TRANSCRIPT

 I'm R.K. Russell, and this is The Slowdown.

Living in Los Angeles, often you get used to the noise. You get used to the helicopters, the traffic, the people — maybe your own internal monologue if you're me. But this morning at 5:00 AM, it was so quiet. There were no cars really on the streets. I didn't play music, which I normally do. I'm obsessed with music. And my mind wasn't racing, which was nice. And there was just something very unexpected but welcomed about the silence.

I'm going through an injury right now, and I could feel it throbbing, but also loosening up as I was taking those first steps. I also, playing football, have a tirade of injuries, so my shoulder also loosening up, my bicep also warming up, feeling myself kind of wake, both mentally and physically.

In terms of my relationship with my mind and my body, it's often my mind pushing my self physically. That just comes from the world of athletics. And in the morning, especially this morning, when your mind is still kind of lulled in sleep, it allows your body to take the lead. So, you're doing things that feel good. You're stretching a little more. You're taking your time instead of the mind kind of communicating, "We need to be at the gym by 5:30. We need to be on the treadmill at this time. We need to be, we need to be, we need to be." You finally get to listen to what your body needs, or just let it do what it needs.

My body's most natural state or feeling is dance, which is crazy, because I'm also this very large man. Lifting and things, it feels good to be stronger. But there's something about music that when it comes on, my body just moves, and it's uninhibited. It's raw. Especially with my relationship in sports and athletics, when you play a contact sport, you're moving another person's body against its will, and there's this push and pull. But dance is just... Yeah, it just is.

A lot of my life was about sacrifice to get to a greater goal or outcome. Whether that was waking up early, working out, going to practice, staying after practice. To be a better football player, to make it to the NFL, to provide for my family. Or whether it was in relationship to my family. Being the man that didn't have to be told to do certain things but just did them. Taking out the trash, paying bills, making sure that everyone's protected and feels good. It was always rooted in identity. My identity as a football player, my identity as a son or a brother or a teammate.

When you start to want to live authentically as yourself, there are also sacrifices that must be made. A lot of those sacrifices are rooted in your relationships. How people view you, how people want you to give to them and love them and care for them. And that's hard because you want to love and care for a lot of these people, but to be your authentic self, you have to sacrifice some of how that shows up.

There's also this discipline in authenticity that is unlike anything else. It's rooted in a lot of deconstruction. Learning and forgiving and having mercy with yourself as you go through different phases of life, different phases of self. What feels authentic to you one day might not feel that way the next day.

I think we view fear a lot of the time as a warning of something negative, when fear is actually a thought, boundary, lesson, or mode of survival that comes from somewhere else. So you need to find where the fear is coming from and then see if it is aligned with who you are authentically or where you want to go, and then you push past it. Fear doesn't mean something is automatically negative.

Today's poem is a declaration of how the right language makes room for love and how love makes room for the right language.

They/Them
by Danez Smith

said short: i feel more like a stud. said
with some nuance: as if i came to
masculinity through the women’s gate,
as if a daughter who grew into her father
but not like trans, but like trans or
a transformation without catalyst
or smoke. or more like born
in the right body too early or born
at the wrong time, in the wrong language.
i remember Tommy said he (is he a they now?)
lived for how i put it in that one poem “more
tomboy than boy” and i think that’s what
language does—builds a room made for living.
and who have i followed further into myself?
Cam, Paula, Tommy, Fati, Andrea, Auntie George
or anyone who saved me from a body of silence
by just living their lives in the sun? and if
the soul is a table on which the body sits
crowded with the meat and the marrow
and the red, red wine, around me sit
too many ghosts to ever rest in isolation.
of course you should address me in the plural.
said short: i am everyone. i am everything.
said shorter: i am.

"They/Them" by Danez Smith. Used by permission of the poet.