Therapy Update

It's been a while since I updated the post-pandemic crisis. So here we are... 

First, I've been faithfully and happily investing time, energy, and dollars into a weekly therapy session, started back in August. It's good work, solid work, and M my therapist is a nice combination of wise, intuitive, and resonant (queer friendly and knowledgable, and in sync with the mish-mash of science / holistic belief that make up my internal world). I look forward to my weekly hour - challenging, often dredging up tears and grief, but always nourishing and positive. 

I've been down the therapy road a few times: 

• In the early 90's as I wrestled with gender issues (with a men's movement / Robert Bly beating drums in the woods therapist). I was not exactly reparative therapy, but definitely working to heal what he saw as wounded masculinity rather than accepting my trans nature. 
• In the late 90's, as a pretty happy and playful gender queer / androgyne, considering whether I needed / wanted to transition
• In the early 00's, as a candidate for gender transition, seeking psych approvals (mandated at the time) for hormones and surgery. As someone who had been a trans community fixture and pretty high functioning, it was all pro forma. 
• The end of the 00's, when I found a life coach / counselor to talk to as I navigated the end of a relationship and moving into my own place. 

And yet none of that work drilled down into the core. Understandable and forgiveable; pre-transition I needed my armor, my survival tools, just to make it through each day. The trauma was not just fresh, it was continuing. Now, late in life and with the end perhaps in sight, I finally am able to unpack it all.

And while the work continues, the list of stuff we've dug through in the past few months work has been impressive:

• First, a realization of how much I have lived my life in ways that are small, invisible, unobtrusive, inoffensive. I was intent on being "the good tranny", trying not to make waves, trying not to be visible, trying not to set off trip-wires with cisgender folks, with queer folk, with anyone. I've lived outside of gender for the better part of 15 years. 
• Next, a realization of the trauma that comes with transition. I've pretty much lost every single person, community, memory, experience from the first 30 years of my life. Family, friends, education, employment - almost entirely gone. And angry and resentful at the bulk of humanity who still have that history. 
  
• As a child, I was subjected to painful and traumatic medical procedures. Not repressed memories, I've noted and recalled this throughout my life. But I wrapped it in rationalization and minimized its impact. That little 5-6 year old kid tearfully walking into the doctors office alone to be painfully catheterized, over repeated visits. Yeah, that kid was traumatized, and carried that burden alone.
• That same kid, when gender started bubbling up as an issue, learned soon enough that there was no help coming from mom or dad - they had neither the information or the capacity to deal. So that became another burden that I was way too young to shoulder. But I did, equating these gender struggles with original sin. 
• Finally, as a marriage came to an end, I shouldered the responsibility entirely, and only now, 30 years down the road, am I letting go of the guilt (and the various souvenirs and memories) from that unfortunate attempt to live a "normal" life 
  

SiriusXM

Slightly annoyed at SiriusXM. My old car (a 2010 Chevy Malibu gifted to me by my mom) had Sirius XM and I had treated myself a few years back. Springsteen and Little Steven, of course, as well as NPS and PRX and MSNBC. But also (true confession) the 70s channel and especially American top 40 each weekend, where they replayed a 70s era show each weekend, hitting the classics but also the one-hit wonders and the schlock. Loved it all. My new car (a Nissan Versa) does not have the Sirius antenna - so a few days after I tried to download the app so I could listen via Apple Carplay. No dice. After working my way through the website, and then talking to two service reps for over 90 minutes, I gave up. A few days later I got a letter from Sirius who apparently got wind that the car was sold, cancelled the account and I have a credit for remaining time on my last year. Why the service reps I spoke to were unable to figure all that out, I have no idea. The funny thing is that Nissan is sending me emails with a 3 month free promotional offer for the Sirius app. Which is what I was looking for to begin with. But the whole encounter with the Sirius service folks left such a foul taste in my mouth I'm just going to walk away....

New Car

After many months (years, really) of hemming and hawing, and spending way too much money trying to keep my old car (a 2010 Chevy Malibu gifted to me by my mother as she was letting go of driving), I bought a new car. I am the (sort of) proud owner of a 2023 Nissan Versa. I've been driving an old car for many years - the Malibu was in good shape when I got it (2016?), and was in fact in nice shape when I let it go - newer tires, fancy rims, rebuilt transmission, good engine, good brakes. But the computers and controls were a hot mess - with an annoying engine temp / cooling system problem that 3 trips to Pep Boys and 3 trips to the dealer failed to resolve, and finally an Electronic Steering Control issue that went from a small annoyance to a total safety hazard. It cost me $350 at the dealer to be told $1200 for the part (steering column) and 12 week lead time. It was time.... So after a bit of virtua tire kicking, and consideration of a used Volvo wagon (kind of my dream car, but I'm tired of having to get an older car fixed), I opted for a Nissan, not quite so theft-worthy as a Honda or Toyota, nor the lower end Kia and Hyundai that apparently are TikTok targets. Apparently Ford has dropped out of the car market completely, and I've had my fill of GM products. I'm not quite set up (financially or charging infrastructure) for an electric car. So a small Nissan it is. I'm already enjoying 50% better mileage (~36 MPG vs. ~24 MPG for the Malibu). I was feeling pretty punk about it all (having gotten very used to no car payments, low insurance, and low property taxes), and thinking I should have pulled the trigger two year ago, but the dealer finance woman noted that two years ago, cars were hard to get and anything they did have was going for $4-5K over MSRP. I'm already enjoying a 13 year bump in technology - back-up camera, emergency stopping (vehicle or pedestrian), road drift warnings (you get a familiar rumble as if you were driving over ruble strips when you cross a painted line), Apple Carplay. I do miss keyless entry (no key fob) and auto-start (not so much now but when it gets cold). But I'll adapt. I learned to drive in a '69 Ford Ranch Wagon and a '73 AMC Hornet, so I'm pretty grateful for any sort of decent wheels.

Find My Phone

Yesterday's adventure into the long, slow slide into some form of mental incapacity: I played the Find My Phone sound four times as I hunted frantically in my bedroom; the sound seemed to move around the room. The phone was, of course, in my back pocket....so it always seemed to be behind me.

I'll be setting up a Go Fund Me for my move to assisted living soon . . .

The Villa Restaurant, Wayland, MA

 

Somewhere in the past, 2016 or earlier, the Russell family went out to dinner at this place. Either Mom or brother Tom recommended it - comfortable, affordable, simple food with good portions. There may or may not have been a family photo taken. Somehow I got onto their email list.

 

Mom died at the end of 2016, Tom died in 2019. We've had three years of pandemic in the ensuing years that temporarily shuttered most restaurants and permanently closed many. And still I remain on their email list and have not quite gotten around to unsubscribing.

 

Such is the nature of grief and loss. You hang on to the dumbest things because you don't want to forget.

New Year's Resolutions

 I've never been the type to make New Year's resolutions - generally not my style or speed, and certainly none of the more traditional sorts of things. However, as I have been wrestling with a certain life malaise, this seems like a good time to turn over a new leaf. Or perhaps to pick up some leaves that have fallen and scattered over the years. 

First, I am going to blog regularly. From my heyday (2006-2008) when I posted ~500 times a year), I am down to 8 (2020), 5 (2021) and 4 (2022). It's kind of embarrassing. I need to write more about all sorts of stuff. 

 Part of the reason I stopped blogging has been social media (and more specifically, Facebook) which captures most of my heretofore blogged posts. I plan to go through my FB contributions, find longer and heftier posts, and back-fill them in here, for the permanent record.

Next, I am going to resume regular neighborhood trash pick-ups (I got out this afternoon and got 1/2 the regular route covered). I need to fresh air and exercise and I do better when my world is less of a shit-hole. So let's start on the block. 

I vow to stay up later. I've recently gotten into a bad habit of crawling into bed very early (especially since the time change) and screwing around online for hours while horizontal. I'll give myself permission to continue to screw around online, but not while in bed. 

I'm going to practice (yoga) more. Right now I'm doing the bare minimum and I need more time on the mat, more time sitting. I doubt I'll ever return to formal classes (too complicated and entangled with all the other stuff I am working with) but I'm perfectly able to practice on my own more consistently and disciplined. 

There's a ton of other stuff, related to food and chores and exercise and money and . . . but this is enough, for now.

Peter Anthonjy Redux

 Just off the phone with a dear friend from long ago, now in Australia and, as he puts it “dotting i’s and crossing t’s” before cancer takes him down. It was a very sweet and very sad conversation. In the midst of it, learned that another long lost contact from the same era, who ran the open mike at the Common Ground in Bristol, died suddenly in November. And this weekend the wake and services for a more recent dear friend and student.

Death stalks. All we can do is get out of bed and beat it back for one more day.

Femmephobia - Part 4

I'm not going to spend a lot of time digging into the past to completely understand how I got to the point of locking away my inner child / inner femme for the better part of 20 years. Certainly not my valuable (both in money and in energy) therapy time, which will be more forward looking. But the subject certainly warrants a bit of naval gazing and a transition post-mortem of sorts, as I emerge from nearly two decades of living a life that essentially turned its back on what seems, today, to be the root of my passion, vitality, and joie de vivre.

Just how did I get here? I have a few ideas . . . 

The State of the Art I: Back in the late 80's, when I first encountered what came to be called the transgender community online (via Compu$erve, this was pre-AOL) one would tag oneself in the CB Chat area or the HSX-200 (Human Sexuality) forums. Initially it was pretty simple. Mary<TV> was a Transvestite. Mary<TS> was a Transsexual. Mary<GG> was a Genetic or Genuine Girl. The queer cisgender women policed gender through VV (Voice Verification, a phone call) so as to keep the icky transwomen out of women-only space.  For a transwoman to pass a VV inspection was passing indeed....

Later, came Mary<CD>, Cross-Dresser which was a bit less fetishistically loaded equivalent to TV. Later still, some pioneers adopted Mary<TG>, no doubt sowing the seeds that came to be the Transgender Identity and Transgender Community. At the time, TG was an intermediate stage, a bit like gender queer or nonbinary today, roughly defined as someone who was more or less full time or living their gender queerly but was not on an established medical transition path. It took years for it to become more of an umbrella term.

And though not stated, please remember that this sample was highly filtered by ability to access online services (having the tech and the funds to do so) as well as the technical savvy - this was long before AOL was spamming the planet with disks, so those of us online were in many ways the tech elite. Suffice it to say things skewed white, assigned male, nerdy / geeky, and economically well off. I paid $4.95 an hour to access online services, back in the day. 

And there was definitely a bit of a pecking order, with TS sitting atop the pyramid, TG slightly lower, CD/TV next, fetish dressers below that. Drag was not even on the radar at that point.

As AOL, Prodigy, and other services came along, they brought their unique spin to things, but the root of online trans community was Compu$erve (and before that, BBS), I think.

The State of the Art II: In the mid 90s, I took my first steps into the real world, first at a book reading / signing by Kate Bornstein. September 29, 1994, if I recall correctly. I was terrified to be among the tribe, terrified to be in the big city of Hartford, unambiguously male in jeans, loafers, and a wool sport coat.  

Soon thereafter, I ended up at one of the two trans support groups in town - CT Outreach Society or COS. I am sure I was a gender blurry sight - with polyester pants, flats, a woman's top, but no wig or makeup. The leader of the group made it clear that the cross-dressers wore heels, the transsexuals wore flats (as I sheepishly gazed down at my shoes). Again, no transgender option - choose column A or column B. I eventually figured out full femme, buying a wig at a friendly shop, learning to do makeup. There are a few photos from that era, I suspect, although probably and thankfully not digitized.

At that time COS and the XX Club (the transsexual support group) kind of ignored each other. Not out of any personal enmity, but because the transsexuals looked down their noses at the cross-dressers. The transition curious cross-dressers wandered over to XX Club surreptitiously, and rumors would fly if an individual were spotted there.

I eventually ended up as executive director of COS for several years - stepping down only when it became clear that I was headed toward transition. I also probably did more to tear down the wall between the groups, welcoming the transsexuals to COS and promoting XX Club to those looking to transition. And personally, I started my long slide toward androgyny and gender neutrality - starting to use my own hair in girl mode, feminizing my eyebrows, starting facial electrolysis "just in case", and choosing to wear things that cisgender (also a word that did not exist back then) women wore rather than the more clearly gendered outfits of the cross-dresser tribe. I also began to move through the Hartford area queer community in both genders, and when that got complicated, I dropped male name / femme name conventions, and began to go by Jude, my middle name from birth, a name that worked across and between genders. 

This gender blur had a number of side effects. First, the wives of CDs started to see me as an ally / resource, someone who would shoot straight with them about their husbands. On more than one occasion, I'd inadvertently out some "on the D/L" cross-dresser by running into their spouse in the grocery store (I was pretty easily identified regardless of gender presentation) and innocently say "we miss Becky, how is she doing?" Becky was doing very well, going out to bars and dating men, and using the non-sexual support group as cover. Probably the start of my taking up the role of "The Good Transwoman", currying favor with women, feminists, lesbians as I turned my back on the less savory aspects of trans community.

Throughout this time, being femme was equated with cross-dressers and fetishists. Transitioners were a lot more low key, if not downright butch. So the less of a femme one was, the more seriously one was taken when it came to transition.

At the same time, access to transition related medical services was through the Gender Identity Clinic of New England (GICNE) - a board that included an Episcopal priest, psychiatrist, psychologist, and endocrinologist. I went before the board twice - once to access hormones, once to access surgery. In both cases, I tiptoed along a line of being femme enough, but not too femme. I damn well could not be seen to be enjoying my time as a woman. "Transition or Die" was the tacit mantra, and you had to convince the board that you were at that point before they green lit your transition. 

Androgyny: I was adamantly not on a transition path (so I said). Instead, taking advantage of my natural hair, my innate femininity, my increasingly hairless face, I began living between genders. I was staking out ground in the mid to late 90s that today is claimed by nonbinary, gender fluid, etc. I was for the most part alone in that world. 

It was a time of mischief and mayhem. I knew where all the non-gendered bathrooms were along the paths I traveled frequently, and when forced to gender myself to pee, it was often a game time decision - which restroom seemed less busy, less likely to create a problem. I started to learn and reinforce the art of invisibility. 

When I traveled for work (as M) I would often have to declare gender (by voice) to the service staff, lest they ask "Something for you, miss?" - picking up gender from the back of my head or my vibe or something. Before the 9-11 attacks, I'd check in for my flight as a male, and then between the ticket counter and the gate, slip into a bathroom, change my top, primp my hair, and complete the trip as a woman. At a trans conference I once overheard someone asking if Jude was MTF (transfeminine) or FTM (transmasculine). I was in gender fluid heaven.

As I snuck up on 40, my stylist (an older drag queen who I adored and who abetted my gender fluidity through creative hair styling) innocently commented that I was starting to thin on top. The whole puckish androgyne thing kind of falls apart with male pattern baldness. I got on track for hormones and testosterone blockers. That pretty much lit the fuse on transition, somewhere down the road.

Shedding My Skin: As I moved towards transition, I pulled back from my many contacts in the trans community. My CD friends were often weekend warriors, looking for any excuse to go out (drinks, dining) at often higher end restaurants where they were less likely to get clocked / hassled. I was much lower on the socio-economic ladder, and tired of either spending so much for lunch, or having to be treated. I was also self employed, and at times it felt like I was the default "hey, I feel like getting some girl time in, let's call Jude and do lunch" wing-woman. I had deadlines and needed to keep the money coming in.

I also found that my leadership role at COS was an issue - as a transitioner, I was not the best public face of an organization that often was the gateway for CDs and spouses, needing desperately to believe that hubby was not transitioning. And after two failed successors (the organization simply looked past them to me for advice, opinion, thoughts) I realized I needed to step back completely to give someone a chance to succeed.

Similarly, the XX Club, which at one time was vibrant and healthy, fell on hard times - a schism related to relationships, the creeping influence of the internet making in person support groups passe. By the time I sought support, the XX Club was 4-5 people clinging onto the life raft of a sinking ship. 

So I kind of ended up adrift, with many friends and contacts but sans a real community or any sort of formal support.

The 9-11 Attacks: I was in Chicago for a trade show (as a M) the week of the 9-11 attacks, and got stuck there. I ended up hanging out at a local queer bar en femme that week, watching the news. I finally ended up driving my rental car back to CT. Years later after I transitioned, a peer recalled being asked on several occasions that week why that woman (me) was wearing a men's suit. Clearly my gender blur was starting to cross lines, to be a distraction.

When the business travel and corporate production gigs that I was freelancing at shut down after the attacks, I began to live more or less full time as a woman. And when clients started looking to hire me a year later, I began turning down work because I was too damn feminine and was unwilling to butch up. The end of my androgynous period was in sight, and I announced my transition effective January 1, 2003. 

I won't go too much into the transition, but suffice it to say I fell in with a relatively new surgeon (Dr. Marci Bowers), became her web-mistress for a time, and was one of her first patients as she took over Dr. Biber's practice in Trinidad, CO. As someone who never envisioned being able to afford such surgery, the opportunity (Dr. Bowers was using Dr. Biber's pricing initially, and I was able to trade some web design work for services) - it felt like the universe was sending me a gift. My one year RLT (Real Life Test), required at that time by the Standards of Care, in reality lasted slightly less than 365 days. Nobody cared; I was too far down the road for any of the gatekeepers to see me as anything but F.

Lesbian and Coupled: During my androgyny phase and transition years, I was coupled with a woman I can only describe as an "angry lesbian". We split in the 2008-2009 timeframe, but we're still close friends. He's become a slightly less angry transmasculine person. However coming off transition, I was hanging with the lesbians - and I guess sought to fit in - eschewing feminine clothes, makeup, etc. I could get away with it (by dint of my many years moving through androgyny and gender fluidity). There was also a sense of perverse pride involved - I did not need to resort to clothing, to makeup, to accessories to signify myself as a woman - I simply was one. 

Over time I came to realize that the lesbian community was a somewhat fraught place for transwomen, and gave up trying to find a home there. I retained the vibe though, finding that being read as a queer, lesbianish woman was easier than trying to be a conventionally gendered woman. So I ended up living as a somewhat soft butch. 

It has turned out to be an ideal place to hide - as I have been evolving and femming it up recently, I've had several friends (familiar with the trans, who I was sure knew my story) confess they did not realize I was trans (probably looking for makeup and heels and wigs and dresses), and just assumed I was a queer woman.

My Inner Child is Pissed (and with good reason) - Part III

When I first started down this road, as a male gendered person trying to come to grips with my cross-dressing, and working with a therapist looking to heal what he saw as a wounded masculinity, I did some inner child work. Little M like Legos (I bought some) and dinosaurs and a bunch of other fairly simple things. He was also unambiguously male. 

Well, my inner child is back (with a vengeance) and she is pissed. She's been locked in a closet for 15-20 years, by someone striving to fit in, to become invisible, to be a well behaved transgender woman, to maybe find a home among the lesbians. I suspect there's another blog post coming (about how and why I ended up turning my back on gender)

M's flip charts were useful here - assigning or identifying an "age of onset" to various traumas and their resulting symptoms, coping skills, dysfunction. It's pretty clear that my inner child is a young girl, realizing she was not happy as a boy, and unable to do anything about that. There are childhood pictures where I am smiling, happy, bright. But by the age of 5 or 6, that bright happy kid looked worried, scared, unhappy. 

My friend B has an alter ego, Lenetta Baby, who she wrote of in college, that became the avatar for her eating disorders, addictions, mental illness, dysfunction. Sidebar, you'll be able to meet Lenetta Baby soon, as Barbara publishes her book Bad Hair Day on Planet Earth this fall. My inner child does not have a name, perhaps I will inquire if she needs or wants one. If nothing else, having a word for this entity or self (like M's use of the word "unicorn" as a shorthand for relationship) would be useful. 

Having had some experience with the sort of work in the past, well, no wonder I have been struggling. Locked away, this sad and angry little girl grabbed everything she could reach within my psyche and began to weaponize it. My passion, my health, my spark, my light, my joy. If she was not allowed to exist, to move through the world, then dammit I was not going to either. 

M commented last week that when I spoke of this side of me (not having really fleshed out an actual inner child or being at the time, just conscious of a need to explore and embrace this part of me), that I spoke with such tenderness and love. And yeah, I love this little kid to death. She deserves so much better and I feel horrible for having locked her away.

As we closed out our most recent session, I pondered "so what is next" and M simply said "I think you should take a victory lap". I imagine a therapist sees a lot of clients who struggle to get to the root of their issue - she might have a pretty good idea where things are going but must wait patiently weeks or month or years for the client to get there. And similarly, once there, how many people lock up in fear and anxiety at having to explore change. So to have someone like me unlock a big piece of the puzzle so quickly and dive into the adventure with equal parts curiosity, courage, excitement and fear - I imagine it feels like a win.

At the moment, my inner child is getting EVERYTHING she wants. I've got enough resources to let her play, buying shoes and clothes and dresses and makeup. I'm not parenting in the least - no adult voice saying "that's really not a great look for you, hon" or "where will you get the chance to wear that" or "you already have a red skirt". She needs to know I'm back with her, she's safe, she's loved, she's going to have a seat at the table going forward. So yeah, things are a little crazy in Jude land.  

Thankfully, she has not expressed any interest in a wedding gown or leather-wear or 6" heels or anything too out there. But as best as I am able, I'm letting her run until she tires herself out. She's having fun. Me too.

But this is not simply a mental or academic exercise; I'm allowing my little femme inner child back into the world. I'm letting myself become more gendered in all aspects of my life, especially in my social and work relationships. Hence the social media posts. When the comfortably gender neutral woman you've been interacting with for 20 years show up in a floral dress, dangly earrings, and a touch of makeup - well, it's kind of a shock to the system. I guess I'm coming out as femme. In some ways its more scary that my actual transition. "I need to be a woman, but I don't buy into all that girly shit" was the mantra, I suppose, that tempered the social explosion of a gender transition and reassured all involved (professional peers, family members, society at large) that I'd be well-behaved, not make a scene or be an embarrassment. 

For the permanent record, here are two (well received) posts I've made on Facebook:

This morning's overnight oats were eaten right out of the mason jar, as opposed to being spooned into a bowl, and I feel like I've crossed a line that there might be no coming back from. 

Burying the lede. Guilty as charged. I continued . . .

In other news, it took about 5 sessions with a new therapist (abetted by decades of groundwork) for me to come to the tearful realization that my decision to transition ~20 years ago was the right one, that I really do need to be (and in fact, enjoy being) F, and that a lot of my churlishness of recent years has been because I have been so intent on becoming invisible, inoffensive and indispensable (and probably a couple of other "in-" words) that I forgot how much I also needed to be me.

 

#FemmeOn

And in response to overwhelming positivity and love, in the same thread I added: 

Thank you all for the lovely and kind words. I am trying to take them all in without too much filtering, both here and in person.

When I first transitioned, I was self employed, gender blurring, androgynous. There was not much of a workplace to deal with, and what contacts I had were no doubt exasperated by many years of mixed signals in terms of gender, so my picking a team, coming out as trans seemed more of a relief than a challenge. Compared to most, I got off easy.

 

This feels harder. I've spent the past 15-20 years expressing gender in a way that might be considered androgynous or gender neutral. Lot of reasons for that (which I continue to explore) but my inner child (who is most decidedly F) has been tired of being locked away and has been kicking my ass for the past few years in dozens of ways. I'm finding ways to love her and nurture her in the moment and giving her a seat at the table going forward.

 

Grateful for the opportunity to be able to make another run at this whole gender thing. A lot of transfolk don't get even one fair shot.

And yeah, it is scary. Because socially and culturally, women's clothing, fashion, and presentation do butt up against sexuality, attractiveness, patriarchy, feminism, availability, vulnerability. I'm putting myself out there - to love and to be loved, to fuck and to be fucked, to be annoyed, to be taken less seriously, to be an object of derision, to be a whipping girl for some, to be assaulted or raped.  That's where the brave / fearless part comes in, I suppose. I desperately want my unicorn to find me. But my bogeyman might find me as well. 

I'm kind of blogged out this morning, but a few final thoughts before I wander off. A handful of close friends, who I have perhaps pushed away, or kept out, have been invited back. In almost every case, hearing me tell my story, there are tears (of happiness for my joy, of sadness for my pain and struggle). There is a knowing that something was amiss, but not quite sure what it was nor how to help. 

In a note to my friend, mentor, #1 fan Barbara, I wrote: 

In some ways the past few weeks have felt like a slow motion Enlightenment Intensive / Direct Experience. My realization that this was at the root of so much of my pain and trauma seems both stupidly obvious (like the Truth, all of my Direct Experiences involve laughter because its so freaking obvious) and also caught me completely off guard. I could (and have, and will) cry for that sad, lonely, hurt little girl I carry inside of me. She gets all the ice cream (or party dresses) she wants.....

And Barbara replied: 

That the little girl will now get some of what she's longed for.  She's been your own unique version of the very unhappy, sabotaging  Lenetta Baby.  

Interesting about IE/direct experience.   After I got off the phone with you a few days ago, that's exactly what I said to Peter - holy shit, Jude had a direct experience!  My heart truly sings for you right now. I see you walking down the sidewalk with a childlike spring in your step.

The new me is just a few weeks old but she feels so very familiar. I'm coming back around to myself. 

When I first encountered West Hartford Yoga back in 2004, I picked up a flyer for a workshop called The Enlightenment Intensive. One of the quotes in this flyer was from the Gospel of Thomas

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

This inner spirit - feminine, funny, sexy, flirty, beautiful, light - has been locked away for far too long, and in struggling to be seen, to be heard, to be let out into the light and the world, was beginning to destroy me. She came close.

She is free, and at the moment I am simply getting out of the way as best I can. As I continue my work with M, we'll figure the rest out.

The Once and Future Femme - Part II of Crisis

Pre-transition, my then partner A and I had a bit of a cruel habit of making up nicknames for the various transpersons in our life. There was "Leggy" (tall and short skirts), and "Fabby" (because everything was fabulous), and Murphy (a close friend, Irish), and "Boney" (skinny, without a lot of feminizing baby / body fat, and choosing shoes / fashion that highlighter her angularity), and "Briskly" (her social style was somewhat curt), and "Moany" (always going on about something), and "Sneaky" (on the D/L about dating men while married). 

I am sure there were others, more or less cruel. My nickname was "Primpy". 

I suspect that nobody who has known me over the past 15 years could imagine me being called Primpy. While I have been blessed with a nice assortment of feminine attributes, I've been living the life of an androgynous, gender neutral, soft butch something or other for many years. There's an old trans community joke: What's the one cure for cross-dressing? Answer: Transition. I certainly stopped "dressing" in anything feminine once I transitioned.

The joke plays on several levels. First, touching on the way some folks (myself included) warmed up to the idea of gender transition by testing the waters as a cross-dresser. Another joke: What's the difference between a cross-dresser and a transsexual? Answer: Two years. 

Second, once one has transitioned, one can no longer be considered to be cross-dressing, but is rather is choosing clothes appropriate to ones gender. 

Third, back in the day, the transitioners / transsexuals, intent on proving their own authenticity (to the world, to medical professionals) generally disavowed any sort of outward display of femininity. We'll get back to this, I promise.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. M, my therapist, spent our first few sessions identifying the issues. Obviously, my pain, suffering, malaise, apparent circling the drain. Something was clearly broken in our heroine, Jude. Second, my self-imposed isolation, from friends, family, etc. Third, the way I got involved in a group, event, community, cause,  and inevitably found myself over-committed, running the place, but no longer able to enjoy, benefit, or participate, and filled with resentment as a result. And finally (scrolling off the bottom of my list, but M would not let it go) my relationships, or lack-thereof. Your correspondent has been wholly out of the world of relationship and sexuality for roughly 15 years.

At our first meeting, I gave M a heads up. I've been down this road before. I've done a lot of work (both traditional therapy, reading, and less traditional healing / spiritual growth work). As a result, I may get there before she did (so please try to keep up), my intuition is on point, and I can be pretty fearless. Once there was blood in the water (figuratively), once I got a clue of where this was going, she would not have to spend 6 months trying to get me to see what to her was crystal clear, and another 6 months screwing up the courage to make changes.

 To call me prescient was an understatement.  

So we talked, we made some charts, she got to know me a bit. She pulled out a copy of Janina Fisher's The Living Legacy of Trauma Flip Chart: A Psychoeducational In-Session Tool for Clients and Therapists. I drew some boxes, and chewed on some stuff. One of those boxes was labelled "The Good Transwoman" and that one has proven to be important. M gave me the language / visualization of having a long antenna - super sensitive to what others are feeling, thinking, etc. - which makes me highly careful as I move through the world.

And then, (maybe 3-4 weeks into our work), two things happened. 

First, my niece was planning a wedding, and I realized I'd need to find something to wear. I've gained weight in the ~20 years since I transitioned. I have a closet full of things that do not fit, are no longer fashionable, are not appropriate. I floated the idea of wearing the dress I bought / wore to my nephews wedding a few years back, but my sister, knowing there would be family pictures, would have none of that. "Go buy something new for your niece"

Meanwhile, M and I got talking about relationships and my exceptionally dour opinion that there was nobody out there for me. Transgender women are often suspect in lesbian spaces; I'm a firm believer that vocal TERFs (Trans Excluding Radical Feminists) are the tip of a much larger iceberg. And while most queer women are polite and PC enough to not be outwardly trans-excluding or trans-phobic, well, we transgender women are generally not dating material, especially among women my age.

On the other side of the gender line, whatever currency that transgender women have with men pretty much goes out the window once one is post-operative. I've been hit on a handful of times in the past few years - always men who recognize that I am trans and are looking for a lady friend with something special (a penis). It takes a simple "sorry, I'm post-operative" to send them on their way, along with pat on the head, because for whatever reason these dudes are usually 5'2" and I'm a kind of amazon queen at 5'11".

Also in the back of my mind - the fact that transgender women get killed by men, invariably men who are attracted to them, seeking them as sex or relationship partners, conflicted by their sexual desires. So yeah, nothing there.

And to be honest, I have no idea what or who I want. I'm not really attracted to a specific type or gender, but rather to how we relate. You press my buttons, you make me feel like a desired, feminine, receptive woman (maybe even leaning into subbing or bottoming) in our relationship - and I'm all yours. Stone butch, silver fox, straight but open minded, gender adventurer - I'm pretty much wide open. 

And yet... M would not let it go and we've come to use the word "unicorn" as short hand for that mythical, possibly one of a kind, person who might want to connect with me: sexually, socially, emotionally. 

M simply posed the question. "If your unicorn is out there, how would they find you?". Boom. Wake up, Judith.

Because yeah, I've spent the last 20 years mastering the art of invisibility. My present FB profile quote has been:

"...invisibility is a superpower." ~ Banksy

Recently changed in light of the current situation: 

 “Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial” ~ Ralph Ellison

And I've hidden from the world as a soft butch, androgynous, gender neutral being, My friend K noted "you're sort of blurry, muddy - blacks and greys and earth tones". So long as the world honored my gender (and the world invariably does) I was fine. But an invisible, gender-neutral person in figurative camouflage might keep me safe, but it is not going to catch the eye of a bright and sparkly unicorn, looking for a playmate or a soulmate. 

And finally, the dresses arrived for the wedding (Kohl's, don't judge) and as I pulled them out of their mailing bags and pulled them over my head (they fit and looked pretty good, all things considered), a familiar feeling, long dormant, washed over me. The same sort of happiness and excitement and endorphin rush I got 30 years ago as I dipped my toes into the world of cross-dressers. I like wearing the clothing that society and culture mainly mostly assign to women.  Boom. Wake up, Judith. 

And this is where it all comes together, where the earlier prescience pays off.  Because it become crystal clear what I had to do: I had to embrace my inner femme. 

About 12 days ago, I sat in M's office, in my usual camouflage. Pondering the need to bait the hook (so as to catch a unicorn) with the suspicion that the positive emotional experience  of putting on a dress might have something to do with it. A week later, I was in there, wearing the best femme mode I could cobble together (after decades of not giving a shit about pretty much anything I wore) and weeping. I want to be a girl; I need to be a girl; I miss being a girl. (I'm 61 and I know its not PC, but the wounded part of me that we're dealing with is still very much a young woman / girl).

Let's just say things have moved quickly. I've come to understand what's happening slightly more slowly than I havelet things unfold. Outwardly: 

• I began to purchase clothing, rebuilding a wardrobe that has lain fallow for nearly 15 years.
  
• I began to reclaim some of my gendered spaces - a dresser top where I keep earrings and jewelry, a closet filled with clothing stretching back to my cross-dressing days. 
• I took 7 bags of clothing to Savers that no longer fit, were no longer appropriate, or were remnant of the various organizations, communities, events, and career requirements I've participated in over the past 25 years. 
• I've "come out" (again) on social media, this time not a trans or a woman, but rather as a "femme", mostly so as to ease the transition with family, friends and colleagues who have not seen me in a dress (or wearing jewelry or makeup or bright colors) in years, if ever.
  
• I've started to move through the world as a clearly gendered, brighter, happier, sexually and emotionally available woman. My friend the unicorn, here I am. Come find me. 

So yeah, 20 years post-transition, and I'm primping again. 

The universe is a funny place. 

My Post-Pandemic (spoiler warning, not) Crisis - Part I

When the COVID-19 pandemic blossomed back in the spring of 2020, I was all-in. Sometime in the first weeks of the crisis, Talking Heads "Life During Wartime" crossed through my listening life and it became the mantra of the next two years. We were on a war footing and I was ready for it. 

 

 

Darkly, I suggested that my life already looked like lockdown, so welcome to my misery, the rest of you. Darkly, I suggested that I was pre-pandemic'd - that the isolation, unhappiness, struggle of my regular life provided some level of protection. Darkly, I quipped that its only PTSD if the trauma were in the past. 

 

I was, truthfully, coming off a period of death and loss. We lost mom at the tail end of 2016. My brother Tom, who I think hung in there while mom was alive,  succumbed to a life of alcoholism in June of 2019, capping two months of crisis as his body failed - lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, cancer in a series of cascading events that took us through 3 extended hospital stays, two aborted returns home, and a final trip to hospice. And finally, my little guy Elo, my beloved doggie companion, passed away at 16 in October of 2019.

I had blogged a bit about grief in March of 2020, thinking I was ripe to go down into it. A week later, the world shut down. Grief would have to wait.

 

Regardless of the hows and whys, I rose to the pandemic occasion. I (along with a few key others) stepped up to save my yoga studio - starting to livestream classes (for free, via Facebook) in the early days of the crisis. Taking advantage of the downtime to knock off some big projects (a 10'x20' storage locker that had been un-opened and paid for 10 years was emptied, 40+ bankers boxes of files were sorted and shredded). I built a live-streaming program, a stretch goal for the studio for many years that we never seemed to know how to get started, in many stage,  that continues to this day. I had enough money to live on, I had no kids or family to take care of, I was comfortable. Bring it on.

At the same time, I saw the pandemic as an opportunity to extract myself from a slew of obligations and commitments that I seemed to fall into and be unable to escape. My folk fest was a two week slog that I had long ago stopped enjoying - too busy to socialize and hang, too busy to listen / watch music. Ballooning felt like work. Playing in the band felt stagnant, and seemed to serve my band-mates more than it served me. And the levels of entangling and over-commitment in the yoga studio and with studio owner Barbara specifically felt oppressive and stifling. When it all went away suddenly - well, Deus Ex Machina. Good riddance. 

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I  was starting to go down. Blood pressure, weight, blood sugar, cholesterol - my body was struggling. I was dying, did not really see a way out, and did not really care. All at the time I was the only person left on the sinking ship of the yoga studio, bailing frantically. We recovering catholics have a Jesus aspiration - no greater love than to lay down ones life for ones friends. And dammit, I was gonna save the studio or die trying. 

Somewhere along the line I noted to Barbara, when the pandemic starts to lift, when things start to open up, that's when I am going to go down. And sure enough, as we ticked over into 2022, my struggle became outward and palpable. I was angry, I was resistant, I was a petulant ass. And, because I was still the one on the bulwarks, leading the fight to save the studio, I was beyond reproach. Fuck you and your advice. I don't see you stepping up....

In June of 2022, as part of the resurrected teacher training program (a program that I steadfastly refused to staff, but got drawn into regardless), our final sharing circle required the naming of an "unreasonable" - something that the trainees could identify as a task to stretch their limits. Things like tattoos or sky diving, or getting married, or breaking up, or getting pregnant, or changing careers, or shaving ones head. My 2022 Unreasonable: to quit teaching yoga. 

It was, in hindsight, a cry for help. And it worked. 

Within a few weeks, Barbara staged an intervention in the form of a lunch date, and I tearfully revealed my pain, my fear, my belief that I was so disconnected from my physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological health that I was close to death. She, no stranger to personal crisis and healing, got me started down the road - both towards getting health insurance (in process) and getting into therapy (well underway). 

Post-pandemic therapists were hard to find. A mutual friend (former yoga studio manager) was now a practicing therapist; she had a colleague with some availability. I'm a cash client (having more money than insurance at the moment) which I am sure did not hurt my chances. And so I was back in therapy. 

And that, friends, is the end of Part 1.

Unmasking

So, I'm embracing unmasking.

Please know that I do so not because of some sense of being done or tired or over it or any of the other ways that the transition from pandemic to endemic is being framed. Rather, I know that the science says its time: 

• the Omicron variant is as mild as we might ever hope to see, As Dr. John Campbells says "Omicron is the vaccine we should have invented"
  
• that natural immunity trumps that instilled by vaccines and boosters
• that every measure (positivity, hospitalizations, deaths) are relatively low at the moment

My fondest wish is that every healthy citizen (vaccinated or unvaccinated, myself included) gets COVID this spring and summer, develops natural immunity, and that the virus disappears into the background so that the at-risk and immuno-compromised can relax. I find it hard to believe that I have not been exposed (through my time spent at the yoga studio) but I've never had reason to believe I have been, there's nobody else in my "bubble", and I've happily eschewed social interaction (things like movies, theater, parties, dining out) over the past 24 months, so who knows. 

We've dropped our mask and vax checks at the studio, and with it comes a need for me (and we, collectively) to let go of our anger & resentment towards the unvaccinated. It's gotten ugly in this little head of mine:

• wishing that unvaccinated friends and acquaintances get their asses kicked by the virus to teach them a lesson
• giving in to schadenfreude as vocal anti-vax / anti-mask celebrities, politicians,  religious leaders, media spokespersons get sick, die. Fuck 'em. 
• a reassuring mantra that COVID is the universe's way of pruning the gene pool (and the voting population) of the superstitious, the anti-science, the willfully ignorant, the politically obstinate, and the downright stupid

Finally, there is healing to be done - personally, socially, culturally, communally. 

For me, the past month has been a time of hitting the restart button. The yoga studio teacher training program aborted in March of 2020 - it's restarted in 2022. It's been odd to just kind of pick up (with a mostly new batch of trainees) - finding all sorts of digital breadcrumbs of walking away two years ago this month, of not finishing the 2020 training. 

I find myself not embedded or directly assisting in the training in 2022 - a first for me since 2011 (my first full year in the training). I put my foot down - I'm drained, broken, and am the primary person holding the yoga studio together (still) - I know that I need to be outside the training room (to manage the training logistics) as well as to keep the studio running (I'm the only staff person reliably able to work weekends), which would mean 18 hour days during training weekends. 

And I find myself broken in other ways. I've come to realize that whatever level of adventure, extroversion, engagement I might have carried pre-pandemic was not natural - but rather something I worked at, cultivated, over many years. And that I've retreated into a solitary, self-sufficient, life that was, perhaps, my armor or survival mechanism growing up fey, nerdy, queer, proto-trans. 

I've let go of so many spaces, people, communities, activities over the past two years, and I'm not really sure how many of these I really want to pick back up. 

• my annual folk festival
• my band and playing music
• concerts
• movies
• balloon crewing
  

At 61 (as of Thursday) I just don't feel like I have that much time, energy, passion left. I'm tired of stepping out and showing up for stuff alone. My fuck-it bucket is deep and broad. 

And as I watch others re-emerge - into concerts and festivals and sport and parties and events and dining out, I'm that little lonely kid, shut up in the house reading and feeling like whatever the hell is going on out there, it's not for me.

One of my pet theories (about gender transition) was that its akin to climbing a mountain. And that once one reaches the peak (presumably some level of transition or self-acceptance) the work is not done - because one needs to climb DOWN the mountain - a task that might take as long (in terms of years, energy) as did the climb through acceptance, self awareness, etc. 

This pandemic is going to be like that for me, for many, maybe for all of us - the scars, the damage, the places of retreat or dysfunction or distraction - are going to be with us for a while - perhaps a few years. 

And part of me wonders if I have a few years left.....

BHD Influences: Griffin and Sabine

One of the first things I brought to The BHD (Bad Hair Day) Project was a copy of a 1991 book by Nick Bantock entitled Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence

 

  

I recall being charmed and delighted by the book back in the day, and find it hard to believe it's been 30 years....

 

Wikipedia summarizes thusly:

The story is told through a series of removable letters and postcards between the two main characters . . . Griffin Moss is an artist living in London who makes postcards for a living. He is unhappy and lonely, though he is unaware of these feelings. His life is changed forever when he receives a cryptic postcard from Sabine Strohem, a woman he has never met. Like Griffin, she is an artist (she illustrates postage stamps) and comes from a fictional group of small islands in the South Pacific known as the Sicmon Islands (Arbah, Katie, Katin, Ta Fin, Quepol and Typ). The two begin to correspond regularly. 

The source material for BHD is two-fold. The first part is comprised of journals, datebooks, artwork, recordings, other pieces of ephemera and "found objects" relating to B's (the protagonist) illness and recovery. The second part continues the story, with the very significant addition of a primary relationship, C. There is a lot of correspondence in the second part, and the fact that we had the original source material (letters, envelopes, often delightfully decorated or illustrated) made me think of Griffin & Sabine.

Ultimately, the BHD story was too big to tell in an art-book like Bantock's works. We did (and by we, I mean Caresse, our graphics designer), however, weave found objects throughout the text in a way that resonates with Bantock's physical letters. 

I could see the B&C correspondance published / reproduced in a very similar way to Griffin& Sabine, should The BHD Project ever take off....

Bad Hair Day on Planet Earth

One of the many side projects I have been working on over the past few years is a book / memoir being written by my teacher, friend, and employer, Barbara Ruzansky, tentatively entitled Bad Hair Day on Planet Earth. 

We're starting to get the social media going for the soon to be released / published project - here's TheBHDproject Instagram page to start. I'm sure other marketing material (website, crowd-funding, etc.) will be ready soon. 

I'm not editing the book (that would be Ali) and not doing layout (that would be Caresse) and not seeking grants or funding (that would be Miranda). I was ostensibly brought on board for socail media purposes, but I'm probably not going to have time or aptitude for that (being rather Instagram resistant). No, my role on the project has been kind of shaman or guru - coming up with ideas or alternatives or concepts that more often than not end up being implemented. 

Not going to write too much about the book project right now. But I intend to put together some thoughts over the next few weeks and months about the process of putting the book together, of influences, concepts related to the book, etc. that might find their way into the book marketing and support channels. Let's call this a scratch pad for these.....

Pandemic Projects

An in-progress list of the things that have kept me busy, employed, and dare I say it, alive during the past 18 months. 

First, I've live-streamed a bunch of yoga classes. Starting with an iPad on a tripod, and evolving over time to include:

• Lights (I pulled the kirtan lighting package out of storage and set up a bit of a stage) 
• Sound (I employed a wireless headset for the instructor for better sound, carefully sanitized between uses) 
• Facebook Live, migrating to 
• Youtube, migrating to 
• Vimeo
• Got the studio up to speed on Zoom, working with instructors who were able to teach from home, and setting up in-studio resources, including
• A Zoom cart - which started with back to back monitors (one for instructor one for operator, who had to sit through class in the room) and adding external cameras and mics
  
• Transition to HDMI cameras and an amazing little switching box that is as close to being a TD as I'll ever get. We used that for Zoom classes (initially) to prove the concept and test the hardware / cabling, before
• Permanently mounting the HDMI system in Studio A (with a control area in the office), and bringing the zoom cart back to life for independent use. Set up includes a remote monitor (for the instructor), some specialized microphones, and provision for bluetooth headsets, direct music from the room sound system, etc.

So right now, we've got a full blown, 4 camera system in Studio A (we livestream all of our in studio classes) and a rolling Zoom cart in Studio B (which I'm still tweaking, hoping to be able to livestream Studio B classes, as well as do zoom only classes)  

And other (sort of related) projects: 

• Cleaned out the long abandoned (10 years) studio storage room
• Cleaned out the shed behind the studio
• Orchestrated the great paperwork purge of 2020, Katie and I were able to send 40 banker's boxes to the shredder.
• Dug out the studio planters and made ready for flowers (they look lovely) 
• Picked up a new hose and reel (ours got swiped early in the pandemic)
• Purchased and supervised the installation of large roller shades on the east side of Studio A (where the morning light makes live streaming challenging)
• Purchased a collection of orange traffic cones (imprinted with WHY, the studio brand) to replace the crappy buckets full of concrete and fence posts doing service as parking lot dividers. 
• Assembled an old wire cart to use as a prop rack 
• Developed a system to set props aside for 72 hours between use (the better to ensure COVID safety on surfaces)
  
• Purchased dozens of white pillowcases (to cover bolsters) for yin and restorative classes
• Laid out little removable stickers on the floor(s) a dozen or so times, to facilitate social distancing and keeping students from blocking camera angles

My mantra over the past 18 months: never let a perfectly good pandemic go to waste. 

Framingham

Some time to blog this morning. Long, long overdue.

I'm wearing a Framingham State University tee shirt this morning. It's a fairly cheap, nondescript grey shirt that I picked up at Stop & Shop two years ago, the day before my brother Tom died. I had traveled north to take the day shift at the hospice facility, and realizing that Tom was falling fast and an overnight was probably in order, I stopped to pick up a tee-shirt to sleep in. It's gone into regular rotation these days, and I think of Tom when I wear it. 

Framingham, MA is home / not-home for me. My fond hometown is York, PA - with the house & church & school & swim club & neighborhood of my youth. It looms magically in my memory, although when I've visited in later years seemed so much smaller and more parochial. 

When dad lost his job at McCrory Corporation in the early-70's, and found a job at Zayre Corporation, the Russell family moved to New England, and found a home in Framingham. We moved in the summer of 1975, perfectly timed (for me) to enter high school. Not so perfect for my sister Kathy who lost out on 8th grade at St. Joseph's in York, where the 8th graders were kings and queens.

I only really lived in Framingham for a handful of years. Four years of high school. Then summer / holidays as I took up college residence in nearby Worcester. Upon graduation, I moved to CT where I have lived ever since (Bristol, Southington, Danbury, Waterbury, Hartford, and New Britain). 

And yet Framingham has been home. Mom was able to stay in the family home for many years after Dad died, so that's where we gathered. When my brothers fledged, she sold the home ($180K, Zillow says it's worth $510K today), but stayed in Framingham, buying a condo in Nobscot that became our family home base. Tom lived with me in CT for a few years, then headed back to a tiny apartment in Framingham, he never quite found his way out of there. Kevin owned a nice home with a pool near the family home, then bought mom's condo when she moved to assisted living - he still lives there. Kathy has homes all over (the Cape, VT, Florida). But I guess in some ways Framingham is still ground zero. 

There are odd little places anchoring me to the town. I worked at the McDonald's on Rte. 30 through high school and college (and had dreams about forgetting to pick up a check or forgetting to report for a shift for decades after). It's still there but not recognizable after multiple renovations. A lot of my social life came through there - vacations, bowling, tennis, softball. Crew picnics at Hopkinton State Park where we'd cook all that McD food on an open grill (it was pretty good).

I spent many hours in the darkness of the Fun n' Games arcade (also still there, also much changed), ate solitary meals at The Taco Maker (a knock off Taco Bell, I still fondly remember the enchilada combo), rambled through the old Shopper's World (we'd ride bikes down, before I was driving). The General Cinema multiplex (when 4 theaters in one location was a lot). The second run "Flick" theater where you'd see artsy films (Tom worked there for many years, I remember the white short and black bow tie).

 Some bar along Rte 9 (can't remember the name) where Mom took me for a drink when I turned 18 (I could drink legally for a few months then they raised the drinking age), probably en route from the hospital to visit Dad who died a month or two later. Later on, drinking with friends in the same bar, we played Bob Seger's "Horizontal Bop" over and over on the jukebox just to be shits, laughing uproariously.  

My alma mater, Marian High School, now closed. Bowditch Field (watching high school football games, one laughable season on the track team). The Framingham Centre  Library, an oddly designed and wholly impractical structure (much like much of the 70s) located on the road between school and home. We'd walk to the library, hang with friends, do homework (or not) and wait for a ride home. 

I'm not really going anywhere with this, I guess. Just remembering. Crying a little. Doing that a lot these days.

Turning Sixty

About two weeks ago, my personal odometer ticked over into a new decade, and your very irregular correspondent turned 60. It's an unreasonable age, an unfathomable age. I grew up with a father who died in 1979, in his mid 40s (I was 18, the eldest child) and on some level I assumed 45 was gonna be a good solid guess in terms of my lifespan. To this day, my regular subconscious shower exclamation is "I'm 40 years old" as if that fact alone was beyond belief. So here I am at 60 . . .

I blow hot and cold on the birthday thing. In previous year's I've gone dark around this time of year - removing the date from Facebook, turning off the ability to post on my timeline. After a few years of more openness, this year I returned to form, and my birthday flickered past relatively quietly on social media.

It was not an uneventful day, however. First, I spent the last day in my 50's at a CVS in West Hartford, getting my J&J COVID-19 vaccination. I can think of no better gift to myself. No serious side effects - a little tired, just the hint of a possible headache. I took my birthday off from teaching which was the right decision. I'm two weeks out, gonna wait another week or so to consider myself fully vax'd, but all good there.

On my birthday proper, I was awoken (literally, I was sleeping off the vax and the phone rang, inviting me to look out the window) by two friends who made the long trek into New Britain with mylar balloons, coffee, cupcakes. I went out in my PJs to fetch my booty and thanks them, but when I realized they were hanging out talking, I put my coat on and went out to visit. That was a lovely way to start the day.

I'm generally not a fan of mylar balloons, professionally or ecologically. I've seen way too many videos of mylar balloons causing power line arcs (power engineer YouTube porn) and pick up too much litter to not be invested in keeping balloons out of the ecology or the ocean. My "6" and "0" balloons are safely inside, still buoyant, and continuing to make me smile, attached to my banister and floating up into the unused space above the stairs (the only place they were not in the way in my too small condo). Rest assured they will stay out of trouble once their useful life is over. 

Other highlights of the day - a zoom call with many friends. A tribute video with many more (organized by my morning visitors, who reeled in many old friends, new friends, and family members). Totally made me cry. An unexpected box contained a large plush Baby Yoda / Grogu; one of those things you don't know you want until you get it. At this point in life there are so few unexpectedly happy surprises - if I want something, I get it. So kudos to brother Kevin for nailing it. I think the only thing that might have beat it is a puppy. 

Also several bouquets of flowers (one the day before, one the day of), lots of cards and gift cards (which I promise to use*), and the day after, a large bag of healthy food (entree, salad, soup, dessert) to nourish me for a few days.

I'm not someone who puts much stock in numbers - 40, 50, 60, all pretty much the same. On a warm summer morning, rolling across the state to chase a balloon with the windows open and 70s music via SiriusXM, I'm not too far removed from 18 year old me, with all my baggage but the universe ahead of me. 

* So about the gift cards. I have some sort of weird thing about them - I rarely spend them, keep them nicely tucked away in a business card portfolio. Not really sure what that is all about.

Part of it is, I get myself what I need / want, so there's rarely something I'd buy myself if I had the funds. Part of that is some sort of hoarding, having struggled financially, there's a sense of putting them away for a rainy day. Part of that is being a lone wolf - I don't have a posse of folks I go out to dinner with so restaurant cards site waiting for a social moment that never arrives. Part of it is perhaps a feeling of unworthiness of the often generous gift, being unable to accept the love behind it. And part of that is that my retail grooves are pretty well worn, so even something like a Home Depot card (I go to Lowe's most often, in recent times) will sit unused until I consciously think of something I need. And for other things - stores I've never actually set foot in, well, it's a stretch to get me to use 'em.

I literally have a note in my "in case of death" letter that tells my heirs to find the portfolio and spend down the cards. Maybe a good goal for year 60 is to spend them on myself and my friends....

Bookends

A story then. 

In November of 2016, I received a call from my brother Kevin. Donald Trump had recently won the election; we (the two open liberals in the family) were both a bit shell-shocked. Mom (in the process of dying, she left us at the end of December) was kind of a Trump fan, mostly because she gambled in his casinos - she and her pal June would plan trips to Atlantic City to "see the Donald". It was easy not to blame her for what had happened in November. 

My brother Tom on the other hand, was the worst kind of Trumper - sharing overtly racist memes about Obama, sexist memes about Clinton, ranting about the libtards and how we were all gonna get ours now, and sharing all the horseshit that we've come to find out was Russian agitprop. It was pretty damned easy to pin what had happened in November onto Tom and his tribe. Ironically, a quick web search reveals that Tom had not voted in decades. 

Kevin called, maybe a day or two after the election, to commiserate a little. And to share some news: Tom (who had a problem with alcohol and been forced into early retirement due to his drinking and resultant health issues) was drinking again. Kevin had been in a package store buying beer, noticed Tom come in, and hung back, out of sight while Tom bought his booze. Filled with anger about the whole political scene, my first thought, probably voiced to Kevin, was "I hope the asshole drinks himself to death". Which is exactly what happened, in June 2019. 

Kevin confronted Tom afterwards (as I remember) and Tom denied it all (he was allegedly buying soda and lottery tickets). Kevin ended up taking the brunt of Tom's illness/addiction - cleaning up bloody messes, tossing dozens of empty vodka bottles, being the one nearby to take the call when medical attention was needed. This after a lifetime of bullying at the hands of a sibling one year older and cut from wholly different cloth than the rest of us. It was a lot. 

Mom had started to slide a year earlier, and we had come together to support her as she transitioned into assisted living, put her affairs in order, and slipped in and out of a confused haze due to COPD and CO2/O2 issues. All but Tom, who was vehemently in denial that this was happening, accused us of "pushing mom into her grave" and wanted nothing to do with it all. 

No idea when Tom started drinking, probably before Mom's slide began, but let's say it did not help. He drank openly at her interment trip to PA, we asked, and were told to butt out.

Somewhere in the ensuing years, Tom (a long time gun owner) started collecting weapons and ammunition. When he started his own precipitous two month slide in April of 2019, we found our way into his filthy, cluttered, two room apartment for the first time in many years to find over $50,000 worth of guns and ammo, piled up in his bedroom and scattered throughout the place. He was terrified that the police / EMS would need to come in and see the guns and confiscate them / arrest him for improper storage. We ended up getting them transferred to his gun dealer (who presumably took a cut on both ends of the transaction). As we helped our brother as best we could, and said our goodbyes, the knowledge that perhaps death was the best possible outcome - that Tom could have gone on a shooting spree, taken out family, strangers, himself. That shit happens, and we feel like we literally and figuratively dodged a bullet. Thankful that his health failed before something snapped. 

So now to 2020. COVID-19 has traumatized our country, the economy, our planet. It's hard not to place the blame squarely on the incompetence and malfeasance of the present administration - I bounce back and forth between blaming Donald J Trump and blaming every stupid mother-fucker that voted for him. As recently as two days ago, I drafted (but did not post) something for social media along the lines of "I'm planning for a COVID-19 death toll of 62,984,828 (Trump's popular votes in 2016) and I'm hoping it's the right 62,984,828 people who get taken down". Yeah, that rage, that anger, so very real. In some ways my pandemic trauma has been tempered by the knowledge that maybe 50% of it's victims had it coming to them. 

Last night the news - Trump confidant Hope Hicks tested positive. And this morning, Trump and his wife Melania as well. No idea how this will go from here, but give Trump's age and general health, a poor outcome is likely. And whatever happens, the United States will be throw into chaos socially, politically, economically. 

You get to a certain age and you can start to see the broader sweep of time, live long enough to see good behavior rewarded, and bad behavior punished. 

Personally, this morning feels like a bit of a bookend, on four years that began with that phone call from Kevin. Maybe this long national nightmare will all be over soon.... or maybe it's just beginning.

Pandemic

And suddenly, the world has turned upside down.

The waves of the present situation began lapping at the shores in late February / early March. We started to think about physical contact and viral spreading at the yoga studio; over time we promoted hand washing and sanitizing, worked to launder / clean props more regularly, went to a rental plan (with all props washed between use), forbid teachers to touch students, reduced room heat....

We kept it going as long as we could, but on March 13th, West Hartford Yoga closed it's doors for in-studio operation.

It did not take me long to shift into crisis mode. After a weekend of stunned silence and regrouping we started to live stream yoga classes the following Monday, and have continued to stream 1, sometimes 2 classes per day via Facebook ever since. We archived the classes on Facebook as well as YouTube - pulling all but the most recent back on June 1, reserved for Supporting and Sustaining Members, vital revenue to help the studio ride through this crisis.

Coincident with that, we started to hold a limited schedule of live interactive classes using the Zoom platform. Numbers have been limited (15 is a big class) but these are folks paying for yoga, and at this time and place, that's a big deal. We're also contemplating opening up (June 17th we're permitted with fairly stringent requirements for social distancing, although we're not planning to open until later). We're also looking into outdoor classes this summer.

But Jude (you say) what about you personally?

We'll, truth be told, I was kinda of built for pandemic. I live alone, and I'm used to spending a lot of time alone. From a social perspective, I barely notice the change. If anything, being so active up at the studio has meant MORE social interaction (albeit socially distanced) than pre-pandemic. And so many of the things that have been cancelled are things I've been somewhat burned out on anyway - teaching yoga, making music, Falcon Ridge. All in all it's been a nice break.

A more cynical perspective - it's my personal hell. Now everyone is living in it. Misery loves company.

And in a lot of ways, I'm thriving. Keeping the yoga studio alive has become my mission, playing to my strengths (tech, A/V geekery, organization, willingness to do stupidly daunting tasks) and keeping me engaged.

• Emptied out a 10'x10' Storage Locker the studio filled up during the move from Jansen Court to Brook Street (nearly a decade ago)
• Cleaned out the storage shed behind the building which had become the place to put things instead of actually dealing with them
• Sorted through 60 boxes full of papers, records, ephemera, resulting in 22 full banker's boxes for the mobile shredder. 
• Free-cycled a ton of stuff - fans, fixtures, mannequins, etc.
• Set up a special cart (complete with flat screen video) to enable zoom yoga classes
• Set up a completely new product line (virtual / online classes)

Financially, not doing too badly either. While my checkered past with the IRS precludes me from any sort of stimulus and I've not bothered to file for unemployment* (figuring that would open some cans of worms best left unopened), the studio applied for and received a Payroll Protection Plan load / grant so I've gotten paid through this mess. I was sitting on a pile of cash from Tom's estate when all this started, and the last check came through a few weeks back. And while my engineering work hit the skids, the last month pre-pandemic was pretty solid and things are starting to revive there as well. And, let's face it, I live pretty close to the bone.

Black Lives Matter

Allow me a little bit of navel gazing as the winds of change and protest swirl around this country, triggered by the murder (the correct term, I assure you) of Mr. Floyd George by Minneapolis police officers, and fueled by decades of police violence and abuse against persons of color, specific acts of racism and exclusion, and an overall culture / climate of racism in which we all play a part.

First, most assuredly, Black Lives Matter. No IFs, ANDs, or BUTs. No "All Lives Matter" bullshit. I do not have any qualms about that.

Where I struggle is in the where and how that I, living intersectionally as both a privileged white person and as a less privileged trans person, should step into this particular struggle. So much of that I am seeing online and in person right now feels a little like jumping on the bandwagon. White people do so like to talk, do so like to take up space, do so like to suck all the oxygen from the room. And I'm seeing a lot of space being taken up by white people this week as they try to outdo themselves personally, individually, through organizations and businesses, to demonstrate just how much Black Lives Matter.

Relationship Status: It's Complicated
  
While I'm not particularly christian these days, the christian texts do contain wisdom, and I am reminded of this, courtesy of Matthew 23:

² The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law are experts in the Law of Moses. ³ So obey everything they teach you, but don’t do as they do. After all, they say one thing and do something else.
⁴ They pile heavy burdens on people’s shoulders and won’t lift a finger to help. ⁵ Everything they do is just to show off in front of others. They even make a big show of wearing Scripture verses on their foreheads and arms, and they wear big tassels^[a] for everyone to see. ⁶ They love the best seats at banquets and the front seats in the meeting places. ⁷ And when they are in the market, they like to have people greet them as their teachers.

And well, the outpouring of Black Lives Matter in the media right now feels a little like an obligation, a desire to get something out there for the optics of it all. There's a piece circulating about how Blackout Tuesday and use of the Black Lives Matter hashtag (which I am purposely not using here) effectively "blacked out" the actual movement and silenced POC for a few days, as (mostly) white people took over the BLM hashtags and once more sucked all the air out of the room.

So yeah, that kind of stuff. I personally tend to avoid all social media movements (mass shootings, hate crimes, terrorist attacks, etc. and I'll touch on Trans Lives Matter in a bit) - finding them to be lip service, intent on making the writer feel better, soon and easily forgotten as the next thing comes along. So jumping in on this cause would feel a bit, I dunno, problematically exceptional. If my overall philosophy is "I don't do that stuff" and I step in here, it's weirdly racist in a different way.

So yeah, Trans Lives Matter. Hate it. It often is rooted in causes and legislation that (mostly) benefits the more privileged members of identity trans, and it mostly uses the images and deaths of the less privileged transfolk (mostly POC transwomen who make up the majority of the annual "Remembering our Dead" lists). And oh, by the way "Trans Lives Better" is derivative of and colonizing "Black Lives Matter". Just saying.

When cisgender acquaintances are all flying the trans flag in social media, those are the folks I stay the fuck away from. Because (in my experience) those are the folks who will out me, use my name and identity to score progressive identity points (referring to "my trans friend Jude" or "my trans yoga teacher Jude"), draw me into their social circles because they kinda need a trans friend to round out the diversity set. My story. My choice to disclose or not. So yeah, my opinions regarding "Trans Lives Matter" definitely impact my choices surrounding Black Lives Matter.

And, to be honest, one of my go to insights regarding trans positive legislation and civil rights has been "black folk have had those protections for 50 years....how's that working out?" Not sure that passing a law is always the pathway to equality and justice. 

But enough about me, enough about trans.

Yes, as a white person, raised in a very exclusive (by which I mean to say, cloistered rather than economically privileged) world, I've got race issues. We had exactly two black kids in our school - Luke died in primary school of leukemia, and Keith, who was the star of the Catholic grade school basketball team. Keith had come to a grade school birthday party; I had kept his card for many years. Protestants and Jews were also "other" in my childhood world, exotic and rare, and Muslims, Asians, Hispanics were completely off the map.

On the plus side, as an economically embattled person who has lived completely within city limits for the past 30+ years (Danbury, Waterbury, Hartford, New Britain), I've lived in more diverse neighborhood than most of my peers. As I make my way up and down the street picking up litter, I am smiling and saying hello to people of many races, many origins, many creeds. And....with each piece of little I pick up I am confronted with my own stereotypes and assumptions surrounding the type of trash, the persons who put it there, etc. It's part of my internal work to notice, to process, to deal with that.

So yeah, I'm not one to fly the flag - black, rainbow, national, etc. But please know that I am trying to do the work. I care deeply. Just find social media to be a tricky place for this sort of thing. 

And, a coda to this piece. I few years back, Netflix released a documentary called Hip Hop Evolution about the development of rap and hip-hop music. Somehow or the other I stumbled in to watch. I was contemporary with the start of this music, which kind of grew up in parallel to the New Wave / Punk music I engaged with. So even as I was peripherally aware of the genre, I knew very little about it.

Wanna know something - I love this series, have found an appreciation for this art form that I could never have imagined. It's become one of my go-to media binges, worthy of rewatching, dispelling so many musical and racial stereotypes, learning about DJs, emcees, producers who were innovators, creators, users of technology (turntables, samplers, drum machines). It is most wonderful that the filmmaker has been able to hunt down these artists, now in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s - mellowed, insightful, wistful as they remember the good old days. 

So yeah. Listening. Learning. Trying to beat down my own internal racism. Trying to leave open space for black faces to be seen, black voices to be heard.

Black Lives Matter.