Beep Beep: A Car Fundraiser for LL

BEEP BEEP, WHO GOT THE COINS TO MY JEEP?
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UPDATE : March 2019

Beautiful Community!

Thank you for sharing this fundraiser and donating! We haven’t given an update yet because as soon as we started posting a queer angel appeared. One morning right after therapy I got a text from a friend who is part of Seattle’s Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network (look them up on IG @twocsolidaritynetwork and donate to them!). They asked if I wanted the car that was donated to them. I couldn’t believe it. I SAID YES! As of Valentine’s Day I am the new owner of a sweet little ride. Registering a car and fixing up a car is expensive. We’ve raised $2,300 and looking to raise another $1,500 so we can pay for some repairs, pay for 12 months of insurance and a little put aside as a fund ready if I need to fix the car in the future.

In April I’ll be hosting a weekly online auction to raise the additional $1,500. I have DOPE gifts to auction off from Leather Coven (@leathercoven), Stitch Prism (@stitchprism), Dandy Dogwalker (@dandydogwalker) and Dori Midnight (dorimidnight.com)  just to name a few! Incredible art from non-binary & trans femme artists Lourdez Velasco and Grey Ellis! We hope you’ll help spread the word or bid on things you like!

xxoo,
LL
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In June of 2017 I found out I have kidney failure.  Kidneys help you get rid of the toxins. And it’s not an accident that Black folks and African descendant people are the highest likely to have kidney failure and in desperate need of a new kidney. As a trans person I deal with the stress of the world not making space for me to be me and those toxins build up. When the kidneys don’t work it makes me tired and incredibly sick. In order to get rid of the toxins in my body that kidneys usually take care of I have to have my fluids and blood cleaned 3 times a week for four hours a day in a clinic aka dialysis.

My schedule is filled with hospital visits for surgeries, doctors appointments, and  dialysis. A car would make traveling to these life-saving appointments much easier and waaay less taxing on my physical and mental health. Having a car would dramatically improve my quality of life while I am gearing up to fight for a kidney transplant. A car is an access tool for many disabled folks: it would help me get from point A to B to C to D without being exposed to scents and other environmental fumes that are terrible for me and for anyone really. I’m realizing it would take 10+ years for me to save for this access tool on my own because I don’t make much.

My body can’t wait that long. That’s why I need your help!

At the bottom is the cost breakdown of what I’m fundraising for. Keep reading to understand more about who I  am (because I’m a writer and that’s how I express myself best) and why this fundraiser will help me. I’m trying to raise $21K by February 1, 2019.

In 2009 I survived endometrial cancer. I began to move slower; I need to move slower and take more breaks than I ever have. My body is no longer able to cycle through grief, hold it well without interrupting my day to day activity like it used to. In the social work world (and in the lives of many femmes) we call this vicarious trauma and because we see the volume of pain and need, we think taking breaks is a privilege and a luxury. It is not. It is essential to our very survival, especially as femmes who are the backbone of the world.

If we don’t make space to process grief and take space to center spirit in an intentional way you end up with failing kidneys, at least for me that’s what happened.

Stress kills.

I laughed at a doctor once and thought it was a scare tactic but he was dead serious. I was not ready to listen. Cuz I’m LL. I’m a superhero. And my community holds me well. When I let them. And I’m just starting to unpack what it means to ask for help repeatedly and often which is so fucking vulnerable. But I am in a position where I have no other choice but to ask. I also know that oppression and internalized ableism (that has plagued me since before I started identifying as disabled...so like since I was 5 years old) is the other reason I have no choice but to ask for help.  A brilliant midwife in Seattle was like “you can’t decide no for us. You better fucking keep asking and we’ll tell you when we can and when we can’t. You don’t get to decide that. Ok?” Emi gives the best real talks, next to Collette of course who was probably the first real talk mentor and sister.

Here’s the thing, we live in a world where people, especially people assigned female at birth, are taught to sacrifice for the comfort of others, sometimes to the extent that you forget yourself altogether. Even in organizing spaces we replicate a lot of these things. Cuz we’re scared and traumatized and want to control something and make things be different for a future we may not fully experience while we are alive. I watched my mom give of her body, spirit, brain and creativity to hold space and fight for and with people who did not share the same small amount of privilege she had as a nurse, organizer and way too fucking smart to go along with the program that she was supposed to dutifully abide by. What I witnessed was that you were valuable if you worked til you dropped. And she said hell no at the ripe “old” age of 65 (give or take 5 years).

One day this summer I was chatting on the phone with my mama and it hit me. I’ve spent my life trying to hide behind my power and only use 20% of it. I was not balanced. I was holding space in so many ways for communities, for friends, for lovers without centering my spirit or what I needed. All my romantic relationships were me trying to beg for something that I so wanted and needed but was too afraid to ask. As survivors we place ourselves last because that’s what violation can mean, we hide our desires because they are dangerous. Centering ourselves is powerful which is why it’s dangerous and it also means we are being seen.

I was holding space for my people which means that my kidneys were working double and quadruple time on ingesting grief and I didn’t have the proper tools quite yet to process all of it.

So at the age of 39 I am finally in a place to begin practicing asking for what I actually need and put a pause on the story that says what I’m asking for is too much.

Want to help with this fundraiser?

Here are a few things you can do:

1) Donate and/or share widely via social media and email;
2) Host a dinner party or brunch and ask people to donate;
3) Share/Bid on Auction Items;
4) Send prayers, light candles and send woo that I reach my car fundraising goal AND get a new kidney!

I want to thank the following people for support on getting this fundraiser together and doing car research:

Zumi
Grey
Collette
Addis
Rebecca
Danielle
Hadley

These people are just some of the people who have been rocking with me and I always feel speechless because of the ways people have shown up for me. We all we got and nothing would mean more than knowing that this car would be blessed by so many people. When I learned to drive it was a true community effort, so having a car with all your love poured into it would be fucking dope! Thank you for reading and see you soon as I speed down the street honking my horn.


Sending mad love, always.

LL


PS: for people who don’t know me or know me well below is a little story about who I am. Enjoy!

About me: LL stands for Lucia Leandro. So if you can roll your Rs then by all means call me Lucia Leandro. I was born in Boston to a single mom from Mexico, who when I was 12 or 13 faced the truth that she was a dyke. Before that moment she was a nurse. Before she left nursing she was working in housing projects as a visiting nurse to mostly poor and Black families. This woke her up to the desire and need to do more than help heal the wounds that oppression, poverty and anti-Blackness were creating. She wanted to get to the roots. When I was born she was already doing activist work. She taught me how to facilitate and to cook. I began doing organizing as a teenager around teen dating violence. As I came into myself as a trans person in 2004, I started my first non-profit job doing capacity building work for a national education organization (GLSEN) while I continued doing anti-violence work within queer, trans, Black and Brown communities in NYC with orgs like The Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Centering disability justice has been more recent in the last 10 years. I always should up with my crip fam as an “ally” and they probably secretly rolled their eyes and waited for me to wake up and smell the coffee. Ally my ass. No wonder I felt at home with crip folks who were mostly poor, working class and Brown. Right now I’m slowing down and slowly building an organization that centers Trans birthwerq through the QTPOC Birthwerq Project. We center all the outcasts who have been told we don’t have a right to our bodies or reproductive futures. So all you trans people, fatties, crazies we are here for you. Doula work in general is about community care and so I’m grateful that doula work found me and said “hey, bitch, get over here!” so that I can practice doulaing others with consent and boundaries and so others can doula me. Birthwerq/doula work is reciprocal. And this kidney failing business is teaching me that we are all each others doulas. We got us in ways no one else can. Not only are we all we have, we are the source and we have a lot. As a mixed Black, Mexican, Puerto Rican I am the product of so many ancestors who made magic in everyday ways. And I’m blessed to be re-learning that every single day.