ninaherenorthere.com

I started taking testosterone on July 21, 2009. There are a lot of reasons why, and none of them have to do with weighing a pro and con list, questions like “Is it worth muscles if I’m going to get acne?” or “Is it worth a few centimeters of dick if I’m going to get ass hair?” There is no picking and choosing; it is all or nothing. Of course, I always have the option to stop, or to flip it into more positive terms, to make a conscious decision to continue every time I pick up the needle.

Sometimes I mull over this unrealistic scenario: If I were to approach a 14 year old boy and tell him he could remain as he is forever, never having to shave or smell raunchy or have zits, that girls would still swoon over him, and hot ones at that, that he would never have to worry about balding, what do you think he would do, freeze time? Am I the same? I don’t know. But I can tell you how I feel.

I feel stuck, not in the antsy, anxious, American fill-the-void kind of way that makes me take an extra handful of cereal when I’m full because I want something, anything more. And I don’t feel stuck like I do in a bad job or in a bad relationship where I just need out. It’s more like a brick wall is in front of me, maybe ten feet high, and I’m standing on my tippy toes, trying to see over, wondering not if “manhood” is on the other side, but adulthood, if there is a dog, or child, or family, something or someone to care for — a future.

Let’s scrap that one, just so there’s no confusion that this is about me trying to get somewhere — it isn’t. I want the feeling of transition, or puberty, or having testosterone, more specifically exogenous testosterone, inside my body to connect me to the experience of no one thing, but the totality of being a teenage boy, a mature man, and a transguy — a person who sticks himself every couple weeks and very slowly plunges a viscous fluid into his quad, a person who carries with that dull tingly sensation nearly thirty years of life in which he was recognized as a female.

I am a writer and so I find it ironic that the words I’ve arrived at seem empty to me — “instinct,” “the wisdom of the body,” “feeling like a man.” I cannot possibly tell you what it means to feel like a man, but occasionally you will hear me utter that phrase, then cringe because I am at a loss to explain or deepen. Maybe I am too logical for something that defies ration, and although I can let philosophy and theory wash over me, I can’t quite explore myself through those lenses.

I can always turn to narrative, even though the term is so dangerous and loaded in the transgender lexicon because of the historical pain it has caused so many people, myself included. Narrative is a construction, a way of connecting dots, of linking elements whose truth is as fleeting as a millisecond tick on a stopwatch. But as Joan Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”; I know I do. And the thing about these stories, about my own narrative constructions is that I’ve earned my words.

It is hard to look back at my time with breasts and call myself miserable, mostly because I didn’t feel that way at the time, or wasn’t aware that I did — we do what we do to survive. But over the three or so years that I struggled to arrive at the decision to remove them, I heard from a plethora of people a countless number of times, “Do not cut off your breasts.” I was foolish and human to listen, to keep beating down instinct with reason. By now, I’ve earned my faith in myself, to listen to the wisdom of my body even if I can’t explain where it comes from or what exactly it is.

As for “feeling like a man,” I still don’t know what that means, but I know that when people call me “he” or I hold my breath from the stench in the men’s restroom that I feel as I imagine other men might feel, and that when people call me “she,” I have no idea whom they are talking about and when I go into the women’s restroom, I feel not like a woman, nor a man, but an outsider, an invisible person. Does this mean that my entire construct of myself is based on pronouns and toilets? Please forgive me if I’m enforcing a binary that I don’t believe in, but I spend a large portion of every day using words and bathrooms.

When I first started exploring testosterone, it was for writing research almost three years ago. T was not something I was actively or even passively considering and I watched an acquaintance receive one of his first shots. I didn’t sleep for a couple weeks. It would be melodramatic or crying wolf to say I contemplated suicide, especially since people do actually kill themselves, more than are counted, for being transgender. I did, however, contemplate what my life would be like should I *have* to take the route of T. It was that fear, envisioning the insurmountable challenges, that had me wishing myself dead.

I’m rambling now, getting off a track I never saw in the first place, spinning around an infinite number of ways to explain how I got from there to here, even when I know it doesn’t really matter at all. I’ll probably come back to these ideas again, revising and refining or changing my story entirely. Until then, it’s the following words that I keep coming back to. They come from a teacher, and although I cannot make complete sense of them, I find them comforting…

The asana is in the transition.

I went to a yoga class once in 2001, a couple times in 2002 and in 2003, and maybe once in 2004. In 2005, I gave it my strongest effort, attending a handful of anusara classes at the only yoga studio in the small town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Back in San Francisco, I bought my own mat, which inspired me to avoid yoga for all of 2006 and 2007. During this time, in the first of many Yoda-grasshopper moments, someone said to me, “When you are ready for yoga, you will open to it.” By the time I set foot in the Castro Yoga Tree only a few blocks from my house, I had attended maybe a dozen classes in a half dozen studios over the course of almost eight years.

Going in, I was aware of some of my struggles. I tried not to let the anxiety provoking length of a 1.5 hour class get to me, and I promised not to berate myself for my novice yoga skills. It turns out this was the whole point of mellow flow, a class that isn’t easy like restorative, but sets the challenge for all of us to go easy on ourselves. The teacher, the much-loved Janet Stone, reminds us of this repeatedly throughout the class, and occasionally I listen. Her classes draw over a hundred people and we all line our mats up, mere inches apart, so that we are nearly sweating onto one another in the warm but not Bikram hot room. As dusk settles onto our Friday, darkening the barn-sized studio, we are instructed to let go of the week’s stress and the American mantra of harder, faster, better. Once a week, I told myself, just go to this class once a week. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.

I followed directions well. If Janet said to close my eyes and wag my tail, I did. If she said to take a deep breath and let it all out with a great big sound of relief, I did. Upon command, I introduced myself to neighbors. I chanted off-key. I mooed and meowed. I did this all, perhaps, because I was in the midst of a break-up and I lacked the energy that self-consciousness requires. I needed to blindly trust in something; I was either ripe for a cult or yoga or the cult of yoga.

It took me months to try a different teacher and a different class. I started going to the Sunday morning bhakti flow class because a few friends attended it as part of their forays into yoga. The four of us would set up in the corner, the only ones, or so it seemed, following the level one instructions. Once, during the new age sermon that carries through every class, the teacher said that yoga was an event. All of a sudden, I stopped considering yoga a workout or meditation or something I did for a couple hours in between other things, and I began to think of it as the highlight of my day, an activity of grand importance, an event.

I also treated yoga class like a 12-step meeting in that there was always one going on, waiting for me when I needed it. If I was having a bad day, and for awhile there were some real rough ones, I would look online, find the next class and go. I always learned something enlightening about myself and my body, and I collected words of wisdom like these: “We are here to breathe. If we decide to do some poses, that’s great. But we are here to breathe.”

My favorite part of yoga class is the beginning. We are encouraged to come up with an intention, to think of a person and offer up our wants and needs and benefits of our practice to them. I change up the person every time, but I always hold someone I love close to my heart. I like to start with that person and imagine my well-wishes rippling in concentric circles out through the studio, the city, the world. I can’t help but picture the slow-motion images of a nuclear bomb, spreading not annihilation, but radiations of warmth and light from my own personal point of impact.

I also like the poses themselves. I like to root my hands and feet into the ground, spreading my fingers and toes wide, envisioning them gripping the earth. I like to concentrate on pulling my kneecaps up, elongating my rib cage, letting my shoulders melt into my back, and relaxing my jaw. I like trying without trying to feel the presence of my entire body, to engage muscles it would never occur to me to use in a certain stance. I like the names of the poses, the Sanskrit words and their English counterparts–tree, mountain, warrior, frog, fish–each one rich in metaphorical significance. I like the focus on balance and strength and awareness over achievement.

The other day one of the instructors approached me during a session with guidance on a pose, and he told me my practice was blossoming. I was surprised, convinced that none of my instructors had noticed me. Feigning amazement, or showing teacherly encouragement, he asked me how I did it, and although the question was rhetorical, I spent the rest of the class alternating between beaming pride and a variety of answers to his question.

I wanted to tell him that I was facing the biggest challenges of my life, that I got to the end of the road and it said, “Not a through street,” that I ran out of places and ideas and escapes from the discomfort, that breathing into it was my last ditch attempt at living. I wanted to say that I came to yoga in desperation, or in a failed attempt to battle desperation, I came in resignation. I considered saying that I’m an addictive and obsessive person, and now that I’ve gotten a taste of the spiritual enlightenment revolution, finally a bite of that bliss, I’m back for more, again and again, because I can’t get enough. I wanted to say that my mind is so full of chatter, and I listen when you tell me to place my head on the ground and let the contents spill out, or that I need to hear that yoga is endless, which is why it’s called practice, or that I think I’m being kinder to myself, softer, and more thoughtful to others, or that I feel physically alive, more in touch with my body than ever before, or that when my thoughts become a runaway train, I need someone to remind me to say “thinking” to myself, smile, let it go, and show up on the mat again.

Yesterday, I tried a new teacher. He asked if it was anyone’s first class, and one person raised a hand. The teacher told him, “Happy Birthday.” It was my 28th class in the last five months. I know because I got curious and had the desk person check the computer. I said “Happy Birthday” to myself, commemorating the big event that is my every class. During that session, the teacher mentioned a few different types of breath. He said, “If you have no idea what I’m talking about for a decade don’t worry about it.” I had no idea and I didn’t care. I spent the last decade on the path to yoga, understanding finally, that I am here to breathe. It doesn’t surprise me that I will spend the next decade learning how to do so.

The office manager didn’t notice me in the room when she read my name in the appointment book and announced, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.” When she did see me sitting there, her face flushed and she started to apologize profusely.

I wondered if it was her lack of professionalism that concerned her, or if she knew she should have been particularly sensitive because of the reason for my visit. We were in a place where names mattered. To many who passed into that very room, the gender of a name mattered more than anything.

I told the office manager it was okay. I wanted to put her at ease. People, especially when I was a child, would say, “the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,” all the time. I almost thanked her. I wanted to thank her. It occurred to me that it might be the last time anyone says that to me.

I was named for my mother’s brother, Norman. He was hit by a car and killed before I was born. I think I was conceived in the wake of his death. He exists in my mind only as a legend. Dark, tall, and handsome. A world-class basketball player. I’ve always been proud to continue the legacy of his three-point shot, to carry his “N” in Nina.

My name is a gift, given to me by parents. There are strings attached to a name, an expectation for a lifetime. I have long felt suffocated by the path set for me by others, but my name is not a burden. It is a gift I treasure.

Every time I hear my name, I linger on the sounds, trace its curves, finger its softness, hold its grace. Sometimes I feel like I’m having break-up sex with my name. I love my name, but we are moving in different directions. We are growing apart.

I treat finding a new name like a game. A friend and I went through baby names the other day. Nate is not quite me. Neil I like. Noah is chosen by everyone. Nimrod made us laugh. Nino doesn’t stick. Nico is the guy I’d like to date. But it’s always been Nick. It came into my head one day, a couple years ago, virginal conception or something. I treat finding a new name like a game because I am barely showing, because I am not ready for Nick.

I don’t need a new name. Nobody is forcing me. But “Nina” sounds like mid-day chimes, pleasant and obligatory, a noise not mine. When my name is spoken, I half expect someone else to step forward. I find introductions uncomfortable. I cringe upon hearing “Nina” in bed. My name is too pretty for me, for my coarse hands, my hairy legs, my boxy jaw, a hardened exterior growing in my imagination.

With all that is changing for me right now, there is nothing I shall grieve for more than the loss of my name. If I do let go of Nina, I will ask you to hold it for me, to place it in an urn on the mantel of your heart.

I hear there is currently a resurgence of the name “Nina.” The office manager who grouped me with the Pinta and Santa Maria told me so at the end of my appointment. She said elementary schools have lots of small Ninas. I picture them with long wavy hair pulled back into barrettes, pierced ears, wearing beige corduroy pants and a red pea coat. I picture them like I was once, a little girl.

When I was about eight or nine years old, I gave myself a scar on my upper right shoulder. I denied that I knew the cause of the small raised bump, saying to my parents and a dermatologist repeatedly, “I have no idea, no idea what could’ve possibly been there.” I’m pretty sure it was once a mosquito bite that I scratched, then a scab I picked off, then a divot I dug into, maybe four or seven or eleven times, until only a raw pink hole remained.

I played dumb about the cause because I knew I had done something wrong; I should’ve stopped excavating my wound. Now, after many more years of picking my fingernails, grinding my teeth, toying with scabs (never to the same degree), and participating in a multitude of other disgusting almost obsessive-compulsive physical manifestations of inner turmoil, I realize the self-mutilation of my shoulder was no more my fault than my genes or my upbringing or my temperament.

I also played dumb because I hated my keloid scar and wanted it fixed. The scar was white, hard as a muscle, and about the size of a button on the cuff of a women’s dress shirt. It was tiny, but that determination comes with hindsight and my adult ability to look at all things in childhood, especially stuffed animals, from a vantage point of greater height and size and distance and age, and see a beloved panda bear or a despised scar as very, very small.

As only a child could do, I went to great and unspoken lengths to hide my scar. At summer camp, I utilized the head tilt any time I wore a bathing suit, draping my long brown hair down my right shoulder like a curtain. I held my head at such an extreme angle, I’m lucky I didn’t develop a neck crick. And I fooled no one. I seem to remember a camper pointing out my trick, to which I played dumb. I also seem to remember favoring life jackets. Even though the vest didn’t actually cover the scar, the puffy material served as a distraction, protecting me from the naked vulnerability of my blemish.

I never wore tank tops and dreaded any and all sports that could force me to wear one. Able to wear a t-shirt underneath my sleeveless basketball jersey–royal blue for away, white for home–I thought I’d escaped the athletic problem. But in tenth grade, I joined a traveling softball team, and despite playing a sport that had no rational reason for a sleeveless uniform, my team decided upon polyester muscle shirts that would’ve looked completely ridiculous with a t-shirt underneath.

I came up with a solution all by myself. I decided to wear a skin colored band-aid, covering my scar, across my shoulder. I had somehow decided that drawing attention to that spot of my shame was better than showing the shameful mark, and certainly better than talking about it with my teammates. I did, however, ask my parents to take me to a dermatologist who over several months (or years) gave me cortisone shots, sharp flicks to the center of the scar tissue, to soften the skin.

For that entire softball summer, I would prepare for my games, which filled up my entire weekends, by applying my band-aid before arriving at the field. The band-aid was always the same size and always placed in the same spot, easy to locate because a dark suntan soon framed the band-aided area. When the season ended, I was spared from tank tops for a long while. Sometime during this period, and oddly I can’t specifically remember when,  the cortisone worked and the raised bump faded back into my skin, still a scar yet less glaring.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extreme efforts I went through to hide my minor disfigurement, especially as I consider undergoing surgery that would leave me with scars large enough to make the horror of the dot on my shoulder pee-in-your-pants laughable. A friend of mine says scars are beautiful, and there is great truth in that, especially the ones he has, markers of a life almost lost, badges of survival.

There are, I think, two kinds of scars, one kind stems from a medical emergency–appendicitis or a wound–and the other is self-inflicted–tattoos, piercings, putting a cigarette out on an arm, ritual fraternity branding. I have heard some regrets about self-inflicted marks, a friend who says she gets tattoos when she is depressed and wishes she didn’t have all of them, and at least a long time ago, I heard the cigarette guy say putting his butt out on himself was stupid.

I used to think that trauma resulted from abuse or war. I used to think that scars resulted from physical injury. Then I discovered therapeutic language and realized living is trauma and scars are the proof of it. Which is why, late at night in bed with a lover, we sometimes share the stories of the body: a pinky knuckle busted from hooking onto a rugby jersey, sun spots from a sailboat trip gone wrong, stitchmarks from a mole removed, remnants of an overscratched  mosquito bite.

Maybe there is no difference between the kinds of scars we have, the distinction I tried to make between medical emergency and self-inflicted scars unnecessary. Maybe the scars I’m so afraid of, afraid of regretting, afraid of hating, and afraid of being especially ugly have been there all along. Maybe I’ve just been covering them up with a band-aid.

I saw my parents every day for the past seven days. I’ve only been relieved of their West Coast presence for a few hours and here I am, in a cafe, blogging about them. I’m hoping break out of my shell shocked state, do what I do best after an intense and disturbing experience: write about it.

But sometimes numbers are worth a 1,000 words. So let’s start there. I spent a total of 32 hours with my parents. Think about that. When was the last time you spent 32 hours with your parents? And I’m talking hours of direct contact. Like sitting across a breakfast, lunch, or dinner table or being crammed in a car. I don’t mean the hours we all spent asleep in the same hotel room. I think 32 hours is a lot of time, a challenge, a test of humility and compassion, and I believe I deserve the Purple Heart for being such a damn good kid.

We only had one major fight, which happened around day six, after three days in Napa and two hours in a Lexus hardtop convertible. We borrowed the car from a relative, because how could we refuse the offer of such a fancy schmancy car. And I sat in the backseat meant for luggage, not people, because how could I ask a 61 year old, a woman who squeezed me, a grapefruit of a baby, through her pea-sized hole to sit in a seat so flawed in its ergonomics as to cause permanent deformity.

My mother is an ant-like woman with the mouth of a gorilla. When she is angry, unlike my father who whistles and steams like a teapot left on the stove too long, my mom turns into bullet-riddled grizzly bear. Beastly howls mingle with flailing arms as she claws and scrapes in her terror fueled frenzy. But that was how the fight ended, with her swipes and raging non sequiturs. It began with her asking me if I had any normal friends, normal as defined as white, heterosexual, and with no visible tattoos or piercings. But in truth, it began the second I greeted the both of them.

It should be no surprise that the subtext of my life for the past year became the subtext of my parents’ visit. Yet it was a surprise because I didn’t think I looked much different since the last time I saw them. My hair is no shorter and my clothing is not new and my legs don’t have any more hair. My breasts are perhaps more noticeably flattened, partially because of lost weight, and I can only hope that my gestures and mannerisms evoke manly connotations (studly with a hint of fag), but I doubt even this would be new. Something has changed though. I am getting older, but I am carded for alcohol more often than ever, almost 100% of the time (including private parties). It seems that the more I embrace feeling like a boy, the brighter my boyish aura glows. Or maybe binding my breasts just makes that much of a difference.

“Did you have an operation?” my father asked me only minutes after hello. I said no, mumbling something oblique, not asking what he meant, but wondering if he knew the difference between top surgery and a breast reduction. Always desiring the route of less information, my dad is the kind of guy who considers queer acceptance referring to my girlfriend as my “friend,” and so he didn’t press the subject of my chest.

My mother, on the other hand, expresses a curiosity so entitled in its nosiness that I knew there would be more questions about my gender presentation. I have made it a habit to grant her a few moments of judgmental interrogation as part of my child duties. My mother has made it a habit to ask build-up questions, perhaps an attempt to control herself, only to erupt during what she perceives as the last moment of our “bonding” time. On our trip to Napa, her build-up questions involved the method with which I flatten my chest, and I showed her my three-quarter length tank top.

She followed up her inquiry while the two of us were dangling our feet into the whirlpool, where I sat on the edge in my boy swim trunks and tight sports bra, the same outfit I’ve worn for the past several years when I decide that swimming is worth the discomfort of revealing that I have breasts. Even before my mom asked the question, I was off in my own reverie, wondering, hoping, dreaming it might be my last time in that awful sports bra. Someday soon, I could be topless in just my shorts, and I preemptively immersed myself in the elation and relief.

“How come you don’t wear a bathing suit?” she asked.

“I am wearing a bathing suit. It’s a boy’s bathing suit.”

“Do you want to be a boy?”

I don’t always answer this question the same way. But even if my mother and I had a shared vocabulary that included words like genderqueer, gender fluid, trans-masculine, even if she could see gender as a spectrum, or as Russian nesting dolls, or as a galaxy, as more contemporary theorists theorize, the answer is still complicated. But as someone who recommends skipping the “bisexual” middle ground on the way to “gay” with the option to recant if the mood so strikes, I chose the more honest of the two answers. “Yes,” I said.

I did throw her a few bones of explanation. I said that when I looked in the mirror, I expected to see a man’s body. She said that when she looked in the mirror she expected to see herself, although she wanted to look less wrinkly, with smaller thighs. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I just don’t.” She said all this with the annoyed tone of a diabetic restaurant customer who just received the wrong meal after waiting for over an hour.

I know all too well my explanations, metaphors, and analogies are not explanatory enough for even the most open-minded of people. But my mother has this bad habit of trying to put herself in other people’s shoes, even if they are four sizes too big. Then she’ll be clomping around with her huge clown feet, screaming that the damn shoes don’t fit, as if anyone asked her to try them on. Over a decade ago, when I told her I had a girlfriend, her response was that she liked her friend, Margaret, but she couldn’t, just couldn’t understand wanting to kiss Margaret. (I couldn’t understand wanting to kiss Margaret either.)

“Are you the boy in a gay relationship?” my mother asked.

“I’m a boy, but not the boy,” I said, choosing not to elaborate on the fact that this sometimes makes the relationship not very gay at all.

I told her there are other people like me out there. I thought about the word transgender. Then I closed the door on the conversation.

******

Aside from a few awkward and difficult moments, including the one big fight about whether I had normal friends, my parents’ trip had all the outward signs of success. But even when the going is good with parents, I still find it challenging. It is only in the past few years that I’ve become continuously aware of my parents’ mortality, either because they are visually aging, or because the my mom’s fears force her to constantly remind me that she’s going to die soon (and that I won’t have to take on her debt). Personally, I think my mom could kick the Grim Reaper’s ass; she’ll probably be the only elderly woman I’ll ever get to meet with a six-pack of abs. I may hate my mom’s hard-headedness, but I admire her hard body, and there is something tragically endearing about someone as lovable as granite rock.

My favorite part of the time with my parents was watching them in the pool. My dad was once a swimmer (it’s the only sport he’s better at than my mother), and he can still hold his breath for long periods of time. They play this game in which my mom climbs onto his back underwater so that the two of them resemble mating turtles. Then he propels them through the water for as long and as far as he can. Maybe I like watching because my mom is is ridiculously enthusiastic about what appears to be an unadventurous, mundane ride. Or maybe it’s one of the few images I have that shows my parents are capable of a happiness independent of me and my life.

It’s a pleasant thought, but not entirely true. My mother may be more forthright but my father has quite an impact. He is a lawyer and he reserves his most powerful comments for the end, for his closing argument. I’ve often wondered if he plans it this way, if he is aware of the obviousness of his intentions to sway me.

It was the very last night of their visit, after dinner, after my dad had paid the bill. He leaned over to me and said, “I hope this is just a phase. I want my little girl back.”

Looking into his eyes, I could see his heart splintering, and so I didn’t crack it over my knee. “I’m not so little anymore,” I said.

I hugged them goodbye, went outside, and punched the wall. I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I owe my parents my life just because they created my life. I wonder when they’ll stop asking me to repay.

The other day, I was walking the last block to my house after a run and a woman engaged me in one of those “I used to run, but now my body is broken” conversations. I’m a sucker for that kind of nostalgia, because despite being a white person in America with no real financial worries, I’m constantly needing to remember that I’m lucky. Last week, a particularly rough time for me, I rented Murderball, the movie about quadriplegic rugby players. I watched it in three installments so I could have a daily reminder, the gift of my able body, to give me perspective on my privileged woes.

The woman on the street told me she had run in a handful of marathons. She gave a specific number, but once the number is one, it might as well be four or five or whatever. Marathon runners kill me, and not so much in that impressive way. We are not made for twenty-six miles; it’s so much unnecessary stress on the body. And I tend to worry about the mental condition of someone who wants to run twenty-six miles. She told me that she used to run up the 17th street hill that we were standing on the lower part of. That impressed me. I don’t bike up that hill. There is a warning sign: 17% grade. “I’m not sure passing cars could tell I was actually running,” she said. “But if I could just make it up that hill, I knew I was okay.”

I have been working out a decent amount in the past few months and have come to count on sweating as a catharsis integral to maintaining a semblance of mental health. But I don’t really set goals or anything. I’ll occasionally leave spin class five minutes early just to spite the workout. Until the other day, I hadn’t bothered to figure out how far I usually run and now I forget, but I think it’s 3.5 – 5 miles, depending. I usually run for about 30 to 45 minutes, but I don’t wear a watch. (I’m scared of finding out that I run a ten-minute mile.) I have no interest in running marathons or a 10k. I’ve always run just to feel good and that’s it.

Today, I needed to feel good. I awoke to PG&E jackhammering outside my window at 7:45 am. If I had planned on being in a decent mood, this would have been a severe blow, but since I was already feeling crappy, the construction workers didn’t bother me. On my way to the cafe, the back door of a van of slid open revealing a bunch of queer kids who appeared no older than twenty. The ringleader called for my attention. She announced that the gay boy thought I was hot, but then the lesbians claimed me as one of their own. “We just want you to know we all think you’re hot,” she said, while her entourage giggled in the background and one of them shouted to the driver, “Go, go.” When that ego boost lasted a whole four seconds, the length of time it took for my smile to fade, I knew I was in trouble. My writing session was awful, if one can call staring at the computer screen writing. By 11 am, I didn’t think I would make it through the day without my mind combusting.

Running doesn’t always put me in a good mood. Sometimes, it is as hard as writing. Sometimes, like today, I know I just have to do it. When I left my house this morning, the sun was just starting to peek out. I ran the out portion of my longer route: down the hill, up and over Divisidero, along the panhandle, and into Golden Gate park to the turn-off for the art museum.

I would never tackle the 17% 17th St hill from my front door without a warm-up. But every since I met that former marathoner, I’d been contemplating hitting 17th St from the backside. It’s still the same height but the grade isn’t as steep, and I’m so desperately in need of a change of running route, or even an alteration, that I consider it a potential reason to move. So after I ran out of Golden Gate park, rather than continuing home, I headed up towards the backside of 17th St.

I barely noticed the uphill. I was in the zone, that adrenaline fueled fantasy where I believe I can run forever. At the top of 17th St, I could see the burnt brown mounds of Twin Peaks, the towers poking through a thin sheet of San Francisco summer fog. I was afraid of the post-euphoric slide, afraid that if I stopped running, I might die. A voice inside my head said, “If you just get to the top, you’ll be okay.”

I plugged along. Passing cars probably didn’t know I was running. By now my hair was wet, my face was dripping, and I felt like a shaggy dog. The noon sun was out in full force, pinking my cheeks as I headed up, up and up to greet it. I knew from biking that on the final climb to the top, the curvaceous switchbacks have a gentle grade. It didn’t take very long for me to reach the tourists lining the walled viewing area where I scooped my arm into the air in the subtlest of victory gestures. In almost nine years in San Francisco, I’d never run to the top of Twin Peaks.

It didn’t surprise me that I made it. It didn’t surprise me that the whole time I believed I would make it. It certainly didn’t surprise me when the tears that had threatened at the start of my run, the ones that were preparing themselves all morning, came spilling out; I know I’m okay.

Approaching the end, or almost the end, thankfully so, of what is my 30th birthday celebration, I’d like to indulge in some decade in review navel gazing.

Turning 30 may very well be my proudest accomplishment, a greater achievement than any graduation or rite of passage, like my Bat Mitzvah or first girl kiss. Last Thursday, I heard, “Happy Birthday,” “It’s about time,” and “Welcome to the club,” but I kept waiting for someone to shake my hand and say, “Congratufuckinglations. You did it.” Because, oh what I did.

My early twenties might as well have been an extension of college, except I received a paycheck. As this was during the dot com depression, even when I didn’t go to work, I was paid, my checks arriving from an organization I never lifted a finger for called the “Employment Development Department.” I passed these post-collegiate years, my queer adolescence, in a state of experimental confusion, evidenced by the many mornings I was still chain-smoking menthol cigarettes at the End Up when the sun rose.

In my early twenties, I concentrated on escapism with an emphasis in drugs. I may or may not have been called “Numero Uno” for my remarkable ability to go to work after a sleepless night. I did many dumb things during this time, but I guess there’s no point in stating the obvious. Better to say I did one, maybe two, smart things. I started to see a therapist who resembled a squirrel and regularly wore red leather pants. She liked to say, “That’s too bad,” and “I’m so sorry,” and somehow this helped me to quit taking anti-depressants, begin working out and lose 25 lbs.

During my mid-twenties, I cobbled together an income from odd jobs, many for friends with small businesses. I worked at a coffee cart, neurobiology lab, and a furniture warehouse; I answered a Craigslist Et Cetera job ad to hand out newspapers at a racetrack; I was a landscaping assistant despite being a city kid who couldn’t identify a weed; I spent a week organizing a Datsun car part junkyard for a paraplegic while the guy who wanted to be my boyfriend fixed his car.

On some days, my alarm went off at 4:50 am. I worked 12 hour days, in the sun and in the wind, manual label and data entry, for whatever anyone was willing to pay me. I took every job having a college degree should have helped me to avoid, and for the first time ever, I learned what it meant to work hard. I learned that I liked it. My squirrelly therapist called me “industrious,” and for those middle years, I didn’t worry about the future, a career.

Every time I had more than $5,000 in my savings account, I stopped accepting odd jobs and went traveling, often alone. I explored, fought through challenges, discovered my independence, built a base of self upon transience and instability. I found out that I’m my own best company and that if I mumble to myself or write down my thoughts, it’s almost as if I’m having a two-sided conversation with a great friend.

In my late twenties, I returned to San Francisco, a place that by default was turning into my home. I invested, committed, followed my passion and disappeared into books, stories, and words. I joined a community of writer’s, a graduate writing program that felt more like summer camp than school. Nearly three years passed this way.

Before the decade ended, I did the one final thing to make my twenties complete. No, not a gender change, although it was certainly under consideration. To cap off the decade, I let another person into my heart, fell in love, floated on the splendor, sunk on the disappointment, and crawled away believing that someday I’ll do it again.

I have plans, or maybe not plans, but thoughts for my thirties. They don’t seem worth mentioning. If my twenties are any guide, I’ll spend the next decade constantly surprised, doing the exact opposite of all that I intend. I do have it in my head that with the soul-searching angst of my early adulthood behind me and the fear of aging still far away, that this will be the greatest decade. I am in the best physical, mental and spiritual shape of my life. I am comfortable and confident. Happy with myself, my growth and development.

Bring on my thirties…

I thought I hated holidays. I was prepared to put on my top hat and swim trunks, go all summer Scrooge and write a ranting post at the end of this long holiday weekend. I expected all to go as planned when the surprise email hit my work inbox on Thursday morning: Office closing at noon!

Bastards! Someone from HR might as well have come up to my desk, asked me to take out my wallet and hand over all my cash before tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to enjoy the day. I’m a contractor, someone who relishes the acceptability and expectation of pre-holiday afternoons of zero productivity. While being paid.

My annoyance lasted about 11 minutes, and then it was time to leave. Pusing through the revolving door of my office highrise, the mid-day Thursday air greeted me in a way that it never had before. It said, “You have no responsibilities. No plans. Nothing.”

Perhaps it was the preceeding month of chaos. Of travel and indulgence and so many days spent in the company of others, but I was relieved that many of my friends were out of town, that both of my roommates were gone. I even felt comforted by the fog that descended upon the city on the 4th. I’m not trying to spite the masses of picnic goers, BBQers, or fireworks lovers any more than my company tried to spite me by cutting my hours on Thursday; I just finally got a holiday on my own terms — no ceremony, no universal celebration, no people bothering me with their general peopleness.

I though a lot this weekend about the timeI spent in Cesky Krumlov, an anacrhonistic town in the Czech Republic with arched gates, a medieval castle and cobblestone streets. Bustling with tourists in the summer, in the winter, or at least the beginning of December, the town is dead. The only other backpackers at my hostel, some Canadian guys, left after the standard 2 day visit, just enough time for us to fire up some absinthe shots and for me puke my guts out. Then there was nobody left in the hostel but me. I, too, was only supposed to stay two days. I planned to head to Berlin before meeting my friend in Paris, the end of a two and half month trip, most of which I traveled alone.

I still wonder what it was that allowed or caused me to stay in Cesky Krumlov for two weeks. I remember reading for entire mornings — The Life of Pi and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (I seemed to think that reading Milan Kundera in his homeland might help me understand it. Maybe it did a little.) I tried several cafes, but started to regularly visit this one decorated with Beethoven themes where I could listen to the river cascade by the window.

Every day in the afternoon, I’d walk up to the castle, across the drawbridge and wander around the grounds. I’d sit by the frosting lake and write in my journal or talk into my mini-tape recording device — the castle chronicles, I called my ramblings. I went on walks — to the local ice hockey rink and along a marked trail into the woods. I cooked simple grocery store dinners — pasta or rice and anything green I could find along with something out of a can — while watching the Simpsons dubbed into German. I read more.

Once a day, I would write a very long email to a friend in San Francisco, our deliberating exchanges building into one long conversation. That interaction took care of almost all of my human contact needs. My only other human contact came from a Brazilian guy with crystalline blue eyes, haunting in their beauty. I saw him when he came for his daily check  in on the Merlin hostel where I stayed. He told me one of the town legends, the one famous to the expats, about those travelers who came and never left: The Curse of Cesky Krumlov.

Maybe it was some type of magic — the supposedly enchanted hollow trees near the castle, the hypnotizing effect of the encircling Vltava River — that kept me grounded in that town until the last possible day.

This weekend, I shifted reading positions from my back deck, to couch, to chair, to bed to cafe. I interspersed my readings with walks and runs and  yoga, with a satisfying conversation here and another one there. I stuffed my face with fruits and vegetables and ice cream. For the first time in a while, I felt as if I’d donned my backpack, my traveler mindset, and had arrived at that place where aloneness is expansive and being occupied has nothing to do with being busy. With all of the junk and distraction cleared from around me, I felt myself back in the hostel, thriving on the solace of Cesky Krumlov, unaccountable to everyone, lost in my own bohemia.

On Saturday afternoon, my friend Ashley and I headed South on coastal Route 1. We were headed to a barn dance at Pie Ranch, the farm responsible for the those great baked goods sold in the city at Mission Pie. Although every month the farm invites friends and family for a potluck and night of contra dancing (similar to square dancing), this barn dance was to be a special summer solstice party, as well as what my friend, farmer Dede, an apprentice at Pie Ranch, billed as the queerest barn dance in the land. This being June, all of Dede’s friends were invited to do what we do best in June: turn everything gay.

When we reached Pescadero, traffic stopped in both directions. Bystanders told us the road would be closed for 8-10 hours for an investigation. Ashley knew we were only about 100 meters shy of the farm, and could see the barn around the bend. So she parked the car in a dirt patch on the side of the road, and we proceeded to walk up into and along the scene of a five-car crash. As we walked, Ashley’s mind ran wild with the possibilities. I don’t know why mine didn’t. Maybe I thought car accidents happen to “other” people. And on this day, they did.

Several people associated with Pie Ranch, heading to the barn dance in a convertible, were involved in the crash, but suffered no injuries. The speeding, swerving driver who caused the crash died instantly, but remained stuck in his car for an hour. In another car, a man from San Francisco, badly injured, survived for 20 minutes after the accident, but not longer. For over an hour, his girlfriend was trapped inside the same car. She survived and was airlifted by helicopter to the hospital. Ashley and I arrived not long after the helicopter left.

Several workers on the farm saw the whole thing. The accident took place so close to the barn, it’s a surprise one of the cars didn’t fly into it. The bodies, the injured and the dead, stayed on the road for long after the impact. Between the glass and debris and the Pie Ranch folks at the picnic tables waiting to give statements to the police, there was nothing in the atmosphere that bespoke party.

Only two things could play out for the rest of the night. First, as guests continued to arrive, there would be lots of chatter about what happened, how it happened. Different people would recreate the accident, the collision dynamics. Others would ask questions upon questions, details so everyone could talk through the shock. Second, there would be lots of appreciation, thankfulness for being alive, about being together; a dangerous sort of collective sentiment to be let out in a hippie community of farmers.

I would’ve done anything to get out of there. To run, to flee, to turn back around.

One of the farm’s leaders suggested hauling the picnic tables by pick-up to another part of the land; I was all for it. But the avoidance plan was quickly shut down as over time the commotion along the accident strewn road quieted and the cops departed. So many people were already there for the celebration, that the leaders decided to go along with the potluck, the rest of the night’s activities to be decided.

Goat stew was the main course. Or to be more specific, “Fiesta” stew. Dede was the first person to say it, to reference the name of the goat. “Sorry,” she said right afterwards. “I’m not sure if that’s okay.” But it was apparently alright. Others who live on the farm referred to Fiesta by name, as well. They lived on the farm for a month with Fiesta, cared for her and loved her. “That’s the circle of life,” I heard someone say, clearly talking about both the goat and the accident.

The sun fell. The sky darkened. The stars would soon start to pop. A semi-sermon grounding everyone into the events of the day, our ecological surroundings, and as I expected, our reasons to be thankful ensued. A woman with gray hair and a dress that made it clear she didn’t care much about what other people thought, said that she wanted to dance. “I want to dance in honor of the people who died today. For their families who don’t yet know they have lost loved ones.”

I know that I didn’t think consciously about the families of the dead, or about the people whose blood still remained on the road within a stone’s throw of the party. I had eavesdropped on one conversation that day, a father telling his son of the debilitating fear he felt approaching the ranch. I witnessed one mother greet her daughter in an explosion of tears. I had walked alongside Ashley while we approached the accident, thinking that her best friend was in it. I never let myself feel that fear; express that relief.

My meltdown occurred after dinner, sitting at a picnic table. I started to cry, an almost endless stream of tears. Getting up and finding some privacy didn’t even occur to me; embarssment and self-pity were far from my mind. I was thankful that nobody said they were sorry I was sad, or tried to cheer me up, or make it to away, or treat my surge of emotion as a bad thing. My friends took turns rubbing my back, wrapping arms around me, holding my head. And maybe it was the physical contact, the warmth and compassion of their bodies, the connectedness and safety that made it impossible for me to stop.

Nobody asked me why I was so upset either. I think all who knew me understood I was grieving. For everything.

I cried for death. For Fiesta. For mortality. For the exhausting jig I’m doing while some yahoo out of a Wild West movie shoots bullets at my feet, screaming, “Dance, motherfucker, dance.” Bullets coming closer and closer, dust clouds rising by my shoes, I know there is nothing I can do to protect myself, my friends, my family.

I grieved for the tiny deaths, too, that of each moment, that which is sometimes called “change.” I cried for my own insecurity, an understanding that we are nothing, have nothing, death strips us of all that we build ourselves up to be, all that we hold onto.

For the death of my relationship, and the first spadefulls of dirt hitting the coffin, slowly filling in the grave. For the shoveling still left to be done, a mound of earth, level ground, a new relationship. For my brother who is ready to leave behind this country, this culture, me. For the uncertainty of his future and his hopeful leap across the ocean.

Why couldn’t I stop crying? That damn moon. Its pull on the ocean, the waves crashing in and out. The cycle of nature. Its pull on my body. The end of the month. PMS.

Eventually, I did stop. I even went into the barn and despite myself, I danced. I twirled my partner left and twirled my partner right. I traded partners. I skipped and sashayed, slapped my thighs and slapped my partner’s hands. I dosey doed. Repeatedly. I listened to a speech about how we transformed the energy of the evening, the implicit meaning: we turned tragedy into mindful celebration.

I wish I could say that I still head some strength in me to remain with my own discomfort and that of the day’s events and triggers. But when the last car was headed back to San Francisco, I asked for a ride. I barely knew the couple and we would have to cram in the front cab of a pickup. It didn’t matter. I thought that by leaving, I could escape to the comfort of my home, that it would offer me a sense of security, protect me. Instead of continuing to stare my own pain in the face, I fled like the chickens on the farm where I was supposed to be sleeping. I followed the couple, a husband and wife who were exceedingly warm and open, but whose names I couldn’t remember, out to their truck.

We walked out past the barn. The night, the space, the escape filled me with freedom. I finally felt the relief, that of thinking I had left it all behind. We walked in the dark, under a star-pocked sky, the moon not yet out.

“Watch out for the car roof,” the husband said.

The wife scanned the ground. It wasn’t that dark out, and the roof was huge, mangled by the five-car accident that left two people dead. I don’t know how she missed it, nearly tripped over it. I don’t know why he needed to say, “car roof,” so specific was the reminder.

I do know why I tried to escape, why I try to deny death, its omnipresence in the large and small. I am afraid.

Lately, I’ve been turning to the author’s note in nonfiction books for guidance about writing. I think this has something to do with my MFA program. There were only two kinds of classes, one where we offered feedback to each other on our shitty first drafts and another where we read literary masterpieces. How to get from a shitty first draft to a masterpiece was never covered. The how is in the writing process, of course, but in nonfiction I always get hung up on the extra element, the translation of “truth” into story. Or more specifically, I get hung up on truth.

The following is the opening of an author’s note from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

“This is a true story. In order to make its rendition tolerable, certain moments in it have been gently altered–by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary.”

Some of this I consider to be standard for memoir writing and completely acceptable. “Blithely skipping over unpleasantness” is what I consider omitting. It’s the scalpel that cuts the arc of the story, and without it, we’d be reading play-by-plays of people’s lives. The rendition would not be tolerable. This line also tells me that for the most part, Boylan chose to shape her story around the positive aspects of her experience. We all have that right.

“Compressing and inverting the time line.” Fine, I’ll take it. For the sake of tension and Freitag’s pyramid, and for a compelling page-turner of a book. I feel like “gently altered” borders on being an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s probably a great example of what my teachers meant about the importance of making perfect word choices.

“Making various people taller or shorter” is changing physical attributes of characters. Not a big deal. But the line is kinda offhanded, like she’s sitting in a wicker rocking chair, smoking a Virgina Slims, tossing a hand over her shoulder as she says, “Tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, no matter.”

Here’s where I get stuck: “Inventing dialogue.” It’s like she’s giving up any pretense of truth. Invent means to create, or to concoct and fabricate. To me, “inventing dialogue” implies that no effort was spent trying to remember the dialogue, as if that would be too much for a reader to expect. Boylan uses dialogue for pacing, and in one scene, I think she put words in a doctor’s mouth, for the purpose of lending them authority.

What are we left with after tossing Boylan a bone for not using composite characters? Well, she altered, gently, the plot, characters, and dialouge, which means the setting is super accurate. The fiction writers I know also often aim for truth in setting.

Perhaps the point then is one that I hear often. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t very different. Fiction has to be believable, and nonfiction has to be salable, I mean constructed, and both have to employ similar techniques in order to be stories. And that’s what Boylan’s book is, a story, and I understand that in the meaningful ways, the ones that are emotionally resonant, her story is 100% true.

To easily categorize this book, it is a transsexual memoir. Somewhere in the back of my mind, even though I know the answer, I wonder why it couldn’t exist as a novel, why the curiosity factor wouldn’t hold up if it were simply a story. Would I feel any better if nonfiction books said, “Based on a true story,” like the movies?

Maybe it would have no impact. I don’t feel duped as a reader, but as a writer. I feel duped into trying to be truthful. That’s not entirely true. My philosophy is don’t get caught. I embellish for humor’s sake. I constantly remind myself that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it makes whatever sound I want it to make. I invent my thoughts with the abandon of someone who knows that scientists have not developed a mind-reader to verify them.

But as I learn from continually reading author’s notes, there is a better philosophy than “don’t get caught.” It’s own up to whatever you did, descriptive white lies and made-up conversations, then explain it at the end of the book, where nobody will see it.