Give Hell Some Heaven: A Lesson in How to Feed Your Ghosts

Text by Alex Deets with Hayes Young

“So, if the theory that these supernatural ghosts or whatever are feeding off of our energy, well, okay, they're feeding off my energy. That makes sense, I'm a southerner. If anything, I'm going to feed everybody. But what if I’m intentional about what I feed them? What if I sit down and look them in the face and ask, “What's going on? What are you hungry for?” –Hayes Young

Hayes and I first met many years ago—so long ago I’m unsure of the details, though I’m pretty sure our first conversation was about being little gay southerners in this weird world of the Pacific Northwest. Meeting other southern queer people on the West Coast always feels like sharing an invisible secret handshake. I like to think that handshake says, “Oh, you can handle me. You know that other side of me that had to adapt because it doesn’t fit in quite right out here.” Maybe I’m projecting, but I like sharing that unnamed awareness of the parts of ourselves we leave behind.

Before this conversation, Hayes and I hadn’t talked in a really long time. We’d both gone into our own forms of hiding these last few years, but then they reappeared on my social media, and I immediately noticed that they seemed more at ease in the pictures they shared. I saw a link to their newsletter and, after reading it, found out we’d been having some parallel experiences. We’re two trans leos raised in two southern states that touch (Tennessee and Mississippi), we’d both left behind our former careers in our forties to go back to school, we both lost our moms very suddenly at a time when our relationships with them were rocky, and it seemed that we shared an impulse to make public-facing work about grief. I’d been longing to talk to someone about the weirder ways grief shows up in the day-to-day, and I had a suspicion that Hayes would be a good person to really dig in with me and talk about this confusing territory of humans being humans with each other. What follows is a conversation where two southerners stop being ‘nice’ and start getting real.

Alex Deets: Hayes, how would you introduce yourself these days?

Hayes Young: I’d say I'm a queer and a homo, I’m a southerner always, no matter where I land. I'm a dancer, I'm a griever. I talk about being a griever, not necessarily as an identity I hold, but as it’s been a consistent part of my experience. I’m a person with unending curiosity, I'm a writer and now, as of this week, I’m a massage therapist!

Deets: (Clapping) Congratulations!

Hayes: Thank you!

Hayes: What a wild thing. The last nine months of my life have literally felt like five years.

Deets: I bet! And this is a big shift from what your life looked like the last time I saw you.

Hayes: Oh yeah, things are completely different. As you know, I spent a good fifteen to twenty years of my life working in advocacy jobs and volunteering and doing a lot of activism. I called myself a shit stirrer, an activator, the one who's like, “I'm just going to name the thing in the center of the room that we all seem to not want to talk about, but y’all, we're wasting time.” And you know, I did some cool shit!

Deets: You totally did!And that’s part of the reason I wanted you to share your trajectory from being an advocate and agitator to moving into this more private space of dancer, writer, bodyworker; I’m hoping you can talk about the impetus of that shift. I mean, yes, you definitely did some super impactful work in your activist and advocacy roles. And I assume that’s all still a huge part of you, but I wonder how much of a toll that all took?

Hayes: It took such an enormous toll on me. I can look back and see how incredibly isolated I was. For instance, I used to love going out to queer dance nights, and I stopped going completely because I'd be in line for my Diet Coke at the bar, and without fail, somebody would approach me with something like, “Can I ask you a question about this surgeon I have an appointment with?” It got to the point where I started carrying my business cards with me and literally had to write on them that I would answer phone calls between particular times of day. At some point, I started to feel resentful of my own community because I was like, ‘Why can't I just go out to a dance night like everybody else?’ So I started to feel the stickiness of that professional identity.

And then it got to the point that my work just kind of broke me, like I broke deep, beyond burnout. I was getting these cyclical illnesses, and I was just kind of angry a lot of the time. But as the pandemic was kicking off, I got pulled into some projects at my job where the focus was on secondary trauma stressors and vicarious trauma, and really centered on ideas of wellness. When that happened, I got this little spark like, “Oh, this lights me up!” and that gave me a second wind, which I hadn't felt in a while. That feeling really showed me that it was time to let go of the other work I’d been doing, so I ended up changing jobs. I had to let go of all these projects that I was so proud of building because I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was just so sick all the time

Then my mom died.  

And after she died, I had to take a step back and really look at her life.

She was seventy one, and it happened very suddenly. She’d only been retired for maybe two years before she died, and her body was just so worn out. She’d been a public school teacher – an amazing teacher who worked so hard and was so dedicated to her students. Many of her students came to her funeral because a lot of them had become teachers because of her. I was really proud of her, even though her work complicated our relationship. So when I stepped back, I saw that my mother did all of these amazing things in service of her students, but did she ever get a chance to live?

Did she want to travel?

Does she want to be a painter again?

Did she want to play the piano again?

And of course I ask myself, how much of that is my own projection?

But also how much can I learn from watching her work herself into twelve hour days, five or six days a week, constantly working. And that's the thing that hit me real hard in my chest and made me think, “Babe, you cannot repeat this. You don't have to do this, even though this is the way of life for a lot of people you came from.” 

She loved teaching but it really wore her down. Every summer she had off, she would sleep almost the entire summer. Those memories of her being so tired really gave me this perspective that I have to quit more than this job; I have to quit this life. I have to quit this pace.

Deets: This is so eerily similar to my mom and my life changes. She also died very suddenly at seventy. We had a very complicated relationship, but underneath it, I really just wanted her to have the peace and space to really live. She spent most of her life in survival mode, so a lot of my mom grief isn’t about her death, but about how she never got this happy ending where she got to live. So like you, when she died, I looked at my life and asked myself,” Where is your peace, your spaciousness, Deets?” And a month later, I quit my full-time supervisor job and applied to art school because whatever momentum I thought I had to keep working myself to death was just completely gone, and at that point, I felt like I was doing everyone at my job a disservice by pretending to show up.

Last fall, when I was starting school, I told my classmates that I feel like my mom comes to class with me every day. I think that feeling comes from this idea I have about how breaking patterns and changing legacies is maybe a kind of time travel—like, what if we could reach into the past, and the past could feel the changes as we break cycles in the present? It’s this nonlinear way that I want to try to live well in case she’s with me. And all of this closely relates to my research in grad school. Since grief decided it wants to be the focus of my projects, my research exists in a sort of ghostly realm. I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of ‘hauntology’—how the past haunts the present and the future and also the other way around. I’ve been thinking about it both individually and in a sort of resonance on a global scale. You write in your newsletter about ghosts and graveyards in a really interesting way, and I wonder if this is kind of a southern way of connecting to grief—through a haunting presence that resembles the grief rituals that are a part of southern culture?

Hayes: Yes, for sure. What you're talking about really connects to how I got started writing my grief newsletter. The essay you're talking about, the day that I wrote that, I had a feeling like a lightning bolt striking through my whole body. I was fighting with this feeling like I was trying to tell these ghosts to fuck off. I was struggling with them, wondering why they were around. Why were they reminding me of all this stuff that hurt? And that lightning bolt was like, “Stop trying to chase them away. What if you just let them be? And not only that, invite them to the table.” You know how, in the south, you get a divorce and then somebody's trying to bring you a casserole? Like if somebody's in the hospital, someone’s gonna bring that casserole. Somebody died, you got 12 casseroles. But it's not just the casserole, because the food is just a means to an end. The casserole is a way to say, “I'm worried about you, or I care about you, or like, I don't actually know what to do in this situation or about any of this. But I do know that I want to put my eyes on you. And I want to feed you… aggressively.” So, if the theory that these supernatural ghosts or whatever are feeding off of our energy, well, okay, they're feeding off my energy. That makes sense, I'm a southerner. If anything, I'm going to feed everybody. But what if I’m intentional about what I feed them? What if I sit down and look them in the face and ask, “What's going on? What are you hungry for?”

But back to your question, in the last year, I've been writing a lot more about avoidance. Like avoidance on both these individual and global levels. I noticed that what I was experiencing with some of my losses, it felt like it was happening everywhere. I was trying to process my career change after doing activist work for so long, and really had no idea how to grieve leaving that behind. I was also navigating divorce and one of my dogs died, I was selling a house, and dealing with illness. I discovered that I couldn’t find many other people who wanted to talk about all of that, or had an easy time talking about it. It was actually other southerners that I’ve had the easiest time connecting to in this way. But that unease around talking about it, it feels like this really prevalent culture of avoidance, which also feels very linked to whiteness. That fear-based reaction or sort of closing off from each other and from ourselves. Or it’s a way of avoiding what’s hard, what’s a ‘bad’ feeling, all these things that are based on a value set of ‘appropriate’ ways to be with each other. But it’s keeping us in a state of disconnection. And it’s almost always intimately tied up with shame. I’m not really into this era of human history we're in, where people joke about wanting to be seen, but not perceived. I'm over here like, “Bitch, get out of my face or get into it!” Like, what are we even doing? Come closer. I want to come closer to you.

​Deets: I see what you mean, if you’re not gonna look at the thing, the thing is gonna haunt you.

Hayes: And if we go one level deeper, it goes back to our relationship with control. You know, like this feeling like I need to control an outcome, the need to know, or the need to be right about things. But what I’m really interested in is what happens when you let go. When we admit we can’t control things? What if we don't need to?

It was out of my control for my mother to die suddenly, and to die when we were not on speaking terms. I see this same sort of control show up in how people react to grief. People are either apologetic or they try really hard to pivot away from the subject. I see them get visibly very uncomfortable, and I have this moment now where I say, “You know, you don't have to do anything with this information. You don't have to solve this for me. I'm like five years in on this journey, and I don't know what to do most of the time. So I don't think you're going to know how to deal with this either.”

Deets: That’s so real. I think about control in this way we use the word ‘healing.’ Like, “I have to master my struggle, I have to get to the finish line and be perfectly healed.” I listened to a podcast recently where Eli Clare and Dean Spade are talking about this idea of living with a broken heart. Eli Clare is saying that instead of trying to ‘heal’ it away, what if we treat it like a long-haul condition that’s always present. Kind of like how you’re inviting the ghost to dinner.

Hayes: You know, as I’ve been working toward becoming a massage therapist, I can think back and see how impactful body workers have been, those who have helped me choose to be in my body when it's in so much pain, while I experience this feeling of loss that is older than I am. And now I’m thinking about that relationship in my own practice.

Some clients with chronic pain come in for a massage, because it is part of their maintenance. Because chronic means chronic, they know it's not going to be fixed by a massage.So this is a part of their holding steady. Some of these folks have no designs on getting better. This idea of “getting better” isn’t even factored in. So much of what they're coming in for is so they can go about their day, or maybe they'll sleep a little bit better the next night. But this idea of healing, of chasing away, that's part of what I was talking about with avoidance.

Deets: What you were saying about coming closer, it makes me think about a quote from your newsletter. You wrote,

“We must leave the stagnation of disconnection, individualism, and isolation. Our liberation depends on it.”  I mean, that’s really it, isn’t it? Like, all of this talk about community and connection, it’s no joke! I think from seeing how isolated so many people are when I’m doing peer support work, I can’t help but feel a sense of deep disconnection on a collective scale. Like, I’m hosting a fun karaoke thing for a project, and it’s meant to be kind of ridiculous, but it’s also very serious. This isn’t about us figuring out how to cry in public or whatever, because that's not even what I want. Honestly, that's too easy. I want to know what happens when we take the masks off and see the whole weird constellation of stuff happening just under the surface. We gotta figure out how to be with each other so we can work together. As you said earlier, we’re wasting time.

Hayes: Exactly. We can get so stuck to our internal worlds that we forget that there's this whole world outside of us because we're so busy trying to ‘heal’. And I'm over here like, “Can you and I just have dinner? Can you tell me about it? Do you want your inner world to come out? Just tell me about it, and also here's a casserole.”

Deets: I think we could all use some practice doing this. That’s a big component of the work I’m making right now. It’s an experiment in connecting to each other through difficulty, but within the container of a soft entry point, like bringing over a casserole, or I’ve made these gentle prompts that are meant to feel like little invitations.

So, these ‘soft invitations’ into grief I’m making, right now the entry point is songs. I’m asking the public to share with me their songs that connect them to a feeling of loss. When I was reading your newsletter, I noticed that you're doing something very similar. You start by sharing a song and then move into your essay on grief, and the two feel really bound up with one another. Then, again in your dance videos, you are very much in a state of intimacy with a song. Can you talk about your relationship between your art practice and music?

Hayes: One of the newsletters I wrote pretty early on was about this experience I had at a Ross Dress for Less. I think I was getting some water shoes to go to the river or something stupid like that. It was not long after my mom died and I was standing in line to check out and this dumb Michael McDonald song comes on. That goofy song that goes, I Keep Forgetting We’re Not in Love Anymore, and heard the opening beats and I just started sobbing and the cashier's like, “How's your day going?” And I just blurted out, “I forgot my mom died.” But, you know, I was just there trying to pay for my water shoes. It was one of the first times that I was just so unabashedly myself in public with my grief and I was really moved by how she responded to me. She didn't try too hard to make me feel better. She didn't try to solve it. She didn’t seem uncomfortable. She just looked at me and said, “Wow, that must be hard. I hope the rest of your day is okay.” It was moments like that that grew the newsletter and then the newsletter led to my dance practice.

When I was recovering from a deep illness and on my cane a lot, I was trying to build up my endurance and I was just working on being upright. I really loved dancing when I was little and something in me was like, “What if you tried dancing again? Just put your headphones on, listen to music, and if the mood strikes you, get up and see what happens. If the mood is not striking, don't get up.” In some of my older videos, I'm just dancing and then it looks like I spontaneously burst into tears, but that’s where my internal world and my external world finally matched up. I think that this is sort of that space you're wanting to work with in your projects, where the internal and external worlds are allowed to meet?

Deets: Yes, exactly. That’s the kind of space I am hoping people can access with my community karaoke project. I explained it once as the songs that come on in the grocery store and for some reason now you’re crying in the chip aisle. That leads me to my last question: If you were going to submit a song to this project, what song do you think you’d choose? 

Hayes: Oh, I know exactly what song I would put in. It’s the song from my first newsletter. So, one of the things that’s happened in the last few years is I came around hard to my country boy roots and I am deep in it. It’s really helped me connect to that part of myself that shows up when I’m talking with my mammaw, where all of the parts of my queerness and transness are more in the background, and this might sound controversial, but I realized I don’t need her to understand my queerness and transness because we connect on these other things like southern rituals and these parts of me that a lot of my queer and trans friends can’t understand. 

But anyway, there is this country musician, Michael Hardy but goes by the name Hardy, and he looks like this smug motherfucker. His music is kind of ‘good old boy’ coded. He grew up in Mississippi, in one of the same counties I grew up in, Neshoba County. So even though his vibe is the kind of guy where we’re supposed to hate each other, I really get his songs and honestly, I think we could even maybe be buddies. So I would choose his song he wrote about his best friend dying. It’s called Give Heaven Some Hell.

————————————

Alex Deets (They/Them) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. Lately, they’ve been engaging with the Portland community as a peer support counselor, creating spaces for those who have disabilities and mental health struggles to work creatively to move out of isolation and toward connectedness. Their current work navigates creative entry points for building community through hard times. 

Hayes Young (They/Them) is a Mississippian living, laughing, and loving in Portland. They spent a lifetime shepherding in trans health access and have recently pivoted to massage therapy and somatic grief stewardship. Hayes writes about grief, loss, shame, fear, and connection through music themed newsletters over at Light Curious.