I have a reoccurring dream. I finally talked about it to someone this morning and found that I was nearly in tears for all the pain it dredged up for me.

The dream is that I am jumping through a bunch of hoops to make it to a national meeting in which I am supposed to help represent a local government-community group on the topic of communicable disease and community-based public health interventions. The dream is always the same: I go through hell to be there, but when I get there, I get lost, the people that I’m relying on to help represent our local issues are nowhere to be found, I do see them but I get the clear message that I should be grateful they’re tolerating someone like me at their table.

I’ve had this dream for more than a decade now.

Radio Silence After Decade+ of Service

Here’s the thing: in 2004, as Ray Hill was resigning in protest from a Houston-based community-government public health partnership group, I joined at the request of Brenda Thomas, a trans woman who made some significant inroads for a public health response to HIV in the gender diverse communities in Houston.

I was part of that group, and for several years, co-chaired that group (with my government partner). I represented the group on a national level for several years, too. I represented that group’s focus on Harris County public health groups and came to chair those groups, too. I reviewed grants for the city; I sat on interview-boards for city applicants; I did 1000 informal meetings that were in addition to the work I had agreed to do, for free. From 2004 to 2017, I was deeply involved in that work but had to stop that unpaid public wellbeing work because my grandmother was losing her mind to dementia and required around-the-clock care because her child had announced that caring for her was too difficult and moved away, never to return until after her death.

I had to resign from all that work because I had to, not because I wanted to. But here’s the thing that has given rise to the pain and reoccurring dreams: nobody, in any of these groups, acknowledged my decade+ of work or my absence. ALL these groups –each one– had a practice of, at the very least, sending a letter of thanks for a member’s contributions when they fulfilled their membership obligations, which generally lasted 2 years. I signed these letters. I helped write them. I participated in awarding significant contributions plaques and awards to past members.

I got no letter, no phone call, no text, no email, and certainly no plaque. I got silence. I got radio silence this from my city, county, and national group. And I couldn’t help but begin to wonder why; what was it about me, in particular, that devalued my work in this uniform way?

After the Emergencies

TO BE CLEAR: this isn’t about me not getting a letter or sufficient praise. This is about literally putting in 5 times the effort and receiving a very particular sort of message from your cisgender peers about the regard in which you are held. It’s that regard that’s painful; it’s that regard that’s the theme of these painful reoccurring dreams.

And, on the emergency scale of terrible shit that’s happened over the past decade, it’s a truly small thing.

This isn’t years of cleaning poop off my grandmother as the woman was slowly consumed by insanity before my eyes. This isn’t the loss of the Trans Center. This isn’t COVID or people dying. This isn’t the rise of US fascism kept aloft by gender anxieties cis people feel intitled to not confront in themselves. This is just a small thing that I happened to give a lot of myself to for many years.

So, what do I do about that now that I’m not jumping from one catastrophic emergency to the next; now that I have the psychological space to think about why I keep having this dream every week or two?

I suppose I share about it.