Published October 22, 2024

Mostly, on my weekends, I’ve been sleeping, trying to get my sleep cycle closer to its “normal” version of abnormal after a disastrous attempt to switch to a different work schedule. One problem with sleeping so much is that it comes with more nightmares.

This one I just had was extra terrorizing.

I was driving in my hometown and realized I was leaving the city limits for a backroads area I seldom traveled. Deciding to turn around and go back, I came across a man I’d never seen before. Managing to escape a situation that seemed dangerous, I left him behind. Another man, one brandishing a handgun, stopped to interrogate me while pursuing the other man.

Somehow I escaped unharmed, though shaken. I ended up at a strip mall, where yet another man with a gun entered the store I was in and threatened to shoot people. He seemed much more enraged and unstable, and with luck I escaped and looked for another place to escape to. I ducked into a shop where I didn’t think he’d go, and I told a young woman to call 911.

Her phone didn’t have a keypad on it. It was closer to being a lump of hard clay than a working phone. This was not helpful. Would simply approximating pressing on 9 once and 1 twice work? What was even going on? My panic was obvious.

“There’s an area behind all the stores we can hide in,” she said. I followed her.

There were restrooms and a wide hall and small dividing walls, and we hid behind one of those. Somehow he found us, and he shot me in the right shoulder. Surprisingly, I was okay enough to try to fight him and knock the gun out of his hands.

I don’t remember how it ended.

I’ve got no desire to analyze this one. There’s no doubt I’ve been feeling chased, threatened and terrorized, as a trans woman and as a human being, for years. This one probably speaks pretty clearly to that.

Writing about these nightmares helps, but it helps only so much. There’s a limit to how much I’m allowed to say publicly about the very real dangers to my existence by merely existing. My day will come when I won’t shut up about all of that, but it’s not here yet. All I’ll say on that right now is that they are fucking with the wrong person.

Half my weekend is gone, and my body rest came with exhausting mental terror. It’s not a fair trade.

You can skip these

I try to write the headlines to these as their own content warning, so you won’t read them if they’d upset you.

Speaking of skipping, I skipped over a lot in the retelling. Some of it is just details. Some of it evaporated from memory. The rest, I assume, my mind won’t let me recall. I appreciate the semblance of protection, incomplete though it be.

Every day, every week, I feel hours behind. These are roadblocks, detours, setbacks, time and energy stealers that will never give back what they’ve taken from me. In total, I am days, weeks, months, years behind. I have a pile of lost years because of bad dreams.

If you don’t think that’s possible, consider yourself lucky. This is no way to live.

I hope you’re doing well, maybe even thriving.

Sending love.

Image of girl in bed afraid of monsters by Yuganov Konstantin via Shutterstock.