“I am.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, blood rushes into the white spaces left by the fronds of the whip, ready to baptize new bruises. Yellow, purple, brown, black, red, and blue — the colors of my masochist sigil. Kara’s heel presses my ears deeper into the pillow. Surprisingly, the rubber soles don’t hurt. If anything, the impending tread pattern excites me.

A Doc Marten hickey? I think.

“Are you going to be a good puppy?”

My lips sink deeper into the pillow. I wag my tailbone and let out a muffled bark of excitement. The role play is deep, and while the tail’s invisible, it’s nonetheless real.

She’s practically begging for more pain, Kara thinks, trying to contain her excitement. She knows that the only thing standing between her and another kill is her love for me. Breathe, just breathe.

My face quivers with imminent, succulent anticipation, because I know that, good girl or bad, the punishments come with equal rewards.

Sex on The Mind

Let’s just say I’ve been thinking a lot about sex recently.

About six weeks into celibacy — along with no dating, no social media, no porn — memories like this have been playing through my mind a lot. Not so much as a byproduct of sex starvation, but more because I wonder what sex will be like on the other side of this cathartic cleanse. Will BDSM, and the manifold kinks that grow there, still have the same confessional, therapeutic charge for me?

I think of some of the spicier elements of my sexual story, and my reluctance to let them go. At the same time, though, I entertain the possibility that whatever falls by the wayside as the evolution proceeds will do so naturally. I won’t miss what I no longer want.

And this isn’t about moral judgment or shame. I have zero shame around sex at this point. I’ve found very little that yucks me. My appetites and curiosity are broad and deep, and the yuck of today may very well be the yum of tomorrow, and vice versa. At least, that’s been my experience.

What’s keeping my mind whirring on this topic is how much all the different types of sex I’ve had throughout ages reveals about the entire bio-psycho-social climate of whoever I was at the time.

“What do you mean, ‘the different types of sex’?” asks Tay, my hairstylist turned new friend, as we watch the world go by at the annual Echo Park Rising music festival. “How many different types are there?”

“Oh my god, there are so many,” I begin, excited to unfurl the concept. “The sex I paid for at fifteen, to erase what would — now, per the terms and conditions of my transition — be framed as my gay virginity. Just that amounts to more than two types of sex: what was gay sex when I was an adolescent boy is now straight sex as an adult woman…”

Thank god Tay’s still locked in and listening — she’s used to my enthusiasm for the human condition by now.

“…so I actually lost my gay virginity first, which is craaaazy.” I feel like Bubba citing the various preparations of shrimp. “There is the sex that felt like love, that was love, that made it possible for you to love another, or perhaps to love yourself. The sex that opened portals or closed doors, the sex in bathroom stalls. Or the sex that revealed hidden agendas, ended in police reports, had you thrown out of the club. The illegal sex in downtown Singapore, which resulted in a cauliflower narrowly missing my head — and hers — and could have led to the juvenile detention of a UK citizen abroad.”

“So is it that there’s loads of different types of sex,” replies Tay, “or just loads of different types of you?”

“Touché.”

Body Counts to Inner Treasures

When I was fifteen, watching all the boys at school bragging about the condom in their pocket, I felt the pressure to conform, and I was so confused. I knew we were only meant to fuck people of the opposite sex. I knew something was “wrong” with me, and I knew that the longer I stayed a virgin, the more it would add to their suspicions.

Faggot.

I hatched a plot to steal money from my mum — a long game, one twenty at a time over four weeks, until I could visit the brothel where I believed a mechanical, un-intimate, strawberry-flavored condom blow job and two minutes of doggy style would quell any rumors about my sexual orientation. But without the affection, the whole thing was disappointing. I never told the story, and it only made me feel more gay.

So I set about finding a guy to fuck immediately. That was the virginity that meant the most to me to lose. I only had sex with a woman first because a recurring intrusive thought told me that if I didn’t start there, I was indisputably gay. I just wasn’t ready for that level of certainty.

It’s easy to say that social stigma and inevitable bullying held me back. But I was bullied anyway, and anyway, Andrew was out in high school, and everybody loved him.

Part of it was the fear of a courageous, self-defining act — an existential fear I have grappled with all my life. Really committing to anything and seeing it through has always been a problem. I bounce from thing to thing. I like to keep my options open. As a result, I’m a bit of a secret, both to others and to myself. Looking back, that only ever perpetuated the loneliness.

When, a week or two later, I finally had sex with a man, it was messy in every way. My clothes were stained, my heart was elated, and the gravity of this new secret was heavy with exciting taboo and deafening shame. I gave a fake name and age. I never got a number. I never saw him again.

That’s how it was. Pre-girl me was so fucking lonely, and ever so fucking sad. Everything was either empty or transactional.

That trend largely continued. My head may have been in love from time to time, but my body was just a hungry beast. It felt like the flesh only had appetites, as the Christian tomes repeatedly reminded us, whether through the cover of church or age-old social values.

Ejaculation and body count were what mattered — that, and the sense of validation in consummating whatever the plan had been all evening.

As a straight boy, body count proved manliness. As a gay boy, it became the metric of gayness. The body doubles down on its sense of purpose, and the machine keeps whirring. While sex droughts in straightness were fine, as a gay man I’d legitimately feel like I was less gay with each day between me and my last hookup. Luckily, most of us were always up for it, and the permissive culture quickly took care of that.

In many ways, my addiction only amplified the whole architecture devoted to the pursuit of sex, until my curtains were closed, the room breathed with meth clouds, and the only people I fucked were the dealers, and myself, for weeks at a time.

Sober sex was different. Still hot, but now also dignified and intimate. I didn’t just remember his name — I remembered the experience of trusting him to move inside me, fully sober, safe and held.

The idea of a body count faded, replaced by a realization that I’d only ever focused on two things — genitals, and the bloodstream that hosted all my drugs. I became friends with older gay men. I learned the lore. I cried the tears.

My body was just now starting to operate as a new source of wisdom, and its first — and only, for a time — message was that something fundamental was wrong, and no sex could fix it.

It kept reminding me, in between the busy moments of life, until the pandemic, when the perpetual solace made my body the loudest sound in the room.

I have to transition.

And it wasn’t just my gender that changed. Completely unexpectedly, so did my sexual orientation. I guess that whatever gender we are, some of us are just gay to the bone.

Sex, Death & Lesbians

As I grew into my emerging body, sex moved from sensation and scorecard to pleasure.

My body became a sommelière, savoring the aromas, the history, and those refractive reality fissures that weep down glasses in rippling pirouettes.

Orgasms became spectrums with luminescent nodes — anal, penile, full-body, and even emotional ones, where intimacy, presence, surprise, memories, and fantasies all collided. And onto that landscape appeared fetish and bondage, where yin met yang, where pain met pleasure.

Nothing quite compares to the alchemy that happens inside the BDSM alembic. Submitting to pain from someone you trust, feel safe around, and maybe even love, renarrates so much of the pain that was inflicted on you without your consent. That first trans girl who kissed me and spat on me at the same time showed me a powerful way to literally change history.

When done with purpose, safety, negotiation, and tender loving aftercare, these practices can resolve ancient disputes that have haunted your tribe for thousands of years. You can release all the control you obsessively try to exert over the rest of your life. You can surrender to embodiment. You can, quite literally, find god.

However, irresponsible BDSM practice is like uninitiated occult tomfoolery — it can also do harm. While I did experience profound, tectonic transmutations of dark energy from my past, it also converged on me and draped me in the shadow of reenacted trauma. It took many ugly cries, practically sucking my thumb in fetal position, to discover that it takes a lot more than sex to fix my mommy issues.

All of the kinks, the fetishes, the submissions and dominations, the lesbian and trans nakedness — they all tasted of the blood, the sweat, and the earth of a collective unconscious, with all the glorious, fucked-up, some trans, some not, shared experience. I have found that my trans body becomes both subject and object of devotion, as well as source, spell, watering hole, and act of creation — one I want to parent with so much love. And when two or three of us have sex, it is also like trans folk and lesbians everywhere are collectively orgasming in a mycelial forest.

Old habits die hard, though, and despite these glimpses into underground truths, I found myself reliving that compulsive need I remembered from the gay male days. Sex became the proof point of my gender identity, and once again I started feeding those quarters back into the meter.

With each woman who passed through my bedroom, the greater the hold that sex, as a benchmark of my womanhood, had on me. There was, and still is, so much gendered debt. I missed out on fundamental experiences, or had them much later than other women. I had to learn the power that tits had to draw not just fun attention, but threatening attention as well.

And so the sex addiction, the love addiction, the chaos, consumed any notion of intentionality in my love life and, like Kara, kept its heel pressed on my face for some time to come — until, clumsily, I emerged and wriggled out of the relationships that didn’t serve me. That included my relationship with myself.

Withdrawal & World Building

Now, some time since the breakup, and well into this chapter of celibacy, it’s not so much that I don’t like the idea of being fucked into submission and told I’m a filthy whore. I do. I really am a filthy whore, and I’m proud of that.

Because a filthy whore, if she develops some boundaries and becomes wise to her energetic economy, can have threshold experiences in peak, altered states that fundamentally connect her to something greater.

I have been horny, please don’t get me wrong. But it’s happened much less frequently than I anticipated, and rarely in the normal course of a naughty mind. It happens while lying in bed, seeing my thighs, my ass, my enchanted body in the wardrobe mirror. It happens on the yoga mat, as my body squeezes out the juice of embodied presence.

When we, like Audre Lorde, liberate sex from its basest form. When we elevate the erotic to the status of “power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge…” which “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.”

Then, and only then, do we begin to prune back sex’s procreative and recreational leaves to reveal the flowers of pure creation. What we used to treat as the destination in itself — “sex” — becomes merely one step of a journey, one tendril of a possibility. One that gets the most press, perhaps, but not the most interesting.

It begins with a call. An impulse. A devotion to engage with and generate things in the world. Out of fucking nothing.

It can’t be tied down to any bedroom, hotel, tent, or back alley. It’s simply too large to be contained by the insulting little box we’ve hidden it in.

It’s a larger, panentheist force. It animates and inhabits us at all times. It is stardust whose thermodynamic story has existed forever. From the pollinating bees, the sun, the food chain, our naked bodies, all the way to the language we use to glorify them — none of these are vessels of a linear experience. None of these are just points on a scoreboard.

They are spirals, endlessly open systems, eternally recurring spherical sides, and our bodies are part of a resident mycelial orchestra. Rhythmic roots embracing, blue neon harpsichord leaves arching their backs toward golden honey sunlight, dripping dew, drop by drop, toward cool, restful soil.

It is ecology, anthropology, theology. Season, ritual, divinity. With balance and intention, it’s chooses between little bedroom deaths and larger than life creations - the essays, paintings, conversations, poems, and songs.

Because surely you’ve felt words fuck you? Or perhaps those essays you write that fuck with you, teasing and edging until the truth is spoken and your body sings? Have you never walked away from a long, meandering conversation, or laughter, feeling sexed? Sometimes the feel of grass under my feet is like a deep kiss on the lips.

It hit me this last Sunday, when a friend read me a poem by an anonymous author. Fiery ginger bangs and arctic ocean eyes darted from word to word, as she brought the verse to incandescent life.

And although I will never know the writer behind “First Protocols of Queer Goetia”, I imagine she is a woman. A woman who may not have left her number on my bedside table, but remains with me forever nonetheless.

Our lives are indeed a “map of sacred places” and “enchanted geography.” From the pollinating bees, through the sun, the moon, the entire food chain, and into language, poetry, art, and life itself — everything cries, screams, whimpers, and fakes orgasms. Instead of narrowing your focus and looking for the next fuck, you learn to see that you’ve always been fucking. Because sex is life force, and Logos. Because sex is holy. Because everything is naked, and everything is sex.

For More Like This

I take a walk and discover looting fear like tumbleweed crossing high-noon streets.

“Echo Park is broken,” someone says as they tug on metal shutters.

But there is juice in my laptop and residual A/C chill at home, a place which, of late, is no longer a shrine to isolation, but rather a magical temple of becoming.

The madness looms in febrile potential as I loop back to my cave — cold, dimly lit, and staged for a day of writing

It’s fucking hot between and August and September here in Los Angeles and this recent heat wave is giving me COVID vibes. The level of lockdown feels unusually pointed and precise, perhaps because my intentions are clearer.

I am receiving this environmentally justified exile as a gift. Like a daytime sofa nap, it’s a treat to feel justified in isolation, not having to fear the FOMO. I give myself permission for this to be the excuse to dig in and do the work.

Back in 2020 I was also undergoing another major personal evolution. Early sobriety from drugs and alcohol accompanied by a disenchantment with the career path I was treading.

Now, it’s almost exactly the same. Rehabilitating my relationship with love, dating, and sex has freed up a lot of energy and focus. I feel carried on its wings and am embracing this surge in my dedication to writing.

Of course, I take targeted dips into society for the cold face splashes of water that only come with joy, laughter and consolation. I’m not a stay-at-home lesbian cat mom just yet. I crave that public/private balance of togetherness and aloneness. It greases the wheels of self-reflection. It brings my mind back to scenes which I recollect with a level of hyper-vigilant detail.

Everything, in life as well as in art, begins with a scene. I take myself there and wait. It sometimes comes as whispers, smells or bookshelf blackholes. Gradually, the senses awaken, the tape accelerates to normal speed and I’m back…

Lying naked on that bed.

Or 30,000ft in the air.

Or, in that living room, lit up like a conservatory by the late afternoon sun, refracted lights make the blue-inked coyotes she drew on the wall come to life.

“You always need a scene, my dear,” said Jill, my late writing mentor, “and it has to be terrible. The true, terrible stories we don’t want to tell are the best kind.” She always glowed like a giggling baby bird when she made a point.

“A scene must not be hypothetical. It must have life’s scent on it.” She continued, a teacher, spirit ballerina, and friend.

Jill and I were a great match because neither of us could stand stories that weren’t visceral, embarrassing and vulnerable.

“Lay yourself bare and write only for you. It’s a lonely life alas, but do that and an audience will appear.” Her words, her Hollywood history, and the way she spoke in aphorisms will always stay with me. Also the fact that, at eighty-four, she didn’t let you forget that “one’s never too old to masturbate.”

In moments and in scenes, she taught me that truth is found in a darkness which, once self-aware, reveals a path to the surface and a new light. A good scene augurs a shift in personality, purpose and poise. A good scene is tough to excavate unless you either have or create an excuse to do the work.

For me, a heat wave will do the job.

Telling the truth is fucking hard. The reward is impossibly abundant. A dance with our skeletons is an invitation we’d all do well to accept.

That truth can get lost in rhetorical flourish, or metaphors that don’t taste the dishes before they’re served. We must kill all our little darlings lest we get further away from the soiled smudge of our actual motivations in that moment, that place, that time. To sanitize is to perform and that just makes the actor play a role.

You can feel it. The mad artistic science of it all is that the story’s still unfolding within you while you write. It nudges you. It makes you legs wobble. It sends you back to that scene with forensic obsession. You examine the dead skin and fingerprints and discover that the story’s conclusion is more subtle, more foundational, more capable of containing contradiction.

The burning house in the scene wasn’t cautioning you to run away from the flames. It was demanding you disappear into them.

These essays send you into contortions. The uneasy brownouts that you have to walk through to loop back to the scene and remember what was happening. The hand gesture, the eyebrows, the grief, the argument with a friend in the car right before.

It all comes flooding back and through the waves you see it fast approaching.

Ideas want to be found. They love adoption and forever homes. You know them when you see them, those dolphins you ride with fearless momentum from the scene to the shore where the story ends and I walk through the door and sit down at the desk.

“I wish I could live like this. I wish this could go on forever,” I think to myself.

And then it stops me in my tracks like a baby’s stroller smile as I type,

“And with a little patience and discipline, I can.”

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About The Work of Becoming

On the side table lingered a day-old Shiraz in the coffee mug, a mosquito drunk on its surface. I’d be drinking that soon enough. All the half-drunk remnants, like pennies collected by a child from behind the sofa, become enough for an hour or so

“Right now, yes. As for how I feel tomorrow, who knows?”

Things were far from normal 5,000 miles and twenty-three years before.

I’d roll up notebook paper and smoke it.

While the other kids were using their fingers to make pretend guns, I was doing it to pretend to be injecting myself with heroin.

Hobbies weren’t pastimes for me. They were obsessions, deserving only of PhD level fixation.

I was an odd child who went to the bathroom in the garden.

Like David Sedaris whose opening chapter in Naked spoke to me in a way few books ever could, I was riddled with OCD, a disorder so lawyered up you’d be a fool to breach its contracts.

Walk this side of the lamppost

If you see another black car, you will be a famous musician

And, as the queer thoughts flooded in to a pre-teen mind: if you have gay thoughts while masturbating, you must go again.

I obeyed. My life a series of pauses to divine whether the gods were in a go left or right mood that day and extremely sore nether regions.

A British girl with four television channels, no internet, no YouTube, in a country inching its way towards thirty-years of legalized homosexuality. At that age, a thirty year old was a parent, a person with a job, maybe a kid. Only later, when I reached that milestone myself, would I realize how utterly all over the place a thirty year old is. Gay bars downtown, “private shops” with blacked out windows. That was all I had to go on. No on-screen positive storylines about trans people.

Freddie Mercury’s death was one of the first memories I have of actually watching the News. Capital ’N’, because then the News had seeming authority. Usually I’d climb inside the fridge for a sweet snack when it would come on.

That’s boring stuff for parents, I’d think. Not for me.

But Freddie was for me. I knew that deep inside. His story, extravagant, flamboyant, lonely, high, sick, dead.

Inevitable

That word burned into my mind as too did the image of the rock critic, Paul Gambaccini, interviewed outside a locked, grey stage door. A visual metaphor - if you don’t keep that private, this is how it ends.

“He lived his private life as passionately and flamboyantly as he did his open, professional life. This is a tragic consequence…which…for him was inevitable.”

Confronted with the stark reality of my potential future, I disappeared into my imagination, where the gayness could live alongside all those other parts of me that I was confident would be rejected.

Books, films, music, poetry I’d scribble down that would later become songs, essays, college admission infrastructure.

Through my dad filtered classic music of the ‘60s. Obsessed with John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Bob Dylan - I’d always thumb forward to the biography chapter where they use drugs for the first time. The idea of being passed out on a floor, artistic martyrdom by suicide, all seemed so romantic to me.

Hunter S. Thomspon, Bukowski, Plath, Camus. Lone wolf depressive punks of their eras. Role models. Gods.

The first toke on a joint was magical, but it was underwhelming. In the muddied edge of the forest, where we would smoke the Marlboro Reds Alex Kennedy has stolen from his parents, the Moroccan resin tasted sweet and earthy. Umami first encountered in combustion. Laughter and that sense that my mind - not just metaphysically, but physically too - was expanding, enrolled me in the school that would become my greatest education.

The underwhelm didn’t deter me. I knew the dragon was out there and that this one, sparks not flames in its belly, was only the beginning.

A few years later, however, when the miniature snow-capped mountain range glistened back at me from the CD jewel case, a hundred-dollar straw stroking my nostrils, I knew that I was about to arrive.

—

The urge is primal. It’s wolflike. Like wolves who go long periods without eating, then kill more than they need, this famine-minded feasting gluttony became my life with drugs.

The more secrets held - mentally ill, gay, trans, the abuse - the more wolves appeared.

The Puerto-Rican drug dealer in stretch limos, an armed guard by his side.

Hurtling down the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, hoping the acid and Molly don’t hit before we’ve parked, but feeling those tingles and imminent wood chimes. 70mph, 90mph, 100…

The celebrities crammed into bathroom cubicles, the four-legged toilet paper dispenser snort.

I could tell all those stories. In vivid, euphoric detail, I recall a time before the problems set in that was genuinely fun.

Drugs did save me.

From the pain of hiding myself, the mother in and out of psychiatric care, and so on, through the endless list of traumas which, while they did not cause addiction, did cast a light that caused it to grow.

Drugs did help me.

To seek, for brief moments, the glass-slippered “me” before midnight struck. To blaze phosphorescent trails in the video-game of potential futures.

And then, they tried to kill me.

Because…again, that’s what they do. Owe enough and you face a fatal passenger ride outside of city limits.

So I won’t bore you with the details of the mother’s suicide - more inevitable than any Freddie Mercury fade. I won’t talk about being first on scene at a motorbike crash, and watching blood bubble out of a mouth until the air’s gone.

read about that next

These stories write themselves. And, lord no matter how boring, diverse, dramatic, jaw clenching - all the things, they may be, with that many typewriting monkeys at work in this vast human sea Shakespeare is also inevitable.

That word has heterochromia. It possess an undeniable, inescapable sense as well as a foreboding, brooding trilogy-box set aura. On the stage, where all of us are playas, slayers, atheistic prayers, something’s only inevitable when it happens - the story hasn’t ended yet. Within its unavoidable walls, a lot of sub-plots are possible but ultimately irrelevant.

Bad therapists might try to eke out causality, draw psychodynamic mind maps, but these jagged market panics, are when zoomed out, pretty consistently trending upwards. At least, - economy and world order aside - that’s been my experience.

“Yes, ok, yes, I do want to be sober.” I corrected myself, after a long discourse on time, responsibility and existential authenticity which I’ve no doubt she tuned out.

Another addict’s hopeless mission to evade responsibility, like Popeye punching the air between him and Bluto.

Something that day interrupted a pattern. Bullet-time held me long enough to step outside myself and see what I’d become.

Shadows climbing the walls. Imaginary feds in the corridor. My hands outstretched and waiting for those phantasmic cuffs. Cockroach corridors, sink dish spores, whisky, beer and crystals the only inhabitants at 1551 Echo Park Avenue. I was an undocumented sublet.

The bullet time - glitching between on and off - lasted long enough to commit to meeting her the next morning, at 730AM, at a support group door.

—

The things I heard inside crashed every theory I had about people.

Women admitting in public to being on oxy with their kids in the car? Sobriety expanded my mind more effectively than the joints ever did.

The unflinching honesty, accountability, wisdom.

The mad notion that asking for help is braver than saying nothing.

More than anything, the rigorous, Jungian shadow work like healthy-vegetables snuck inside a kid’s dripping burger, reminded me of that authenticity I was always romanticizing. That authenticity which I thought you had buy a ticket for, travel to, borrow, scrape and steal.

A process by which, beneath every grudge, every horrendous thought, word, or deed, lay fears. Fears and coping mechanisms beautiful in their fractal adaptation, were revealed and a whole new world opened up.

My questions about my sexual orientation, gender identity, purpose - all deferred to “one day at a time.”

Did those questions still burn with insistence? Yes, of course. One day is actually more than enough time to work some of this shit out, I quarreled.

But I did slow down. Enough to see the landscape that had previously been a blur from inside this derailed bullet train.

—

Almost eight years later, it’s clear to me now that the path isn’t straight. This is not a direct train. Many stops, pauses, changes, ‘out of service/fuego de servicio’ sighs.

It’s an adventure closer to Frodo’s than the linear symmetry of the hero’s journey. Sometimes we have to go through the thing, not around it, to get to the other side. Dead faces will rise from the swamp. Bony hands will clutch at your bruised feet. You will wonder why the eagle’s couldn’t come sooner. Maybe they too were taking it ‘one day at a time.’

I like the winding and meandering. Three, then five, now inching closer to a decade of sobriety, my world has changed again and again. Career, gender, codependence, binging/purging, and now purpose have been some of the many gifts bestowed upon me by the last thing I’d expect to celebrate Christmas - pain.

The joys and evolutions always come after another forest has burned. The paradox of the inner and outer worlds conflict, swords sparking as authenticity finally makes ‘fetch’ happen against the feudal lordship of capitalist empire.

People describe it as alchemy. Our life is the alembic vessel, our self is the base metal which burns into something new.

Pain contains so much power but anger burns it off with smoky, yellow inefficacy.

“It’s their fault,” I say as I scatter my mum’s ashes into the ocean on that cold, grey October morning.

The erotic chi could subdue volcanoes, but instead she cums to the sound of America’s Got Talent.

The hookups I chase for an impossible love.

Sadness is the pressure valve, which lets out steam so the whole thing won’t blow.

The tears I allow, rather than the self-pity I use as an excuse

The hidden places, where the private is finally accepted by the public and, in many rooms across the world, becomes the detail that causes another person to pull up a chair.

The rebirth, where Freddie Mercury struts the stage well into his seventies, and where

All this rotten defecate in our life either leads to an emergency plumbing call, or top-notch compost. It takes planning. It takes repeated replays of the tape to remind us how our way, is often the wrong way.

Until it isn’t.

Until the rebirth, where Freddie Mercury struts the stage well into his seventies.

Where the possibilities are endless.

And where, if you participate even just a bit, inevitable.

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About The Work of Becoming

The addiction ignition turns on and the engine of this one-time hookup, hottie curiosity begins to hum.

A loud part of me wants to say, casually of course, “…this ended a little weirdly between us, right?” It also wants her to confirm that there’s a there still there, and gloss over my erstwhile desperate texts.

At this point in my sobriety, I know that my higher self wants something different for me. It knows how quickly girls can drive me insane.

No, I’m going to promise myself a shred of dignity and keep it platonic.

She tosses me a half-smile, which I throw back.

I can’t help but watch her move around and think: I’m not actually that attracted to her. Even the smile - which I usually interpret, wrongly, as a come hither - does nothing.

Phew.

After plugging in microphones and testing volume levels, she walks over.

“So, what’s up? How’re you?” She asks.

I try to match her matter-of-factness.

“Oh, I’m good. Mostly writing these days. I took some time off work to focus on myself.”

And then I open my mouth, “…this ended a little weirdly between us, right?”

Shame floods my system as my higher self bangs her head against the wall, mumbling with self-reproach.

And so it goes. I have always made mini-commitments to myself, only to break them. Things like making morning walks with Kiki a vape-, phone- and $6 coffee-free zone.

With embarrassing frequency, despite years of therapy and self-work, my feet carry me unconsciously to the café. I sit down, vape in one hand, cold brew in the other, and my notifications glowing back at me from the table while I try to work out what book the cutie’s reading to prepare a conversation starter. The day ends in bed, the remote out of sight while irresistible cliffhangers resolve into new episodes.

I know how good it feels to stay true to these promises. Getting another one on the scoreboard sends a tingle of healthy pride down my spine. I believe in myself a little more. I trust and like myself a little more. The next day, that new habit is easier to keep.

And yet, many repeated failures later, I believe in myself a little less. I trust and like myself a little less and, sure enough, the next day, I do it again.

Broken internal promises don’t have obvious social consequences. We tell ourselves that there’s always tomorrow, even if we know that, without new habits, tomorrow just becomes another Bill Murray.

They disrupt the pain/pleasure continuum and, like a cocaine-addled maze-rat, we die high and dry. They come mostly from $6 pleasures.

Our awareness is our checking account.

$6 pleasures are credit cards and we have too many.

The interest rates are insane, so a $6 pleasure becomes a $10 pain in the form of compounding interest shame that drains you entirely

It takes a major awakening to begin paying it off and getting that bank balance back up.

One that shows us that broken promises lead us to apply for more credit cards to pay off the others.

A sweet treat feels measurable. Kicking the rule down the road quickly pays for that pleasure by signing us up for another future promise. Sure, it might see our home repossessed, but that’s then and this - this is the present mother-fucking moment.

A lifetime, however, is a collection of those moments. Broken promises quickly add up to character traits, which themselves define the person, the choices, and ultimately, the life.

I credit increased, albeit inconsistent, attention to this fact to almost eight years, and counting, sober.

Whether motivated by a rock bottom, peak enlightenment, or both, it’s the self-capital that plumps the numbers in the awareness bank balance.

I save up more life and energy for myself, which opens my eyes to the sacred duty to protect time spent with Kiki and at Stories, where she languishes with me. Mostly, the holy vow to empower the self behind it all with: rules (no sex, dating, social media); accountability (to my spiritual practices and to one or more people, who I can goss with about all the withdrawal pain and who make great suggestions, such as keeping cold brew in the house); a whole host of enriching activities, whose healthy pride pays handsome dividends that ground my $6 pleasure budget in reality.

My story changes. A new heroine appears.

It used to the the Miser. “I’ll never change, I’m too old.”

And the druggie. “I need sex, love and coffee-on-the-go. Wooooohooh!”

Then the Trickster, tried to make me see. “I just walked five miles! I’ve had a tough life. I deserve a treat! What’s $6 anyway?Riiiight? Hmm. Maybe…not?”

Now it’s the Wise Forest Fairy, who declares, “This is who I am. This is what’s important to me. I will fight to the death to protect both!”

As a result, I’d be back on the scoreboard again if scores existed in this new awareness. I vape, caffeinate and phone much less on my walks to Stories and, once there, monitor my queer yearning, because it’s priceless.

I also begin to avoid some of the more self-punishing promises I level on myself, such as those cruel, Dickensian intrusive thoughts which force my bladder-bursting body to fine-tune this paragraph before allowing a bathroom break.

I’m actually starting to love the process of writing and engaging with Substack enough to arrive home from that morning walk, slug some store-bought cold brew, and pee while vaping and checking my phone, before I sit down at my computer.

The Work Of Becoming

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More Like This

Behind these essays are a series of evolving practices I’m collecting here. Each one has helped me pave a previously bumpy road. While potholes still exist, there aren’t as many and, I do blow a tire, there’s plenty of pull-over lanes to reset and wait for AAA.

These light-working counterbalances to the often painful shadow-side excavation are activities which, when I engage in them, give me that sadly rare feeling of “enoughness”. If scarcity mind is the big-chain store on every street corner, these activities are the little mom-and-pop boutiques with locally handmade soaps, candles and birthday cards.

Walking

Thank god I have a dog who needs this fuel in her tank first thing and last thing in the day. She’s a Shepherd mix, so even after a seven mile walk and a short nap, she’s ready for more. I can’t help but absorb the calm of quiet mornings and early evenings. I dip into curated playlists which, like a yoga teacher, gradually ease me from emotional indie child’s pose to more strenuous upbeat EDM balancing acts.

I usually end with The Chain or Home ft. Walk the Moon, which bring forth a tai-chi style dance in me. I dance sensually. That erotic place Audre Lorde talks about - not sexual, not lustful - just powerful and embodied.

Yoga

Girl, I’m telling you, if you haven’t either cried or quietly orgasmed while doing pigeon pose, you haven’t lived. A fifteen minute session of yin yoga can transform that antsy morning tiredness that makes me descend into catastrophizing doom spirals and irritation into a namasté humming intentional puppy who knows at a gut level that she need only exist to look cute and get strokes from the universe.

Meditation

It’s always changing. Sometimes I’ll just sit, eyes closed, and focus on my breath, a mantra or a chant. Sometimes I’ll follow the strange swirls of light in my third eye (at least, I think that’s what it is). Insights and curious images sometimes come, sometimes do not. I breathe in through my nose for a few seconds, filling my belly and then topping off my lungs, then hold for a while. I exhale slowly out my mouth, and then hold. This slows down my heartbeat.

Five or fifty-five minutes later I feel more refreshed than any nap has ever made me feel. If I’m feeling horizontal, I’ll do yoga nidra and just scan my body tip to toe and back again, letting my attention rest on each part of me, noticing the energy, the warmth, the tingle or just the strangeness of paying more attention than usual to an eyelid. “Woah, my eyelids are trippy, maaaannnn.”

Journaling

I jot down moments throughout the day that strike me. Something absurd, irritating, beautiful, or funny. It could be a spiritual sign, like a perfectly timed dragonfly as I contemplate transitions afoot in my life, or an overheard snippet of conversation at a café.

Walking kicks up a lot of ideas for me, who stretch their mental legs alongside my stride. That’s the one exception to my no-phone rule during walks - I use the voice memo feature to avoid agitating my peaceful mind with clumsy thumbed typos.

Days blur into one if we don’t pay attention to the little moments that make each one unique. Even if it’s just a list of things that happened that day, it relaxes and reminds me of victories and lessons I’d otherwise overlook. Anxious and depressive feeling tones can dominate the end of my day - looking back at a list of the little joys can change that.

Abundantly Abby

How to overcome your fear of journaling

Journaling is hard. It’s scary. But it’s the one tool I continue to return to for my sanity…

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20 days ago · 1 like · AbbyGrace

Little You - Inner Child Quality Time

A while back, in therapy, I did a visualization exercise to find my inner child. A particularly memorable photo of me looking very faggy became the basis of this little girl who I speak to and spend time with. Now I can just close my eyes and invite her in. She responds to questions I ask. I whisper encouragement in her ear. I reparent her. Even writing this makes me tingle with contentment.

I spend quality time with her. Usually, during moments of meditation or stress, I close my eyes and invite her up onto my knee where I stroke her hair. I tell her everything’s going to be ok because, and I genuinely believe this, inside that quantum experience I reach back into the past to comfort her. Some Interstellar level shit, I believe she survived to this day because future me was nurturing her there.

Birds

Have you ever just stopped to listen to them? The cadence, frequency, tone and diversity of those songs throughout the day? Looked up to see their origins - blue-backed, red-crested or speckled? These original musicians, once the human orchestra goes silent, play in the background, often unnoticed. The sheer complex simplicity of birds has the power to bring me back from the darkest places.

Crows are smart as all hell. The fact that hummingbirds - who drop into a paralyzed torpor during sleep - ever survive is a miracle that makes a lot of problems seem small in comparison.

Nature

Nothing revitalizes me more than watching bees fly between flowers, the flowers themselves, the bird song, the lizards scuttling across my path. Sometimes I hug trees. Sometimes I talk to them too.

Nature predates and outlives us all. It’s feral and ordered at the same time. Even in the densest of urban environments, a tree’s bark, or that priestly white dog collar on a pigeon has the power to bring me back from whatever I’m obsessing about.

Sometimes I get lost inside the mycelial mystery which I strongly encourage anyone to learn about.

Running decisions by others/Asking for help

If I genuinely need support, I don’t try to go it alone. My mind’s inevitably a feedback loop - big decisions and big feelings both run me around in circles. My best thinking - confronting the person who hurt me, breaking up with the partner/friend/weekly group activity, quitting the job - often comes from the shadowy parts of me where limiting beliefs and ingrained negative patterns lurk.

An outside opinion, or three, from friends can shed new light and reveal more angles. I ask for feedback. Sometimes I let them know that I just need them to listen and validate my sadness. I have friends who don’t dive into fix it mode. Problems and feelings live within an entire ecosystem which, like nature, doesn’t just exist to be extracted and turned into widgets. Sometimes they just need space to breathe and to regenerate, nourished by an interdependent support system as real and predictable as the sunrise.

Crack Cocaine

Sometimes there’s nothing quite like a hit on the pipe. I get plenty of attention and the quiet warmth of a busy jail cell to sleep it off.

I’m joking. Just making sure you’re paying attention.

Outreach

I call someone and ask them how they’re doing. In 12-step traditions, people are reminded that their sobriety depends, in large extent, “upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.”

While drug etc addiction may not be your story, emotional sobriety - not being controlled by our ego and feelings - applies to everybody. While I think tending to others’ gardens should be balanced against building serenity in our solitude, it still holds weight and offers a quick antidote to the tyranny of self that colors our most anxious, depressive and ultimately self-obsessively stuck moments. If a call doesn’t feel aligned, I just return stray carts to their pen at the grocery store.

Social Plans (Preferably With People Who Make Me Laugh)

I’m one of those people who makes social plans then spends every minute leading up to them thinking of ways to cancel. I’m always glad I see them through. A minute of laughter especially has the power to cancel out a week of despair.

I try to steer clear of catch-up friendships - I like to see my friends often, and inhabit their lives with a presence of mind.

Crafting/Writing

There’s nothing more liberating than sharing my experiences with the world. Whether or not anyone reads them, I do it for me. Watching words turn into paragraphs that distill story arcs and insights delights me. I doodle. I don’t do ceramics or cross-stitch, but that’s in my future for sure. In an increasingly disempowering world, focusing on creation, even at the smallest scale, is an act of ecstatic rebellion and a reclamation against the vampiric forces at large.

Sticking To Self-Made Promises

If I decide to not check my phone or hit my vape on my morning walk, and then renege on those promises the minute I approach a café, there’s a micro-shame moment. I rationalize it away - “it’s just a tiny slip” - but these events add up and quietly erode my discipline. Each occurrence makes the next one more likely. I’m impulsive and my best plans fail in the heat of the moment - but underneath the seemingly trivial failure, I’m giving more lines in the script to the voice that tells me I’m not good enough. That voice doesn’t need a speaking role in this movie. Cleaning dishes, taking out trash, brushing teeth, sorting through mail - all these fall into micro-shame elimination. The longer those things go brushed under the rug, the harder the fall when you inevitably trip over a strangely mountainous rug.

Cooking/Prepping

An air fryer and an instant pot have become indispensable sidekicks in the war against food delivery. A touch of seasoning on a frozen chicken thigh and a cup of rice can, in about 20 mins, serve serious deliciousness. Idle moments during the day can be spent chopping onions and tupperwaring them to speed up advanced recipes. Eating food I’ve prepared adds a stitch to the fabric of my self-sufficiency.

Songwriting

Whether it’s picking up the guitar and crafting something special, or improvising songs sung to my dog inside the theater of my own apartment, songwriting is a major creative outlet. Singing calms my body. That juicy moment where the right rhyme comes and the words describe my current joys and sorrows. Almost unparalleled.

What are your light-working activities? Feel free to add them in the comments below!

I don’t usually check it first thing, but for some reason it wasn’t on silent and my hand automatically held it up to my face.

listen for messages about life purpose

Hmm.

My pre-coffee mind was still buffering as I walked over to the kitchen.

Maybe it’s some kind of weird shaman-coded text message scam? “listen for messages about life purpose. You stand to win a free ayahuasca trip to Costa Rica. Click on the link below to find out more. Reply STOP to unsubscribe.”

By the second slug of cold brew, my brain woke up.

Ohhhh yeah. The reminder I set!

Astrology.

Yes, I’m that girl now. The only thing standing between me and full Californication is a stroller full of bedazzled Yorkshire Terriers.

But hear me out. I’m feeling stuck on the question of purpose. So much so that, after a lifetime of skepticism, I actually dug into my chart. To my surprise, it had me down to such a tee, I searched my apartment for hidden cameras. The death and transformation, emotional permeability, suffering, and entanglement of will and identity - it was all there.

After the ninth upturned beetle, a portent of impending transition sent by the gods to my apartment, I entertained any and all insights. So, when my astrology app told me the following Monday would put some wind in my limp sails, I immediately set a reminder. And then promptly forgot about it.

Until that evening.

“You dress like a whore.”

Spit flies through the air as she drunkenly hisses her first coherent sentence of the evening. Greasy, curly black hair messily nested in her mouth. Outside the moon’s pale contractions draw closer together.

I scan the room. A heap of pill boxes. Food-caked plates. Two bullet cases. I lock eyes with her coat-hanger thin boyfriend who, just minutes before, was crying in my arms and now looks like a loose cannon. Clearly the planets had ditched subtlety for the night.

Is this the sign? An invitation to remain in the world of addiction counseling? Even though it doesn’t feel aligned anymore, surely the first paid gig coming out of the blue on this, of all, days is a god shot?

These cases are hard. You live with chronically relapsing clients for weeks, maybe months, cocooning them inside a sober bubble of codependence. The money’s great - my bank balance would agree - but there’s a cost. You abandon your friends, routines, personal space — your entire existence — to live with an ungrateful, often insolent, young adult for an indeterminate chunk of time. You do it because you may have to wait a year for the next gig. Clearly I don’t just pursue emotionally unavailable women. I chase equally abusive and avoidant income streams.

“Is there a gun in the house?”

“Yes ma’am, right here.” He points to his waistband. I look back at her, to gauge her reaction to what’s now a lethal variable in the mix.

“Don fucking look a me,” she slurs, confirming an uncomfortable intuition in my body.

This moment always arrives eventually, whether it’s on day one or thirty. Every time, no matter the misgivings, my inner adrenaline junkie and all her minions take the wheel, bulldozing instincts that would cause most to leave immediately.

Right now, however, they’re present but they’re not saying a damn thing. Instead they just stand there with their heads bowed. Not in a defeated way though. They look almost reverential.

I guess it’s just me then, ladies? I think, while mentally preparing to surrender to the chaos.

And then my inner council divides down the middle. My heartbeat thumps. Walking towards me, the most beautiful woman I’ve never seen, with purple hair and silver skin stops, claps and lifts her eyes to meet mine.

“If you can learn how to say ‘no’ to that which does not serve you, is it possible that this might help you say ‘yes’ to yourself?”

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After a lifetime of ignoring my inner compass, I listened. I didn’t walk out that night - saying yes to yourself isn’t license to renege on a promise - but I did have an exit strategy.

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, while a bad situation got worse, I lined up colleagues, referrals and concrete next steps. Even though she was sober, relocated to an Airbnb away from the armory, and presented with immediate treatment options, she kept trying to burn it all down.

After sharing her location with the boyfriend, and pitting me against a guy with a gun, this moved from energy that didn’t serve me to an unacceptable level of danger.

So I traded financial security for my own security and walked away.

Ask any drug addict who got sober only to develop a gambling problem and they’ll tell you: it’s not the drugs that they’re hooked on. It’s the chaos. Beneath the underlying, highly individual patterns, lies one universal trait: we’re all ghosts cursed with a huge appetite and an impossibly tiny mouth1.

And so, we nibble endlessly and indiscriminately on each “next thing” - whether it’s a girlfriend, meth, doomscrolling, or a Martini - hoping for something that will change the way we feel or control the way we’re seen. It’s the promise of a full stomach that never arrives.

Chaos, for most of us, is the closest thing to normal we ever knew. If we can’t find it, we create it. The “I” behind us, if it ever served a purpose beyond furnishing a driver’s license with booze-purchasing credibility, is replaced with irreparable emptiness.

I spent much of my life oblivious to this. Tumbling inside the velocity of external forces I believed would quell my hunger, while I felt alive, I was in reality as animated as a zombie whose body used to mine.

There was no higher self to act as North Star - most decisions were determined by the chaos - until I quit drugs in 2018.

For the first time, I’d found spiritual nutrition that began to quell the hunger. My cosmic blood sugar lifted. Beautiful things happened. But at some point, the hunger returned.

The spiritual path isn’t linear. Addictions switch tracks, maybe from drugs to sex, or alcohol to work. The work is ongoing and stagnation whets that ghoulish appetite.

What I also had to learn is that hungry ghosts both manically feed and let themselves be fed on. What chomps down on us is varied: it might be chronically late bedtimes, obsessive scrolling or, it may even look, on its surface, like altruism.

Throwing myself into these addiction cases allowed me to take extensive vacations from myself, in the name of doing “god’s work.” I always had an excuse for why I wasn’t meditating, or writing that book everybody insisted was inside of me.

I was - still am - woefully irresponsible with my energy. Almost eight years sober, and still feeding every belly in the house. Except mine. For every mouthful of spiritual food I took, I let three chunks be gnawed out of me.

In the weeks leading up to that night, at some level, an awareness was developing around the energetic buffet I’d allowed myself to become.

Social media - off

Dating - off

Sex - off

Work - on pause, which I can’t afford. But I really can’t afford to die young, miserable and unfulfilled. For me, it’s a no-brainer.

This period of abstinence has shown me how easily I give it all away for the slightest chance of validation or attention.

We’re all hungry ghosts to some degree. We stand in line at the soup kitchen of financial stability, where we devour jobs we convince ourselves taste good, but which aren’t remotely as nourishing as the meals our Michelin-starred, higher self could prepare.

Deluded by digital algorithms and a social consensus, we fall for marketing strategies that repackage pernicious groupthink as the height of individualism.

The good news is that escape appears to be possible. The bad news is, it takes discipline. The great news is: you can go at your own pace, every pitfall is a lesson and there are no fail grades.

On this path, senses are heightened and, at some point, mysterious messages will come through. From the gods, Mother Nature & Her Mycelial Choir, or perhaps, just from inside of you. Choose your own explanatory adventure.

These messages can be confusing. They live beyond our fabricated binaries and, as such, can hold multiple, seemingly contradictory, truths simultaneously.

At first, I was sure my first job in six months was the sign and answered the question of what to do next. However, upon reflection, I don’t think these messages make our decisions for us, which would only perpetuate our codependent reliance on outside solutions to internal problems.

Instead, I think the messages are invitations to notice, feel, and get curious. To play back the tape of life and witness a hungry ghost refuse real nourishment while it also gets eaten alive.

The takeaway for me feels less like a decision to leave the addiction industry, and more so an invitation to feel into the question of how I spend my energy: responsibly or like it’s going on someone else’s credit card? To play back the tape of life and witness a hungry ghost refuse, time after time, the only food that could nourish it.

To get quiet enough to maybe hear a voice - amidst the self-abandoning, chaotic noise - pose an utterly revolutionary question.

It’s been two weeks since the night I heard that voice. I’ve heard it many times since. This morning, eyes closed at the center of a dragonfly swarm, I could feel her on one side, and Little Hana on the other.

I’m seeing small but powerful changes. When others say no to me - perhaps in the form of a ghosted text exchange - that old pang of rejection is gone and I tilt my cap at Maya Angelou’s words, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I waste no more energy there that could be spent elsewhere.

Like on the creative path, which terrifies me more than any gun or snarling drunkard, but is infinitely safer and more rewarding. It’s also very solitary and silent, so I’ll probably start hearing a lot more voices. I hope they allow Substack in the psych ward.

As for the identity of that young voice, who knows? This girl, who honored the inner knowing I always silence. A girl whose age can’t be far off the eight years I’ve spent stumbling this ‘higher’ path in search of the ‘me’ that I aspire to be?

A girl I have named Mia, who joins me and Little Hana, as we make our way home.

I was invoking a goddess I knew little about. Witchy smatterings here and there of the goddess of transitions pricked up my ears but it wasn’t until recently that the idea of communing with her became more real.

She is many things, of which my knowledge is incipient. One thing I know is that an invocation of her must be accompanied by an offering, contingent upon the help being sought. Exhausted and impatient for insights, my approach was bootstrapped and I would learn as much very soon.

Hekate Kleidouchos was the specific manifestation of her that I was summoning. “Keeper of the Keys”, this seemed the most germane to the questions I had - about next steps in my latest season of change.

“I do not bring a gift, for which I apologize.”

The kitchen was full of plenty of possible devotions but I was the kind of exhausted where comfort swallows you up, and movement feels abrasive. “Next time, I promise.”

Was I testing her? Trying to see if this works and only then to hassle with devotions, like a free trial I could cancel before the charges are applied? Possibly. Almost certainly.

A nocturnal scene - crossroads, with soft lit cacti on one side - came into my inward focus. I presented her with my predicament - the various paths before me like school children with hands raised desperate to be picked by the teacher.

“Should I be healing, speaking or writing?” I asked. I invited Hekate into my mind to better understand the implications of my vocational shorthand. The words sat like the names of kingdoms, calligraphic black on an ancient, yellowed map. Each an entire country, within which each vocation’s underlying routines, lifestyles, tasks and accomplishments were drawn like roads, rivers and mountains.

I cannot present the gods with bullet points. My mind doesn’t work like that. It’s rich and evocative, relational and tonal, not linear or logical. It’s associative tendrils cling onto even simple decisions, like when I’m scrolling through DoorDash and I have to imagine the existential consequences of every dish. Like screenwriters build characters: what kind of person would eat this? What is their central conflict? Would they squeal or shout when stubbing their toe?

“Please, in the coming days, show me signs and give me intuitions about which path I should take,” I continued, before signing off for the night, “Farewell, Hekate!”

I turned off the bedside light, turned over and went to sleep.

The next morning, naked and blind without my contact lenses, I opened the door for my dog Kiki’s dawn salute. A few minutes later, face washed, eyesight restored, and fully clothed, I stood at the threshold. Up on the terraced mezzanine, stood Kiki bemused at an empty, blue sleeping bag draped over her pink beanbag throne. Up the stairs, the jasmine bush entangled gate was ajar.

The violation and panic set in.

Someone broke in and slept here?

I sleep in the nude, the blinds half open for the morning sun to rouse me.

Did this, presumably unhoused, person spy on me? How did they even get in?

I dialed 911 while rifling through my desk drawer for pepper spray and my hunting knife. I’m unphased by the threat of violence. And yet, my cold and stoic stare into its darting, ravenous eyes, isn’t matched by my fighting chances. Also, while I’m not afraid to die, I’m equally desperate to live. I’m invested in this story and have a growing fondness for its protagonist, so I’m curious to know how it ends.

In Los Angeles the emergency service lines now have hold music. You don’t get straight through.

How many murders have been soundtracked by their muzak, I wonder, right before I connect the dots. Hekate, Keeper of the Keys…break-in…where are my keys?

I scoured the countertops. Nothing. Did I leave them on the ledge outside after unleashing Kiki last night? Gone.

And then it dawned on me. Still waking up, the memories of last night’s seance emerged, blood droplet evidence on the sleeve of the waking nightmare.

Hekate.

Jesus, she’s…but…she can’t be…

My shoulders caved, my knees buckled and my heart almost tried to punch its way out of my chest.

Even my internal organs didn’t want anything to do with this cursed body.

She’s fucking real!?

Like a ouija spyglass jerking fingers and spelling out my name, my stomach growled and my hair stood on end. Sure, I show up in my prayer with a solid sense of an abiding universal presence animating all things, but the real world unfolding is usually subtle, whimsical and slow. It’s mysterious and open-ended, like the ethereal promise of the kingdom of god in the New Testament - we’re still waiting…

This, though, was some Old Testament shit. Blue skies turn black, thunder clapping like a judge’s gavel, as Elijah slits each and every throat of the prophets of Baal, leaving no ambiguity in his message: Yahweh is fucking pissed.

The clearcut cause of my summons and effect of the night’s crime pierced and bruised me like an addict’s recycled needle.

What the fuck have I done? Did my empty-handed invocation open a portal? Am I cursed?

It’s one thing having OCD to such a degree that my mind constantly berates me with shame, or PTSD vapor trails with their spectral paranoia. At least I can chalk those up to chemical imbalances and trauma’s baseball bat wielding loan shark collecting on a debt.

This, though, was something else entirely. I’d unleashed something terrifying.

Later on that day, I paced my temporary prison while impatiently awaiting the locksmith. My body was limp but agitated after three cold brews. The conversation with the police settled me a little, but I always feel, even as a victim, that they’re going to arrest me.

All I should have done was pray. Or heeded my friend’s advice.

“Azizam,” my Persian lioness, Darya, suggested, “You gotta sage that place right away!”

But instead, I was racking my brain for a more active defense against the dark arts, furiously texting other friends to see if they knew any witches, mediums, or shamans. Anyone that might know how to put a lid on this cosmic clusterfuck.

And then, head down, thumbs tapping away at the iPhone keyboard, my frazzled mind running on serious latency, I realized that I’d just seen something coming back from the mailbox.

I turned around and walked back.

Are those…?

Several apartments down, atop a wooden fence, my keys had been presumably waiting this whole time.

I don’t know how they got there. Maybe my invader repentantly tossed them as they fled and a thoughtful tenant put them somewhere they’d be found. It didn’t matter. I could finally lock up and take a walk to put some distance between me and the crime.

An unfortunate start to the day, some inconvenience and fear, but that’s it, really, I reflected as Kiki’s wagtail body bounded down the hill.

Knowing I could at least sleep a little easier that night, my mind turned to the curse.

Maybe this wasn’t a curse. Maybe it was a message? She’s made it abundantly clear that she’s real - that’s for fucking sure. Not only that, she’s a badddd bitch not to be trifled with.

But Hekate had another message for me. A warning, in fact. And it couldn’t have been more clear.

“Next time, dear mortal, you’d better come correct.”

It’s no use trying to go back to bed. On the horizon, through the east-facing window, the sun is arching its feline back and the room is already brimming with light. On days like these I know that I must be silent in the forest. I must move slowly and deliberately. A simple twig snap might disturb the quiet despair which tries to convince me the day’s over before it’s even begun. The cruelty of these activated states is that they dredge up all the things I should be doing, haven’t done, have left unfinished.

My familiar, Kiki, yawns, stretches and leaps off the bed. For her every day is a gift. She greets the light, bounding out before the door’s even halfway open . My perspective skews the sun hostile, as it insists upon itself like that offensively enthusiastic travel companion, the one who’s already dressed with the entire day planned before you’ve even remembered coffee exists.

I know that a good cry will break this spell. A rain will clear these clouds. I just have to access it.

As my calves stretch with the first incline towards Angeleno Heights, and the propaganda floods my mind, I put my earphones in. Bon Iver’s album, “For Emma, Forever Ago” always transports me into a landscape empowered with my own brand of curated nurturing.

Within seconds, the impending heat and limp palm fronds are replaced by a frost which covers the gloaming, nocturnal ground, moonlit silver sheens on the tips of rust red leaves. Fog blankets brisk, damp air. Hands warmed by breath which condenses and fades. Between the rough skin of spindling pines disappearing overhead, a spider web sags with dew drops. Unphased, Lady Arachnia whispers, “and so it goes.”

And it does. In moments like this, crying cracks a hole in the frozen lake, making it possible to sink a line and fill a stomach. For Little Hana, the world is simply too loud right now. She needs her mama who, in turn, needs hers. Slow footsteps trace the outlines of melody as Justin Vernon’s voice evokes the mother in me.

Only love is all maroon

Gluey feathers on a flume

Sky is womb and she’s the moon

Nearby, in a glade just coming into view, my tears hear. Through rough stone rounded by calloused hands into loaf-like, grey dough, stacked and sacred, nuns with their hoods down, in sackcloth vespers, silent shuffle toward the sanctum. Called to prayer and led by footstep memories, like god’s inner map, they have been waiting for me.

I tell my love to wreck it all

Cut out all the ropes and let me fall

As I enter through the thick oak door, my tears moist beneath my bare feet, absorb and rise. Without help, candles light. Trickling down my face at first, accompanied by that tapered breathy peristalsis preceding choking sobs, the velvet purple sky outside flashes white and the skies let go.

Crying is the key to my breakthroughs, of late. She is the midwife to my labor, long and hard. I am uncovering so much, connecting so many dots, observing so many stale patterns propped up by flimsy, outdated needs. This process of uncovering and discarding is grief. I am letting parts of me die. Some days are spent in mourning, while others are all about celebration. The harvest marks the triumph of the ploughed fields which, now exhausted, deserve their rest.

Crying brings me closer to the Piscean rivers which flow through me.

Sometimes it’s the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling which I struggle to make it through without sobbing.

Sometimes it’s rewatching episodes leading up to the tragic death of a principal character, like George in Grey’s Anatomy, or those paternal aches in About Time that prepared me for the day when my father too would be gone.

Most often it is music for what other medium can so elegantly lend ink to the senses unbridled desire for poetry or even begin to contain what stirs in me when I see a child’s colored chalk message on the sidewalk, “I’m sorry if she barks,” which floors me every time as I can already see the power and the pain of a kid who, like me, might also be labeled “too sensitive.” Whose wet face was once mine, shamefully wiped because daddy wants me to, “stop with the crocodile tears.”

It’s not always a sad cry either. A lot of the time, it’s a joyful embrace of the resurrections I am witnessing. The ecstatic synchronicities of life, the beauty of whimsical infinities, the revolving door of new beginnings.

The way The Chain by Fleetwood Mac builds, a Wild West saloon door opening, the heroine’s silhouetted shadow in the midday haze, spurs like keys clinking, fingers tickling the air around the trigger, ready to rid the town of highwaymen.

Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise

The thud of that bass drum, steel guitar sparks like Blacksmith’s preparing for war. The multiplicity of scenes that run through my mind as I dance, my arms slicing through the air, sensually sliding down the sweat of my neck and on to my breasts which I fought so hard for.

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain

As that music flows through me, break the chain. I am connected to everything that is, that was and will be. I undress my soul and for fleeting seconds I feel space between my feet and the ground. I believe that it is indeed possible to fly. To emerge through the dance floor of heavens, starlight speckled by the disco ball, a knowing nod to the DJ and a face glistening with the saline of a heart that’s just a little bit lighter.

The Moment She Becomes “He”

It’s a familiar scene.

The sun is caressing your dolled up, trans femme face. The pool water splashes and snaps like the sound of smacked lips, young children tossing balls across its sapphire surface. A drink in hand, the conversation with the newly arrived afternoon party guest is going so well.

You’re beginning to love what they have to say. Your opinions flow like electrons through a jump cable. Your minds merge on shared musical interests as you begin to finish each others’ sentences. A third person comes along and asks what you’ve been talking about.

“Well,” your new bestie begins, “he was just saying…”

He was just saying? He?!

It’s over. All this time you’ve been connecting, your new timeline partner has been seeing - to a greater, or a lesser extent - you as male. Or as whatever gender you fight, day in and day out, to leave in the dust.

It’s not just a question of fighting just to arrive at the starting line, only to find the runners are already disappearing into the distance. We understand that most people’s gender identity isn’t up for debate and pronouns are the least important part of their sentences. We’re not stuck on that. We’re stuck on the reminder that our very safety is predicated, whether or not we like it, on your acknowledgment of our gender. It doesn’t just darken one day with a profound sense of danger - it stalks us all the time and everywhere with a reminder that to pass as a woman, is to more effectively avert death.

Tiny Cuts, Massive Wounds

I know, I know. It was “honest mistake.” Trust me, trans people aren’t congregating in basements, adding you to kill lists for slips of the tongue. Or at least, not anymore since Julie said we couldn’t use her house anymore. However, these moments are like tiny cuts on bare feet in unsanitary environments - with each step, the sting screams and the sepsis broods.

“It’s my shoulders. The missing hourglass curves from my ribs to my hips,” we hear ourselves say in front of the mirror. It feels like we have failed because we cannot even trust when we feel femme enough for ourselves without it needing validation by others.

As someone whose transition began in earnest in her late thirties, I have to reckon with how much of my forties I want to spend obsessing over surgeries just to avoid being misgendered. Will I submit my body to a decade of careful knifing, only to be given away by feet that demand sizes many shoe brands don’t carry, or hands that clumsily refute the delicacy I crave? Can I really handle the cumulative months of recovery and sleepless nights propped up in bed? Are there not more important matters of the soul’s evolution, let alone where my income is coming from, that I should busy myself with?

And yet, I am reminded almost daily, that on a dime I can go from part of the background, to the center of quite violent intention.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” says the hoodie-hidden man in the shadows at the bottom of the hill. He doesn’t just happen to live on my street - he’s following me.

What Men Want

We’re in a double bind. As the focal point of policy, most trans women cannot help but be preternaturally insightful about sociology, politics and the history of gender.

We will always be caught between the pendular swings of womanhood as defined by a patriarchal set of expectations versus a more amorphous, authentic and heteronormative set of presentations. Porcelain symmetry and a chiseled, Michael Jackson nose feel inherently desirable for so many socially contagious reasons and we throw the baby out with the bathwater by falling prey to these skin-deep categorizations.

With each new object of feminization - our ass, our face, our voice - we’re reductively hyper-fixating on a trait which, we imagine, stands between us and being a woman. Scores of women with lower voices, flatter curves, voluminous, unshaved, body hair are tossed overboard by a cognitively dissonant, confirmation bias driven hot pursuit towards what is at its core, a series of traits decided on, ultimately, by cis white men. That delicate voice, that submissive, demure posture, that bulimia contoured belly.

And while most of us know at some level that it’s utterly ridiculous to boil womanhood down to all these things, we’re forever prepping the next set of bandages which, once removed, will see us ascend to a pink throne at least a little safer, if not subject to the security we lease back from the cis men.

Staying Alive

I’m not here to knock aspiring to the tantalizing pursuit of “perfect” features. It’s a road paved with potholes and bandits - the same corporate dysmorphia-inducing attacks to which all women fall prey - but I turn down that street plenty.

However, the primary driver is darker and more disturbing.

The outright hostility towards us from society is unprecedented. Of course, it’s fueled by power-crazed fascists who one day awoke to realize that they’d missed a trick by failing to add trans people to skin color and national origin as potent tools in riling up the masses with identity-driven explanations for the ailing economy and their child’s fail grade in math.

However, it’s also fueled by centuries old conditioning. Women’s clothes, while deigning to cover Madame’s naughty bits, are specifically designed to implicitly reveal them. This expectation, therefore, leads to the inherent deception that trans women are alleged to perpetrate by daring to confound or confuse the uniform code.

Women wear women’s clothes so they can be protected from men who apparently cannot be expected to restrain their primal urges, but specifically gendered garments also prop the door ajar for those clothes to whisper in his ear, “yes, but she has tits and a pussy and doesn’t that just get you all hot and bothered?”

While the more pervasive notion at play here is non-sexual - that cis men, most of all, are somehow entitled to know everything about our bodies - the punishment for transgression does spring forth from the seat of libidinally misdirected rage. If there’s a penis beneath that skirt, an erstwhile friendly Dr. Jekyll can instantly become a rapacious, murdering Mr. Hyde.

For those who have had bottom surgery, while it would never occur to them to reveal their entire family history, darkest trauma secrets or even their appendectomy to someone before sex, the social violence lives inside their heads as they wrestle with the feeling that they owe “him” the backstory of their neo-pussy before the bed sheets dampen.

Even men self-avowedly aware of the T and expressly into trans women quickly go from calling you “baby” and “beautiful” to “fucking deluded guy in a dress” if you deny their advances. As a lesbian, even I’m not immune. Men retain the power of judge, jury and executioner beyond the bedroom, and extend that authority to everyone scared to question them.

In such an environment, it’s inevitable that achieving ‘perfect’, ‘stereotypical’ femininity is neither cosmetic choice or inward journey, nor a duplicity we perpetrate to deceive. It’s a survival strategy.

The Soirée Isn’t the Whole Story

This Russian roulette is compounded by all manner of traumas both related and unrelated to transness.

I for one have had my nervous system frayed for so many reasons not pertaining to transition. Add to that queerness and gender confusion, replete with its internal, idiosyncratic awkwardness, and you’ll quickly understand why the world appears to me like a retraumatization minefield. Seemingly neutral things have the power to utterly destabilize me. Everything is a matter of safety, from the shadows on the path behind me, to the backfiring car down the street.

Cis women are of course subject to this implicit and explicit “undertone of violence”, as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie reminds us.

Cat calls, a smile perceived as a sexual invitation, and men following women home is a feminine universal.

The male rage that accompanies the discovery of a woman of trans experience, however, is an historically state-legitimized form of violence and exclusion. Auditing the books of social life, anti-trans violence barely registers as miscellaneous reconciliations for the everyday citizen accountant. That little moment of misgendering feels to most like a blip on the radar. Either they apologize so much that we now become responsible for their upset, they don’t apologize at all or, we discover, they intended it all along. Whichever way it cuts, the water ripples aren’t the innocent result of pebbles tossed into the lake; they’re augurs of the social T-Rex from whose advance they’re protected in their ivory towers.

As a trans person, all somebody has to do is tell you that they’re male, female or non-binary, and almost instantly an ontological shift takes place that rewires our brain. We don’t need a reminder. For all those who complain of the complexity of the new world changes, it really is a self-inflicted mistake. While you proudly and vapidly declare yourself an ally, it’s abundantly clear how much of your brain is dedicated to upholding a social contract you simply haven’t lost enough to question yet.

When you consider the silent suicides of our trans siblings, the violent beatings, forced conversions, murders and escalating legislative agenda, the soirée-misgendering moment isn’t an innocuous oopsie. It’s a symbol and reminder of the inescapable, brooding fear that makes the never-ending chase for stealth femininity as much as matter of safety as authentic individuation. Remember that next time you’re clinking glasses with a doll at a pool party. Who knows, you could help her forget, even briefly, what’s waiting for her once she leaves.

The anonymous girl from Grindr left five minutes ago and I’m alone again. The hollowness is still hollow and the meager high is fast fading. Propped up in bed in my dark, studio apartment, the TV blares with a show I’m using to dissociate, not to watch, and my face is illuminated by my phone. I hop from dating app to hookup app, to Instagram and Discord DMs. I’m looking for love. More than that, I’m looking for salvation. As sick as it might sound, I actually look forward to this part of the day, with its unrequited promise of soulful resurrection.

Back to the Messages app. She hasn’t texted back and it’s been four hours, but the terror set in after five minutes - hence being on numerous apps, collecting backups for the future wife casting couch - or at least, the next hit of enoughness. At the very least, lord give me those three bouncing dots. Give me a sign!

Perhaps the trauma-bonding has scared her off. Perhaps the love bombing is too much. Sure, she has red flags galore, but I can change her. Or, easier still, I can just change myself.

I need to order food. I can’t bring myself to cook and I don’t have anything in the fridge anyway except three olives bouncing around in brine kids left in the swimming pool while mommy takes another work call. I can’t afford to keep DoorDashing, but I can’t do anything until she - anyone - responds. I order and bring up my bank balance. I seek temporary comfort in the numbers.

“Six months until you’re out on the street”, that villainous internal voice whispers.

I would journal or pick up the guitar, maybe take a walk, if I only had a reply from someone to fill me up.

Not like that. Lord, get you’re head of out the gutter.

OK, fine. Just like that, but also to fill me up with a sense of self-worth.

Maybe if I go pee and leave my phone on the bed, by the time I come back I’ll have a new message.

I am so, so sick. And then it vibrates. I lurch like a hungry dog for a treat. It’s just Jay. I love her, but there’s none of that romantic, sexual intrigue there. Less chance of redemption.

“It sounds like you’re taking crumbs when what you really want is a meal,” she begins, responding to an earlier text where I expressed my anguish at not hearing back from a girl I made out with at Dyke Day.

“You’re looking for security, certainty, and connection from a situation that hasn’t earned any of those things yet. Of course your nervous system wants more. You end up obsessing, analyzing, waiting, hoping, and wondering why you’re still unsatisfied. The more you chase them, the further away you get from yourself.”

She’s right. Goddammit, she’s right. And what follows from this unsolicited, but necessary, epiphany, is the darkest, dankest rock bottom of my life. A cavern carefully eroded over time by a failure to take a long hard look at my attachment wounds. This summer has been the most painful, suicidal, dark and achingly empty yet.

The bitter irony of the latest pitri dish of self-replicating spores under the microscope is the addict’s refrain: bleeding out from searching, seeking, fucking, fantasizing, and yearning for something outside of myself and attempting to dress the wound with …more searching, seeking, fucking, fantasizing, and yearning. And so it goes —a monochrome feedback loop, a spiritually abusive relationship, and a hell realm masquerading as one’s lot in life.

I’m no stranger to befriending my shadow. My first sobriety required confrontation with the parasitic coping mechanisms that at some point outlived their effectiveness and began killing the host.

The beauty of the pitch black dark is the enhanced ability to hear, to feel and, ultimately, any light that flickers there burns like a magnesium coil - impossible to ignore or to unsee. And so, you lean in and get curious.

Esther Perel, Because Of Course…

As LA’s standstill traffic fills my pebble-cracked windscreen, I drop into a long-form podcast in the hopes of discovering some little truth.

In periods of new recovery and ascent of new spiritual summits which impress themselves upon me with life-or-death urgency, I find myself listening to a lot of podcasts. I’m coming up on a few days of no sex, no dating or hookup apps, no contact with existing romantic prospects and no searching for replacements, so I have a surprising amount of time on my hands now. Who knew so much of my energy was going into all this? All those moments add up, and soon a life becomes a pinprick in the rear view mirror.

I gravitate toward self-help, relationship driven, eminently girly shows like We Can Do Hard Things . God bless those women and how I long to lay my head in Abby Wambach’s lap as she runs her fingers through my hair.

And there I go again - sexualizing everything.

I recently got turned on to Esther Perel, whose soothing Belgian accent disarms the sharpness of her insights.

A few minutes in, her guest - as usual, just a random Joe or Jane public - asks, “How do I make peace with being enough or recognize that I’m enough?”

Esther paused and my skin tingled with anticipation. This new program of recovery I’m working suggests writing out a list of replacement activities to fill those moments where you’re either acting out or on your way there. Right now they feel like pale imitations and lifeless obligations, like taking out the trash, or cleaning the dishes. Maybe Esther will give me some wisdom.

“I don’t have an answer for you on that one. Let me start with that.”

Fuck. Say it ain’t so. Don’t leave me hanging, Esther. Please let there be a formula.

And, thank god, in the next thirty seconds she hands me a clue.

“But I would like to ask you, have there been moments when you have it?… Tell me some of them… let’s see what wisdom we can draw from those exceptional moments.”

At first, her comment flew past me. Having seemingly evaded the question, my mind had turned off. I’m naturally inclined to favor complex answers to life’s questions, so when she didn’t drop into some kind of spiel about CBT, DBT, EMDR, or even a recommendation of kabbalah, I zoned out.

But something in it must have beckoned. I rewound.

On second listen, my mind glowed like the first glimpse of dawn on the horizon. For a split second, I forgot I was driving.

Screeching to a halt inches from “Baby On Board” bumper sticker, it hit me.

Of course! My toplines should be activities which, when I’m engaged in them, make me feel “enough.” Recovery is a participatory, individual and personal process. The key to my jail cell, which I discover inside my own pocket, probably won’t open yours.

Mic dropped, mind blown, pupils like dark, galactic orbs. Fueled by this new obsession, instead of pining for someone’s head on the pillow next to mine, I locked my arms around the toplines laying by my side this whole time.

Filling Up With Emptiness

For so long I’ve just assumed that self-love—more than hollow affirmations immediately lost among life’s demands or drowned out by my inner monologue—was some kind of esoteric knowledge, protected by a sacred few. Like Stonehenge, its mystical purpose lost to the winds of time.

Perhaps it comes from filling your schedule with socially agreed upon “wellness” activities. A combination of ongoing therapy, yoga, clean eating and turmeric tea. Perhaps throw in some “esteemable acts”? People in recovery rooms love to drop this one and, while engaging in activities that benefit others is inherently worthwhile, having a loving relationship with ourself must, at some point, reckon with the moments we’re the only one in the room.

While I know all this, my latest existential crisis revolves around the priority I attach to romance and sex, validation and attention, as the most promising avenues toward self-love.

Of course, they’re not. They are the gilded, glittering cups, we are reminded by the ancient Crusader, that no son of a carpenter would ever drink out of. And yet I reach for them every time. The communion wine is seawater, and I drink myself to death.

My last relationship, after almost a decade hiatus from dating, signaled no personal evolution whatsoever, despite approaching eight yrs of sobriety.

I told her I loved her on day two of our first, three day date. She moved in a month later and I proceeded to spend every minute with her. Even popping out to Seven Eleven for a drink brought on anxiety and withdrawal I never felt with meth and whisky. I genuinely thought she’d leave me if I didn’t rush back.

I abandoned hobbies, creative pursuits, and friends. I turned my back on any notion of what it means to be me, a self, a separate, sovereign nation with boundaries, values, habits and, perhaps, dignity. It’s particularly sad because I’d fought hard to reclaim all this once my mum’s death released me from her codependent colonial death grip. My self is the first thing I’ll give up for love. Not just biting my nails, leaving the milk out, or failing to replace the toothpaste cap. No, everything.

In short, I abandoned my self. The message was clear—right here, there is no love to be found. But, over there, sitting at that table, that’s where I’ll find it.

Perhaps my neural pathways were configured at an early age to conflate sex with love, and to seek it out in all the wrong ways and places? All I knew, at this new invitation to recovery, was this: I’m currently wired either for isolation and yearning, or codependent merging and pervasive abandonment fear. Oh, and still yearning.

Each new attraction brings with her outsized expectations. I animate women I barely know into fantasy roles, with backstories, beginnings, middles and ends not grounded in reality. Then, I get upset when they don’t stick to my script. Madness.

If I’m single, I’d actively clear the decks for an evening of isolation, glued to my phone in swipes, private messages, and hollow hookups. Configuring my entire public life towards finding women who could make me feel worthy. Mommies who could give me what she never did.

At one point, I almost paid for sex, although I was really just Richard Gere-ing it—I just wanted the company and was willing to monetize it. That’s probably more depressing.

The thing is, self-love dependent on externals is exactly that—dependent. It only works if you keep those externals alive, active, and generating. If fantasy is what powers them, they are absolutely destined to fail.

They’re shortcuts through bad neighborhoods and, while they get you home quicker, it comes at a cost. Or, it’s like electricity, as Hunter S. Thompson reminds us:

Electricity is neutral. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there—and it will.

Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is also lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy—a fatal attraction, for sure—but he won’t go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier.

Melanie, the BDSM Tent, and the Hillbilly with the Shotgun

A week or so earlier, at Dyke Day, the drunk, gun-toting hillbilly was revealed. LA’s annual carnival of succulent lesbian chaos is as over-stimulating as a cattle prod in a jacuzzi but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Especially now I’ll hopefully remember it as the moment I turned my life around. Again.

She was standing in line at the BDSM tent. Our eyes locked from a distance. Apparently, we knew each other—Melanie something. I had no recollection. I went with it, of course.

“Are you in line for a spanking?” I asked. A lithe brunette with smoky eye mascara, Melanie was wearing a burgundy silk slip. Bedroom clothing that broke the fourth wall and ransacked my imagination.

“I am.” She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and recast her posture from observation to attack, a lioness stalking her prey. “Although I think the wait is like over an hour.” She raised her eyes to the heavens, an ellipsis pregnant with emotionally kneecapping provocativeness.

“Well, then, we’ll have to see what we can do about that. What are you into?” I asked, pushing through my fear that she was out of my league, but liking my underdog luck.

She focused on my eyes with the precision of an IMAX camera.

“Femmes,” she said, moving closer—our pheromones dancing like fireflies in a two-way stream of soft warm breath—”perhaps you could spank me instead?”

The seduction was swift. I asked if I could remove a little stray mascara from her cheek. My finger brushed up against her nose. She leaned in and we dissolved into a deep, passionate kiss.

I would love to have treated this as a cute little Dyke Day moment - the way I am sure she was experiencing it. No strings attached, breezy fun. Instead the familiar feelings of immediate self-abandonment and instant love flooded in.

How do I find out when I’ll see her again? How do I not fuck this up? I wonder if we’ll spend the rest of the weekend together? I’ll have to rent a bigger apartment.

My mind raced with wedding plans, wallpaper selection and school districts. Right then and there, I would have let an Albanian mobster harvest my organs if she’d asked.

Time stopped. My insecurity pulled out a megaphone and, in 1930s drawl, hollered, “Roll up, roll up! The world’s most pitiful woman. The freakiest of freak shows. The loneliest of spinsters! Who needs a bearded lady when you can watch this lesbian monster rip out her heart and hand it to the lowest bidder!?”

And yet, once her number was in my phone, the terminal insanity began again until Jay’s text put one hand on a shoulder to stabilize me while it slapped me with the other.

Thank god. Melanie never texted back. The silence would have killed me but a response would have just opened the floodgates for more of the same old, same old. The hamster wheel spins either way.

Toplines - The Dæmons That Might Save Me

It’s a few days since Esther cracked open the piñata. I’ve just had the most delightful morning of moisturizing, walking, seeing friends, meditating and writing. I’m still thinking about sex, dating and all the intrigue, but the abstention is cleansing. These new toplines, I think, are working their magic.

To my right, Kiki’s chest rises and falls, her ears rotate like satellite dishes searching for squirrel signals in the dreamworld. I am in deep, deep peace. I am enough.

I’ll go to a meeting and call some other people in program later. In my early drug recovery, these would have been daily, morning priorities. That tradition makes fellowship with and service to others the apex recovery goal. Don’t get me wrong, all that’s essential. The issue is that I did it to the detriment of building a relationship with myself though, and it became just another avoidance tactic. Now, instead, I am writing again.

Sex and dating are on hold until I can work out how to stop appointing people to the pantheon of powers ruling my serenity. I’m steering clear of social media and endless TV binges, all of which unleash a sense that I am missing or avoiding something.

Right now, these toplines are still glistening with dew on the morning grass of a new life, but they are beginning to settle into my earth, sprouting tendrils, and flowering.

I like to think of them as my dæmons and muses. They draw near like Athena in the moments we take to cultivate ourselves, bringing us closer to our curiosity and birthing another realm. It’s been given many names—gods, goddesses, universe, spirit, Mother Earth, and so on.

Elizabeth Gilbert called it Big Magic. Audre Lorde called it the erotic, locating it “in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” My estrogenated body resonates with her on this—in transition I discovered so many strange, new rooms in the house of me.

These dæmons glow like the Northern Lights, trek like wolves for days across forests, and dart from stamen to stamen like hummingbirds.

The dæmons call us to nature, art galleries, music studios, yoga mats, knitting needles and clay. They are fecund and rich. As much jasmine scent as manure stench. They flourish in spontaneity and diversity, flexing their muscular technology by shaking us out of the mundane routine and leading us down the road less taken. They love when we mix it up and challenge the humdrum, seeking everything out with beginner’s mind. If we follow them, they’ll take us on different routes to work, sometimes ditching the car in favor of the bus, like I did yesterday.

My head rested and bobbed against the metro transit windows while the amber resin sun outside seemed like a stranger to this air-conditioned tube. The machine itself thudded and hummed its mantric chant, flowing through me and playing its mechanical music. This percussive moment of rest cracked open a treasure chest of memories. Riding the school bus on those cold mornings, my overcoat Camel Light cologne, while kids crammed in homework due that day. The cross-section we sliced through town, past the brothel where I would lose my virginity once I’d saved up enough pilfered twenties from my mum’s purse. One stolen each week so as to avoid detection. Of course it was a shameless crime, but one which, in retrospect, covered the rent for the space she already took up in my life, immune to eviction.

These dæmons concoct spells in the back of my journal, where they are listed one by one like Orishas. Each of them has its own force, a herbal pharmacopeia of apothecarial potential. Music taps me into the current moment, causing recent memories and struggles to surface and glow. Characters etched into golden rings. I purge myself of love addiction narratives with guitar strums and songs of redemption.

Walking, oh walking, she is my most bright-eyed muse. Especially first thing in the morning while the heat is still laying like a parent in dawn slumber, as of yet unstirred by a rowdy child bouncing on the bed and demanding cereal. Duck waddles, pollen rich, purple flower vulvas, tree bark exfoliations, pristine new pine fences with their proud angles and ocular chestnut knots in proud, solar yellow. Walking for me is like walking into a thousand grandmothers’ kitchens, ancestral recipes wafting past the noses of gurgling stomachs. Like Mah Jongg tiles’ plural combinations on stone tables in the park. My phone teems with voice notes of observations like seeds I’m desperate to plant in size 12, Times New Roman.

We can choose to follow our dæmons and muses. You know when they speak and you feel it in your muscles when you fail to heed. That photo you wished you’d taken of the stencil art on the wall, the thoughts you wanted to put in your notebook, but life’s productivity demands won out and yanked you home, the scarcity panic of work, appointments, pharmacy pickups setting in. We cannot stave off the world, of course. We can however indulge these little moments that we have convinced ourselves we do not have time for, whose five, ten or fifteen minute rooms we gaudily decorate with Instagram scrolls and cheeky wanks instead of something more devotional.

We can charge up this energetic field, too. It’s accretive. We can become familiar with its mineral rich soil. The more we do, the more aware we are of the difference in our somatic response between enoughness and those other, anxious, “less than” guests that come rapping at our door.

These toplines are keystone behaviors. Like the ravishing desire to eat a big salad after a workout, they unlock new characters for us to play. They make the next self-loving step reveal itself. They make us aware that it’s time to move on from one situation to the next. I can tell when the conversation at the café has concluded, and that if I spend any more time spent in this chapter I become a hungry ghost itching for attention, or simply that my purpose now lies at home in front of the page.

We begin to see the energetic lineage that binds one moment to the next and where, in whose karmic flow, we log future worries or future wisdom. We take out the trash, clear the dishes from the sink, and empty the mailbox of its accumulating obligations. We know that little and often will avert the overwhelm when life’s tasks untended to converge and submerge.

We know where to find the power ups too. The little Mario stars and mushrooms which sparkle and grow. Yin-yoga nourishes the meditation that follows. The walk, yoga and meditation make writing connect with my innermost self, rather than scramble for attention.

Your dæmon doesn’t hate on the self-sabotaging, wasteful uses of your energy, for there is no anger in their realm. Like Lady Ayahuasca, who closes off her channels to pilgrims dabbling in cocaine, she knows CPU-draining energy when she sees it. She bids you farewell and points to the nearest shower.

Destructive behaviors—whatever yours may be, for each dæmon is as unique as you—simply undermine the continuity of your streak. The energy increasingly only gets your voicemail. So, she sleeps until you’re ready to wake, and she will wait an entire lifetime. She is free power, no setup fees or monthly bill panic attacks. Avail at your will.

The Garden Begins To Grow

Just a couple of weeks in, this abstinence and withdrawal has felt like years in the wild, living with the gorillas to learn their ways and getting mauled in the learning process.

Frequent visits with dæmons have shown me all those activities whose pursuit makes me feel like I need nothing and nobody else to fill me to the brim. They’re like the rocky outcrops and shark infested waters you can see from above, but not while treading water.

This sense of enoughness is growing and beginning to feel familiar. I can sense when my hull has sprung a leak. I can tell, with the brain fog, or tight chest, when it’s time to come back home to myself.

Seeking out this new relationship with me, focusing on friendships that don’t devolve into sexualized longing, may see me happily partnered in the dream house with the wallpaper rolls laid out in front of us, or it might not. What I do know is that real love, of self and others, is a table with two full glasses and enough lemonade to go around. Right now I’m watering the lemon trees.

I hold the phone above my face where, of course, it falls twice as I fumble to unlock it. My morning face is still emerging into the day - it’s not yet ‘me’ enough to convince the Apple doorman.

“If you’re not on the list, you’re not coming in…”

I type. The screen unlocks. It’s 7:30. Yesterday I was up and out the door by 7:00. I work from home, but I punish myself with this arbitrary deadline nonetheless.

And, what’s more, she didn’t text me back. Her, in whom I invested so much hope of the fast-moving, U-Haul love. She who most likely is responding to this desperate energy.

Or some variation of that.

I reach for my vape. That dizzying first hit that makes my body purr like a cat. The seizure-like tingle as it runs through my synapses. The vape promises me continuity from the day before. She acts like the gatekeeper to a ‘good’ morning because I believe that this body, starved of nicotine by eight hours of sleep, needs her to carry me over the threshold and into the day. But does she?

Matcha beckons me. Less conscious thought than muscle memory. A healthier, more loving god, but still she insinuates herself like clergy in between me and the awakeness that feels like salvation.

And so, the race begins. Relentless. Manic. Too fast for anything other than tense hands on the steering wheel. Throughout the day, these gods promise either relief or energy - the will to go on, and to proceed to the boss of all the pseudo-gods - the sense of perfection, completion, productivity, acceptance, whose flickering flames and flimsy wicks constantly snuff out and need to be relit.

It’s not clean relief, or renewable energy. It’s not a road trip stop to take in the Grand Canyon, to feel the humble smallness of humanity inside a ferociously beautiful world. It’s Grand Prix pit stops, noisy, competitive, streamlined. High-octane necessities governed by victory or defeat.

The Gods

These gods, capricious and cruel, highly transactional, recline on fainting couches in the heavens and issue their constant demands while courtesans feed them grapes and fill their golden chalices with wine.

They don’t just demand behaviors, they demand complete subjugation. This is an Old Testament god who can part oceans for quick escape, only to impose forty years of parched and starved wandering. Is any of this for my benefit? Are these loving gods?

The god of the vape. The god of the romantic and sexual intrigue. The platonic friendship gods. The fertility religion god who oversees the text anticipation cycles and decides whether the village thrives or starves this winter. The demi-gods of Diet Coke and Door Dash, whose promises, while lower in the pantheon, still promise salvation in that first sip or bite.

Each of them promises relief and peace, joy and success. Their commands feel worthwhile because, on the other side of the fatted calf, I am shown some confirmation of my worthiness, lovability and the reduction of my anxiety.

They are short-cuts, plain and simple. Core pillars of modern living that promise immediate answers. But these answers come up short. The short cut is a sacrifice, not a blessing. It presupposes that speed, not patience, is a virtue. That trust is a disposable truth.

They always result in a crash. I forever find myself wondering why I attach so much belief to unreliable statistics. A craven bankrupt gambler who unwaveringly believes the next hand will deal success.

The gods are treasurers of the dopamine economy that governs my life.

Addiction - Feature, Not Bug

So why do I do this?

Well, no matter how long it’s been since my lips felt the sweet sting of Jameson’s and my nostrils were caked in the cocaine batter blend of snot and blow, I am still an addict.

It’s a hardwired identity feature, not a bug. It doesn’t want my agency or autonomy. It wants - it needs - only my fearful attention and cowering. It demands I invest in the idea that transactional gods are the only ones that can save me. That worship can and should bypass discomfort, whose educational signal truly terrifies the gods. That signal where the real road back to myself will be found.

It loves when I crawl on my knees before it, and these gods are one of its primary weapons.

I always want the rollercoaster, never the quiet, backcountry road, the sprint, not the marathon. I am always ready to invent new gods off the back of magical thinking. If I did three laps around the lake and the work day was teeming with victories, then three times is crowned both the expectation and the chain.

But the cost is high.

These bursts of fantasy and distraction fragment my life like a mirror smashed into a thousand pieces. Now only glimpses of my reflection remain. Instead of fixing the mirror, I accept its brokenness and seek myself out inside shiny, external validations.

Tiny hits of recognition always shy of a full reflection.

But really, the answer lies in picking up the pieces and putting them back together. To come back to that steady reflection. She who looks back to reassure me that my default state is OK. That the queendom is within.

The Pause

Stopping, even just for a second, interrupts the pattern. Maybe not enough for complete destruction of these idolatrous shrines I have erected across my life, but enough to bring me back to myself.

It’s the terminal velocity, the capitalist economy, the one-click-purchase scarcity that lulls me into this eternal thought rut and skin-burning question, “How can I make myself enough?” As if, by some process of self-reproach and constant external deification, ‘enough’ would be more than just an empty promise - the trials of Job which beg the question, not how to satisfy a god, but why be so drawn to a god that humiliates and wrecks you so utterly?

The pause might simply be the moment my fingers leave the keyboard, I recline back in my chair, and look out the window at my dog crunching down on an ice cube. An ice cube that fell out of the freezer while I retrieved a La Croix which, of course, I thought would give me the burst of inspiration to finish this essay.

It might be steady breathing - four seconds in, seven seconds hold, eight seconds release.

Or noticing my body - the breeze coming through the open window, or the tiredness I was moving too fast not just to feel, but to honor. To treat as somatic information to be heeded, rather than overridden by caffeine.

The walk, whose movement circulates blood and oxygen, unties stress knots and makes my soul more available, more curious.

These acts of devotion which slow me down and remind me that I am ok out the gate. That all these rituals, these trickster gods, only have power when I buy into the idea that there is some ideal cruelly kept just out of reach.

These returns, on whose sacred steps, I ask the real question, “how do I show up for myself?”

RTF is where I go deeper into resourced, trans‑led approaches to recovery, mutual aid, and political healing, while this space stays more focused on my personal work, behind‑the‑scenes thinking, and coaching‑adjacent experiments.

If this topic resonates, I’d love for you to read the full piece over there and, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing to RTF so you don’t miss future essays.

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Rainbow Transformations

Why “Affirming Care” Isn’t Working (And What’s Missing)

I write as a queer trans female coach with a somatic and relational orientation, working with trans, gender diverse and intersex people in and around treatment, recovery, and systems of care…

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5 months ago · 1 like · Rainbow Transformations and Hana Leyland

We are currently raising funds to launch a trans-led housing and care model in Los Angeles.

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Trans people move through the world in ways that don’t always fit existing ideas about gender and the body. And when systems encounter something they don’t understand, they tend not to expand. They simplify. They reduce. They attempt to translate complexity into something legible within the limits of what they already know—rather than learning how to hold what is actually there.

This has consequences.

Trauma, within most clinical and social frameworks, is often defined as something singular—an event, a moment of acute danger, a discrete instance of harm. But for many trans people, harm is not isolated, and it is not always explicitly physical. It is lived across environments, across interactions, across time. Not something that happened once, but something the body has had to carry, again and again.

Trans bodies store trauma shaped by ongoing social violence. Misrecognition. Surveillance. Pathologization. Like racialized and ableist violence, this harm is not abstract. It is repeated, cumulative, and embodied.

“Trans people are not merely misrecognized—we are constituted through the worlds that refuse us.”

Talia Mae Bettcher

This is the deeper structure of the harm.

Misrecognition is not just a mistake. It is not a moment that can be corrected with the right language or better intentions. It is something built into the environment itself—into the assumptions, categories, and expectations that shape how people are perceived and responded to.

To be constituted within misrecognition means that the world does not simply fail to see you clearly—it actively shapes the conditions under which you are seen at all. The injury is not only what happens, but the structure within which it continues to happen.

The body adapts.

The nervous system learns what it needs to in order to survive. Vigilance. Constriction. Dissociation. Self-abandonment. These are not signs of dysfunction, but of intelligence—of a system doing exactly what it has learned is necessary to move through the world as it is.

But survival does not stop at the level of the nervous system. It shapes how we come to understand ourselves.

In a world that does not readily recognize trans bodies, we learn what is legible. What is safe. What will be accepted. Over time, this can become a pursuit of passability—not simply as a form of expression, but as a strategy for navigating risk.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to feel aligned in one’s body. Nor with desiring forms of gender expression that feel familiar, beautiful, or true. These desires are real, and they matter.

At the same time, the standards we are given are not neutral. They are shaped by narrow, often patriarchal ideals of gender—ideals that can constrain as much as they affirm. Ideals that can require a kind of ongoing self-monitoring, a narrowing of possibility, or even forms of self-harm in order to approximate them.

These pressures are often carried in the body. Restriction. Over-control. Disordered eating. Chronic vigilance toward appearance and perception. Not as vanity, but as adaptation.

And even when those ideals are achieved, something remains unresolved.

Many trans people are taught, explicitly or implicitly, that their recognition is conditional. That their belonging can be revoked. That even in moments of being seen, there is an undercurrent of being perceived as deceptive—as though their identity is something being performed or concealed, rather than something real.

“Marginalization is not just about being excluded—it’s about being made invisible.”

Julia Serano

Invisibility does not mean absence.

It means being seen through the wrong lens. Being flattened into something simpler, more comfortable, more easily categorized. It means that even when one is present—recognized in some superficial way—there is still a failure to actually apprehend who that person is.

This is why recognition can feel unstable. Why even moments of acceptance can carry an undercurrent of doubt. Because what is being recognized is not always the person themselves, but a version of them that fits within the limits of what the system can understand.

This produces a particular kind of instability. One in which success does not fully resolve the underlying tension. One in which a person can arrive at the very thing they were told would bring safety, and still feel that it could be taken away.

This is what it means to build a life inside misrecognition.

And it reveals something fundamental about the systems we rely on.

When we encounter social systems—especially clinical and medical ones—we sometimes see gestures toward inclusion. A line for pronouns. A space for a chosen name. Small signals that an institution is trying to recognize us. And while these shifts matter, they often exist alongside a subtle, self-congratulatory sense of having “arrived” at affirmation.

“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”

Bell Hooks

Recognition, like care, is not a statement. It is not a form field. It is not a declaration of intent.

It is something enacted. Sustained. Built into the structure of how a system functions over time.

Without that, what appears as affirmation remains superficial. A gesture that sits on top of a system that still misunderstands the body, still fragments care, still requires explanation, still places the burden of legibility on the person seeking help.

And so these moments—while meaningful in isolation—can feel insufficient when they are not accompanied by deeper change. Not because the effort is wrong, but because it is so clearly not enough.

“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

Adrienne Maree Brown

If recognition is partial at the level of interaction, it will be partial at the level of structure. If care is conditional in small ways, those conditions will scale.

This is how systems reproduce themselves—not only through policy, but through patterns. Through what is normalized, repeated, and left unexamined.

It is not that these systems fail despite their intentions. They fail because they are built on assumptions that do not recognize trans life as it is actually lived.

They overlook the body as a primary site of harm and healing.
They struggle to support the construction of daily life in ways that are sustainable and meaningful.
They fail to create conditions in which identity is recognized as foundational, rather than peripheral.

In doing so, they leave people to bridge these gaps on their own.

What is missing is not care, in the abstract. It is a system that can hold the body, support the building of a life, and allow for identity and meaning to emerge without being constantly negotiated.

Without all three, stability remains fragile.

And no system, as it currently stands, integrates them.

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And so it goes, it seems, quite regularly in my life. I find a new skin emerge as I writhe and wriggle out of the old dry husk, leaving it behind me in the sun-scorched dust as I seek out the shadows. It’s always a messy affair. The amniotics of existential transformations are nutrient rich and you must always eat the placenta.

While I say rebirth, it doesn’t feel linear. It feels spiral like. It weaves like a möbius strip. It is an eternal return. It is the everlasting promise of a sanctuary that beckons every time you wander too far from your heartbeat. When you embraces the “cans” over the “wants” and imbibe the synthetic capitalist baby formula with its ferrous aftertaste, designed to have you doing jumping jacks and scrubbing the bathroom floors with a toothbrush. Tricked into thinking that there is no other rifle like ours and that it is, in fact, our best friend. No. The war machine thrives on our constant comparison to some impossible goal and we flounder in the estuary thinking not of escape but of Class Pass swimming lessons.

Because what is happening is this adhan, this call to prayer. The goddesses and fire-breathing dragons, the woodland creatures and sprites, the mountain goats and wandering wolves all dispatch their messages to me.

The “cans” are all those things that you find within your reach. They are the safe and certain ground beneath your feet. The financial security. The riskless middle. Easy targets if you want to flow with the system. The things that come at a lower cost in the short term but which feel to me like sacrifice and misery.

The “wants” are not those frivolous temptations or limbic desires. They are not the sexed and engorged, the drive-through binge. They are rather those guttural aspects of design and vocation that, while charting a steep and treacherous path, align us with the very essence of life. That emergent organism interconnected with the whole with its juicy synaptic threads. That “one wild a precious life” Mary Oliver begs of us to find. A path, however, that insists that we trust. That trust, both in myself and in others, doesn’t come easy for me.

That said, I am an inveterate optimist. Like my cheekbones, I know this is something to be happy about. However, there are times when I would wish to sulk, when the days are long, tiring, maddening and saddening. Instead, while I go to sleep in darkness, I always wake into new light. I have come to see this as faith. It has been visited upon me and I daresay it’s a blessing, not a curse. It’s one that I have taken for granted and I refuse to do that anymore. Even if, in fact especially because, I could be hoodwinked into thinking that my chips are currently down.

My dad’s health is waning. His own light is flickering as the wick to wax ratio hangs in the balance. His voice cracks, his facial features recede, his reckoning emerges in the utterance of more “I love you”s than he has said in a lifetime.

I just moved house. Untimely, I thought the ground beneath my feet would continue a while longer but the cliff edge appeared.

The world turns on itself once again. Itself subject to the spiral, we find ourselves in the heaves of techno feudal eugenics and blood flows in the streets.

All of this though conspires to nudge me out of complacency. Mother bird nourishes me with vomit as she tosses me out of the nest. The quivering and unrest is the space in which revolutions, both large and small, take place. Those moments of helplessness which might occasion you to seek more control, or perhaps even to surrender, which is where I find myself now.

In this quiet space, the ether offers up that reminder which, like my inveterate optimism, always returns. It never gives up on you, even if your senses dull to its signs.

This time I am listening. This time I am following. This time it is terrifying, like a child’s first day at school.

I have several recurring dreams. One of them casts me back into the cobbled streets and sandstone of Oxford University where I spent the better part of five wonderful years. I didn’t fit in. I drank like a fish. I snorted like an anteater. I hid my truest self. And yet the ancient oxygen of academia filled my lungs in a way I have never felt since.

I yearn for it and search for it. I find myself close to it when I write and let that symbiotic energy flow through me. I crave those concentrated attempts to articulate and integrate. To take thoughts meandering vapor and condense them into rain.

But I do not want to return to the ivory tower, where the mind and the body are divorced. I want to conduct the music of ideas with the rhythms of life and see something real come into existence. Something which actually changes lives.

I find myself on the cusp of all this. A PhD and a real, concrete fusion of theory and praxis. While I am not ready to talk about it in detail - I want to let it breathe - but I am in the river now. My instincts tell me to swim. My better angels tell me to let go and float because I was born for this and because, as my friend, vision partner and teacher-appearing-when-the-student-is-ready says, I did “not arrive at the edge by accident.”

Jeff Gaddess

The Willingness to Race

— — — There is a personality that does not arrive at the edge by accident…

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6 months ago · Jeff Gaddess

While some days I see the crow’s feet and wish that some things, my transition especially, had come to me earlier, I actually welcome my forties. Carl Jung said that everything that comes before is research.

I am ready for my life to begin. I just have to let it.

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Trigger warning: this page contains references to themes of childhood sexual abuse which some individuals may find distressing

I remember the mountainous soap suds, paradoxical icebergs in the warmest of oceans. Just mum and I in the bathtub. I don’t recall how old. Old enough to know the word “coconut”, or at least to understand it.

That’s what we called it down there between the privacy of her legs. Parents bathe with kids and kids, I imagined, were curious creatures eyes open wide to the new, the different, the similar but bigger, more hairy, etc.

I remembered noticing, on other occasions, that while Dan was not circumcised, both dad and I were. It was a fact which, to me, further confirmed our special bond. Something which made me wonder whether Dan was adopted.

Dad’s thing was always at a distance but, alone with her in the bathtub, mum’s was closer and observation turned to touching. The exact number of occasions this happened eludes me. Either one deep imprinting or a series of lighter touches of ink on a palimpsest of preternatural templating.

I would trace my fingers across the hairs above and to the sides. She wouldn’t discourage this. I don’t remember the extent of the exploration. The memories are fuzzy. What I do know is that the memories would surface years later when, spending time with a close friend and her young children who always leapt up onto my lap with their knees leading the charge at my groin, she would remind them “to be careful and respectful around people’s ‘privates’.”

There was no privacy in the bathtub. In fact, quite far from discouragement, she actively gave it a playful name.

She called it her “coconut.” Weeks after the first summer fête where I had seen children throwing balls at coconuts mounted on sticks in the hopes of taking home the large cuddly toy. When Dan had won and I watched dad in the garage spear this this exotic anomaly through the top, drain out the almost ultra-violet liquid, and then WHACK cleave the husks in two like no fruit I had ever seen, two bowls vibrating in circles.

This was the connotation that she brought to mind. Playful, exciting, new.

Outside of the bathtub I do not recall any affection. No hugs, no kisses, no verbal affirmations. But in the bathtub, magnifying glass bubbles and the smells of essential oils, there was a naked warmth and tender closeness there that was anathema in the rest of our life. Hot turned to tepid, skin curled and pruned, and the rest of the evening would proceed with everyone taking their separate sofas in the living room.

From the very beginning, in whichever direction my sexuality would take me, from girls to boys and back again once my trans identity would finally reveal itself ,the true north of my predilections was eternally cross-wired by what took place on the hot, high seas of that porcelain journey.

For years this memory would lie dormant. Hidden and unconscious, but nonetheless potent and confounding, this enmeshed and codependent Eden, with its naked boundaries, emotionally dysregulated inconsistencies and insecure attachments, would establish a template governing where, how and with whom I would seek affection.

Erections happened around women, even though the sex was never quite right. Erections based on an early arousal template that couldn’t distinguish sex from intimacy.

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The body had been transferred to A.J. Adkinson & Sons Funeral Directors. They couldn’t release it, or the death certificate, until the coroner’s autopsy had been completed.

Dad had first identified the body and, other than that, the only people who had seen her were police officers and forensic experts.

I didn’t want to see her. I couldn’t imagine that tanned skin and those proud vaulted cheekbones looking pale and sallow. I wanted to remain in compartmentalized denial and I just wanted to get back home as soon as possible.

In retrospect, this might have been a mistake. The dreams had already started and they would continue for years. Dreams with the faintest halo of her face, holding out her hand, then disappearing into the night. I’ll be disabused of the compelling truth of a dream roughly one hour after waking at least once every few months.

To this day part of me half expects her to call and laugh it all off or play dumb.

“Dead? Suicide? What on earth are you talking about? Now…let me tell you about what we have planned for the village Christmas tree festival this year,” I imagine her saying while I drop to the floor.

Right now, as I walked under a stiff black awning into a red brick funeral parlor and the latest hangover began to really bare its teeth, the death was more real than it had been since the day on the beach.

I think dad and Debbie must have been laying in bed every evening having the same conversation.

“Did you drink that much tonight? Three bottles we got through!” Dad would say. “I maybe had a glass or two.” Debbie would respond, although it’s hardly a mystery fit for Sherlock, because everybody knows.

Outside the black cast-iron fence, onyx Jaguar hearses and a British flag flailed. My mind was cast back more than twenty years, as I’d drive past with dad on the way to Swatland’s convenience store, Blockbuster rental in hand, to pick up a vast array of chocolates for family movie night.

For some people, a hearse might well be the classiest car ride of their lives, I thought to myself.

In the greeting area, twee wallpaper - none of the walls matching - was up-lit by Tiffany lamp glow. Ornate French court furniture clashed with mid-century modern glass coffee tables. It felt like they were trying to accomplish two objectives. One, to cater to all possible variations of grief-stricken customer. Two, to use synapse-crushing cross-temporal furnishings in order to pattern interrupt the awfulness of death and hypnotize you into a liminal headspace that could forget the sadness and focus on the price points.

It was almost difficult not to laugh at the way the staff had so obviously been trained to speak to the mourner. They adopted soft, hushed tones and fake upper-crust accents which appealed to a lost empire whose faded fun still represented a lifestyle goal for the average English person.

“What would she have wanted?” One asked, his slicked back black hair almost dripping on the carpet.

What would she have wanted?! Probably not to be unmasked, castigated, driven away and forced to buy canisters of helium typically reserved for inflating children’s party balloons in a hotel filled with low-level business conference attendees…

I felt inhuman and emotionless. I didn’t want to be here, inside this, the HR department of death. I felt under pressure to be seen to be grieving a particular way. I felt ashamed that I was neither crying nor on the verge of it. If anything I was impatient, inconvenienced and angry. I felt like every choice I made said something about what kind of son I was. What kind of human I was. And this human was hungover as all fuck and keeping a close eye on a stomach aching to vomit. Two directional peristalsis, like a car veering into oncoming traffic.

They handed me a brochure, which I imagined mum leafing through. She’d have been pressing the double-page spread down with her thumbs and staring at it coolly. Her lower lip would hang in that frog-like focus, as she’d lift her head to look at me.

She’d wear that sideways smile she always cast when she’d exposed the lies most of us believe without thinking. Or so we both thought, that arrogance a blend of real intelligence cut through with defense-mechanistic cynicism. But where had that scarcity-mindset gotten us?

On my part, it was this selfsame grey philosophy that motivated me to go to university to study theology with the pompous goal of proving to everyone that religion is a lie. The identical garrulousness that I deployed as a sideshow to throw everyone off the scent of my existential discomfort.

For her, that maudlin geometry caused her to sink to expend all her energy blaming others and, finally, to set her sights on a story which symbolized her entire situation: the abandoned girl who went missing.

For her it ended with with pillow mints, single serve shampoos and no goodbyes. For me it continued apace towards what, I was beginning to realize, was an equally lonely fate.

I could hear her quoting one of her favorite poems, This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

A sucker for good poetry, it never really hit me until later why she had this one committed to memory. At the end of the day, she did have kids. And here I was. Maybe she was warning me?

I don’t know how people plan funerals without doing harm to the saccharine doting of the mortuary staff. I wanted to be in and out and, at that particular moment, I could no more imagine a god ordaining this series of events than I could a large group of people eager to attend a service in her honor.

I chose ‘the Glen’. It was the first one in the brochure. It was the cheapest and easiest and, despite her airs and graces, over the years mum had expressed a growing casualness around death. It was certain, it was normal, it required no pomp. A light oak, matte-finished coffin with brass-effect handles would suit her just fine.

Same with the flowers - white, heart-shaped, simple lilies. The urn would have to be what they called a “bio-box” for transporting back to Los Angeles where I knew the ashes would be headed.

Despite the will, in which she asked to be buried at St. Andrew’s church in Burton Overy, where she and I had lived from 1998 onwards, she was persona non grata there now and even if she were, I was already fielding calls from journalists asking to attend. The village would have been easy meat.

“Would it be possible to have a couple of photographers there?” Asked the Guardian reporter who hounded my Facebook messenger and now the landline at dad’s house.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted down the phone.

“Well, you know, you don’t ask, you don’t get.” I’ll never forget that deep through line of guiltless reasoning. The same line the sex worker, to whom I had lost my virginity years before, had used. An incantation of self-advocacy it would take me another decade to utter.

And so I settled for a low-key crematorium on the far side of town and no hearse procession because, at this point, I was the only person I knew who was going.

The body is that of a white female 174 cm in height and 64.7 kg in weight.

It’s odd to see a human life reduced to the cold facts cited in a coroner’s initial report. Most deaths permit a certain curtain to remain intact. We needn’t think too much about coroners, cold flesh.

We focus on the memories and the ceremony. We begin to wade through the grief. But that wasn’t the case here. Newspapers reported, the internet bubbled, TVs rattled and the police investigation was in full swing.

Detective Taylor was a stout and kind-looking man. He offered me a coffee as I sat down in a room with windows on all sides like an control tower. Through the glass, policemen went about their days. Although none of them was likely thinking one iota about me, nonetheless a deep wellspring of paranoia gurgled inside my stomach. The addict possess a peculiarly perpetual guilt. We tend to think the worst of ourselves. If they had accused me of mum’s murder, some part of me would have been willing to believe it, so low was my self-esteem and so loud my shame.

Outside the sky was relentlessly grey, with a thin film of rain irritating the air. I has felt panicked and guilty on the drive to the station. I’d always had a perennial nervosa and it had been increasing of late. Even before mum’s death I was having more and more panic attacks, which would assail me with no warning. I didn’t make the connection between the way I was living - the increasing amounts of cocaine, the all night escapades - and the anxiety. I would sit in the doctor’s office holding forth with complicated theories extrapolated from my Web MD research. It added to my anger towards mum that she abandoned me in my most turbulent and depressive year to date.

This feeling was old. It was a lingering sense of shame and guilt about everything I might have done, said, thought or felt the day before. My scattered brain would leap between potential crises like melting stepping stones in lava.

Will I be in financial ruin? Am I going to be fired? Did I say something to upset someone? Are my friends talking about me behind my back?

These were the polyvalent agitations of a never quiet mind. To this day, chaos, paranoia and shame are familiar feeling-states that makes me feel oddly close to mum.

Disorganized attachment was baked into our relationship and our bond was marked by a never ending dark magic push pull of withholding and resentment. Manic highs as we would dance singing nonsense rhymes around the living room sending our then boxer, Sweep, into a complete frenzy, were followed by nuclear rows and bleak periods of silence when one or the other of us, in our minds, had fallen short.

And so, even though I was thousands of miles away when mum went missing and even though there was nothing I could have done, I was preternaturally disposed to feel guilty and responsible. Mum might have been gone, but I was still enmeshed. Mum and I were Munchausen proxies utterly dominated by each other’s emotions, and constantly trying to wrest control back.

For two hours I walked Sergeant Taylor through the series of events. Her character, her backstory, the prior dalliances with suicide I’d only just learned of.

He scribbled everything down on a witness statement in immaculate handwriting. Several pages summarizing an entire life and exculpating the national media establishment, which would later keep me up at night.

Could I have been more sparse and gotten a hundred million dollar settlement for their role in all of this?

Just before we finished, Sergeant Taylor asked me if there was anything else I would like to add.

“No,” I said, but for some reason all I could think of were two details she shared in her final email exchange with me before all communication ceased. Details which, before everything went black, stuck the dagger in one last time and left me with a legacy of guilt.

“I have always felt very passionate about many areas,” she wrote. “Oddly, I lost it over the last 30 years and re found it but in a misdirected way

I had turned 30 four months before.

My head was spinning with a constellation of believable predictions: universal unemployment, economic collapse, weaponized blurring of reality with AI, disappearance of truth, humanity driven into an immobilizing identity politics, the vanishing of morality behind a Nietzschean techno-feudal power consolidation.

More than anything, I walked away with a sense of helplessness in the face of it. My Instagram and inbox feed me facts at a rate inversely proportional to my ability to compartmentalize and relativize it.

I see Mad Max dustbowls, show trials, purges and pogroms. I see my trans healthcare not waving, but drowning. Is it impossible to believe that trans people, like immigrants, will soon have to hide in resistance attics?

Tricked by Hollywood and romance for the extremes, I find myself titillated and repulsed in equal measure by the sense of adventure this stokes in me. I am fascinated by the morbid. The idea of dying in a plane crash holds more than just a fleeting interest. I am drawn to experience what ordeal and terror unleash in the human condition. I am an addict. I cannot help it.

My mind is predisposed towards not handling this well. A conspiracy of genetics and traumatic upbringing, it’s like an old antenna driven cathode TV with an aerial you have to finagle into increasingly contorted ways to receive transmissions, sometimes simply having to stand there holding it in between your fingers.

Left to roam free, insights and skewed perspectives multiply inside halls of mirrors. A labyrinth of paranoia engulfs me as I’m stalked by the minotaur of rejection sensitivity. It clouds my judgment. It infects the way I perceive my closest relationships. It makes me question everything and riddles me with doubt. More than anything, it isolates me and creates a blanket of righteous anger. It’s a sodden blanket, doused with hot water which, while initially warm and comforting, rapidly evaporates and leaves me shivering. Alienation and victimhood robe me with this cloak which I falsely think, on bad days, protects me from the world. In fact, as I well know now, it marshals a dark confirmation bias that nobody is trustworthy. It hardens me, if I don’t keep it in check.

I am a dipper. I dip in and out of relationships. I am a performance artist, a jester, an immiscible mix of court reporter, defendant and judge. I keep myself at arm’s distance, or come on too strong and feel pangs of shame as I walk away. Either way, I find ways to justify my exile.

In moments like this, I need to get out of the house. There is and always has only ever been one thing that absolutely guarantees my sanity and egress from such befogged mind states. Only one manner of extrication that allows me channel my usual anxiety into something useful.

Walking. And thank god I have a dog to force me put one step in front of another, often at moments when the motivation of doing something for somebody else far outstrips the desire to help myself.

I begin my walk up the hill opposite the apartment building. I’ve been walking this way recently because it avoids the 101 freeway underpass, where the trolls lurk surrounded by overstimulating noise. Instead, I take the back-streets, past the craftsman Victorian, mint green house where Kate lives.

Kate’s in her mid-seventies and, as often happens, a chance encounter turned into a gorgeous new friendship. I have an open invitation to swing by and I dream of sipping tea with her as the sun comes down. I crave elder wisdom. Now is the time when we must look to those who have survived terrible things. Those with that kind of resilience which reckons casually with death and appreciates the small things. This little joys are my bastions of faith. The flower, the bird, the breeze, the smile.

I cross the bridge straddling the 101, watching a motorcycle weave in and out of traffic. It occurs to me that the collective noun for cars should be “a passive aggression”. A conspiracy theory checks into the hotel of my mind. It’s one of those long stay hotels like in Midnight Cowboy. Insalubrious tenants. I wonder if Google is shepherding traffic patterns to drive populace frustration into a stultifying anger. Like all things which previously sounded hysterical, it seems like a reasonable tactical choice of the plutocracy in 2025.

It occurs to me to flash my tits at the oncoming cars. To provide the people with a moment of unexpected delight. I am shameless but, at the moment, it feels like the most honest, human and joyful thing to do.

The lingering smell of skunk lurks in the air. Roadkill from two nights before. I personally love the smell from a distance. I love the smell of all sorts of things that most others find repulsive or off-putting. Gasoline, tar, acetone, formaldehyde, manure. Like I said, I am an addict. I cannot help it.

A surveillance camera appointed on top of a pole casts a watchful eye over this adjacency of homeless encampment to middle class living, typical of LA and presenting a glaring contrast of socio-economic means.

A little further up, there’s a spontaneous roadside shrine to Santa Maria. Blood red with mirrors and glittering plastic gems. An urban equivalent to those shrines you find spotted across the Italian countryside, etched into the sides of mountains. An on this urban pilgrimage, there is the ever present tug of Kiki on the leash, her only worry being where next to sniff some piss. We hop off the sidewalk into the street to avoid shards of glistening glass from smashed bottles. Enemies of dog paw. Crushed yellow flowers deck the pavement like the aftermath of an Indian wedding.

I’m tired. Coming down the stairs to Echo Park lake I spy what at first looks like an alligator but turns out to be a couple of mallards engaged in conversational quackery. These flickering exhausted eyes are seeing more things like this of late. I like the whimsy my brain generates. Recently I saw a white dog bed in the middle of the road, but my mind initially processed it as a polar bear. I prefer this magical optic.

A bearded, unhoused man with that street tan shuffles past us clutching his entire world, and engaged in conversation with himself. I remember when hands-free headsets first came out and you were faced with a question when walking through town: is it earphones or psychosis?

Or is this a false dichotomy? Are on-the-go phone conversations not the real psychosis? This need for constant companioned distraction. Motivated by meeting our step count and taking a working walk, accompanied by productivity guilt because surely every moment must be squeezed for checklist completion. All this while the lake, the geese, the ducks, the occasional crawfish extradited from the shallows, provide an abundance that’s best enjoyed in silence. We choose starlight projectors over actual night skies. Even if this isn’t a simulation, we seem to live like it is.

In all fairness, I am leaving out one other familiar friend - gabapentin - which helps to slice through my anxiety. Mixed with coffee it creates a strange presence of mind. A balance of introspection, manic creativity, and somatic warmth that causes me to not simply see, smell and hear, but to feel and to imagine outside the lines. Gabapentin, I imagine, causes me to experience the world a lot closer to how people not riddled with anxiety experience it. To feel a sense of normality as a foreign feeling is strange. But I invite this guest in whenever I need their company. If I didn’t have gabapentin, I’d quickly become like unstable plutonium more than a handful days of the month. A dirty bomb of anxiety.

Ultimately, what walking and gabapentin help me to achieve is a ray of curiosity piercing through the overcast skies. Anxiety and curiosity are, for me, a long-term married couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary with a slice of cake and a game of croquet.

Like those mushrooms that digest plastic, my anxious overthinking paradigm has become one of the principal sources of both personality and joy for me also.

It forces me down rabbit holes of wonder. When coupled with my OCD, it vehemently refuses to allow me to take most anything at face value. There is always a history, an etymology, a back story. My neck and shoulder muscles must be overdeveloped because I’m always craning and twisting to absorb more of who just walked by me, the building I just passed. I do have to keep it in check, else I’ll become like Kiki who could easily sniff every inch of earth for smells and we’d never move an inch.

My famished curious eyes always analyze people’s gait. It comes from refusing to wear corrective glasses as a kid.

“Four eyes,” the other kids would lampoon. I’d prefer to stumble blind than to open myself up to more bullying.

Thus, I was forced to find other ways of deciphering the visual data around me. I became adept at identifying people by the way they move. I can now spot friends and interesting people at a greater distance than people with 20/20 vision. While part of the insufferable, but powerful, apparatus of perpetual hyper vigilance, it causes me to hone in specific features. I’m terrible at remembering names, but show me the silhouette of a person walking and I’d know exactly who it is and where they met me.

There is a strange locational context to all things. The anxiety factor wobbling me on my axis so much of the time means that I also recall exactly where I was when I learned things about the world. I can replay that moment in detail. Taste the seltzer I was holding, the weather, the smells. With this, I am forever inside a story within a story, synesthetic layerings of knowledge, colors, sounds.

This multi-faceted way of moving through space and time yields a relentless optimism for some reason. The world is rich. The journey of identifying each spice in its marinade vibrates. Nothing is ever one dimensional. It’s noisy, and sometimes way too loud, but it places me in a diorama.

I once embarked on a past life regression accidentally in a reiki session. The lemurian crystals in my hand buzzed and whirled like a CT machine and I passed through a portal to find myself witnessing cavemen killing a woolly mammoth with flint-tipped spears. I recognized that I was not an animal in this scene. I was rock. I was simply cut into the mountainside. Somehow imbued with this animate experience of inanimate material, I walked away from that session with new wisdom. New acceptance of the möbius strip of life. I’m at pains to say that no drugs or liquor passed my lips before this session. It was entirely soberly undertaken.

That experience lives alongside another story told me by my mother. Dead for a few minutes in the operating room after a perforated ulcer, she would later describe people outside the room with startling, accurate detail. Knowledge impossible outside of some spirited hovering. A sense of spacious consciousness somehow both part and separate from us.

My therapist told me that he likes library books because, in the thumbed down pages and greasy fingerprints of previous readers, you can see an emotional topography. You can see those parts of the book that evoked a reaction.

The world is the same. While it writhes in pain at the irradiating carnage we visit upon it and to each other more than ever before, if you just take a walk outside, open your eyes, and allow your pain to turn into curiosity, something beautiful lies in wait.

“Hullo, how’re you? Good flight?” my brother asked outside the arrivals doors at London’s Heathrow airport. Flickering eye contact between the floor and the sides of my face. Right hand wrapped around the back of his neck, self-soothing the social anxiety.

“Oh, I’m good,” I lied, untruth a constant companion now that I was barely cognizant of the disconnect, “Long one, but I managed to get some sleep in.”

Sunken panda black eyes told a different story. It felt like I was a series of bubbles waiting to burst, the sheer scale of the masquerade that my life had become. The flight was awful, anxious, busy, crowded, drunken and, for the most part, an itchy sleepless blur.

I hadn’t seen my brother in five years and that last encounter was a brief couple of pints and a temperature take as to whether we might want to be back in each other’s lives. Clearly, that didn’t pan out. And now, money, as it has the habit of being, was at the bottom of internecine familial politics that had resulted in the severing of ties.

I am ashamed to admit it but part of me was relieved at mum’s passing. Her death had already begun to elicit a hint of togetherness that had been missing in this family for years. This sense of reprieve had set in minutes after I had found out about her death.

The tension of days of not knowing and the uneasiness of wondering what life would look like if she had lived. Certainly I would been faced with the aftermath of her tattered reputation, quite possibly remaining forever on suicide watch or presiding over yet more time in treatment.

The second thought was the addict in me wondering, “how much did she leave me?” There was a restless eagerness to quit life entirely and focus on drinking, drugs and the great gonzo journalistic debauchery and musical career I’d been putting off. I despised myself for having such thoughts, but my mind had always been a kaleidoscope of disorganized possibilities, unspeakable provocations and vague attempts to embody a value system. I had no idea what I believed in, who I cared for, whether anyone cared for me, and so the idea of being financially capable of disappearing entirely was kind of perfect.

“Your niece is in the car. I thought it’d be nice for you to meet her at least once. I don’t know what the next few days are going to look like, so…” he trailed off.

A half-smile landed on my face at the prospect of meeting her. Although she was several years old, this was my avuncular baptism. Perhaps an opportunity at that “normal” life that had always felt like a gift I’d want to return.

“Sounds good,” I said, remaining cool and nondescript so as not to immediately relinquish years’ worth of accumulated fraternal resentment. I could sense the dilemma and imagine the conversation he’d had with them in the car about whether he should greet me as I left customs like so many other happy families, just drive up, or split the difference and wait outside the terminal. A little bit of one-on-one time. Enough to comment on the weather, but not enough to talk about anything consequential.

Even at pre-verbal ages, kids are like sponges. Despite the press attention rapping at their door the days prior, they had managed to avoid talking about the facts of the matter with her and would continue to protect her from it for almost another eight years.

I am not ready for this.

She couldn’t have been more than four. Her disarmingly blue eyes were identical to my brother’s. Crystal aquamarines teaming with expansive ocean depth. Childish, spry, innocent and alive, she was a symbol of the life he had built without mum or I in the picture. She was the living embodiment of what life might have looked like had I not dived headfirst into both a closet and a marriage. She sat in the bumper seat next to me as the Range Rover clicked into gear and pulled away.

Immediately the memories came on as the countryside rolled by in a blur. Family car rides on summer vacations in Scotland, or down south. Always taking the “scenic route”. Adventurous perambulations for the parents, laborious delays for the children connected by an analogue Game Boy cord, with me notching loss after loss on Tetris.

With each new village or town that came into view, “Welcome to Buxton” or many more, either dad, my brother or I would say, “Mum was born here.” Because she never told us where she was born. No doubt there was a birth certificate somewhere, but she liked conjuring mystery.

Life became a performance for her. Bubbling in the magma of secrets she couldn’t reveal, the sense that she wasn’t good enough, perhaps, there emerged a storytelling mythos she wore like a gown.

She was a first-class bard. Her flourishes and fiction were a running family tradition and a source of constant entertainment. I tied them together like newspaper scraps over the years. Ancient oral traditions among near eastern nomads, accreted layers of story gathered like dust.

She lived next-door to Elton John, “when he was still Reggie Dwight,” she said one time as we drove past Middlesex.

Her mouth would curl up at the corners and her eyes would glimmer when she’d begin a story. There was an intrigue in her voice that sounded like she was sharing gossip. Fascinating and tantalizing, but untrue.

She loved the attention her mystic folklore conjured. She’d lean into it. It kept her in the lime-light and we played along. But it kept us at a distance. At last her storied waters had broken their banks and merged with another stream: the woeful tale of a little girl gone missing. Stories can be dangerous things.

While her refusal to really talk about the Brenda behind the mum had started out as a little game, it hinted at a darker truth and paved the way for a secret life that would ultimately cause her demise.

At the time, it was lost on me quite how similarly clad in story mum and I both were. How desperately we wanted to throw people off the scent. How important it was to us to be seen and thought of in a way that was entirely at odds from how we saw and thought about ourselves: as at one and the same time, both much better than you and more utterly wretched than anyone could ever begin to imagine.

The car pulled into dad’s house later that day. Time had been sucker punched by the non-sequitur beat poetry of jet lag. That synthetic chronological fog and sense of displacement. One minute I’m surrounded by sunshine and palm trees, and the next I’m in grey damp and disabusing cold, like an infant who falls asleep on the sofa only to wake up in their bed; this time my parent a lumbering assemblage of aeronautical metal, clinking ice cubes, liquor and Xanax.

The house is located in the heart of Derbyshire’s New Forest. Beautiful cast iron gates give on to a speckled brick driveway. Guest house to the left, main house to the right, long sprawling green fairway garden terminating in a river that trickles towards an old mill. A tree you can climb up into to read books and, just a little further up, the homestead with art hanging on every hay-insulated wall.

This was a cruel reunion. Nobody knew how to act. Everyone had experienced their own version of Brenda Leyland and, by virtue of the life-sustaining axis between us, the ragged double-face of mine. The relationally pot-holed life I had lived between these family conflicts had tapped into my essentially feral bipolarity - like the cat eager to be stroked only to bite and scratch on a whim.

Dad helped me in with my suitcase. My step-mother stood behind him observing me and trying to figure out which Ben she was getting today. Because there had always been two of us. One authentic, enthusiastic, entirely caught up in the magical curiosity of life, eager for debate, occasionally going too far. The other an extension of mum, a double-agent wielding anger and reprisal. A codependent avatar skilled at darkening anyone’s doorstep. And yet, always, she’d have compassionate thick-skinned patience for whichever one won.

My step-sister, half-brother and -sister were somewhere in the house and had most likely been told to keep a distance until my mood was verified.

Nobody knew what to expect, an emissary from a faraway land either looking for love or blood. The kids had been shielded as much as possible and it made sense to keep them out of the welcoming committee until it was established where I was at on the emotional caprice curve.

Mum had been a divisive figure, on several occasions threatening both dad’s wife and the children. She never knew how to react from a place other than fear, abandonment and anger.

While she had always told me she wanted nothing more than for me than to have a happy relationship with dad and his new family, passive aggressive clauses and conditions were woven into her emotionally dysregulated threads.

We were inveterate trauma-bonders with our own well-established abandonment grooves and she would pounce on the faintest hint of hurt in my eyes or my voice after seeing or speaking with dad. A blatant conflict of interest, she would coach me through these moments, sit me down and groom nasty scripts for phone calls with him or, her coup de grace, lengthy emails which would result in days, weeks or months of Cold War between me and him. In retrospect, whether. at war on Twitter, or with my dad, she was at her best in the circumspect safety of a computer screen glow.

I was more her weapon than her son, and as I arrived back to England, a decommissioned ballistic with a still heavy payload, everyone was on tenterhooks around me.

No more hails to the chief were necessary now she was gone. I could theoretically start over with everyone, including myself. However, it is hard to domesticate a wild animal. It doesn’t happen over night. It might never happen at all.

And so I made for the back room where the wine was kept and opened a bottle. I went through the alcoholic’s ritual of pouring a glass for everyone, checking for refill needs when mine was the only glass perpetually empty. And then I sat down in the living room, reflecting on a nest whose comforts, warmth and memories overlapped with, but were most certainly not, mine.

Suicide is different. It’s just as swift as other unexpected deaths, but it has another side to it. A twin energy that vibrates with both surprise and chilling, retrospective inevitability. A dense asteroid field orbiting the last words exchanged, locating blame, guilt, ifs, buts and oh so many why’s.

For anyone in the Leyland family, the coroner’s inquest was unnecessary. While the sheer publicity of her ignominy undoubtedly pushed her over the edge, everybody knew that she wasn’t, and had never really been, OK.

As we moved past the wine and on to the Laphroig, the conversation consolidated around the patio stove fire, a black cast-iron monster crackling as if it were a secrets factory from which we forged never-before spoken truths. The whiskey’s peat-driven bite burned as hot as the coals in the otherwise frozen evening which glowed red and black with the Morse code of clues.

Over the next few hours, truths came out which had never been discussed.

“I remember walking into the kitchen one evening,” my brother began, “and she was sat in that nook behind the door at the kitchen table - you know, where the telephone was - with two bottles of pills popping one after the other into her mouth. I had to rush her to the hospital.”

The secrets came far too close for comfort. The countless times, beleaguered by panic attacks, spiraled into catastrophizing doom, arrested by cocaine-induced palpitations, I had made my own peace with death, either unconsciously and passively ideating it so that I could feel its dark breath on my neck or, more actively, as I would sit and write the final notes as the bathtub slowly filled.

While I was hardly surprised, the realization began to dawn on me that, when you also considered her two or more stints in rehab during my early adolescent years, this wasn’t a safe woman to allow to mother me, and yet that was exactly what had happened. The resentment grew as it became clearer to me that everyone knew she was unwell and had never really sat down to take responsibility for how it affected me. Never suggested therapy of any sort.

“You know, she was completely incapable of ever telling the truth,” dad assumed the talking stick and leaned in towards the fire. With his hands outstretched, he cupped the warmth and rubbed them together. The secrets were now really beginning to come out.

“When we started dating she had granny and grandpa believing she was a high-flying advertising executive and that she was dating well below her pay grade with me. All while I paid off her bloody debts across the East Midlands.”

He rolled his eyes, “It was bloody infuriating being forced to choose between keeping her happy - which was hardly what she was - and the truth. But she was much more pleasant to be around - and a better mother to you, I might add - when you just humored the stories and didn’t confront her…so what can you do?”

“Oh, you don’t even know the half of it,” I piped up, slurring, “she accidentally forwarded me an email she sent to her brother while she was staying with me for Christmas. There we are playing board games and watching TV on a cozy but uneventful evening, but the next morning she concocts an entire story about an elegant black-tie ball in Langley Virginia carousing with director of the CIA, diplomats, ambassadors and various heads of state.”

And yet my relationship with the truth was hardly a North Star. I had spent the better part of my life stuffing everything down, putting on the brave face. I had dedicated everything to the magnificent external dog-and-pony show of pretense. The grades, the accolades, the career, money, wife and cats. A white-picket fenced distraction that was authentic in so far as I wanted nothing more than for that to make me happy. But it hadn’t. It didn’t. The only truth that was constant through it all was that secrecy, lies, materialism, alcohol and drugs were really all that mattered. Without those I was an accident waiting to happen. Frankly, with them I was too.

“I always wondered whether she was, well, you know, a lesbian,” dad started up.

To everyone else it might have seemed like an odd segue but, to me, it felt like he was reading my mind. My closeted hyper vigilance immediately came on shift, ready to pay all the unnecessary attention to how I might be seen to respond - my words, my gestures - and whether or not that might give me away.

“I mean. She was never able to get intimate with me. Maybe she wasn’t really ever attracted to me. Two kids or not, we didn’t ever have what you could call a sex life.”

My brother and I exchanged the look that two sons give when their dad talks about sex. Perhaps the first flicker of fraternity we’d had since I’d arrived.

At this top end of the conversational crescendo, there were few places left to go. It occurred to me how easily I could have drunkenly sneaked my sexuality into the conversation. How with everything else going on, it could have been the least dramatic revelation that night. I leaned forward, waiting for clumsy words to form and fall out of my mouth but, like so many times before, I let the moment slip away.

“Well, what can you do…it’s a fucking tragedy that someone should go through life like that unable to talk to anyone. God knows she had her mother and father’s anger, looking at that Twitter. Shame that’s where all that potential had to go.” A mulling silence, dad’s words had a sense of finality as he got up.

“Alright boys, I’ll leave you to it. I’m headed to bed.” He clasped and squeezed my shoulder. “It’s good to have you home, son.”

The idea that mum and I had been living under one roof with the same queer secret that neither one of us could broach was agonizing. Mum and I were cut from the same cloth. Two prisoners each holding the keys to the other one’s cell, and completely unaware of each other’s suffering. Or else, aware but consumed by our own private hell.

Even now, with the entire family convened and confronting far darker matters, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about my own desire for men. Partially because my brain still ran amok on the topic.

I was still almost waiting for the “phase” to end. I knew that while women hadn’t fulfilled me, there was still some primeval part of me that got aroused around them. As the secrets around mum’s past were stirred, so too were ancient memories trapped in the amber of my physiology. Memories which began to connect the dots between our relationship and my own sexual confusion. An arousal template. A generational legacy. A trauma about to resurrect.

To read the next installment in this series, Part 5, click here.

One of the positives in my life recently are my tits. I love them.

They were born September 24, 2025 and weighed 2.38lbs. The left one is called Maggie (after Dame Maggie Smith) and the right is Nina (after Nina Simone). A girlfriend of mine at university, Anastasia, named her breasts and referred to them collectively as “the girls” and that level of playful intimacy has always stuck with me.

Inanimate objects with names are just one piece of the panentheist worldview which, more than anything else, sustains me. Maggie could love up on or cuss you out in the space of a single sentence. Nina, while smaller, brings a balance of romance and tenor badassery to the udder choir.

It’s not so much that I got tits. My breasts were developing under the tutelage of Madame Estrogen, but just a little too slowly. While some dolls are lucky to develop fast, even with the progesterone and high saturated fat diet mine were moving at a glacial pace.

Alas, Madame Estrogen’s slow work was too much for me to bear. For me she was the kind of teacher who focused extensively on the rudiments of Latin well before any actual reading or writing. I needed active tittage. I needed it fast.

And thus, blessed by a cancellation, my surgery was brought forward and my tits were born under a Libra moon. Whispered incantations inside silicone domes, I woke up to them in the post-surgery recovery area and immediately felt my transition leap forward.

Getting misgendered is part and parcel of the transition journey. As I have written elsewhere, while such mistakes initially felt like sunlight on a vampire’s skin, I try to pass them off with more casualness these days. I have only so much control over how others perceive me, as much as I wish it were different. Tits, however, have moved the needle dramatically.

This now mountainous silhouette that I cut results in at least one car horn or cat call a day. Underlying terrifying masculine primal aggression aside, these moments nonetheless have a validating impact that has been long sought.

In the drowsy moments shortly after waking, as my mind is rebooting and remembering itself, I still have a moment of surprise.

“Fuck me, I’ve got tits”

Dysphoria is still a part of my life. My penis hangs like a dead flower, missed by the gardener and bringing down the vibe of the entire rose garden. However, the girls pendulous weight lifts my mind out of the mucky muck of depression more than occasionally. Shallow? Vain? Nope. Trans and seeing a dream come true.

The disinclination to top people in the bedroom (or wherever my wild oats find fertile soil) is slowing and while I’m a submissive bottom through and through, knowing that I wouldn’t need to close my eyes to dissociate through penetrating someone opens up possibilities.

The nipple clamps haven’t yet been brought back down from the shelf because the area is still largely numb. Nibbles and tongues do little to arouse me, although the psychological tingling is there. I don’t fully appreciate the way people fondle, smoosh and cup them but, again, the addition of that menu item is a welcome diversification of the fornication portfolio.

As Miriam Margolyes says in her memoir of incomparable honesty and laugh-a-minute authenticity, Oh, Miriam, “tits make all the difference.” My roommate, who has had large knockers for over a decade, echoed this, “it never gets old.”

And with that, they clasp the sides of their bells, clap them together with a branch-snapping thunder, and we salute the busty gods with beaming smiles.

The first time mum went away I would’ve been about twelve years old. It was bizarre. One minute she was there, the next she was not.

Children’s recollections are fuzzy. Scrapbook minds sometimes precise, sometimes silted by the accumulate of subsequent events and interpretations. Mythologies of meaning which carry them forward.

Mum and dad’s marriage was over. Years of underlying tension noticeable only in the signs you piece together in retrospect. The complete absence of physical affection between them. The 38th parallel running down the middle of the bed where they slept, with neither crossing it, not even for a goodnight kiss. Dad spending as much time at work and in the garden as possible. Those late nights where of course the wife begins to put two and two together.

That my best and only real friend, my father, had found another family. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t know how. We were ginger freckled pale skinned compatriots who listened to La Bamba in the car until the cassette wore out. Who watched and re-watched the first moment Clark Kent revealed his true identity to the Metropolis public in the classic 1978 Superman: The Movie.

Just as the dust had settled and I had gotten used to not smelling the gentlemanly sophistication of his aftershave mingled with the tart Granny Smith apple in the car on the way to school, for some bizarre reason, one day he picked me up from school instead of mum. She had gone somewhere to “get better”.

He slept in the soft peach wallpapered spare room, only ever occupied by grandma for Easter and Christmas. It’s delicate color scheme added to the emasculation of not being able to sleep in his old bed which in and of itself added insult to injury. Mum is gone. Dad isn’t even really back.

It could have been thirty days, or maybe sixty. It’s testament to the lack of closeness between us that it felt like a vacation I hoped would never end. My dream of it just being us and dad, though, would have to end and she would have to come back to a home where, once again, he had left.

And when she returned, the melancholy remained. There were a few moments of initial excitement as she regale stories about celebrities “in treatment”.

“No way!” I said, “He’s gay?” I said, referring to the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the UK at the time. I relished these types of secrets. The ones that touched close to home and made me feel that, one by one, maybe more people I adored might come out of the closet too.

And then there was her friendship with a Saudi prince who may as well have lived at the Priory treatment center the amount of times he’d been in and out. One sunny day in the gardens, mum squinting against the unseasonal rays, he ran inside and returned clutching a large trash bag full of objects.

“Pick a pair of sunglasses, Brenda,” he said.

From what must have been fifty or more sunglasses cases, she pulled out a pair of Max Maras Shopping addiction, it seems, was another thing he was working on in treatment.

These were early indications to my youthful ears of other people with deep soul vacuums that they try their best to fill with external trappings. And which they never succeed, at least more than temporarily, in doing.

Airports are strange places when travel is related neither to business or to pleasure but rather to illness and death. LAX was a glass and metal cathedral whose shops held no interest. No leafing through Vogue or the Atlantic. No excited selection of eatery. No purpose driven momentum or childish excitement but rather every robotic announcement, every line from the check-in script

Did you pack your bag yourself? Have you been around your bag at all times?

Every gesture, from the checking of the bag to the boarding of the plane, is an inconvenient reminder of how life insists on going on when you just want it to hold still forever. Every mundane act was an irritating utilitarian neutralization of my desire to be both the center of attention and ignored entirely.

My nostrils were red raw, I could feel my sides aching as my liver screamed at me to sate it with more poison. My skin felt hot and cold, invisible beads of sweat accruing on my forehead.

I was clear in my aim - stay no longer than is absolutely necessary to bury her, administer the will and try to be courteous to family. I was willing to succeed in two out of three of those areas. I didn’t want to be around family. Addiction, especially when it steps on the gas in high victim-potential cases like this like a sports scout looking for talent, operates by isolating the target. In Los Angeles I was able to be very selective with my company. In England I’d be sleeping in a spare room surrounded by relatives in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere with cars that drive on a side of roads I had never learned on.

This was the ultimate away game and the other team’s line-up was killer. Being mum’s ally had come at a cost. My older brother, Dan, had exiled her - and thus me - almost a decade before. Married, with a child, I had no contact with him. The reasons for this exile didn’t really matter now that mum was gone.

When I look back at it, both of us had eventually had our fill of schisms with her. He cut her out entirely; I moved over five thousand miles away. Escaping from her macabre manic depression and the perpetual responsibility of guessing and regulating her mood, betting the farm and selling the shop, had a shelf life.

Dad was likewise a specter to me and, again, by no fault of his own. I had simply chosen the side of the person I had to spend the most time with.

Caught in the crosshairs of her bottomless pathologies, mum had poisoned the well of that relationship, on the one hand encouraging my relationship with him with a fragile, put upon martyr’s smile and, on the other, being highly tactical with the things she would say about him.

“You know, if he’d had his way with us in the divorce, he’d have left us penniless in a halfway house and taken you out of school,” are among the sorts of things she would tell me

A textbook borderline, mum couldn’t keep the sense of dad’s infidelity to herself. She’d had to bring it into existence through me. She had to weaponize it in the divorce proceedings. The result: a fragile father-son relationship with skirmishes so exhausting, that eventually dad, with his new wife and kids, had to set a boundary and we hadn’t spoken in a long time.

The truth was, also, that so much of my life was hidden from view. The drugs, the drinking, the sex with men. Having a second life around people only barely familiar with your primary one is a lot of work. It’s like a big budget fantasy movie: I needed to be in make-up for hours, applying prosthetics and wigs, before the cameras were ready to roll.

I sat myself down at the airport sports bar. Between two screens covering NFL replays and, another featuring a segment on the story.

Twitter Troll Found Dead in Hotel Room

A conversation was in full-swing a few feet away. Two executives engaged in one of those short-lived, beer-lubricated airport-friendships, looking up at the TV screens.

“Suicide. How terrible. Can you even imagine what that does to a person? To the son? My heart goes out to the kid.” Said one, Brooks Brothered off-the-shelf tailoring, nursing a coffee.

“Right on, brother. Jesus. As a father these kinds of things make me immediately want to call each one of my kids and make sure they know that I love them.”

“Same here. You know, I was just speaking with my boy. Twenty-three. Beautiful kid, really takes after his mother. He came out to us a couple years ago. You know, I have my opinions about that kind of thing, but at the end of the day I just want my children happy, you know?”

The other man, raised his mug to signal his assent, “Amen, brother. I don’t want my kids to ever feel like they have to hide anything from me.”

The Brooks-Brother nodded and continued, “right? Right?! And here’s the beautiful kicker. James - his name is James, by the way - James just volunteered with this non-profit, the Trevor Project, or something. Spends eight hours a month talking to other kids like him on the phone who want to kill themselves because,” he got choked up now.

I could see a glistening in the corner of his eyes which you could tell he wanted to stifle, “because, well, he got pretty close to that himself.”

The other chap leaned in to offer him support, looking first to tap his hand, then settling with a shoulder squeeze. Brooks Brother turned his head, gave an awkward smile.

“I don’t know. He’s seeing a therapist and all that. I think he’s doing better now. But, anyway, I’ve gotta imagine sometimes the only person who can tell you everything is going to be OK and actually make you believe it, is someone who’s,” the tears were winning now, “been there themself, you know?”

The other man, his stoicism barely concealing now welling eyes, patted him on the shoulder and signaled to the bartender for a refill. Were it any other time of day it would have been whiskey, but coffee would satisfy the gesture for now.

I clenched my fists and began to tune out the noise as they each took their phones out and proceeded to the parental show-and-tell.

“Here he is at his graduation…”

“This is us in St. Barts…”

This display of saccharine, perfect parenting left a bitter taste in my mouth. If only, if only…

I would have to die for you to come back to England to visit me, a specter of my mum appeared in my mind, repeating well-worn lines, eager to shift the focus back to our only and shared frame-of-reference: self pity. That’s what it would take, isn’t it?

I could hear her saying it, with that cocked head and downcast childish eyes with a flicker of orchestrated guilt-tripping. This was her coup de grace, her final act, her Svengali defense. She realized that only by dying could she initiate my return. She’d manipulate me into that shame which was the only way she had ever known to draw me closer. That dark osmosis which would always cause me to disavow my opinions, feelings and relationships in order to keep her stable.

She was always exquisitely persuasive.

I looked up at the departures screen. On time. Twenty minutes to boarding.

Just enough time.

I needed to escape. Inside an edifice whose sole purpose was to shepherd me in the one direction I didn’t want to go, I needed to escape. I slipped off the barstool and sidled over to the shower room, leaving my wallet on the counter. That dance of trust I’d do. Wanting to test the players, see how they respond. Act like it was insouciance, this anonymous first-class passenger who could leave his stuff laying around without a care in the world.

But really I was aching for the drama of coming back to find it stolen. Maybe even hoping for that excuse to file a police report and not get on the plane. I opened the door and locked it behind me, the sound like a bullet entering the chamber. I sat down, fully clothed, on the toilet seat, took out my phone and opened up the browser. Alcohol, sex and drugs. These were my tonics. And this might be the last time for a few weeks where I could rub one out without the fear of being interrupted.

All I could hear in a heart-rending story of coming-out and parental love was the desire for escape and pornography. Sexualized escapism.

Inside my internet browser, ten tabs of tabloid coverage of the suicide. It felt odd to type the lurid URL into one of those tabs and watch the page replace the photo of me and her by the Pacific Ocean with some guy on all fours. I always compartmentalized my porn consumption with OCD level precision, opened up a new tab and started typing.

Https://xxxboy.com

Beyond the colonnades of the faux-Georgian front door, up the carpeted stairs and to the left was a boy leaving the bathroom and turning the light switch on and off in two rounds of five. Odd numbers bad, even numbers good.

And it wasn’t just the numbers. It was an entire retinue of psycho-spacial symmetry my mind was aching to replicate. A platonic form of pathology.

I had to walk on a particular side of a lamppost but couldn’t decide which was the right side until I got close and sometimes had to backtrack if I walked on the wrong side to unravel the mistake and start again. Unraveling entailed mentally pushing all my thoughts either to the left or right to feel the delicate beauty and ordained structure of their balance.

Sometimes, in the car, I’d close my eyes and tell myself, “if the next car is a BMW you have to tell dad that you’ve been pooping in the garden, if it’s a Mercedes you have to tell him about the way you feel about boys, and if it’s a Ferrari you’ll get a million pounds.”

I held myself in perpetual slavery to some unobserved but cruel, capricious god to whom I must bring constant sacrifices.

It was like there was someone or something else in my head making decisions for me. Telling me what was wrong and what was right. But mostly what was wrong.

All the motor rituals were like invisible contracts. Silent commands issued from underneath the skin. Indicators of a darker presence that suggested things weren’t OK unless they were within my control. Of course, very little was.

And soon the perseverations developed into grimaces and shoulder shrugs, jerking of my head and neck, with guttural grunting and barks. I’d do it all in private. Have entire conversations with myself. Voices and self-punishing punches to the head if I got excited or depressed. I’d have to stand in front of the mirror and shout things at myself. Self-reproaching angry words, like a demon possessed. I’d walk around like Gollum, pressing my head into my neck, baring my teeth and growling, or digging my nails into my skin.

When I finally saw the depiction of Gollum in the feature length Lord of the Rings movies I saw a younger me. It was difficult not to sympathize.

If you do these things, it said, you will have a good day.

And there were more bad days than good for a boy just discovering the sweet release of masturbation only to experience floods of shame every time a boy popped into his mind during the act and having, post-ejaculation, to start over with the thoughts of girls.

Red-raw penile pries from the stickiness of blood and underpants. A balanced equation of orgasm, equal parts boy and girl. Reprieve until the next…and the next…and the next.

I couldn’t tell anyone about the boys, or the sweet fascination with mum’s make-up or dresses. All that, I was certain, would self-correct over time. A phase, a quirk, an infantile sin.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything because every time I opened the cupboard in the kitchen I saw the boxes upon boxes of medications that were necessary to keep mum more mum.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything because there always seemed to be something else more pressing.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything because the secrecy felt like the only thing I had that was my own.

And I couldn’t tell anyone anything because nobody asked me if I was OK and I was very good at pretending I was.

Next up…

Are my preferred source of inspiration

Iridescent flows of ideas and vehement optimism

Accompany each footstep

Calisthenic morning pages whose ink creates a sense that anything is possible

As thoughts emerge like steam from a coffee cup

Brief episodes of hyper-social eavesdropping intrigue

Inveigle me into conversation

With single serve hot sauce sachet friendships

Which appease the dark magic dance of my

Attachment disorder, whose witchcraft keeps me forever at arm’s distance

A charismatic Puck whither wandering, scared of ever really being known

Murals which come alive at midnight

And go fishing in the lake

Only to reel the fish in for a kiss

Catch, smooch and release

This tender love story, sepia-tinted and sound-tracked by the click and hum of old projector motors

And the smell of buttered popcorn

Mandatory Eastside Portland style vegan alabaster barista

Genderqueer with pigtails and farm-to-table fresh rosy face

Serving expensive ceremonial cacao while cabals of British accents outside price out the locals

$2500 for a studio is literally a steal

The hiss through open windows of dry cleaners

(A process, I understand, is far from dry)

Craftsman houses with bucked and bowing roofs

Whose lifecycle is almost over

Making way for McMansions with drought resistant lawns

Large carbon footprints and empty ally vibes

My dog sniffs and marks in the same spots as my late best friend

Urine lineage, odors of the ancestors

I wonder if prayers leave their jowls as they squat or cock their legs

Do dogs have separate languages

Or mock those with cheaper toys?

“Is it not possible",” I beg, “to spend the rest of my life just walking,

Waking,

Listening,

Dipping in?”

This is my love story, my ode, my only lifelong discipline

Which began with lonely adolescent years of queer fear and not fitting in,

And has continued ever since

Except now I am simply alone, not lonely,

Content for just a small handful of people to really know me

Upon which small square footage

I harvest all the love I need for now