I always love your missives, Vivian. It feels like we are collecting notes from one another on the beach. It makes me feel less alone in a way that is still enveloped in so much solitude and stillness. This shit is hard. The terror of losing it all -- family, partners, safety, love -- because of a failure to live up to gendered expectations is so strong. And it is not only external expectations, which a rebellious side of me can take pleasure in thumbing my nose at. It is also the expectations I laid out for people myself with how I presented and acted and narrated the story of my life and loudly self-conceived. The masks, as you say, that I wore and became and discarded and lost and sometimes even missed.

Sometimes I foolishly long for the days before I had bothered to think about my gender. I delude myself that I could have gone on not feeling any discomfort or risking so much if I had not opened the door. My entire history disputes that. The pain I was in was written all over my body, it is in all my health records and failed relationships and friendless years. But I still can get it into my head that I've made some terrible mistake and squandered everything that ever made a person appreciate me. Even though I never appreciated a moment of my life back then. Nostalgia and internalized bullshit and rumination and stigma can do a real number on me.

It is so hard to think oneself out of mental traps that were created by the culture we live in. I wish I could get a new operating system sometime! It's also hard to know what to want when you have rejected so much of what society wanted for you. One really has to enter the abyss. and so maybe it's only natural to be terrified and to want to turn back sometimes.

I hope you are feeling better since your illness! And that you and your daughter were still able to have some good times.