Heartbreak Is... With J Mase III

James,

I am so excited to have you on coming back because your book of poetry,

Blessings,

Rants is such a – it takes this journey of like the waves,

The ping pong,

Pinball ricochet of grief and like smooshes it all into one little book of like,

Holy shit,

That's what this experience is like.

And I was just blown away by reading your work and I'm just so excited to have you on to share your story today.

So can you start where we start all of our interviews and share your lost story with us?

So yeah,

For myself,

I think I have so many different tales of loss.

The one in particular that I'm here to talk about today that kind of spurned this book for me is the loss of my father shortly after the loss of my grandmother about in 2012.

And so for me,

My father was a person and is a person I spoke to every day,

I still speak to every day,

Is someone that was my best friend and was my weekend breakfast buddy.

And so he had a stroke sort of in the middle of the night.

One night I just moved up to New York City from Philly.

I was in a new job literally for a few months,

Very brand new,

Getting used to the city and such a bigger city than Philly.

And went from seeing him constantly and saving every single voicemail he ever left me to only getting to talk to him on the phone every now and again.

And so I get this call while I'm at work that he's had a stroke.

I wasn't informed until like the next morning,

Which was also kind of a stressful moment for me to think of not being there when that happened.

I was with my father for the next almost two weeks as he was in the hospital kind of fighting for his life.

And so lost him to that stroke.

My grief story after that is the ways in which before that I had lost cousins,

I had lost friends,

I had lost,

As I shared my grandmother,

Literally the month right before.

And my father was the closest person I had ever lost to me.

And so I didn't realize I'd been going to funerals my whole life.

I've watched multiple people die with my two eyes and been part of the dying care for people,

For multiple people.

And yet that hit me the hardest.

And so I wasn't expecting that.

And so it kind of knocked me into a tailspin.

So yeah.

Totally.

And that makes so much sense with like a sudden or an unexpected loss,

But also it seems like you aligned yourself with your dad really closely.

Most definitely.

Most definitely.

I'm just going to jump straight into your book,

Which is called,

And Then I Got Fired,

One Trans Queer's Reflections on Grief,

Unemployment,

And Inappropriate Jokes About Deaf.

One of the very first pieces that I read when I started screaming at the book,

Which was an image that was on the back.

Please scream into this book.

My favorite piece of all is Heartbreak Is.

And it's a longer one.

It's about six or seven pages or so.

But it's all of these different iterations of what heartbreak feels like or how heartbreak presents in the world.

And I'm wondering,

Do you have a copy of your book nearby?

I do.

Is this something that you might be able to share with us today?

Most definitely.

Most definitely.

I love it.

Because I read it in my,

I have a voice in my head,

As I'm sure other grief growers listening to this podcast,

We read books in our own voices.

But I think it's so powerful when we can hear the stories of others and theirs.

Thank you.

Heartbreak is a gurgling sound.

It is a sound of breath leaving the body.

It is the third body.

You left like that.

Heartbreak is a sound your phone makes when it's been days since you got a call,

A text,

And the one person you want to tell won't wake up again.

It's the sound of being a teenager and wondering if you have feelings at all.

It is being an adult and wondering if you can stop feeling so much.

It is the way your tears sound like they are coming from a demon.

One you haven't met before.

One that takes over after you blacked out on grease,

On liquor,

On drugs,

On whatever was around to comfort you.

Heartbreak is holding your dad's hand for the last time in the hospital room,

Knowing he cannot speak,

Knowing you cannot understand,

Knowing even if you could talk through tears,

He can't hear you.

Heartbreak is knowing every abuser you ever had will always be at more parties,

Be more extroverted,

Have more friends,

More lovers,

And way less insecurities since they passed down theirs to you.

Heartbreak is realizing the most lovable,

Shiny bits of you are paper mache pieces of whatever mask you use to protect people you love from the sadness of you.

The gray parts with no silver lining that fester in the dark.

Heartbreak is realizing the world doesn't believe in fairness and the shit your parents told you as a child about good people and bad people were just lies they told you so you had more to hold onto than they did.

It is knowing that this ache might never go away,

That a single name,

A word,

A syllable,

Or two can have it all crash down.

It is knowing that sanity is a made up condition,

That there isn't always time to heal if you want to stay alive.

Heartbreak is knowing some days you struggle to be alive and wonder if all this is real tomorrow,

What the hell was the point?

Heartbreak is knowing that at some point you'll have to just forgive God.

They don't know how hard it is to be human sometimes.

It is knowing that no one is coming to rescue you from reality,

That this is sometimes all there is.

Heartbreak is knowing you'll choose to do this again because the uncertainty is scarier.

Like if you could just hear a voice once,

You'd do something different.

If you could see something once,

You'd stop being afraid.

Heartbreak is knowing that you can always experience more pain and it is safer to manage the wounds you've got.

I just always do a big exhale when I read that because there's so much in here.

The question that's coming to me is what is your relationship to heartbreak?

What is my relationship to heartbreak?

So even as we're talking about grief,

I think the thing that I learned most about my relationship with my father and other family members was after you don't have an opportunity to argue about anything anymore,

Or you don't really have an opportunity to go through your relationship or you realize how much you negotiate in order to stay in community with people.

So for me,

Especially at some point in the book,

I talk about being in a domestic violence relationship and a dating relationship.

I dealt with that relationship while I was dealing with grief and afterwards I'd asked myself,

Was this the first abusive relationship I'd ever been in?

And when I asked myself that question,

I realized it wasn't.

It was like that actually I'd been primed in many situations.

I talk about my dad very much and I don't share this in the book much,

But so yeah,

My dad was definitely my best friend.

My dad was also someone who didn't necessarily,

When I was a kid,

He sometimes wanted to deny that I was his kid.

Sometimes he would be away and I would think that he was at work for years at a time.

And that's,

I laugh when I'm uncomfortable.

But this is,

For me,

Heartbreak is about knowing,

Even that piece of,

I said,

I've been with people while they're dying.

And it's hard to describe to people who have never been with people while they're dying,

What that experience is like and what that means.

What it means to lose people,

To friends,

To suicide,

What it means to lose cousins who are younger than I am now,

Right?

Like younger than I am now and I'm 34 years old,

What it means to lose different types of people.

And it's knowing that you can't,

That you have to find a way to mend a relationship after that person no longer physically with you.

So I think that to me is the hardest part and the biggest part of heartbreak is,

I wish that I got to tell my dad about how some of the things that went on between us when I was a kid made me feel.

I wish that I had an opportunity to kind of go into some of those experiences and thoughts about abandonment because I basically tracked down my father as an adult and not that,

It's not that he was,

He was so hard to just pin down and sometimes it would go a few years without talking.

So I basically stopped this man.

I found his number,

I didn't have his current number when I was in my 20s,

I had to find his current number online through one of those people search apps.

Have you seen those before?

Yeah,

Like Intellius or something like that online.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I found that and had to,

And I would basically call his house number and his cell phone number and I'd be like,

Listen,

We go on to talk.

I think we're going to talk.

And so I'm sure that he was dealing with his own stuff around shame or anxiety around the loss of the relationship for a while,

But we ended up being really close and I have no doubts that I was my father's best friend.

I know that everyone in his life describes me that way too.

But it's because I chose to be an adult in the situation in which I was the child,

Right?

Like even in my 20s,

I was still the child to this person that I loved very dearly.

So that's for me,

That's a long answer to your question,

But of what I think heartbreak is for me or has been for me.

I think that's really fitting because that's the story of so many of us who are grieving is that it's like we're in the middle of a phone conversation and the call gets dropped and it's dropped forever.

And like you never hear anything back from the other side.

You can't redial,

Like the phone's dead forever.

Not only is the phone dead,

But now the relationship is as well.

And I literally wrote something down as you were speaking about how you said,

I wish I could have processed this idea of abandonment with my dad.

And I kind of want to get into like death as the ultimate abandonment because something that I harbor with my mom as well,

Especially as somebody who also identifies as queer in the world and that she essentially died in the middle of a fight.

We were negotiating my sexuality and where it fit into my life and whether or not she would be willing to show up for me if I ended up with someone who was not a cisgendered man.

And so for her to die,

For the call to drop in the middle of that conversation was just earth shattering,

Especially when our relationship previously had been really solid.

I didn't have a lot of like abandonment or disconnection from her so to have it show up so suddenly in her death like totally rocked my world.

But I'm wondering how things are different possibly between you and your dad where that pattern was kind of always there and then death is like the ultimate abandonment.

Well,

I'll say for myself,

The stuff around my transness and my queerness was never the part that my father wasn't around,

Was difficult about.

So for me,

When I came out,

I came out and I was primarily living with my mother and my mother was someone who lost,

For all judge's purposes,

She lost her shit when I came out.

I had to do the therapy thing.

I don't think my therapist at the time would call himself a conversion therapist,

But did he believe that my 15 year old self was queer even though a sitting is off of telling him that?

No,

He did not believe that.

And was basically telling my,

So I was in the situation which my therapist was telling my mother that I'm just confused about the world or all these different things and trying to shift my narrative.

And so coming out to my father at that time,

He didn't have that reaction.

His stuff was more about,

I have a twin sister,

I don't really talk about my other family members in the book.

I just specifically talk about just my relationship with my father directly.

But so I have a twin sister and so he didn't just abandon me at different points in my life.

He abandoned both of us.

I have a brother who's a half brother that I didn't meet until I was an adult.

And so my brother didn't get to really engage with my dad until he was in his,

Until really,

Again,

Until he was in his 40s himself.

So yeah,

So I think it was hard for me to have this parent that was similarly okay with me being a queer person,

But also just wasn't around.

And so it was abandonment from being a really small child and when they would have separations or things like that.

And I might not hear from him.

My mother used to call my dad's mother,

My grandmother,

Not the one that passed in this story,

But one that passed a few years prior to that,

That he was living with when my mother and him separated when I was a child.

And she would pretend like my dad called me,

You know?

And so she was doing all this work.

And so my mother and I,

We went through all of our stuff around.

So I felt like I got embedded in multiple ways,

Right?

So from this one parent I lived with that was just so ashamed of me.

And then this other person who I loved and my queerness was like,

He did all his personal work.

He's never said anything in front of me that was anti-queer,

Anti-trans,

Anything like that once I came out,

But just simply wasn't around.

There's something that the grief recovery method talks about,

About when people die,

How it feels like you're reaching for them.

And if they've never been there,

You're reaching again and they're still not there,

But there's more of like a sense of forever.

I don't know what idea I'm getting at with that,

But something about permanence keeps coming up.

Like just that idea of permanence.

And yet that's conflicting with what you said at the very beginning of our conversation where you use the present tense to describe your relationship with your dad,

Which you used the word is,

Which I absolutely love.

Yeah,

Because I'll say like,

So I have an altar in my apartment that I have some of my dad's things on.

I talk to him every day.

I pray for our healing,

For our continued growth.

I think there was some places in which my dad was also dealing with abandonment of folks in his family and other sorts of stuff that he never healed from.

And so in his,

As we think about afterlife,

I don't know what everybody's listening,

What their belief system is,

But I believe very strongly that we have the opportunity to continue healing after death.

And that it's my job as someone who's in this body in the living,

Especially for those of us that believe our folks are still with us,

To kind of continue having those conversations.

Like I want my dad to have a better relationship with love and family than what he had during his lifetime,

And I want to have during this lifetime a better relationship to that while I can in this physical body.

And so that anyone that comes from me,

Whether it's biologically or just through our connection spiritually,

I want them to also even be able to do even better than I was able to do.

Can you talk about what some of those prayers consist of,

Or maybe even how they started?

You know,

So I started building my altar right after my dad died.

And so he had a,

So at his funeral,

A cousin of mine,

She is a,

She's a florist.

And so she made this big,

This big,

Really beautiful flower arrangements for him that had his photo kind of in the center of it.

His flower was all stuck around.

And so it's this big blown up image of him from a picture that I took of him.

So even talking about,

When we talk about that,

That rejection around queerness and transness,

My father's wife hated me,

Which is a whole other thing when you're talking about planning funerals and doing all this stuff together with someone who otherwise would not engage with you.

And so I remember putting together the booklet for his funeral and I picked up this picture,

Which was important to me because of the picture that I had taken of him while we were at a brunch together,

While we were like a breakfast situation.

And so he's looking at me.

And so every time I see this picture,

It's like,

He's just looking at me and we're having this moment again.

And so that picture was not used in his little booklet,

But my cousin unbeknownst to me,

She made this beautiful flower piece with this picture in the center of it.

And so I brought that large picture home.

And so I think for me,

The prayers started just as I was thinking about just the residuals of the grief,

That it wasn't just that I was mourning the loss of this person that I was talking to every day,

But I was also mourning this loss of my ability to heal some sacred shit.

I started just mutually,

I just light candles and just pray.

So I have an old ring of his,

So he's part of the Nation of Islam.

So yeah,

I have a ring of his from back in the day and a watch of his and some other things.

And so when I'm praying and candles,

I'm asking for universe creator and for the both of us to be committed to our continual healing.

And so I say something like that to him every day or share something about how I'm feeling.

But yeah,

Just like we pray for the living,

I think we have to also pray consistently for the folks who are past that we want to have relationship with.

I think that's so incredibly valid,

Also incredibly personal,

Also incredibly spiritual.

It's an amalgamation of a lot of different things that are proof that thoughts,

Hopes,

Dreams,

Relationships continue in the aftermath of loss.

One of my favorite quotes,

I believe is from Megan Divine.

She's an author on grief,

But it says,

Death ends life,

Not a relationship.

And so for as much as our effort shows up in the world,

We can continue these relationships.

There's just like the growing pains of that relationship needing to show up in a different way,

Or us needing to be willing to be the ones who pick up the phone and try and start the conversation again,

And then be willing to have what comes back on the other end of the line not look like anything it has ever looked like before.

Right.

Yeah.

That's wild.

Is that picture the one that's in the back of your book?

Yeah,

It's a picture I use for him very frequently.

And so I think someone asks like,

Oh,

This is the one that you always use.

I'm like,

Yeah,

Because it's just,

For me,

It's our adult relationship.

It's us having that space where I feel like I had a very different relationship to my dad than my siblings had.

I believe that everybody has a need to have at least one person in life that loves them unconditionally.

I definitely was that person for my father.

Good,

Bad,

Or indifferent.

I know that's the role that I played in his life.

Wow.

That's like really powerful to say.

Thank you.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's just to be able to say I know for sure that's how I showed up for him.

I'm just having it.

That's wicked cool.

I'm just having a moment with that.

That is wicked cool.

Well,

I think it's important to,

So for myself,

I'm having this conversation with another fellow member of mine who's one of their siblings is sick and terminal.

And they're at a place where they've been arguing for years.

And I said,

You have to really just ask yourself.

I said,

If you feel like this person has hurt you to a point that if they do pass,

You won't care,

That's fine.

That's your own business and that's your right.

But if there's a part of you that feels like you would miss them,

This is the time to start doing some of that work.

And that you just,

As you said,

Not knowing necessarily what's going to be on the end of the phone when you call.

So I have no uncertainty around did I show up for my dad in a way that we both needed because I knew that it's something,

My dad was in his forties when I was born.

So I knew he was going to pass before my friend's parents did.

And when I thought about the idea of something happening to him,

I was like,

No,

I know that I would miss him.

And so I'm going to put that extra effort.

Most people teach you that,

Oh,

No,

It has to be the parent that does this,

Or this is what we learned growing up,

That it's our parents that have to be the adults all the time.

And I knew in this situation that I could be the adult,

I could be that person and that I could reframe what I expected from this relationship in a way that was mutually beneficial.

And so that's what I did.

That takes a lot of self-awareness for what you as a human can and are willing to bring to the table.

Yeah.

And I'm not sure that I will do it again the rest of my lifetime.

In this sense,

Yeah,

In this sense it made,

It's what I needed.

Like I definitely,

I would say that my father was my soulmate in the world.

Like he was someone that I understood his anxieties,

I understood his depressive moments,

I just understood some of the things that he experienced in the world.

Yeah.

And I don't think I've ever understood a person like that.

It's just such a phenomenally neat way to phrase that.

I've just never heard it phrased that way before,

Because I think all of us in some ways,

Grievers,

All of us in some ways humans,

Like forget even the grieving aspect,

But we're entering into all the time energetic contracts with people in the world and deciding like how much of myself do they get to see,

How much of me do they get to receive,

Vice versa and like all that that implies.

So to be able to step in and be like,

I'm holding here with unconditional love,

Despite and inclusive of the past is like mind blowing,

Especially now inclusive of your dad's death.

What's death?

Can we get into,

I want to talk about two things and they're very intersected for you.

I want to talk about what it's like to be black and grieving and to be trans and grieving and where those things come together,

How they're different from quote unquote white grief,

Which is all so much of the grief sphere is very white and very cis female,

Which I've picked up on the longer than I've been in this sphere.

And just,

It's something that you speak to so strongly in your book.

And so many of your blessings are geared towards trans people.

My favorite is dear trans person,

You have a right to heal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what I would say for myself with this book,

What I thought was really important is a lot of times as black trans folks,

We have as black folks and trans folks and as black trans folks specifically,

We're often taught to write from a perspective that the audience doesn't necessarily know what you're talking about or what your experience is.

And so this book kind of comes in a place in which I want it to be so that folks in my community can pick it up,

Read it and feel like they were listened to and thought about and centered in all the different kinds of ways.

And so I don't know that I can separate into like differences of black grief versus white grief,

Because I don't necessarily know what it is to grieve as a white person.

I do know what it is to be alive in a system of white supremacy in which people don't ever see your pain.

And so as black and trans people specifically that oftentimes we are dealing with folks who are committing suicide,

We're dealing with folks who are being killed,

We're dealing with folks who are attacked.

There was a woman who was just briefly attacked in broad daylight in Dallas,

Who is a black trans woman by a group of people.

And so it's that you're constantly in spaces in which you're antagonized.

And so even going back to,

For me,

Finishing up with my father as far as him passing and then having to negotiate with stuff about his service with people that see me as a sin or see me as unworthy just by my transness and the sheerness of my transness.

For me,

When I think about the role of black trans people,

And so there's a poem,

The first poem that's in the book,

Zona Rarity,

Which talks for me a lot about the divinity of black trans people and knowing that there's a legacy of transness within black and brown communities that was specifically targeted by colonizers,

By conquistadors,

Specifically because of the roles we played in healing.

I'm very clear when I share that kind of legacy and that information that to be a black trans person means to be a person who is a holder of ancestral wisdom and means to be someone who's a holder of healing and seeing yourself beyond what other people have already gained for you.

And so to me,

This book and just being able to talk about my grief and talk publicly about healing stuff for me is vital because I think that when we talk about the spirit,

When we talk about.

.

.

So regardless of what traditions people come from,

For those that identify any kind of spiritual space,

Any kind of faith or spiritual space,

The constant story that we're always told is we are having a physical experience as spiritual beings.

So we're having a physical experience as spiritual beings so that this physical experience is temporary for us as we move through spirit.

And I don't know any other group of people that exhibits being spirit more than trans people because someone can label something about your body,

Someone can label something about who they think is supposed to be in the world,

Someone could say how they perceive your physical self.

And for you as a trans person to say like,

Actually,

No,

Screw that.

That's had nothing to do with me.

That's about you.

I see myself,

My possibility beyond all that for myself coming from a Muslim and Christian household,

I think very much about Yusuf and Joseph of Genesis.

So Yusuf of the Quran,

Joseph of Genesis,

Who some theologians talk about as a potentially trans character in texts,

Which people want to hear me talk about those things at the whole another day of nerdy theology stuff.

But so this character who was so,

Who as is,

Especially if we think about this person as a gender nonconforming and trans being who was a survivor of domestic violence,

Who was sort of a survivor of sexual violence,

Who was a survivor of incarceration and all these different types of being,

But also throughout all of this,

Throughout all these different tribulations that are very trans experiences,

All the things I named were also very trans experiences that Yusuf could see themselves beyond what other people had ordained for them through their dreams and through their capacity to connect to the divine.

And so I think that for me is the piece around black transness and in particular is to be connected to a sense of possibility that most people don't have capacity for.

Most people have never questioned themselves in that kind of a way.

Most people have never thought about,

Like really thought about the spirit because the spirit for them is so connected to what they've been told about the body.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I think that is the difference is that I'm seeing myself as part of the legacy of ancestors,

Of healers,

Of dream builders,

And so I see my healing around my grief,

Helping other trans people heal,

Helping other black trans people heal and helping a legacy of erasure,

The erasure of black trans bodies to come back into black spaces as a whole.

So that's some of the hopes for my work and my capacity to want to talk about healing and grief.

Well,

And just from hearing you speak,

It sounds like you're saying,

I have plugged into a channel that has existed for a very long time.

And so the wisdom that's coming through is like,

It's way older than me.

But also here I am living it in these times and broadcasting it in these ways.

And like to me reading this book,

It's not even like so many other books in the grief sphere where it's like,

Hey,

I'm showing up.

It's like,

Hey,

I'm insisting on being here.

I have always been here,

But now I'm like,

I am insisting on showing up.

There's something that's like,

The word that's coming to me is like ancient about it.

And I think that's really fantastic because there's something,

There's not even like,

I mean,

Have you ever questioned your connection to divinity,

Spirituality,

Either as it relates to grief where there's like a crisis of faith as loss happens or just in general within the course of your life?

Because it seems like these practices,

Like prayer,

Like giving blessings,

Like being connected to these ancient spiritual channels are second nature for you.

You know,

I think because we are spirits having a physical experience,

No,

I think everyone has some sort of crisis.

I feel like if someone has never had a crisis of faith,

They're not human.

That's how to weed out the AI that's coming into the world.

Yeah,

Because it's just like,

You have to.

Because especially as we think about the loss of the things and people that help center us throughout the experience that we're having,

It's normal to question.

It's normal to,

So even with the poem I read earlier,

Like Heartbreak Is,

You know,

Part of the piece of,

So there's a line like,

If you only heard a sound once or if you only heard this once,

You know.

After my father's death,

I think I was expecting to show up in a very specific type of way in my life.

I was expecting to see a very clear type of vision.

I was expecting to see certain types of things and I didn't see that.

I did not see that.

I had this experience a few,

Probably almost a year ago,

I was speaking on a panel about transness and faith and someone came up to me and they were kind of,

You know when someone's kind of being really shifty and secretive,

You're like,

Oh,

Like what is this?

Which is never,

You know,

After,

So most of my work is,

You know,

Talking in front of people or performing in front of people.

And so I'm like,

Okay,

So this is going to be a weird conversation just now.

And so I'm kind of gearing up for this conversation.

And so this person says,

You know,

Like,

I've never,

I've never shared this with anyone.

I've never really seen this before,

But I just needed to tell you.

And I was like,

Okay.

This could be anything.

This could be anything.

I was like,

I'm a space alien or like,

You know,

Whatever.

I just robbed a bank.

Like,

I don't know what this is.

And so they were like,

You know,

When you talked about your father on that panel,

There was this light that appeared behind you and it was just,

And the way this person kept was describing this thing.

It was just like,

You know,

It's like,

I'm cheering.

I'm just thinking just,

Just cause it's,

You know,

I expected my father to show up in a way that was palatable specifically to me and the ways that I've always expected that stuff.

You know,

I think there's a certain way that we described those sorts of visions.

And the reality is,

Is I've,

I've known that he's been with me this entire time.

And so I've had doubts because as times,

Because he didn't show up in the ways that other people told me to expect,

You know,

Sort of jealous of people that will talk about like,

This person shows up in my dreams all the time,

Or this person does this.

It's like,

I'm pretty clear that my dad has always trusted,

Especially as an adult,

That my dad has trusted my wisdom and my intelligence,

Which I think is something that not everyone also has the peace of knowing from their parents.

Right.

But I'm very clear that my dad saw me as a smart person,

As a together person,

And all those things.

And so also know he's showing up in a way that he can be present with me.

And also in a way,

Because he also trusts me.

And so it's nice to even just hear those,

Those things from people because that's not the only time I've heard someone say something like that to me.

But yeah,

Having more experiences like that,

Definitely,

You know,

It,

It reinvigorates,

Right?

Your,

Your faith.

Yeah,

For sure.

And that's something that you and I were talking before we got on the mic about the concept of secondary losses,

The things that fall away in the aftermath of what I would refer to as like a biggie.

Yes.

And crisis of faith or loss of faith is one of the biggest ones that gets kind of shoved under the rug,

Partially because it's taboo,

Partially because everybody's is different.

And partially because there's so much shame surrounding like of all the times in the world now is when you don't believe in God,

Like you might want to pick a better time to stop believing.

I'm like,

No,

I think there is a better time to stop believing.

And that's why I love that line from Heartbreak is is like,

You're going to have to find some way to forgive God because that can be standing for the universe,

The divine order of things,

The way life works,

Being human,

You can,

You can substitute a lot of things for the word God,

It's like,

The three letter word God is not like what you put stock in.

But it's,

It's this concept of like,

At some point,

You have to reckon with your alive and the person that you love is not.

And so you have to negotiate how to continue to exist without their presence.

Yeah.

Yeah,

Which is something that I think for all of us,

There's at least like one or two people in our lives that,

You know,

If they weren't around,

We don't know who we'd even be,

Right.

So for me,

Even this,

This place like,

So my grand,

I spoke to Stephen very briefly about my grandmother,

Not my father's mother,

But my mother's mother,

Who had died right before my dad,

You know,

She lived 10 blocks away from me in,

In Philly.

And so moved up from Philly to New York within a month,

She had passed.

And then a few months afterwards,

My father passes,

You know,

And so in those things,

Like,

These are people I saw all the time and were relatively okay until I left,

You know,

So even thinking that you're going to have that me going up to New York,

Like from Philly was such a big transition in my life.

And I didn't that in and of itself,

I didn't realize how much my life was going to change in a few short months,

Right afterwards.

I didn't know how to be,

I,

You know,

When people talk to me about the,

You know,

The,

The tagline or started the book,

It's like,

And then I got fired,

You know,

People,

People that will see me work,

We were talking about tourist season before we got on the recording too.

And just like how this is such a productive time,

All that stuff.

I'm very much a workhorse.

I will say that.

And people will say like,

I don't know,

Mase,

I don't know how you got fired from a job before.

And I was like,

I know exactly how I was a basket case after my family died.

Right.

So I was,

I was crying all the time.

I couldn't do work.

You know,

I had no thoughts about what was even the purpose of living,

You know,

If these folks are dead,

Like why are you even here?

You know?

Oh yeah.

So yeah.

So I think that that kind of secondary piece and just loss of,

You talked about loss of identity and all these different things,

You know,

That,

That just natural,

It's natural and normal to experience those things.

I wonder in your world,

What does some type of happiness look like or how is that starting to flesh out for you since this triple,

Quadruple whammy of events in 2012?

Listen,

It was,

Yeah,

Cause that was so many things.

It was the move,

It was the death,

It was the firing,

It was,

Yeah,

I don't even go into all the different types of things.

So there's lots of stuff I left out.

I kept the book purposely short,

But so yeah,

So I was going through it in a lot of different directions.

So for me,

Happiness has been,

You know,

The blessing for me was coming into being a full time artist that when I was sitting there and I was,

You know,

I,

I remember specifically when I left my job and it was May 1st,

It was,

Yeah,

May 1st,

2013,

I would,

It was still one of the best days of my life.

I was like,

I hate this job.

I hated this job when,

Before all these bad things started happening,

I hated it from,

I just didn't want to work in a certain type of space.

I was working in higher ed at a very hoity toity institution.

And you know,

That kind of pretense that you had to have every day just wasn't who I am.

And so I remember calling my mother and saying like,

I'm just going to do full time art now and I'm going to just skip homes.

And she got very nervous.

She was like,

Are you moving in with me?

Like,

Are you going to make money?

Bah,

Bah,

Like what's going to happen?

But luckily none of those things happened and I wasn't planning on having to move in with her.

But yeah,

So happiness for me is I,

I think that there's a lot of ways in which black trans people get pushed out of,

Especially black and brown trans people get pushed out of nine to five work.

And again,

It goes back to living in systems that don't see us human on a regular day.

Like most people don't ask us like when you see us,

Like what did it take for me to catch a bus that day?

Right?

Did I get followed that day?

Did someone harass me?

What does it mean to be purposely humiliated by someone at the TSA,

At the DMV,

Right?

What happened when I was in line at the grocery store and someone gets focused on what I am or their child says something nasty to me,

Or if someone pushes me while I'm crossing the street.

There's lots of ways we get antagonism on a regular daily basis.

And then to have to work in heartless systems,

Makes that anxiety,

That depression,

That desire to be a recluse even more.

And so for myself,

It's reclaiming my history legacy through poetry,

Right?

Again,

In that spiritual space.

It's also right now I'm working on a project with a friend of mine called the Black Trans Prayer Book,

Which we're going into much more beyond faith and interfaith conversations about the divinity of black trans people.

So it's being able to create things like that.

It's being able to do workshops with people.

Like I just,

I want to be on a stage and spit poems and theology for the rest of my life until I die.

Like that's really what happiness is for me.

And because the grief part made me so incapable of doing the things I hated,

I started to move a little differently and start to think about,

You know,

Because I'm at this place where life is no longer meaningful,

Like it's no longer the only option,

What would I do if I was unafraid?

And the thing I would do if I was unafraid was to move out on faith and be this poet that I knew I was supposed to be.

Faith gave you this enormous perspective that like,

These are all the things I hate.

So like,

What are the things that I really,

Really love?

Yeah.

If there was even a possibility for you to love after it,

Right?

If there is even a possibility for you to love,

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Cause I know I will say for me,

Like when I think about,

I love poems when I love most people,

Like it's just,

It is,

It is what it is in my life.

And I know that I was fortunate enough to know that my father also loved that for me and was really supportive of that.

And so I know that for a lot,

And especially when we talk about black and black grief and this grieving as black folks in a system of white supremacy and all these different things is that,

You know,

I think one thing you had mentioned before was like,

You know,

What do you do when you have this much debt after,

After a funeral?

What do you do when you have all this?

It's like,

We come from systems that don't have access to wealth oftentimes,

And we don't talk about that.

We have really polite conversations about race,

But not really about what does that mean for the day-to-day life of people,

Especially when you're coming from communities as trans folks and as trans and queer black and brown folks,

They're even more stigmatized and more less likely to have access to work,

To credit,

To friends and family and stable housing,

Right?

To safety,

To paper,

All those things,

Right?

Again,

With the constant antagonism.

So for me,

Like doing this is,

Is,

I know that a lot of people that I come from didn't have the capacity to feel like they were allowed to dream,

Right?

That they were allowed to feel good.

That a lot of times when I was,

Even when I was having that conversation with my mother,

Who was like having a breakdown about me being a full-time artist,

My mother didn't have the opportunity for someone to ask her what would make you happy.

You can do that,

Right?

And so I'm stepping out on a dream she didn't even know she had.

So she was really nervous about that in that moment.

And now my mother is really excited about my work.

She'll come and she'll travel to come see me perform places.

She'll sit in the front row.

She'll want to hang out with people,

Talk to other people about my work because she,

Like my father,

Didn't have the opportunity to dream.

He did stuff just to make money and that's it and to feed people,

Right?

Yeah.

So even that feels like a service to community of saying that black folks have a right to dream and to fulfill those dreams and to manifest things and to,

To be unafraid,

Right?

And that as trans people,

Specifically as black trans people,

We have a right to safety.

And so doing this work has also given me a certain type of safety that I think other people who are dependent upon folks who don't understand their experiences for resources don't.

Yeah.

And that's so perfectly phrased an image of,

I think I saw a tweet from an Asian actress the other day.

She's like third generation Asian American.

And she's like,

It's now finally a privilege to be able to dream,

Like to,

To take hold of things that my parents and their parents could not even fathom taking hold of because they were busy just trying to survive.

She almost phrased it as like,

It's a privilege,

A luxury,

But then also a right to be able to dream.

And thank God it's coming in third generation.

But like,

For so many of us,

Especially as a white man,

I'm like,

Of course I get to do that.

So like,

Just even hearing you say that is such a different perspective.

And so to be shaky,

Have a shaky foundation in so many other ways and to be grieving on top of it is like,

Holy moly,

Yes,

Please pursue your art.

Yeah.

I think even it's to me,

Even so much of a necessity because for survival of people and communities,

You have to be able to remember history.

You have to remember you have to have motivation,

All these different things that I think art creates,

Right?

So in like for some of these pieces,

Like I'll even say in this book,

And especially I'm going back to the Zona Verity piece,

Because that's like,

I would say like took the most research of all the poems in that book.

But that short three minute history that people get from something like that is something that people need to know about like just our right to survive where,

You know,

That the things that they're experiencing are real and that we must remember who our ancestors and people were that that fought so hard for us to be there,

Right?

So all that stuff to me comes from art.