How We Fight For Our Lives, A Memoir by Saeed Jones

I’m adding “NECESSARY” to the badges this paperback wears on its cover. 

The New York Times calls it “DEVASTATING,” NPR says “RAW AND ELOQUENT,” and The New Yorker weighs in with “URGENT, IMMEDIATE.”  These kudos betray the artificial fragility and normative lens that any non-conforming person faces continually. 

I urge anyone who wants to congratulate an author or any person for their bravery, courage, or warrior stance against a culture trying to disappear them to turn towards themself instead and ask the very important question if they are, in fact, holding a weapon, too? What can be done to remove the boulders in the road that non-conforming people must so “bravely” scale? 

Between Queers, this book is a necessary cathartic cry with a friend who gets it. Comforting. Loving. A cool drink of water or a cup of hot tea. Being seen. 

For people in the margins, the implicit and incessant cultural messaging about the right way to be a man or the right way to be a woman, the right way to relate to others, all while denying the spectrum of gender and sexuality, always boiling down to either/or,  is a maddening gaslight. Always lit.

Literature like Jones’ takes a stab at extinguishing the gaslight that sucks valuable resources and energy from vibrant people with much to contribute. Jones shows examples of the lengths humans will go to find the belonging necessary to survival and shares examples of what can happen when one sacrifices one’s truth to belong. For many of us, these examples are not “devastating” so much as a report from what life looks like from over here.

If these stories can help illuminate the unity between humans for folks who aren’t there yet, great. In the meantime, Jones’ words are surely CPR for people suffocating under the very lethal impacts of social isolation created by culture’s commitment to normativities.