Viral Hope

It's currently just after noon on a Saturday, but I have barely left the house in any meaningful sense in over two weeks. My area is currently facing severe restrictions on movement and daily life due to the global pandemic situation, and I've been fortunate enough to have a head-start on the physical isolation aspects because my employer was proactive and cautious even ahead of the (admirably responsive) local government.

I also have experience with life in less-than-convenient circumstances. Going weeks between opportunities to obtain groceries or supplies is not unfamiliar to me. It's been many years since I needed to draw on these skills, but after a little bit of dusting-off, they're still sharp and effective.

So I have avoided the panic buying sprees, the crowds, the unrest. It's brutally hard, as an extrovert, to not be able to see people right now, but video chats and phone calls help immensely.

I recognize both the financial and life-history privileges that make it possible for me to sit here, in the midst of an urban area being essentially locked down, and feel optimistic. I also recognize that optimism is inaccessible for most people right now. Hell, treading water feels out of reach for many.

So here's what I want to do: I want you to see what I see.

Human Interaction

The depth, reach, sincerity, and responsiveness of human compassion in the past few weeks has been breathtaking. You won't see news segments that really capture it. You won't read about it in articles. Because people are too busy being out there making a difference. And besides, hope doesn't sell advertisements.

Physical isolation does not need to imply social separation. If anything, this is the time for as many of us as possible to lean on the technology we have access to and benefit from, and make our social connections as deep, rich, and extensive as we possibly can.

I have my toes in a number of different online communities, and through each of them, I see a steady stream of people rallying to action. We may not be able to gather in large numbers, but we cannot be stopped from talking. And the conversations are fascinating.

Support

There are many kinds of response necessary to endure a crisis. All of us will need emotional and social support, as much as we can get, in the coming months. Now is the time to be cultivating those relationships in any ways we can.

But support is not enough. There must also be perspective. Support can keep a group of people alive and managing - and it can last a long time, through incredible strain, if the relationships are strong. Eventually, though, hope begins to dwindle, energy is exhausted, and support is no longer enough. It may be days, or it may be years, but support cannot sustain hope indefinitely.

Perspective is what allows people to see the possibility of the crisis ending. If nobody thinks we're going to make it, we end up in despair: the belief that action is not worth attempting. Perspective allows those who see the possibility of hope to encourage those who do not. This is a crucial fuel for support.

Even that, though, is not sufficient. Perspective without factual backing becomes false hope. False hope quickly turns to poison and undermines support. Cheerily looking for the bright side, when the positive outcomes continually do not occur, is a recipe for quickly losing credibility in a dark time.

So perspective must latch on to real positive events. Hard data. Facts. This thing happened and it was good.

Because of this, we all need to take a part in reinforcing perspective. Signal boost and relay every ounce of positivity you can muster. It may be huge or it may be a funny picture or it may just be talking about watching birds through your window. Talk (or think) about something good as frequently as you can. If you cannot, find someone who can support you and offer perspective.

Action

Even positivity will run out eventually. The crisis does not solve itself. Someone has to act. This is where trust becomes an essential question.

In modern life - for the people who are most likely to be able to read these words - we trust the wrong things (and people) far too much.

We trusted the infrastructure of the world to keep people safe and healthy. It has failed us.

We trust governments and law enforcement to solve the problem. In many ways, they are doing heroic amounts of good. In others, we are at a critical juncture. Not that long ago, it was popular to talk about anti-fascism and the importance of stemming the tide of repressive authoritarianism. Many used to talk about being in Germany in the 1920's and what they would do.

I had family in Germany in the 1920's. Some became fascists. Others became resistance fighters.

This is no longer a thought experiment. Police-enforced lockdowns are already reality in many places and that will only continue as the efforts to curtail the pandemic ramp up.

You are not in 1920's Germany, but you are on Earth in 2020. Make your choices, and take your actions.

There is no such thing as too small of an action. If all you do is read this, agree that the world needs help, and talk about it in your own way in your own social circles, you are taking action. That action will add up.

But there is so much more that can be done. If you are able, I encourage you to do what you can. If you are not, you are still valuable, you are still important, and you are still loved. We will fight for you - who need it most.

Systems

I want to shift gears for a moment and talk about social, economic, and political systems.

I am a computer engineer. I work on some highly advanced software technology and among some truly brilliant programmers, network architects, and tech leaders. I have been unstoppably curious and mischievous my entire life, and I work on a product that is a mildly appealing target for information-security attacks.

If there is one thing I know from that experience, it is this: every system can be broken. Most systems, especially complex ones, contain the very keys to destroying themselves. (Fascinating side note: formal logic itself contains the tools to dismantle the idea that logic can be used to explain/understand most of reality. Research the work of Kurt Gödel and the "incompleteness theorems" for more.)

Societies are often thought of as systems. So are economies and governments.

Given sufficient stressors, all systems break. This is an inescapable truth of life.

When a system breaks, the natural response is to replace it. Strengthening a failing system can suffice for many things, but in a global crisis, we cannot make the systems strong enough fast enough. Things are already breaking down - jobs are at risk, livelihoods are in danger. The economy of the planet is taking a serious beating and the political responses are verging on dictatorial already.

So how am I sitting here being optimistic?

There are two kinds of approaches to replacing a failing system: we can try something that is basically equivalent but a little better ("upgrading") and then there is revolution.

Humanity is not unfamiliar with revolutions. We see them frequently in technology and culture these days. Not so long ago, a revolution was something that happened every few lifetimes. Now they happen every few years.

We are on the cusp of a revolution - not necessarily a violent, dark, unpleasant one. A hopeful one. Here's what I see.

Assumptions

We've all been given a tremendous gift: the opportunity to question our assumptions en masse. All of us, at once, are facing the same kinds of questions: how does the world work when we cannot leave our homes as much as we are used to? How do we take care of each other in this kind of situation? How do we deal with the dreadful projections that this mess might last over a year before it gets better?

The assumptions here are interesting in their own right.

The first question assumes that leaving our homes, or being in large groups, is vital to life. Is that really true? It may be vital to a certain way of life, but that way of life is (at least temporarily) not an option. Life can, in fact, be rich and enjoyable and worth living even with these restrictions.

The next question assumes that we can only use the existing means of social interaction (minus physical gathering) to offer care to each other. But since people can invent new things, find new ways to thrive socially with this strange new constraint, is it really useful at all to assume that we won't adapt?

The third question assumes that the experts modeling the pandemic and human behavior are correct in their timeframes and predictions. But here's the thing: a model is just a mathematical system. Describing what people do is fundamentally important, but predicting what people do is fundamentally useless.

People have free will. We have autonomy. We can take action. And we can be unpredictable.

Predicting human behavior requires mathematical systems. Every system can be broken. Break the predictions: we can make this turn out better than anyone could predict right now. And that includes exceeding the predictions from people like me, optimistically envisioning a hopeful future.

Incentive Structure

Systems are fragile. Making a system resilient in the face of stress is incredibly difficult to do from an engineering perspective.

And yet, we see millions of different forms of life all around us - life that can survive incredible natural disasters, incredible abuse at the hands of human conquest and greed. Life that can exist for unfathomable eons and somehow just get stronger and better the whole time.

All systems can be broken. The antidote to a system is an organism. Organisms are not isolated, contained in simple rules or processes. Organisms interact. They intermingle. They spread and affect the world around them. The most resilient technology does not resemble a set of rules and processes so much as it resembles something living, breathing, adapting.

Humans may face a temporary difficulty in physical interaction, but you're here reading this, which is a monumental testament to our ability to continue interacting and being alive even if we are given a harsh set of constraints.

Creativity always blooms brightest when there are uncomfortable constraints. The most brilliant, passionate works of human art and genius have come from some kind of awkward (if not outright awful) limitation of circumstance.

So here's what I see: it is time to change the incentive structure of people as a whole. If you're not sure that we need this, keep in mind the Ebola virus - and the fact that it was considered incurable until recently - now has an effective vaccine, which was developed in defiance of capitalist incentive structures.

Capitalism has thrived for far too long on the ideas that the economy is important. If we can't spend money and buy stuff, our life ends! I remember this rhetoric hitting fever-pitch just after 9/11 - not quite nineteen years ago. The assumption still deserves to be challenged.

Buying stuff is a way of life that many of us have never seen an alternative to; but in the human scale of history, consumer capitalism is a footnote. Other modes of life were all there was until around two hundred years ago, when industrialization kicked off - you guessed it - a revolution.

Capitalism controls our incentives. Do well at work, get more money! Why do you need more money? To spend it on things, of course!

If there is a severe inability to work, then there is no way to get money. And if money is necessary to have shelter, food, and health care, then of course anything that risks the success of the economy seems dire.

The economy is a system. It has already been broken - for a very long time. The only thing that this viral pandemic changes is that now we have no choice but to confront how broken it really is - and that frees us to begin building alternatives.

Collective action has been recognized for decades as an immensely powerful means to effect change - so much so that the entrenched wealthy power-holders of the world go to massive lengths to stigmatize it. "Unions are bad" and such propaganda has been effective (in the United States at least) at preventing people from taking collective action for longer than I have been alive.

Nothing can possibly stop humanity from collective action now. The only question is, what will our actions be, and what changes are we trying to accomplish?

Hope

If we didn't need to spend money to get basic food, shelter, and medical needs addressed, capitalism would erode overnight. The only reason it "works" is because of the stranglehold on human necessities.

So fight it.

Sharing food and shelter is a serious risk right now, and most people are not equipped to provide medical care. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. Organisms that are weak in one area shift the burden to some other, stronger parts to get through stress, injury, and crisis.

Think about how you can lessen your impact on the strained organism of human life right now. As the saying goes, flatten the curve.

We can do more than just that, though. We can share ideas, provide support, offer perspective. And most of us, as hard as it may seem, can still act - on behalf of those who cannot.

And many of us will act.

When the virus settles down again, I intend to live in a country where people have embraced the collective understanding that doing nothing but fueling the economy is a waste of human life. I intend to exist in a world where the value of being alive and being able to interact with each other are no longer concealed by the ever-present need to make a paycheck and then spend it again on things we cannot live without.

Change the incentive structure in your own world. Tweak what you can control. The enemy of hope is despair; despair is the belief that action cannot effect change. Defy the predictions, and replace the systems - not with upgrades, but with revolutions.

May the human organism thrive after all this is said and done.

Log Entry: 2020-02-22

A number of years ago, in the midst of a particularly difficult psychotherapy session, my doctor said something to me that caught me completely off guard - and has stuck with me ever since.

I had just finished recounting something - maybe a story, an anecdote, or a description of a reaction I'd had to something that had occurred recently. I don't remember what led up to the moment.

All I remember is her tilting her head to the side, clearly working to maintain the requisite balance of professionalism and human empathy that is so crucial to doing well in the field of caring for people. I'd been in therapy and mental health circles long enough at that point to know something momentous was coming - and, thankfully, I had a strong enough relationship with this particular doctor to know it wasn't going to be one of the all-too-common "well, time to find a new shrink!" experiences I'd had in the past.

But even still, it floored me when, after an uncharacteristically long and thoughtful pause, she told me, "Your degree of self-awareness is probably the hardest thing you have to fight against, and probably the only reason you've survived through everything that you have."

Undergoing something like a transition is basically a completely immersive, inescapable, all-encompassing exercise in juggling self-awareness, while trying to develop new skills for dealing with so many things changing at once.

Some things seem to change too fast, and others can't possibly get done changing soon enough.

I've remarked, many times in fact, that I feel like transitioning in my thirties is actually pretty good timing for me. I've accumulated plenty of life experience and skills for managing stress, change, and uncertainty. In a lot of ways, the past year of change has only been different from the rest of my life in one major, defining way: this is the first time I've ever undergone drastic life changes that seem like they might actually stay stable now.

After moving homes seventeen times in my life, I now see no real reason to ever want to move again.

I've settled into a career I love and a position that continues to excite me and provide opportunities and challenges beyond what I ever imagined it could have.

Many things are still changing in my life, but many more are locking into place, and every time I ponder what's happening, all I can think is, I did well for myself with a lot of volatility and upheaval in my life; what can I imagine accomplishing with such a strong core of stability for the first time ever?


Looking over all the things that I've weathered in the past, it's sometimes tempting to wonder how things could have been different. And for much of my life, I spent excessive amounts of energy and generated endless angst trying to think about how things "might have been."

But now, having gotten a taste of what actual stability and certainty can do, I've simply stopped thinking of it that way.

At work, I spend a lot of time talking to people about problem-solving - looking at various challenges, things that have succeeded, things that have failed, things that need improvement. A sentiment that I draw on a lot in those discussions is best summed up as "I don't care why it happened; how do we make sure we can do it again (or not do it again if it was bad)?"

It often catches people off-guard at first. What do you mean, you don't care why?

But the phrasing is important: getting caught in "why" is usually a recipe for endless tail-chasing. "If this team had done X, if that hadn't happened at that moment, if only, if only, if only." This almost inevitably gives way to blame. "That team or person dropped the ball. That supplier is too hard to work with. Somebody broke a contract." And so on.

By framing the conversation around what we do in the future, it instantly transforms the tone of what can often be a nasty, mud-slinging meeting into a collaborative effort to fix things. It's the same set of problems to solve, but focused on action in the future. Just a change of tense and timing.

Don't tell me what could have been different. What will you make be different next time?


After the past year of personal rearrangement, I find it oddly comforting that techniques I've drawn upon for years in my professional life have formed the basis for re-establishing my life out side of work.

For three decades, as soon as I left the office, I didn't know what to do besides fret about what could have been different in my personal world. And now I don't care anymore.

If things need to be different, I go make them different. And I have an unspeakably wonderful network of people who can support those efforts - people to learn from, people to struggle alongside, people to try to help by relating what I've managed to learn so far.


Close to 14 years ago, I wrote something uncharacteristically vulnerable and personally revealing for me (at the time). I talked about the aspirations I had, how I wanted to change things, to improve the world, to fix what I felt like were serious problems. I had no shortage of things to do.

I just never did them. So in a late-night moment of exposition on the internet, I simply pleaded with the question, why?

It was only a few paragraphs, but the angst was palpable, and even now, reading the words is haunting. They feel like they belong to someone else (and in many ways, they did) and yet all I can think is I know how to answer your question.

At the time, I lacked both the situational stability in life, as well as the certainty of identity, to really do anything. I floundered, a lot, for many years on end, and somehow managed to occasionally do something that seemed to work.

The rest of the things - the failures - I got good at quietly burying. Until I was alone, late at night, trying to figure out what could have been different.


I've enjoyed rock climbing - both freestyle bouldering and basic belaying - for a long time. I love the analogy of a good climb. When you first start out, even a fifteen foot training wall can be intensely intimidating - it's a difficult physical challenge, but also a brutal mental challenge. If you get halfway up and get stuck, you have to let go and either fall onto the mats or trust the ropes to get you back down.

Bouldering routes are often even more intense for that - if you do get all the way up, you can rest for a bit and celebrate, but then you still have to get back down.

Climbing without experience and guidance can be treacherous - just like life.

To know if you can do a climb, you need a few key things: you need to know yourself, your body, your capabilities, and your mental limits. I've found many climbs physically trivial but mentally insurmountable. In a gym, you can benefit from the deliberate design of the courses, and advice from others.

Bouldering in the wild is a vastly different experience. You often find yourself attempting a climb that nobody present has ever done before. It becomes an exercise in improvisation - within the limits of yourself, factoring in the advice of anyone else around, can you piece together a satisfying climb?

Climbing alone is generally considered inadvisable, even for highly trained and practiced experts. The safety check of additional perspective is essential, even without the importance of having help in case something goes wrong.


When I first began climbing, I'd look at people effortlessly gliding across a rockface and wonder how they did it. If I could ever be like that. It was tempting to just walk away and say, "nah, I can't." Someone had to coax me into the first harness, talk me into that first short ascent. By the time I wrapped my exhausted fingers around the "success" marker at the top of that wall, I knew I was hooked.

(I'm still, all these years later, no good at it; but it's still a huge amount of fun.)

Knowing that it's possible is a big prerequisite. Someone else just climbed it, so clearly it can be done.

With help, practice, and training, that becomes something all of us can own: I climbed that one, so maybe I can also do this other one.

With any practiced skill, knowing that there is room to be better is important for motivating the desire to get better.


And life is really no different. There is so much room for things to be better.

The answer to my questions from 14 years ago is really the kind of thing that sounds so simple to say, but I suspect can't possibly really resonate without the first-hand experience of the life I lived in between.

Life is a climb, but there are resting points. There are hard routes and easy routes, and we don't always get to choose which ones we have to travel. The journey is never predictable and often hard and painful.

The good news is, we get to decide what we consider to be success. We get to decide who to take along for the journey. We get to seek traveling companions who can point out a quicker route, or a more interesting vantage point to rest at.

Know who you are. Know what you've got. Know what you can trust, and what to take with you.


And when you reach a resting point - on a small anchor drilled into the rock, or a tiny shelf, or a full-blown base camp with the comfort of a fire and a good night's sleep - take the time to think. Tell me your story of the preceding leg of your journey.

But don't tell me what could have been different.

Tell me what you will make different next time.

Know It In Your Heart

Something I've come to treasure at the end of a day is the opportunity to just sit and reflect - sometimes on the day itself, but often about much more as well... the past, the future, all the things in the present that seem to deserve a little extra attention and appreciation before I tuck all my thoughts in for the night and fall asleep.

There is a powerful magic in the still moments of a late evening, when things are slowed down and restful. It is an ancient and often tragically elusive truth that when your consciousness approaches stillness, it is easier to be aware of more of reality - a sort of grander incarnation of the temporal principles of relativity in physics. The less you move your mind, the more your mind can apprehend.

I've been fascinated with thought for so long I can barely remember when I first started turning my brain in on itself. Self-reflection is a vital resource for anyone, but through obsessive practice, I long ago warped the skill into a kind of crippled philosophical blinder through which I insisted on experiencing everything.

On June 10, 2019, I wrote something that seemed interesting enough at the time, but in hindsight, turned out to contain far more insight than I could have understood. There's half a paradox and half of a deep truth in there, but first, a (slightly simplified) excerpt from the journal entry itself:

One of the reasons I take my transition desires seriously is that they are very different from other things I want.

What should I get for lunch? Oh, hmm... maybe a sandwich? Do I want a sandwich? What kind of sandwich? The place that makes that kind of sandwich is further away, but you can get this other, less appealing sandwich closer - and cheaper! Is that compelling enough? Or should I take the hit and get the first kind? Maybe I don't even want a sandwich at all. Do I even want lunch?

Give me a decision to make, and I'll find a thousand questions that are somehow all super important for making the actual choice. If I don't know much about the decision, or the implications of various choices, it gets even worse... first I need to understand all the ramifications of all possible outcomes, and then I will ask a thousand annoying questions about all of that.

I over-analyze the ever-living shit out of literally everything.

In general, I have a lot of trouble just wanting things. And then there's gender expression matters. Everything just feels like the polar opposite of my usual process. Would I like to have long hair? Yes. Am I content with the color of my hair? No. Jet black or bright blue with purple highlights. I have never had appreciably long hair or any kind of coloration. I have no point of reference here, no anchor from which to understand the impact of these desires.

And I don't fucking care. I feel no need to ask questions, to weigh options, to consider consequences. When I am suddenly insistent on not analyzing things at all, I think that's a pretty good sign that the feelings are real.

What actually prompted me to remember all of this was, in fact, a moment of completely empty-headed absent-mindedness.

I realized, earlier this evening, that lately I have been making an astounding number of decisions almost entirely on what I've been referring to as "instinct." It's a sort of highly abstract, incredibly information-dense thought process, with impeccable logic forged through an incredibly deep supply of life experience, and yet I've just been doing things without "thinking" in the classically word-centric way that I used to feel trapped in all the time.

I've been on hormone replacement therapy for almost exactly five months. I'd heard that it does miraculous things for the mind, to finally have the neurochemical mix that actually works properly for the brain itself.

As much as I desperately wanted to know how that could work, I couldn't have possibly imagined how well it works.

I used to know a lot of things with just my brain. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant or self-obsessed. I've always loved learning things - I own hundreds of books, almost entirely non-fiction, many of which I've read multiple times. At one time in my life I literally had to impose "no Wikipedia hours" so that I could tear myself away from the endless fascination of "well, maybe I'll just click one more interesting link. I'll go to bed before 4AM this time, I swear."

I've never been able to resist just accumulating bits of knowledge, of wisdom, of insight and stories from other people. Occasionally I find some small thing of my own to contribute back, but only in the interests of finding another thing to learn next.

I still "know" all the same things. If anything, my memory is actually functional for the first time in my life. A year ago, nobody who'd ever been around me for more than a few hours would have questioned my ADHD diagnosis. Today, I constantly remember things with ridiculous clarity and accuracy that some of my closest friends and family can scarcely recall - until I start prompting them.

In a way, I know these things better than I ever could have with my brain.

There's a kind of ownership of truth that goes beyond knowledge; the sort of thing that comes from living, from having a personal and visceral experience. It stops being conscious awareness and simply bakes its way deeper into the mind.

And, now, I finally am beginning to feel the infinitely broader, richer, and more powerful kind of truth - the kind that comes from not simply experiencing and understanding, but from actually wielding properly functional emotions at the same time.

It goes beyond data, beyond awareness and analysis and thought itself, beyond the reaches of logic and language and even the kind of communication that can be accomplished with images and movement.

I know I'm a woman. I have come to own this truth - not merely by thinking about it, or contemplating it; to be sure, I've done plenty of that. But this is no longer a mere fact. I couldn't possibly "know it" to this extent with my brain.

I know it in my heart.

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.

Indomitable.

Almost seven months ago, I started the series of personal journal entries that would eventually turn into this site. There is a lot I want to do here, but I'm going to start by publishing what I can of the original documents I wrote this year.

There are 55 pages of entries in just one document, and dozens of auxiliary artifacts I want to weave into this as I go. Much of it needs to be scrubbed for sensitive information and I will need to tag content warnings on a huge amount of it - so it will take a lot of time and care.

That said, the first two entries are already back-dated onto this blog and I will be accumulating more as I go along.

The Starship Gender has crossed through a lot of metaphorical portals on the journey so far. There are a few big ones ahead, and the surest way to navigate the universe safely is to know where you've come from, so you can steer towards the future you want to be in.

Stick around. I plan on doing so, and I'm ready to share what I can.