Folks: if we think of ourselves as flowers, what does it look like to bloom? Does a flower grow on its own? Or does it need love and light and care to truly blossom? And what comes after the bloom?
Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Liz Maker, a full-time landscaper and part-time florist living in coastal North Carolina, in conversation with myself and Victoria Landers, our podcast producer. Liz started their floral business After The Bloom in the fall of 2020 after receiving much community support to help fund their top surgery.
This success sparked a desire to help other members of the gender-expansive community on their gender journey. Through After The Bloom, Liz has bought binders, helped pay tuition, and most recently ran a gender-affirming surgery campaign which involved a GoFundMe and community-wide raffle. Liz is transgender non-binary, but feels most connected to the word genderqueer. Liz uses they/them pronouns, Colgate toothpaste and a Nissan Frontier.
“I think when you're coming into yourself and you're really figuring out who you are and you're being—or at least trying to be— the most authentic version of you and the most true version of you, that community, it's just magnetic. It's definitely connecting and making yourself vulnerable. It shows the good in people. And it's so much easier to find that community now that I feel like the community knows who I am and what I stand for.”
— Liz Maker
As a queer Southerner, I spend a lot of time thinking about the role I play in this place. I never got to see people I identified with find joy in the places where their roots grow. To really push this language, I never got to see them bloom. Most of the narratives of queerness I saw here involved leaving, heading off to somewhere where community could be cultivated and grown— somewhere else.
But for better or for worse, I am someone who craves roots. I want somewhere to call my own and somewhere to thrive in, and I want to be able to do that in the places I love, the soil that has nourished me from the start. We talk about leaving your hometown as if it is something we should all want. But for many of us, learning how to be who we are in the places that have seen us through every stage of growth is the most beautiful thing imaginable. And coming back to plant the seeds for what you did not have growing up is one of the most radical and transformative things you can do.
I love this conversation, and I love the work that Liz is doing. It is important and necessary and is, in my eyes, the true essence of what community building looks like: putting yourself out there to help keep the ground where you are rich and watered and thriving. If we think of community as a garden, no one succeeds when only one plant grows tall. We have to learn to live together. We have to learn to be what we needed when we might have thought we were the only plant for miles, because we never know what is growing beneath the surface. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
“I believe no one knows you and your body the way that you do. Honoring that is your birthright. And coming to terms with that is a spiritual experience, in a way. And I want people to feel confident with that inner knowing that of who you are, that the world tries to steer you away from.”
— Liz Maker
EP 9: Liz Maker