2019.

I've had a semi-formal tradition, for many years now, of sitting down at the end of a year to reflect on what has happened, and try and set a bit of a tone for the year to come.

It's a good thing I have practice at doing this, because there's just... far too much to comprehend, packed into the preceding 365 days.

My memory - refreshed by estrogen therapy and a remarkably effective set of additional vitamins - is scarily accurate these days, but there are still patches that are dark. I don't know what I was doing exactly a year ago, but it was probably because I was recovering from a massive tooth infection and a messy holiday season spent avoiding my biological family.

I had just begun to dimly realize that I was not, in fact, a straight cis man. The world seemed weird but somehow had some alluring potential, and maybe things would be new and exciting.

January

January had barely begun when things went off the rails. My rescue Malamute was caught outside in a nasty winter storm and - despite knowing full well that he could simply come in through the gigantic dog door I'd had custom-installed in the side of the kitchen wall, he simply... didn't. The next morning, he was shivering, soaking wet, and terrified on the back deck, looking out at the completely demolished fence around the yard.

I'd invested hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of grueling labor getting that fence reinforced, because - as with many Malamutes - my dog was an escape artist. Given some privacy and a little bit of boredom (or just the incentive of something smelly on the other side of the fence) he never passed up a chance to try and explore the wide world.

And that night, he just sat on the deck, and went nowhere.

I spent a couple weeks struggling to keep him comforted and help him recover, but he deteriorated quickly. Night after night, we walked around in the snow and freezing rain, hours on end. I'd bring him back home, shattered and exhausted, and hope he would sleep for even just a few hours. Eventually, between the threat of impending pneumonia and the obvious psychological strain of my own, it was clear that he needed other care.

I surrendered him back to the rescue agency and tried to settle in to face the first year I'd spent without him since 2014. I thought it was a nasty way to begin a year, but hey, a few miserable weeks in January couldn't ruin all of 2019, right?

February

My personal life was a bit of a mess, but I threw myself into my job, as I tended to do in those days - looking to stay occupied, keep busy, just regain center.

Part way through February, our company went through a truly brutal set of layoffs and restructuring. As tends to happen, people continued to leave voluntarily over the next few months, seeing a lack of hope and a chance to try something new elsewhere.

I struggled to hold together some kind of effectiveness on the job, even while secretly fighting back a panic that I wasn't even able to handle myself.

March

By the end of the first quarter of 2019, the very year itself was a four-letter-word in almost all of my social circles. People seemed to have unprecedented pain, loss, unforeseen or maybe just unavoidable. It was a quiet but passionate curse.

2019.

I saw relationships (including my own) shatter and vanish. I felt like I'd lost almost everything. Too much time to just sit around in my now-empty (and deathly quiet) house, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

April

Spring started and - as the metaphor goes - things started to bloom again. I found my first name on the 8th, while sitting in traffic. I drove around mindlessly a lot that month, using the car as a sort of mobile isolation chamber to just try and let my mind roam while I struggled to make sense of it all.

By the end of the month, I'd latched onto something, but wasn't yet entirely sure what it was. The 28th saw the inaugural entry in a journal that eventually became this web site.

May. June. July.

Looking back, those three months were defined by a single theme: I knew, at least one some vague level, who I was supposed to be; it was a matter of charting a course and figuring out how to get her to replace whatever mess was roaming around the physical world in charge of my body.

A dear colleague left the company during that time. I was nowhere near out, yet, but when they told me in person that they had resigned, they quietly asked if I was also looking for work.

At first I was taken aback; I'd been fighting - hard, and with good success - to salvage my team and job, and leaving was the last thing on my mind. They must have seen my confusion, because they noted that I had "been clean-shaven and dressing nicely a lot" and also taking odd hours off - and maybe that correlated with interviewing.

It was all I could do to suppress the line that immediately sprang to mind:

Yeah, I'm actually training my replacement already. I think you'd like her.

On July 2nd, I had a private meeting with a representative from HR, who I knew and trusted. And for the first time on any "official" level, I declared my intent to live my truth.

On the 4th I was dealing with some nasty wounds left over from growing up overseas; the outright colonialist, nationalistic zeal was overwhelmingly sickening, and I wrote some impassioned words trying to make sense of it all.

I knew I needed a legacy - a heritage, to replace the family I'd finally shut out completely and left behind. I needed a full name to use when I finally announced to the company who I really am. And I needed to feel ownership of the growing well of fierce love and protection I felt towards... people.

On July 6th, the last piece of that puzzle clicked into place, and for the first time in my entire life, I signed my real, full name.

August

The email from HR went out on August 7th. I had taken the day off work, just for simplicity. A couple of weeks before, I'd visited a women's clinic in the area and been put on the path to obtain hormone replacement therapy - what proved to be a vital breakthrough for me. My first set of prescriptions was filled a week later, at a pharmacy I've used since moving to the area over eight years before.

On the night of August 16th, a Friday, I had what I can only describe in hindsight as a profound panic attack. I was still, on some level, uncertain of whether or not I was doing the right thing. I hadn't actually picked up my prescriptions. That night, huddled in bed and feeling strangely out of sorts, I resolved that - one more time - nothing could possibly stop me. I was going to get the pills, and start taking them Saturday. It was all safe, easily reversible for a while, and I had every assurance that if it didn't work for me, I'd just try some other way to live.

I hadn't even gotten back to the house with the pills - let alone actually taken any of them - when the incredible, inescapable gender euphoria came flooding in. And for the next week, I shed layer after excruciating layer of baggage, pain, and what I quickly realized was just debris accumulated from years of not knowing who I was.

Amelia was free.

September. October. November.

The year had begun with pain and loss. The summer had ended and I found myself with an unbelievable amount of momentum. Anything that felt like it might have been holding me back was examined carefully, and either healed, or set free. On October 18th, I wrote something of a ritual saying, that I used frequently in the following weeks:

To the Disconnected.

May we never meet again as the people we once were.

Should two strangers encounter each other by chance someday, perhaps we can marvel at who we have become in the time between.

And then it was time for Thanksgiving, and family came calling again.

(I should note that I'd been in contact with exactly one relative throughout the year, for various reasons, but suddenly others were concerned about why I'd been invisible for over ten months.)

By the end of November, I had finished thinking it over, and knew I had to do something. I wound up writing several pages of heart-rending truth to my parents, and stuffed it all into an envelope and left it in the mailbox one morning in early December.

December

Nothing could have prepared me for the complete about-face in my life. In December of 2018, I'd begun systematically blocking contact methods from my relatives, sealing myself off from a life I was prepared to never think about again.

Instead, I spent hours over the Christmas week on the phone with my parents, my sisters, and other friends. I used to hate phones. Somehow, during 2019, I became something of a power user of my Pixel 2 XL Android phone, and we're now inseparable.

My house no longer feels empty or lonely. At any given moment, I have ongoing conversations with someone - slow, thoughtful email exchanges, or rapid-fire chats, or texts back and forth. My kitchen is spotless and there's a nice promising nook in the window where I want to grow some succulents next year.

The yard is a mess, but as a sign of promise to myself and my future plans, I keep a hummingbird feeder stocked at all times in the back - a place where once a huge, fuzzy dog roamed free. It amazed me to learn, years ago, that hummingbirds frequent this area even in winter; and while I've yet to see any this winter, I look forward to the spring, when I know they'll be around in force.

I've begun sorting through the mountains of memorabilia and random "stuff" I've accumulated in three decades of floating around Earth. At one time, I never really though I would ever really understand the idea of "home." And yet, here I am - five and a half years in this house, the longest I have ever spent in any one residence in my entire life, by a factor of two beyond the next runner-up.

I understand the idea of roots, of community, of belonging, of purpose.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of winter with a kind of powerful, wise reverence - of a time when growth turns inwards, to strengthen a core and build towards new life when the warmth returns.

2019.

Fuck it. We did it. We're here, we made it, and it's all but over. Just under 5 hours from now, there will be no more of this year left. For a long time, I literally couldn't imagine what the year could have lying in wait. Ten months ago I was terrified of what might yet be coming.

And now, at the end of this cycle, all I can think is that this is the best damn year of my entire life. But it isn't in a sad, wistful way - I haven't "peaked."

I'm just getting started.

Let's see where this Starship goes.

"Other" by Default

This is one of those thoughts that, somehow, your brain manages to assemble while asleep - and, while it may seem like you just got up for a quick midnight snack, what you really needed to be awake for was to write this stuff down. Because it's important.

It's probably pretty apparent at this point on this site that I'm fairly unusual. I have proudly worn the label "queer" for some time now, but there is a larger and more powerful label that I have repeatedly worked at owning for most of my adult life:

Other.

I was raised overseas. Discovering the idea of "third culture" phenomena in my young adulthood was a huge revelation to me, and it ultimately proved deeply healing. It explained so much of my struggle to find identity, community, and belonging. Without spending too much time on the details, "third culture" is basically the inevitable outcome of being "born in" one culture and being raised in a second. Kids in that kind of scenario inevitably feel alien to both cultures on some level. Host country can, as it did for me, become far more of a true "home" than the "passport" country.

Citizenship has always felt strange to me. I was surrounded by peers, as a kid, who had been born outside the United States (or other countries of "origin") and therefore held dual citizenships. I had known this was a possibility for maybe two hours in my young life before becoming jealous and, frankly, somewhat resentful of my own US citizenship. I was already trying to cling to my otherness as a more powerful, resonant identity.

Growing up, I found myself other in more ways over time - my refusal to conform to the religious ideologies around me; my cultural incongruence and strange insistence on speaking multiple languages (sometimes to try and teach them to other people, but often just to be cryptic and a generally incorrigible teenager); my fascination with computers and electronic technology. I was fortunate, in that sense, to be fairly introverted, because I spent a lot of time alone.

The friends I made were not numerous, but the friendships were unbelievably deep. We connected, every single time, over being the weird ones. We were the nerds, the geeks, the social outcasts, the culturally inept or simply too different.

I eventually discovered Hunter S. Thompson and immediately fell in love with a quote of his, about one of his characters: "too weird to live, too rare to die."

With the benefit of many years of hindsight, I've found another category of other which has connected me to people deeply over the years: and that, quite simply, can be called queer.

It's not really a secret that the label "queer" is controversial. And I think there are many reasons for that, but to me, the term is well on its way to being reclaimed from the slur it has often been, and the hateful intent behind it can certainly be replaced with a healthier - even healing - sentiment.

I have long been fascinated by etymology, as a way to trace the lineage of words, and understand their intent and connotations beyond what a typical dictionary entry can capture. The literal lineage of the word "queer" is - prior to its political weaponization - easily summarized as a phrase: "well, that's kind of different!"

Queer to me began as a simple line in the sand: gender and sexual identity. The gender binary and the entire social construct of gender are things I've spent much of the past year deconstructing and reassembling in my mind. Sexual orientation was certainly one of the older connotations of the word that I've had to try and wrap my lesbian brain around, and being a child of the 80's, "gay" was a slur I heard far too often growing up.

But as I dismantled all this in my head, "queer" rapidly became so much more; there are relationship structures that are "kind of different." There are personality quirks, cultural elements, behavioral patterns - so much of being human is fodder for that exact reaction:

"Well, that's kind of different!"

There is a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from my youth that has always tickled the part of me that is fascinated by linguistics. The titular characters have a brief but amusing discussion about "verbing" - the practice of taking a word that is not usually considered a verb, and making it one.

As Calvin famously observes, "verbing weirds language."

Nothing - absolutely nothing - says "let's weird up our language" to me like reclamation. Let's make it kind of different! Make it our own. And so, early this year, I internally started referring to the process of reclamation as "queering."

And, again, it didn't stop there. Why bother limiting it to reclamation? So much of queer culture is about developing identity - finding what works, for each of us, and in our own myriad combinations of intersectionality, creating something for ourselves.

In early September 2019, in a small community I like to hang out in, I posted a thought that has become increasingly dear to me:

i dream of a world where people can come together, share a chuckle about our similarities, and get on with the good bit - where we revel in our differences.

So, that's the context - the setup, if you will. Here's the fun part.

Proof

Let's start by running with the current idea of "other" - something which makes us different, sets us apart. A reason that - for many - we could be considered separate; a reason to treat us badly, perhaps, or to be shunned, isolated, alienated. Maybe it's simply different, but generally, it has a bad connotation.

But here's the thing: people are not isolated. Isolation is, universally, recognized as a brutal, inhumane, and even evil thing to impose on a human being. Sometimes we choose isolation - and, as a longtime introvert, I get it. But "queer" and "other" communities have a powerful and consistent theme: we find each other. It may take an excruciatingly long time; it may be a hard fight. But we find each other, as often and as best we can - often by nothing more than blind instinct.

And we stick together, our little pockets of other, trying not to feel so alone.

Star Wars is in the zeitgeist right now, and The Rise of Skywalker has a quote that I feel is powerfully resonant here. No matter what kind of enemy you might be up against, just remember this: "they" win by making you think you're alone.

So here's the logical part. Let's go back to the actual denotational semantics of the word "other." If you have two things, you can say you have one, and the other. If you have more than two things, you have one, and all the others. Any time there is something not-in-isolation, there are others.

Individual people can be isolated - by choice, by coincidence, by coercion. But it's patently false to assert that people are in isolation. The planet is crawling with literally billions of us.

Since we're being somewhat intellectual about this, let's grab some mathematics. Combinatorics gives us a powerful tool for computing how many combinations of something can be arranged. So, here's a fun exercise. (Check my math, please; it's 4 AM and I'm winging this.)

A common example is selecting 5 cards from a deck of 52 cards. The formula is messy and a pain to do by hand, but the number of unique 5-card hands you can draw from a "standard" deck of 52 cards is 2,598,960.

There are about 12,000 people in the small "city" area I live in (crammed inside a larger urban area, of course). So, let's say we want to gather 20 people from that population. How many ways can we form a group?

The notation in combinatorics is nCr where n is our population (12,000) and r is the number of elements we want to combine (20). The number is given by (12000!) / (20!)(11,980!) which is, according to a few online calculators I used to cross-check this:

1,551,030,175,211,381,239,928,461,989,115,295,098,895,532,576,866,970,233,655,389,400

That is the number of unique ways in which 12,000 humans can form groups of 20 individuals.

Think about that for a moment. Please, genuinely, do your best. It is an incomprehensible number and well beyond the threshold of what human intuition is equipped to handle.

When you've recovered, proceed carefully. It gets worse.

Try that math again, with one million humans to choose from. Form a party of 20. This is the largest I can get a web site to do for me, and the answer has 103 digits. It's literally incomprehensibly more than the upper-end estimate for the number of atoms in the known universe.

One more leap: 7.7 billion people, estimated as of this year, live on this planet.

How many ways, do you suppose, can we form groups of 20, with over seven and a half billion individuals to choose from?

And now it's time for the punch line.

Pick any subject relevant to, say, intersectional feminism, or social justice, or being - well - "other." Anything that makes you feel different, feel alone, feel ostracized. Something you had to "come out" as being, doing, feeling, believing - whatever. Something that sets you apart. Makes you different.

Every single person, in all space and time, is unique. No matter how tiny, there is something that makes you even just a tiny bit different.

How many of those do you have?

How many people do you know who can share at least one of those things?

Can you think of anything that you consider part of yourself that qualifies as "other", and also imagine that maybe 20 people on the planet share it? (Perhaps you already know those people - fans of a cult classic film, members of a club, maybe just a family of some kind - or perhaps you don't know any, but simply hope that they're out there.)

Seven and a half billion of us. Countless ways to be unique. If we all formed groups of 20...

"Other" is not abnormal. "Other" is not rare. "Other" is not an aberration, a flaw, a reason for isolation. There are far more ways to be "other" and still be together than there are ways to be "normal."

Normativity is poison. Here's your antidote.

Other is the fucking default.

Don't fill in the blank of your life as a "please specify." Demand that everyone else justify why they think they are "normal."

We're all other to every other person already. Own it. You deserve it.

Form groups. 20 is an arbitrary number. We have larger, and smaller, intersections available. Link up. Find the rest of the revolution, in whatever pockets of otherness you want to own.

Let's go queer the world.

Debut

One of the interesting tidbits of culture that I've recently become fascinated with is the idea of "queer prom" and other special-occasion events that are "redone" - sometimes long after the expected event would typically occur - in order to provide people with a more authentic experience than they could have had earlier in life.

There is a wonderful insistence in these circles that "there is no such thing as too late." The power of these cultures is in acceptance and adaptation - take whatever combination works for you, and make it your own.

The European tradition of the débutante is mired in highly problematic issues of patriarchy, classist hierarchy, and curated marriage. But the core of it - the literal meaning of the word, i.e. "female beginner" - seems useful to me.

A few weeks ago I bought a dress, and in a combination of excitement and complete unfamiliarity with dresses, managed to break the clasp behind the neck, rendering it unusable. I spent yesterday afternoon tediously sewing a new clasp into place so I could wear the dress last night.

It was the first time in my life that I have not only worn a dress, but done so in public, in a large and highly populated venue, for over seven hours total. It was the first time in my life I carried a purse, at all - complete with chapstick, a supply of mints, and neatly folded lace gloves that matched the dress.

For the first time in my life, I had not only been eagerly anticipating a social function, but also thrown myself into preparing for it. I spent hours hanging out with a range of old friends, and made a few new acquaintances; I got to recommend a drink to someone who informed me later that it was her new favorite drink of choice; and - quite possibly the biggest deal for me, personally - I spent the entire time hanging around with other women and being treated as if I'd always belonged there.

It's a good thing the venue kicked us out when they did because I was prepared to try and ride the adrenaline for the rest of the night; falling asleep by 2 AM was tricky enough as it was.

In all the most meaningful ways, December 7th, 2019 was my debut - as my true self.

It took 33 years to discover that self. Last night was four months, to the day, after a company-wide email was sent out in which I announced who I am to my coworkers.

There is no such thing as too late.