Conversation with Mx. Luisa Aparisi-França, featured aaduna contributor

Conversation

bill berry, jr.’s chat with Luisa Aparisi-França

aaduna 2023-2024 Volume 11 Issue 1

Finding Self.

Finding Home.

A continuous life-long exploration through words and photos

(Side comment: as an educator who rests in life-long learning experiences, I want to platform your journey from where you were to where you are now to where you might go next…I think childhood photos through childhood, teenage years, young adult and current can be dispersed throughout our conversation…I have not done that before. You will need to provide photos.)  

Aparisi-França

Prologue 

“…integrity. 

It is, by far, the thing I'm most concerned about. I often explore intersection and how mine are linked to privilege through the textual use of italics (when using other languages) and through structure. It's normally seen as othering when languages other than English are italicized in text, but I use it as a method of separation. Who I am and how I was raised is not something that is visible to most, and there's a clear disconnect in how I'm perceived, which I think is most accurately reflected, in my case, with the use of italics. 

“Naturally, it makes me feel as if I can't fully claim the language as something that is inherently a part of me. It is often seen as a "plus", an accessory to my identity, even though I don't see it that way. There's often a lot of anxiety or looseness in tone too, where a great deal of introspection and guilt can be found. I think of it as "fracking", where confidence or "wholeness" are chipped away at by altering structure and letting doubt creep in as an intuitive guide, rather than as a form of punishment or penance. It's often a difficult but cathartic process to exhume things, and to separate what is cultural, what is privilege, and what I would actually like to be in between the push and pull of all those things. And I think too, there is a subtle horror present, always, in exploring how to heal from a place of authenticity as someone with racial privilege, especially when you are given every option to look the other way. 

“I've got many thoughts too, about enmeshment and experiences with narcissism, and how these feed into more societal horror and an improved understanding of connection. As you can see, I'm always more than happy to talk about these things! 

“Mx…. thank you for using it. 

I use she and they based on how distant or close I feel to something. I'll use they when referring to something I've cut ties with, or people/things that no longer serve me. It is linked to self-protection as it is to identity. In moments of intense joy or hurt, I tend to use she, since it's more accessible and familiar. I'm she when taken off guard or delighted. They when trying to be matter-of-fact or impartial. 

“…my headshots. I have professional ones, but they are of me back when I was much more femme presenting—a version of myself I no longer recognize.

…through voice notes with friends, many of which I save and go back to. 

It's actually an incredibly important part of my writing process—although in a parallel sense. 

“I wouldn't dream of asking you to edit a response. It's always the first thing we instinctively say that rings truest, whether they're personal values or our own misconceptions of ourselves. It shatters performance, which I consider a personal debasement.  

I've learned a great deal from exploring instinctive speech. First words have always been my greatest teachers, and in all things I look for roots and balance. 

No matter what is said, the first word is more important than the last. It gives us choice to raze or defend, and it provides a genuine backbone from which to build up.  

“There's no sport quite like rethinking in action. It's the purest clue we have to work with, and the reason I'm always so eager and willing to speak. 

Let the games begin!”

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bill berry, jr. (bb): Where were you born and I wonder what your childhood was like… who were your parents and what did they do…do you have siblings and what was your relationship with them as a child and what is it now…describe your childhood, best friends and a childhood event that you have always kept dear to your heart. 

Luisa Aparisi-França (LAF): 

Painful, painful questions. They make me tear up, or it could just be that this past week has been stressful. I have trouble pinpointing the fulcrum of things, where something starts and something ends. There’s often a space in between the accumulation of experience and the compounding of feeling that reminds me of lightning and thunder, how you see a thing before you hear it. It’s why I myself am so insistent on documenting beginnings—I venerate them. 

To be able to pinpoint a beginning is to be able to dictate the flow of something. Who cares about the edges when you own the foundation? 

I was born in Miami, FL, on December 14th, 1995 at 3:14 in the afternoon, in the same room that my own brother would be born eight years and eight days later. 

I was a long baby, purple and bruised. One side of my jaw was shorter than the other. In the womb, the left side of my face was pressed against my mother’s pelvis, and so I was born a hellish looking thing, to the great consternation of my mother, who not two days later, took me to see a plastic surgeon.  

Naturally, he turned her down. Said my face would even out as the muscles exercised the bone while chewing. He was right, despite me having two distinctly different side profiles.

At the age of two, we moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, because my father, a journalist, had become the Latin American correspondent for the BBC. We stayed there until I was four, and for the rest of my life, I’ve had a slight Argentinian accent in Spanish that gives people pause, because they can’t quite place where I’m from. 

My mother was born in Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, on September 12th, 1960. She was one of five children. Her mother was a great beauty, and so was she. My grandmother was intelligent, spoke fluent Italian and was a fantastic cook. She was prevented from working as an accountant by my grandfather, a photographer. They later lost everything in a fire that was accidentally sparked by one of the children in my grandfather’s darkroom.  

Both of my grandparents were excommunicated from the Catholic church after my grandmother witnessed a priest sexually assaulting a child while making a surprise visit to deliver a holiday cake. They reported him, the story was covered up, and they were excommunicated. It created a huge rift. Strangely, to this day, my mother loves to walk inside of cathedrals. To sit in the pews. Something about community overwhelms and holds her. But as a family, we never saw it as a place we could be whole. 

On all sides, I think, immeasurable loss. She lost her sister (my lifeline) to suicide and homophobia, her mother to an allergic reaction, and her father (who was her first patient as a physical therapist) to stroke after stroke that wore him down like the filterless cigars he chainsmoked—pure tar. She grew up in a dark home, the shadow of a brother, but I’ll say no more, because the story isn’t wholly mine to tell—though it was passed down and is mine in a way too—all the things we try to carry for ourselves and others. 

My father, on the other hand, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 23rd, 1960. He never spent more than a week in the city. As soon as he was born, he moved to São Paulo with his family, and grew up there until the age of thirteen. The son of Spaniards, my grandparents fell in love when my grandmother went on a cruise and saw the vacuum salesman of her dreams. He looked like Yul Brynner and claimed he could sell a vacuum to damn near anyone. He even kept them in the trunk of his car.  

A weird flex, but hey, she fell for it. She not only ran away with him to South America while on the cruise—she dropped out of college. She had been attending a university in North Carolina, (I don’t remember which) and absolutely hated it. Said all they did was pray and wear long skirts. 

And yet, I never heard the end of it when I would come home at two in the morning while she was visiting.  

I believe she had left Spain to escape Franco’s regime, but I don't think it was the only factor. During Franco’s reign, the Catholic church sided with him, and so my father’s side of the family also bristled at religion—but I think, really, the alarm was rooted in the uniformity of faith. 

No one thing or person can feel or believe the exact same thing in the exact same way. Organic spirituality, on the other hand, my family and I feel deeply. Minus my father, who was always very intent on cutting himself off from intuition. But then again, he is a narcissist, and I think of no greater act of self-sabotage or false sense of protection, than the fictions that narcissism causes a wielder to wear. Glamour is a farce which leads to performance. Performance projects the expectation of reciprocal performance—and so the sickness can spread. That is why I am so against it. To perform is to inhabit a sick space. One of mental pus and indignation. A thing of anger and immolation. 

But I have empathy for the child, and wonder often who and what he would have been, had he not experienced so much at such a tender age. A shadow hurt him, too. All shadows are cowards—bastardized refractions of light. 

My father was also the one who found my grandfather after he shot himself. It was why he and his family moved to the US when he was thirteen. Apparently, the same thing had happened with my great-grandfather. Not sure if it was a gun, but when a body is dead, does it really matter? 

Whenever I think of that charonic lineage, I think of how fitting it is that we’re travelers. Never at home and never at rest. But the point of holding that knowledge is to break the cycle, to better understand, to disarm and to heal. 

When I think of my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, I think of horsehair worms. 

A horsehair worm, also known as the zombie parasite, infects crickets and then causes them to commit suicide by jumping into a body of water. The worm emerges to make its home in the water—and the fish lurking nearby consumes the cricket out of its element. 

I am trying to do my best to skim the surface with you. I do not like to plunge others into cold, heavy water. But I am also trying to give you all of the pieces, because you asked for the picture. 

Going back to what I had mentioned about narcissism and integrity, we cannot address ourselves without first digging up the past and holding up the pieces to the light to see what is us, what is them, what is broken, and what needs to be discarded. Cycles are fires that can’t be given oxygen, and in all things that have to do with whiteness, it is a responsibility to step out from behind the veneer of perfection that it pretends to be. 

I think that this and my woman-adjacent status are what caused the comfortable split that informs my gender identity. For me, being a woman has always been pure pleasure or pain. Being non-binary or seeing myself as woman-adjacent, gives me the opportunity to pause and rebuild. So much of white womanhood is about wielding the men around us. Being their extension. A fine, golden canary in a coal mine. 

In short, this long entry is for context, so that you better understand the root of any future answer I give. They’re all mostly lessons from people I have never met, who have nonetheless crawled inside, and so I introduce them first, when speaking of myself or my family. 

But with that dark chapter over, some light. 

My brother and I get along swimmingly. He is my absolute opposite. Large, strapping, and preferring the school of hard knocks to books or academia, he often misinterprets many things, in part because he is always in the present and cares little for context, to my great discontent. I love him deeply and am content to share the world with him in the concrete ways we both agree to experience things. 

We normally bond over jiu jitsu or strange, silly things he finds on the internet. Despite his poker face, my brother is hysterically funny. 

Once, when I parked the car, he whipped out his phone to show me a video of a woman on a reality TV show who had a visceral fear of olives. I can never guess what he’s thinking, but in terms of tongue-in-cheek humor, we are a match. 

Just the other day, I told him about how I was tutoring a student virtually, when his younger brother came barging in, panicked and wide-eyed. 

His voice cracking, the boy said: 

“Eythan, I–I ate a whole lemon,” as we all sat motionless, mouths open in shock. 

I could not stop thinking about the wax on the skin of lemons. But as it turned out, the small boy had a bit of a stutter, and he later amended the sentence to include the words lemon drop. It must’ve gotten lodged in his throat momentarily, and the little boy panicked. 

As for my childhood, it was strict, mainly because I was the first, and a girl. My father was very adamant that I learn Spanish properly. I was often assigned novels that were meant for adults, and for years, I had a negative association with the language. 

But despite his heavy handedness, my father taught me all the things that are the pillars of my professional and personal life today: language, money, and psychology. 

Portuguese I learned through music, stories, and my parents absent-minded conversations. It was only years later that I cared to learn the writing of it, but it’s similar to Spanish, with some key differences. 

It is my language of comfort and care. My language for home. 

My best friend was a girl named Daniela who lived in my building. She loved animals and took great care of them, which I've always taken as a good sign. She also addressed her parents by their first name, which both shocked and irritated me. On a weekly basis, her family and I would play Monopoly, and then we would binge watch That’s So Raven. 

Daniela also knew every line from Friends by heart, and I absolutely refused to watch it with her. I couldn’t stand the way she would mouth the words. But she was kind, and liked my quirky, aggressive energy. I think she thought it was quite funny, the constant urge I had to prove myself brave or strong or knowledgeable. 

When she first met me, she thought I was a boy, which upset me. Many people would comment on how androgynous I was as a child, and would ask if I was a boy or a girl. 

Now, of course, I couldn’t care less. 

I was pretty carefree as a kid. I daydreamed a lot. In kindergarten, when we had to write about journal prompts on the board, I would draw. I once walked up to my teacher and had her help me draw the leg on a dinosaur I was working on. Another time, we were asked to draw our dream home (why a six-year old would want to imagine a mortgage, I'm not sure), and I drew a haunted house, complete with bats and storm clouds. I wasn’t wholly aware of how much of a contrarian I was at the time, but I did know that it didn’t matter if I wrote about what I had eaten for breakfast. It simply mattered that I wasn’t bored. 

As I got a little older, anxiety and obsession for control set in side by side with high expectations. As a kid, I had whole shelves dedicated to knowing things about the world in order to better protect myself from things beyond my power. I knew the difference between reindeer and caribou, and that blue-ringed octopuses could kill you, despite their small size. I didn’t know why I felt the need to know these things, but at the time, control was important to me. Truth be told, control has always been important to me, and I pay close attention to how others engage in power dynamics or associate with them. 

People thought it was quite funny. A little girl in Miami sweating under eighty-something degree weather, worrying about the difference between elk and moose. I was always overprepared. It sometimes led to ridiculous instances. Once, I was so indecisive about what shirt to wear before going to play with my neighbor, that I put on every single shirt that I owned in succession and showed up on the neighbor's stoop looking like a smaller version of the Michelin Man. I was laughed out the door and went home fuming. It's quite funny now, and I'm happy to say that since then I've unlearned much of my perceived perfectionism, though it's still in the process of deconstruction. 

I now wear one shirt, but always take a sweater, because you just never know. 

I mostly read encyclopedic material from ages six to ten. I only truly fell in love with fiction when I began reading about Greek mythology at the age of eight and could see the stories attached to the words we use. 

Tantalus, Atlas, Narcissus, these all brought to life concepts I could not see before.

My other best friend at the time, Florencia, who I’m still friends with today, I met while playing near a low wall that divided my building from another. Her grandmother cleaned the building halls and she would tag along sometimes. She is fair and diplomatic. A good ballast to my intensity.  

She loves puns. Just the other day, at Goodwill, I bought her a mug that said “You’re Llamazing”, with a tiny llama in the center of the cup. 

And as for a favorite memory of mine—it would be making brigadeiro with my mom on a Saturday afternoon. We’d normally do this as a treat when we were done cleaning the house. I loved the scent of lemon in the house after the floors were cleaned. Marisa Monte would be playing, and we’d eat the brigadeiro hot from a glass bowl and in big spoonfuls. 

For reference, brigadeiro is a Brazilian sweet commonly sold as street food and made at birthday parties. It’s condensed milk mixed with cocoa powder that’s then rolled in chocolate sprinkles. You normally eat it cooled, but if you’re feeling lazy, you make it and eat it hot with a spoon. 

bb: I am thankful and graciously appreciative for your honesty and ability to share life experiences that are all too often held close to one’s heart, and rarely shared with others let alone a frecent addition in one’s life. You have given me so much to mull over so excuse my stance to ;ick and chose issues that require follow up. 

You mention whiteness and I think you shared that is how you perceive yourself. You are multi-ethnic, cross cultural, bi- if not multi-lingual and have a range of global living experiences. Many people of color would see you as a person of color. Is your sense of whiteness rooted in “privilege” and does that suggest that folks who see themselves as POC cannot be privileged, middle-class, upper middle-class, wealthy? 

Did being perceived as androgynous bother you as a child? And that begs the question, when did you start to see yourself as a “distinct” person who may not have been definable by a specific gender amongst others?  And did that realization prompt emotional, mental, or physical health issues for you? And as a professional, as you shifted from a more feminine outward appearance to how you present yourself to yourself (and the public) now, what were the reactions? 

Lastly, your sense of control, home, rest…are those qualities still embedded in you and if so, are you traveling widely or is Miami a secure home for now? 

LAF: 

My sense of whiteness is rooted in privilege, yes, but I think what you said about some people considering me a POC quite interesting. That has certainly been the case in the past, and I have corrected them. I am not POC and would feel like a fraud by identifying as such, because I’ve never experienced any racial discrimination. I’ve always been mildly surprised when people have thought to include me as a POC, because unlike other Latin people that do consider themselves to be white, they sometimes fall short when introduced to the concept of whiteness in the US. I cannot say that that has ever been the case for me, and I feel like it would be very offensive, even fetishizing, if I were to identify as anything other than how I am treated (in terms of privilege). 

In fact, the importance of learning Spanish and Portuguese—although colonial languages—was stressed not just because they were a cultural and familial bridge, but because I believe they were the “price” I had to pay for ethnic credibility. Proper code switching was seen as the ideal, and has often been the only way through which I’ve been able to legitimize myself culturally. Race is another matter separate from this, and I would never think to invoke that so lightly, seeing as how for the greater part of my life I have been oblivious to it. 

Being perceived as non-white was important to my father. Once, he caught sight of my demographics card at school, and locked eyes on the word white. He went down to the school and made a huge ruckus about it. I was confused and had no idea why it was so important to him, because I did identify as white. In the end, they didn’t change my race. 

It later became clear to me that he seemed intent on positioning himself as the underdog in any situation, whether the conversation be about race or gender or anything else. There was a clear sense of false martyrdom and something sinister akin to a savior complex—a thing which I unwittingly absorbed and also have had to parse from myself and isolate in the unlearning process. 

I refuse to identify as POC because I believe in my case it would accessorize a profound lived experience to which I cannot speak of. Other non-Latin people have, in the past, felt comfortable exuding caricatures of Latin people around me, as if they too could be Latin, despite them clearly not being so. I think there is a very sinister lack of boundaries when people cannot quantify race (not that we should, it’s bizarre and dehumanizing) that makes it so that they feel comfortable infiltrating its parameters and wrapping themselves in it, like a plaything. 

I don’t think it would be realistic, ethical or true to say that I am POC, precisely because it seems to soften the seriousness of racism if another white person can look at me and see me as some mirror access to a race/ethnicity that is not theirs. Worse too, because we would look so similarly. I would not like to be the reason that they find a caveat to misbehave within a space that they felt comfortable infiltrating through me. I suppose that I could get away with it, but I think in my case (I cannot speak for others), that it would be a cheap decision on my part. 

Were I darker like my mother, I might feel differently about it. It’s odd to think of her as non-white, and I can’t say that I fully do, given how my brother and I are perceived and never questioned in terms of whiteness, though certainly, in most other parts of the US, she is not considered white (I don’t think). I also think that latinidad is much more complex and layered than simply saying someone is X, Y or Z. I prefer to say that I have a parallel understanding of some things. Community, for one. Different ways of living, for another. But for all intents and purposes I have been socialized and treated as white my entire life, and I think it’s disrespectful to pretend that I have experienced life in other ways, when I have not. 

My mother was often approached and asked how much she charged for babysitting when we lived in Buenos Aires. The women always wanted to hire her because they had never seen a babysitter take such good care of someone else’s children. They never asked if I was her child. 

The perception of whiteness, to me, has often been touted as a sealing off of sorts. To what extent can you contain or segment your difference? To move invisibly is something I was granted for a great part of my life. Much of that invisibility remains today, though my gender expression makes me more visible in other ways. That is probably why it fluctuates constantly, though I have a strong preference that seems increasingly set in terms of permanence: I love to lean into the feminine by filtering it through the masculine. 

In all things, I edge into them through their peripheries. Tiny kaleidoscopes. It’s probably why I looked to feminine gay men as my idols and initial objects of fascination. I think it was easier for me too, to access sexuality in a space where I could be a listener and an observer. External support is something I excel at, and it made sexuality easier to explore—though the people I turned to were dark in thought. At the time, it reflected my misery, and I felt held in the pain and the strictness. To this day, there is something about a certain level of stress that is necessary in order for me to be able to inhabit my body. It normally manifests itself as a sense of responsibility, the drive to act out of a sense of self-preservation. Stillness is a new thing, and a difficult one for me to master. 

But looking at your questions again, a pause before I go back to the edges. I do not speak of my privilege in terms of wealth. I also don’t make an explicit correlation between race and wealth—though that is not to say that I don’t think correlations exist—especially when it comes to generational wealth. 

I think more and more we’re coming to terms with the fact that everyone is getting the short end of the stick financially in the US. It is now standard to have multiple streams of income, and as a whole it seems that our overall middle class has disappeared. 

Granted, there are POC who have been here for many more generations than I have, and there is no doubt in my mind that they could be more stable than my family and I financially. After all, I am only second generation, and the first to be born here. That said, I think there can be just as many hurdles that are slow to be removed, even for people who have settled down in a place for a long time. I think there are too many factors for me to make any bold claims, but I believe you can certainly be POC and wealthy—just look at Miami. It houses so many of Latin America’s elite. You run into people who are millionaires back home down here. I’ve met the daughter of one of the most well-known household brands in Argentina (a thermos brand), and once even found out that one of my bosses was the son of a past presidential candidate back in Haiti. 

It’s odd to feel so close to so much power and yet be barred from the access they have to this city. Miami is the backyard of foreign elites. Whether they’re buying investment properties or raising rents beyond reason (just a couple of weeks ago, my landlord, who is based in Colombia, tried to raise my rent by $200), there is a great deal of wealth in Miami. That is not to say that colorism isn’t prevalent here, or that the workplace requirements such as bilingualism don't pose financial obstacles to anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. 

Generally, I don't think of anyone really being wealthy in the US other than foreign investors who come here. 

There was a time that my family was more stable, back when I was younger. But the truth is, that my parents never truly had much financial wealth, especially now that they’ve been divorced for a number of years and we’ve all gone our separate ways in terms of living situations. 

I shared a room with my brother for eight years, despite our large age difference. Space matters a great deal to me. The space to move unobserved. Holding space for people. Being able to expand in celebration or retreat in safety. I have a huge attachment to it, and for years suffered from debilitating claustrophobia when I would get stuck inside of things: elevators, a bathroom where the door knob fell off into my hand, and once, stupidly—I locked myself inside of a dryer while playing hide and seek, forgetting that I couldn’t open it from the inside. 

The only privilege I ever talk about is either in regards to race or in regards to my home education, which I have to say was exceptional. Knowledge of the body for instance, what and how to feed it. Knowledge of languages and psychological multiplicities, that were hard lessons learned whose value I can now appreciate. 

I consider it a privilege to speak multiple languages, but not in the same way that I perceive whiteness to be a privilege. Whiteness is a responsibility to be careful with—it loves to disappear in the middle of an argument—to not hold itself accountable. Languages, on the other hand, are infinite joy—they trickle down and branch out in predestination—and while I believe in all possibilities with languages—the rule of the first word always rings true, and I often find that words that I let simply “happen” often create intense statements or images that I fully back. I have long stopped pretending to know where a poem is going—but I’ve learned to listen to them. 

As a matter of fact, I always write a poem for someone when I fall in love with them. It always happens early on, and looking back, every single one of them was on the money in terms of the structure of the relationship, its focus, and its longevity. Trauma bonds are no stranger to me, and I spend countless hours disentangling myself from others on paper in hopes that it will not happen again in person. 

Language is a privilege because it is an honor to be able to be a different self—to transmute. Language is also an invitation. In general, it interlocks, and I have a great deal of fun in prying out the pieces of others and myself, holding those up to the light and then joining them to see what new thing we birth. 

Even in this conversation, I have to admit—it’s not my go-to register. I looked at the word “ruckus” and almost erased it. Who is that? You or me? Or my perception of how I should match your energy and goodwill? 

Ruckus is a funny word. Reminds me of a peacock in a bar fight—don’t ask me why. It’s probably because I’m normally much more aggressive in speech and yet here I am, trying to not be so, speaking like someone other than myself, but wholly me—just in conversation with you. Normally, I like to barrel into the chest of things—to stun and disorient—which is where my love of the em dash comes from. 

But I don’t actively do this in conversation with others, only when trying to rid myself of something or give it structure. Instead, when speaking to others, I often mirror certain parts of them, the ones I like and wish to see more of. 

You seem to be intent and impish, two of my favorite things. Intention and humor are invitations that bring something to the table, and I normally reward it by writing around the person, so they can settle in. 

I write a lot about motherhood and parenting in my poems. Whether it’s reparenting myself or taking care of others, there is power in creating space and in being held. It solidifies a body and magnifies attention. How much more ourselves do we feel when we feel seen?

That was made clear to me as soon as I came out in July of 2020. It took a pandemic for me to get out of bed one morning, look myself in the mirror, and tell myself that it was time to stop carrying so much dead weight. 

When the pandemic started, I ended a long term relationship that I had been in since high school. I also had long hair and initially identified as bisexual. I looked, for all intents and purposes, very femme when I first started working during the pandemic. 

I quickly cut my hair shorter and shorter, making louder and louder changes in dress and appearance. My coworkers were fascinated and very supportive. People liked to see the reinvention. I think it was exciting for them, to know that we can be many things, always. 

It has been almost two years since I came out. The first year and a half were very painful. I experienced severe cognitive dissonance and early on after my break up with my first girlfriend, compulsory heterosexuality. I hope to never experience this again. Self-abandonment is an awful, awful thing, and I do not like to be a guest in my own house. 

Certainly, a lot of anxiety about wanting to have a set identity. At one point after I came out I thought I was trans—and who knows—later on I might be. But for now, I am comfortable in the world existing as a person who is woman-adjacent and I slip in and out of the feminine—but on my terms. Easing into my non-binary identity stripped me of false mannerisms. I never liked crossing my legs or tilting my head to listen intently. I always look very intense and stoic when people are speaking, but that’s just my face at rest, and I don’t see why I should change it (though I’m quick to do so during a job interview). I now have to remind myself that without certain mannerisms there is a disconnect in ritual with some who feel that they need it. 

There were glimpses of my being non-binary early on, though it was chastised. I think that’s why I felt embarrassed and ashamed when I was younger. I could tell that I did not “practice” gender in the way I was expected to, and it made me feel inadequate. I grew to believe the fiction of being a girl in the same way that I was bombarded with messages at an early age to make me believe that I was straight. 

As for my sense of control and home—that lives within me. Rest is something I still have not been able to give myself, and it’s the one thing that I still turn to others for. But I am in the process of reintegrating it back into myself and owning it too. 

For much of my life, there was a sense that I was living in a disembodied state. Living for other people or through them and I think the opposite was true too. Now that things have shifted in me back to their original, unperturbed state, my writer’s block (which was severe) has completely vanished. And (funny little side note), after coming out, I became ambidextrous, which for some reason, was immensely significant to me. 

I will say that at the moment I do not travel widely, but I’ll be moving to Atlanta, GA, this summer. 

Like everything else, I welcome the change. 

Publisher’s Note:

Mx. Luisa Aparisi-França conducted this conversation with me over several months that concluded sometime in the summer/fall of 2022. In October of that year, Luisa visited Auburn, NY while residing in Atlanta, GA. She read at aaduna’s annual gala word/fundraiser at The Carriage House Theater, Cayuga Museum of History and Art and captivated the audience. Prior to that reading, Luisa visited with and engaged young folks at Pride House housed in Westminster Presbyterian Church, as well as visiting with students in the Women’s History class and 1st Amendment 1st Voice participants at Auburn High School.

Currently, Mx. Aparisi-França lives in South Dublin, Ireland wrapping up the fall semester for a MA in Applied Linguistics. And interestingly, Luisa met Mae Jemison, the first Black woman astronaut to go into space at a local lecture in Ireland. Presently, Luisa cooks a lot; explores local museums and old estates; is befriending two Shih Tzus called Walter and Pickle, and just maybe, learning how to operate a stick shift so she can drive on her own.