Monday, August 23rd, 2021

I've been a big fan of writing down my thoughts for many, many years. I started writing stuff that (eventually) wound up becoming this blog nearly two and a half years ago.

Life doesn't stop, and neither has the discovery, the growth, and the change. It seems like every time I pause to catch my breath, I look up and realize I know myself better than I did the last time I took stock.

I'm honestly kind of surprised that I haven't burned out, after all this. After just over two years of hormone therapy, after an incalculable number of harrowing, lonely hours struggling with grief and trauma and three decades' worth of unresolved pain, and after losing track of the number of times I've caught myself saying stuff like, "wow, I had no idea something that good was even possible."

During the time I've started thinking of as the "prelude" to my life, I would have found this concept daunting. I would have expected the idea to be exhausting, demoralizing, scary to the point of wanting desperately to avoid it.

But now, somehow, as I've gotten my footing as my actual self, as my real life has begun, I find it peaceful - calming, reassuring, and hopeful.

I've learned how to move forward when I can, to dig deep and explore and stretch while I'm able, and when to rest. When to sit still, just listen to the tiny signals coming from my brain and my body, and tend to my own heart.

And from that nascent skill of pacing and self-perpetuation, I've learned so much more.

There doesn't seem to be much point in expecting permanence in my answers. Sometimes I learn things that help me formulate better understandings; and sometimes I simply change out from under whatever I thought I understood.

For now, I have a few answers that are working nicely: I'm non-binary, specifically girlflux, and spend most of my time really close to basically just binary-female, but not quite. My attractions are undeniably Sapphic in nature. I'm autistic. I'm emphatically - perhaps even radically - non-monogamous.

A few other answers have come and gone. What once felt like gray-asexuality, or maybe some flavor of demisexuality, has come into more focus; as I continue the marathon of discovering and processing the myriad forms of trauma I've survived, it seems increasingly obvious that I'm emerging from a deep, gnarled, wounded shell - a desperate armor forged by a combination of repression due to religious "purity" culture, plus the memories and scars from enduring some of the worst instances of child abuse around situations where I'd made the appalling mistake of admitting to have sexual curiosity, and ruthlessly tempered by the adult experience of spending four years being emotionally and sexually abused by a domestic partner.

Come to think of it, a lot of answers I've clung to over the years - some for longer than others - sort of melt away under the lens of understanding and healing from all of that trauma.

I don't know what's going to happen next. I have no idea who I will be another year from now.

And that's OK.

I wouldn't have it any other way, honestly. I get to live, now. To be, to change, to experience, to enjoy, to feel, to exist.

I come back, over and over again, to a wry comment that originally popped into my head about two years ago, thinking about the challenges of attaining a measure of self-actualization in a world that often would rather not have me.

The old cliche expression of "marathon not sprint" seemed woefully inadequate, at the time; this isn't like running one marathon, it's like running dozens at the same time, shifting between so many different races and struggles and challenges, constantly feeling like the tiny bits of progress are never going to add up. Finish one race, only to realize that it was just a segment of a larger, harder process. It's not a marathon, it's a fractal marathon. A fractathlon.

Somewhere along the way, though, that process smoothed out somehow, and gave way to a more natural, sustainable rhythm - a life with moments of change, of activity, of discovery, and then time to rest, to pause, and to prepare for more. Days end in calm evenings, nights give way to sleep, and in a pattern that still stuns me in its reliability, I wake up again and feel like I can do another day.

So maybe the moment does suck - this one, right now, writing this blog entry. Maybe I am exhausted, in pain, scared for the future on any number of fronts. Maybe I am aching... for touch, for closeness, for the embrace of someone I may not see again in person for what seems like an unbearably long time, with what feels like a hopeless absence of options and possibilities for connecting with anyone closer.

Interesting, perhaps... but so what?

It's all fractal anyways. Some of life's patterns may repeat themselves, but as everything goes along, the fractal gets bigger - grander, brighter, lovelier. I have survived worse. I have found the luck, the fortune, and the companionship of others that I always wanted, the ingredients I need to truly get what I've always sought from life. In time, the ripples of hurt and unease in the now will fade away in the exhilaration and splendor of more life, and life well lived.

So for tonight, I set my course for Sleepies-Space, the plane of existence without consciousness, to revel in the company of my as-yet-uncharted dreams.

I hope our paths may cross, someday, but if not - may this be a signpost to you, traveler. There's life out there. Don't lose hope.

Waiting

There are some things that are hard to believe, even as we live through them.

I never really bought into the line that "truth is stranger than fiction." But there are parts of my life I couldn't invent, no matter how much I tried.

There is a story - part of my story - that was over twenty-four years in the making. And after it was over, it was another two years before I even realized what had happened.

I don't think stories really have beginnings. There's always some antecedent, some context, some background, something prior. There are moments that are easier to start at than others, however, so that will suffice.

The starting point for this fragment of my story took place in a small house off a nondescript side-alley of a minor road, in a city most people reading this in English would never have heard of.

The house didn't matter, to this story; the city didn't, either.

What mattered was that I had my bedroom in that house, and a small single bed. I was eight years old, or perhaps nine; somewhere around late second-grade. In that bed, one night, I had a dream.

At such a young age, I had not yet begun to appreciate the subtleties or the intricacies of human dreams. I'd dreamed many dreams before. But that night was the first time I had a dream that I remembered vividly, that seemed more real than waking, that stuck with me - haunted me - for days after.

Or, as it turned out, for decades.

I dreamed of a girl, about my age, who was powerful, beloved, amazing in every possible way my tiny young imagination could conjure. As often is the case in dreams, I had no notion of how we'd met, why we were together, or why any of it felt so important.

We adventured, together, in that vaguely abstract and indescribable way of dreams; I had no idea what it was we were doing or why, but I knew it was important.

I knew I had some kind of connection to her, one that I couldn't quite explain, either in the dream itself or the days after that I spent brooding on it all.

There were many firsts, in that dream. It was the first I remembered so clearly, and it was the first that had a profoundly confusing symbolism within it.

At the end of our adventures, and what I somehow knew even in the moment was about to be the end of the dream, the girl pulled me aside from it all. There was a foundation, a place to build a building, to construct something. I knew it, even then, as the life that somehow we were supposed to share.

She gave me a watch - not one that worked, but one that seemed frozen, that made no sense... as the notion of time often tends to do, within dreams.

And together, we buried that watch, under a corner of the foundation, knowing that somehow it meant a promise - albeit a tragically delayed one.

I knew she would be back.

Or rather, I knew she wasn't really gone.

But as she evaporated from my awareness and I drifted awake that morning, all I could process was that I'd lost her, somehow.

I spent days, carefully trying to hide how much the dream had unsettled me, pondering and contemplating it constantly, trying to understand what had happened and why this nonsensical event during sleep had rattled me so deeply.

I couldn't articulate why - not for many, many long years after - but I kept it secret. Somehow it felt like betrayal, like sharing her secret - our secret - to even whisper about it to anyone else.

And so after a few days, I concluded I'd probably never understand why I'd woken up crying, that morning, aching for the loss of a girl that wasn't real and didn't exist.

And with my mind made up, I set about slowly forgetting what I'd sobbed quietly to myself before leaving my bed; the name I couldn't make sense of, the person I couldn't understand from a place in my head, the connection that I wasn't quite sure actually even occurred.

Twenty-four years later, I was sitting in my car, in traffic, one late afternoon... the afternoon of April 8th, 2019, to be precise. I knew I wasn't who I thought I was, but I had no name to call myself; or so I thought.

And I flailed, for just a heartbeat, mid-sentence in a thought in my own head that no one could hear, trying to figure out how to refer to myself, this trans person in the midst of self-discovery.

On that day, in that moment, I remembered my name.

I struggled to describe it, for almost two years afterwards; it couldn't really be a memory, could it? It felt like a reunion, like coming home, like returning to something long lost and deeply forgotten. For months upon months, I caught myself thinking of my journey as going back - I kept stumbling over the word "again" as if part of me knew that this wasn't the first time I'd understood myself.

But how could that be? There was no way; surely just a meaningless slip of the tongue. I scoured my memory - fragmented and traumatized as it was - for indicators that I'd ever known "before" or that there was any real precedent.

And now I've finally found them: the signs that there was understanding before. Prior to the dysphoria. Prior to the social struggles. Prior to anything I'd thought was relevant.

When I was eight years old, I awoke one morning from a dream, crying over the vanishing of a girl I didn't know was me. And I knew I had to keep her secret, forget her name, hide her memory, even as I knew it hurt, and I had no conscious idea why.

One spring day, not long ago, at the age of thirty five, I remembered who I'd been crying for all those long years ago. What I said, over and over, for the agonizing minutes after I'd awoken.

My Princess Amelia.

It turns out I kept that promise after all. Dreams have always held a profound, almost mystical, fascination for me. She turned up, over and over again, across the years - to the point that I even broke my silence about her at one point, without even knowing.

Maybe it's all just a bit too hard to believe, maybe it's just easier to brush it off as revisionist wishful semi-fiction.

But I'll always know the truth.

I love you forever, Amelia.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

I have nothing against being wrong - not in general, not in principle. Being wrong is part of guessing, and guessing is part of trying something new; and, after all, one of the biggest reliefs of my entire life was discovering just how wrong I was about who I am, a couple of years ago.

But there are times when it's harder than others. Times when I have to just admit that I was wrong, and if there's any usefulness to be had from the mistake, it's lost in the sheer pain of how awful the mistake was.

I made the mistake of thinking things were OK with my relatives.

This is the only way forward now.

* * *

The trash cans are just sitting there, on the curb.

Maybe for some people it’s "just" a "simple" matter of opening the garage, pulling them inside, and disappearing into solitude again.

Not for me.

I can’t go out there.

Instead, I have to be in here, fighting off the whispers of anxiety and dread that say someone out there is judging me for not having taken the cans inside yet.

Never mind that half the neighborhood just leaves their cans on the road all week.

Never mind that even the people who do bring them up a driveway, into a garage, around to the side yard... they often take a day or two to manage it themselves.

I almost wish I could say something, as if to explain what’s going on and just avoid further conversation entirely. Tell everyone. But why? I don’t want their pity, their offers of help, or their involvement.

All I want is to be left alone… and they already do that. No one ever bothers me here.

But I can’t go outside.

They know I’m here. It’s not some kind of secret. I’m not fooling anyone. Nor am I trying.

I know why all of this is.

It has nothing to do with being left alone. It has everything to do with not being rejected. Not being treated as a problem, as a freak, as an abnormality, as a monster.

No one here has ever given me a reason to think they would respond that way.

But I know who did.

There’s a flashing storm of images in my brain, words and sounds and faces, a parade of horrible people doing horrible things. Echoes of long-faded physical pain flash through my nerves.

Being beaten by my father at a party, him hauling me into the driveway of the host’s home and hitting me over and over again, for embarrassing and inconveniencing him. I’d had a social anxiety attack and lost control of my bladder, surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar setting. Somehow his impression of the right response to that was to begin smacking his eight year old child.

That was the right response to everything. Hit me.

I remember exactly one time - eighth grade - when I dared to walk away from him when he started getting angry at me. I left the room, went upstairs, and quietly locked the door to my bedroom behind me. Without even leaving the kitchen table downstairs, he yelled for me, promising that if I didn’t come back down and listen to his tirade, he’d "make me remember" the consequences. I didn’t get hit - that time - but I remembered anyways.

I have no idea what he was even pissed about, all these years later.

All I remember is the depth of how awful, how profoundly terribly incomprehensible, it all felt. To be struck time and again, for almost two full decades. "This is only for your own good. I’m only doing it because I love you. It hurts me more than it hurts you."

Bullshit.

I’m not afraid of my neighbors saying something shitty, or being ignorant or rude. I can handle people acting badly.

What I’m scared of is the remote chance that I’d see the same look in someone’s eye, that tiny flicker of disgust, the judgment, the silent hurrying away as if I’d ruined their day just by existing.

The look he gave me all the time.

I dread trying to talk to them, trying to help them understand that the strange woman living on the corner lot just needs some space and some privacy... I dread the beginnings of things starting to work out, people still being just as respectful but with a little more knowing behind the casual waves from across the street... I dread the eventual outcome of the illusion shattering, the bubble bursting, and someone finally telling me they couldn’t handle being kind to me anymore because I’m just too much.

The way my mother always did when I sought refuge with her after yet another incident with my father.

* * *

I tried again, all those years later, to make it work. To tell them the truth - who I am, what they did, why I struggled for weeks deciding whether or not to even give them another chance. I sent them the recommendations… books to read, documentaries to watch, people to talk to.

For a little while, it seemed like it might have worked. We talked on the phone, now and then. Occasionally even ventured past the petty small-talk that I always find so exhaustingly pointless.

And then it stopped. The illusion broke. For everything that has changed, nothing really changed at all - not with them.

A year and a half ago, my father promised to answer the letter I wrote him explaining who I am. He has since disappeared again into whatever obsessive religious hole he’s finding interesting these days. I’ve heard nothing from him, but he’s found plenty of time to write letters - to absolute strangers, trying to sell them his advice. 

A year and a half ago, my mother promised to try and build an actual relationship with her youngest daughter - with me. And when we’d finally reached a point where I felt comfortable telling her that I am autistic, and relating some of my struggles to her, she fell back into the same old habit she always has. It’s just too much, can’t we talk about something else?

I turned thirty-five years old over a month ago. I have heard absolutely nothing, from either of them, since the beginning of this year. For all their promises, for all their assurances that they’ve changed and become better people, they’re still just as problematic as ever.

I spend most of my nights and weekends working through the leftovers of the traumas they both put me through. Violent abuse on one hand, and dismissive neglect on the other.

Someday I will be able to get my trash cans without seeing their shadows hiding around every corner.

I am breaking the cycle.

This shit stops with me.

Terminology

Yes, I am trans.

No, I didn't "transition."

Not the way you want to think of it.

You could say I transformed, perhaps.

I transferred decades of pre-existing experience into a better life, a better existence, a relentless insistence on forging a better reality.

I exist in transit - not from one place to another, but having left behind something less than real, to chase a dream that was more factual than the fantasy I occupied in the material world. I can never reach my destination - but not because it is unattainable. I've already reached so many, and there will always be more.

My body has been transmogrified - the power of science interwoven with the magic of self-knowledge, the undoing of ill-fitting habits and the creation of new ones, authentic and truthful and full of vitality.

Hand me a transducer, I'll make some noise; listen to what I shout to any who will hear me, and be transported into a world that is so much more vast and wonderful and healthy than this one.

The thirst for life is transitive. It cannot stop with me. It will spread. We'll go somewhere lovely, together.

And heed this warning, all you passers by, whose gaze flits past me in the chaos of your day: be careful how long you let your stares linger, lest you find yourself unable to look away - transfixed.

Sunday, March 7th, 2021

One year and one day in quarantine.

I didn’t ask for this pandemic. It’s not like anyone did, really, but that’s also not the point; it’s just one more thing in a long line of shit I never asked for.

I didn’t ask to grow up without money but with a father who relentlessly criticized every minute aspect of everything he encountered - the words, spat with such derision and such heartless frequency, are still deeply burned in my brain: “cheap, worthless piece of junk” - as if every imperfection of the world, however subjective or imaginary, was to be loathed and despised.

Nothing was ever good enough.

How could I have been?

I didn’t ask for a first job that profited immensely off my irreplaceable work and refused to pay me fairly for it. Or the second job that ultimately did the same.

I didn’t ask for a domestic partner who randomly, arbitrarily, inconsistently, and capriciously chose to outright tell me I wasn’t good enough for him and demand I do various things on his every whim just to have the “privilege” of keeping him around.

I didn’t ask to spend my life in the specter of constant risk of disapproval. I didn’t ask to waste hours of every single day of my existence intricately planning the details of how I will justify every tiny aspect of every single thing within my reach, just in case someone decides I should be called on the carpet for them not being right or enough. I didn’t ask for the constant anxiety of inventing hypothetical futures wherein some complete and total stranger finds a speck of dust on the baseboards in my personal bathroom and reaches the only logical conclusion, that I am a failure of a human being and worthless.

I don’t care if my neighbors like the music I listen to. But I live in mortal terror of the possibility that they can hear it, and have secretly determined the inevitable truth that I’m an inconsiderate asshole who leaves the stereo on too loud.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t hear it in the next room of the house let alone from outside or across the street.

Are my curtains too blue? Are the lights inside too bright at night? Do they see the neglected yard, the worn-down exterior, the moss beginning to take over the driveway, and judge me as the utter failure I know they must think I am?

My biggest fear is meeting one of them, someday, and their first question being why the outside of my home looks like shit.

I don’t care if they like me. But I can’t risk finding out that they disapprove of me.

I can see my own value - sometimes.

I know other people see it far more clearly than I do, almost all the time - even people who barely know me.

None of this makes sense. I know in my brain that this is all broken illogic, all a deeply tangled cascade of layer upon layer of emotional scars. Neglect, vulnerability, trauma. Rinse, repeat. That’s my life.

Or rather, it was.

For the past two years, the single most defining theme of my life has been shaking off the endless series of lies, abuse, coercion, deceit, ignorance, malice, and apathy that I was steeped in for so long.

I knew, twenty three months ago, that I had a name that no one had ever called me before. A girl’s name.

I knew, twenty two months ago, that I’d trade anything for her to be alive and real.

I’m here, now. I have been, for a pretty significant chunk of time. Nineteen months.

I know I can’t expect thirty two years of shit to dissolve so quickly. Rebuilding a life takes time.

But not just time - also effort. I know better than to believe that the mere passage of time can fix anything.

I’ve collected data. Lived my life a little bit - as best as I can, in this fucking pandemic. Cleaned up what I’ve been able to, and gotten things as comfortable as I can manage. Little wins here and there, adding up. Clear an obstacle. Rest. Remove some friction. Next time will be easier.

So I lay here and I write.

What if those neighbors do see me? What if they do see the strangely happy girl occasionally pop the curtains open and smile and laugh at the world outside? What if they do hear the faint rumble of bass while I dance around in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning with a soundtrack?

What if they don’t see the run-down exterior, but just the steady stream of small deliveries being made as I rebuild every facet of the home inside? What if the people who walk their dogs by here every day quietly notice that things are slowly, gradually getting cleaned up?

What if they've been paying attention, and they see the single, autistic girl struggling to stay alive and above water in a brutal situation? What if they’re all quietly rooting for the mysterious, enigmatic woman who lives on the corner lot, secretly hoping she continues to follow whatever path has so clearly helped her turn her life around over the past two years?

What if the random delivery people, the occasional pedestrian who catches a brief glimpse inside my front door or open garage, looks and sees an intricately planned, carefully decorated, meticulously organized interior and silently smiles and nods in almost envious approval?

What if my coworkers really do mean it when they talk about my nearly-magical capacity to know things long forgotten about immensely complicated technology? What if they really do find the advice and suggestions I give to be as helpful and impactful as they say?

What if the reason my dad never calls me has nothing to do with discomfort or disapproval, but because he’s afraid I won’t accept him after everything that happened?

Sunday, November 22nd, 2020

I try to say things, usually, to the widest audience I can - to the largest set of people who may be able to hear something from it all.

This one needs to be a little more focused.

This is for my trans sisters.

I don’t know your name, or where you live, or what you look like, or how old you are.

But I know that none of those things can change what I want to tell you.

I don’t know what you’ve been through, or what you’re dealing with now, or what else is to come in the future.

But I know the path you’re walking.

Maybe you’ve spent longer on this road than I have, or maybe you’re not even sure this is your journey. I can’t know any of that.

But I know the fear, the hesitation, the uncertainty, the frustration, the exhaustion, the pain and senseless hurt of it all.

I can’t promise you it will get better, but I can promise you that it’s worth trying.

The world is not ready for us. We are beyond the scope of what most of the humans on this planet are prepared to understand. It is getting better, and there are so many fighting to ensure that things continue to improve.

For right now, though, it’s beyond tough.

We are questioned. Doubted. Dismissed. Erased.

Or worse.

I know what it feels like to not want to open my own front door, because I can’t bear having to endure the looks of disgust and confusion from my own neighbors.

I know what it feels like to watch people’s behavior towards me change - from professional, courteous, respectful - to condescending, rude, uncaring, even cruel… all for revealing the truth that I am in fact a woman.

I know the pain of watching people decide they no longer wish to treat me like a person because I’m not like them.

I know the confusion and the frustration of watching those people suddenly becoming defensive, making up excuses, even attempting outright gaslighting to cover their own sexist behavior, all the while denying that anything is even happening.

I know what it’s like to be told to calm down because I dared to care about something.

I know what it’s like to be told I am a monster, a predator, not even a person.

I know what it’s like to be mocked, scorned, and treated like a melodramatic child for having the sheer audacity to ask someone to respect my identity.

I know what it’s like to be treated that way because someone else in the room stood up for me when I could not.

I know what it’s like to be told that my experiences can’t be real, or valid, that it’s all my imagination and I’m trying too hard to be someone I’m not.

My sister, I hope you do not know these things, and I hope you never will; but I cannot promise you that.

Chances are, you will face some or all of these, and more.

Chances are, you will find yourself out on the frontier of human experience, with only scattered hints of what is going on - grasping, much as I have, for anything and everything that feels like certainty and solidarity in the world.

I know it may not be much, but I hope this finds you, and I hope it adds something to the map we must all create.

For us. For each other. For those walking this road now, so that someday those who follow after us may be a little bit less lost.

Some people will travel with us, even though this journey is not their own. They are rare and precious. Find them. Thank them. Tell them to find others to go with us all.

I can’t tell you how this journey ends; I barely know much of it, myself, and my route will be different than yours - in some big ways, and in some small ways too.

I can, however, tell you this:

You are worth it.

Travel forward, if and when you can.

Take a rest, when you need to - for as long as you need to.

Find and cherish those who can travel with you, even if it is only for a very short time.

The pain is real. The uncertainty is real. The hardship and the fear and the exhaustion are real.

No one else can tell us who we are.

No one else can tell us how we feel.

If this is your journey - whether you’re barely even thinking about planting a foot onto this road, or many years along the path - you know something that no one else can know.

You know who you are, somewhere; it may be deeply buried, it may be hidden, and it may take extraordinary time and effort to make sense of it all. It may be hard for anyone else to see, and it may earn you mistreatment for showing it.

Trust yourself.

It won’t always make sense. Sometimes it will genuinely be senseless. It’s hard, out here, on the frontiers of human experience.

Stick together. And, if you can, leave signposts for the next set of travelers.

Invitation

As often happens when I sit down to write, I am not entirely certain what it is I need to say here tonight.

This isn't to say I'm not sure what to talk about - I simply haven't transferred the imagery in my mind and heart into words yet. It's part of the way thinking works for me. All I know for sure, right now, is there is a lot to be said.

My heart is both tired and very alive. There is much work to be done, in this world, but I feel that we have a chance to get that work done. The election in the United States this past week was draining and - in many ways - a deeply unsettling experience. To know that so many still see the world in certain ways, that so many are still profoundly mired in damaging ideas and attitudes, that divisiveness remains such an effective weapon of oppression even just within this country is difficult to watch.

In a sense, though, it is a source of a kind of dark hope, for me.

My profession involves engineering. To solve a problem, you have to know what you're trying to solve. The scale of troubles afflicting the world today is immense - but at least we have a sense of what needs to change. The clearer our understanding of what is still broken, the more effectively we can go about fixing it.

Human connection has always been the strongest antidote to any form of evil: neglect, oppression, abuse, mistrust, abandonment... connection is what gives us, as a species, the resilience we've needed in order to survive. Connection is what helps specific people feel valued, supported, loved - it gives us purpose and meaning.

This past year has afforded me many chances for deep contemplation. The more I ponder, the more I am struck by the contrast between some of the more timeless wisdom of our species, and the attitudes that are prevalent in the world today.

There is dark hope in this, too.

The importance of connectivity is far from lost. Our truest, deepest reality - that we all share a single ball of rock in space - is increasingly impossible to ignore. The very engines of capitalist, expansionist, colonialist horror that led to the current "global economy" and planet-scale interaction of people in general have given us no choice but to acknowledge that we're all in this together - just as we always were.

We can no longer, collectively, hide from our truths - neither the pleasant ones, nor the ones that give rise to our greatest fears.

It very well may be that this world will eventually be undone by our greed, our unchecked obsession with "individuality" and personal aggrandizement, our self-centered and short-sighted refusal to consider anything but ourselves and our in-groups.

Or this may simply be the exact level of dire warning we all need to hear in order to actually listen.

I hear the retorts - echoed to me in actual conversations I've been involved in, and parroted by millions of concerned people in similar discussions across the globe: "But there is too much to change; too many things going wrong and too much momentum; too many people and not enough time..."

Interesting, if true, but I fail to see how that could possibly matter.

Change does not happen suddenly, nor easily - this is true of every part of our universe. To transform solid metal into a liquid can be done... with the investment of immense energy. To transform a minuscule seed into a towering tree can be done... with the investment of many, many years. To heal a culture, mend a species, guide an entire planet into an unprecedented level of flourishing is certainly not out of reach; it simply requires sufficient effort.

So how do we get that effort to happen?

Ice doesn't melt all at once. The surface thaws first - the area closest to a warmer temperature. If the temperature difference is high enough, the transformation is quick - but proximity is important. The sun is millions of times hotter than it would need to be to melt ice, and yet we experience winters on this planet wherein ice and frozen water persist for weeks or months at a time... all because of a small shift in proximity to the sun itself, brought about by the tilt of our planet's axis.

On a human level, much as in physics, proximity can lead to friction. It can also be a deeply necessary ingredient for connection. But for people, proximity doesn't need to mean being in the same place: technology can give us closeness in ways that were impossible even a decade ago, to people thousands of miles away. Few things have underscored the possibilities of this like the past year of global pandemic effects.

I will not change the attitudes of bigots via the words in this blog. I will not undo the horrors of racism, of ableism, of sexism, of binarist gender oppression, or much of anything else, really - not by myself, and not by what I write here.

So what's the point?

The point is that I have chosen my fuel, and I have chosen to use that fuel where I can. I won't change the world, here, and I don't have to.

All this project needs to do is give someone hope. All this writing needs to accomplish is to help someone think of something they haven't quite thought of before. All I need for my vulnerability, my angst, my public exposure to lead to is someone having permission to be themselves in a way they couldn't before they arrived here. All this ever was meant to accomplish was for someone to read something here, and decide to keep on going with whatever it was they're meant to be doing - or perhaps to change gears and do something else that they should be doing instead.

Every tiny nudge, every tweak in the right direction, moves us all closer to where we all desperately want to go - a world where we can all live safely, happily, and where we can thrive together.

Any time the words here bring someone a little bit of energy, or joy, or a new perspective, or reassurance, or hope, or motivation, or comfort - that's success.

Any time someone leaves these entries thinking a little harder, looking for ways to do something of their own, even if it feels tiny and insignificant - that's success.

A solitary molecule of water has no hope of doing much of anything on the scale of an entire world; and yet linked together, those same molecules make up a massively vital component of all life here. The difference is a matter of connection.

On my own, I'd never dream to change much of anything. Our world is conditioned to believe the lie of the lone heroic figure, the genius in the garage, the writer with a vision, the solitary inspiration. Against that overwhelming deluge of mistruth, it would be easy to lose all hope of accomplishing anything meaningful in life.

I'm here to tell you to disbelieve that story. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Nobody ever acts truly alone. There is no such thing as isolation. There is no such thing as an individual - we are all intertwined in each others' worlds in ways far more numerous than the world around us is set up to let us see.

You're reading this - which means you have access to some kind of technology, either directly or because someone transferred these words from the internet into a format you could access. People made that happen. Someone helped make the wires, the electronic devices, the software that allowed it all to exist. Someone grew the food that helped those people do their jobs. All those people were once children - a process that, by the very nature of our species, requires still more people to have been connected.

Nothing we do occurs in isolation; and so if we use our connectivity to our advantage, we can gradually stop being disconnected, disaffected, ineffectual molecules of water floating around as a vaporous gas. We can condense, coalesce, join a larger body of connection and become a surging, roaring tide.

It's raining outside, right now, as I write. That water didn't just happen to show up in the puddles on the ground, or the streams and rivers and lakes nearby, or the oceans a ways beyond that. Pick a molecule in any of those puddles: an hour ago, it was in a cloud.

What got it down here was connecting - to a dust particle, to other water, anything and everything sufficient to cause it to condense into a droplet and begin to plummet. It fell into that puddle because of gravity: the natural force of everything attempting to connect to everything else.

Gravity can be taken for granted, invisible in more than just a literal way. It can be inconvenient. It can even be terrifying.

It can also be used to amazing, profound, and hard-to-believe effect, if you know how. Knowledge of gravity got people onto our planet's moon, and our inventions billions of miles into space.

What would happen to rain, if the molecules of water one day decided they were too scared to drop down to earth?

What would happen to our species, if we all decide that we can't possibly fix any of this?

Maybe the formula, the cliche, is to ask the inverse question; to try to inspire by asking everyone to do some small part.

But even that isn't really the answer, as far as I can tell.

I see a different path for this world: some of us will respond, will take action, will readjust, will engage, will persist. It isn't the goal for any one specific person or even group of people to change it all, or even fix a large part of anything.

Any change has an edge: a frontier, a zone where things are likely to happen. We can see the edges of frontiers all around us, every day, if we choose to look. On those frontiers, the tiniest bits of effort are what causes a change to perpetuate. One bit of ice melts; the warmer water that it becomes can then start melting the next bit of ice, and so on. One melted drop doesn't have to do much else. It can pass along the heat it is able to transmit, and then simply rest - the edge, the frontier, has advanced. Give it enough time, and a lake will thaw.

Tremendous change - the kind of planetary-scale changes we need in this day and age - does not happen easily. It does not happen because of the dramatic actions of a tiny number of people with a lot of luck and brilliance and dedicated energy.

It happens because, over time, one person allows themselves to use their own connections to impact a few more people around them. Sometimes those impacts are large, but mostly they are tiny - maybe even invisible, perhaps impossible to even recognize by themselves. But they add up.

You may not be near the edge right now; but someday, that is likely to change. You may not have the energy to do much with the edges you are near, right now - but someone else does. Connections allow that energy to flow, and change to propagate. The edges will inevitably move.

The more of us who can use our connections to spread hope, to spread compassionate empathy, to provide safety and acceptance, the more people will be able to find inspiration, to relay insight, to discover strength and vision to move forward in larger and larger ways.

There is no such thing as too small. There is no such thing as not enough.

This is your nudge, your dare to go ahead and do the thing you've always wanted to try.

This is your permission slip. If anyone questions who said you could, tell 'em I said so.

This is your admission ticket to a place where you belong. If you don't feel like you belong to anywhere else, join everyone else who doesn't belong.

This is your invitation - to the dance of life, to the story we all write together, to simply be who you already are and allow yourself to exist in connection with the rest of us, and to cherish that connection.

If you accept this invitation, it will add up. It will make a difference - no matter how imperceptible or unimportant it might seem, it all contributes.

There is no such thing as too small. There is no such thing as not enough.

You are hereby invited.

Your response is up to you.