My life doesn’t matter. Neither does yours, while we’re at it. And still it’s worth living. What does it even mean to matter? If you’re forgotten between your last breath and the next one taken near you, what then? A bronze statue of you on a rearing steed is no seal of validity. Did you make other people while you were here? Our culture definitely assigns value and matteringness to that act. And there’s no guarantee anyone will sing your song when you’re gone, even if you did make people and expect them to sing it.

When my friend Dave died after a very short walk with cancer, in his mid-20’s, I remember listening to songs that he loved. Brian Eno, RJD2, Q-Bert. I found myself wondering what he felt when he listened to this song or that song. Did he listen over and over until they became something more than music? What did music set loose inside him? Is this feeling I’m feeling the same one that made this one of his favorites?

I only saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire once, but I remember it being about how we each come to know things in such uniquely circumstantial and accidental, but indelible ways. Things that shape us and guide us. They build the armor we wear. What I know from being with Albert as he died are things you’ll never know. You might know things like them, but you’ll never know how his hair fell across his eyes as he exhaled that final time or how eucalyptus will never smell the same. And what you remember from the first time your grandad made you slit a pig’s throat is only yours.

In the movie, this “uneducated” slumdog (a low-class, invisible, city dweller), Jamal, is on a trivia game show. The judges think he’s cheating, but each question is another pivot in the film where we’re taken back through his life to the place, the circumstance, the moment when he learned the thing that allowed him to answer the seemingly obscure and erudite question of the moment.

Jamal is asked a question about the Hindu deity Rama. He is silent. His expression, is it blank? Is it tortured? Where has he gone?. The host leans in expectantly, certain this is where he wins. Jamal meets his eyes, “I wake up every morning wishing I didn’t know the answer to that question,” and the movie cuts to a scene of his mother being killed in a protest. He answers, “A bow and arrow.”

Knowledge doesn’t require formal education and memory is so much more than a collection of data points from our wanderings. There is a playlist I’ve made over the years called “My Celebration of Life.” Driving home earlier this week, I was listening and singing. Hard. You know what I’m talking about. I went deep into each song. The layers, the smells, the tears, the ache that earned each song’s spot on the list. Faces and experiences flooded across my awareness. Gratitude, sorrow, forgiveness, deep, thumping bass and good old-fashioned longing.

When I die, maybe someone will find this list and listen to it and wonder. And there’s no possible way they will know these songs the way I’ve known them. The way Bobby McFerrin’s whispering lullaby fills my nose with wet sea air in a musty massage classroom when I knew more about massage than I know now. The way James Taylor’s lilting rendition of Close Your Eyes transports me to my rickety, desert tan, diesel Rabbit 4-speed and high school in Pawley’s Island, but also of Maureen McGovern singing the same song at the end of set that included her vocal (yes, vocal!) rendition of Rhapsody in Blue when simulcast was all the rage, but also of so many long and winding drives to and from Ramsey visiting with my most wonderful uncle as we watched cancer slowly take him from us. Tenderness, inspiration, dusty beach roads and feelings so deep that even today, I often don’t know where to put them or how deep they live inside me.

Ani DiFranco calls me out. I am the bull in your china shop. And this feeling is the most exquisite satiety as I tuck into the delicious meal that is your love. We’ll take turns driving the car and carrying the heavy things and the whole scene will leave us both weary and sappy and safe.

I have read about how monks benefit from chanting. The rhythmic, predictable acoustic vibrations soothe the nervous system and unite the hemispheres of their brains. I do love to chant and to sing along and yes, I do sometimes feel like a motherless child and could sing it all the way down to the river. And the songs on this list are mostly not that.

But are they?

If I’ve listened to any of these songs less than 100 times in my life, I’ll eat my noise-canceling headphones. Are they predictable in and of themselves? Not objectively speaking, but do I know them by my broken, mended and tattered heart? Yes, I do. I chant them, I sing with them like the friends and lovers and brothers they are. And in that, my hemispheres synchronize, my cells breathe deeply and I am reminded of the incredible depth of what this slumdog knows.

And it matters, even if only to me.

The words fell into my eyes and through my brain as I read. I didn’t get it. “This guy’s an idiot. Just say what you mean, man!” Slowly, the dawn crept in, exposing the strong myths and limiting perspective I hold about the future.

Despite the very common belief that the future is predicted by the past and even the present, there are many ways in which that’s never really been true. A future that doesn’t include paradigm shifts, major shocks or plain old wild cards is not the future that lies ahead. Never has been. Never will be.

In a serendipitous turn, I was recently introduced to the paper Ten Principles for Thinking About the Future: a primer for Environmental Professionals.

It has ruined my brain in the best way possible.

The paper explores some seriously heady, but also digestible invitations about what shapes our perspective on this thing we call the future. The one that’s really stuck with me is that the future is plural and it holds and will hold profound, unexpected disruptions.

Can you imagine?

Probably not. I can’t do it quite yet either. And with good, deeply programmed neurological reason. Turns out, we use the same neural networks to envision the future as we use to recall memories. Yep, that means what you think it means. If we don’t know or have never known something, it’s really difficult for us to imagine it. You can bet I’ll be putting this little quirk next to “the shoulder” and “airway/foodway crossover” in my journal of serious human design flaws.

Despite my own neural programming being stacked solidly against me, I want very much to remain open to new futures fueled by hard to imagine paradigm shifts. I will try till I die, even if, from my wee seat right here, it may be virtually impossible to trace my specific efforts to measurable impact on “the future.” This is the committed surrender with which I approach this world that feels to be in deep, dark, precipitous decline.

This surrender lives alongside this transgressive little ditty. Every time a person has told me they’re having a baby in recent years, I’ve had to check my face. It’s one of those times that exposes me to my belief that the the future is dark and riddled with suffering. People who choose to make other people must not believe this or maybe they believe that making more people will prevent the inevitable collapse? The choice to make another person must be imbued, at least in part, with a suspicion that the future holds promise and goodness. The future is plural and all the options are positive! These thoughts trickle below the surface of my much louder inner wail, “Why on earth would you bring a child into this burning, angry, broken world? We’re already running out of food and water! War and fires are breaking out constantly! What we decidedly do not need is more humans weighing down this doomed, fiery rock of madness!”

Somehow though, my face emits, “Wow! That’s great! Congratulations.” Generally, it’s even accompanied by a smile-like twitch of my facial muscles.

In somewhat related news, when I work with people planning for the end of their lives, they often get stuck. They know the future is plural and that plurality is paralyzing. They know, somewhere deep inside them, that there are endless possibilities when it comes to how their lives will end. Serious injury. Slow illness. Anvil. Spider bite. How can a person plan for the infinite paths that could unfold?

The answer is you can’t. As a wise person recently shared with me, “Planning is everything, but a plan is nothing.”

The essential unknowability of the futures is too much for most of us to get our arms around. That’s real, but what you can do is think about what you would and wouldn’t prefer. What you do and don’t want to experience. Getting familiar with and even writing down these contingencies is not a guarantee, but it’s a deeply useful exercise in something akin to manifestation. While Steven Covey and his famous “habits” are problematic characters on several levels, when we begin with the end…or ends…in mind, our actions between now and the end change. They matter. They shape and guide and interrupt and interfere with what might have happened had we simply acquiesced to some unfolding of events we’ve agreed is/was inevitable.

Environmental futurist Jamais Cascio says humans think about the future because the future matters and because we still have a say in the future we get. And then I go back to my sad, limited wiring and wonder how to make the say I have something that isn’t defined by an established, possibly centuries-old cognitive rut. My tiny mind is flummoxed by the idea that the present and recent past may not largely define the future. What kind of roadtrip will my defective, limited and counterproductive mental maps deliver?

The snacks will be subpar, I’ll tell you that and I’m definitely getting a mean sunburn on my left arm.

Knowing that I’m predisposed (unless I get real mindful-like about it) to believe that any vision of the futures that doesn’t track with the patterns of the past is fanciful science fiction or plain old delusion feels like a hard hill to climb. As an amateur student of what we call history, I think I’ve added some mud and rocks to that climb. If I want to be expansive and curious about the deeply unknowable future that is fast and slow, surprising and unsurprising and rich with possible unfoldings that could be anything including possible, plausible, probable and preferable, I have to resist the temptation, the conditioning to anchor to what I “know” has already happened.

When I can reframe it a bit, I’m buoyed in considering that perhaps it’s my limited and reflexive assumption that the future will track with the past that’s the real illusion. It’s not about forgetting what I know. It’s about knowing that I don’t know what I think I know. Ya know?

The antidote, if you will, involves something Richard A.K. Lum and others call “strategic foresight,” which is as much about critical thinking and openness as it is about imagination and surprise. Only when we bring a multiplicity of perspectives and a receptivity to things that may not “make sense,” can we develop a meaningful view that allows us to understand and consider that the future will be different from the present.

Our deeply human unwillingness to be with nuance and uncertainty makes it hard to for most of us to be ok with the reality that this thing we call “the future” is a tangled braid that weaves a variety of paths rife with paradox and contradiction. Our white-knuckled clinging to any sense of certainty leaves us ill-prepared to even consider what could be, much less to participate in creating it.

When we say, “the future,” singular, we lean into the idea that there is one path. The kicker is that there are exactly zero facts about the future. Ever. What’s fun is that if that’s true, then we can float from and between attitudes of optimism, pessimism, resignation and even transformation without ever losing sight of the possible, plural futures. In fact, that kind of floating may be an imperative to seeing fully.

No perspective is objectively valid. I have no handbook for how to feel about what you do and don’t see or what you can’t and can’t imagine. Sorry about that. Oh, torture! Nuance be thy name!

I’ll leave you with one more bit that may lighten your load if you share my bleak sense of “the future.” Phillip Tetlock’s long-term study of 82,000 predictions by 284 experts found that the predictions offered by the experts were only slight better than random guesses. It turned out that neither education level, experience, nor disciplinary background shielded the experts from getting it wrong…a lot. The one factor that appeared to quite clearly separate the accurate predictions from the not-so-accurate ones was whether said experts were classified as ‘hedgehogs’ or ‘foxes.’

Basically, in this framework, hedgehogs tend to have a single narrow and inflexible world view with a healthy peppering of strong ideological convictions. There’s one way. And it’s their way. The way that is familiar to them and which can be, according to them, argued logically. Those wily foxes, on the other hand, are all about seeing and being with complexity and nuance. They’re pragmatic, but flexible and curious with expansive worldviews that are made to bend and shift. These are the people who make more accurate predictions and, I think, who are most likely to intentionally change the course of what we call the futures.

While I would happily accept a karmic refund for the time I spent watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, its author, Sir Arthur C. Clarke had it right. “[t]he world is…full of things that intelligent and well-educated people at one time believed to be impossible.” Planes, germs, radio waves and gene editing should serve as just a few of the solid reminders that we don’t know what lies ahead, but whatever it is, it matters. And we have a say in it.

The time before last, we took a roadtrip.

Always fun.

Always good memories and snacks.

Like shooting fish in the memory barrel.

This last time?...we watched a bizarre triple feature of Weekend at Bernie’s, Back to School (I’m not proud) and A River Runs Through It (good LORD, Brad Pitt was pretty in 1992.). Three of my favorites. What can I say?...I’m a complicated ladyboy. I made trash nachos. My progeny gamed while I napped. We did nothing. And everything.

When I get on a plane, the risk I feel is almost entirely invented. It’s a statistically absurd worry. I take an unnecessarily deep breath as I walk down the jetway. It’s ridiculous, but I do it anyway. For a few moments at least, death feels closer. Real.

Lieutenant John Hampden Chamberlayne wrote to his mother, Martha Burwell Chamberlayne after Second Manassas, one of the bloodiest battels of the Civil War, “If I should never see any of you again, remember that I am in charity with all men…Tell Nancy to sit down when you get this and sing one of her best pieces. So shall I, as I sit here on the banks of the Monocacy under the beams of the full, unclouded moon, fancy that I hear her clear notes welling up in the trills that I remember she used to warble out like a sweet little bird.”

Did Nancy ever know that John experienced her singing like that of a sweet little bird? That he would carry it in his heart onto the battlefield and be buoyed by its memory as he looked out over the hills of dead men and horses? Did John ever notice the moon before he was forced to consider that any moon might be his last?

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien wrote, “Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”

I have heard this from friends, both civilian and military and certainly from so many I have loved who have lived with and still live with cancer. They have shared that their experiences in or near combat or something like it had an addictive quality. They didn’t know how or where else to feel the way they felt when the potentiality of their imminent death was undeniable. They stopped knowing how to be when they didn’t expect an incoming mortar or tumor spread at any moment.

Is this not a fundamental flaw in our wiring?

Why do we need to be in imminent danger to show up for ourselves and for those we love? To say the things we mean, but which are too dangerous to say when we are in the culturally perpetuated lie of everlasting life?

“I’m so grateful I said yes to this. We did SO much and I kept up and just threw myself into the fun and it was amazing! I sooo hope I am alive a year from now and we can do it again. It’s hard that that was in the back of my head the whole time…I just hate knowing that each time could be the last time.”

My friend is barely 30, living with metastatic breast cancer for the past 5 years on top of a seemingly endless barrage of other challenges. She never gets to pass Go. Never has. She spent a few days last week with her son and his friends…camping. Good god. I asked her if somehow it wasn’t enough that cancer has been trying to kill her. “Camping with 4 pre-teen boys? Hold my beer, cancer! I got this!”

I wonder. What’s the middle ground between “don’t worry about it, there’s always tomorrow” and “If I die tomorrow I’ll be devastated that I said ‘no’?” It’s so hard to resist the temptation to greedily hoard memories. To bank experiences. To squeeze the shit out of every last moment. And if we do resist, if we do surrender, will we gnash and wail in our dying moments, knowing that we chose to lie on the couch that one time or go to sleep before the meteors were visible?

We know this thing is gonna end.

If we’re not loading a cannon or getting a chemo infusion every three weeks, we don’t think it’s gonna happen soon, but isn’t this what truly makes us get up in the morning? This knowing that this could be the last morning, even when we’re certain it won’t be? Can we have grace for ourselves in the moments when we simply can’t…whatever?

What if sometimes a bag of potato chips and Golden Girls reruns is what showing up looks like? I mean maybe losing the tip of your nose to frostbite on K2 isn’t really where it’s at. Just sayin’.

Morty may have it right. “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”

“The fires,” I heard myself whisper.

Everywhere.

A short drive away in Aspen. A thousand miles away in Washington. Thousands more miles away in Spain, France, Angola.

My heart sank. My cells deflated. I let the weight of my arm pull the blinds the rest of the way up and wandered out to push the button on the speed kettle. At least there’s coffee. For now.

Today would not be overcast. It wasn’t clouds. It was smoke. The sun would not come through. It wouldn’t even look like it was trying. People with lungs should stay inside and breathe all shallow-like…until further notice.

But the sun did come through, and its name was Amy Poehler. The rage, the sadness, the powerless gnashing inside me was interrupted by Amy talking with Anne Lamott. (I’m not at liberty to confirm or deny whether I went on to binge Good Hang and learned more than I ever wanted to know about Will Ferrell, John Cena, Clare Danes and Mindy Kaling, but it’s possible and don’t pee on my self-care parade!)

I’ve never been one to keep or encourage others to keep a gratitude journal. I despise bright sides. They hurt my eyes and my self-respect. I also hate homework, so there’s that. Not everything has a bright side, but everything does have more sides than we can easily see or maybe even want to feel. It can be easy to lose sight of what’s possible when the sun is blotted out by the gasps of a ravaged planet and the rest of the shit show that is life on earth in the year of somebody’s lord 2026.

I can’t get on a plane and go to the Gaza Strip. And even if I did, I’d be another mouth and soul who needs resources, care, love.

I don’t know how to fight forest fires, so driving my non-firefighting ass to Washington State would be helpful to exactly nobody.

I can’t even keep the king from drowning when the pipe breaks in Royal Match intrudes on my crossword puzzle, so it’s safe to assume I would be useless in both hacking or un-hacking a municipal water mainframe.

And still I can show up in ways that matter and that slow the landslide for me and the people, animals, and places I can impact.

I can put down my phone to pet my cat with intention and feel the swell in my heart when I do.

I can care about my friend who’s living with a wound-vac for the foreseeable future and intermittently send her stupid memes of animals acting the fool.

And I can remember that this is all temporary.

Not just the fires. Not just the wars or the water hacking. This entire gig. This moment. This breath. This earth. All temporary and yet, here I am. Here you are. Here we are. Having arrived here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

If you’re in fire, so am I. If you’re in grief, I am, too. If your heart is exploding with love, I’m in the soak zone. The Buddha said a lotta shit, but one of the things he is said to have said is that life is suffering. Meh. I don’t disagree but, suffering, like death, like joy, like Homer Simpson, needs a counterweight to matter.

There’s laundry to be done, garbage cans to bring in, and snacks that need sharing. And you better believe there are cats (and humans) who need your full attention.

Wanna be counterweights together?

We were musing about gender, inspired by the very queer-friendly décor, signage and beer names (non-Beer-nary, Chosen Family, Sandra Day) and my friend was saying that she’s sticking with she and her prounouns. She explained that she doesn’t see a personal need to shift to they and them because she still feels like a woman, but a woman who is curious about how much we can push the envelope of all that she and her can encompass.

Honestly, no problem for me. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s push all the envelopes. Let’s rip ‘em, burn ‘em, stop using envelopes altogether.

Naturally, though, my mind wandered to my own alignment with they and them. She and her and they and them can both be acts of advocacy that challenge us and our fellow humans to wonder. I have actively chosen they and them even though I could stick with she and her in this evolving world. It feels more accurate for me as I float between the imagined points of this ludicrous binary, but I’m also more than willing to take the hit of identifying as ‘trans,’ and inviting people to wonder and feel uncomfortable and enter into curious exploration of what this all means.

But what my friend is choosing is also advocacy.

We love to award the openly weird folx with the titles of authentic or advocate, but I think people who choose to be who they are without a visible shift in labels or signifiers do something equally important on the spectrum of light and heat that work to melt our imaginary world. It’s not a competition. There are endless ways to be and there are endless ways to advocate for that reality.

Interestingly, I have no problem believing her when she makes this stand. I mean, isn’t this the core of empathy? At its root, empathy rests in a real willingness to believe that the other person is telling you something true.

I had only settled effortlessly into believing her for a few minutes when I felt the face palm from the universe.

The Stakes Are Murky

You may recall a piece I wrote a few months ago about the ongoing path I’m traveling with my almost-16-year-old. When my friend who is 50 years old and has been living in her body and with her gender and sexuality for many decades tells me how she’s feeling and living into pronouns, believing her costs me virtually nothing. I’m not invested in some future outcome or in the importance of my role in “allowing” it or “showing up” so it can evolve. She said it. I believed her. We went back to watching England and Norway slug it out on the projector screen and sipped our beers.

But when my child shifts…from he and him to they and them…and now from they and them to she and her, I’m finding it much harder to believe her. I am not proud that this is true, but there it is. She’s not finished! And if I believe her today, does she anchor here in a way that she wouldn’t if I didn’t join her? Am I closing off her options by jumping on board without question? I would never want to be the reason that she is afraid, 6 months or 6 years from now of saying, “I’m not sure she and her are a good fit anymore.” And then I realize that my ambivalence is fueled at least in part by benevolence, but it’s also fueled by hoping?...that it won’t stick.

Can I love her fully without needing her to be finished? And what’s really mine to do and undo?

Ugh. The world is a dangerous place for girls and it’s an exponentially more dangerous place for trans girls. And when you have a person who moves and talks and thinks like a boy, but presents like a girl, her obliviousness to the danger amplifies my fear for her.

It’s not about which word is right. It’s about what the world looks like from inside my child’s heart and mind. What choices are available? What dangers is she opening herself up to experience? What will happen for her if she decides that she is or wants to be someone else at some point? Oh, gawd! Make it stop!

Just Like That…Sort Of

My kid’s been doing some work in the business of a family friend these last handful of months. I went to pick her up from work a few weeks ago and found myself just hanging out for a few minutes with my friend who owns the business. “They really seem to like working with you. Thank you so much for making a space for them to learn all of this and contribute to what you’re doing.” My kid came around the corner carrying a couple of crates full of supplies. My friend smiled and nodded her head toward them. “Are you kidding? She’s a hard worker. She keeps everyone moving on time.” No hesitation. No checking my face to see if I was picking up that she was using she to refer to my kid. Just normal as anything.

I almost threw my back out. It was like I had to physically catch up to what was happening. It couldn’t have actually been more than a second in real time, but my internal experience was stupefied relief. A punch in the chest of recognition. A deep gratitude that my kid was spending so much time with someone who sees her. “I’m so glad to hear it. I wish she was that helpful at home,” I glance at her as she sets the crates down, rolling her eyes, “but I’m glad she’s such a help.”

Her boss who is my friend is a gorgeous human. Full stop. And she is not going to have pick up any pieces of the messy gender journey…if it gets messy. She just wants employees who are kind and work hard. She didn’t raise this person from a wee behbeh. She knew them…dammit!..HER!...briefly as them and then ever after as she.

I want to be clear here. The worn grooves of my old brain are not an excuse and I have no interest in blaming my brain and leaving it at that. Those grooves are, however, a reminder that I may have to work harder. I love my kid and want her to be safe and seen and, yes, to never have to have the painful experience that so many of us, queer or not, honestly just have to have. The one where we snap out of whomever it is we’ve been one day and say, “Oh, man. Remember when I thought that was who I was?”

I believe my daughter.

Aw, hell. We haven’t actually discussed if she wants me to call her my daughter. Note to self, ask about that.

I am also deeply aware of wanting it all to just feel settled and safe. Send snacks and maybe some dry erase markers.

This is what it is to love humans. Messy, constantly changing, nuanced, confusing madness.

And this is not “just parenting stuff” like hoping my kid ‘turns out ok.’ Kids get mowhawks. They pierce their noses or their cheeks or…other parts we wish they wouldn’t, but those choices don’t carry the same stakes, in this angry, difference-hating world, as embracing one’s transness.

Even so, I do know that believing my kid, even if she tells me something different tomorrow, is the kindest thing I can do for both of us. And that I’ll need reminding that that’s true.

My record skipped. This person’s not “a blesser.” Why would she bless me? We’ve known each other for years. Albeit, in a professional context, but why would she tell me to have a blessed week?! It’s not of her effing business what kind of day I have.

And then, the ocean of self-awareness began to wash over me and the tide was most decidedly coming in.

Why do I care? I really like this person and have liked her for years. She’s a lovely human whose whole job is to look out for other people. If she wants me to have a blessed week, I’m cool with it.

I mean, right?

Oh, but I most certainly was not. Turns out all kinds of nasty, messy detritus of insight was crashing in with the tide.

Every time I came up for air, it was impossible to escape the reality. Despite the person I mean to be, I spend most of my life sorting people into like and dislike, engage and ignore, like a reflex. It happens almost entirely beneath my awareness.

So, what’s my beef with being blessed?

Welp, my assumption about “blessers” is that they’re fundamentalist, sanctimonious sheep. Yep. It’s not pretty in here, but that’s what came up when I asked myself what it is about being instructed (because it’s not an invitation, it’s a command, dammit!) to feel blessed that gets my hackles up, but it didn’t stop there.

I’m smarter than that.

Blessing is for wishers and wishers give away their agency to some bearded guy in the sky.

I don’t need that kind of “help.”

Next thing you know she’s gonna tell me to give my shit up to god or some other inane ovine wisdom. I will not!

Somewhere, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were playing me back down to earth, riding the tiny elevator of my consciousness, one smooth trumpet note at a time.

Ok. So, if I had hair, this is where I would have taken a few deep breaths and run my fingers through it. Maybe splashed some cold water on my indignant mug and come back to myself. In fact, I did do that, without the water, and my fingers go more over my hair than through it, but you’re with me.

What’s probably true is that she hopes lots of people have blessed weeks, and even days and hours and lives, for all I know. It might even just be part of “who she is.”

I know. It was real embarrassing how hard that one hit.

I became pretty sure that my friend, the blesser, is not wasting her life doing some calculus every time she suggests that someone go forth with her kindness in tow. She’s not troubling herself wondering how the person will receive it.

Blink. Blink.

What if it’s simply a true expression of her deepest wish for me and everyone else toward whom she offers it.

Sitting with myself, watching the waves recede, I could feel the idea of wishing someone a blessed week creeping in as something I might actually do.

Man, this introspection shit is for the birds.

Aw, hell. I do hope you have a blessed week.

In 300,000 offshore miles, Kretschmer has survived waves as high as skyscrapers, certain in the moment that this was it. And yet, he sails again and again. With the ocean. He’s not for it or against it. He’s part of it and he knows that his best efforts will not change it. They may allow him to live another day but having all the safety equipment and radar and flares and all the rest doesn’t guarantee smooth seas.

He doesn’t expect it to.

Blair Braverman is an adventurer, writer and long-distance dog sledder who has completed the Iditarod and thrived in the crucible of the wilderness for more than two decades. Blair says, “Anything that happens to you in nature will not have been caused by malice…None of these things want to harm you the way people can want to harm you.” Storms. Animals. Freezing cold temperatures and howling wind. None of it is about you.

It just is. It doesn’t choose sides.

I think about this constantly, on the worst days.

As I find myself buffeted by rogue waves and in danger of being dragged under by riptides, accompanying friends both furry and human through serious illness, surgical complications and the inevitability of age-related decline, the wisdom of nature and of people who know it well buoys me. This truth that nature, and thereby, my existence, is not a series of rewards or punishments, but simply a flow of forces searching for equilibrium, makes deep breaths and spaciousness easier to come by. Mostly.

These forces dance around and through me as lab values fluctuate concerningly, as the test comes back negative, but the fever persists, as rush hour makes a 70-minute drive to the hospital a 2-hour odyssey. I am at sea, but humor is my box of flares. Napping, a life jacket. The ability to zoom out and shift perspective, an important trim of the sails. It’s not that these things prevent exhaustion. They simply ensure that there’s more than exhaustion.

We shuffle the cards and deal another hand as the gales howl above deck. “Are there no aces in this deck?! Who dealt this crap?!” And then I snap at the kind and lovely valet in front of the hospital.

And this is what it is to sail with the ocean. Not waiting for it to be over. Just another day at sea.

Not all of my fellow sailors are up for another day at sea. Honestly, I’m not always up for it either and that might be the hardest part.

One of my shipmates is anchored to the story of being “mad at” her body. I watch this person I love and admire shout at this ocean. We keep tapping her on the shoulder, reminding her it’s her turn to play in the card game, but she just yells, so we hold her and her anger. Pass.

It’s hard to fully believe that the shore isn’t where the real refuge is. Even so, I know that it’s only out here among the waves that we can all keep learning the truth of this.

I don’t pretend I’m not tempted to shout at the sea myself, but there is something beautiful about deciding to let the ship be lifted and lowered, rocked and rolled, as illness, infection, and mystery threaten this vessel. In the stead of shouting, I can notice. Heat radiates off the endless line of cars ahead of me, yielding an otherworldly shimmering sunset. My sweet, soft cat rubs against my leg and then falls into me, presenting her chin. That five minutes I take outside is better than anything I could “do.” Slowly, I begin to believe in the small, embodied awareness of choice and beauty, even down here in the hold or or up on deck bracing my collar against the spray.

Kretschmer says, “No sailor who has survived extreme weather spent a moment shouting at the ocean.” Sure, the shouting won’t stop the storm, but man it’s hard to let go of wishing it would.

“It goes over. It totally goes over. Who doesn’t know that?” Oh, toilet paper, you harbinger of civilized behavior.

In my recent research to support a three-part cultural humility series I’m facilitating for a community health clinic, I was looking for creative ways to invite the group to consider what it is about “others,” (defined as “anyone who is not this being I call ‘me’) that pushes our buttons and prevents us from truly seeing each other.

It won’t surprise you to learn that there are soooo many things written about how to trick ourselves into being something better than jerks. Perspective taking. This other thing called “generous attribution” where we assume, when other people behave like jerks, they have a real and understandable reason for their behavior. There’s also the “just like me” situation where you consider that, while a person’s behavior may feel questionable to you, you can see how they’re “just like you” in trying to get their needs met even if their methods are so deeply and obviously flawed.

My favorite, by far, however, is the “What rule of mine is this person breaking?” Wait. What? Why have I never wondered this aloud?

Oh, man! So. Many. Rules.

Capri pants? Nope. Make up your damned mind. Shorts or pants. Why you gotta be so noncommittal? Besides, I don’t need to see your ankles.

Black coffee? Why do you hate joy?

Tucking in the sheet at the end of the bed? Ah, I see you hate freedom and your toes.

You do NOT edit a recipe before you’ve made it as written. I mean, unless you’re a terrible person.

So, yeah. I got a lotta rules.

I bet you do, too.

And, I wonder, if you also allow them to let you dislike people you’ll never meet for reasons that make no sense. I bet you do. I know I do.

This is the thing about facilitating invitations for humans to get honest about how our brains very naturally work. The rules we make up about the world and about how people should behave in it are just one of the many flavors of cognitive shortcuts that make our experience as sentient beings efficient. But efficiency and connection are not…connected.

I spent just today. This one day. Noticing how often “others” irked me. I kept asking, “What rule of mine is this person breaking?” As often happens when we choose to notice something, it got real ugly. My love for my fellow humans did not grow nearly as much as my awareness of my prodigious list of rules. Rules of which I was largely unaware previously, but rules that have undoubtedly shaped and shrunken my life including potential and even current relationships.

Maybe this isn’t true for you, but I realized that I’m canceling people and situations all day long.

When I open my inbox. Are you serious?! They’re called commas, fercyinoutloud!

When I leave my apartment. Ugh. Everyone knows retractable leashes are dangerous.

When I wander through the grocery store. That’s not food you’re buying! Don’t you know that? Why do you hate your body?!

It’s painfully clear that nobody knows about my rules. I can’t believe that they would ignore them if they knew about them, so I assume they simply don’t know.

But how could they not know?!

Everyone knows that you don’t stand in front of the milk cooler with the door open, contemplating your life choices while someone right behind you just wants some Oatley. I mean, don’t they?!

I’m certain everyone also knows it’s cuckoo to swing left when you’re about to turn into a parking spot on the right. I mean, they must! Mustn’t they?

Alas, I think it’s time for a follow-up question. For my own peace of mind, really. Something like, “Why do you care?”

Does it honestly impact me so greatly when someone swings left to park right? Not so much.

How does my life change if someone has a tan from their mid-calf to their ankle? It doesn’t. I mean, except that I’ll make the friends they didn’t make because people thought they were a 1/4 -tan freak to be avoided, but that’s a win for me, so…moving on!

Every time I invite students to consider a question like, “What blocks your joy?,” without fail, they list so many things. And then, when we sit quietly for even a minute with those lists, every single person settles into the disappointing (and honestly, shocking) truth that, “It’s me.” I block my joy. I prevent myself from feeling fully and connecting with the world.

So, I’m gonna try breaking a few of my own rules.

The order I pretend they create is probably costing me more than I want to admit. Certainly, we’ll all benefit if I start with being less concerned with your open-toed boot situation and your “I’m a cat” eye makeup, because let’s be real, when it’s your rules that suck, I get to feel superior. And feeling superior is easy. I’m seriously amazing at it.

When the rules are mine and I can finally see them, it’s time to get curious about myself. And honestly? That’s so much worse.

And so much better.

“Winnie the Pooh is wise. He’s completely himself. He knows who he is. He doesn’t get upset about the drama in The Hundred Acre Wood. He’s just Pooh.” She pauses. “Allow yourself to breathe out.”

I mean, lying there on the mat, envisioning Pooh was, indeed, relaxing. I brought his round little self to mind in his little red t-shirt. I imagined him wandering about dreaming of the next time he would taste honey. I breathed out. I yog’d.

But then, because I’m me, in the days that followed, I began wondering how to be more like Pooh. I want to be this being who is so completely themselves that wisdom just wafts off of them as she suggested is Pooh’s lot. Interestingly, the more I reflected on what I know of Pooh, I wondered even more. Being like Pooh didn’t feel very engaged or action-oriented when I really got down to it, mapping his behavior and all that.

I don’t actually want to be Pooh, even if we substitute tacos for honey.

I’m not gonna lie. Pooh does have a kind of groundedness that the other characters lack. He’s most certainly not performing. He’s not anxious about what Rabbit thinks of him. He’s not trying to be more than he is. He’s not straining toward wisdom. He’s not straining toward anything. He just shows up. Usually hungry.

I mean, is contentment wisdom?

Let’s just say a sage and a golden retriever are unlikely to be mistaken for each other. Even so, I’m open to the possibility that being grounded may be just as rooted in self-knowledge as it is in a solid relationship with our appetites and zero social ambition.

The community that is The Hundred Acre Wood only works because everyone is fully, unabashedly themselves. Eeyore doesn’t pretend to be chipper. Tigger doesn’t pretend to be calm. Rabbit doesn’t pretend not to be a control freak. Eeyore isn’t a problem to solve.

Pooh’s authenticity, if we want to call it that, just happens to create the least friction.

Rabbit is possibly one of the most genuinely, painfully authentic characters in the Wood. He gets the least credit for it because he happens to be himself in a way that creates friction, for himself and everyone else.

Rabbit’s controlling behavior is fear wearing productivity and order clothing. He has no access to anything like wisdom or peace because he’s too busy managing everything around him to notice what’s happening inside him. If that’s not real, I’ll eat the ribbon off Eyore’s tail. The hard part is that Rabbit deploys who he is as armor rather than as a gift to the community. The difference between Rabbit-as-anxious-controller and Rabbit-as-his-best-self might just be trust. Imagine a Wood in which Rabbit is sometimes able to trust that everything won’t fall apart if he puts down the clipboard for an afternoon.

Here’s what I think. Recognizing your value in community, in the Wood, requires it to be legible to you. It also requires you to believe you belong in it. As you are.

And that’s when we come to dear Piglet. That’s his whole little pink journey.

Piglet is afraid. Frequently. Visibly. And he shows up anyway. He doesn’t have Pooh’s untroubled relationship with existence. He has to choose to participate despite the anxiety. Pooh doesn’t even perceive risk. There’s no need for courage because he hasn’t bothered to worry if things will work out. Piglet knows they won’t and he still shows up…as nervous, tremulous, loyal, loving Piglet.

And Piglet’s not the hero.

Nobody’s the hero.

We only need a hero if someone needs saving.

The Wood works because everyone keeps showing up as themselves, mess and all, and nobody tries to fix anyone else. Eeyore doesn’t need to become cheerful and nobody really asks him to. He needs to be included. Tigger’s gonna mess up the garden, because his aliveness demands it.

So, if you’re a Pooh? Do that shit. Be you and feel the love for and from everyone and everything.

For those of us who drew a different card, I think the question might be less “how do I become more like Pooh?” and more “what does it feel like to be fully, unashamedly the character I actually am?” That feels like a question that is available to all of us, regardless of how dramatic or invisible or bouncy or grey our particular brand of authenticity looks to the outside world.

We can’t Rabbit our way to Pooh-ness.

Pooh will never be Piglet.

And Tigger will always be wonderful.

Personally, I’m pretty sure we’d need some serious CRISPR-level gene editing for me to find my place in the Wood as Piglet and Pooh’s unholy lovechild. And I’m cool with that.

PHOTO CREDITS:

yoga class: Rendy Novantino- novantino

Yogi: Charanjeet Dhiman

Golden: Zach Schup- shuppy123

woods: Bryan White- crvscience

She laughed and assured me of what I already knew. Dogs are amazing.

We walked and began to leave the trail behind. The breeze playing in the aspens. Waves of air soughing like a wilderness ocean. Pine needles and fire scarred deadfall crunching under our boots. The air wound around us, redolent with pine, as we followed magpies, chickadees, and woodpeckers deeper into the woods. The specter of mountain lions hovered in the back of my mind.

We entered a clearing surrounded by ancient rocks and dotted with tiny spruce buds. The sun ducked behind the clouds as they sped across the sky. My guide stopped, Turned halfway to face me. “This is a good spot, yeah?” A good spot to be mauled by a mountain lion or to be found by a search dog, I wondered. I smiled and set down my pack in novice, affable agreement. My guide headed back to HQ to alert the search team and begin the exercise.

I closed my eyes and let the bird song and windy branches welcome me. “Subject 2 is in place. Over.”

I found a small rock, unclipped my pack and settled in. Waiting to be found.

The last time I went deep into the woods like this with no distinct plan was during an 8-day silent retreat in Muir Woods almost 20 years ago. Despite the magic of being visited early in the day by a pair of orange rufous hummingbirds who hovered and thrummed over my chest as I lay on the forest floor, that day remains one of the longest, loneliest, coldest days of my life. Even now with 20 years of loss and life and love within me it stands out with a haunting, hollow ache.

At that time, as I shrank and gnashed and wailed among the redwoods, I had no idea how to be with myself. I trusted neither nature nor my own nature. The desolation of no escape was crushing. I was witness to a profound death that day. The death of a part that didn’t serve me, but still…a death is a death.

But when I sat among the aspens in my new home in the Rockies, perched comfortably on a wee rock, listening to the wind in the treetops, a deep, trustworthy joy arose in my heart. A smile crept across my lips. What a gift it was to have this time with myself and with the woods. I won’t lie, the knowledge that my time in the woods would end with a visit from a dog would certainly have softened any idea of desolation that might have threatened to creep in, but my joy was unmistakably in and for that moment. It was untethered from the anticipation of being found. It was a joy nourished by enjoying my very own company.

The desolation that invaded my awareness back in Muir Woods had been a heartfelt invitation to become familiar with the darkest places and the lightest inside myself. Little by little, over these last 20 years, I have removed so much armor. I have loosened the hasps and allowed space for repair, for healing, for surrender to the scars.

There have been so many deaths along this path. Deaths that have become a steady reminder that loss is not always losing. It’s possible that I am finally living in Rumi’s guest house, welcoming the possibility that each perceived loss is just clearing me out for new delights.

Twenty years ago, I tried everything. Everything but coming closer to myself. I stood. I sat. I laid flat on the ground. I waited for the sun to peek through the trees and when it did, it never ever warmed me. I would see it and lean toward it and when it would hit my face, my arm, my leg, it was not warm.

I tried to sleep. I paced. I drank water. I hummed. I did all of this to escape, to busy, to protect. There was no escape from myself. Even without a watch, I could feel the clock rolling backwards with each moment. Each minute dragging on with torturous sloth.

Over the last 20 years, I have crouched, then kneeled, and then stood naked in front of the dragon as it breathed its hateful fire. And I would give none of it back.

I won’t pretend I can no longer be seduced by the familiar stories of my unworthiness, but they are much more tedious and uncompelling than they once were.

I know the birds. The woodpeckers are laughing with me, not at me. I hug the trees without self-consciousness. The ground holds me in a way I couldn’t allow 20 years ago.

The sun began to peek through after a few hours in the spot that had been chosen for me by my Mountain Rescue guide hours before, so I laid on my back and let the sun warm me. And it did. Hat over my eyes, my belly rose and fell with the miracle of breath. I was home. I am home.

The dog did find me. And that was hardly the best part of the day.

If we created a pie chart of my brain, the biggest wedge would be labeled ‘stuff about gender,’ bleeding at its edges into ‘who is my child and how can I help them know themselves?’

My child, who was assigned male at birth and is currently 15 years old, has been trying on some gender flexibility. A lot of kids are doing this, particularly in more urban and suburban communities, and I’m noticing something.

As I watch her speak with a voice made increasingly deep by uninterrupted puberty, I wonder. As I see them move the way a 15-year-old boy moves and behave in ways that, to me, seem very “dude-like,” I wonder. What is inspiring them to claim a trans identity and to use they/them and she/her pronouns? What is it about using eyeliner that feels aligned to her right now?

The gorgeous being that is my child has been and continues to be raised by 5 people:

• my kid’s mom (androgynous) and her (cis-gendered, female) partner

• me (transmasculine/non-binary) and my partner (cis-gendered, female)

• my kid’s mom’s mom or “grandma” (androgynous)

…you still with me?

This constellation has undoubtedly shown them that women are smart, strong, flawed, funny, and all the things that a person of any sex or gender might aspire to be. And even though they have many quite beautiful (inside and out) cis-male role models and family members, what I suspect they have (reasonably) absorbed from this moment in cultural life is that it might actually be easier to hide behind transness than to try to be a “good man.”

People who have not lived in such a skin may wonder, particularly in this moment, “How is being trans a good way to hide? Seems like a great way to be targeted.”

It’s not so much about hiding from the world, although that’s also part of it. I wonder if it’s about hiding from themselves. If she declares herself “trans,” she doesn’t have to do the work of figuring out how to be a good male-assigned person in a world where it looks like lots and lots of men are just shouting, harming, bombing, marginalizing and all the rest. They can simply be “other.”

In the 80’s, when I began the lifelong journey of figuring all this human business out for myself, I was not exactly dressing for success and that included a lot of hairspray. Many of my friends wore their hair long and over their faces, donning sloppily tied or untied combat boots or any of several other fashion choices that I now know were a type of armor.

I’m certain our parents worried about us, too.

When I ask my kid about wearing eye makeup or presenting in other traditionally “female” ways, they say, “When I wear this I feel like myself.”

I wonder. Can you know, when you’re 15, the difference between feeling something like safe or insulated and feeling “like yourself?” I know I couldn’t have and really, really didn’t, but that doesn’t mean my kid can’t. Maybe?

I also have to hold myself accountable in another way. I wonder how much of all this is about my own default, Gen X gender conditioning? Because, let’s be clear, they do not seem concerned about “all of this gender stuff.” They’re not being bullied. They’re respected and supported by their teachers. They have good friends and outside interests. When I say “this,” I’m referring to my own obsession with my kid’s lack of interest in my desire for them to adhere to gender norms.

I have to walk my talk. Openness to her experience must include contradictions. When I say to myself, “I’m struggling to use she/her pronouns because she acts so much like a dude,” I recognize myself as an obstacle to fully accompanying them on this journey. I miss out and so does she. Right now, it’s like I’m kicking up a growing cloud of dust as I chase myself around this tree and she’s sitting in a camp chair, feet kicked up, tossing popcorn in the air and catching it in her open mouth.

Even though my kid says they’re exploring—Well, and let’s back up. That is NOT what she says. That’s what I say. They’re just getting up every day and lifing. “Exploring” is what I have decided is happening. No matter who’s saying it, “exploring” doesn’t feel quite accurate.

They have chosen an image and presentation and that’s been the thing, for a couple of years now. But, because I’m this guy, what I want so deeply to know is this: is that presentation a reflection of the truth of my child’s luminous, deathless, wise self?…or is it simply too scary or daunting to make a change now?…this week?…today? We all know this one. We’ve staked our claim. We’re on a path, dammit! We’ve climbed the hill and we’re prepared to die on it. They have told us and continue to show us that THIS is who they are. Any change of course feels like more work than most 15 years olds want to take on.

I want to know: Are they going to be there for it when that still, small voice inside them suggests something else might be in greater alignment with their soul’s longing?

And what if, like all of us, their soul’s deepest, most desperate wish is to belong to the world around them? If that’s the inspiration and she’s finding that presenting as she does is delivering that connection in real ways, I don’t know many people who would want to risk losing that, particularly without having experienced the lightness of honestly going your own way and finding a kind of belonging inside yourself that trumps any kind of outer belonging.

When I think of it like that, this feels like another moment when the best parenting advice I could offer myself is to do my own work and stay out of her effing way. And if it turns out she’s wiser than me and I’m wrong about all of this? I can spend this time making room for that inside myself.

In the early years, they called me “Little Mama.” Their other parent was, well- “Other Mama,” thankfully. I don’t know many women in their late thirties who would relish being called Big Mama, even by their own child as a term of endearment.

I’m not entirely sure when the shift happened, but my now fifteen-year-old has been calling me Dad for quite a few years. When it happened, I was delighted by the upgrade, though I noticed my internal discomfort when they used it in public. Despite my best efforts, there are things about me that generally lead most people to clock me as female, or at least “not male.” I was certain someone would hear my fairly feminine-presenting child call me Dad, do a quick bit of anatomical math, and one or both of us would be assaulted on the spot.

That has not happened.

Instead, what has happened is that I’ve grown more comfortable being my kid’s dad, inside and out. In my personal experience, dads are pretty great. They’re the people who help you fix things, make pancakes, tell stupid jokes that leave you both just shy of pissing yourselves, and ask questions about what you’re about to do that make you think twice before doing it anyway.

My kid’s life is a small but fascinating laboratory for the future of gender.

Most of their close friends are cisgender boys who refer to my kid, with mind-numbing ease, using the female pronouns they have adopted. Then they all get online and play Helldivers 2, shouting at each other and inventing the kind of ridiculous insults that only emerge when you’re blowing up robots in defense of intergalactic democracy.

My kid’s screen name is “John Helldiver,” which breaks my gender-bending brain a little every time I think about the eyeliner they put on that morning and the midriff top they’ll happily wear when it’s twenty-eight degrees outside.

Watching my kid and the boys they spend time with has me wondering about something I keep reading and hearing.

Boys are in trouble right now.

Not in the shrill culture-war sense you hear on cable news, but in the quieter, data-supported sense. Boys are, in fact, falling behind in school. They are lonelier than they used to be, and they are less likely to attend or complete college. They are also overrepresented in certain kinds of violence and die by suicide at significantly higher rates than females or girls.

These are real problems that deserve real attention and, like so many issues that face us today, we keep reaching for the same hammer that bent the nail in the first place.

I read a lot of what Richard Reeves writes about this subject. He raises important points about what’s happening with boys and young men in the United States and is careful to note that helping boys doesn’t require abandoning the work of advancing women and girls. This shouldn’t get him points since it’s just science and reality, but thank you, sir. It’s not pie. Never has been. Never will be.

In the past few years, a growing chorus of writers, podcasters, and politicians has begun describing this moment as a “crisis.”

Meanwhile, my kid has found an oasis in a miasma of hate-driven and fear-fueled nonsense, but for lots of boys and maybe even for my own kid in ways I don’t see (and that we’ll explore in a more complicated blog soon), it’s not amazing being male in this moment.

Sadly, the solution I keep hearing is that boys simply need more men to teach them how to be men.

Men raising boys to be men is exactly what got us here. And, to be fair, Reeves doesn’t suggest that men double down on traditional ‘manliness,’ but he does suggest that men, and mostly men, are the best people to help young men and boys out of this space.

For generations boys were handed a script about being strong and stoic. They were told and taught to be providers, protectors. Men don’t cry and men don’t have needs. That script has created a world where men harm women and themselves. A lot.

We don’t live in that world anymore.

And yet boys are still being handed the old script.

“Man up.”
“Don’t be a girl.”

The problem isn’t that boys lack men.

The problem is that we’re still clinging to a painfully narrow definition of what a man is.

Personally, I don’t remember being sat down and taught how to “be a woman.” No one handed me a sacred scroll labeled The Duties of Uterus-Holders.

I have been shaped by people.

My dad and my uncle (both cis-gendered men, as it turns out) taught me tenderness. They modeled emotional presence and care in ways that had nothing to do with anatomy.

Women coaches and teachers taught me toughness. They demanded discipline. They showed me how to push through fear.

And my mom taught me to feel the gutting intensity of Priscilla Lopez’s rendition of “What I Did for Love” deep in my bones before I understood what either love or loss really meant.

That kind of transmission has no gender.

To my knowledge, no particular configuration of genitals was required to transmit any of those essential learnings.

So when I hear that boys need men to teach them how to be men, I can’t help but wonder what exactly is being conveyed that is so biologically exclusive.

Show me the study that located empathy and humility in the vas deferens.

Male suicide rates are not a branding issue. They are a human emergency, and perhaps the clearest proof we have that emotional suppression is not a sustainable coping strategy.

Boys have been quietly and not-so-quietly promised status for generations. Not necessarily happiness or wealth, but position, generally above women, in the social hierarchy.

That promise is eroding and equity can feel like loss if you were raised expecting dominance, even if that expectation was never spoken aloud.

Many boys today are not just confused about masculinity. They are navigating the disappearance of an inherited advantage while standing in the middle of a culture that hasn’t yet figured out what replaces it.

The old model is cracking.

The new one is still under construction.

Boys are growing up in the scaffolding.

They need adults who apologize when they’re wrong, who know how to repair conflict, how to feel anger without becoming violent, and how to show that strength and tenderness can and should coexist. That’s not anatomy. That’s humanity.

Some of those adults will be men. Some will not.

Boys are not in trouble because they lack men.

They are in trouble because we have confused masculinity with a narrow performance.

Ambiguity is hard. And we are living through an era of profound ambiguity.

In the gap between an old script that no longer works and a new one that hasn’t fully emerged there is space.

Space for boys to become men who are not defined by stoicism.
Space for fathers to model vulnerability without humiliation.
Space for strength that isn’t domination.
Space for tenderness that is empowering.

I see glimpses of that future in my living room.

My kid and their friends, most of them cisgender boys, log onto their consoles and shout at each other while blowing up robots for democracy. My kid, who was assigned male at birth is called “she” without hesitation by their friend. They talk and joke, and laugh until someone has to mute their microphone because they can’t breathe.

To them, this strange, flexible world of gender isn’t a theoretical debate.

It’s just life.

They are figuring it out in real time, without the rigid scripts their grandfathers inherited and without the certainty their fathers were promised.

Maybe that uncertainty is exactly what we’re supposed to give them.

Not a thicker mask.

Not a new costume.

Just more room to be human.

These days, my kid calls me Dad. I love it. And I love them.

The ability to be a complicated, loving, strong, tender, connected person has never depended on what’s in your pants.

Teaching boys the truth of that is work that belongs to all of us.

It’s easy to let the abstraction of “legislation” soften the very concrete harm that will be greenlighted by the passing of such a bill. What this means in practice is worth a little unfurling.

A birth certificate is not a philosophical document. It’s social and tangible proof of existence, of social legitimacy. You need it to get a driver’s license, a passport, a job, housing, healthcare. When the state decides that legal documents must forever reflect a fiction they are not making a bureaucratic footnote. They are making specific lives measurably harder and, in many cases, genuinely dangerous. People who have swum upstream for decades to finally have their official documents reflect who they are will be outed against their will. People will lose jobs. People will be turned away from shelters.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s Tuesday in America.

The flag ban should honestly be embarrassing to Oklahoma legislators. I know it’s not, but still…the sheer volume of clutched pearls would make an oyster blush. Woe is me! The pride flag! That terrifying rectangle of color will most assuredly topple the walls of government buildings across the Sooner state which would clearly sooner marginalize a tiny sliver of its citizenry than get back to the real issues facing its citizens, like ranking 50^th in the nation on education or being one of the most impoverished and unhealthy states. (SPOILER ALERT: These realities have less than nothing to do with trans people.)

I’d laugh if the message underneath it weren’t so clear, or actually, maybe that’s precisely why we should laugh: Your joy is a provocation. Your visibility makes us feel feels.

I know I’m supposed to be devastated. And honestly, parts of me are. The particular exhaustion of watching people in positions of power squander hours of time and countless calories trying to make me and so many people I love less real is well…exhausting. It’s supposed to be. Obviously.

But the truth that lives right next to the wound is that this whole effort is deeply delusional.

There has never been…not once, not anywhere…a world without trans people.

Every civilization. Every era. Every corner of the human map has produced people who could not and would not be compressed into the gender box their culture deemed appropriate and least likely to upset their fellow citizens. Trans people predate Oklahoma. (In fact, if you’re curious, check out some trans milestones that happened in Oklahoma!) Trans people predate the United States. We predate the concept of a birth certificate by several thousand years. Cultures across history didn’t just tolerate gender variance, some of them revered it, built cosmologies around it, named it sacred.

Oklahoma cannot legislate away a fact of human experience. They can make our lives harder, and they are absolutely doing that, and it is not abstract. People will be hurt and are already being hurt. But you cannot make us not exist. Ever.

My favorite part is the way that all of this effort and “legislating” is an uniwtting testament to the impact of the trans community. You don’t mobilize an entire legislative session to eradicate something that’s irrelevant. You don’t draft bills, hold floor votes, issue breathless press releases about things that pose no real threat. The scramble to protect their fragile worldview is a tribute. The sheer legislative energy required to try to push us back into invisibility is, in its own unhinged way, a testament to how thoroughly, undeniably present we are and, sadly, to how frightened so many people are of nuance, authenticity and joy.

They have come for us before. With legislation, with violence, with erasure written into law and culture and medicine and religion. We are still here. We remain, not despite that history, but shaped by it, strengthened by it, carrying the names of everyone who came before us who survived it and left a lineage of perseverance, forbearance, and fabulousness.

So yes. It cuts, but seriously Oklahoma?...you’re tilting at windmills. And this windmill is calling your bluff.

We are not going anywhere. We were never going anywhere. And every bill you pass to prove otherwise just adds another line to the very long record of people who have tried this and failed.

When the dust settles, trans people will still be here. Raising beautiful families. Teaching your kids about compassion and love. Working across the aisle for fair, community-minded legislation and drinking milkshakes at Culvers, cuz that’s the kind of subversive shit we’ve been up to forever.

I went over and over it so it wouldn’t be identifiable (even though the lawyer I worked with said it’s all public record), but it’s not really about the case as much as it’s about my experience within it.

I hope you…enjoy?…it.

Another Jane Pratt Thing

It Happened To Me: I Was An Expert Witness And Became Convinced The "Rapist" Was A Victim

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6 months ago · 3 likes · 3 comments

There was nothing performative about it. She wasn’t “doing” the brightness that asks you to notice it. This was quieter. It was a sort of luminosity, which is a word I don’t use lightly. She has spent decades working in the world of spirit and energy and intuition. This is a realm that those of us who move between worlds sometimes call, with equal parts affection and defensiveness, “woo.” And yet I experienced her as one of the most grounded, embodied, pragmatically alive humans I have encountered in a long time.

We talked. We exchanged information. We recognized a fellow-traveler-ness. There were obvious work-related things that would logically bring us together, but it was more than that.

We parted ways with a clear commitment to meet up on the Zooms machine very soon.

I was looking forward to learning more about her and to simply sharing more time together. Our screens fired up and we talked about an upcoming opportunity she was pursuing in a more mainstream environment than the ones she had been inhabiting for so many years. As she shared about the steps she was undertaking in preparation for this new opportunity, she mentioned that she was thinking about how to “go dark” in terms of her previous, intuition-forward, energy-fluent internet presence. She understood, without paranoia, that many people in her new sphere would question her ability to be practical, effective, scientific if they knew she was so in touch with the ineffable, the mysterious.

What struck me was not that she planned to go dark, but the way she said it. She wasn’t asking if she should and it was clear she was not coming from shame or an intent to disappear. This going dark was a deliberate, strategic dimming of the parts of her public presence that are rooted in spirit and intuition as preparation for moving into a new, more mainstream role. Her marketing person was “already on it.” She spoke about it the way you’d speak about packing for a different climate. Considered. Intentional. Unbothered.

As I listened, a feeling crept in for which I didn’t immediately have a name.

It took me a few days to find the word. Which, ya know, was fine. I’m used to being vaguely and gently confused by my own inner sitch.

As I sat with it though, a word did come to me. Relief.

I work at the intersection of mainstream healthcare and massage therapy, which sounds straightforward until you’re actually standing there, one foot in each world, watching each one look at the other with barely concealed suspicion. I spend real energy managing my own visibility. I wonder, moment-to-moment, how much of my full self to bring into a room, which parts of what I believe to lead with, which parts to leave in the car so the conversation can even begin. It is a daily negotiation. If I’m being truthful, it is its own kind of daily going dark.

The healthcare machine is real. It’s huge and hungry and it has a particular appetite for the people inside it who might otherwise challenge it. It does not announce this. It doesn’t need to. It just makes certain things progressively more difficult, more marginalizing, more costly, until the path of least resistance is to become smaller, quieter, more legible, more palatable to the system that is digesting you.

Those of us who work to stay whole inside this machine, doing the work of challenging and changing harmful systems without being consumed by them, know this negotiation intimately. We know the particular fatigue of it. We know the way it can make you question whether you are making strategic choices or just slowly disappearing.

Meeting someone who seemed to move between worlds with wholeness intact, was a relief. A genuine, uncomplicated, involuntary relief. It is possible. It can be done.

And then I felt suspicious of the relief.

I began to interrogate it. Was my connection to this person about their wholeness, their luminosity and genuine embodied wisdom, or was it about what their existence gave me permission to feel? Did I love their ability to go dark and walk into a mainstream room because it meant something real about human complexity and integrity? Or because it made my own concessions feel more okay?

I’m not sure I know.

What I do know is that she appeared to be experiencing this choice with an uncommon clarity. There was no shrinking. No hiding. She was choosing, with full awareness, which facets of her complexity to foreground in a new context. That’s different than erasure. I know the difference, or I think I do, though I notice I have to keep reminding myself of it.

The question for those of us doing the slow, unglamorous, repetitive work of staying in integrity while making necessary concessions to systems we are simultaneously trying to change is not whether we go dark sometimes. We do. We will. I think we must. The question is whether we know we’re doing it, and whether we can find our way back to the light we dimmed when the moment calls for it.

He is facing the fence, hands together against his heart, in front of my friends’ house.

I know this because the police placed a hidden camera there a few days ago after my friends’ rainbow flag was forcibly torn from said fence and then a replacement flag was burned.

Where my friends live and through the lens of the police force where they live, this forcible flag destruction and removal is unquestionably a hate crime. They are investigating. This destruction of private property is a violation.

I am mesmerized by the video. What an odd feeling to be surveilled by prayer. A hollow rage rises inside me with no place to go. Even so, it’s possible the uninvited intimacy of the praying is worse. I mean, I don’t love the flag tearing, but at least that person isn’t pretending they’re doing my friends any favors.

I’m wrestling with what I wish was a clearer difference between harm that looks like hatred and harm that looks like love. When I’m the target, they both feel violent.

It’s so complicated inside me.

The flag-cutting and the praying are two points on the same spectrum. It’s even hard to know if the man praying is also the perpetrator of the flag destruction or if he’s someone who has simply seen and internally sighed with relief at its removal and the damage that’s been done to it. In his heart, perhaps he is the second wave of my friends’ redemption. Some unnamed stranger removed the flag and now my friends are free to be saved.

In my journey as a massage therapist, I was introduced to the idea that we can’t love our pain to make it go away. When we rub that painful shoulder because we want it to shush, that’s different than saying, “I hear you. I know you’re hurting.” That’s hard to manage as an organism that is primed to feel deeply on both a somatic and emotional level. We all want to make it stop, don’t we? And we’re so certain of our pain, but when we love our pain to make it go away, it isn’t fooled.

We all know when we’re being placated.

This man praying at my friends’ fence believes he is loving them. He assumes my friends are in pain and he is in pain because they exist. He believes that his love, god’s love, can heal them, save them, release them from what he is certain is their deep sin.

As I watch, this man’s “love” feels like that familiar and hard lump in the throat and heart we call tolerance. And it’s dressed up as faith. As caring.

I have heard Christians suggest that we all should live in god’s image.

Does god indulge in small-minded, tiny-hearted things like spite, hate, and punishment? I think the level at which you engage truthfully with these questions influences how willing you might be to tear a flag off a stranger’s fence or to stand in front of their fence and pray for them, doesn’t it?

I sit with this and I wonder.

What’s mine to do and to feel in a world where so many of us simply want to feel safe and seen? What I know in my heart is that this is the same world in which my friends and I spend ourselves (you read that correctly) every day, every step, every breath declaring our value and worth.

If you want to pray, pray for that, my friend. Pray for that.

Then there’s sympathetic just “below” that. Sympathetic gets a bad rap, if you ask me. Sympathetic, simply put, is when I’m aware. Prepared. Ready for action. Personally, I find myself shifting from ventral to sympathetic when someone says, “I mean, tacos are fine. I guess.” Who is this person? Are they in charge of anything I care about?!

I’m concerned and may need to take action.

I can also find myself in sympathetic when, from my spot on the couch, I hear plans being made in the other room to buy tickets to the Madeline Kahn-a-Thon at the art house theatre. I’ve stopped petting the cat. I’m on high alert. How do I get myself invited to this situation?

I’m excited and may need to take action.

Then there’s dorsal, the “bottom” of the ladder. Dorsal is rough. I slip into dorsal when I hit what feels like a professional dead end, like when the Director of Medical Education at a big hospital system recently emailed me and said, “We’re really impressed with the work you’re doing, but we don’t have a way to incorporate massage therapists here. Good luck.” It’s the “why am I alive? Why do I do anything I do?” feeling. Nothing is working. It’s all futile. All of it. Even tacos.

But I’m not sure I experience any of it exactly as this sort of sinking down or climbing up a ladder. It’s a feeling of being more or less tethered to what’s important, to my true nature.

When I slip into dorsal, it’s a bit of an agoraphobic, vertiginous situation where I could fall, I could fly away, I could deflate. Who knows? All I know is whatever happens, I will not be the boss of it.

When I’m in ventral, I’m floating, but not floating away. I can feel the wind lift me and settle me down and the whole experience belongs.

Which leads me to my point, because I do have one.

Enter the Putz (and the Parade Float)

Mark Zuckerberg sucks, right? I mean, I think we know this. Recently, he cited a “statistic” about how the average American has “three people that they would consider friends.” As his face continued to make sounds, this also fell out, “the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s, like, 15.” A rigorous social scientist, indeed, our Mr. Zuckerberg.

He’s a putz, but let’s say this thing about 15 people is rooted somewhat in reality. For me, it’s more like I need at least 15 people to hold my parade float.

It’s complicated though.

The most famous floats, your Snoopys, your Spider-Mans, your Mickey Mouses…require hundreds of handlers. I’m more like the Happy Hippo, who needs just 20 or so handlers.

It turns out—and let’s not unpack this just now, but-- this is not the only thing we have in common. Like all the Macy’s balloons, the Happy Hippo and I were also created in New Jersey.

Ahem.

How to Fly a Hippo (And Other Essential Knowledge)

In the parade, every balloon has strategically placed ropes, called bones, that help the handlers to manage each balloon’s orientation, height, ability to weather gusts and other unexpected events. (And because I know you’ll love this as much as I do, the handles?...at the end of the ropes?...they’re called dog bones.)

There’s a captain (The captain gets a whistle, so that’s pretty cool. I’d like to have a whistle.) who gets orders from the front pilot at the head of the balloon, who gets directions from the lead pilot who walks backward about a block ahead of the group.

So, there’s the balloon and then there’s no less than three people directly and specifically guiding it, seeing around corners, working together in the best interests of the balloon.

There are also some co-pilots and co-captains, but the rest of the people really don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re kind of along for the ride trying not to get hurt or be noticed.

Thing is, you don’t switch captains or pilots mid-parade. The ones you had when you began your journey at the bronze plaque on west 77th are the ones you’ll have when you park yourself in front of Macy’s on 34th Street 3 hours later.

That’s a long walk. Buffeted by the wind. Doing your damnedest not to smack into the side of a skyscraper or the Nuts 4 Nuts wagon. Up. Down. Tilt. Roll. Reeled in and let out again by the hold other people and other forces have on you.

My Current Handler Situation

When my son doesn’t respond to my text messages, the ground is suddenly disappearing from sight. My son is 15! What are they doing holding a rope to a 20-foot balloon on a windy day?

When I get word that my textbook proposal was accepted and they want me, I settle back toward equilibrium. Thanks for that tug…strangers at the publishing company.

Oh’p!...I just heard my dad pass the phone to my mom and say, “It’s Cal. She’s talking about…”….up, up I go, losing myself, then sinking and tilting, out of control. How the hell are they still holding that rope?! Where’s the manager?

As I await a reply to that email to a major donor, I float further away, swirling eddies gather, the ground rushes toward me with sickening speed and then falls away just as wildly. This means everything! Wait. It does? You! Leave it! Drop it!

My spouse steals behind me, presses her hands to my chest, kisses my head. I’m back, ropes taught, but with give. You. You hang on to that rope. Stay.

I think it’s time for a staffing shake-up.

The Dream Team (And the Balloonicle)

If I could go back to the beginning of the parade route and handpick my 15 handlers now? Today? I can easily think of 3 people to captain and pilot this nutball hippo and 15 others to whom I would be honored to pass one of my dog bones. People who see me and who don’t just pull because a wind is coming or because it feels too loose or too tight on their own hand, but who shout up to let me know what they see and who stand ready to pull or to let some rope out as I rise and fall and float and balance.

Of course, my real plan is to aim higher than whistle privileges and one day be my own balloon pilot.

One day, I’ll drive a balloonicle!

You should seriously come to that parade. Even if you don’t, it won’t matter. My self-powered hippo will be tearing up the joint. Or maybe it’ll be a sea star, a salamander, or some other metamorphosing beauty traveling along at its own pace. Look ma! No bones.

I’ve always been drawn to darkness. At 13, I asked for Gilda Radner’s “It’s Always Something“—a book about cancer, about dying too young. Somehow Sweet Valley High wasn’t scratching the itch. While my peers were deeply invested in whether Jessica or Elizabeth would win the big cheerleading competition, I was over here like, ‘But what about the void?’

Heart of Darkness. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These were and still are some of my favorites. I devour stories about people imprisoned, stranded, in extreme and suddenly life-altering circumstances. Trapped in ice pack in the Antarctic in 1915? Bring it. Manning the first submarine (which has already sunk three other times) on a torpedo mission with 7 of my besties by cranking something like a hand bike? I’m so in. I want to know everything, Simon Weisenthal. These are the places where humans are stripped down to something raw and true. These stories remind me of the tenuousness of every single thing.

This kind of darkness is where delusions fall apart and unvarnished reality emerges. This darkness leaves me curious and tender.

The Sucker’s Bet

Most of us live on one side of this gauzy barrier we maintain between ourselves and certain truths. We tell ourselves that suffering happens to them. That violence and cruelty are perpetrated by people who are fundamentally possessed of some evil we could never access. We believe that we’re safe, that the life we’ve built will continue more or less as planned, even in spite of how untrue that presumption has been for so many others.

This veil is comfortable. It lets us plan for retirement, stress about trivial things, build elaborate futures in our minds. But then a diagnosis, a death that “shouldn’t have happened,” a personal rock bottom, a pandemic—and the veil lifts. Suddenly we see what was always there: the shimmering, terrifying, gorgeous truth that we are mortal, vulnerable, capable of both profound connection and profound harm. The truth that everything and everyone we hold dear is temporary.

Then, just as quickly, we revert to the cold, but familiar comfort of routine arguing about whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher, as if the dishwasher will always be there. As if we will. But some of us have seen behind this veil, and we don’t want to forget.

Why I Keep Looking

When I was 16, I found myself hospitalized for suicidal ideation while most of my high school colleagues were doing what high school kids do in a resort-adjacent South Carolina beach town. Man, why couldn’t I have just gotten high and passed out on Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill?!

Depression had been with me for years, but in a “bootstraps” kinda family that didn’t do therapy, I just kept getting good grades, playing soccer and doing what I now know was overfunctioning. What I didn’t know then was that I was already living a kind of double life, already feeling the wrongness of a body and identity that didn’t fit, though I wouldn’t have words for being gay for many years and it would even longer before I would live into my expansive gender identity.

I remember scratching my name into the concrete ceiling above my bunk that first night at the treatment center. I wanted someone to know I’d been there. I wanted to believe I mattered despite knowing, in a cosmic and matter-of-fact sense, that I didn’t. Writing my name on the ceiling was a manifestation of the optimism that has supported me all my life.

Just a few days after being admitted, I was standing in line for breakfast. I had never had Life cereal before, but it had become something I looked forward to. I said to no one in particular, “Man, I love Life,” as I filled my bowl to the top. The girl behind me glibly offered, “You’ll get sick of it.” We both laughed. Nothing bonds you quite like gallows humor at 7 AM over a bowl of off-brand cereal in the psych ward.

But that time, those weeks, were my first real trip behind the veil. My desire to know the darkness and to find the place where acknowledging it gave life to its opposite strengthened.

I started to see a therapist.

This brilliant, kind man listened and nodded when I told him about how I was haunted by thoughts of the inescapability of death. He laughed with me at the immutability of it all. He told me I was ok. And I believed him. He was not afraid of the dark and he showed me that a person could be that way. I still felt a deep, yet amorphous sort of homesickness for a few years, but I knew that nothing about me was wrong, including my thoughts. That therapist was a fiercely tender human. I wanted to be like that.

In my work as a massage therapist, years later, I sat at the bedside of a dying stranger who talked about regret, pain, and his favorite harmonica song. This was the home for which I had longed. Behind the veil with a person who maybe was there for the first time, but who knew it was unlikely to shield them again. We were there together in that truth.

The Collapse of Assumptions

In the academics of grief there is a concept called the “assumptive world.” I’m paraphrasing, but it’s essentially a nod to the truth that people assume things about the world. We assume it’s a just place or that it’s benevolent or safe. We build our lives on these assumptions. These deeply held assumptions defy our more superficial sense of the world. In this moment on the planet earth, I suspect many of us would say there’s nothing fair or benevolent about the world. And yet, somewhere deeper than those reflexive, defensive postures, we do still believe that we’ll have tomorrow, that most people are fundamentally good and that means those people will not harm us. We believe that we are those fundamentally good people. We expect that our bodies will cooperate, our loved ones will stay, our plans will unfold as imagined.

These assumptions are necessary to function. They serve an important purpose in our ability to keep moving, to keep coming back to relationship and to a sense of the future. But they’re also a socially sanctioned, collective delusion. And it makes us angry when the delusion is exposed for what it is, because it feels personal and unlike what we believe we deserve.

Each year, since 2020, I have facilitated a 12-month online course called “A Year to Live.”. Three years ago, we started inviting people from a cancer support organization to register if they were interested. At first, the organization asked me to change the name of the course. “A Year to Live is too confronting,” they said.

I said no.

Too confronting? For people actively confronting their mortality on a daily basis? I had to admire the commitment to denial. Very on-brand for the cancer support world and, honestly, for our species.

The course is now full of people living with cancer and it’s gorgeous.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: The women with cancer show up with a capital “S.” They want to talk about all of it, and they do. They’re not pretending. They’re not centering others’ comfort. They’re behind the veil, and they willingly hold it up for the others to peek in. They seem to know that we all spend time in the “kingdom of the well” and “the kingdom of the sick” and that it’s a mere twist of fate that finds any of us in either at any given moment.

But the people without cancer? Some have shared with me that they don’t want to say much in class. “Well, I don’t have cancer. I have no right to be unhappy about anything.” We love the Suffering Olympics, don’t we? “Welp. Sorry, Janet, your existential dread doesn’t count unless chemo has taken your hair at least twice. Next!” Trivializing what’s on our own hearts and minds allows us to get real…later. When it’s “serious.” Luckily, there’s no suffering threshold you have to meet before you’re allowed to acknowledge that you, too, are going to die someday.

These non-cancer-having participants peek politely under the veil but they don’t want to put their feet in there and get it dirty. They say it’s about respect, about not wanting to burden people who have “real problems.” I think it’s also that they’re not quite ready to give up the delusion. If they see just how much they are like those women whose active disease makes it harder to pretend, then what? I say why wait to let that make you tender?

The Freedom of Darkness

I say I’m optimistic, but maybe curious is a better description. I don’t believe that “things will work out.” I just wonder and want to know what will happen, what could happen. But I always think there’s a reason to try, to ask, to understand, or at least I know I’d rather die showing up and trying.

At the end of Heart of Darkness, Kurtz dies a victim of his own delusion, crying ‘The horror!’ Frankenstein’s innocent, docile creation becomes a monster when he learns violence from the violent world and is destined to perpetuate that cycle and Henry Jekyll is utterly defeated when he can’t separate good from evil. In the end, he’s both and always was.

These stories are invitations to honesty and surrender that are especially tragic because their protagonists did not wake up until they were wasted. They declined the invitation to stop pretending humans are one thing or the other, that if we do this, then that will happen. That there is order to the world that will keep us safe.

The more I embrace an open-eyed awareness of my simultaneous capacity for cruelty, suffering, love and connection, the more tender I become: the more I love the world. The more vivid it all is. My sweet is sweeter, my bitter more tart.

I love the freedom of the darkness. That space on the other side of the veil keeps me honest. I’ve found something like home there and it’s pretty great. The people are more alive and more fun, and honestly? The snacks are better. Nobody’s pretending to like celery behind the veil.

And sometimes 16 months does actually represent a key difference in formative experiences. So when this age gap recently became the fulcrum of an argument, I realized how much weight can rest on these differences. Like the night a few weeks ago when we were at our favorite barrelhouse down the street enjoying their latest imperial stout and, for some reason that now escapes me, we started talking about Daniel Tiger. And the wheels. Came. Off.

Kerry says, “Oh my god, yes! Like Daniel Tiger!” And her mind does this:

I laugh and say, “Yeah, all I need is a little red track suit!”

The needle scratches across the record. You know that moment when laughter dies and you both realize you’re not talking about the same thing? Yeah, that.

She stops laughing as hard as we had both been laughing, but I can see in her mind she’s searching for an episode where maybe the otherwise naked…ahem, nude (save, of course, for his signature Rolex) Daniel donned a red track suit, so we can keep joking about the s

ame thing. Alas, when she invoked the big cat’s name, I saw this guy:

Here’s what you need to know. When my spouse and I met, I was the parent of a 4-year-old. I stand by my decade-long assertion that I must be pretty great because even though she will readily share with you that she has been pressing her ovaries against the microwave since the late 70’s to ensure that children would not be a part of her life, she still opted to make a life with me, which, of course, included my kid. (There is enough fodder there for many more blogs, but let’s keep our eyes on the ball.)

I am often piqued by what feels like her wholesale unwillingness to take the perspective of a parent and she is equally piqued by this thing she feels “breeders,” myself included, do: we assume that people without kids are still working with the same map they had when we took the other road and had kids—like their map just...stopped growing at that point. As if becoming a parent transformed a basic folding map into some kind of 3D IMAX experience with topographic details and bonus insets, while people who didn’t have kids are still squinting at the same flat, outdated thing from 2009. The truth is that she has a map too. It’s detailed. It’s been continuously updated with her experiences, her growth, her life. It’s just charting different terrain. Not lesser terrain. Not incomplete terrain. Different terrain. And I keep assuming I can see her map clearly because I remember what mine looked like before, when really, I have no idea where hers has taken her since.

In a nutshell, I’m annoyed that she doesn’t get what it’s like to be a parent and she’s annoyed that not getting this parenting thing is somehow interpreted by society and maybe even by me as a deeply intractable character flaw.

We will both tell you the other is off-base. And we keep trying.

Fast forward, back to the barrelhouse. I’m still a parent. Now my offspring is 15 years old and in high school and, as of 7 months ago, lives 1,500 miles away from me…and I from them. (NOTE: this is another important piece of undercurrent that contributes, even if indirectly, to the torpedoing of an otherwise lovely evening. In my most regulated moments, I feel that I am a good parent. In the non-regulated ones, I’m a terrible abandoner and any story about being a good parent is a fallacy. If you were to ask me, when I’m out having a drink with my spouse and not worried about what my kid may be up to, if I’m a good parent, I would be unlikely to crow about my parenting prowess.)

“What are you talking about? Daniel Tiger is a puppet. You know…? The nude puppet with the Rolex?” (My wife says “nude” instead of “naked.” Always has, in my experience. It’s one of the many quirks I adore about her.) Hmmm…nude tiger puppet? Hilarious image, but nope. I got nuthin. Now listen, I did watch Mister Rogers and did, after a little shuffling of the formative Rolodex, remember him, but honestly Lady Elaine and her creepy puppet friends were so weird and scary that I remember very little of that show except a sense of vaguely traumatizing creepiness and maybe there was a train?

It does not occur to me, for even a second, to say, “Oh, man. I totally don’t remember that guy. I know I watched that show, but the way your face lit up, sounds like we had very different experiences of it. Lay it on me.”

Nope, I just doubled down, calling her Daniel Tiger creepy and lauding the one that I knew better, because—you guessed it, I had watched it with my son who is currently 1,500 miles away and no longer of Daniel Tiger-watching age. I loved the animated Daniel Tiger and the way the show tackled challenges of relationship and trust and all the stuff that hits kids out of nowhere when they start to interact with other kids.

I’m certain that I even pulled up a picture of my Daniel Tiger and talked some shit about how at least he has a track jacket and a watch that seems a little more fitting to his likely socioeconomic status. Man, I can be a dick.

I mean, I was actually trying to be funny and to keep us connected, but each word I uttered was like snipping another strand of the rope bridge on which we stood.

Then, she did the thing she does when she’s done. “You’re right. You have a kid so you know all kinds of things I don’t know.” And turned to face the bar.

She crossed her arms. “Who cares? It’s a stupid kids show.”

Look, I grew into adulthood at the feet of self-help books and a cadre of psychotherapists. Flippant dismissals like this are for the weak! We’re too smart, too connected, and too much in love to let “a stupid kids show” ruin our evening. So, I said, “No. I’m not sure what this is about, but it’s not about a stupid kids show or even about Daniel Tiger. I love me some Daniel Tiger, but not enough to get into a fight with you about in public… or anywhere.”

A look of “Here we go. Another session with Dr. Cates,” crept across her face.

My stomach sank.

I wasn’t even trying to be right. Wait. Was I? Shit. I was. Of course I was.

Suddenly, I ached to rewind to the fork in the road where this moment went from a potentially vulnerable share by my partner to a joust of who is more wounded, more aware, more… something.

We quietly tried to come back to equilibrium, but the fun had been fully sucked out of the evening, so we closed our tab and began the short walk home.

We walked silently for a minute or two and then we started to unpack what happened and what we knew was kind of still happening.

Some therapy styles would call what we were having “a core argument.”

As we walked and then talked some more, we surfaced pain about where and how we learned kindness as children and about how hard it can be to be a parent, particularly when becoming a parent at all is something about which I was always ambivalent. We took turns. We stopped each other when interrupting threatened to escalate and undo our progress.

“But seriously, the original Daniel Tiger was creepy, right?” I ventured.

She laughed. “Oh, man. 100%! And he taught me about kindness. And Lady Elaine was a badass.”

We laughed again and I thought of my wife’s mom. Who is kind and also a badass. As I contemplated adding this to the conversation, she laughed at herself and said, “Well, oh and I guess my mom, too!”

Loosening.

We each listened. We took short, organic breaks to laugh at the things we both found ridiculous about our respective Daniels and about 70’s children’s programming in general. We shared about the anger that comes up for me and the related conversational and energetic shutdown that it engenders, when I think of times in her life when she was loved poorly, ignored, minimized or made to feel weird.

The thing is, it had been a while since we’d had one of these arguments and as we continued into and through it, it seemed that maybe we had both done some of our own work since the last time. I found myself able to receive some hurtful, but truth-informed feedback about how she perceives my sharing of experiences I have gained from parenting. I felt her woundedness. I apologized from a new level of insight into her perspective.

I won’t pretend I didn’t slip into some old patterns of trying to flip, redirect, or revert to the ol’ “You hit me back first!” defense. I really want to get better at trusting, in the heat of an argument, that there will always be another time for my perspective to have the floor, if it even still feels important later.

In this argument, I’ll give myself a C+ on that. Much better than in the past, but man, the urge to defend myself is so strong. Even with this person I trust and who doesn’t wound me intentionally and, to my knowledge, never has. I won’t speak for her experience of the argument, but I count it as a win that the conversation “ended” when our orange cat (who wears neither a track suit, nor a Rolex) got randomly spooked, shot straight into the air, and out of the room simultaneously. We broke into ridiculous laughter sitting on the floor together, feet touching, taking in the ensuing feline lunacy.

Some very big issues that were not about this specific relationship as much as they were about patterns and baggage we’re both still bringing to this party were surfaced. Our tarnished, war-weary armor maintaining its tenuous grasp, despite its obsolescence. In a way that was unlike other arguments, I learned deeply important things about my spouse and what she needs and about what I can do to meet or at least acknowledge those needs. That is some hard shit… and imperative if I want to be in authentic, connected relationship.

And listen, she can wind her Rolex while I zip my track suit and we’ll keep riding this train together out of the Land of Make Believe. Except when we forget to get off…or when Kerry reminds me that it was trolley, not a train.

(FEETSNOTE: Whenever I write something in which my most excellent spouse features prominently, I always ask her to read it. So, I say, “Hey babe. I wrote a blog about the Daniel Tiger argument. And before I can even ask her to read it, she says, “Oh, great. Do I look like a monster?” I think you’ll agree that she does not…and that was true before her ((mostly hilarious, but also clarifying)) edits. She’s pretty swell.)

I was raised by two people who love each other and who were openly demonstrative with me. They came to all of my soccer games, ski meets, choir concerts and theatre shows. They never told me what kind of job I should have or where or if I should go to college. They just kept me gently inside the lines and supported me. I also learned some not-so-helpful things from my family about how to feel responsible for other people’s mental health and mood, how to use sarcasm as both shield and weapon, and how to command a room by being funny at my own and others’ expense.

This is the backdrop for a decision I made a little over a decade ago to leave a fifteen-year relationship in which I was one of two parents to a then-four-year-old. A relationship that, by all outside accounts, was one others would and did idolize. A relationship in which I was loved, had fun and made some excellent memories. And still, I left because I realized I had spent fifteen years making myself as small as possible and I didn’t know how to change that. I met someone who showed me just how small I had become and that was the inspiration for making possibly the hardest and most painful decision of my life.

I had internalized the lesson that it was my duty and responsibility to make other people happy. I had become expert at staying out of trouble. I did everything I could to ensure that nobody would ever be mad at me. I brought with me the skills of reading tone of voice, facial expression, and body language—skills about knowing when to be one way and when to be another. Those skills had served me throughout my childhood and into my young adulthood. They served me in my most intimate relationship, too. Or at least I thought they did.

There is so much more I could say about all of that and about the epically ungraceful way I left that marriage, but what I want to share here is about the bittersweet ache of creating the life you want when the path not taken is something you dip into on a regular basis.

Because I was the parent of a then-four-year-old and am now the parent of a fifteen-year-old, I have attended countless school events, band concerts, theatre shows and other family events in support of my child. At those events, other people are performing “happy family” in amazingly convincing ways that challenge me to stay in my power. I wonder, with an ache in my shoulders and a dip in my chest, if I could have done it. Should have done it. Could I have just stayed and it would have been ok? Well, yes, I actually know the answer to that. It would have been fine. As a dear friend said shortly after the breakup, as I processed with her about second-guessing my decision, “It’s hard to justify, right? Because nobody was getting hit.”

Yep. My relationship was, in many ways, good and loving and it did what a good relationship is supposed to do. Even though I was feeling increasingly less alive in that relationship, it was still enviable as I looked around me.

Six months ago, I made another big change. I moved to Colorado, 1500 miles away from my kid and the life I had lived for the previous 25 years. The ability to make this choice was and remains deeply contingent upon the grace and generosity of so many others, not the least of which is my ex-wife, my child’s mom. It’s also the willingness of local friends to vacate their house for the countryside when I come back to town to spend time with my kid so we can have a place to be together. It’s the flexibility and kindness of friends who lovingly make a car available to me when I’m in town. It’s the commitment and dedication of the people I work with who have no plans to leave the area where some of our most important work happens and who said, “Yes. Go! You’ve always wanted to go. We’ve got this. Just make sure you have internet.”

Trusting others to be grown-ass people who can and will say “no” when “no” is what they’re feeling and need to say is dicey business. There are only so many times and ways you can check in to confirm that a thing is, indeed, okay with another person. And then you have to set it down and hope they will speak up if that changes. This is another work in progress.

Since moving 6 months ago, my child has come to see me in Colorado for a week and I have been back to see them on three separate occasions, take them to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the 50th anniversary screening of Jaws and to sit around and do nothing with them while slipping in tips about homework, studying and general humaning.

So far, so good.

And?...when I sit in the bleachers at a football game, waiting for my kid and their marching band colleagues to come out at halftime, I often sit with my ex-partner and also, sometimes, with her current partner and my ex’s mom, with whom I have a friendly and loving relationship. And I think, “You’re an asshole. You messed this up, bigtime. This could be a perfect scene, but you’ve made yourself an accessory. You’re ‘the one who left.’”

My heart aches. My shoulders tense. Even though I was feeling increasingly less alive in that relationship, even though I looked around me and knew I was on the outside, that voice insists I created this distance. This problem of “otherness.”

I see the proverbial scales in my mind. On one side, the things all “good” people “should” do—the one with “staying married to the mother of your child,” “living in the same state as your kid,” “not having to explain your life choices to skeptical strangers.” One the other side is self-knowledge, self-love, a tenuous, but growing grasp on boundaries and deep listening. That side dips. It wins, but still, there’s a voice in my head that is sure I’m pushing down on that side to make it look better. To make it matter more.

When I saw the first therapist who helped me navigate what ultimately became a divorce, I remember her sharing a piece of wisdom from one of her own teachers. “You can have anything you want as long as you’re willing for it to look different than you thought it would look.” It was honestly a little baffling to process that truth at the time. Now it’s a regular touchstone.

Every time I get on the plane to leave my new home in Colorado-- which is the first home my heart has ever known-- I feel a pang of missing it and of missing the closeness and daily support that I love with my current spouse. When I land in Washington, DC, I feel apprehension about how I will keep my feet under me. My cells hold their breath. The muscles of my face tighten in a sort of suspended animation.

How will I quell the howlers?

How will I make my time here really count?

Then I hug and spend time with my kid, with my long-time friends, with the people who have helped to create this tapestry of my life. I feel loved and connected and like I’m in the wrong place, but with some of the best people. At the end of that week or couple of weeks, when I hug my kid goodbye, look them in their beautiful eyes and remind them that I’m proud of who they are as I head to the airport, it’s crushing. And then I slowly reinflate as I wing across the country back to my new home and the life I’ve worked so hard to create.

I did make my choice those many years ago and, six months ago, when I moved 1500 miles away from my kid it was another step toward honoring myself and what I need. I can only hope that seeing their parent move away from codependent patterns and say yes to things that are both nourishing and unconventional will be powerful learning for them. I’m learning to set boundaries. I’m unraveling damaging, long-held patterns about making myself small. I’m building a life that is rich and beautiful and intentional. It’s sometimes painful. There’s a healthy dose of longing. The path not taken pulls at me, yes. But I know—I know—that staying small wasn’t living.

As I survey the current scene, I have so much of what I want and it does not look anything like I thought it would look.