I was 20 the first time I visited my great-uncle in his garden, finding him sitting between foxgloves and dahlias, lavender and a bird bath. He was bathed in sunlight and, when he saw me appear, he gasped. So theatrical and dramatic that I wondered if he was faking his surprise. Then his eyes watered and he settled into a quiet, knowing smile: “Oh... I knew today was going to be a good day.”
We had recently reconnected at my grandpa’s funeral, where he had called me over to sit with him. It had been at least a decade since we’d seen each other. In the intervening years, I don’t remember when I’d learnt that he was queer, or even who told me, only that they hadn’t painted it as being a good thing. I never questioned why he wasn’t at family gatherings. Sitting down next to him at the wake, in the late amber light, he whispered in my ear, “Darling, do you know what we are?”
I shook my head. He smiled. “We are simpatico!” I laughed – I had no idea what he meant by this, but I remember feeling like I was being let in on a secret. Something only he and I knew.
I had only recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital, after experiencing the fourth psychotic episode I’d had since I was 17. I felt like I was on borrowed time; moving with the kind of frenetic energy of someone who feels like they’ve got nothing to lose. Having found myself drawn to painting during an art therapy session, I’d enrolled at an art school that was close to my great-uncle’s apartment. And so, on this day, I ended up in his garden – a place I would visit more times than I can count over the next decade, and a place that would, ultimately, save my life.
Much has been written about the role of community on trans becoming. As I understand it, community is not a set number of people, or a group you slot into. It’s something that we make and are made by through active participation. Community is a collective doing; an action that makes becoming feel within reach, feel possible. It is ongoing actions of relational care through the sharing of resources, skills and knowledge. And we can make it anywhere. Even in a garden, where I learnt the lessons that would make my transition possible.
Time
In hospital, just weeks before my first visit to the garden, I heard an elderly woman (who wore crop tops to show off her butterfly tramp stamp) describe her madness as being “out of time”. I immediately went to write it down, feeling like her words had captured so perfectly how madness was a disturbance of time more than it was a disturbance of emotion.
Madness took me out of time, disappearing me from my life for months on end. During my first visit to my great-uncle’s place, however, he took me on a tour of his garden, introducing me to his plants – who he described as his “company of ballet dancers”, who he was teaching how to dance in slow choreographies across decades. Through my many visits across the next ten years, I bore witness to this slow dance and came to understand why my great-uncle was forever moving his pot plants about the yard. Observing how he would rearrange them as the sun shifted position in the sky, I realised he was guiding his dancers towards the light.
Being in his garden taught me patience, since witnessing this slow dance required showing up regularly and consistently across time. In turn, this taught me not only how to be in community, but also how to be with myself through my own transition. Since no part of transitioning is instantaneous, coming to think of one’s gender transition as a slow dance across decades brought me great comfort. It ultimately allowed me to feel in time.
Decay
In her book, A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit quotes the writer Pat Barker, arguing that metamorphosis is a violent process: “the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly... No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”
When I came across these words, I held them in my mouth like a secret, tasting their metallic truth as I thought of the many hours I’d spent in the garden, learning about processes of decay and the violence of metamorphosis. My great-uncle was 97 when he died peacefully in his sleep; the man who created space for who I was just missing out on the procedure that helped me to be: my top surgery. A procedure that mutilated my body.
To mutilate is to inflict violent and disfiguring injury on, and I use this word (which is so often weaponised against us) to describe the shaping of my body, because by transforming and altering it with sleek metal tools, I was sliced open and taken apart, carving out space for a future in which I live.
Trust
Experiencing bouts of psychosis as a young person, I spent a lot of my twenties finding it incredibly difficult to trust myself. Madness is, for me at least, less about losing my mind, and more about losing my body. In other words, I was never thinking things that weren’t real, I was feeling things that were at odds with the reality everyone around me seemed to agree on. It was bodily instinct gone haywire, which made the early days of my transition incredibly difficult, since I didn’t know if I could trust my own desire to transition.
This all began to change the day I turned up in my great-uncle’s garden in suburban Australia, and I found him dressed as a Parisian. He told me he was commemorating the death of one of his favourite French painters. We soon found ourselves speaking at length about death, and it was in this conversation that I remember him telling me that he didn’t believe in God, or a heaven. He said, “My religion is trust. I don’t need to go up there to whoop whoop. This is my universe down here. It’s the only one I’ve got!”
Being with my great-uncle, I learnt how to sit and be still; to observe and to listen – to the world around me, but also to myself. I learnt trust, and in a world that is so often distrustful of trans testimonies, learning to trust oneself feels like a revolutionary act.
Simpatico
After several years of visiting my great-uncle, I came out to him, in his garden. He responded: “My darling, it is an honour and a privilege to love and to witness you.” Then he threw his head back and laughed. “Anyway, I’ve always known!”
It was at that moment that I understood what he’d been saying all along. Why he’d been telling me we were “simpatico” (meaning, on the same wavelength) all these years. Because it wasn’t simply that I was an artist like him, or even that I was queer, like him. He had known some deeper truth, about how we are bound to others across lifetimes, through shared dreams and memories.
Simpatico.
As in, our lives are not quite our own, because we love and care for one another. Like flowers dancing, leaning in unison. Always. Towards the light.
Dua’s Monthly Read for June is Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest – a novel exploring life in transition. Watch Dua’s interview with Kae here.
Dylin’s latest book, A Language Of Limbs, is available here. You can discover his artwork here.
