Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption

By Tucker Lieberman

This book will make you trans.

It is an atheist Torah interpretation with a new spin on the deaths of Nadav and Avihu.

It is a memoir of suicidal hallucination and psychiatric medications.

It is a poem. About butterflies.

Everyone who reads it becomes trans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glyph Torrent
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781732906020

Tucker Lieberman

Tucker Lieberman-haunted by his acquaintance with the late author of "Eunuchry"-wrote the ghost story "Exit Interview" for DefCon One's "imaginary friends" fiction anthology, "I Didn't Break the Lamp." At Brown University, he received the Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction and a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He earned a postgraduate degree in journalism from Boston University. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, he lives with the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano in Bogotá, Colombia. He is turning forty.

Book preview

bad fire

A Memoir of Disruption

Tucker Lieberman

copyright

Copyright © 2020 Glyph Torrent (Bogotá, Colombia)

Cover design by Tucker Lieberman. All interior art also by Tucker Lieberman, unless it is obviously by someone else.

Fonts: The cover has the title in lowercase Plakat-Fraktur and the author name in Impact Label. In the paperback version, the text of the book is Goudy Old Style with headings and drop-caps in lowercase HumboldtFraktur, but in the ebook version, your mileage may vary.

Author photo courtesy Alexandria Mauck Photography www.alexandriamauck.com

This is a work of nonfiction. Why would I make this up. I would have made up something else.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First eBook edition: December 28, 2018

Second eBook edition: January 1, 2021

ISBN-13: 978-1-7329060-2-0

Engraving by Gerard Jollain. The Death of Nadab and Abihu. From La Saincte Bible: Contenant le Vieil et le Nouveau Testament (Enrichie de plusieurs belles figures), 1670.

introduction and acknowledgments

Disaster doesn’t look like yelling and waving. In a crisis, we never feel whatever we imagined we’d feel, either.

Bad Fire is a memoir of anxiety, suicidal hallucination, acid reflux, unintentional weight loss, and medication. Those who find these topics stressful may still benefit from exploring them, and, with that in mind, I extend to those readers this gentle warning and invitation.

I interpret the Biblical story of Nadav and Avihu from a Jewish-and-atheist perspective, reaching an unorthodox conclusion.

I discuss capitalist perspectives on how people show up at the office.

Taking the caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor for life change, especially as it is often applied to gender transition, this narrative lets that insect go a little wild.

This is a story about how a small collapse looks from the outside and how it feels on the inside.

Mostly, it is about letting go and letting become.

In Bad Fire, you may read my partial rejection of the term illness as it applies to a specific situation I experienced. At the times when I reject that word, I may need another. Perhaps I suffered from the condition of too muchness, as Rachel Vorona Cote names the emotionality and self-determination with which women defy prudish and hierarchical constraints.¹ The social judgment implied in the too much is what may make us feel or seem ill. You, reader, can decide.

This is my limit text, to use Lance Olsen’s phrase: an example of using a disturbance to test the limits of storytelling so that we, together, can never quite think of it in the same way again.² What is the it: the disturbance or the storytelling? To answer: I hope that both my disturbance and, more broadly, storytelling itself are reconceptualized, and I hope that even the it is reconceptualized as disturbance-and-storytelling. It is the event that intrinsically gives rise to memoir-making and is reexperienced through the resulting story.

As a bonus: Reading this book will make you trans. You have come to the right place. Even if you do not want to be made trans, you are in the right place, as the right place may not be about what you want.

On Illness

After several years of working on this story, I discovered that many of my approaches had been discussed by Arthur Frank in The Wounded Storyteller.

When overwhelming illness strikes, Frank says, we live immersed in chaos stories that aren’t yet proper stories. In chaos, we hardly even have a self; pain obliterates us. We are in a process of unmaking the world (there, he is using Elaine Scarry’s phrase). Only much later the voice of chaos can be identified and a story reconstructed. The narrative we make of an illness will depend on our social context and is related to three other kinds of story we can tell about ourselves: spiritual autobiographies, stories of becoming a man or a woman and what that gender identity involves, and finally survivor stories of inflicted traumas... We have to tell these stories, if not to patch holes and correct course, then at least to map ourselves back into the world and relearn how to navigate on a new journey. Frank cautions: Chaos is never transcended but must be accepted, and a caring audience must realize that chaos always remains the story’s background and will continually fade into the foreground.

An illness narrative probably won’t try to suggest who has suffered more nor will it assign blame. Suffering isn’t a contest nor a hierarchy. Ideally, an illness narrative connects us to each other and asks if we are caring for ourselves and others. We might note that what we say about our bodies comes through our bodies — so a special kind of listening, too, is needed from our audience, Frank says.³

In Bad Fire, I express ambivalence about the word illness as applied to my situation, but the framework of the illness narrative helps illuminate what this book hopes to accomplish.

On Running at Night

This is a memoir about running at night. In that regard, it is also a memoir of being white.

Kiese Laymon also ran at night. He wrote about it in his 2018 memoir Heavy. Someone who cared about Laymon begged him to cope with his work-related stress in a way that doesn’t involve the possibility of you getting shot…You are a big black man. Stop running at night.⁴

I ran at night because I was mentally ill. Because I am white, certain situations — related to running at night, as well to anything and everything else in my life — have played out differently for me than they might have for someone who is not white.

White Americans are less likely than Black Americans to be shot while jogging (or, generally, while existing) and, strictly related to that, when I ran around Boston at night, my sense of security was rational. I wasn’t deliberately comparing my risk to some other hypothetical person’s risk; I just wasn’t at much risk, regardless of whether I bothered to think about how or why.

That same sense of security left space for me to express my illness floridly. I admitted all my demons to myself because I found no reason not to exercise them. Running at night may have magnified the illness even as I felt I was fighting it. I was indulging the fantasy. Being on the street at night gave more rein to my mental illness. My behavior, the running at night, arguably wasn’t motivated by real concerns and was minimally grounded in reality. The physical exercise through which I tried to stanch mental pain might also have entertained and prolonged my pain.

White supremacy teaches people to assume that whiteness — that is, the construct of whiteness, and anything that flows from it — is the best way to be. We have to let go of that assumption. We have to actively drop it. When we drop it, we can no longer assume that a mental illness is better (less threatening to oneself or others, more easily handled, more rule-abiding, more artistically generative, or morally superior) just because a white person is experiencing it.

Instead of thinking in terms of better or worse, we can start by observing how people’s mental illnesses are different. That knowledge will allow us to begin to address our emotional and physical states and life situations while recognizing all our particularities, whatever race each of us may be.

Racism makes us all sick, though white people usually find it hard to imagine how it hurts them. Here, I am suggesting one way in which racism hurts white people. If a white person can have a flavor of mental illness that is influenced by their whiteness, their whiteness is hurting them in that particular way. It is hurting them all the more if they don’t spot what’s happening or if they are in denial about it.

Also — I mentioned this earlier, and I say it again because it is very important — suffering isn’t a contest. There is nothing to be gained from making a hierarchy of oppression and pain (especially when people from the more privileged group put themselves at the top of that hierarchy to center themselves in a discussion). To more fully understand the collective pain of racism, we have to try to perceive its effect on everyone, especially on others. White people like myself ought to try to perceive how we ourselves are hurt by racist patterns in our societies (as these insights will be revealing of things we need to know), but in doing so we cannot subtract one iota from the significance of how racism hurts people who are not white, because racism is a collective problem and white people’s pain is not at the center of it.

We are responsible for being antiracist all the time. We ought to start today. If we are ready to fix our own lives, and if we are ready to contribute to the wholeness of the world, we can start by dismantling whiteness. Antiracism is, among other things, a way to prevent and prepare for problems. When crisis strikes — whether it’s our own emergency or someone else’s — we will need good tools in our hands. Being antiracist right now will prepare us to meet crises in a better way.

This moral effort is a kind of work, and it’s something we have to learn how to do. White people especially need to learn how to do this. Most white people still need to learn why they should do this. Whiteness contributes to all kinds of problems.

In Judaism, the repair of the world is called tikkun olam. The work does not end. But if we do the work today, we can hope to see results in our lifetimes. We can hope to enjoy more non-racist outcomes in our collective future. We might avert mental crises: perhaps those of others, or perhaps our own.

Social justice is not a pursuit to diminish anyone’s well-being. It is a pursuit of everyone’s collective restoration. One can’t begin the work with a selfish agenda. One can hope for everyone to stand a better chance at a healthier life. We can’t do it if we are focused only on ourselves. We can do it if we are talking to each other.

Antiracism can’t be practiced in a vacuum. It needs to be part of other projects. That is why, although this book is not primarily about race, I have put a statement about antiracism at the beginning. When you read this memoir, you may notice how it — it being this set of events I have selected, or my retelling of those events, or your reading of them — is influenced by race. You may generate new ideas about what you can do for collective restoration.

A lot of this book explores natural unfoldings. Change that happens on its own gives us the opportunity to learn to wait rather than push. But there are, of course, situations in which it is better to push. That is an idea you may want to weigh in the balance.

You already have all the permission you need, but I will tell you that you have my permission, too, if that is the spark you need to flex your wings.

You Need to Know This Author’s Gender

An author’s gender can be of varying importance to readers. It can depend on the reader’s interests, and it can also depend on the book’s content. To understand this book, readers must understand my gender, so I have to take a moment to explain it to you.

I also need to explain my language choices. My gender is boring, but not so boring that the world hands me obvious words for it. The language that privately makes most sense to me has fallen out of favor with others, while the language that is most in vogue today feels confusing, inapplicable, and irritating to me. I toggle my terminology in this book: sometimes I use one term, sometimes another. There is always a reason for my choice. I want to explain what I mean when I use gendered language so that you can better understand my points in this book.

Remember that this book will make you trans, so we have to permit the magic to work.

I was born female. I was obliviously uninterested in gender until I reached adolescence, at which point I