A Mad Trans Cartography: “I Leave Clues for Myself in the Darkness”
If I want to get through this mad life I’ve realized I have to make tangible maps for myself. I make them in my journals, I write them in the stories I share with friends, I use words and metaphors and parables, and sometimes very concrete reminders that help me stay on the path…I leave clues for myself in the darkness [emphasis added]. Some of them are obvious and clear as day and some of them are written in code, only decipherable when I’m in the head states that need to hear them…Sometimes they are my escape hatches. Sometimes they are safety nets…They hold metaphors and maps we can bring with us into the future (DuBrul, 2013, pp. 4-5). When mapping the terrain of my Mad trans bodymind (Clare, 2017; Price, 2014; Schalk, 2018), I find myself returning again and again to the moments of Mad trans embodiment that feel like temporal and spatial un/realities that exist outside of the realm of time and space, itself, carving ulterior pathways through previously clandestine portals that manifest within the mere millimeters of separation between body and essence, self and not quite self, a confluence of unselves that arises like the pause between breath and exhalation, a juncture that, I’ve been told, can bring peace when one’s awareness is centered there, this liminal space between beingness and nothingness, where the maps of my Mad trans embodiment begin and, equally, never seem to truly end… “I leave clues for myself in the darkness” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 4). Walking home from my advanced doctoral research methods course last year where my Mad trans methodologies and their emanant hauntings called themselves forth into a form and essentiality so acutely embodied that I dare not ignore, I paused under the streetlamp to give my essence - this ghostly portent of what existence might be when we inhabit the between spaces of here and there, somewhere and elsewhere, becoming and not yet become - a moment to catch up, hoping that it may finally choose to reinhabit the corporeal form of my Mad trans bodymind. Despite what felt like an endless waiting, this essence that possessed my consciousness or, rather, an imprint or trace of my consciousness, found home in residing a half step behind my body, a watcher, a spectral traveler, edges soft and porous… “The edge can be a dangerous place to be - there’s always the possibility of falling off” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143). So tangible, so visceral, I wondered if this essence of me, beside me, behind me, all of me and none of me, could be seen by passersby in the glow of the streetlight, or by the fractal luminescence emitted by a beingness that, simultaneously and contradictorily, lacked clear shape and form, known and, yet, un recognizable… Ghost (n.). “It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge…Here is - or rather there is, over there, an unnamea ble or almost unnameable thing: something between something and someone, anyone or anything” (Derrida, 1994, p. 5). (Yoon & Chen, 2022, pp. 77-78, bolding and italics in original). Is it the burden of one’s apparition to guide one back to the parts that have been lost, to the pieces of self that must have died along the way? “…it will happen again; it will be there for you. It is waiting for you. We were expected” (Gordon, 2008, p. 166). Feeling bodies move past me, not one making a sound, no shudders, exclamations, or frights, it quickly became clear that this splitting of self, this rupture between body and essence, detached and distant, yet bound by a temporal, spatial, spiritual, and metaphysical relationality, was imperceptible to all but me. An eerie calm settled over me… “The edges all blur - I start dreaming while I’m awake” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143). I was now moving through this world, or pausing as the world moved through me, unencumbered by the weight of a body, a complexly fleshy animacy that had yet to feel entirely mine, completely and sincerely alive… “the material realm was an illusion” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143). Floating through spaciousness, defying the parameters of others’ time, existing in the interwoven expanse of everywheres, anywheres, and nowheres, uncertain what caused this fracturing, unsure of the etiology of this dislocation… “I cured nothing because there was nothing to cure” (Clare, 2017, p. 180), and with no idea how I might return to myself, a single, coherent whole that I am unsure was ever whole all along… “I claim brokenness to make this irrevocable shattering visible” (Clare, 2017, p. 160). How does one trace the boundaries of the boundless, of that which eludes naming, categorization, definition, that seeks to reject the ablesanist white supremacist, colonial, cisheteropatriarchal expectations of “chrononormative time” by refusing to be a “static stable subject” (Pyne, 2021, p. 346), that queers and trans and Maddens time and space, being and essence, existence and emptiness, past, present, and that which is still to come? If Mad maps help “me get back to the place where I have the feeling that my body fits well on my soul” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 187, italics in original), how and where do I begin to chart pathways, lineages, and linkages from me to me, from myself to my ghosts who have finally found respite outside of a body whose form is still in a state of transition, becoming, unfurling towards futures and imaginaries that only the Mad parts of me dare to envision as real, as possible, as enough? “I leave clues for myself in the darkness” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 4).
Note
- Ablesanism, a combination of the terms ableism (the privileging of able-bodiedness) and sanism (the privileging of neurotypicality, able-mindedness, and the absence of Madness), is defined as “the stigmatizing and pathologizing ways in which mental illnesses/psychiatric disabilities and developmental disabilities are understood and reified through structures of exclusion, dispossession, incarceration, and death” (Aho, 2017, p. 1).
References
Aho, T. (2017). Neoliberalism, racial capitalism, rationality, and mental illness Conference handout]. American Sociological Association Conference, Montreal, Quebec.
Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Duke University Press.
DuBrul, S. A. (2013). Maps to the other side: The adventures of a bipolar cartographer. Microcosm Publishing.
Price, M. (2014). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. The University of Michigan Press.
Pyne, J. (2021). Autistic disruptions, trans temporalities: A narrative ‘trap door’ in time. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 343-361.
Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press.
Yoon, I. H., & Chen, G. A. (2022). Heeding hauntings in research for mattering. In Tachine, A. R., & Nicolazzo, Z. (Eds), Weaving an otherwise: In-relations methodological practice (pp. 76-91). Stylus Publishing, LLC.
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About the Author
Jersey Cosantino (they/them), a former K-12 educator, is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University, holding certificates of advanced study in women’s and gender studies and disability studies. A Mad and trans studies scholar and oral historian, Jersey’s research utilizes disability and transformative justice frameworks to center the experiences and subjectivities of Mad, neurodivergent, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals. Jersey identifies as Mad, neurodivergent, queer, trans, and non-binary and is white with education and citizenship privilege. A co-facilitator for SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program’s course Dialogue on Racism and Anti-Racism, Jersey holds a master’s in education and graduate certificate in mindfulness studies. They are also the co-editor of the International Mad Studies Journal, a consulting editor for the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, and a former Trans Lifeline call operator.