…today

These days feel a bit like Groundhog Day, each one quite similar to the last. I fall into patterns, some not so good. I miss the bustle and energy of my high school campus, miss the interactions with my friends and colleagues, miss the energy of the classroom, the energy of the students.

Being alone has always been okay with me. Typically, I am pretty content. In many ways that’s where Kay was born–in my aloneness. When I moved out of the house where my wife and I and our kids had lived since 1997, I came to my little cottage in the woods, and it was just me and the critters, and the trees, and the quiet.

I remember thinking at the time that this place was like a cocoon, a protective and supportive place where I could let Kay emerge, and there was no one around for whom I had to be responsible, no one to disagree with my choices or stand in the way of my transition.

A friend of mine emailed me the other day, and among other things she commented on my TEDx talk, that I must be a really strong person to get up in public and speak my truth. But it wasn’t always so.

The gathering strength I brought with me to my “coming out” was hard wrought over several years of remarkable frailty. Both of mind and of spirit. Yet, even at Kay’s genesis, when at times I hung on by a thread, hovering between identities over the dark pit of the unknown, there was a stalwart part within that spoke from the deep and urged me on, a part of me that wouldn’t be deterred.

I finally explained to my wife here recently that the reason I did all of the crazy things I did, the reason for the deception, the lack of transparency, the seemingly eternal recurrence of saying I would do something and then not following through was because I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from getting where I knew I had to go. I had always recognized that voice within, but it was only recently I understood how it had motivated me to and through my transition.

It reminds me of Kierkegaard and his “teleological suspension of the ethical.” He says of Abraham that even though sacrificing his son was immoral, because he was called upon by God himself to do it, there was a “suspension of the ethical” because he acted on faith and in response to the “Absolute.”

I know it may sound strange to some, but I really believe God in me, or my soul, was calling me forward to surrender to the truth that I want to live as a woman. In the face of that absolute truth, I had no choice but to heed that call, and any sins I committed along the way, and there were sins, were necessary by virtue of that call. In my imperfection, I did what I thought was best, based upon what I understood at them time. Kierkegaard also says that others may not understand Abraham’s act, and he may be held accountable, yet even so, it is only Abraham who has to answer to God, to the Absolute.

There are times these days where I don’t feel like I used to, like I felt when Kay was first arriving in waves of new energy, bringing things I had never felt before. And just as CHT brings about an accelerated adolescence, so is it short lived, and we move beyond that first flushing, the first breast buds, the first shadows of a new outline, and we leave the excitement of the new, and we open to depth. At least that’s the plan.

Still, there are days of late when I miss that feeling of discovery, every day a new sensation, a new understanding, a rush of fresh energy. And so, I look forward and want to open myself up to new discoveries, to open up to that depth I know is my inheritance, beyond biology, beyond the physical, that energy that birthed me so many years ago and that birthed me once again as Kay. Isn’t that the blessing? To have literally been born again? And not just to repeat the same day over and over, but to rise anew each day, to embrace this transient gift I have been given, to build the strength I need to move me forward, to open, to be born again each moment.

I guess it was a pretty good day, after all.

Radical self-love, ya’ll, radical self-acceptance.

Kay out