"I HAD A DREAM THAT I WAS FINE. I WASN’T CRAZY, I WAS DIVINE.”
LANA DEL REY - 'I CAN FLY'
her Actual LAW SCHOOL Statement, YOU Daily Wire IDIOts
(You know what they say about assuming??)
One unread email—one lost Environmental Studies degree. If I had calmed my anxiety and slowed down to read the email, I would have known to do one last task to fulfill my degree requirements. But the email went unread, the requirement went unfulfilled, and I was left with only a Visual Arts degree and shakier prospects for admission into my dream law school. This was such a small thing that to get my mother to understand why I made this mistake, to explain the unexplainable, proved a far more difficult task than simply chalking it up to irresponsibility.
Anxiety is as systemic as it is biological—and in the summer of 2017, when I came to terms with myself as a transgender Desi woman, the anxiety was insurmountable. I was in my dorm room at night, furiously making art to figure out what was happening with me and through the colors, it hit me: woman. And suddenly, everything about me made sense; and nothing else did. My overflowing inbox, all addressed to a Mr. , became a thing of nightmares. But to top it off, a white psychologist (Dr. Wrong, let’s say) misdiagnosed me with psychosis, a fate all-too-common for transgender women of color who dare seek out psychological evaluation. The fault lay with many systems in need of change: the transgender-rejecting questionnaires, the culturally-biased tests. But even more so, it lay in the small things: Dr. Wrong’s patronizing tone, her insistence upon calling me a guy. According to her, it was due to my twisted upbringing with two parents who had a (gasp!) arranged marriage that I refuse to believe I am free in America, that I fear police, and that I distrust the government—all marks of true psychosis, of course. She told me I was unfit for law school.
But another psychologist in the office (let’s call her Dr. Right) saw me differently. This black woman saw all my fears as grounded in reality. Dr. Right did not brush aside the cognitive intelligence and verbal fluency tests which placed me in the 99th percentile. What we both knew is that for women like us, this country is not the land of freedom. She revolted against Dr. Wrong and rediagnosed me with the holy trinity of anxiety, depression, and trauma. She helped me realize that if I want to not only survive but to thrive, I would have to pursue my own healing and fight for my truth every step of the way. She saw my work ethic and told me I could get into the nation’s top law schools.
Dr. Wrong’s misdiagnosis was just a flagrant example of what girls like me see in the eyes of people we meet every day. Those who, looking straight at us, despite all our qualifications and good-naturedness, question whether we even exist. This double-edged sword puts me in the constant position of having to prove my own existence and sanity, which is why I just did it once-and-for-all through my Visual Arts thesis. My thesis, a 26-page pseudo-legal manifesto that I used to establish my and my people’s reality first-and-foremost to myself, bears witness to the power of rhetoric, history, and writing to either make or break someone. I established how Dr. Wrong—not me—was out of touch with reality. I revealed how the written word can shut out subjective knowledge passed down through dynamic, spoken relationships, cherishing instead knowledge in laws and textbooks. By exploring language, I carved out a space for myself and my people. I came to understand the gaps in our legal system and realized the liberatory potential of my culture’s use of the spoken word. Using my thesis as a pick-axe, I climbed my way out of the cultural gap and saved my life.
I have since healed and fallen in love again with the written word. Now, I want to thrive. There is no person, no being, and no thing that I desire more than to heal, and I’ve got my eyes on the mountain peak that is the legal system. Some see my artistic and legal ambitions as antagonistic, a confusion I once had but now which only amuses me. To heal cultures, one must change systems; to change systems, one must heal cultures. My artistic and legal ambitions are in no way separate: both carve out spaces for my people. On the USA’s legal summit, small words affect billions. Oppression’s greatest impact lies not in grand acts of brutality but in its derailment of our futures by tripping us up over small things. Small words. Small details. And, yes, small emails. After being burned by the lost degree and with a newly-forged attention to small things, I found the need to transform society everywhere.
I will carve liberating words into this mountain peak. I want to organize my community and build a co-op on a farm upon which me and my girls, law briefs and seeds in hand, heal the land from its abusers and let the land heal us from ours. Our anxiety will exist as long as oppressive systems torment our minds, but my work with a prison garden program in Providence and my time on a homestead farm has shown me there exists no greater healer than Mother Nature. The first floor of our farmhouse will house a multi-practice law firm and an artist workshop, to ensure that our lawyers remember the necessity of cultural change and our artists realize the importance of systemic change (two things, I feel, each field lacks). Our farmhouse will be a spiritual and physical haven for those falling into cultural gaps. I seek [INSERT LAW SCHOOL NAME HERE] for its unparalleled desire and ability to bring about systemic change. Such is my dream, and I’ve climbed from too low, for too long, and traveled too far, to reach for anything less.
more (art)work
Visual(ish) Art
Legal(ish) (Art)Work
Literary (Crit)Work
This link will take you to an Instagram gallery of her work. A more formal online gallery of her work can be found here.
Literary (Crit)Work
Legal(ish) (Art)Work
Literary (Crit)Work
This link will take you to an old creative writing blog of hers - be forewarned, many of the links are broken! You may have to edit the url to replace "scwrite" with "badgaltranny".
Legal(ish) (Art)Work
Legal(ish) (Art)Work
Legal(ish) (Art)Work
This link will take you to her Twitter account which posts links to some of her academic(ish) publications.
selected publications
"The Pursuit of Hereafter" - California Institute of the Arts Open Assembly: Experiments in Aesthetics & Politics
"Common Sense Again: Addressed to the Women of America" - Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés
"Of Law and Men" - Northwestern Law Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; Symposium Issue on the topic of Hate Crimes
"Court is Drag: What Citizens United Revealed about Western Identity Politics" - Northwestern University Law Review (NULR of Note)
"The Monary of Materialism: Understanding White Fragility" - Hampton Institute
Blog posts on Medium, including: "On the (Double) Death of Modern America & Hopes for Its Future" ; "On the M/F Divide and the General (not +) Solution" ; and "On the Grooming of Children & (Actually) Preventing It".