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25. Hot yoga at dusk, covered in sweat, and wearing only a pair of shorts.

24. The strap of a messenger bag making a perfect diagonal line across my upper body.

23. Doing it on top without the flappity-flap of my flesh. 

22. Plaid boxers.

21. Barefoot, shirtless, and free ballin’ it in jeans while cooking breakfast on a Sunday morning.

20. Pick up bball with nine dudes and taking a charge into the brick wall of my chest.

19. An expensive tailored dress shirt.

18. Skin tight white t-shirts.

17. Long-underwear style shirts.

16. Gripping the back of a t-shirt with both hands, pulling it over my head, and throwing it to the ground.

15. Transgender visibility.

14. Running on the beach in swim trunks and splashing into the shallow waves.

13. Enjoying a hot tub.

12. Small nipples.

11. Making-out with a gay guy, our hard bodies pressed together.

10. Making-out with a queer girl, our physical differences magnified.

9. Embracing my faggy effeminate side.

8. Knowing, even when others can’t tell.

7. No more San Francisco Indian summer days with a sweaty, chaffing, suffocating plate of armor underneath my shirt.

6. Long runs without a sports bra.

5. No more shoulder straps. Ever.

4. Being topless and happy at the same time.

3. More space in my drawer for underwear and socks.

2. A closet and bureau that consists entirely of men’s clothing.

1. A sleeping lover, her head resting on my flat chest.

Sometimes when my brother and I are hanging out, his phone rings. This is how his side of the conversation goes:

“Hey man, how’s it going?

“No way, man, I had no idea.”

“Really, man, that’s cool.”

“I’m just hanging with my sister, man. We’re eating dinner and relaxing. We might get some beers.”

“Yeah, man. I’m around tomorrow. Let’s do it”

“Later, man.”

I’m not exaggerating. For some reason, my mature, intelligent, educated, well-spoken brother develops a tourettic “man” tic when he talks to his friends. It’s not even special friends, although it should be more than clear that it is only when talking to male friends.

A couple weeks ago, I bumped into a co-worker at a restaurant. He greeted me with an excited, “Hey man, how’s it going?” I rode high for the rest of the night, convinced that he saw something in me that I see in myself, and outside the workplace, fueled by a dinner buzz, the words just naturally spilled out. This probably isn’t that case. He probably meant it the way some people think “dude” and “guys” is a gender-neutral form of address, which is way too big of a discussion to get into here, but suffice to say, there is a part of me (not the only part of me) that hears the gender-neutrality of those words, or connotations that transcend gender, like two friends (neither of whom were me) ripping bong hits in a tapestry-decorated college dorm room while listening to Cypress Hill’s “I Wanna Get High” and referring to each other as “dude.”

For me, at least, it’s a bit harder to hear anything other than the man in “man.” It’s the beginning of it all, Adam and Eve, mankind, the Founding Fathers and ”all men are created equal.” It’s biblical, heteronormative, the binary of man and woman and a union defined with the words, ”Do you take this man.” It’s the evil we fight against, the Man. It’s the burden to “Be a Man.” It’s the silent destroyer in the word that should unite us all: “human.” It’s a greedy bastard, taking up space and infiltrating the one place it isn’t welcome: “woman.”

As I’m becoming more vocal about myself, expressing that which is unspoken by my chromosomes, my hormones, my flesh, people are responding. The other day, I did a nice thing for a friend. “Thanks, man,” he said. A few days later, I made a new friend and he offered me a nod of understanding, “I’ll see you later, man.”

The word sounds funny on me. New. I equate it with hoary white guys, eighteen year old boys, and those with dick-size insecurity. ”Man” doesn’t sting my ears the way an address of “lady” or “girl” or “woman” does, but like a pair of unworn snowboard boots, it hasn’t been broken in yet.

Last night, I had dinner with a good friend, the queerest person I know, and someone who sees me so clearly that I sometimes wonder if she’d be as shocked as I am upon sight of my unclothed female body. “Does it bother you when I talk about my man-hatred?” she asked. “Like how I was offended that you didn’t consider yourself a woman?”

She was referring to a discussion we’d had months before, after my outrage post at being referred to as a “woman” in Curve magazine. At the time, she’d told me that a small part of her took my response personally, that she was slighlty offended because deep down, she was a “big old lesbian,” and I was rejecting that. I thought about wearing my rugby jacket to the Indigo Girls concert it ‘98, the older woman with feathered bangs and a softball player’s phsyique who kissed me and then cracked a joke about her toaster collection. Deep down there is a place in my heart where I hold the big old lesbian in me.

“No, I’m not offended,” I said. “I hate men, too.” There was this guy sucking face with this girl on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building. I admired his stubble.

“Well, I don’t hate men,” she said. I rolled my eyes a little, internally. She has a live-in boyfriend. Of course, she doesn’t. 

Today, I got an email with the double “man,” a greeting of “hey man” and a closing of “take care, man.” I don’t want to ever hear someone talk to me like my brother talks to his friends, dropping the word constantly the way I did with “like” in high school. I know that there is some calcluation gone into this form of address, especially with me. When I hear it, the man-hater in me wants to try on a frilly yellow dress one more time. But the man in me is appreciative for the recognition, for the invitation into the brotherhood; I just hope it doesn’t mean giving up the key I already have. I may not use it regularly, but I always sleep with it under my pillow. 

I was inspired by last week’s New Yorker, the one with “Red Death on Wall Street” on the cover, no schadenfraude intended. Despite the nightmares in which I’m greeted by the Grim Reaper in Dennis Rodman hip-hop garb and I cry tears of blood, the Malcolm Gladwell article, “Late Bloomers,” gave me a bit of artistic hope.

It opens with an anecdote (warning: article spoiler) about this guy who quits his job as a lawyer with the dream we all know too well of being A Writer. He has little literary training, but is disciplined. He sells a few stories, and is obviously intelligent, having passed the bar and all. At this point in my reading, I start shaking my head and muttering obscenities. I’m having flashbacks to the Murakami article several months ago (culled from his new running memoir) in which he describes quitting his bar-owning lifestyle to become a best-selling prolific novelist because it “suited” him. I’m not sure if I’m revising Murakami here, but I basically understood his career path as an I-decided-to-be-a-writer-and-so-it-happened tale.

So, this lawyer sells some stories, then there’s a dark period, an unpublished novel, then something in Harper’s, a short story collection, then lots of awards. I’m envious and bitter and pretty sure I’m on the local bus to nowheresville, when Gladwell tells us the catch: the timeline. This lawyer guy’s rise took 18 years. Immediately, I felt buoyant.

The article explores our natural inclination to associate genuis with precocity, using examples like Ben Fountain (the lawyer and late bloomer) and Jonathon Saffron Foer (the precocious genius), as well as Picasso and Cezanne. It debunks some myths and introduces the concept of the “patron,” the person or people who fund the artist on the long walk to glory. I began to find that it helps me deal with my job if I consider my company my patron rather than my employer.

This is one of my favorite quotes: ”On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

I like the quote and the article because they give me the illusion of hope, offering a nod to the blind faith that is the antithesis to my logical constitution. It is one of last lines in the article that left me the most encouraged, “sometimes genuis is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

I have more rejections coming my way. More setbacks. More thoughts of failure. More crappy patrons. More ass sores from sitting in that damn desk chair. But someday, I tell you, some day…

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.