Monday morning, when I pulled over on Monroe Avenue to pick you up, I told you that you were the second hitchhiker that I’d picked up in the exact same spot in a few short weeks. I was trying to cut the tension of our short, but mutually perilous hitchhiker/driver interaction. I told you, “You’re a lot more chill than my first hitchhiker.” And this, to be clear, was 100% true.

I didn’t tell you how low the bar was. I was alone when I picked you up. When I picked up the first rider, I was in the car with my wife, Krista. He stood next to his stalled car, waving frantically to get the attention of people passing by. He was white, dirty, several days from a shave or shower. He scrambled into the back seat of my deceased step-mom’s Acura and thanked us profusely for stopping.

“Where you headed?” Krista interrupted.

“I got to get to a gas station that has a gas can they can lend me. I just stopped at another place, and these fucking sand n------s wouldn’t even lend me a fucking can, the motherfuckers. I guess I probably shouldn’t talk like that, huh?” He clocked that we weren’t down with his easy use of slurs.

“Yeah, you really shouldn’t,” Krista said.

“It’s not great for your cause,” I said, then quickly changed the subject. “What’s your name? I’m Jude.”

“I’m Chris Brown**, but not the singer.” He said confidently, as though the clarification was necessary. “I’m the white Chris Brown. I wish I was the Black Chris Brown.”

“Being the Black Chris Brown is probably not without its problems,” I said.

“Yeah. Probably not.”

We dropped him off at the nearest gas station, acted as though we didn’t understand his attempts to not-quite ask for money, and drove away quickly.

So, yes, April, you were a more chill hitchhiker than white Chris Brown, but that’s not why I can’t stop thinking about you.

Sunday, the night before I picked you up, the months of stress of this summer- money, a legal battle with my ex, my stepmom’s passing, my dad’s health issues, my career, and the most haphazard move of my life culminated in a panic attack that I have decided, if only out of practical necessity, was my rock bottom.

Based on our short conversation in the car, and my gift for stalking people on the internet based on a few scant pieces of information, I’m almost certain that you, like me, are a trans woman. So, trans woman to trans woman, I will share with you that I was dilating when this panic attack came on. I was in bed after a brutally hard weekend of arguing with my ex, reading the comic book “Kim and Kim” as part of my eternal search for IP to turn into films and TV series. I was naked from the waist down, with a hard plastic rod inside me, a three-times-a-week ritual that keeps my vagina from collapsing.

A little backstory: about a dozen years ago, I started running marathons. I stopped in transition, because god forbid I rob some middle-aged cis woman of finishing 673rd in the category, but a side-effect of the marathon training persisted. Since then, I’m prone to intensely painful leg cramps. My feet curl like salted slugs into hard, painful knots, and then my shins pull them back open, yanking my toes towards my knees. The cycle repeats: involuntary, slow-motion flopping that leaves me unable to walk and crying out in pain. The feeling is intense beyond anything that makes sense, April. I know intense pain. I’ve had so many surgeries on so many tender places in my body. I’ve been badly burned. I’ve been concussed and broken bones. These stupid, completely unsympathetic cramps are as bad as any of those.

Sunday night, for the first time, the cramp precipitated a panic attack. But I didn’t know that then. I’m not prone to panic attacks, so I didn’t recognize it when it was happening. It was a new kind of panic attack for me, anyway - very different from the ones that defined my early transition. My mind fogged intensely; I couldn’t make sense of the words on the page of the book I’d been trying to read. My vision narrowed to a dark, telephoto tunnel. It was hard to breathe.

I thought I might be having a heart attack or a stroke. I imagined the humiliation of my dead body being found with an orange plastic medical device jammed between my legs. Sure, I knew it was medical, but when the EMTs and coroners came, it would be anomalous, a real David Carradine in a Thai hotel room scenario. With Krista in Mexico City, there was no one to call for help. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to call out to my kids. I jammed a pillow in my mouth, smelling the lingering scent of the head(s) of the previous renter(s) through the clean pillowcase.

“Is this how it ends?” I thought, “How embarrassing.” But also: “Well, at least I’m done with 2026.”

At some point I stopped resisting the cramp and the panic attack. I allowed the tunnels of my tunnel vision to close. Everything went black. But I didn’t die. I just fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up, alive and approximating “well”. There had been no stroke, no heart attack - just a body keeping the score. It was one of those moments of clarity that addicts talk about, but it was low on the clarity, just a sharp, instinctive feeling that a lot needed to change, even if it was just one chore at a time. In symbolic pursuit of this vague clarity, I made an appointment for my first eye exam.

When I pulled over to pick you up, I saw you study the car for a long moment before you got in. Even when I rolled down the window to talk to you, you stood back a bit until you’d seen me and my whole visual deal: trans, tattooed, stress acne and messy hair.

“You need a ride?” I asked.

You got in and said, “I like your tattoos. Are you from Tennessee?” I’d forgotten about the Tennessee plates. Of course you’d been worried. Tennessee is fucking dangerous to people like us, among others.

“Nah. This is my deceased stepmother’s car. I just moved here, and I’m getting situated.” I told you a little of how I arrived here, trying to put you at ease. You seemed to be struggling. You were out of breath. Your movements were flinchy, involuntary, the kind of beat-dog reactions people have when they’ve been through a lot of pain. I hated to think about what you’d gone through to put your nervous system on such high alert.

When you heard that I’d moved to Rochester to be closer to my dad and my kids, you made too big a deal of my kindness. You did the same thing about the short ride I offered you - thanking me too much, like I was really doing something for you. Maybe I’m projecting, but the way you responded to a little bit of love and empathy, like it was some kind of rare and precious commodity, made me think you hadn’t had enough.

When I told you I didn’t know Rochester that well, you said you didn’t either. You’d moved here to live with your dad, who sounded like a bit of a stranger to you. I wondered about your androgynous haircut. Had you cut it for him? Had you been “boy-mode”-ing?

“I didn’t grow up with him,” you said, “and it’s not working. I can’t get anything to stick here. I can’t make things work. I’ve got to get back to Providence; that’s the only place life really works for me. I looked it up, and it’s a six-day walk, maybe less if I can hitchhike some of it. I already walked for four hours this morning. I think I can do it. I haven’t told anybody. But that’s my plan.”

As a mom, I wanted to tell you how stupid this sounded. But I’m friends with a lot of punks and outsiders, so I knew they don’t tend to listen to life advice. My wife hitchhiked, rode on freight trains, and lived in squats and camps when she was younger, and I don’t think ten minutes with a random transsexual would have changed that.

When I dropped you off at the ice cream shop you’d picked as our destination, you offered to pay me. “All I have is two dollars to my name,” you said, “but you can have it to pay for gas.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s my whole thing. I pick up random hitchhikers and shake them down for money. I’m going to hit my first million any day now.” You looked stung.

“Keep your money, April. You’re going to need it.” I pulled over and gave you a little more, enough to get a bite to eat. “Sorry, I’m pretty broke right now, but I hope this helps. Please, please be careful, April. Please take care of yourself.”

You thanked me and said you would, and then walked away in a nervous race-walk, first in one direction, then the other.

I drove away, thinking about all the things I needed to do to get my life back on track. I stopped at the post office to ship a package for Krista.

Almost immediately, I had regrets. I thought about all the times people have asked me why I didn’t come out when I was younger. “Why didn’t I come out as a trans girl in the 90s? I would have been fucking homeless. I couldn’t have gotten a job. I wasn’t brave enough for that shit.” And this is kind of true, but comes with the implication that it’s easier now. And maybe it is, for some of us, but not for most. Not for you.

My kids are cis, het, white, and male. They live in a world built to prevent them from turning into white Chris Brown. I hope that they feel loved and know that there’s nothing they could do or be that would make them unwelcome in my home. But, when I thought about what it would do to my heart to know that broke and in their early 20s, they were planning to walk and hitchhike for the better part of a week, I had to go back. All that mattered to me was getting you a Greyhound ticket, getting you on a bus, and keeping you a little sheltered from all the dangerous kinds of people who might pick up a trans girl with her thumb out on the side of a rural road.

April, I looked for you in three coffee shops and both floors of the closest library, in case you’d needed a place to charge your phone. I went back to the ice cream shop you picked as our destination. I drove five miles along each of the three most likely paths you might have walked towards Providence. You were already gone.

You’ve been on my mind since then, as the tiny fragment of you that I observed in our short time together, and how you remind me of aspects of my wife, myself, my kids. But, of course, you’re not a symbol in my story; you’re the center of your own.

I will never know, but can guess at the things that left you so jittery. The actual blows that might leave you flinching over the future blows that you imagine.

Lately, a lot of people who know the details of my life have been telling me how strong I am. This is never a good sign. All I want is a world full of people who never have to find out how strong they are because they’re safe and their needs are fully met. April, you are clearly so strong, even in your fear and woundedness. I am so sorry you have to be.

In case this message ever finds you (stranger things have happened to me), I want to share what our short time together taught me. I have seen other people in similar crises. I have seen other people with your habitual tics of self-defense and fear. I have versions of both things in my own life. And, witnessing these things has previously filled me with sadness and anger.

For whatever reason, the timing of our interaction and the small, specific outlines of your particular strength that I witnessed refocused my attention. Instead of thinking of the tragedies and injustices that caused you to flinch, I thought about the things that your flinching protects: your truth, your vulnerability, your ability to love and hope and dream, your dreams for something better than what you’re running away from. I thought about a lot of the damaged people in my life and the precious things they may be protecting with their tics, and it made them easier to love. It shone a light on some of the fragile things in me that I’ve been so focused on protecting. It made me see that there’s not a lot of point in protecting treasure that you don’t actually enjoy once in awhile.

I’m so sorry I didn’t think faster or come back sooner. I hope whoever picked you up next was smarter and kinder than me. I hope that sometime today or tomorrow, you arrive in Providence, safe among people who see, love, and protect you. I hope that you get a chance to enjoy whatever beautiful thing it is you’re trying to keep safe.

Safe travels,

Jude

*I’ve changed April’s name and details to protect their privacy

**I didn’t do the same for white Chris Brown; this is exactly as it happened

Eileen’s* hair reminds me of my grandmother’s, dyed red with long white roots, sort of hinting at a desire to look younger, but not particularly invested in the illusion, a crimson crust teased to float over its translucent base, halo-like. Dye that communicates: one and a half inches of hair ago, I made an effort.

“Can I join you?” She asks.

“Go right ahead.”

Eileen opens with old-person small talk, a well-rehearsed recitation of her ailments. She ends it with her standard conclusion, “This never used to bother me in San Diego.”

“San Diego?” I ask. “Eileen, how did you get from San Diego to an assisted living facility in Rochester, New York?”

Eileen’s expression is a cocktail of emotions. She’s about to tell me something painful, and her eyes narrow a little, wincing at the memory. But also, she’s relieved that somebody’s curious, and the corners of her mouth raise a little at the attention - a tiny smile.

“It’s a sad story,” Eileen says, leaning in. “My daughter tried to murder me.”

My dad and I are sitting at a table with Eileen in the cafeteria of an assisted living community. Dad and I are both still reeling from the events that brought us here. His wife, my stepmom Mary, passed in June, faster than any of us expected, least of all him.

The Monday after Father’s Day, I left my dad in Knoxville, TN, surrounded by boxes of medical equipment and the foam mattress she died on (the medical equipment rental company isn’t permitted to take used mattresses; they must be chopped into smaller pieces so they can fit into a residential trash can, a messy little cruelty for the grieving).

I stayed in Knoxville as long as I could, but left my Dad less than a week after Mary’s passing to go upstate to spend my custodial time with my kids. It was, as it always is, an adjustment for two teenagers to go from their school-year life with my ex to the shaggier, less familiar version of life with me. This summer, without LA or Mexico as a destination, it felt all the shaggier. My 16-year-old confided in me, apologetically: “It used to be that spending the summer with you was an adventure. Now that you’re here, where I live, in an Airbnb, it’s basically a shittier version of my normal life.”

“Yeah, bud, it sucks to hear that, but it’s not particularly surprising. These days my whole life is kind of a shittier version of my normal life. It’ll get better, but it’s gonna take time.”

For my part, I was barely able to provide the shitty version of his life. The total-stretch-to-afford-it Airbnb I rented was a dump - a shoddily flipped house in a historically disadvantaged neighborhood. Previous reviews had called out “This place is in the hood,” which it was, but that was actually the best thing about it. We were there on the last day of school, and the street was full of life. Our neighbors were cooking, playing music, dancing, organizing games for each other’s kids. It was social, communal, an American version of everything I love about life in Mexico. The community outside the Airbnb was beautiful.

Inside: there was a urine-scented flood in the basement, nothing to cook with in the kitchen, a broken dishwasher, and flies, lots of flies.

This has been a trend for me in recent years. I book the Airbnb I can afford, and it’s a nightmare. I call the landlord. I call Airbnb tech support. I spend days arguing with the slumlords of short-term rentals. They fight for their ROI. I fight to get out. I feel like a loser.

We got out of the first Airbnb. We moved into a second Airbnb, a college-with-too-many-roommates-y attic apartment. The carpet was sticky. There was one outlet in the kitchen, so we had to be particular about the order of breakfast preparation: a pot of coffee (unplug), toast (unplug), then start the burner for the eggs (which required the stove to be plugged in to spark the ignition). It was gross, but cheap. It was only available for four days.

I told the kids we might have to spend the summer in Mexico because I couldn’t find a livable place I could afford. My sixteen-year-old threatened to run away. A friend of my ex’s messaged a Facebook mom group to see if anyone had a short-term rental available. Someone with the username xXyYZz* said that their brother might. xXyYZz put me in touch with their brother, Larry*. Larry said we could rent his place for the summer. He arranged for his sister to give us a tour of his childhood home, which he’d bought a few years ago to keep it in the family while he ran his business in North Carolina.

Larry didn’t send a lease or take any other formal steps. He asked me to send him a couple thousand dollars over Zelle. Zelle wouldn’t let me. The algorithm flagged the transaction for its obvious sketchiness. I could only send Larry $500 at a time. I called him to apologize. He told me not to worry. Over the next week, I slowly paid the deposit and first month’s rent, $500 at a time.

Meanwhile, we moved in. I told the kids, shitty version of real life or not, this is what’s happening. After a lot of complaining, they packed their stuff and moved into their not-as-good-as-home rooms.

Our first Saturday in Larry’s rental, the kids had plans with friends, leaving Krista and me alone together for dinner for the first time in weeks. We went to a Chinese place, ordered, and while we sipped tea and waited, she told me she wasn’t happy in Mexico. Before we’d left LA, she’d been doing clothing resale and upcycling, harnessing her superpower of spotting treasure among mountains of trash at the Goodwill bins, and paying her portion of the rent with Poshmark sales of designer labels that she’d purchased by the pound.

I love Mexico City. I’m finally getting comfortable speaking Spanish. Not good, but comfortable. Our couple years spent living there have been profound, transformative, healing. But my work is portable. “If you’re not happy, we should leave. Can we wait until the midterms? Where would we go?”

“The kids are in Rochester, so that’s what makes sense. We can wait for the midterms.”

By our first Sunday in Larry’s rental, we weren’t all exactly happy, but we’d reached the kind of uncomfortable homeostasis that I’ve come to learn is the standard first act of divorced-family-summer. I hadn’t exercised at all since arriving, but Larry’s place was close to the reservoir. I put in my headphones and went out to get my steps. I made it to the base of the reservoir when I got the call: my dad had a fall. An ambulance had been called. He was in the hospital.

I told Krista I had to go back. I hoped it would just be for a couple of days. Maybe the kids could just stay so we wouldn’t have to restart the summer again? She agreed that they could. I got on the first flight to Knoxville.

As soon as I got to the hospital, it was obvious I was going to be in Knoxville for more than a couple of days. My dad was in rough shape: from the fall, from some kind of aggressive infection, but mainly from a broken heart. I fell asleep, curled up in the hard plastic chair next to the bed in his room in the ER. At 4 am, we were transferred to the nephrology floor, where my dad would spend several days being pumped full of antibiotics and examined for the source of the infection. Test by test, the kidneys, the heart, and the gut were exonerated.

When my dad was awake, we’d argue about the best course of action. He wanted to go back home, to spend a couple of weeks sorting his things and finishing writing his novel. I wanted to get the fuck out of Tennessee as quickly as possible so that he would be near family every day, especially the next time his health or heart gave out.

We had variations of the same conversation over and over again, like we were in an episode of ER written by Samuel Beckett. I’d argue with my dad until he fell asleep, then escape to the hallway to argue with my brother on the phone. In the halls, I’d absorb the local misery: A doctor walking out of a room after being screamed at by a patient, leaning against the door while she sighed “Christ, what an asshole,” a nurse reporting to her supervisor that when she started to clean a bed she thought was soiled in feces, she realized it was chocolate frosting from contraband cupcakes - and that patient’s surgery needed to be rescheduled, hazmat teams cleaning room after room after fetid explosions of blood, diarrhea, urine and vomit. I caught another nurse taking over the visitor bathroom for a twenty-minute smoke break. Nobody was happy.

Once the infection was adjudicated as a medical mystery, my dad was moved to the TCU, where Mary had spent two weeks before being discharged into hospice. A familiar array of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and aides welcomed us. I got hugs from all of them, “I heard about Mary! I’m so sorry!” they’d say. I’d thank them and make a dumb joke about how much my family loved the unit and couldn’t stay away.

I bonded with Kamara*, a nurse from Sierra Leone, who, like me, found Knoxville to be very lonely. I visited her at her other job, working as a line cook in a diner on her off days, and she was so happy to see me; she brought me a stack of pancakes a foot tall without exaggeration. I froze the leftovers and ate one pancake every morning, with a gratitude meditation for the care and friendship the pancakes represented. Kamara and I made loose plans to visit Sierra Leone together someday when our schedules align.

When Mary was sick, I’d gotten angry with my dad over his habit of constantly outing me: using the wrong pronouns, bringing up my time playing middle school football, or asking me if I had any use for size 13 men’s shoes in front of our battalion of deeply Christian, deeply southern healthcare workers. I was terrified that someone’s judgment of me might affect Mary’s care.

When it was Dad’s turn to be sick, I let it slide, acting as if I hadn’t heard the seven-sentence strings of he’s and hims, or that I was a feminist invader of the boys’ football team. The southern, Christian, conservative nurses came to my assistance. They saw my long hair, women’s clothes and pair of tits, heard my feminine voice, assumed I was a woman, and gently corrected my pronouns in conversation, taking the mistake as a sign of senility. I went home, did yoga, ate too many fake-weed Tennessee Delta-9 THC edibles, and drank too much of Mary’s wine to numb the residual pain, embarrassment, and awkwardness of the day.

As soon as he’d beaten the infection, my dad wanted out of the hospital. In a two-day flurry of phone calls, my loose plans to bring him to Rochester firmed up in a crash-course on moving a parent into assisted living. I found a good place that would accept him on a temporary basis so he could leave if he hated it. It was across the street from a nature preserve and a park where my younger son played baseball and soccer. I got referrals for plans B, C, D, E, and F if plan A ended up failing. My brother booked a flight to Knoxville, and three days of 24/7 home healthcare aides for the long weekend we’d spend packing Dad’s things before the move. They’d rent a van and make a road trip out of it.

I told the supervising nurse at the TCU that, despite the hospital’s recommendation that my dad spend another week in physical therapy, we were leaving. I signed the discharge papers, and Dad’s and my fates were sealed.

Dad was discharged. I packed his clothes and choice personal items into boxes. My brother and his girlfriend arrived in Knoxville, and I left for Rochester, our new home.

At the dinner table in the assisted living facility, Eileen unburdens herself: “I needed help in San Diego. I knew I wasn’t able to get along as well as I used to. I could have used a little help with going to the grocery store and putting things away. Not a lot. And I called my daughter. I called her every week, but she wouldn’t come.”

“So I called my other daughter, Amanda*, who lives in Rochester, and she said, ‘Mom, come live here where we can help you.’ I gave her power of attorney so she could help me sell the house so I could afford this place.” Eileen gestures loosely to the building.

“I guess when you change power of attorney, the lawyers inform whoever used to have it. My younger daughter got that letter in the mail, and I guess it really set her off. You know, I didn’t understand it. Amanda called me one day and said, ‘Mom, don’t let anyone in the house today. Even if you know them, don’t let them in the house.’ And it sounded crazy to me, you know? I’m in my seventies; what is this, stranger danger? But I tell Amanda I won’t.”

“And then my grandsons arrive with a shopping bag from the pharmacy. It’s just vitamins, not real medicine, and I remembered what Amanda said, so I told them through the door to leave it on the front step. But they say their mom said they had to watch me take the medicine. Watch me take vitamins? I take vitamins twice a day, I tell them. Are you going to come back in the morning and watch me take the vitamins? Eventually, they tell me they have to leave and take the pills back to their mom.”

“I call Amanda. I tell her about the vitamins, and she says again, ‘don’t let anybody in the house today,’ like I’m a kid at home alone. And then, a couple of hours later, Katie* comes by. She’s got the vitamins, and she’s furious. She’s screaming at me through the door to let her the F in. I tell her I’m not letting her in and she can do what she wants with the vitamins. But she had a key, I guess, because all of a sudden she’s in my kitchen and she’s punching me in my face. And then, I’m on the floor, and she’s got me by my hair, slamming my head into the floor, over and over again. It’s a concrete floor, just a thin layer of tile, and she won’t stop.”

“I scream at her: ‘Katie, why are you doing this?’ And she says, ‘You took away my future!’ Took away her future? ‘What are you talking about?’”

“Katie screams, ‘You took away my money!’ And I figure that she thinks she’s not going to get money from the house because of the power of attorney. The house is the only money I have.”

“Eileen,” I say, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“I ran away,” Eileen continued, “I made it into the backyard, and I hid behind a tree that we planted when the girls were young. It was only this big around when we planted it,” she says, pantomiming the circumference of a grapefruit. By the time my daughter tried to kill me, it was big enough to hide behind.”

“One minute, I was standing behind the tree. Then, all of a sudden, I was upside down. My backside was against the tree, my legs up in the air, and they hurt. I wondered why my right leg hurt so much. I realized I’d been unconscious. I was unconscious, and now I was waking up, and it felt like my leg was broken. She’d found me, I guess, and beaten me until I blacked out.”

“I looked across the yard and saw her car driving out of the driveway. She was leaving. I got up and limped back to the house to find my phone and call for help. That’s when she saw me. She backed down the driveway, chased me across the lawn in her car, and ran over my legs. I screamed so loudly that it scared her. She heard that scream, and she drove away, and I crawled into the house and called 9-1-1.”

“And you know what, when the police came to her house, you know what she told them? That I attacked her. Can you imagine me inviting my daughter over to attack her? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“My leg wasn’t broken. I got out of the emergency room the next morning, and Amanda bought me a ticket to Rochester. We sold the house as fast as we could. I took the first offer. A million dollars. I think I could have gotten four million. I’m writing her out of the will. But I want to do it so she doesn’t find out until after I’m gone. I don’t need another night like that one.”

My dad is ready to go, exhausted from his own tragedies. He reminds me that I need to leave to get some work done. “Eileen, that’s terrible,” I say as we get up from the table, leaving her alone with her dinner. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it,” Eileen says. “My husband was a bad man, a liar and a cheat. And before him, my father used to beat me. That’s just my life.”

“I want to hear about it all,” I say. “Another dinner?”

She nods and tucks into her food. My dad returns to his room to edit his novel. I go back to my family, at Larry’s house.

*Names changed to protect people’s privacy.

I’ve got a complicated relationship with Pride. I’ve only been to two Pride events in the States: my first was West Hollywood Pride in 2019, with my two sons. They bought rainbow-flag capes, wore rainbow Mickey Mouse ears, and asked if all the fuss was for me. They were excited to learn that cops, firefighters, and Chase Bank employees could all be queer. They ate snacks. They asked what organization the people in the leather harnesses and dog masks belonged to. I managed to make them sound like artisan leather-workers, old-world cobblers. There was okay food. Great music. When we left, my sons were very, very proud of me. Who else gets a party like this?

A week or so later, I went to my first trans pride. I was a wallflower. I spotted some trans people I knew, but not well enough to say hi. I ran into my therapist, and somehow that only made me feel like more of a loser. I tried to start conversations with people who seemed to be roughly my age and level of unaccompanied-ness. I failed. In the land of the straights, I was too queer - a bald dude in makeup and a pencil skirt. In the land of the queers, I felt like the meme of Steve Buscemi as an undercover cop in high school, “How do you do, fellow kids?”

I eventually made actual trans friends and didn’t really go to Pride for a while. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me. Pride was Passover or Eid, full of other people’s nostalgia for other people’s milestones. So many parties, hookups, protests, and performances that I had no memories to match. Being disowned by your mom in your 40s hits different than it does in your 20s.

Deeper down, something else kept me away from Pride: I wasn’t particularly proud. I was at the early stages of working through years of shame and deeply internalized transphobia. My inner landscape was an intricate system of excuses and rationalizations. I could easily “forgive” other trans people for traits that set my own self-hatred ablaze. Her deep voice? Beautiful, confident, sultry, funny… My deep voice? Mannish, a punchline from a hack sitcom. Her big hands? Elegantly long-fingered, pianist hands, guitar player hands, she’s the girl from the Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun. My big hands? Frankenstein, Mickey Mouse, some golum. Her shaved head worked for her because her face was so pretty. My shaved head only underscored my ugliness.

Somehow, this idea that every other trans person was worthy of love while I was the appropriate receptacle for all the million hateful lessons I’d learned from daytime talk shows, and dead tranny jokes made sense to me. I was like a mountain in the desert with nuclear waste stored in its depths.

While I want to say that this was predictably unsustainable and objectively bad, I’m not sure that’s true. This contained transphobia, like spent uranium rods, had a half-life (thank God, not 4.5 billion years). Time spent living as myself helped. A half-dozen surgeries helped. Deep, abiding love from a partner who never took issue with my transness helped. And, at some point after I moved to Mexico, something in me shifted.

Now, trans people are beautiful to me, full stop. They’re not exceptions to the rules I used to punish myself with. They’re not beautiful despite being trans. They’re not beautiful-through-a-certain-framework-informed-by-queer-and-feminist-theory. They’re just fucking gorgeous. I live pretty far from most of my trans friends. Still, when I run into trans strangers in the wild, it feels the way it used to feel when traveling from Texas or LA to NY, Mexico City, or Paris: where beauty is personal, idiosyncratic, and fascinating. Yes, I want to look at you. Also, I want to read your memoir, because I have a feeling you’re very, very interesting.

Months ago, I decided that writing about this emerging, enthusiastic, uncomplicated love for and admiration of my community would be my Pride post. I’d go back to the Marcha Lencha in Mexico City and tell you about the queer community there and the connection that’s come with embracing queerness in a place where I’m isolated by language and culture.

Life intervened. I spent most of May and June in Tennessee, helping as much as I could in the last weeks of my stepmom’s battle against cancer. She left the hospital at the end of May for in-home hospice care. The night of June 1st, my dad and I ate dinner next to the hospital bed we’d installed in the living room. I said, “Oh my gosh, Mary, it’s June first! Happy Pride.”

She said, “I’m going to punch you.”

We had developed this rapport over many, many “slumber parties” in her hospital room and back home, where I’d set alarms on my phone to shake me from sleep at night to check on her and administer medication. I slept on a futon on the floor of her home office, surrounded by her books on world religion, epidemiology, and yoga. Dying is a serious enough endeavor that I didn’t feel like she needed any more gravitas from me. When she had the energy to be playful, I was playful with her. Between all the sleep, poking, prodding, and other hospital indignities, I pitched her on getting into trouble. What if we snuck out to go to a dive bar? To get tattoos? To use her hospital wristbands as a get-out-of-jail-free card for driving 120 miles an hour on the highway? I said irreverent and inappropriate things because that’s what I do. I also held her hand, caressed her face, and kissed her forehead, because that’s also what I do when I love someone who is hurting.

I had initially been scared to spend so much time in Tennessee, because the last time I’d been there, I was met with hard stares and interactions that left me concerned for my safety. As it turned out, the only people there who misgendered me were family.

Not Mary, not even one time, not even as cancer ransacked her brilliant brain. She called me “Mom.” She called me “my sweet girl,” “my beautiful girl.” In the painful, scary, sacred, last chapter of her life, she opened her heart to me with absolute ease and grace. It was a profound gift to me, very much in keeping with how she’d always treated me. We met when I was a petulant teenager and had very little interest in adding any new adults to my life. As I grew into an often-very-arrogant man, she overlooked my many rough edges. She was quick to tell me she loved me, even when I was slow to reciprocate. She was consistently my fan, even when I blew off her support.

When I came out to my family, Mary was the first to run towards me with unqualified acceptance and support. I think she’s the only relative who has ever told me that I looked beautiful as a woman, and she meant it. She gave me her pearls when she stopped wearing them. The first night I spent with her in the hospital, she insisted that I take her gold necklace. When I was living as a man, I don’t know that I needed another mom, as maternal as Mary was to me. After transitioning and losing the woman who gave birth to me to hatred, Mary’s love was profoundly needed and deeply appreciated.

My pride in most things is the kind of pride a person develops in a hyper-capitalist society founded by puritan extremists. It’s a pride not in being, but in doing. It’s a pride of accomplishment, a pride in receiving praise from people whose accomplishments I admire. Even in my relatively new, unrestrained admiration for my own community, “pride” is an uncomfortable concept. I didn’t decide to be trans. While I’m excited about how my transition turned out, I owe that mostly to some great doctors*.

This June has given me a different kind of pride. Over the better part of two all-consuming months, I got to know my stepmom better than I ever have. I met her best friends from her nursing career. I read her high school literary magazine, which called her out as the school’s “own Betty Friedan.” I saw the effort she put into preserving her family’s heirlooms for the next generation. I learned how she poured herself into life when given a diagnosis that she knew very well meant it was likely she didn’t have much life left. I was trusted to be there at her side in all of the pain and indignity of her last days, one of the doulas trusted to escort her out of a life well and fully lived.

I’m happy that it wasn’t too late to get to know Mary so well. I’m proud that someone so wonderful chose to love me as a daughter and let me be a part of it all.

To those who celebrate: I hope you had a great Pride. I hope equally wonderful people have chosen to love you.

* An aside, re: my great doctors - I’m proud to have been a small part of connecting my GRS surgeon, Dr. Satterwhite with BUTT magazine for this incredible interview/profile: https://buttmagazine.com/interviews/dr-thomas-satterwhite/

Thirty and forty didn’t really hit me as milestones. Fifty feels huge, surreal, a bit insane. Somehow I feel simultaneously fifteen and five thousand: still kind of down for whatever adventure, but also composed entirely of scar tissue.

I’m in Tennessee. My wife is in Mexico. My kids are in New York. My friends are everywhere but here. My family is going through hard, hard things. For the last week and a half, I’ve gotten gentle, generous notes from others who have gone through this distinctly middle-aged rite of passage: tending to the expanding capacity of teenagers and the declining capacity of old folks while also hoping at some point that your own career and financial life aren’t just a footnote in everyone else’s journey.

For most of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sleeping in a chair at the hospital, at the bedside of someone I love who is battling pernicious cancer. I took the night shift, came home, and slept on a futon mattress on the floor of a family member’s home office. Last Monday, at Krista’s suggestion, I checked into an Airbnb for my 50th eve and a couple of real nights’ sleep, before returning to the futon on Wednesday.

Honestly, I felt guilty leaving so many people in so much distress. The distress, sadly, was still there on the 27th (and 28th, and continues). And it feels like a minor miracle that I’m here and more-or-less in one piece.

The 25th, I bought a ticket to I Love Boosters, bought a 9oz glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and sat through the first fifteen minutes not really bothered that the theater was projecting the sound wrong: Tune Yards’ manic soundtrack on full blast, Keke Palmer and Don Cheadle, a faint whisper. I kind of hoped some nerd would complain to the theater, but I was too tired. Some nerd complained to the theater, and they noodled with the sound and restarted the movie, promising us free passes for the trouble.

While the nerd and the theater manager fixed the sound, I googled “LGBTQ friendly restaurants” and made a reservation for one at an upscale casual place a block away from the theater, which Google AI told me offers a “laid-back, come-as-you-are” environment.

I Love Boosters restarted. I loved it as a film and a workers’ rights manifesto. I loved it because it gave me hope that there’s hope for the kinds of films I love getting people to the theater for a Memorial Day matinee.

I walked to the restaurant. I turned out that “come-as-you-are” mostly meant “you can wear cargo shorts, one of those American-flag-and-Punisher-skull mashup t-shirts, and a flick-open Gerber knife on your tactical belt.” Canceling the reservation would incur a $25 dollar charge, so I smiled back at the people who stared at me while the host waited for my table to be ready. I ordered a cocktail, which I was surprised to learn arrived in a little bathtub. I had some spicy rigatoni and watched one of the Punisher-skull-cargo-shorts guys feel uncomfortable as he tried to impress visitors from New York with his urbanity. Being the most acceptable person in a room doesn’t guarantee being the most comfortable.

I retreated to the AirBNB. I talked to my kids on the phone. I ate a gummy and read a graphic novel I stole from the hospital’s lending library: Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor. Scott McCloud is most famous as the author of Understanding Comics, a non-fiction graphic novel that explains the mechanics, grammar, syntax of the comic book form while utilizing the comic book form. I read it dozens of times as a teenager who was RISD-bound, sure that she’d study illustration and become the next Dan Clowes. I’ve read it several times since, as many of the lessons are equally applicable to filmmaking and any other form of telling stories with pictures.

The Sculptor, as it turns out, is the perfect book to read when you’re turning 50, steeped in the fragile mortality of the people you love, starting a new artistic chapter in your own life, and wondering/fearing the possibility that that makes you the filmmaking equivalent of the 37-year-old rapper selling his demo CDs in the parking lot of a Kroger, doomed to fail and the last to figure it out.

The premise: a sculptor who had early success in his career, which he destroyed by being an arrogant prick (relatable), just wants to make meaningful work that connects with people (relatable), and strikes a deal with death to make sculpting his superpower. In exchange, his lifespan is shortened to 200 days. He’s never been more capable of expressing himself, but that doesn’t free him from the impossible task of using those skills to make work that connects with its viewer, and all of the normal delays of life and the art world become more heightened now that his days are numbered (relatable, relatable, relatable). And while the sculptor initially thinks that the banal pleasures of love and relationship are less worthy than his craft, of course, he falls in love with someone who will almost certainly outlive him (as most of people I love are younger than me, relatable).

I don’t yet know how The Sculptor ends. I fell asleep with 100 pages to go, luxuriating in my own (real!) bed, steps from a bathroom I didn’t have to share.

The morning of my birthday, I slept in. I found what I think is probably the best bagel place in this particular Tennessee town, and ordered a plain bagel with olive pimento cream cheese - a Proustian breakfast that always transports me back to the bagel-store-adjacent laundromat in Providence, where I first sat with mountains of dirty clothes, journaling about the hopes I had for my adulthood.

I went to the house where a hospital bed, wheelchair, and bedside commode were scheduled to be delivered, and unpacked medical supplies from Amazon boxes while I waited. I posted a birthday post on Instagram, in need of a little remote love from my far-away friends. When family came to relieve me from my waiting-for-medical-equipment shift, I took a yoga class. They wished me a happy birthday at the check-in desk, with bright-eyed, yoga-studio enthusiasm, and it meant more to me than it probably should have.

When I checked back in at the house, the circus had arrived. The hospital bed was there, occupied by its patient. A home healthcare aid sat on a couch while family in their 60s and 70s argued with family in their 80s about the best way to provide and track the patient’s care. I’ve learned, repeatedly, in the last few weeks, that even among the people who love an ailing person the most, it’s less about the patient’s actual needs/wants and more about the caregiver’s need to feel like they are doing something important, actively raging against the dying of the light. Hearing is the first thing to go. Ego is the last.

A conflict over the best layout for a sheet of notebook paper to track pill dosages came to a détente. I took that as my cue to exit. I went to the two-hour massage I booked, and found the massage therapist rifling through some file cabinets at the studio. “Sorry, I’m looking for oranges,” he apologized over his shoulder.

“Did you check under ‘O’? That’s where I would file oranges if I worked here.” I said. He stared at me blankly. I apologized for speaking. He found the oranges and gave me a two-hour massage that left me feeling younger and more athletic than I’ve felt in a long time, at least since I started sleeping in a hospital chair.

I went out for sushi at a restaurant that seemed to be staffed and frequented by animé fans. The food was good. When I finished my Dolly Parton Roll™, I told the waitress, “Hey, I’m going to be kind of a diva here. Today is my fiftieth birthday, and it’s honestly kind of a mediocre day in a crappy month. Could you bring me the tiramisu with a candle in it, but also promise me you aren’t going to sing or make any other kind of fuss?”

“I don’t know if we have candles.”

“I believe in you.”

She returned with the dessert with a candle. I blew it out while FaceTiming with my older son.

I went back to the Airbnb with a bottle of sake, ate a gummy, changed into a swimsuit, and headed down to the communal hot tub I’d reserved. The jets blasting, I leaned back into a few deep, mindful breaths. When I opened my eyes, I saw two autistic-seeming teenagers staring down from the neighbor’s balcony above me, wearing thick noise-attenuating headphones: a gangly white boy and a pretty Asian girl with albinism.

The boy called back to their parents: “The hot tub is on!” The dad assured him that was okay, and the family piled into a Subaru covered in Star Wars stickers.

I took a few more mindful breaths and wished myself a happy birthday. A mile or two away, in the densely wooded hills, I heard the rhythmic tapping of someone emptying the clip of a semi-automatic rifle. Then, more evenly spaced taps as someone else emptied a pistol. Then, a bunch of firecrackers, chaotic and crazy. Then, once more, the large gun. With the weed, the sake and the hot water, it felt like it was all for me. I texted Krista:

Wednesday, I took the 80-something-year-old to the ER when their blood oxygen read 87% and spent six hours getting confirmation that this wasn’t (another) AFIB like the one they’d had two weeks prior. Thursday, the oncologist’s office required that we transport a very frail patient from their bed to a wheelchair to a van to the hospital, just to tell us that the patient was no longer a candidate for chemotherapy and that he was very strongly suggesting a switch to hospice care. Friday, we celebrated the patient’s return home with a dinner party and one of their favorite meals. Everyone joked and laughed and drank too much wine.

It was beautiful.

The woman next door is crying out between gasps, “He’s gone! He’s gone!” She’s choking on her grief. I can’t tell from the sound if someone is there to comfort her. It breaks my heart to overhear it. But that’s one room over. In this room, we are carrying our own hope, fear, sadness, pain, and love. The next room over, there’s another family, and another universe of love, memories, fear, and pain. And in the next room and the next.

We see each other in the hallways, in the elevator, in the cafeteria. We’re all raw with watching the people we love struggle. We’re all hoping for the best. We’re all quietly tending to our fears of the worst. We hold elevator doors for each other. We exchange overwhelmed looks at the vending machines. We overhear each other’s conversations as we try to keep our respective families up to date on what happens next.

It’s been a heavy week, but often profoundly beautiful. I spent four days in the deep south with journalist and author Sarah Stankorb, cinematographer and documentarian Paul Cannon, and podcast producer and sound recordist Andrew Gill, interviewing someone with one of the most troubling and inspiring life stories I’ve ever heard. It was a strange and intimate leap of faith. This person showed extraordinary courage and trust in what they shared with us. We worked as filmmakers to be worthy of that trust. I agree with Sarah’s assessment that the time we spent together was sacred, charged with love, meaning, healing, and growth.

Driving from there to here, through the lush green Tennessee landscape, I thought about my grandparents’ house in Houston, Texas, how it was the longest constant in my life. How I can still remember the texture of the thick white and brown carpet, the yellow, green and blue velveteen furniture. The smell of Shalimar perfume, dark-room chemicals, chlorine, and crème de menthe. Curio cabinets. Paintings. Reel-to-reel recordings of classical music. A lone metronome on a seldom-played, ever-so-slightly out-of-tune piano. Ticking clocks, near and far, slipping in and out of sync with each other. Christmases. Screaming arguments. The tenderest possible care applied to a scraped knee, a summer case of strep throat.

My great-great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker. He traveled from town to town with a small credenza designed to showcase his craftsmanship. It was meticulously carved, with small, impractical drawers not designed to hold things so much as show how fine his larger drawers would be. The wood was gorgeously mottled and polished to a gem-like shine. Beneath the bottom drawer was a secret compartment. I loved that little cabinet and would carefully examine the joint work. My grandmother would let me hide various “treasures” in the secret compartment: a piece of snakeskin, a four-leaf-clover, a card drawn from her tarot deck with some kid-mystic intention. She told me that it would be mine when she and my grandfather passed. She never wrote this intention down. When my mom asked me what I’d like to keep from the house, I asked for the credenza and a wooden cabinet my grandfather commissioned while living in Venezuela. I told her about my grandmother’s intentions. She seemed to think I was lying. It went to her house. The Venezuelan cabinet is in a storage unit in LA with the few things Krista and I deemed worth keeping. I haven’t talked to my mom in six or so years. I don’t imagine that I’ll ever talk to her again.

As is the way, the rest was sold in an estate sale. I wasn’t there. By then, I didn’t live in Houston anymore. But I couldn’t have taken it anyway. Every object, even the ones I never would have wanted, felt imbued with a kind of magic that I fear may be lost to screens and constant activity. Of course, the haggler thinks this or that knick-knack or tchotchke is only worth five dollars. They don’t know how many hours I’ve spent staring at it in the slow, boring flow of time that died as soon as cell phones obviated the need to wait around at home. They will never give it the same attention.

Transition came with so many losses that were writ so large (my wife, my mother, my status, my assumption of safety), that eight years in, new losses still surprise me. The documentary shoot was based out of Memphis, and, as I’ve written about, the prospect of traveling to a state and region that’s so deeply hostile to so many categories of people meant I was a bit of a basket case on my way there. In the Houston airport, I lost my passport briefly and spent an hour and a half trying to hold my panic attacks at bay as I imagined a new passport with an “M” on my gender. You stupid fucking bitch, you’re no better than Caitlyn Jenner! After taking so many steps to stay one step ahead of American fascism, I was crestfallen. I missed my flight. I texted Krista a flurry of terrified text messages about how badly I’d fucked up.

Then, a Customs and Border Patrol Agent with a kind smile found me and handed me my passport. “I’m so glad I found you!” he said. He offered to help me rebook my flight. He wished me well. I thanked him profusely. I went to the United Lounge and sat among so many Spanish-speakers with shopping bags from Palacio de Hierro, that it felt like I hadn’t left Mexico.

I made it to Memphis. I picked up our camera package. I picked up Paul and Andrew from the airport. By the time we had everything we needed assembled, it was late. We headed south as the sun set. We drove by gun stores and billboards claiming that five-week-old fetuses have the ability to smile. We stopped in a Cracker Barrel. I got a weird look from a family in American flag T-shirts. I felt an old paranoia come on - one I thought I’d outgrown with my time in Mexico. I took a deep breath. Nothing outs you as a scared transexual like scanning a room for threats like a scared transexual. My PTSD mantra, “I am safe right now,” escaped me. In its place was Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction. “Be cool, honey bunny. Be cool.”

It was cool. Our waitress told us to have a blessed night when she brought us the check. We said, “You, too.”

We arrived at the cabin where we’d be living and filming for a few days. Our subject had stocked the fridge, made a mountain of food, and essentially provided their own craft services. Sarah and I helped them make a bed. We chatted for awhile and were enchanted by their accent, which they described as “deep fried and smothered in gravy.” Their voice hit me in the soul. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that beautiful, beautiful sound.

It went like that over the days we spent filming the interview. Two nights of the shoot, a relative of the subject brought over huge pots of incredible Cajun food and cracked jokes that walked up to the line but never crossed it. When I gave interview instructions to a retired cop, he responded with a “Yes, ma’am.” The night we wrapped our main interview, we took bottles of homemade grapefruit and pear wine to a dock and chatted and drank and watched the sunset, the trees and water around us thrumming with bird calls.

None of this was exactly the South I’d grown up in, but all of it felt very, very familiar - a first cousin of the people who had loved me, fed me, and embraced me as a kid. It hit me: I thought I’d lost this in transition, too. As it turned out, I haven’t. At least not all of it. This epiphany was nourishing in ways I had not expected.

Of course, it’s complicated. Loving the South as a white southerner is tangled up in some of the worst brutality the world has ever seen. In the same foyer as the credenza I loved so much was a painting I was happy to let go of: a crude portrait of General Robert E. Lee. My arrival in Memphis aligned with Tennessee’s Jim Crow-era move to redistrict and disenfranchise Black voters and their accompanying political power, as well as a raft of new, cruel anti-trans legislation south of the Mason-Dixon Line. And while I feel hopelessly, obviously, stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb levels of visibly trans, I’ve had hundreds of thousands of dollars of surgery (thanks Hearst Magazines health insurance!) and have to acknowledge that I may pass as cis at least sometimes in these environments. That’s armor that a lot of southern trans folks don’t have, especially trans people who aren’t protected by whiteness.

All that being said, I’d rather be engaged in an active conversation with a complicated past than to lose ties with that past altogether. I spent four days working hard to understand and illuminate the truth among strangers. Now, I’m among family, working hard to care for someone we all love as they face a daunting battle to heal and recover. It’s spiritual work and exhausting. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. The accent I worked so hard to lose when I moved from the Fort Worth area to Houston in high school, and someone told me, “Oh, you’re actually smart! You sound so dumb,” is coming back a little. If it sticks, I’m not sure exactly how to explain it. I’ll figure it out. The story isn’t over.

It’s hours after I started writing this. The mourning woman next door has left the hospital, hopefully to grieve with people who understand the depth of her loss. The room has been reset for the next soul who’ll occupy it. The family will go through the awful work of deciding what’s worth keeping, who gets it, and what will be sold off to strangers who won’t understand (or care to) how much all of it means. They’ll keep a few things and a couple of photos. Other than that, all that will be left of whoever died on the other side of that wall will be stories.

Working with Sarah, a tireless and diligent journalist with an enormous amount of compassion for her subjects, illuminated something important to me. If a story is most of what we leave behind, to be trusted with someone’s story is to be trusted with someone’s life, or at least some portion of it. That’s an enormous responsibility. But something about being here, with family, caring for each other, makes it seem manageable. Being trusted with someone’s story and life doesn’t have to be an impossibly weighty act of perfection. It can look like holding a hand, adjusting a pillow, bathing, feeding, and a million other small acts of care.

Please send your prayers and/or loving kindness to the poor, heartbroken family next door, and to mine as we work to get everyone healed and back home. I’m sending mine to you.

P.S. This letter from Nick Cave found me in exactly the right moment, and I want to share it in case it does the same for anyone else:

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Of course, I miss them constantly. This takes the form of a constant ache in my heart, which I’ve sort of gotten used to as an unpleasant but persistent part of me, like my scoliosis, red-green colorblindness, and propensity to mumble. But there’s also a cloud of FOMO of all the small moments I’m missing along the way. The things that seem too small to report on our nightly calls, the things that get lost in the chaos of teenage weeks.

What unexpected love, beauty, humor, or wisdom am I missing when I miss all those dinners, walks, and chore days?

Years ago, before I came out, when our family was still nuclear, we all went on a nature walk on a trail near my ex’s family’s house. The sun was setting. The woods were as spooky as woods half a mile from the suburbs can be. Somebody had built a witchy hut out of fallen branches. And, halfway up a hill, through a hedge maze formed by tangled vines, was a depression just deep enough that in the shadow light of the setting sun, it looked like a deep, black cave.

I told my youngest that it was probably full of snakes.

He looked skeptical. “No, it isn’t.”

“Cool.” I said, “Then go look.”

“What will you give me?”

“A Starbucks cakepop.”

“Three cake pops.”

“Two.”

He looked up the hill, through the narrow tunnels he’d have to crawl through, and the ominous “cave” up the hill.

“Two cake pops? You promise?”

“Yeah. But you have to really look in there. You know, count the snakes.”

He considered it. He looked from the “cave” to me and back again. And then, he took a deep breath and cried out, “It’s time to face my fears! Yaaaaaaaaah!”

He took the hill in a fast bear crawl, charged to the cave, then decelerated. “It’s not even a cave! It’s nothing! You still have to give me the cake pops!”

I gave him the cake pops. It was a 360º bad parenting experience.

“It’s time to face my fears! Yaaaaaaaaah!” became a family battle cry. I’ve thought it or said it out loud for a million scary steps of transition, obvious, and less so.

This battle cry came from the same kid who, when I took him out to learn to ride a bike without training wheels, took off peddling and didn’t look back. It was so fucking cool, but I also felt robbed. My first son really needed help learning to ride a two-wheeler. Providing that help was the good stuff of parenting. Same with the snake cave and the cake pops. I was sort of imagining him realizing, “Wow, I guess I really can do scary things, thanks, Jude!” But he already knew what I wanted him to know: that fear is a really emotionally charged kind of information that you get to act on out of your own free will.

I hope that when my time comes, and I’m staring into the light, my last words are “It’s time to face my fears! Yaaaaaaaaah!” as I scramble into infinity.

Krista and I take online Spanish lessons three days a week, to supplement our super-impressive Duolingo streaks and the bits and pieces we’re picking up through osmosis. It’s usually a half hour of gossiping about our lives in Spanglish, and then a half an hour of question and answer sessions that test our vocabulary and ability to conjugate (both rudimentary, both improving).

A few weeks ago, in my last Spanish class before our trip to Iceland, our teacher asked me, “Describe tu vida ideal.” (Describe your ideal life).

I said, in the most broken Spanish, the truth: I’m living in a beautiful, safe place, full of beautiful art and kind people, and great food. I have time to write and paint. I’m traveling around the world, developing my scripts, directing short films, and producing documentaries. I’ve got a great partner, family, and friends I love. Most of us are healthy; those who aren’t are receiving great care. This is my ideal life. It just doesn’t really pay at the moment. In my little corner of things, I can kind of sort of control in this world. I’ve only got one problem. This is a privilege and a blessing, and complicated, and I’m grateful. Everyone should only have one problem.

My Spanish teacher said, “Probablemente tengas más de un problema.”

Probably so. I’m a fan, conceptually, of having a beginner’s mindset. No matter how many things I make, the nature of film and television is that you’re almost always remaking the wheel. Until somebody makes JAWS, nobody’s ever made JAWS before. That kind of starting over every time preserves some dignity and honors your experience.

But as I’ve embarked on the journey of starting a company and putting together a slate of my own projects without the comfort of working for some large and seemingly stable conglomerate, the more humbling thing has been keeping a beginner’s mindset about my beginner’s mind.

Working for myself has been like therapy. Now that I’m my own boss, there’s been a lot of interrogating of habits. Why is this thing so easy, that thing so hard? The answer is usually shame, a lack of experience/confidence, and/or fear. It’s cool getting to do everything my way (I don’t miss Microsoft Teams at all). But, without the structure of weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, I find myself having to get radically honest about what time of day I can read a contract with focus and scrutiny, and when it’s time to drink a Coke Zero and walk a dog.

Somewhere, a few days’ journey behind me, follows the fear. That I’m too old, that the entertainment business is being dismantled to make room for an AI slop machine, that my identity makes my endeavors incompatible with late-stage capitalism. And if I accidentally eat a sativa gummy, I add WWIII, global famine, climate collapse, and technofeudalism to the looming shadow.

I used to brag to my therapist that my superpower was being able to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, exactly how any situation would go wrong. This was a great skill set in corporate America, where success is consistently deprioritized in favor of avoiding failure. Gallows humor was a big part of my personality. It came in handy as I witnessed at least seven rounds of layoffs at MTV. It was helpful when I watched one set of former bosses go all in on Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-lived bet on Quibi. It was a useful coping mechanism at my last job when we lost The Savant to Charlie Kirk’s Murder and a big Amazon documentary when Amazon spent their whole documentary budget on Melania.

Now that I’m on my own, this comfort with worst-case scenarios is a lot less fun. I need some wins, not just to impress a boss, set myself up for a promotion, or pad my IMDb, but because I need to turn those wins into money for rent, child support, retirement, tacos, and Spanish lessons.

So I sprint towards the things I believe in and try to keep as much distance as possible between myself and the fear.

A few weeks ago, as I bought plane tickets and reserved an Airbnb in Reykjavik, the fear closed in. What if the screenwriting lab were a self-indulgent waste of time? What if I hated the other writer’s projects? What if they hated mine? The other writers’ scripts came in, and my fears were relieved. Then, en route from Mexico City to Newark, to connect to Iceland, I got a notification from Iceland Air that our Reykjavik flight was canceled due to weather. The fear set in again as I imagined returning to Mexico with nothing to show for myself other than receipts for a trip I couldn’t take.

I tried messaging Iceland Air customer service because the in-flight WiFi kept going in and out. Krista slept a few rows behind me peacefully. Good, I thought, she doesn’t know we’re doomed.

And, of course, we weren’t doomed. We spent hours in a Newark hotel on hold, listening to Iceland Air’s absolutely unhinged hold music. We got a flight in two days (I’d arrive 3 hours before the lab started). We went into the city, toured the MoMA, shopped at Uniqlo, and ate a nice meal at a cute bar near Chinatown.

The lab was great. I was inspired, learned about a host of possibilities for queer film and series in Europe, and came away with more confidence in my practice and craft as a writer.

I came back to the States, spent Spring Break with my kids, and returned for Easter Mass at the same church my oldest son and I went to for Ash Wednesday.

My healthy head start against the fear was back, and held for a couple of weeks, until the weekend before I was scheduled to fly to Reno, Nevada, to direct Maren Curtis’s short film Holy Shift.

Saturday morning, Krista and I went to an art opening in Roma Norte. It was a little random, but familiar - the kind of illustrative, 90s-era paintings that put the magazine Juxtapoz on the map—expensive, low-brow, well-executed pop art. When we left, I was hit by sudden and complete exhaustion. “I think I need a nap.” I confided to Krista.

The nap stretched on for three hours, ended by seven hours of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea, sometimes in rapid succession, sometimes simultaneous. It was the kind of stomach flu that inspires a person to start making deals with God.

One of the most generous lessons of the Sony directing program I participated in was learning from so many established, talented, award-winning directors exactly how terrified they are before they arrive on set to direct your favorite films and TV shows. When you’re about to lead a team of talented, sensitive people while spending boatloads of other people’s money every minute, imposter syndrome is just part of the process.

I begged God to end the digestive nightmare with enough time to finish prep and do a good job in Reno. In exchange, I would skip the imposter syndrome. I’d skip fear altogether. I slowly felt better. I did my best to keep my word. The fear tried to catch up: What if the all-Reno crew hates me? What if we don’t make our days? What if the cast doesn’t gel? What if I’m no good when I’m not working with friends? But I just decided that I would keep the promises I made to God while puking in a wastebasket in our guest bathroom.

The shoot was great. Better than I could have hoped for. A total lovefest. The cast and crew coalesced around Maren’s hilarious script, and we spent three and a half days making something that I think is going to be really special. The only remaining Sister of Perpetual Indulgence in Reno was in the film and hosted our wrap party. The Reno queer community showed up to be in the film and also to fundraise for it.

At the wrap party, Maren presented me with a Holy Shift poster signed by John Waters (on his 80th birthday, btw). She had no way of knowing how much the gift would mean to me. When I was at RISD, I was one of two film students invited to dinner with John Waters. Despite his generous grace with me, I felt hopelessly square, straight, and boring in his presence. I had been picked for the dinner because I was a strong guy with a shaved head, and John liked to have someone to shield him from his more extreme fans (at his previous appearance, a menstruating fan pulled a bloody tampon out of herself and tossed it to him to sign - I was the tampon blocker). I’ve spent a lot of time since then thinking about how much cooler that night would have been if I’d known myself back then and had been able to arrive at that dinner fully myself. The signed poster from the “Pope of Trash” felt just a little bit divine.

This week, I head to the Deep South for a three-day shoot on my first feature documentary with my new company. It’s my first time back in my current incarnation, and I can feel the fear catching up with me. I’ve double-checked all the local anti-trans laws for the states I’ll be in. I’ll be declining beverage service and peeing on the plane so I don’t freak anyone out in the airport.

I wasn’t going to go at all, but cemented my decision at a random bar in Reno. I stopped in for a plain hamburger and fries, my go-to meal when recovering from stomach issues. The place was empty when I arrived. I sat at the middle of the bar and ordered my food. Five minutes later, a man in his late sixties sat next to me. He seemed well-to-do. If I had to guess his politics, I would guess that he was conservative.

“What brings you to Reno?” He asked, clocking me as a visitor.

“I’m here directing a short film.”

“What’s it about?”

“An evangelical family struggling to embrace their queer kid.”

“Their what kid?”

“Queer. Like gay, lesbian, trans. Queer.”

He looked like he was going to make a joke. Then, he looked like he was reconsidering the joke. Then he just looked at me. “So, how long are you here?”

“I leave Thursday.”

“That’s a shame. I’m hosting an old-fashioned English fox hunt on Friday, and I’d love to invite you.”

“You know what? Thank you. That’s one of the most compelling and unique invitations I’ve ever received. I didn’t know you had foxes here.”

“We don’t. We hunt coyotes.”

“Pet owners must love you.”

“Everyone does.”

“Cheers to that.” We toasted. His friend showed up. They had a drink and left. I paid for my food and my beer, put in my headphones, and pressed play on Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

I thought about the shoot that was starting the next morning. I thought about the deep south shoot in two weeks. I thought about my son and the “snake cave.” I looked around to make sure nobody could see me talking to myself and allowed myself a quiet “It’s time to face my fears! Yaaaaaaaaah!”

Our weekdays were predictable, full of comfort and pleasure. Every morning, I got up early and went to swim practice at the park around the corner. After an hour and a half of swimming, I came home, ate whatever I wanted (often: butter sandwiches, giant slabs of butter on white bread, but she let me buy all the cereals my mom forbade, so there were Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, and various other folklore/corn syrup mashups).

In the afternoon, there would be one activity and lunch. At least once a week, that activity was a trip to Toys R’ Us. Often, it was accompanying my grandmother on excursions with her old lady friends to the Galleria Mall, to the Gem and Mineral show, to the outlet stores, and even the occasional auction. They were wry and tough and sweet to me. They all had candy in their purses. Some also had snub-nosed, pearl-handle revolvers. One bragged about pressing hers to the balls of a man who tried to mug her in the Neiman Marcus parking lot. He cried and begged her to let him go. She thought that was funny.

She’d do some chores while I ran around the neighborhood with my friends. Almost every night, dinner was chicken, which would go straight from the freezer to the microwave, where it would thaw, cook, and get some kind of sauce on it. She served rice cooked in bouillon on the side and alternated between canned green beans and canned green beans as a veg.

While she “cooked” and chatted with my grandfather, I sat in the family room and ate a cucumber salad and half a can of chickpeas. I watched one episode of Barney Miller and one episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Then we’d eat. I did my best to construct strategic bean/rice bites that overwhelmed the rubbery chicken. I helped clear the table. My grandmother did the dishes while my grandfather sat in his sky blue velvet rocking chair and watched the nightly news, anger incarnate. He hated the anchors, the field reporters, the politicians, the pundits, even the people in the human interest stories. His TV time was a two-hour monologue, sometimes entirely mumbled, sometimes rising to shouts: curses, epithets, slurs, accusations of malfeasance and worse. It was all made quaint by his frequent use of “Bub” to address male targets of his hate and “Madam” for the ladies. “You’re a thieving, greasy bastard, and you know it, bub!” Or “You, Madam, are a lying slut!”

I watched him watch the TV, sometimes drawing in a sketchbook or flipping through my grandmother’s deck of tarot cards. It was scary, but night after night, summer after summer, I learned that the rage only flowed towards the television. I was safe. When the dishes were done, my grandmother sat next to me, quietly smiling through his outbursts.

When the news ended, my grandfather instantly returned to normal. It was like a werewolf movie. The clouds cover the moon, and suddenly, the monster is just some guy in ripped-up clothes, wondering why everyone is staring at him. “Well, goodnight, all. Sleep well.” He’d say, warmly, and then teeter off to his twin bed, a few feet from my grandmother’s (his PTSD from WWII made him impossible to share a bed with.)

We’d wait a whole commercial break to make sure he wasn’t returning for his glasses or a cup of water. Then, I’d turn the dial to channel 20. M*A*S*H would start, with the sad notes of its heartbreaking theme song “Suicide is Painless,” and I’d run to my grandparents’ wet bar to pour a large glass of creme de methe for my grandmother and a small “taste” for myself (every night, to make sure I still liked “Scope you can swallow). Then, we’d watch three episodes of M*A*S*H until the station went off the air with a recording of the national anthem and a waving American flag. Sometimes, when my grandmother was tipsy enough, we’d stand and salute or put a hand over our hearts. Sometimes, she’d sing along.

M*A*S*H was a touchstone for me. It was brutally sad, tender, and funny. It was also my first taste of gender non-conformity in the very hairy, not particularly femme Corporal Klinger, played with humanity and tenderness by Lebanese-American character actor Jamie Farr.

Klinger was, at minimum, a dedicated cross-dresser. In the logic of the show, this was because he was hoping to get discharged from the Korean War due to a lack of mental fitness. But, other than his crossdressing, there was nothing wrong with Klinger. He was a valued member of his mobile hospital unit. And so, despite the occasional disapproving eye roll from characters the audience was meant to read as uptight assholes, Klinger was accepted, which meant he remained deployed.

I wouldn’t have dared to see myself in Klinger, but my Grandmother and I loved him. It’s one of the thousand puzzle pieces that tells me that if there’s a great beyond and she happens to check in on me, I think she understands.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Klinger lately. M*A*S*H was a critique of the ill-conceived American war in Vietnam masquerading as a show about the ill-conceived American war in Korea. Both wars seem like brilliant military strategy compared to the current WWIII foreplay that our mad king is engaging in to distract from his obvious participation in raping children alongside an elite club of moneyed predators. He’s already killed thousands of Iranian civilians and an unknown number of American soldiers. This body count is likely to skyrocket if he mounts a ground invasion after firing all the responsible generals. It will be worse if he does the unthinkable and attacks Tehran with a nuclear warhead.

This sounds extreme. But mass deportations of innocent people with active visa claims sounded extreme. Arresting journalists sounded extreme. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela sounded extreme. Shooting protestors, too.

Don’t take it from me, Trump’s administration is working overtime to add new impediments to voting, but in December of last year, they automated the draft process for all men under 42 years old.

But for a limited time only, they’ve also empowered the most diverse military fighting force on planet earth to resist dying in a senseless war of distraction.

On January 7th of 2025, Trump issued a trans military ban. It was part of his efforts, alongside alcoholic rapist Pete Hegseth, to make the military identity more like a local chapter of the Proud Boys: homogeneous, violent, terrified of being seen as weak. This was a devastating move for the trans community. The US military was the largest single employer of trans people, and it jettisoned decorated soldiers out of pure spite.

Our troops have an advantage today that Klinger didn’t have. In his fictional Korean War, Klinger was surrounded by men and women, too busy trying to keep themselves and each other alive to care that a corporal was attending to the wounded in a sundress. His current-day counterparts, on the other hand, only need to change their pronouns in their email signature and social media handles.

If you were assigned male at birth, 42 and under, and don’t want to re-enact D-Day in the Strait of Hormuz, I want to welcome you to the trans community personally. Gender is weird, right? Who is to say that your experience of maleness is like anyone else’s? You can’t climb into someone else’s head. You can’t experience someone else’s cocktail of chromosomes and hormones. If we’re being totally real, there are probably as many genders as there are people on the planet. Welcome to the trans community, brother, sibling. Viva la revolution. What are your pronouns? They/Them? Classic! Nobody will ever get that right. Ze/Zir? Fucking incredible! Prepare never to be referred to again!

This is a semi-ridiculous idea, obviously. But, I think, less ridiculous than fighting a war, so the population doesn’t find out you raped little kids. The part that’s patently not ridiculous is one I’ve talked about before: embracing trans people even if you think we’re strange, funny-looking, or incomprehensible is a powerful tool against fascism.

At a minimum, you take away a talking point that billionaires are using to keep the peasants fighting each other. But if you are under 42 and were assigned male at birth, you might be saving lives.

I believe in “big tent” transness, and if it keeps you, your son, or innocent Iranians alive, I welcome you to the community. When you get that discharge, come over. We can watch M*A*S*H, and the crème de methe is on me.

That morning, Kristi Noem had announced that she was suspending TSA Precheck. So I was folding the kids’ laundry and collecting scattered socks, phone chargers, and homework assignments while mentally preparing myself for discussing my genitals with strangers, in front of strangers.

The best cope I’d come up with was “Well, you’ve already done it once, and this time Krista will be there!” It wasn’t doing much for me. When the “your flight has been canceled” text came in, I was unloading my kids’ stuff into my ex’s house and yelled, “Fuck!”

I went back to the Airbnb to search for alternative flights on my laptop. Everything was a week away. I called customer service. They said they could put me on a flight from Newark to Mexico City that day for “only” $900. Desperate, I gave them my credit card number, but my instincts kicked in by the time I got to the “three-digit code” on the back of the card. Why were they asking? They had my card number on file. Oh, because I had misdialed by one number and fallen for a scam. I was honestly a total bitch to my dad about it when he fell for the exact same one. I yelled “Fuck!” again.

While we rebooked travel with the actual airline, the text messages started coming in from friends and family: Were we safe?

“Are you safe?” is an unsettlingly open-ended question in Trump 2.0 America. That day, I’d been reading about the latest updates to the “Anti-Trans National Legal Risk Assessment Map” which had been updated to reflect the recent Kansas laws invalidating trans IDs and putting a bounty on trans people who use public bathrooms. I’m always surprised when cis people even know about things like this - usually, anti-trans actions sail through the world lubricated by Gavin Newsom types who make our eradication seem like a reasonable compromise with the Epstein class.

So, it wasn’t a surprise when I realized the Sunday texts weren’t about domestic anti-trans policy, but rather the fallout from the US-backed assassination of “El Mencho,” the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.* Cars were burning across Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara. The airports were being evacuated. It looked like the Costco was burning down.

This is all, obviously, bad. The cartel in Jalisco was recently found to have a crematorium with several hundred shoes and the remains of at least 50 people on a farm near Guadalajara. But, the cartel wouldn’t gave the ability to commit atrocities like this if it weren’t for the US appetite for drugs and a constant stream of US guns, where strip mall gun stores like “Carter’s Country” in Houston become major suppliers to cartels. Historically, decapitating cartels of their leadership has produced more bloodshed and chaos, not less.

And it was shocking to see Puerto Vallarta on fire. I sent our kids videos of cars and buses burning on the streets where they’d posed for pictures last summer. Look how fragile this beautiful place is! But flying to Mexico City put us far away from Jalisco. It’s something like the literal distance from Chicago to Minneapolis and at least some of that psychic distance.

We spent Sunday night in an airport hotel out of the path of the blizzard. We got on a 6 am flight out of the snow and made it back to CDMX in time to welcome Krista’s mom here. I decided that once I’d caught up on sleep and work, I’d take some time to learn more about the geopolitics that caused El Mencho’s rise and fall and develop some kind of thesis about what might happen next. But, before I got to that bit of citizenship homework, the US and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran, so now having a POV about WWIII has taken priority.

Nonetheless, all the messages of concern made us feel very loved and very grateful to be safe and checked-in-upon. The thing I’d love to see most in my lifetime is less scarcity of safety, less necessity to parse which dangerous thing someone might be asking you about.

I’m new to the etiquette of we’ve-removed-two-heads-of-state-and-one-cartel-leader-so-far-in-Q1 US politics. It feels inappropriate to even have good news, let alone share it.

But I have good news, two pieces of good news that I’d like to share with you.

First: I’m going to Reykjavik, Iceland, in March. My pilot, We/Us, a family comedy extrapolated from the vibes of me and Krista’s short film Funny Face, was accepted into The Whale Screenwriting Lab. This is exciting to me for many reasons, but as media in the States gets more conservative and more consolidated, I’m especially curious to connect with people internationally who have an appetite for supporting trans stories.

Second: Speaking of people who support trans stories, I’m going to Reno, Nevada, after Iceland to direct the short film, Holy Shift, which was written by Maren Curtis as a tribute to a trans relative and the well-meaning Christian family who struggled to accept them. Maren has written a very funny script that I relate to both as a parent doing my best to raise good kids who live their values, and as a trans person who has been rejected to make room for other people’s bigotry. The premise? Two evangelical parents cross-dress on a family outing in an attempt to cringe their trans kid out of gender non-conformity.

As I continue to pursue opportunities to direct TV, I’ve been hoping for chances to direct things that I didn’t write and don’t act in. Maren’s script is the perfect version of that, and she’s brought in a collaborative, respectful team of people I’m excited to be making the film with. We’re casting, storyboarding, location scouting, and doing all the fun dreaming that starts this process.

Many people who read this substack already support me financially with subscriptions (amazing, and profoundly appreciated). Many can’t or wouldn’t, on principle (so valid, and diminishes my love for you not one iota). And of course, as the joke goes, all of the same trans filmmakers just pass the same $20 to each other year after year via crowdfunding. But in case you happened to win one of the Powerball drawings I lost when I was on the East Coast, here’s the Seed & Spark Campaign Link, where you can donate or just follow along:

Anyway, thank you for checking in on me. I hope you and the people you care about are safe and that you’ve still got some good news coming your way.

*Faithful readers of this substack will note that in a prior edition of this substack, two of El Mencho’s employees were abducted while selling drugs to American queers in Oaxaca.

I converted a couple of years before he was born, making friends with a queer woman in RCIA classes and getting a lot of value from the path the ancient faith gave me to connect with the Jesus I love from the Gospels: a social justice warrior, an assaulter of predatory capitalists, a friend to the sex worker, the leper, the eunuch, the person working hard and barely getting by. Like, a real friend to them, sitting at their table and sharing his food, healing their bodies, washing their feet.

Since I was young, I’ve loved Jesus, and felt equally strongly that most people telling me about him were getting him totally wrong. He’s a phantom, even in his four short chapters of the Bible, written down years after his death as third-hand stories once people realized “Oh shit, that dirty hippie was important.” I was never raised as a literalist. I was always told that the book represented the best efforts of the people at the time to capture what they saw as sacred. Even “divinely inspired,” the text would be full of errors: of fact, of bias, of misunderstanding, and (I believe, in the case of St. Paul), outright apostasy of the kind that defines most people’s experience of Christianity.

When other “Christians” told me Jesus wanted me to hate, judge, or dehumanize other people, they seemed fully insane to me. How had they missed the part where their guy told them “Judge not lest ye be judged?” Even more simply, how can you be told by your god on earth, “God is Love,” and miss the meaning?

As a trans dirtbag Catholic convert, I socially avoid a lot of the complexities that mainstream cradle Catholics carry with their faith. Pope Francis compared transition to nuclear arms, saying that both fail to recognize “the order of creation.” He was forgetting, like so many Christians do, that Jesus himself was pretty chill about gender nonconformity, effectively telling people to get over the whole eunuch thing in Matthew 19:12. Which is all to say, between the Church’s opinions about me and my opinions about the church, there’s some distance.

My faith exists in the distance the church’s hatred creates: I get the god who believes that love is divinity, who knows the sight, sound, smell, and texture of human suffering and wants to free us from the pain of thinking we’re somehow innately sinful or bad, the Vatican gets colonialism, the inquisition, the misogyny, the support of empire, the culpability for facilitating and concealing sexual abuse of minors.

But my son? He’s straight, white, 6’4”, 250lbs. Unlike me, he is who the church wants in the flock. He is who JD Vance wants in the flock. And even though my son is a kind, thoughtful, loving person, his interest in Catholicism makes me uneasy.

Last summer, when he told me he wanted a Bible, I told him I’d buy him one if he’d let me pick the translation. We went to Barnes & Noble on the Santa Monica Promenade. He flipped through pages as I looked at the spines. “Shouldn’t we get a King James?” He said, seduced by the formality of the thine’s and thou’s.

“What are you, a fucking Protestant?” I said, too loudly for the “RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY” section. A woman reading a book about manifesting gave me a look, shelved her book, and went to look at magazines. Two cool young queers joined us in the aisle, one looking at Buddhist books, the other at the tarot and witchcraft section. It would be so much easier if he were just into witchcraft, I thought.

“We’re looking for the RSV,” I told him.

“Why that one?”

“It’s neutral. You can sit in the soup of the weird translation. I’m not getting you some Bible where Jesus talks like a youth pastor. You want salvation, you can bang your head against the terrible prose like the rest of us.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. I’m a lot. My kids are generous about taking it in stride.

It took ten minutes to find one RSV Bible among the dozens and dozens of slang-heavy evangelical editions. It had a hot pink cover.

“I’m cool with hot pink, mom.”

“I’m not. It reflects on me. I don’t want people thinking it’s a bit.”

I spent another five minutes finding an RSV with the classic black faux-leather cover you’d see in The Exorcist or The Handmaid’s Tale.

He started with Matthew, like I asked him to. He jumped back and forth between Matthew and Genesis, because he’s a teenager and doing exactly as your parents tell you is anathema. He struggled with it, like anyone who attempts to read the Bible does. “That’s how they get you, buddy. People outsource their Christianity to people who claim to tell them what the Bible says.”

He kept reading. He’s stubborn this way, a keeper of habits.

I told him a little about my thoughts on Jesus, who was so good to so many people that he became a threat to the power structure of his time. Who was so kind and loving that people paid attention. “Think about kind, loving people in your life. Are they the ones who get attention?” I asked him. “Usually not, right? Kindness is boring. Helping other people is boring. Even if every quote in the Gospels is wrong, even if half of the stories are made up, even if they nailed him to a cross, he died, and was never resurrected… think about the ways you would have to love the people in your life to have people talking about you 2000 years later. Look for that. It’s there, in little flashes. And in my very uninformed opinion, the way we actually bring Jesus back is by working to love the people in our lives with the same intensity. It’s really hard. I fail constantly.”

“Uh-huh.”

At the end of the summer, we went to a silver shop in Puerto Vallarta, and I bought him a cross on a chain. He wore it there, but I haven’t seen him wear it since. I understand. Externalizing something that personal can be uncomfortably vulnerable.

Wednesday of this week, at his request, I took him to Ash Wednesday Mass. He’d actually wanted to go to Mass the preceding Sunday, but overslept. I mistakenly told him that Ash Wednesday was a “Holy Day of Obligation.” It’s not.

In the town where my sons live, there’s a Catholic parish that was excommunicated from the official Catholic Church for allowing women to conduct the Mass as priests. We’d only been once before, for Easter, and it was a beautiful embodiment of what it should look like to worship a god of love. We went there. My son objected, but when I said, “Jesus didn’t need a permission slip from the Pope to serve communion,” he didn’t have a good comeback and went along with it.

The last time I’d gone to Ash Wednesday Mass was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York when I was there prepping for MTV’s 24 Hours of Jackass, an overnight stunt filmed out of MTV’s TRL studios. I don’t remember that Mass at all. I remember walking from St. Patrick’s to MTV HQ and feeling like a terrible Catholic when I wiped the ashes off my forehead so I wouldn’t draw unwanted attention from Jeff Tremaine or Johnny Knoxville. Did this make me a Judas?

This Ash Wednesday, we sat in a small, old church with beautiful stained-glass windows. The attendance was moderate but respectable for a weekday noon service. Mostly, the crowd was what you’d expect, skewing towards old ladies, but there were families there. Some looked queer. Some looked like straight people who listen to Democracy Now.

Outside, it was heavily sleeting. There weren’t any open parking spaces. We arrived late, in time for a reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which I wasn’t sad to miss most of, because truly, fuck that guy. The Gospel reading was a cornerstone of my faith, from Matthew 6:

Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your God who is in Heaven.

When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your God who sees in secret will repay you.

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.

But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your God in secret. And your God who sees in secret will repay you.

I nudged my son, making sure he heard this in his journey into Catholicism.

The priest began the homily:

“A few years ago, I started a community that met regularly in my home. Queer people, folks in recovery, divorced people, a few young people, all kinds of outsiders… Most, maybe all, had experienced church harm and had long given up on a church that had given up on them. When Ash Wednesday approached, I had to give some thought to the words that would accompany the imposition of ashes to this group who had been so deeply wounded by a church intent on crippling us spiritually, with the constant reminder that we were sinful, that we were wrong, we had failed, we were unacceptable, less than, other, and outside. After conducting a little research, I settled on these: ‘Turn away from believing you are sinful and follow the good news that you have always been holy.’”

Turn away from believing you are sinful and follow the good news that you have always been holy.

I’m almost fifty, and the words shook me. I wished I’d heard them when I was five or fifteen. I hoped my son heard them deep down in whatever part of him is seeking the divine.

We received the ashes on our foreheads. He wore his to track practice. I wore mine to my younger son’s Catholic league basketball game.

For the next forty days and forty nights, I’ll be doing my best to follow the good news that I (and you, and my teenage sons, and all the complicated people in the world) have always been holy. My son will be giving up candy (not counting the chocolate covered pretzels he had before Mass).

Three weeks ago, I was in suburban New Jersey, meeting my friend Al, a veteran of the second Iraq war who I’d met through the WGA veteran’s initiative a couple of years ago, for the first time in person.

I’ve been working with Al since a Zoom-based speed-pitching event the WGA hosted. His pitch was raw, full of love and hope and pain, and it stuck with me in a way I couldn’t ignore. I reached out to him and offered to help tell his story however I could, not sure what form that would take. And many long months, two layoffs (me, from Hearst, him from the Veteran’s Administration) and one new production company (mine) later, we were in a bar around the corner from Snookie’s boutique, doing shots to steel our nerves before we picked up the executive from the production company we partnered with, and take her and two fancy showrunners to a high school wrestling match for a taste of New Jersey wrestling culture.

It was a beautiful night. One of my favorite things about filmmaking is the passport it provides to lives you’d never know about in worlds you might never otherwise visit. Working on movies, I’ve met cops and gang members, tuna fishermen and famous athletes, and I’ve loved the ways that a location scout or a film set equalizes us in the giddy vulnerability of trying to put on a show and hoping it turns out okay.

The fancy showrunners were lovely, curious, and passionate. The executive was as fun a hang in person as she’d been over the years we’d met over Zoom. The wrestling was good. We were the last ones out of the Italian restaurant that had been Al’s last meal before deploying, his first back from war. Everyone left to return to the city. I stood in the cold, dark parking lot shivering for twenty minutes while I waited for a Lyft. I felt excited about my future in a way I haven’t since I was much, much younger.

I wrote a post on my way to New Jersey and another on my way back to Mexico City. I deleted them both. My excitement felt crass against the backdrop of the States boiling over in reaction to public executions at the hands of the state.

Two weeks ago, I was back home in Los Angeles to perform in my friends’ storytelling show, That Reminds Me, get headshots, and remind my people that I’m still alive. I spent the trip studying a stack of notecards, knowing I was going on stage with a lineup of professional performers who had actual jokes and lines memorized.

Every coffee, drinks and networking meet up started with me tucking the cards in my purse, hugging a friend and colleague, while trying to remember the streamlined description I’d rewritten of my near suicide: “Jeffrey! So good to see you! You look beautiful!” (Cinderblocks, towing chains, two 9mm pistols, tucked in a cooler beneath ice and a six pack of coconut LaCroix…), “Kaz, it’s been too long!” (The Wisconsin man sat in a blue-collar bar with music playing on the jukebox, staring expressionless at the camera, he wanted to fuck me up), “Naz! So good to finally meet in person!” (The weekend after my wife told me she no longer wanted to be married to me, we had a garage sale, more symbolic than financial. We sold the crib, the toddler toys, and the baby clothes. This chapter of our lives was now closed).

I had a meeting with a director/producer I met through the Sony program, who has been generous and supportive of my efforts to direct television. She arrived 15 minutes late, out of breath, and frazzled. “I’m sorry I’m late. I spotted an ICE truck in my neighborhood and had to follow it until someone else could take over.”

She showed me a video from her block. A middle-aged handyman was grabbed from a ladder while painting a house, shoved roughly into the back of an SUV as panicked ICE agents formed a protective ring around the SUV, hands on their pistols. They drove off so quickly that they left one very scared-looking ICE agent behind. He ran after the SUV, waving his hands and shouting for his colleagues to stop, terrified to be alone with all the East Side suburbanites filming him. It would have been funny if it weren’t so horrific. The handyman had diabetes, and it took days for the neighbors to track him down in the detention center downtown and broker an agreement for white citizens to deliver his insulin, to avoid ICE using him as bait to capture more of his family.

I gave myself a couple of hours before the show to do yoga and silly dances in the room of my capsule-ish hotel in hopes of shaking off my nerves. It was a less efficient alternative to the whiskey shot Al had bought me in NJ, but I had a photo session the next day and didn’t want to look puffy. Whatever nerves I had managed to shake off came back as I watched the other performers. It was a night of incredible stories beautifully told, and with each one, I dissociated further. I was last in the lineup. I took the stage, and my mouth and stack of notecards took over. I was only really conscious of how often I said “like” and “um.”

The show was over. We hugged and celebrated. I was honored that so many friends came, old and new, including one of the fancy showrunners from New Jersey. People told me I did good. I chose to believe them. The event organizers waited for my Lyft to arrive, and I drove downtown with a different flavor of complicated happiness and nostalgia for LA before the ICE invasion, before the fires, before the strikes, before Covid.

On my way out of LA, I stopped by Transparency Studios, a photo studio run by trans life and creative partners Alexandra Chandra and Brook Lee Karner. I sat for my new “corporate” headshots, now that I’ve got an LLC, a few months on Mounjaro, and bangs. As a rule, I don’t particularly love being perceived, but being seen, safe, and able to make jokes I can’t make in cis company allowed me to relax and actually take direction.

Photo session completed, we got tacos for lunch near their Highland Park studio, walking through a whistle-filled anti-ICE protest on the way.

One week ago, Krista and I were in Zipolite, Oaxaca, attending Somos, a queer music festival, with tickets, airfare, and a hotel room I paid for months ago when I still had a job. I’d been curious about Zipolite since reading Chloe Aridjis’s book, Sea Monsters, a coming-of-age novel infused with the goth music of my Gen-X childhood, which culminates in a trip to Mexico’s only official nude beach.

Krista and I stayed at a hotel called Nude, which is next door to a hotel called Naked on the northwest end of the beach. We were given wristbands that said “NOTHING TO HIDE.” Despite this, most of the guests were clothed. There were some retired American swingers in the pool. A group of muscular gay men sunned their polished scrotums by the pool. Both groups got less attention than the occasional stray dogs and cats who wandered by the avocado-shaped pool in search of table scraps.

Somos, like most gay things, was mostly men. These men were mostly from Los Angeles. Opening night, I went to the FLINTA gathering (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Nonbinary, Agender), which was attended by a half-dozen FLINTA folks staying out of the way as the venue prepared for that night’s Kiki Ball.

I snuck away to meet Krista for dinner at a Thai place that only offered family-style seating for guests without reservations. We were seated with a straight pair of swinger grandparents from Wisconsin who were taking a local resident on a date. They were nice enough. The husband was clearly put off by the all-male orgy that takes place every sunset on the south end of the beach, affectionately called “the meatball.”

Swinger grandpa scowled. “You can’t unsee a thing like that.”

Krista teased him, “Well, it’s not like you didn’t know where you were going.”

Swinger grandpa struck me as the kind of guy who wouldn’t love knowing that I’m trans, but who doesn’t exactly know what to look for. When we asked for the check, he asked, “Do you ladies like weed?”

Krista shook her head ‘no.’ I enthusiastically said, “I love it!” He gave me a joint, and I tucked it into my bra. We left, and I smoked it as we walked down the beach to the festival.

A few local ballroom houses hosted the evening’s party. Despite ballroom’s enormous impact on my life (POSE opened my eyes to my own transness, and the show LEGENDARY gave me a way to explain the community to my kids), this was only the second ball I’ve been physically present for, and the first I’ve paid attention to.

And still, sitting in the sand, a little high on ditch weed, in the hypnotic chants of “¡Aplausa! ¡Apluasa! ¡Apluasa-pluasa-plausa!” felt like some kind of homecoming. I sat in awe of the beautiful, confident trans women owning the stage, the beach, the world. When the MC called for all the trans people in the audience to take the stage, I stayed put, watching as a few dozen beautiful trans people danced radiantly in the colored lights. Part of me wanted to be up there with them. Another part of me felt neither beautiful nor trans enough, somehow. I soaked it in, feeling proud of “us,” but also small and lonely.

Every morning at Somos, I went to the yoga classes they offered. The first was sort of what you’d expect: good bodies, hippie vibes, some dirty jokes about how opening one’s throat chakra might come in handy later that night. The second was taught by a substitute instructor who filled in at the last minute when the first instructor partied too hard and overslept. This instructor was a local who taught a nude class, and as soon as he shared this, the class was naked. My mat was in the back, and as I moved through chaturangas and downward-facing dogs, the sea of exposed cocks, balls, and buttholes made me feel as though I’d just adopted a litter of cats.

The last day of the festival, only me and an actor/artist from LA showed up on time. We chatted, kind of waiting for the instructor, but not really expecting him to arrive. When he did, ten minutes late, he announced that the class would be part yoga, part witchy ritual to thank the ocean. Were we okay with that?

Of course, we were. We spend half an hour in a mix of conventional poses, affirmations, and self-hugs. Then, we moved down to the shore for a dance and impromptu sermon, before we stripped off our clothes and took the practice into the warm, clear waves.

It was every bit as silly as it sounded, but 1,000 times more beautiful. I felt brave and free to be so ridiculous right there in front of a half-dozen tourist bars. The actor left the waves sobbing as some deep pain moved through him.

I met up with Krista and spent most of the day naked, swimming, sunbathing, and exploring tidepools. Any seediness I associated with the swingers or the meatball vanished, along with my very-American, very trans sense that my body was an original sin, a source of shame and wrongness.

There were so many kinds of bodies on the beach in Zipolite: exercise freaks, nudist lifers who looked like tanned melting candles, a beautiful, hairy, non-op trans man, local families, what’s-the-big-deal European tourists, and on and on.

Of all the bodies and scenes I saw, the most beautiful was a local family. Every day we were there, the father, an uncle, and the kids would haul the mother in her wheelchair through the deep, soft sand a hundred yards to the water’s edge. They parked her chair out of the tide and carried the mom, naked, down the beach into the water. She sat in the waves as they splashed over her thin legs, big belly, and breasts. Her kids played next to her. The men stood by keeping watch for large rogue waves. Everyone was joyful, and the whole family was unashamed. I tried to imagine a version of American culture in which a whole family makes extraordinary efforts to ensure the person with the least typical body can safely experience freedom and joy.

The last night of Somos was full of “Bad Bunny Parties,” which is what a town full of queers and hippie nudists calls The Super Bowl. Krista and I skipped the closing-night party to get to bed early so we could go whale-watching Monday morning at 5.

While we were at home, the party was ramping up on the main stage. Partygoers were buying coke and molly from two Puerto Vallarta-based dealers who had driven in from Jalisco for the event. As the dealers mingled around the venue, chatting with Somos attendees, a car full of locals pulled up, two guys with guns jumped out, and forced the PV dealers into the car. The queers scattered, the organizers pushed the party onto the beach, and the party continued. Krista and I woke up the next morning, unaware of the chaos, saw whales, dolphins, a few sea turtles and a manta ray.

Today I’m flying with Krista to the East Coast, sunburned all over, weary from travel, but excited for a week with the three people I love the most.

I’ve got a real post coming soon, but wanted to let you know that I’ll be performing next week at The Virgil on Thursday, Jan 29th at 8pm at Alisha Brophy & Rich Monahan’s wonderful storytelling show, THAT REMINDS ME.

If you’re in LA, I’d love to see you, embarrass myself in front of you, and then buy you a drink. It will be like a date, except that all the mortifying and awkward aspects will be intentional.

GET TICKETS TO THE SHOW HERE

Ok, thanks and hope you’re hanging in there. I hope to see you soon. ❤️

This particular Christian had a kind of a fucked up Christmas, but has no complaints otherwise.

The day I got laid off, I tried to cancel our family Airbnb reservation for the holidays, four days past the host’s cancellation deadline. I messaged “Antoine”*, our French host, who saw my plight and raised his own. He was sorry I got fired, but was running a business and had to stand by his policy.

I’d be lying if I said I was cool with his response, but I accepted it. Fair is fair. I used to run an Airbnb and counted on that money to make ends meet.

I arrived in LA and did a Costco run to stock the place before Krista and the kids arrived, filling the run-down kitchen with our staples: mountains of ground beef, a twenty-four pack of Coke Zero, and a large plastic container of kimchi. And then, my older son had to reschedule his flight from the East Coast, due to a bad flu.

My younger son came on his own, taking his first solo flight, so as not to lose days with his LA friends. While he was in the air, I got back from a shopping trip and tried to shower, but the hot water had gone out. I let Antoine know, and he sent a handyman while he boarded a plane to Provence for the break.

The handyman was comically out of his depth. Post-transition, men try to bluff me with skills they don’t have in ways they never did when they perceived me as a peer. I told him the hot water was out. He checked the water heater: the pilot was on and hot water was pumping to the back house of the Airbnb. He stomped around the house a little, tracking mud everywhere. He made a couple of phone calls before announcing that he needed to take apart the kitchen sink.

“Cool,” I said. “Do you think that’s going to help with the hot water in the shower? I didn’t know they were connected like that.”

He thought about it. “Let me take a look at the shower.” He turned on the hot water knob. Nothing came out. “Hmm. I don’t think it’s the sink. I’ll call Antoine, but I think I need to come back in a few days.”

“I stink. I’ve got one teenager here and another one coming. We need a shower today.”

“Okay, let me call Antoine. I’ll tell you what he says.”

The handyman went outside to call Antoine, but instead, got in his truck and left.

I picked up Krista from LAX (my second of seven total trips to LAX over the holidays). She’s heartier than me, and took a cold shower. We slept in separate twin beds, but she was kept up by the sound of mice in the walls. She got a glass of water from the messy kitchen and saw a mouse there, too.

The next morning, not loving the way I smelled, I tried to do some laundry while I waited for Antoine to respond to my “Hey, here’s a list of 24-hour plumbers in Los Angeles” messages, in hopes that we’d have hot water. Predictably, at this point, the washing machine didn’t work, either.

I called Airbnb for help. They spent the day telling me I needed to give Antoine time to respond with his plan to fix the problem. I spent the day explaining that Antoine had fucked off to France and was now sipping rosé on his brother’s estate in Provence.

While this was all happening, I got a calendar invitation from the HR person who laid me off in November. Since the layoff, I’d been in conversations with Hearst Magazines about returning part-time on a contract basis to see through the couple-dozen film and TV projects I’d put into motion during my time there. The contract was to commence January 5th, but I’d already gotten back to work with the joke that “Look, as long as the money is better than unemployment, I’m okay proceeding in good faith.”

The HR guy gave a long preamble explaining that what was being proposed was an either-or scenario. I would be able to take a small severance and unused vacation days along with my unemployment, OR I’d be able to continue with the contract. But, emphatically, there was to be no double-dipping.

“That’s what I assumed.”

“Ok, so here is the contract offer. $18 an hour for 10 hours a week for six months.” Not only was he offering less than unemployment, he was offering less than half of unemployment. He was offering less than In-and-Out’s starting salary of $22 an hour.

“Oh, absolutely not. I’ll sign the termination agreement today.”

“Do you want to hear the rest of the offer?”

“No thanks, I’m good.” I ended the Teams meeting and got back to the fun work of begging Airbnb to cancel the nightmare reservation. When they had gone a full seven hours without a response from Antoine, they relented and refunded the money for the reservation. We packed out all the food from the house and raced to an airport hotel in El Segundo.

I checked us in while Krista and our youngest went to In-and-Out for some of their tasty and better-compensated-than-Jude burgers. When they came back, they found me in the parking lot, pushing a cart full of suitcases and grocery bags up the parking lot ramp. My youngest caught up with me, laughing. “Wow, you’re looking a little homeless there, Jude.”

“Fuck you, buddy. Why don’t you help?”

We had one night in the hotel before we rolled the dice on another Airbnb in Santa Monica, a bigger, nicer house for less money than Antoine’s more rustic offering. I napped for a couple of hours before going to LAX to pick up my older son from his redeye.

The new Airbnb was much better: an architectural tree house built by the owner’s father. There was hot water and a working washing machine. Hidden behind a secret bookshelf door was a third-floor secret nook that my youngest immediately claimed as his bedroom. And there were balconies everywhere - a big one off of the primary bedroom, with loungers, one off of the secret third-story nook, and a second-story balcony that was being used to house several active bee boxes. We saw the empty honeycombs in the garage.

Krista put up Christmas lights. And while 2025 was a “no presents” year, being settled in a comfortable house and playing boardgames together felt close enough.

The vibes continued through Christmas Day. We had a lazy morning, celebrating that after days of torrential rain in LA, it was finally sunny. We decided to go for a family run when our youngest woke up. Our oldest wanted to watch Taxi Driver, which I allowed, even though it wasn’t the most Christmas-y choice.

There was a knock on the front door. Krista had noticed the neighbors noticing us, and I figured it was probably them checking in to make sure we were legitimate guests in this out-of-town family’s home. But when I opened the door, it wasn’t the neighbor. It was a skinny, very dirty white dude with a long beard and wild eyes.

“Hi?” I said.

“Hi.” He said. “I’m The Goblin Knocker. I’m knocking on doors for Christmas.” He stared at me, intensely.

“Okay,” I said.

I was not giving him enough here. He scowled. “Is it not considered appropriate to knock on people’s doors anymore?”

“Honestly, not like this. This is kind of weird.”

“Okay. I’ll leave.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

I watched some TikToks. I played a game on my phone. I checked in on Taxi Driver. “What do you think about Taxi Driver?”

“It’s okay. It’s weird.”

“Yeah, movies like that were more fun before people like Travis Bickle started podcasts.”

At this point, I assumed that The Goblin Knocker had moved on. The west side of LA is full of people with a tenous connection to consensus reality, and they mostly drift along not hurting anybody, except maybe themselves. I walked out of the house and looked up and down the sidewalk. It was empty. Cool, I thought, He’s gone.

Then, I looked across the street. The Goblin Knocker was sitting behind the wheel of a couple-year-old Lexus SUV with a ladder strapped to the roof. He was smiling at me and waving, manically, like he was the mayor in a small-town parade. By the time I processed the strangeness of the moment, we’d had a prolonged, intense few seconds of eye contact.

I went back inside and upstairs to check in on Taxi Driver. As I passed a second-story window, I saw that The Goblin Knocker was now standing in front of the house with a little notebook, intently jotting down observations about the house.

Krista had just gotten out of the shower, and I caught her up on The Goblin Knocker. “What’s he doing now?” She asked.

I looked out the window. He was closer to the house, taking more notes. I reported back.

“Do you think we call the cops?” I said, not wanting to call the cops, but looking at The Goblin Knocker’s ladder and thinking about the kids and all our balconies.

“Yeah, probably.”

So, I called the cops. I said, “Hey, I really don’t love calling the cops about stuff like this…” which is, I’m sure, what many Karens say when they call the cops about stuff. I told them about The Goblin Knocker, trying to make it clear that I was concerned, but that he wasn’t behaving violently. So, you know, arrive at the house and shoot him, please.

When I hung up, my older son, who is 6’3” and 250lbs, said in a very judgmental tone. “Jude, why’d you call the cops?”

“I’m proud of you for asking that question, bud, but this is all a little too weird for me to let it slide.”

He was unconvinced. I checked the window. The Goblin Knocker was still out front, still taking notes. Then, he abruptly went around to the side gate. I went to the garage to look for a baseball bat. I found some strangely light hockey sticks and golf clubs. I opted for a hammer.

Our younger son woke up, emerging from the secret room in his underwear. “What’s going on?”

“Get dressed. If things get intense, go back in your room and close the bookcase behind you.”

By the time I had everyone up to speed on the plan, the cops had rolled up on The Goblin Knocker. They sat him on the sidewalk in front of the primary bedroom balcony. Krista and I took our coffee onto the balcony and listened in.

“Why are you taking an aggressive posture with me?” The Goblin Knocker demanded.

“We’re police officers,” the cop said, honestly. “Why are you taking an aggressive posture with us?”

The Goblin Knocker went on a ramble about the meaning of aggression and the communicable nature of human nature, including aggression. One of the cops asked him his name. He told them that he was God.

“Ok, God. Are you a danger to yourself or others today?”

“I am not. Are you a danger to yourself or others today?”

“No. Are you a registered sex offender?”

“Are you a registered sex offender?”

“I’m a police officer.”

“Am I committing any crimes?”

“That’s what we’re here to determine. You’re knocking on strangers’ doors on Christmas morning, so that’s unusual…”

They went back and forth like this for a while. To the cops’ credit, when they asked to search his car and The Goblin Knocker asked for clarification on his rights, they advised him that they weren’t legally allowed to search his car without his consent.

“Then I do not consent.”

They asked him to leave.

“Are you asking me to leave or telling me to leave?”

“There are two armed officers here asking you to move your car in the next five minutes.”

“But, you’re asking me?”

“There are two armed officers asking you to leave.”

Through his mental fog, The Goblin Knocker got the hint, sullenly shuffled to his car, and drove away.

I went outside to thank the cops for coming on Christmas morning and keeping the vibes calm.

The lead cop gave me a firm handshake and looked me up and down, assessing me as a weak, feckless father. “You did the right thing, man,” he said, reminding me that he was an ally to neither The Goblin Knocker nor me.

We went on our Christmas run. Krista, who has made a habit of running at elevation in Mexico City, took the lead as she savored running at sea level. Our younger son kept up with her. Our older son, who is on his high school track team, did the thing that he does when forced to run with his family: lagging behind and pretending that he’s succumbed to a crippling cramp.

As we passed a park, I turned to motivate him to catch up. I waved my arms in a large, stupid gesture of, “Dude, hurry the fuck up!” He shrugged it off and pretended to have a cramp. I made larger, stupider waves before remembering that I was visible to people outside of the family. I looked around to see who’d seen me.

The Goblin Knocker had relocated his car to the park parking lot and had seen me. He mirrored my insane waves back to me and bellowed, “Hello!!!!!” I make it a general principle to try to be the least interesting thing in unhinged people’s lives, but I entirely failed on Christmas.

Things got more normal after that. The kids caught up with their friends. Krista and I saw some of ours, but not as many as we would have liked, before she went back early to CDMX to catch up with an old friend who was visiting.

The boys and I returned to the airport hotel for New Year’s Eve. I went to pick up our older son from his best friend’s house at midnight, and sat in the car outside listening to Naimi Bock’s Below a Massive Dark Land as a farewell to 2025. At midnight, LA exploded into a rogue fireworks display. As we drove south on the 405, we were flanked on both sides by bright bursts of roman candles. We even saw a New Year’s Eve car crash: a jackknifed 18-wheeler across all lanes with wrecked sedans on both shoulders. We carefully navigated the JG Ballard scene as the drivers milled around the vehicles, safe but stunned.

The kids were delayed leaving LA on New Year’s Day. Their midnight flight took off at 3 am. I was supposed to leave on the 2nd, but delays meant I wouldn’t make the connection. I booked myself a room at the closest airport to LAX, begged the baggage desk to give me my suitcases back, and dragged them a half-mile through the rain, a wet rat by the time I arrived at the check-in desk. The receptionist brought me a towel. The bartender let other people wait while she made me an old-fashioned and a Caesar salad.

I set my alarm for three in the morning and woke up to news that Trump had kidnapped Maduro and a notice from United Airlines that Caribbean airspace had been closed. I thought maybe we’d be leaving the strangeness behind in 2025, but it was coming with us.

*I’ve changed Antoine’s name; in reality, it was even more French.

It seems that I am starting a production company? Hollywood has gotten orders of magnitude more cluster-fuck-y in the two weeks since I ate weed and dipped my toes in these post-layoff waters. Somehow, watching center-to-far-right billionaires fighting over which decades-old company they can scrap for parts has only made me more confident that if now isn’t the time to create new things, that time is months away.

I have a lawyer working on my trademark. I’ve got a designer working on my logo. I’ve got my first project, which I totally can’t tell you about, but involves two EPs of TV series you’ve watched and an iconic, bucket-list production company. And, this morning, I was kind-of-sort-of unlaid-off from Hearst, given a contract to return and see my slate through. We’re doing the thing.

The last couple of weeks have been full of conversations with other filmmakers. These conversations have been the opposite of the sky-is-falling narrative I’m reading in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline. Powerful stories are still being written. Movies are still getting made. If anything, it seems to be a season of scrappiness. I love scrappiness.

When I was a kid in the suburbs of Dallas/Fort Worth area, my friends and I were all convinced that a large, very dilapidated house was the real site of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We would dare each other to knock on the front door, half-expecting Leatherface to answer, snatch the knocker, murder him, and make him into chili.

Starting an entertainment company in the throes of late-stage capitalism and Project 2025 feels a little like the days when I took the dare. Every new commitment feels like a step toward the inevitable horror just behind that beat-up front door. This is how I will die… Doing something really stupid. I hope it won’t hurt for long!

The reality, then, was that it wasn’t Leatherface behind that door; it was a sweet old man who wrote poetry, adopted cats, and left behind a journal of his life and recipes, which I inherited when the house burned down. My sincere prayer is that this metaphor holds and that when the doors I’m knocking on open, there is something as surprisingly lovely on the other side.

I got my Apple end-of-year “Replay,” which is like Spotify Wrapped, but less relatable. It held a mirror up to my latest musical obsession, Naima Bock’s album “Below A Massive Dark Land,” which I’ve been listening to multiple times a day every day since August.

Naima has a gorgeous viola-of-a-voice and an oddball Brian Wilson approach to composing aching songs about love and loss and longing. She’s a Greek/Brazilian/Brit in her twenties, so whatever inspires her music is coming from a life very different from mine. The album feels like a sacred journey to me every time I listen to it. It’s carried me from summer through the holidays, somehow resonating with every emotional turn. It made sense as the soundtrack to returning my kids to their ex and leaving the States. It comforted me in the anxiety that preceded my layoff. It was the flashlight for the soul-searching that followed the layoff. You know the corny poster of the footsteps on the sand, where it turns out that every time it seemed the writer was alone, it was actually Jesus carrying him? Since August, Jesus has taken the form of the former lead singer of Goat Girl.

Art is pretty fucking magical. I’m envious of all the people who can play a note and make other people feel things. But, it’s all a gift, right? A gift to feel. A gift to connect people with their hearts.

I’ve been writing a lot to hone my shaggy, instinctual approach to making things into a compelling elevator pitch that will seduce some down-ass investors to put their money into the things I think are cool. It’s been a weird process of distilling my life and raisons d’etre into a value proposition. I’m pleasantly surprised at the revelations I’ve found at the intersection of vibes and ROI.

Something jumped out to me as I was journaling this morning in a water-damaged school notebook I picked up at the CDMX equivalent of a 99-cent store (they don’t call them that in Mexico for obvious reasons). As I’ve been trying to define why I care so much about stories and which kinds of stories I care about, I had an unexpected core realization. Stories were the currency of love in my childhood.

In a tumultuous time that I rehashed for years in therapy, stories were an emotional DMZ. Every time my dad went on a business trip, he’d leave behind a single-page story for every night he was away for my mom to read to me before bed, tapped out on his humming IBM Selectric. Into my teenage years, my mom would either say goodnight or good morning by reading to me from books we’d savor together. My grandmother read Mark Twain to me for years. Decades later, my brother and I read Huck Finn back to her as she passed away.

I remembered my mom explaining Jesus to me as a storyteller whose truths were too radical to be accepted outside the bounds of a narrative. The Middle East, she explained, is a place of parables. But, where isn’t? What’s more beautifully human than leaving messages on the path to steer the next person who comes along towards joy and truth, away from pain and misunderstanding? What better way to keep that message alive than to wrap it in a story? I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but I carry some piece of ancestors I’ve never met in their stories.

Years and years ago, when I was an aggressive young man, I happened to have a chance to talk to one of the captains of industry negotiating the current merger madness. It was a tough time in entertainment (as it has been for almost all of my career, with the short exception of the Quibi fever dream). I was trying to be a more savvy corporate animal and understand more about how the money people think. I asked him something about how he planned to navigate the rough waters ahead. He excitedly explained to me, MBA to MFA, how his company would be making less to cut costs and throwing away some of what had already been made, for tax benefits (passing the losses on to you, the taxpayer).

He checked in with me to make sure I was keeping up. I said, “Yeah, I dunno, man. If I worked for a sandwich shop and my boss told me that his plan was to throw out a bunch of sandwiches now and make fewer sandwiches in the future, I might start looking for another sandwich shop to work in. But, what do I know?” He excused himself, which was more than I deserved.

We’re currently not in any danger of running out of sandwiches. We are, however, running perilously low on empathy and hungry for it. It’s not totally clear how and where audiences and filmmakers will connect in the coming years, but it feels like a worthwhile puzzle to solve.

Also, to be fully honest about who I am, there are currently 10 notecards on my wall. One card represents the aforementioned cool project I can’t talk about yet. The other nine represent other shows and movies I’m working on. Some are very far along (documentaries in progress). Some are nascent puzzles that I’m trying to solve. One of these projects is a movie that’s very much about poop. I am who I am.

I had a 5:30 am flight to JFK to connect back home to Mexico after a long Thanksgiving break with my kids. I got to the airport at 4 am and was surprised to find a long line at the small counter. I checked my bags at a kiosk. I tried to add my pre-check number to my flight, but I couldn’t find it on my phone, and I could feel the people behind me getting impatient, so I gave up.

Before I’d had “all the surgeries”*, going through TSA was more daunting. I’d spent years with various niche anatomical variations that felt dicey going through airport “porno-scanners.” But since 2023, my body has been congruent with a female gender presentation to the degree that new doctors will query me on when I had my last period and how I’m certain I’m not pregnant. Put more bluntly: I’ve got a vagina.

So when I stepped into the body scanner on two hours of sleep, I wasn’t expecting the dreaded “Genital Anomaly” alarm to go off. But, it did. The theoretical rationale for the “Genital Anomaly” alarm is that it would catch someone who appears to be female if they had a bulge in their underwear. What if that bulge were not a penis and testicles, after all, but instead, a hunk of plastic explosives? This is, of course, all just imaginary. American culture abounds with hypothetical what-if-a-trans-person-did-something-terrible fantasies, but there’s a real scarcity of actual examples.

Regardless, in what scenario would an unexpected lack of a penis and/or testicles be dangerous? What risk could my surprising vagina potentially hold? Would a pilot see it and die of fright? Might I be concealing a miniature black hole that risks ripping apart the space-time continuum, starting with a small commuter flight?

In reality, this is security theater, like taking our shoes off, like the porno scanners themselves, like the “random” extended screenings of Brown and Black people, particularly anyone who might look a little Muslim. A lot of real harassment unleashed on a few minority passengers to prove that the government is taking steps to thwart the imagined terror plots that live only in the minds of scared white people.

Having read the stories, I knew what was coming and thought I wouldn’t care. A female TSA agent in a Khimar and floor-length dress told me loudly enough for a few other passengers to hear, “You were flagged because you have a genital anomaly.”

“Do I, now?” I said, flatly. “Tell me more.”

“I need to do a pat down.”

“Ok. Whatever.”

“Is your luggage on that belt?”

“Yeah.”

The TSA agent went to confab with several others. They all looked up at me, chatted a little more, looked at me, chatted some more. Finally, three of them approached: the original agent, a woman who seemed to be in charge, and a guy.

The guy spoke, again, loud enough for a new group of passengers to learn about me: “You have a genital anomaly.”

“So you say,” I said.

“So, you could have a woman do the pat down, or you could have a man do the pat down. You can pick. Which kind of person is the person who should do the pat-down? Or, if you want, we can go to a private location.”

“Yeah, I really don’t want to go to a private location so security guards can touch my junk. We’ll do it here.”

Being in this moment suddenly felt very different from how I thought it would. I was SNL’s Pat in a very not-fun version of the guess-the-ambiguously-gendered-person’s gender sketch. Other passengers were now in on the fun. Who will Jude pick to inspect her genitals? I felt like I was selecting players for a kickball team. The guy very much seemed like he wanted me to pick him. The original agent was the opposite. I felt a little bad for her, but also remembered that she, a Muslim woman, had signed up for the TSA, so I only felt so bad.

“Well, I don’t want this at all, but since I’m a woman, I’d like to have a woman do it,” I said, mustering all my voice training and hoping I sounded cis.

“Are you sure?” Eager dude asked.

“Yeah.”

I spread my legs. The original agent patted my lower back, my thighs, my calves, which was more theater since none of those areas had been flagged on the scan. We both knew this was police-state foreplay for the main event, where she inspected my vulva in a series of rhythmic pats. First, where my penis would be if I had one, I saw her face register surprise here and felt like a real Chriss Angel. Then, she patted further between my legs, eliminating the possibility that I simply had a tight tuck.

“You’re ok.” She said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

She put my shoes through the X-ray, just to complete her performance. She went back to the waiting cluster of TSA agents to report in whispers on the shape of my junk. The passengers who had lingered to get to the end of my genital anomaly story realized that they, like fans of Pat, would not be resolving the mystery of my gender this particular episode.

I reassembled my carry-on, put back on my shoes, texted Krista (who I knew was asleep), and tried not to cry. I felt embarrassed about what I’d just experienced and ashamed that I’d been so sure that I would shrug this off, that I was tougher than friends and strangers who’d gone through it. Especially since, as violating as it all felt, at least my junk-inspectors were polite and hadn’t misgendered me. No bystanders got in on the act. I didn’t end up on TikTok. This was, as TSA run-ins go, not that bad.

Some wise, sleepy part of my brain reminded me that I’d get over this eventually, so why not now? This kind of sort of worked, other than a short burst of tears when I told the story to Krista in person.

Otherwise, the trip was great.

I got to see two of my older son’s varsity post-season football games, and one of my younger son’s church league basketball games. I was sick Thanksgiving day, but still managed to get a full meal on the table napping as things baked and slow-cooked. Other than lumpy potatoes, it was delicious. I made the kids watch 28 Years Later with me. They balked at 28 Days Later, my youngest saying “Not enough megapixels,” and ignoring my arguments that the lack of megapixels gave it a lo-fi, punk sheen.

Throughout the trip, I had advice I’d received early in transition on my mind. In the early, crisis-filled stages of transition, I realized that one of the cool trans women I followed on Instagram lived near me, and I DM’ed her to see if she’d get coffee with me and tell me what she knew about how I might possibly pull this whole transition thing off.

At the time, I was preoccupied with the shrinking of my world, with the realization that there were whole categories of people I’d previously been able to hang with who would now reject me out of hand. I’d taken seriously my grandfather’s advice to me to be “a democrat to all people” and to be able to make a friend out of someone I didn’t see eye to eye with. But, you know, it takes two to tango.

My friend told me that she’d been grateful for the way her world had contracted in transition. She told me that an unexpected pleasant side-effect of transition had been the way it filters people. Small-minded, unkind people fade away. Compassionate, curious, interesting people remain.

The holidays have historically been a bit of a mixed bag for me. The worst ones have been the stage for some epic family conflict, but a lot of the pre-transition okay-ish ones still meant sharing space with people who were unpleasant to be around: the devil’s advocates, the just-asking-ers of questions, the “I’m sorry, I don’t have a filter” types.

Even after transition, I shared space with people who I knew from Facebook to hate my community. At one Christmas party, I even quipped to one of them, “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom - I hope that’s okay with you!” Uncomfortable laughs all around.

But, better than making nice with people who have enough manners not to cop to openly hating you? Not seeing them at all. Filling that space and time with other people, or even just peaceful solitude. The vibes improve. The conversations are better. The connections are more meaningful. The holidays start to feel like they’re supposed to if you believe the songs and American Express commercials.

Oprah and Mel Robbins made some waves among online queers this Thanksgiving with their variations on the idea that life is too short to cut off family. The reasonable response from the LGBTQ community was: What in the world do any of us get fostering relationships with people who treat us with disrespect, disdain, and abuse? I’d take it a step further. If you’re looking for a real warm lavender bubble bath of a relaxing, restorative holiday season, then stop what you’re doing right now and come out to your family as trans**. Let the chips fall where they may. You’re going to lose some people. But, five years later, you won’t miss them. In fact, you’ll be thankful. You’ll be thrilled.

You know, until you have to fly home.

* “All the surgeries” isn’t a real thing, I’m allowed to say this, just like Tucker Carlson is allowed to say “faggot” because we are members of those communities and allowed to reclaim damaging language.
** If other trans people give you shit for this, tell them I said it’s ok. But I expect a five-year commitment to the bit.

I want to start a minor league baseball team. Definitely not literally at all. But spiritually? Bear with me….

I’m in the United Lounge at LAX, and when I threw away my tin of weed gummies before going through the TSA, there were a couple left in the box, and having recently lost my job, I didn’t feel like I could afford to waste them. These are recessionary times.

Most of the last week in LA has been gray and rainy. It’s the time of year when the sunsets seem remarkably abrupt, crammed into moments before rush hour. By the time you’re in traffic, it feels like 9 o’clock, even at six or seven. Last time I was in LA, I missed the city deeply. Los Angeles, more than any other place, has shaped me, giving me the freedom to figure myself out, the support to make work I’m proud of, and a community of creative, caring, passionate people.

But, this trip, seeing LA was like seeing someone you love in a rough patch: just dumped, struggling with health or addiction, down - but not out. Most people I spent time with don’t have jobs. Some of them have, inarguably, some of the coolest jobs in the world, making shows that you’ve seen or will see soon. But even the job-havers seemed nervous. Across the board, the consensus was loosely that shit is both bad and weird. Billionaires are gobbling up media companies, and all seem to be playing by the same strategy: cut, consolidate, use culture wars to move “content consumers” (in the business model, we, the audience, are effectively factory-farmed pork) into feudalism wrapped in a vague and tenuous vibe of moral superiority.

It’s felt like the bad guys are winning for a little while. We’re in a political crisis of leadership. We’re in a corporate crisis of leadership. Value is being extracted everywhere, and it’s hard to find places where it’s being replenished, much less increased.

LA was a city of glamour and growth most of the time I lived there. Now it reminds me of Providence or Memphis. “We used to have a textile industry…” “We used to have Sun Studios and Elvis…” “We used to be a place where scrappy immigrants told stories and built empires…” A graveyard of FOR LEASE signs.

And yet, I’m leaving LA jobless and feeling more optimistic than I’ve felt in a long time. Mexico City has a lot to do with that. It’s energizing to be in a place where new things are being created, after leaving a place where everything is being scrapped and sold for parts. Certainly, like anywhere else, the future in Mexico is not evenly distributed. If nothing else, right now, it’s a lot less bleak.

Domestically, what gives me hope is how obviously unsustainable it all looks. Sure, the fall of the oligarch class won’t be instantaneous, but it sort of feels inevitable since they’re outnumbered by hundreds of millions of people? I sort of assumed that younger, smarter people than me would be the ones to build something more interesting, meaningful, and sustainable than what’s going on, but also, I suddenly find myself with time on my hands.

Years ago, I was one of the first hires at a media startup and was given equity in the company as a “founder.” This was exciting to me, as I’d heard stories like the one about the artist David Choe making $200 million on a mural he painted for early Facebook stock. But when I did the math that had been carefully obfuscated in legal limbo, a $100 million sale of the company would have meant that I’d almost have enough money to send both of my sons to private four-year colleges.

A six-figure windfall would be a huge deal, of course. But at the time this was put in front of me, I was the creative person tasked with finding, developing, and/or creating the projects that would get us to that valuation. I didn’t sign the equity agreement. Eventually, I was hounded for it and expressed my concerns to the person who’d proposed the deal. He smugly told me I was thinking too small. The company would sell for a valuation in the billions.

I’m sure he intended to make the offer seem more appealing, but it had the opposite effect. It revealed to me that the actual product that we made was the least appreciated aspect of the endeavor. In fact, it was incidental. “Content” was just an input in a spreadsheet. The math that turned that content into a billion-dollar valuation was likely the most wildly creative product that particular startup generated.

It would be cool if that imbalance were rare, but it isn’t. Throughout media, people with JDs, MBAs, and MAccs work carefully to ensure that “creatives” aren’t paid as much as people on the “business side.” And while I think lawyers, finance people, and accountants make enormous contributions across media, nobody’s favorite show is their favorite show because the cost reports were so flawless or the contracts were so airtight.

Much of the value of the Harvard MBA type in media seems to be justifying their own participation by cleverly exploiting the “flaw” built into creative people: that they’re so passionate that they’ll accept exploitation if they’re allowed to make their work. Their role is to optimize the exploitation for the benefit of the shareholders and C-suite compensation. This is how we arrive at ludicrous extremes like Spotify’s pennies-in-compensation to artists or every media company’s pipe dreams that we will spend the money we worked hard to earn in human labor on AI slop.

Now there’s a quintupling down on this approach: mass consolidation and layoffs, using AI as a specter to make everyone feel desperate and like they’re competing against a robot to hang on to their quality of life. Certainly, most entertainment will flow through this system, at least for a while, but the system will hemorrhage artists who don’t want to/can’t afford to make work in these conditions. It will also accelerate younger generations’ migration to more interesting work being made on more accessible platforms.

On top of all that, almost every media company heard Timothy Snyder’s advice not to comply in advance and decided to do the opposite. All demographic data indicate that the US is becoming more diverse, younger generations are more queer, and women are increasingly outpacing men in college education (which will likely skew earnings as they move through their careers).

Yes, we’re in a hugely culturally retrograde moment - but it doesn’t seem to be that popular. Trump has a -41 approval rating. The MAGA movement appears to be shattering. Jimmy Kimmel’s brief ouster was a humiliating failure. ICE is getting spanked across the country. After handing the GOP a mandate to fix the economy, we’re one Jenga block away from an AI bubble burst that could start an economic depression. Streamers have canceled minority-led shows across the board, put Bari Weiss in charge of a newsroom, and shredded any effort that looks like an attempt to diversify representation.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably politically inclined not to love any of those choices, but also, I think they’re bad business decisions, too. What do I know? Maybe the Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” will destroy Bad Bunny in the ratings on Superbowl Sunday? I think there are a lot of hardcore Republicans who would likely make the same bet that lefty, trans-y me would make on that outcome.

Mainstream entertainment has MBA’ed its way out of sustainable economics and anti-woke’d its way out of making films and series for a growing demographic. I think there’s an opportunity there. I believe that opportunity will be bolstered by a generation looking for authenticity away from celebrities who try to dance around eugenics while putting out lesbian movies and AI simulacra of stories they actually care about. This might not be a billion-dollar idea, but maybe it’s a way to make some stuff that people care about and provide a living for some artists (and lawyers and accountants) along the way.

I got lunch in LA with my first boss in entertainment, who saw that I’d been laid off and reached out (so many people did, thank you!) I told him a more nascent, less high version of the above, and he pointed out that the piece missing was what I actually want to make and do. I think the answer is: start a production company. That feels kind of scary and dumb, on some level, but also - it’s not like there are any jobs out there in this moment, so what is there to lose?

What would we make? This is a harder question to answer, as I pride myself on being both creatively promiscuous and super picky about what I like.

My favorite things I’ve worked on include an animated series, an Oscar-contender immigration documentary, a few LGBTQ short films, and two backyard stunt shows. Being trans and all, I’d like to make trans stuff; I don’t want to be put in a box that represents less than 1% of the audience. I like inexpensive things that make big splashes, from Tangerine to Blair Witch to Jackass. I like audacious creatives and characters. I like stories worth repeating at a party. I like people who are vulnerable and unafraid to show their pain and scars (nobody interesting hasn’t been humbled and beaten up a bit along the way). I almost always root for the underdog. I love kindness and agree with James Gunn that it’s more punk than cruelty. I love going to places I’ve never been and learning about lives that are nothing like mine. Storytelling gives us a chance to know what it’s like to be someone else, and I think that’s beautiful to the point of divinity. Oh, and every now and then, it’s fun to blow things up.

It’s not like I’d be in the top 50th percentile of people attempting things like this, as measured by fame or fortune, but I’ve got a point of view, a certain kind of person loves working with me, and I would be thrilled to take on projects that the big bads in this space can’t afford to consider.

Think: A24’s weird trans sibling, pop-up shop Participant, baby Killer Films. Or, think of the Durham Bulls, the Frisco RoughRiders, or the Toledo Mud Hens. Minor league baseball. Small, scrappy, fun, and promising good, cheap fun.

I’ve already got the seeds of a slate, lots of hard-earned experience, and illogical optimism that keeps kicking even after the edibles wear off. If you know how one might go about doing such a thing, please let me know. I’m looking for advice, mentorship, and eventually (a little bit of) money. And, eventually, I’ll need some down-ass MBAs, JDs, and MAccs.

Anybody with me?

After “vague posting” last week about middle-aged problems, I can now specifically post that I have lost my job. It’s not the most surprising surprise ever sprung on me. A message about “Clarity about your future here” turned into a meeting with my boss, which turned into a 15-minute delay to allow an HR person to join our meeting. At this point, I knew what was coming.

I took a shower. I thought about how dressed up I should be to get laid off over Zoom. Should I put on a professional-looking top of some kind? Makeup felt like a lot of effort.

While I was contemplating the question, my phone rang from an unknown number in LA. I answered and was greeted with the sounds of a girl or young woman screaming in pain. I had a brief moment of concern. “I can’t understand what you’re saying. Can you just tell me your name and where you are?”

She didn’t answer. I made another attempt. She just screamed. Because it was a recording.

The phone was “passed” to a man with an Indian accent. He asked me if I had a daughter. Unless one of my current sons follows in my footsteps, I don’t. I said, “Yes, I have a daughter! Is she okay?”

“This is very serious, ma’am. She’s been in a serious accident. We need your help. Can you tell me your daughter’s name?”

I said, “Felicia. Her name is Felicia.” All I wanted, in that moment, more than a good severance agreement or a contract so that I could finish out my slate of films and shows with the incredible producers and filmmakers I was partnered with, was to try to get this man to say “Bye, Felicia,” to my imaginary, suffering daughter, before I then said “Bye, Felicia” back to him. But he played scammer games that I didn’t have time to go along with and ultimately we parted without resolution, allowing poor Felicia to go without help.

I put on a tank top and leggings so I could exercise after my layoff. I joined the call. The HR person, like me, was a couple minutes early and looking quite pained (I learned later that he’d been doing this for some part of the morning - I was one of at least four at my level). I wanted to make a joke about how stressed he must be spending the day this way, but decided that I’d save my superpower of impropriety for any hard negotiating required by my exit.

My boss joined, told me how great I am as a colleague and creative, bemoaned the awful state of the film and television industry, explained that Thursday would be my last day, and then jumped off the zoom.

The stressed HR guy gave his HR talk about my severance agreement while I ignored him and texted my inner circle: “I’m getting laid off right now. Last day at Hearst.”

He asked if I had any questions. I asked how long I would have email access. He said I’d have until 4 pm Eastern on Thursday, so that IT would have time to shut down my account. I sent a quick, “Hey, I just found out I’m being laid off!” email to the hundreds of people I’d been working with and had a good cry.

I’m writing this on Saturday morning. I still have email access. I wonder if they laid off the IT person who was supposed to kick me out of the system.

I’m in LA. It’s raining. I’m staying in a little studio AirBNB that reminds me of the house I left behind when I left LA in January: wood-paneled walls, a Fred Flintstone fireplace, the general sense that this is a home purchased from old people who died a while ago. Lots of plans to renovate, no resources to see those plans through.

I had some work meetings scheduled for the LA trip, which I have canceled. Things are once again sketchy with trans passports. With our pedophile in chief increasingly out of options to distract from his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, I wouldn’t be surprised if he signed a few executive orders to hurt trans people as a smoke screen. I would have canceled the whole trip, but it was too late to pull the plug on the AirBNB. And, besides, I have two work laptops in a storage unit here and need to return them. I assume at some point, some IT person will notice my absence.

So, here I am, back in my favorite city, feeling like a tourist in a way that I haven’t since I first visited in 2002. I will be seeing friends. I will be “networking.” I will very casually be exploring what one does at almost 50 when ones industry is collapsing and all of ones peers are putting effort into sounding excited about a future in which all programming is funded directly by marketers. Like how things were at the dawn of television.

Everything old is new again. But, am I? Can we spare some of the excitement we’ve faked for the return of in-show Tide commercials on TV for a middle-aged trans woman? Can I find this excitement for myself?

Whenever I’m feeling completely out of control of my life, I take refuge in self-help books, which I listen to on long walks. In the thick of transition, I was listening to some NY Times Bestselling professional development book, trying to round out my artsiness with a little MBA thinking. One of these books counseled not to allow yourself to get too wrapped up in any particular identity. If you think of yourself as “a great mom” you will be destabilized when your kids leave home. If you think of yourself primarily as “a loving husband” you will be doubly wrecked at the passing of your wife. If you think of yourself as a “development executive” you will be lost when a stressed-looking HR guy strips you of that title.

I don’t remember the book, they’re all a little fungible as comfort. I do remember the book landing the identity chapter with the phrase “keep a loose grip on your identity.” This, as I was navigating the early days of new pronouns and looking like a bald man in a dress, struck me as hilarious advice.

What happens next? I don’t know. I don’t have much faith in the constraints of 2025 capitalism to support making media (or much of anything) that people care about, connect with, and cherish. The principal innovation of so many so-called leaders seems to be cutting: people, costs, quality. But, at some point, cuts become unsustainable. The machine becomes a dumb, mad, sorcerer’s apprentice of a thing, franchising, de-risking, automating, licensing, and along the way losing all the magic that got people excited about it in the first place. I think this applies to everything from theatrical movies to magazines to Teslas.

I’ve been very privileged in my career to sit in places in the hierarchy where I know what “the plan” is at this or that company. Not since my twenties when I worked for lovely big-haired Texas ladies making local-market advertising in Houston have I heard “the plan” and thought “Wow, that’s a really good plan!” Or, probably more importantly: “I would bet $500 of my own money that this plan will work.”

For now, it’s nice to have not much of an identity or plan beyond “person who writes and makes films and paintings” and “looking for a plan I’d bet $500 on.” Thanksgiving and Christmas I get to focus on my family like I haven’t in a long time. If you’re in LA between now and Thursday, let’s hang out. I might still be getting work emails, but for you? I will ignore them.

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The metaphor I find myself returning to is a night, years ago, when I was parenting a toddler with a stomach flu and he projectile vomited, exorcist-style, all over the living room. It made for a night of demoralizing and unwelcome discoveries. Under this rug? There is vomit. Between these sofa cushions? Vomit. On those barbells, purchased as part of a New Year’s resolution? Vomit. In this shoe you should have put away sooner? You get it.

But now the discoveries aren’t vomit. They’re sad surprises in the health of people I love, in relationships old and new, in the state of trying to make shows and movies in an Hollywood that is more focused on making cuts, and of course, always, in my rights as a citizen of the greatest country in the world™.

This is the preamble I wrote to apologize to you, small, lovely group of people who read my work, for “not writing.” But I have been writing. And painting. I’ve even started on a small sculpture: a diorama of a giant female golum crawling away from a ruined home (all art is self-portrait).

I’ve even written for this Substack, a short story I’m quite proud of, and shared it with a book editor I met in Mexico City, who gave me smart notes. I filmed an interview with Jackie! Zhou, a fellow member of Sony’s Elevate TV directing program and found a talented filmmaker (Zaq Latino) to edit it. It’s all coming soon. I just need to make some tweaks. But my executive function? She is not functioning.

Recently, non-binary writer, influencer, and angel Jeffrey Marsh invited me onto the podcast they host with the aforementioned talented filmmaker Zaq Latino. We talked about transition and parenting, and when they did the very standard-issue podcast thing and pivoted to sending their audience to my Substack, I screwed up my own plug, answering “what can people expect to find on your Substack?” With “I’m not writing my Substack right now, I’m writing a Christmas movie.”

Indeed, I am writing a Christmas script. But, in my right mind, I would know better than to talk about that on a podcast, or really to anyone I don’t love deeply or think I can sell something to.

But, maybe I’m not in my right mind?

The nice thing about previously having had your life fall apart at some point is that you know what to look out for. A strange health problem. An inability to reply to messages from the people who most excite you. A hyper-specific creative obsession. A sudden craving for self-help books.

When I returned to Mexico City at the end of the summer, I had a blood test waiting for me.

Finding trans healthcare was a priority for me when we moved here. It wasn’t really for transition reasons, since I’ve had all the surgeries and hormones are available over-the-counter here (I get mine from Mercado Libre, the Latin American version of Amazon). It was to avoid “trans broken arm theory,” which is when a physician gets so distracted by the novelty of a trans patient that they fail to attend to the actual health problems presented. Doctor, my arm is broken, the patient complains. Ahh, says the doctor, how long have you been on hormones?

I found a doctor twenty minutes to an hour away from me, depending on Mexico City traffic. She’s a cis woman, kind, and very stylish (in my last appointment, she was wearing a tutu-shaped Adidas skirt and absolutely pulling it off). My intake appointment lasted at least forty-five minutes. We discussed my health history, both during and outside of my transition. We explored my family’s medical history. Not simply who had what kind of cancer and when, but the context, with follow-up questions about how my lifestyle is similar and dissimilar from theirs. She showed me medical white papers which explained the difference in the Mexican medical establishment’s treatment of HRT and that of US physicians.

And, she did all of this in English after asking me which language I could best convey my medical history in. When I switched to Spanish because we were struggling to understand each other, she stopped me and took time to look up the words that were causing the confusion. I’ve had some great surgeons in the States, but I have never had a primary care doctor show this much care.

Of course, she found problems: with my cholesterol, my blood sugar, and my weight. She sent me into the summer with a prescription for Metformin and Mexico-specific dietary instructions. “Birria, no more than once every three months, especially if you order tacos with fried tortillas. Queso panela is okay, but avoid Oaxacan cheese. Juices sound healthy, but remember how much sugar is in aguas frescas. This summer, lots of ceviché…”

The metformin made me sick. Over the summer, the kids ate like kids. So, I ate like a kid and hoped for the best.

I arrived at the doctor’s office at 7 am and had a lab technician waiting for me. She spoke rapid-fire Spanish to me, and I was proud that I understood it all and could give her the information she needed about how long I’d fasted, what my drug allergies are, and which hand I’d prefer the blood be drawn from. She explained that I would be administered glucose over the next few hours and that she’d take samples occasionally to see what was up with my insulin.

She did a quick finger-prick blood test. “Ay, no!”

“¿Qué pasó?”

She showed me that my blood sugar, after 14 hours of fasting, was 127. I was kissing diabetes. She explained that she couldn’t give me the rest of the test, since it would be unethical and dangerous to add more sugar to the maple syrup already pumping through my veins. All I could think about was the cheesecake I’d planned to get right after the test. The angel on my shoulder: I should not eat cheesecake for breakfast; I should get healthy. After all, people count on me. The devil: Sometimes, it’s our vice that preserves us. Look at William S. Burroughs, he lived to be a million and one, and his vice was heroin. YOLO, Jude, eat the fucking cheesecake.

I did not eat any fucking cheesecake. I headed back to the doctor’s office the following Friday to learn about the remedy. It was pouring rain, which made rush-hour traffic even worse. I sent WhatsApp messages to the receptionist, explaining that I’d be 10, 20, 30… minutes late.

Eventually, the doctor called me in my rideshare to start the appointment.

“You said you were not able to tolerate the Metformin? Can you describe to me the problem?”

The car was quiet. Rain on the windshield, the whoosh of passing cars in the fast lane. I mumbled, “It gave me diarrhea.”

“I’m sorry, could you speak louder, please?”

“Diarrhea. The Metformin gave me diarrhea.” The Didi driver glanced back. In Spanish, ‘diarrhea’ is ‘diarrea’, so it wasn’t like I was speaking in code. The doctor and I got granular about this particular side effect. She had follow-up questions. I answered them and became someone’s diarrhea passenger. We all play many roles in our lives.

When I arrived at the clinic, I rushed right into the courtyard office, where my doctor was training another doctor. She cut right to the prescription: Mounjaro, the nuclear option, to get my prediabetes in check. It made me a little sad. After years of hating myself for being chubby, I’d sort of embraced it and the cheesecake that came with this self-love. I got distracted daydreaming about poisonous food.

“Do you have a problem with eating to society?”

“No, I mean I eat pretty much what everyone else eats. I don’t like eggs, really, or organ meats, but yeah…”

“Mounjaro will help with society.”

“For sure. Everyone in LA swears by it.”

“It will help you feel full.”

Oh. Satiety. I wasn’t sure if she’d been mispronouncing it or if I’d misheard and gotten lost as I tried to understand what ‘eating to society’ might mean. It certainly sounded like a valid headline for a critique of American culture.

She gave me another Mexico-specific food prescription: “Pan de Muerto is okay, but get the kind with sesame seeds on top, not the ones with fillings. You can drink chocolate, but order the dark kind, 80% cacao or more, not the sweet.” She went on to parse various sweets, all new to me, some more dangerous than others.

I got on Mounjaro. The first week reminded me of my first week of testosterone blockers. One moment, there is desire, and then it’s gone. Then, the desire to fight and fuck. Now, the desire to eat cheesecake. Modern medicine is full of these weird fairy tale spells that allow us to barter a little chunk of our human experience to make the rest of that experience longer, less depressing, or skinnier.

What would I do with this new life freed from all desire and the pain that longing brings? Cheesecake fantasies gave way to imagining myself as some kind of big-pharma-enabled bodhisattva, floating through the world sans hunger or libido, spreading love.

And then, instead, I wrote a Christmas script. I took it harder than I thought when the most significant project on my slate at work had its release postponed due to Charlie Kirk’s murder. I got emails from cool people I admired, and I ignored them. I got in a five-day email battle with someone from my past. While Krista was in town, I distracted myself with all of the beautiful, profound, hilarious, overwhelming chaos leading up to Dia de los Muertos. And when she left for a week on the East Coast, I hid in our apartment as parade after parade after parade roared by. Every day I worked on my job. Every night, I got high and wrote about Santa.

The doctor’s appointment made me religious about hitting my 10,000 steps a day. This gave me lots of time with earphones in. After the five-day email battle, it was obvious why I got the audiobook “Difficult Conversations.” That book made me feel less crazy about the difficult conversation I’d just had. It was less obvious why I followed that book with Dr. Aditi Nerukar’s “The 5 Resets,” a book about neuroscience-inspired techniques for managing toxic stress.

I was only leaving the house to get in my steps. I was living off of slices of an (awful) pizza I’d ordered and a big tub of char siu fried rice. I was ignoring my talented, creative friends to make a paper clay model of a “she golum.” Why would I, of all people, need a book about stress?

Only as I listened (a little judgmentally) to stories of other busy professionals losing their shit, did I think “Wait a second, Jude, isn’t that kind of you?”

I can’t talk about the middle-aged problems that knocked me off track (yet), but they are like everybody’s problems. Things I feared might happen are happening. Threats to my identity and ego abound. Challenges are apparent everywhere, but solutions are being coy and playing hard to get.

The unknowns are unknowing as hard as they have in my life since I came out seven years ago. Then, my life shattered in all kinds of ways: a vase hurled hard onto a concrete floor. It could be reconstituted only as a mosaic, and much of the work has been about letting go of how much I loved that vase.

Now, as democracy, human rights, and entire sectors of the economy collapse spectacularly, my own small crumbling feels almost cozy. Not a shattered vase, but a crumbling cookie, melting appealingly along its chocolate chip fault lines. I’m, of course, on Mounjaro now, and I don’t want this cookie. But, I’m back, have missed you, and am happy to share whatever portions of the cookie don’t fall on the floor.

When I was in junior high, my bully died. He was popular, he was good at football, and he terrified me. He was a major antagonist in my early teen years. I was a non-factor in his days. I doubt his friends remember me.

With a couple of other misfit boys, I had signed up for football as a strategy to avoid getting my ass kicked off the field. This was the Dallas/Fort Worth suburbs in the late 80s/early 90s, and the football players in the school were essentially given a free pass to harass non-football players.

I had no interest in football. I’d seen one or two Dallas Cowboys games before signing up. My dad, gamely, brought me home autographed 8x10s of Jimmy Johnson and Herschel Walker from his advertising job. It was the kind of gift that would put me on a pedestal with my sons, but unbeknownst to both of us, I was not his “son”, I was his daughter.

In Junior High, all I really cared about were books, arts, and music. My best friend was a tall wannabe goth who wore a long black trenchcoat to school that I loved for its scary anti-social vibes (this was pre-Columbine, so trenchcoats were edgy but not terrifying). I did my best to be sort of goth or alternative, but I was lost. My mom wouldn’t let me wear black or buy band shirts, so I ended up in a lot of densely-patterned rayon button-up shirts. I wore a large, silver, feminine Ethiopian cross my grandmother had bought for me at the Houston gem and mineral show. Sometimes, I wore a Chinese army hat she’d brought me back from a trip to Beijing after school, until a Vietnam vet scout leader had a meltdown at my dad for the red star.

But I was weird, and kind of faggy, and this was Texas in the times of the first Gulf War - lots of Lee Greenwood, lots of “These Colors don’t Run” T-shirts. The woman who gave me rides to school listened to nothing but contemporary Christian music. For homecoming, we bought our dates elaborate mums with our football numbers on them. A girl I dated took me on a date to her church, where she told me it would be really special to her if I were saved and baptized in the hot tub turned Baptismal font. More than once, I was called into the principal’s office under suspicion of “Satanism.” Once they drug tested me, which I gleefully complied with as I was proudly straight-edge, even though I didn’t know exactly what that meant.

Even being on the football team, I was fair game for getting punched in the halls: in the arm (fine), the solar plexus (not great), or the balls (so humiliating). As a JV bench player, I was ensnared in a lot of almost-fights that started from varsity players’ boredom and the challenge, “What the fuck are you looking at, faggot?” Sometimes, I’d have to fight back. I’d try to be crazy, fight dirty, and hurt them, but they were stronger and I was outnumbered. I managed to avoid the scariest beatdowns, but watched another queer-seeming kid on the team get his face slammed into the locked glass door of the gym until his head split open, covering the window with blood with each impact. After that, I stole my dad’s fillet knife from the tackle box in the garage and kept it in my backpack, just in case.

My bully was strong. He was popular. He was good at football. He did shop, where he hung out with a skinhead who bounced into and out of school with various suspensions and drama in his home life. The rumors were that the skinhead had brought a railroad spike to shop and sharpened it on a belt sander, fashioning it into a junior high shiv. When the skinhead was around, my bully was emboldened. But the skinhead didn’t play football, so when I felt things escalating with my bully, I’d try to engineer our conflict to escalate in the locker room, where at least I knew things could only get so bad before the coaches stepped in.

And then, one day, I arrived at school to an eerie quiet. No one was running or rough-housing. Clusters of girls were holding each other. Guys were covering their faces. I found a friend and asked what was going on. Hadn’t I heard? My bully was in the hospital. He’d been shot.

The best I ever understood what happened: my bully, the skinhead, and a couple of other boys from shop were sawing off a shotgun with a jigsaw in my bully's garage. They had clamped the gun to his dad’s workbench so that they could take turns slowly working their way through the barrel of the gun. They had not checked to see if the gun was unloaded. At some point in the project, my bully bent over to inspect his work, looking down the barrel of the gun just in time for it to discharge in his face.

I was not sad.

I tried to pretend to be sad, because I was in the minority and I would stand out if I didn’t. His close friends were devastated, but since he was popular, everyone felt they knew him, at least a little, at least enough to cry. And again, this was pre-Columbine, so our expectations of mortality and our odds of dying in a gun death were different from what they’d be now.

There was an announcement—an assembly. We were offered counseling. Some people went home. And weirdly, I felt safe. The bully was gone. His accomplices were shaken by sadness. It was nothing that I ever would have wished for, but I relished the freedom. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder at the lunch table, my locker, or the restroom. No one hit me. No one called me faggot. The school’s heart was broken. But, for a few of us, it was - at least for a little while - a safe place.

My bully died in the hospital. Not sure what “pulling the plug” actually meant, we gossiped a little about how terrible it was to allow a child to die. None of us could comprehend our parents making the same choice. None of us could understand that someone who’d been so strong the last time we’d seen him could not viably be kept alive.

The skinhead and my bully’s other shop friends, who’d been there when he died, returned to school. For a little while, they were too heartbroken to be scary. In a culture of harsh fathers, results-oriented coaches, and disciplinarian teachers, it was strange to see these tough boys receive gentleness. Seeing them this way made me feel sorry for them.

Even then, I found it infuriating that it took a kid blowing his face off to make the school adopt a position of kindness. That anger etched a total distrust of adults into my worldview. I’d sort of assumed that I was ignored and unprotected because of my low rank on the pecking order. But, look at how they’d failed the golden child. What a scam.

Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

I was not sad.

If Kirk and I had gone to junior high together, he would have been in my social circles, avoiding my bullies, and likely having the same highly-conflicted feelings of the peace that came from my bully’s death. His junior high experience was 10 years later, post-Columbine, in Prospect Heights, Illinois, one of the best neighborhoods in Illinois.

I mean this kindly: while I don’t know much about pre-Turning Points, pre-“Debate Me” Charlie Kirk, he didn’t strike me as someone comfortable in his own skin. He had a strange appearance that I think would have been charming in a less hateful person with a more fun haircut. He had enough intelligence to know what intelligence is shaped like and the power that it brings, but I don’t think he felt confident in what he brought to the table intellectually (Exhibit A: grown man makes a living debating inexperienced college kids). And, I’m not the first to point out that his reaction to being viciously lampooned on South Park stank of emotional and social immaturity and desperation: overhearing jokes from the cool kid table and mistaking them as an invitation to sit down.

His last words were villainizing trans people and ham-handedly dodging a question about gun violence. I watched the video of the impact, where his lanky body jerks and slumps chaotically to the ground, while blood sprays from a wound that looks tame compared to the kind of close-range AR-15 fire we accept being inflicted upon American children. While right-wing media is comparing his assassination to MLK and JFK as a historical inflection point in American culture, the image of his death is more visually similar to that of Lee Harvey Oswald. In death, he was not Hamlet or Caesar. He was Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

It was quick. When my time comes, I hope it comes as quickly as his did. I doubt he even had time to realize he was dying before he died. Even after all the incendiary things he has said about women, about the Black community, about immigrants, and about trans people, he felt safer sitting in a tent in a college quad than I feel going through the TSA.

I will not tell you how to feel about it, because I don’t know how to feel about it.

I’m happy that he won’t be sharing his particular message with the world. I wish this had come from something rarer than a bullet: a change of heart. I was not quite as big a piece of shit at 31, but I’ve spent a lot of the last 18 years working on myself, my relationships, my politics, and my empathy. Who knows what kind of person he could have become in 18 years? I have retained too much of my junior high cynicism to think that he would have had an Ebenezer Scrooge moment. But also, I know many people who have worked on themselves in profound ways and emerged redeemed. I find it sad that he will not get that chance, even while I recognize that a lot of nicer people have died in a lot worse ways.

On a personal level, it would be cool if this meant a respite from transphobia - but that already seems unlikely, with Trump eulogizing Kirk as a “martyr” and chronically disappointing Gavin Newsom saying this:

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence. Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation.”

Do I feel guilty about laughing at the jokes I’ve seen on my TikTok feed and in text messages? No. Charlie Kirk was part of the American fascist propaganda machine. Current hand-wringing liberal discourse about “political violence” ignores that every fascist state in history has had a thriving propaganda machine as part of its machinery of violence. My grandmother delighted in telling me off-color jokes about the Nazis, most of which I’ve forgotten, except singing along with her to “The River Kwai March”:

Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is rather sim'lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.

Can you imagine admonishing her? “But Grandmother, Goebbels was a father!” (Of 6, killed by Goebbels when he realized he’d bet on a losing horse - parenthood doesn’t bestow moral worth as anyone who is or has had a parent knows).

Is Kirk equivalent to Goebbels? At what point in his life’s journey did Goebbels become someone people from Allied countries were allowed to mock? Should we take it easy on Goebbels because he had kids? What level of cultural contribution would Kirk have to make to deporting non-criminals, limiting access to reproductive healthcare, making mass shootings more accessible (and maybe even helping to inspire some), and propping up anti-Black racism to get into Goebbels’ ok-subject-of-a-sick-joke’s ballpark?

I’m not a historian or ethicist, but I would argue that for many, many people on the wrong end of Charlie Kirk’s multi-multi-million dollar propaganda machine, humor is a very healthy, very human way to move through the relief that his chapter is closed, and the fear about what chapter comes next and who will write it.

My fear for the Charlie Kirks of the world is that they are made and emboldened by the kindness that my bully and I didn’t receive. I have a suspicion that he was the recipient of the kind of “participation trophy” culture I’m sure he would have slammed. He very-special-boy-ed his way into Breitbart from a high school in a great neighborhood. He breezed into the company of powerful people in a way that probably rendered the problems of most Americans extremely abstract. And because he was born into the trappings of respectability, he was able to bring his uninformed, empathy-free, exclusionary politics into the American mainstream.

In my youth, I longed for the kind of kindness that diminishes violence. While nobody was giving us participation trophies, and we were left mainly to our own devices, we very much needed the curious, active, brave, investigative kindness that would have prevented lots of kids at the fringes from getting beat up, and one kid at the center of things from dying.

Now, I fear that capitalism and “the algorithm” incentivize cruelty to the extent that it’s almost impossible to steer our world towards deep kindness. I mean the kind of kindness that allows us to see - really see - each other’s lives, struggles, and humanity. Kindness isn’t letting people get away with whatever they think they can get away with (whether it’s sawing off shotguns or debating freshmen into shamed compliance). Kindness is making sure someone’s needs are met, that they’re seen, and that they can participate in this dense, too-short, interdependent world of life. If you love a person, kindness probably means having the courage to tell them when they’ve poured all their energy into something poisonous.

In his 31 years here, Charlie Kirk made the world a less loving place, amassing fame and fortune on the way. He can’t change that now. We might be able to, but we’re running out of time.

A summer in Puerto Vallarta and three weeks in the States left my memory of Mexico a bit hazy. I got on the Newark to CDMX plane trying to remember my street address and the name of the security guard who didn’t seem to like us when we first moved in, who then melted into kindness when he met our lopsided Husky mix, Zeby.

On the plane, I sat next to a woman traveling to Mexico City for a conference on tax shelters for people who live internationally. She was one of those people whose class I can never quite place. She boarded with the “Global Plus” passengers and had spread her things out over her seat, an unoccupied middle seat, and my aisle seat by the time I arrived. Her sunglasses and purse were Gucci. She asked me to move my one overhead bag so that “my two bags can stay side-by-side.”

But her nervous energy made me think the Gucci was fake, or maybe real, and an attempt to pass in fancier social circles than those from whence she came. Where should she eat in Mexico City? How should she get from the airport to the hotel without being ripped off by a cabbie? Is it safe to walk around at night? She lacked the uncanny lack of anxiety I expect from elite travelers and people who make money off of money. When she figured out that I, too, was a person living internationally, she handed me her card and said, “Ooh, so you’re an expat?”

I said, “Oh, no, never an expat. I’m an immigrant in search of a better life.”

We put on our headphones and distracted ourselves, digitally.

The revulsion to the “expat” label was automatic, and bolstered by recent anti-gentrification protests in Mexico City, where marchers smashed stores and restaurants in Roma Norte, Polanco, and Condesa perceived to be catering to affluent foreigners. As a foreigner in a neighborhood close to those, I see myself as a different, better kind of immigrant. I’m not an entitled American, not even trying to speak Spanish, I’m an ashamed American quietly stumbling and mumbling in bad Spanish through every interaction to show that I’m Trying™. While I don’t think I’m welcome on the anti-gentrification marches, I’ve marched along with Mexico City trans people, lesbians, and anti-Trump protesters. As far as I know, most of my money is spent with Mexicans. I love Mexico, and as an immigrant, I try to be “one of the good ones.”

Despite those efforts, my mixed feelings about the situation are visible.

Friday, Krista and I had some friends over for dinner: a couple from Dallas who own a condo two blocks away from us and who have been introducing us to other American queers in Mexico City. They are the kind of angels I hope to be to someone else someday: introducing themselves in line for coffee and inviting us over for drinks. We made them an American dinner: chicken French, mashed potatoes, and roasted asparagus. Krista made a lemon and blueberry olive oil cake for dessert.

Our apartment is lovely, but a work in progress. We’ve had it since April, but have spent almost as much time away from it as we’ve spent in it (this summer it was occupied by a lovely friend who house-sat for us and dog-sat for Zeby). It’s slowly getting more comfy and lived in, but very much in our style and in keeping with our priorities. Before the summer, Krista bought a large, white sectional. Now, she’s dyeing it in a 1970s orange, one cushion at a time, in a cauldron-sized pot that sits on all five burners of our stove.

When our friends walked in, one of them took stock of the apartment and said, “So, I’m seeing that you don’t have any art on your walls… Is that a choice, or?”

We laughed. We ate the chocolate chip weed cookies they baked and brought over. We ate chicken French. We drank wine. It was a lovely night, and when it was over, both Krista and I were still chewing on the comment about our lack of art.

The truth is, the lack of art is a symptom of our (my) complicated relationship with this exodus. Fully committing to Mexico feels like giving up on the dream of the States. After all, what if Trump suddenly and tragically passes away? What if there are midterms, and suddenly Newsom, Buttigieg, and Khanna find trans people less disposable? What if the pendulum swings back and there’s another “trans tipping point” and more curiosity about the perspectives of those living on the frontiers outside of the gender binary? Wouldn’t I come running back?

I think so? Maybe not. Maybe not running, anyway, despite how desperately I want all of those things to happen. I hope for them, but I don’t believe in their likelihood.

The closest I’ve been to this feeling before was the year I spent in couples therapy, hoping my ex would come around to loving me as a trans woman, that I’d be able to hang on to all the sumptuously familiar things about my life and family. Back then, I’d bring examples of her most neutral actions to my friends, which I'd present pathetically: “Don’t you think this means she’s going to stay with me?” (So many friends were heroic in their neutrality here, thank you.)

This kind of thing is extremely embarrassing in retrospect, but even in the moment, the total lack of traction is palpable. Life spins and skids away in the present as you attempt to bend the future back towards the path through the sheer force of hope.

I found traction back then by giving up. Not completely, but a lot. Not on the notion that I’d find love, but on the places it might make sense to look for it. Not on having a family, but on what shape that family might take. I let go of what I’d hoped for and made something beautiful from what was left.

At my current crossroads of “where is home?” and “what is the future?”, I’ll occasionally catch myself reminiscing about simpler times when I knew what the future held. It’s a dumb, hilarious thought that I can chew on for several sad songs before seeing its irony. Here I am, someone I never saw coming, with a future that feels completely unknown, wallowing in nostalgia for a decade-ago version of myself who thought he knew what was coming, even though he didn’t see me coming.

I don’t miss knowing what the future held. I miss thinking I did. Hindsight being 20/20, I miss the confidence I had at the peak of being totally fucking wrong about the future. Isn’t this the delusion that comes with imagining that any days were good old days? But it’s also the impulse of fascism: sprinting backwards towards moments in history that are the exact reasons we find ourselves where and how we are. We all want a time machine with a side of amnesia.

Saturday, I participated in a webinar about self-compassion, which I felt a little imposterish about (lately, I’m pretty nice to myself). I’m a fan of Elena Rangel, a coach who I met at the Sum of Us Festival a few years ago. She’s been a reliable source of wisdom since then, among other things, introducing me to Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity. So, I wanted in even if I’m not at peak self-unkindness.

It was great, of course. It was also striking to hear how common it is for people to feel both extraordinarily sad/low/depleted (due to unemployment, health issues, immigration issues, etc) and also guilty that in this crappy state, they aren’t doing more to change the world. Elena’s advice wasn’t self-care. There are, ultimately, not enough scented candles and bath bombs to cover the stench of what we’re living through. They were suggesting the more Catholic version of compassion (my jam), “suffering with” oneself, in the reality of one’s circumstances.

We are together in not knowing what the future holds, but also together in authoring it. I’ve spent a lot of time being scared of unknowns, but lately have started to think that the fear is a kind of psychic lubricant for the engines that power the outcomes I fear. Being present, hopeful, loving… that’s the sand in the gears.

In 2019, when I decided to stop resisting reality, it looked like joining a trans workout class, changing my name, and going on some dates in a skirt. In 2025, it might look like listening to paranormal podcasts in Spanish and squirming through some uncomfortable networking events. This week, Krista and I will be buying a canvas and some paint and making some art for what is (at least right now) our home.