situations knowing how to follow the rules is a useful tool, but I think understanding what I was doing as a useful tool and not taking it so like personally, because there was a lot of things I think played into my perfectionism and my sense of self. I think a lot of that unconscious messaging I got as a kid was that we’re worthy though the grace of god and if you’re a good person and follow the rules, good things will happen. I feel like those were the two things that were kind of taught to me, which superficially seem fine, but the messaging kind of became that I was inherently not worthy and that if you follow a certain sequence, you’re owed something, like that’s kinda what unconsciously got planted. So I feel like, as I’ve gone out in the world and expanded my understanding and seen how life works, I kinda feel like I had to switch it and be the total opposite which is that like I am beautiful and I deserve everything, I deserve everything, but the world doesn’t owe me shit.

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: So like it doesn’t matter, you can follow every rule, you can do all these things that they tell you, but it’s maybe not gonna work out for you, it’s not gonna work out for everyone. So I think really that seemed really scary to do both, like I wanted to just be like “Can I just do the first one, which is I’m beautiful and worthy and also if I continue to be a good person and follow the rules, then all good things will happen to me?  Like can I just do those two things?” and you can’t because at the end of the day, don’t get me wrong, the world has so many amazing things available to us that are just right there if we’re able to be in that space, but there is not that sort of ledger, there is not an owing in that sense, no matter how perfect and how good you perform to be. I think that a  lot of things that kind of happened in my coming out to my parents is that I think I always was like “I tried to be the best girl that I could be and it didn’t work so I’m trans.” and I think they were a little bit like “Wait, what? This is the first time we’re hearing this.”

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: Whereas for me, from my point of view, I was all like “You saw me try everything and you know I’m good at this so if I couldn’t make it work then come on, trust me!” 

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: “Trust me, I did the leg work. I figured it out. I tried to do that.”. But you know, I also, I hope everyone, I’m saying this with a lot of generosity because we were all doing the best we can and I feel very grateful and lucky that my parents are in my life right now. And you know, it took a lot of years of getting to know each other, who we are now and so a lot of this work is really more about like me and my own working through my past selves and it doesn’t have that sort of active pain or active heat that certain wounds did in my 20s. Like in my 20s, I was mostly estranged from them and I think I sort of underestimated how some of the wounds and some of the pain of that, how it affected me and it’s only been in kinda the past like 5 or 6 years that I’ve been able to peel back and actually kind of address that. I actually just, for my birthday, one of the books I ordered was Janet Mock’s second memoir, “Surpassing Certainty”, because I realized I hadn’t read it, I had read her first one, which is more about her teenage years, but then I totally kind of missed that she had a memoir about her 20s and I was like “Oh, this is perfect, I can work through my 20s and read about her 20s.”

[Raymond Laughs]

Raymond: I also have, I was on live journal back in the day in like 2000, 2001, so earlier this year, I was doing some memoir writing work and research and I was digging through some of those journals from that time. It’s kind of wild to see like some of the ways I talk sound very oh I’m in my early 20s, like there’s a certain kind of like confidence and sarcasm and just there’s something about it that I was like “Oh yeah that version of me.”. But it was also funny to see like some of the stuff I talked about or was struggling with was like the exact same stuff I struggle with now, just as far as dealing with my brain or dealing with people or dealing with energy, you know all that stuff, just slightly different language. This is so silly but one thing that Betty White, I said years ago, but I think about it all the time is that what they don’t tell you about aging is that like you kind of really don’t change on the inside, like obviously we learn things and we grow and things shift but like our sense of self I feel like doesn’t totally change, you know? And how we carry ourselves as a lens and how we take things in and how we put out, there’s something that’s very like that’s our essence. 

[38:37]

[Music Plays]

[39:05]

Billy: Raymond, thank you so much for joining us today. If you’re interested in contacting Raymond for more information or any kind of question, you can contact him through his website, mountainzenshiatsu.com, and also, purplefluorite.bandcamp.com, those things will all be on the website here for the podcast at queercirclepodcast.com.

[39:40]

[Music Plays]

[39:50]

Billy: Today’s music was provided to us by Raymond Johnson, Purple Fluorite, available wherever there’s streaming: iTunes, Spotify, and more.