It's Not About the Past. It's About Taking Our Joy Back.

I've struggled at times with the idea of making peace with my past.



What does it mean to make peace with it? Does it mean that I have to come to a place in which I am okay with that bad stuff? Does it mean I have to let it go and be done with it as though it didn't happen? Does making peace with something mean that it doesn't affect me anymore? Making peace with the past often sounds akin to wilful amnesia, and I'm just not that good at forgetting.

I've decided that making peace isn't about forgetting or being unaffected. I've decided that making peace is about gaining a practical and balanced perspective. The bad stuff is still there, but I can come to an understanding of its proper proportion and shape in my life so that it no longer dominates my heart and mind, clouding over my decisions and my ability to enjoy being alive.

Sometimes it's hard to gain that perspective, though, and I don't feel like putting in the work. I just want to eat, sleep, do my jobs, and stop with all the complication. It's at those times when it seems better to just choose the evil I know and keep on going the way I have been.

I had an epiphany in the bath today, though, that made sense of why working toward a balanced perspective of the past continues to be important, even if you think you can continue to handle its negative fallout just the way you are:

Putting the past into perspective isn't about the past;
it is about claiming our natural ability to experience and create joy in the present.

The same negative history that makes me at times cynical and angry, that makes me feel small and unwanted and hurt, that makes me feel unworthy, steals from my experience of joy, as well. That feeling of unworthiness tells me that I am undeserving of joy, and, not only that, it also makes me believe that what joy I do experience is accidental and beyond my control. If I am not worthy of it, then it's certainly not mine to have and create.

When I feel like I can live with the anger and occasional depression, I'm right, I can, because I'm a pro at that, but can I live with the knowledge that I am also choosing to live with less joy when I do so? That's a double-whammy of bullshit right there when I look at it in that light. I can live with the depression and the anger, but I can't live with knowing that the rest of my life will be less bright because of it.

Up until now, I've hated the work of dealing with my history, but that's because no matter what I did, parts of my past still sucked, and I felt like I was just dragging myself through the muck repeatedly. This revelation makes sense of it now, though. I can't make the negative parts of my history better, but I can knock them down to size and put them in their place so that the past can't keep stealing stuff from my present that doesn't even belong to it.

My joy is mine. It belongs to me, even if the past tends to get a little big for its britches sometimes.

And again, because I mean it:

Putting the past into perspective isn't about the past; it is about claiming our natural ability to experience and create joy in the present.

That was some bath I just had.

Our True Words Are Powerful Things

Last week, I finally wrote my piece in response to the It Gets Better Project. I sat on the idea of writing it for a long time, unsure of how to talk on this website about my experience, because, while I've written about my gender and sexuality here before, this site has become increasingly more public to friends and family over the last year. In the end, though, I knew that I had to do it, no matter what judgement I might feel from friends, family, and the internet at large, because, although I am happy and comfortable in my own skin now, this was not always the case, and I would have given anything to see myself reflected in the world like this in my teens and twenties.



And so, I wrote about how hard it was while I was hidden and about how much better life is now that I'm on the other side of the closet:

I didn't really start talking about the real truth of who I am until I was in my thirties, and, even now, I don't mention it very often. Coming out, though, writing it down and being open about my identity and experiences, has been nothing short of liberating. I have shifted from someone who felt unworthy and invisible to someone who feels and is worthy and seen.

I am beautiful, and I am loved, and I am here fully in this life in a way that I only dreamed of when I hid what I once thought of as my great sickness but I now know is the gorgeous fact of my personhood and humanity.

As much as I received a lot of positive feedback on that entry, though, time passes quickly on the internet, and it doesn't take long before you feel like your message has been buried and forgotten. I learned today that this is only partially true.

Some of what we write here does get lost under the reams of content we pour into the internet every day, but some of it sticks with people and gets carried further while we're not looking. Some of it keeps going in conversations in middle schools in Iowa, which you find out through an email from a friend:

I was at a girlfriend's house the other night talking with her, another friend, and her 14-year old daughter. The subject of sex came up and then homosexuality and cross dressing. Ultimately, we started talking about the myth of choice and stereotypes.

I brought up your story and the way you have described sexuality and gender as being on two different spectrums. That analogy has always been so powerful for me, and I could tell it made a lot of sense to them.

The next day my [friend] relayed something her daughter had said. She said talking to me really opened her mind up and she went to school and talked about it with her friends.

Middle school kids in small town Iowa are having a better conversation about gender and sexuality this week because you shared your story. Perhaps someone at their lunch table will recognize themselves, or maybe they will remember that conversation later in life when a friend tells them their story. Maybe it will just be an interesting talk they had one day.

Wherever the ripple goes, I wanted you to know it was moving here, too.

Thank you for your courage. I'm so grateful you've been given the gift of communication so that you can share your story with us, with me.

...

Britt Reints

I cried after I read this email, because it confirmed my greatest hope: that what I said changed the way a few people thought about people like me, and that not only did what I wrote changed minds, but it changed the minds of people who likely will never see my original words. You know you've expressed an idea worth sharing when the specific words you put together matter less than the idea they seeded that continues to spread.

I hope those kids' conversations continue. I hope that they take those conversations home with them. What I hope most of all, though, is that there was some kid like me there to hear that they are not alone, to know that their peers might be more receptive to them now, and to understand that it really can get better.

Most importantly, Britt's email confirmed for me that what we do here — when we write out true things on our blogs and record it in videos and share it in photos — matters. What we do here matters not just during that few days when people bother to leave comments but for weeks, months, and years afterwards. We can't always see the offline effects of what we create when it moves out into the world beyond the medium in which we expressed it, but what we do continues on without us in places we do not imagine, shifting the minds and hearts that build our culture as it moves.

Our true words are powerful things.

We Are All Children Until We Die

I've been feeling lost lately.



I have felt lost in one way or another for much of my life. I was adrift in a complicated family. I could find no counsel for my desires at puberty. Gender norms made me feel stricken. Depression came again and again, and then again. I fell into the valley of addiction. I loved good people badly and bad people well. I allowed abusive employment to keep me from the things I loved.

These are the things I think about when I am feeling lost. I think about all of the terrible things that I had a hand in and how I feel terrible because I am a terrible person. I only think this way, though, when I forget the truth of the matter, which is this:

We are all children until we die.

When we are little, we think that we will grow up and know what we are doing one day, that the curtains obscuring our clarity will magically part with maturity, and we will know what is right, and our paths will be marked. I know I thought that, or at least I hoped for that. I'm really glad no one disabused me of that idea back then, though. I wasn't equipped to know otherwise at the time.

The truth is that we grow and change and learn and shift all of our lives. It's the great gift that no one tells us about, this beautiful truth that nothing is ever as it seems and nothing stays the same.

When you are dropped down into the deep and are mourning losses, you go there from a higher place, and you will return to it. When you are soaring on good works and accolades, it is a happy holiday from the ground. Five years yesterday, today, and five years tomorrow held, hold, and will give you different things. There is no graduation into an established adulthood.

We are all children until we die.

When I declared my sobriety at 37, I began one of the most difficult journeys of my life. It's been a hard, long road in many ways. It's been an incredible one, too, and I've discovered so much power inside of myself that I don't know what to do with it all, and yet here I am, lost as all hell, wondering why, with all this power, the path is still not clear.

And then I remember to hold myself gently again. I remember that it's not for me to know everything, to be all the things that every situation could possibly want of me. I am only me, and I am still a child, after all, learning all of this for the first time with these eyes.

I am learning to be gentle with myself, to be gentle with you. This is the gift. We are not built and then left with whatever hand was dealt. We build until we're gone. We can't help ourselves. It's the state of humanity. It can feel like the worst thing some days to have to keep pushing and doing and changing, but on other days that is the exact thing that will have you flying.

We don't get to choose to stop being creatures of movement, but it's in that sometimes maddening dynamism that all choices are born.

I might feel lost, but I am still moving, and that will bring me somewhere more solid-feeling, at least for a time. This is not an act of faith. This is unavoidable fact. I am not finished yet — none of us are finished yet — because we are all, truly, children until we die.

----------------------------

This post came out of a comment I left on Laurie's New Year's Day.

And 2012's Guiding Word Is...

I really and truly dislike December every year. It would be a perfectly good month if it weren't infected throughout by Christmas, the pressure of the annual New Year's milestone, and my damnable birthday. All three must happen, though, every year, but this year I made the bold decision to take it in stride, aside from some complaining on Twitter, of course. I have to remain true to myself.



I decided that, while taking this whole end-of-the-year avalanche of milestones and meaningfulness in stride, I would go one step further and create my own little meaningful piece of it as a way to claim some of this for my own. Plus, winter is long and hard in Saskatchewan, and I need for things to suck less.

After giving it a bit of thought, I decided that the little meaningful piece I created for myself would be this: I would choose one word to use as a guide through 2012.

While I was thinking about what my word would be, I asked the people of Twitter what their words would be, and I received a number of answers: fun, joy, money, healthy, open, persistence, investment, dare, less, completion, wholehearted, patience, believe, tenacious, rehearse, onward, peace, fearless, tend, love, mindfulness, perspective, and acceptance. I also found out that Ali Edwards had already had the same idea with One Little Word 2012. I took this as a sign that it was a good idea to be having.

One word kept coming back to me, and I didn't like it, because it wasn't a particularly emotional or inspired sounding word, and it lacked a certain sexiness, but there it was, creeping back in among the much more interesting words I was trying to push it out with.

shift
verb (used without object)

5. to move from one place, position, direction, etc., to another.
6. to manage to get along or succeed by oneself.

See? "Shift" does not score very high on the sexy meter, but it's a pushy little syllable, so there it is.

2012's "shift" is going to help me to remain mindful of when I need to shift in direction either in thought or in action. "Shift" will be my reminder to sidestep complacency and change paths when I feel stuck. "Shift" will help me to keep moving rather than allow myself to become mired in self-doubt and the safety of repetition.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that "shift" is already in action.

If you were to have a word to help guide you through 2012, what would it be? Are you surprised by what comes up for you?

Who Knew A Murmuration Of Starlings Could Be So Awe Inspiring?

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.