It's 2023 and You're Going to Pride

The parking is always a nightmare, even when you think you’ve safely parked in the vendor area. A couple hours into the day, a festival volunteer asks you to leave your booth to move your car and find other parking. They suggest a neighboring garage, which you queue up for while your car’s AC blasts warm air at your face. By the time you’ve made two loops inside the garage, you realize that the entry gate doesn’t calculate the garage’s capacity, and so you are now trapped in a continuous train of anxious gays looking for parking spots that don’t exist. At some point, you take a wrong turn and wind up in a dead-end near the entrance, where cars are still filtering in, obliviously entering this queer crab trap and watching you scoot your bright yellow Honda Fit back and forth to make a 17-point turn.

You do eventually escape and make your way to the parking lot next to the Indiana Historical Society. After you pay your $20 to the gate attendant, you hear her coworker shout to her to let in Marriott employees for free. You briefly consider telling the attendant that you work there, but then you remember that you’re wearing a glittery mesh shirt, a dog collar, and shiny gold shorts.

That shirt, as it turns out, is rapidly deteriorating in the heat. The insides of your elbows are plastered in sparkles and when you look down your shirt at your chest, you look like you’ve been bodied by a fairy, which may yet happen, if you’re lucky.

But for that dream to come true, you must pass the Good Ol’ Gauntlet. The first encampment of Bible-thumpers is waiting on the lawn of the Historical Society. You slow your pace and keep yourself between the megaphones and the group of queer teenagers wearing trans and non-binary flags as capes. You’re good bait in your shiny booty-shorts: small, unassuming, smiling pleasantly, inherently approachable despite the rainbow attire. The thumpers focus on you, pushing pamphlets your way while the caped crew passes mostly unharrassed. The evangelists say something directly to you, about you. You smile and absorb nothing.

A Historical Society employee is stationed next to them and he apologizes to you on their behalf and makes sure you know these people have nothing to do with the Society.

“I didn’t figure the Historical Society would support these guys,” you say. “Y’all are good folks.”

Suddenly, you are receiving an impromptu lecture from the employee about the Society’s NRA funding and its affection for Mike Pence.

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” you say.

“Spread the word,” he tells you.

You nod and continue on.

There are more proselytizers this year than you’ve seen since you first attended a Pride festival. They are stationed around the ticket line to the festival grounds, waving black signs with scripture in a stark white font.

“Love is patient! Love is kind!” a sunburned man on a crate yells at passersby. “It does not envy! It does not boast! It is not proud! Do you hear that? Love is not proud? Does that sound familiar to you?”

You are familiar with 1 Corinthians. You wonder if this finger-jabbing man is proud of what he’s doing. You wonder if perhaps he’s even a little bit envious as you position yourself between him and the line of festival-goers.

The festival grounds team with flags and people of a thousand different colors. You return to your booth and you watch beautiful drag queens sweep effortlessly by on heels that somehow don’t sink into the soil. One of your leather pup friends hugs you and takes a selfie with you in the shade of the canopy. You see young folks wearing pronoun pins and you remember being their age and not even knowing trans people existed. You only knew that you were an alien back then. There just weren’t other words for what you were, so you were an alien, and gosh, that explained a lot. You were so lonely, so clumsy, so far from home.

As the afternoon wears on, your voice grows hoarse from greeting your friends and complimenting strangers’ makeup. You buy a drink that’s mostly tequila and the bartender - who for some reason assures you that she’s straight - accidentally makes a second drink, tells you you’re cute, and hands it to you. You’ve played this game with your straight cis female friends before and know this isn’t flirting but it’s nice to be called cute and even nicer to double the drink on such a long, hot, dusty day.

You’re there for several hot hours, the rainbow foil stars melting into your sweat and pasting themselves over your body. You feel like a very slowly transforming were-disco-ball.

Eventually, you’re maxed out. Your girlfriend is recovering from a nasty cold but she came with you today despite it and you’re so grateful but if she stays here any longer she’s going to collapse. You haul your cooler a few blocks to the parking garage. The street preachers have dispersed. Love apparently wasn’t all that patient in the end.

You go to dinner with your friends at a pub you and your girlfriend have been meaning to check out for a few months. The antique interior briefly unsettles you until you see the Progress Pride pin on the server’s lapel. It will be OK to use the bathroom here.

After you pay the tab, one of your friends gives you a drawing he’s made of you as a Pokemon trainer and you are so surprised and delighted and tired that you tear up. How incredibly thoughtful. How kind, how generous, how full of love.

You get home and want so badly to just topple into a nest of pillows but your girlfriend won’t let you so much as sit on the edge of the bed. The sparkles spackled across your torso would breach containment and permanently glitter your sheets. You MUST take a shower, but at least your girlfriend has offered to help.

You scrub the grime and sunscreen off of each other and trade time under the shower head. There’s another party you could attend tonight but you’d rather stay here, together.

Later, as you snuggle on the couch with your love, you search “indiana historical society pence” and discover the Society did indeed host an event and book-promotion for Mike Pence last November. Unfortunate. You wonder what your uncle would say in the Society’s defense. You have an imaginary argument with your uncle even though you know you’re both on the same side, even through he was the one that introduced you to the local queer scene. You give up on the argument because you’ve already rehashed it too many times. You are frustrated with his optimistic expectations but you can’t bring yourself to argue against hope.

Just before bed, you double-check 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and wonder if the red-faced men screaming hate at children ever got to the end of that famous passage:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

And so will you.

Artificial

When I clicked to add a post (my first of 2023, a desperate bid to inspire myself to return to writing), I discovered a new button twitching in the upper left corner of my drafter. Yes, actually twitching, jiggling back and forth every few seconds to catch my attention. It succeeded, and upon hovering my mouse over the lightning bolt icon, I was not surprised by the floating text announcing Squarespace AI.

AI is already selling itself to me in so many places. It offers to write emails on my behalf. It conjures descriptions of parties I want to throw with my friends. It wants to banter with me on SnapChat.

It’s already old news that ChatGPT and its brethren are not reliable resources. At this stage, AI is a smooth liar, citing papers that don’t exist and inventing reasonable-sounding but ultimately inaccurate answers to the questions it begs us to ask (sometimes with costly consequences). Some say that the current shortcomings are nothing to worry about; just a nuanceless mirroring of linguistic patterns that can’t match the human voice.

That may be true right now, but how quickly will it advance? And even if the product is subpar, are the hollow paragraphs and overly-rendered art pieces of today already enough to take work away from living creators? Gotta say, it was deeply disheartening to rev myself up to work on some overdue creative writing only to discover the hungry phantom that is wide-spread AI text generation haunting my drafting screen with its annoying “LOOK AT ME!!!” wriggling.

Sure, “Squarespace AI (beta)”, go ahead. Write about my experience of top surgery, the original subject of this post:

“I underwent top surgery two years ago and it has been life-changing. As a transgender man, having a chest that aligns with my gender identity has brought immense relief and joy. The surgery itself was a major undertaking, but my surgeon and medical team were incredibly skilled and supportive throughout the process. The recovery period was challenging, but I had a great support system to ensure that I was taking proper care of myself. Overall, having top surgery has allowed me to feel more confident and comfortable in my own skin, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have had it.”

Oh sweetheart, I WISH it was two years ago. Anyway, what a detail to provide, surely not stolen from some other trans person’s writing.

Because that’s what AI is right now: a regurgitation machine. It’s a toy and a shortcut and a plagiarist and a hallucinating self-appointed professor. But it won’t be like that forever. In fact, there are concerns about the pace at which this technology is developing, the lack of constraints on it, and even the potentially apocalyptic consequences of its present trajectory.

A little paranoid? Maybe, but hey, I’m originally a science fiction writer, after all. With the rise of political deepfakes, AI chat “buddies” that feed and grow off our interaction with them, and art-thieving image generators, I feel my anxiety is at least a little justified.

I mean, that little AI blurb about top surgery was essentially accurate. Yes, I absolutely felt relief and joy, and recovery was uncomfortable at best, and I had a great support system. Like, a really, really great support system. I have very rarely felt the kind of communal love that I received in the weeks before and after my top surgery. Friends and family were so incredibly generous both financially and emotionally. Over and over, I was moved to tears by the kindness I experienced in those magic weeks.

Yes, that blurb summed the general feeling up, but it doesn’t know me, doesn’t know how nervous I was for days before my surgery because it felt like it might be yanked away from me, something I fretted about even as I donned the surgical gown in my little pre-surgery cubicle (backwards, because, you know, the nervousness). It doesn’t know the sudden desperation I felt when I realized anti-trans legislation was closing in around me, the fear that choked my heart like strangling vines at the thought that my long-delayed surgery would be delayed even further (or worse). AI couldn’t know, much less express, just how much of a struggle it was for me to give up on my original surgeon and seek out someone out-of-pocket, someone I couldn’t afford without the incredible, tear-inducing assistance of loved ones and strangers alike.

Only I can share the lived truth of my experience. There are so many details I could call upon, like how I tried to take a shower the day after my surgery, accidentally tugged my blood-filled drainage bulbs, and genuinely thought I was going to pass out on the pink and blue tiles of the bathroom floor. It was worth it to rinse off the hospital smell, and I had my partner’s supportive, experienced arms to keep me on my feet.

Oh man, I could go on and on about those damn bulbs, which dangled, gory and translucent, from both sides of my ribs like some sort of deep sea parasite. And when they came out? Somehow, I hadn’t realized just how deep they went, and when the nurse pulled them free, it felt like she was tugging flaming snakes out of my pecs by their tails.

It was all worth it. I am overjoyed! I am grateful! I am still in awe of my own reflection as I massage jojoba oil into my purple-pink scars every night, and last week, I went swimming with my top off (don’t tell my surgeon). At last, my shirts button evenly over my torso and I don’t have to worry about throwing on a binder to answer the door. To my absolute delight, I can cross my arms and wear tank-tops and hug my friends without feeling constantly aware of my chest!

I don’t know what the future holds, but hey, even if we are plunging deeper into a cyberpunk dystopia, at least I’m entering it feeling more myself than ever.

And, you know, tit-free. That feels pretty damn good.

Enjoy this very flattering photo of me asleep on the couch after coming home from surgery. The fortress of pillows was a necessary line of defense between me and my incredibly clingy Chihuahuas.

Off My Chest

I arrived an hour ahead of schedule for my appointment, budgeting for a variety of obstacles. I’d only been to this medical center once before, and only to the ER section to visit a friend who’d been in an accident. I remembered the labyrinth of cold linoleum, the many identical passages branching from each sterile hall. Even after rereading the emailed directions a dozen times, I feared I’d wind up in the wrong building, resulting in me missing my appointment (and perhaps being trapped forever within an infinite sick-white sprawl of hospital walls).

I couldn’t afford to miss this consultation. I’d scheduled it almost a year prior after leaping through a series of hoops just to earn the right to be seen. I’d changed primary doctors in order to have a better shot at being referred and I had to see that doctor regularly over the course of several months before he felt equipped to write a strong enough letter of support for me. I collected letters from him and from my therapist, knowing that I’d have to collect new versions of those letters eventually anyway. I called my insurance and spent almost two hours on the phone confirming and documenting coverage with a young woman who, though kind and patient, was not at all familiar with what I was asking after. I’d even contacted a local health support group to get back-ups of the required letters and documentation in case my doctor or therapist accidentally misphrased anything in a way that my insurance would automatically reject.

If I missed my consultation, I wasn’t sure that my heart would be able to take it. That’s why I plopped myself in that waiting room an hour before I was scheduled to be seen, clutching a folder stuffed full of my medical history and extra copies of every document that had ever been requested of me.

“Last name Douglas?”

A tiny moment of relief as the nurse called me by my surname and led me past the reception desk. I’d heard great things about the surgeon I was seeing, but didn’t know how tactful his staff would be.

While I waited in the exam room, I mentally rehearsed my arguments.

Hello, Doctor. My name is Gordon and my pronouns are he/they. I am transmasculine and have socially transitioned. I am out at home, at work, and in public, and feel safe and supported enough to continue with my medical transition. By July, I’ll have been on testosterone for a year, and it has been the best year of my life. I have worn a binder off and on for ten years and have worn one almost every day for the past year. It is very important to me that my body more accurately matches my gender identity and expression, which is why, after years of consideration and discussions with doctors and therapists, I’ve decided to seek a double mastectomy.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to be prepared for an interrogation. The top surgeon walked in, greeted me warmly, and we got down to business. After a few minutes of conversation, questions, and physical inspections, he announced that I was an excellent candidate. He also noted that, thanks to the pandemic, surgery couldn’t be scheduled yet, even though operating rooms were opening back up. He told me to expect a call late in the summer for a surgery that could happen in late fall or at the start of the next year, at the latest. Disappointing, sure, but I’d waited 30 years to get this done. What was one more year?

At the end of the visit, after the surgeon assured me that he was experienced at working with picky insurance companies, he looked me square in the eyes. “We will get this done,” he said, and I almost cried.

That was in January of 2022. I’m writing this in December of 2022, and as of yet, no surgery date in sight. The updates I used to receive every two months have stopped arriving in my inbox. When I finally contacted the surgeon’s office to make sure I was still on the waitlist, I was assured that I was, but instead of the just-under-a-year wait they’d originally predicted, they were now estimating one and a half to two years between the consultation and the surgery.

I was gutted. I was supposed to swim topless next summer. I’ve been loading up my closet with cheap button-downs to wear during recovery. My mom was awaiting a date from me so that she could take time off work to care for me after the procedure. I had tried to keep myself somewhat pessimistic about the surgery time frame in the first place. “Definitely in 2023,” I’d repeated to myself. Now even that isn’t a guarantee.

2022 has been a rocky year, to put it mildly. I experienced new and interesting ways in which to get my heart broken. I finally caught Covid for the first time, and boy howdy, did that suck. I flew from Indiana to Oregon twice, and the second time, I returned via U-Haul with my girlfriend, two cats, and a sense that all of our lives were about to change dramatically.

Luckily for me, despite the grief and chaos, I’m a professional silver linings finder. I spent what could have been a very lonely summer pushing myself out of my comfort zone and making new friends. I finally proceeded with my legal name and gender marker change, since it no longer seemed like I’d have to time that around my surgery (else risk further insurance hurdles). Despite feeling pretty gross and miserable during my Covid experience, it also gave me the chance to slow down and rest a little without feeling as guilty about not being productive. I attended two weddings, got two(!) tattoos, started running a D&D campaign with my buddies, and even performed a very silly cowboy-themed burlesque act, complete with a fake mustache, tear-away pants, and a lasso trick that I practiced for hours using my stationary bike as a bull.

You know what they say: Save a horse…

When it comes to putting a positive spin on my indefinitely delayed surgery, however, I tend to struggle. Still, I’m looking for the bright side! To start with, between rising inflation, car trouble, and several cross-country journeys, finances are a bit tighter than usual. Even with insurance, my top surgery will be a larger expense than I’m accustomed to swallowing. I need time to fill my savings back in, and while I’m emotionally devastated by the distance between me and a flat chest, I’m financially relieved.

Another unexpected benefit of waiting is that I am immediately readable as trans to fellow trans folks. Would I like to pass as a man better than I currently do? Certainly I would, but from the jump, I figured a short, flamboyant, baby-faced fairy like me would always have some sort of tell. That aside, passing isn’t the be-all end-all of transition for some people. I like being perceived as queer, and if my bound chest tips other queer people off, then that’s great! I’m fortunate to be surrounded by friends who use my correct name and pronouns, and when trans and/or non-binary strangers see me being loud and happy and respected as transmasc regardless of the shape of my body, it conveys that this is a safe place to be oneself, even if your looks don’t line up with your identity.

On that note, I’d like to remind folks that presentation and appearance are not the same as identity. We live in a culture that has trained us to make quick and “accurate” gender assessments with everyone we encounter. That culture is shifting, albeit slowly. For most folks, their gender and their presentation are likely in sync. But for plenty of other folks, whether or not they’re transgender, that’s not the case. There are straight, cisgendered men who have lived their whole lives as men with he/him pronouns but who happen to wear more traditionally feminine clothes. The “gender reverse” of that is true as well (though perhaps less visible, considering how masculine clothes have become the “neutral” standard). I try to use neutral language until I know someone’s pronouns, and when I introduce myself, I try to include my pronouns as well.

These are behaviors and attitudes I had to learn and which I’m still learning. Despite everything I just said about avoiding assumptions, I still hope people look at me and see a man. A quirky little muppet of a man, sure, but still a man. That’s difficult when one of the major ways people make gender assessments is through body shape. I’ve managed to grow a goofy little goatee that helps guide people toward masculine assumptions, but what good is that under a mask? Even when I’m not masked, there are times when I get the quick, awkward up-down glance from strangers who are usually trying to be polite and don’t want to “sir” me in case I’m just a butchy, hirsute lady.

The best I can do for now is to continue being my boldest and kindest self. I’ve had to fight quite a lot just to get where I am now (I’ll have to write about the ridiculous experience I had just trying to get my pharmacy to fill my first testosterone prescription sometime soon, because wow, I really wish I’d been braver back then). The surgeon who spoke with me is skilled and sympathetic and surely overworked, as so many in the medical field are, especially in midst of ongoing pandemics. Currently, he’s the only top surgeon in my state who takes my insurance, and while I’m tempted to find a way to pay out of pocket for another plastic surgeon, that feels like such a financial waste.

So I’ll wait. I’ve made it this long; I can certainly make it a bit longer. My body isn’t who I am. I know this, but the more I pass, the lighter my heart feels. It’s hard knowing that there’s nothing more I can do but be patient and keep enjoying the things I do have control over.

Maybe it won’t be next summer, but some sunny July, I’ll run down a dock and dive into a lake looking more myself than ever, and I know it will feel just like flying.

The World's Smallest Digital Sketchbook Library

I’m not sure what triggered my memory to check The Sketchbook Project’s site for the status of the book of poetry I submitted last year. I think it must have been when I was cleaning up my art desk (an uncharacteristic move, I know) and found the drawer where I’d stowed my first draft of the book, back when the project had been something else, a sort of memoir-esque comic that was too ambitious for me to complete by the deadline.

I was very aware of the deadline, which is why I rebound my sketchbook twice: first with sturdier sketch paper for the comic, then with neon-bright printer paper for my last minute plan change. I’d been given the sketchbook by some beloved friends, and as I am unable to complete any significant task without forcing myself into a procrastination-induced panic, I waited until months after I’d received the gift to put serious work into it.

It was a terrific gift: a little, customizable book I could fill with just about anything and then return to the Brooklyn Art Library, which houses the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world. I was delighted by it, and did a great deal of daydreaming about how to fill it (without making tangible progress, of course). I started getting my ideas on paper in the beginning of 2020, aware of the late summer deadline, but unaware of what 2020 had in store.

I tried my best. I scheduled out my pages, set alarms on my phone to remind myself to work on them, and came up with schemes to create large, artsy-fartsy filler sections. In the end, I just couldn’t do it in the way I’d originally intended. I did my second rebinding and decided to feature some of the poetry I’d written that spring instead so that I’d at least have something to submit.

I was still proud of it, for what it was. I’d worked hard to write a piece of poetry every day during the month of April (National Poetry Month!), and this way, I’d get to kinda-sorta publish some of that work. I took some photos, packaged my book up, and sent it on its way just in time.

Then I forgot about it, because if something isn’t in my direct line of sight, it has a 50% chance of being immediately flushed from my brain, an issue that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. In this case, I knew it would take a while for the sketchbook to be digitally uploaded, and that I’d get a notification when it was, so I felt safe dismissing it from my mind.

A year passed, and the notification never came. Whatever triggered my memory of the book also compelled me to check on its status. Had it really been a year? Or was it only months ago? Time’s been goopier than usual, so it seemed reasonable to me that I’d submitted more recently than I thought, and that my book might still be in line to be uploaded.

When I logged into the site to check, however, I discovered that my book had never even arrived.

It was just gone.

I sat there stunned for a few seconds before I started to cry. Actually, “cry” may be too gentle of a word for what I was doing… I was bawling. My body suddenly felt so heavy that I just folded forward onto my desk and sobbed and keened and blubbered until my cat finally decided to come chew on my hair, snapping me out of it.

I knew I’d probably never physically hold that book again, but the concept that it was missing from the world in a way I’ll never be able to track sent such a thunderbolt of grief through my heart that I felt actual pain.

I have felt that pain several times in the past few years. Loss is Change’s ugly cousin, and it has visited all of us recently. While change comes with the promise of an exchange, a transformation of one thing into another, loss is just… loss. Something is gone. Nothing inherently takes its place, fills that gap. There aren’t answers or explanations, there is only absence.

I’ve been preoccupied with loss lately. I live in fear of it. I fear losing my job, losing my pets, losing my friends and family, losing my mind. In fact, earlier this year, I was so convinced that I was indeed losing my mind that a therapist proctored a series of tests for me, including an intelligence test. I’d been so scattered and sluggish and forgetful that I assumed my brain was physically deteriorating. I scored fine. I scored well, actually, though I know intelligence isn’t really that simple to measure, and that my various privileges inflated my score. But what if I used to have an even better score? What if my cognitive functions are slowly draining away? What if I finally lose it all?

Of course, the truth is that I will lose it all, one way or another. I am impermanent, which is a concept that’s even harder to comprehend than loss. All I have is right now, and that’s always draining away as well. I won’t get the minutes back. They, too, are lost.

Or are they?

I’ve spent a long time thinking of Change and Loss like those cousins - separate yet connected - when I really should be thinking of them as different states of the same phenomenon. It’s all just change, the universal constant that I struggle so eternally with, but sometimes I must take a more active role in the transformation.

For example, while I may never get back my ever-dwindling minutes, it’s not like they never existed. I exchange each moment for a memory. And when I lose those memories? Well, that’s a bit harder to consider. Just because I can’t remember them, however, doesn’t mean they never happened. Maybe the things I forget will be something someone else remembers. Maybe it’s not all about me in these exchanges.

Maybe it all cascades.

On my (hopefully distant) horizon, I see death, the ultimate transformation. I will lose all that I am that day. I can’t conceive of a greater loss than that… It’s impossible to think about the total absence of self. It’s all I’ve ever known (and damn if I haven’t learned A Lot about myself in the past couple years). The change that happens in my final second on Earth is a change I’ll never know.

But maybe other people will, and that’s what I mean by “it all cascades.” I think of a friend’s friend whom I wish I’d known better and his eagerness to say “Yes, Absolutely” to adventure, and how that shapes my own willingness to be bolder and wilder years later. I think of my grandmother when I pass yard sales or crave a late night bowl of ice cream to enjoy with a good book. I think of another friend every time it rains, and about a specific moment we shared, lying in an alley and letting the water soak us so that we could stand up and see our dry silhouettes for a few seconds before the storm faded them away.

I can only hope that, while I’m still here, I’m creating my own cascades. I am here right now. I have changed, I have lost, and yet I also have the power to transfigure at least some of those losses. I mean, even my name has changed since I put this book together. Maybe it’s good that it only exists here, where I can tell you directly that I’m Gordon now, and I was Gordon then, and Gordon made this book, even if the name on the cover says otherwise.

No one that I know will ever see my poetry book again, but you can see it here, hastily captured as it was, in the world’s smallest digital sketchbook library.

Please enjoy my Poems from April.

Death of an Imaginary Therapist

It started with a neon-bright, alien-themed Hawaiian shirt, impulsively ordered for a family trip right before the start of the pandemic. It was gaudy and flimsy and covered in vacationing extraterrestrials lounging in flamingo floats, so of course I had to have it. As resentful as I am about capitalism’s greedy, ad-targeting claws, I admit that I fell prey to them this time.

When the package finally arrived, I could barely stop myself from leaving work early to retrieve it from my front steps. I held out until the end of the day, however, before rushing home, releasing the Chihuahuas into the backyard to potty, ripping into the bag the shirt had been delivered in, and donning my, ahem, “gay apparel.”

I admired my reflection in the hall mirror. Winter-whitened skin, screen-strained eyes, and the tackiest shirt in all the land, and yet I felt so perfectly me and good in a way that I hadn’t for quite some time. I couldn’t control the parts of me that were causing increasing discomfort - my chest, my hips, my voice - but I could put on a bright, goofy shirt. Something that communicated some part of me that I hadn’t been communicating before, even if the communication was mostly to myself.

Of course, I say it started with the shirt, but really, this has been a conversation I’ve held with myself for most of my life. That conversation has been at times aggressive and self-eviscerating, at other times whispered, muzzled. I could say it really started with buying a binder for a drag show in college, or being mistaken for a boy in a Target as a preteen, or even insisting that “I’m not Abi, I’m HENRY!!” as a child. If this all sounds familiar, it’s probably because I wrote about these incidents in 2017, when I first published a piece on my genderqueer identity. Even that could be called a start, even though I’d been talking about wibbly-wobbly gender stuff for years before that essay.

But the shirt was something different. It was a step toward a new outward presentation, something I hadn’t allowed for myself outside of select scenarios. Everything about it was unapologetic. It was confidently ridiculous. It was masculine, but in a very unserious way. It was playful, bold, and silly, and it was me.

Oh dear, I thought as I surfed a wave of euphoria. This may require action. How inconvenient.

Months passed. Strange, lonely, stressful months, and I was one of the lucky folks who didn’t get sick, didn’t experience the pain and horror of a family member or close friend dying from a disease that we should have, as a society, been able to contain and mitigate. Even so, by November, I had scheduled my first voluntary therapy appointment.

I have severe depression and anxiety. I’ve talked quite a bit on this site about my experiences with those illnesses, and my fluctuating willingness to even admit I struggle with my mental health. The American healthcare system and the general societal stigma regarding mental illnesses have hindered my willingness to seek professional help, and even when I did, negative experiences with medication and dismissive doctors scared me off for a long time. Instead, I relied on an “imaginary therapist” - a nameless, faceless figment to whom I could rehearse what I would say to a real therapist. That was helpful for venting purposes, and sometimes helped me work through irrational thoughts in order to see my situation more clearly, but talking to myself could only take me so far.

I meditated. I changed my diet. I exercised, I cleaned (although it’s never been my strong suit), I forced myself to sit outside in the sun on the days I just wanted to hide in a puddle of blankets. I researched and practiced my mindfulness. I kept a gratitude journal. For a while, those things helped, too.

But day by day, and funky Hawaiian shirt by funky Hawaiian shirt, I realized there was an underlying issue that I wasn’t equipped to handle alone. After some false starts and scheduling issues, I finally met with a therapist, and, in addition to working on my standard array of struggles, I started talking about coming all the way out of the closet.

I am now four months on a low dosage of testosterone and am going by my middle name, Gordon (Go for short!). I no longer feel like I have to be “good” or “valuable” enough to ask for people to refer to me correctly. I no longer fret over ignorant people who insist I have no right to my pronouns. History and grammar are in fact on my side, after all.

And I’m aware that I’m not alone. The isolating (and traumatizing) environment of the pandemic has brought many people face to face with themselves as individuals, and that kind of introspection tends to result in discoveries and growth. With growth comes pain, but my pain has been MASSIVELY offset by new heights of joy and self-confidence.

With that in mind, clad in a shirt as loud and weird as I myself am, I have held an imaginary funeral for my imaginary therapist. This essay stands in as a eulogy for them. Without their presence, and the encouragement of my actual, non-fictitious friends, I may not have had the strength to seek a real therapist. And had I not done that, I may have delayed my coming out even further. I regret how long it’s taken me as it is. However, I’m relieved to finally be here, and I have renewed energy for the long trail that still stretches ahead of me.

Between the time I started writing this entry and now, I’ve learned that my actual, real, would-not-be-accepted-into-Foster’s-Home-for-Imaginary-Friends therapist put in her two weeks, and I’ve seen her for the last time without even knowing it. I gotta say… That threw off my groove a little. That said, I’m grateful for the months of work I’ve done with her, and because of that positive experience, I’m more willing to seek out assistance again. The system is imperfect, not every therapist is a good match, and obstacles like insurance and stigma still block the way sometimes, but I believe in the value of forging ahead regardless.

Farewell, imaginary therapist. Hello, new tools and refreshed hope.

And hello to the bigger, happier version of myself whom I’ve gotten to know quite a bit this past year. So many loved ones have welcomed this version of me into their lives, and I’m so grateful. I’m still evolving and still struggling from time to time, but I feel lighter as I go.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Hugs and Butterfly Kisses, Your Friend,

Go