What For?

I sometimes feel like writing this blog is a very self-absorbed thing to do. I mean, really... who wants to hear about all my weird experiences and thoughts on this crazy ride of mine? Okay, so in many ways it helps me to write it, helps with all of the processing and pondering - but does that mean I have to publish it? And while I’ve hoped it might help to spur more conversation, more dialogue and more visibility around these issues, especially in my home community - well, who knows whether that’ll really happen or not? Maybe I’m even embarrassing a few folks who wish I’d be quieter about all of this!

But lately I’ve been talking with a friend of mine who recently lost an old and dear companion to a probable suicide... and it makes me think again.

My friend’s friend had no LGBTQ-related issues that I know of. But it is likely that this person felt really alone. Really, really alone.

I know what that feels like.

I remember a night, probably about six years ago, when I lay awake and pondered whether or not I should keep living. It felt like every path I’d tried to take in life was a tunnel that crashed down around my head, leaving me, once again battered and breathless, to fight my way back out with a pick and shovel. And this time, finally, I felt too tired to do it all again - to keep doing it all over and over, only to find another dark tunnel leading to another cave-in... and another, and another.

That night, thank heavens, I decided that life still held enough potentially good things - small things, but meaningful - that I wanted to keep living. I found that I could not abide the idea of choosing to never hear music again, or laugh, or see the sky when it’s that particular shade of azure that lifts my heart. Of course, once I was dead I wouldn’t mind that... but the thought of what those last few living moments would be like, knowing that I had cut it all off for good, was almost unbearable.

I think, in retrospect, that this is why I have never been actively suicidal, even during those dark times (and there’s been more than one) when the idea of just ending it has been, in some ways, a lovely, longing thought, a welcome guest in my mind’s weary ramblings. That night was as close as I have ever come to seriously crossing the line.

But on some deep level, I guess, I am fundamentally an optimist. Not in the simplistic “everything works out for the best” sort of way, but in a more opportunistic sense, one that takes the good and lives it as potently as possible, and then waits for the next bit of good to come along. And learns to bear whatever else happens in between.

But those in-betweens have been very dark, very long, and very solitary.

In the first installment of this journal, and in our recent Water Communion service at my UU church, I talked about telling our stories. About how important it is to connect with each other, not just on the intellectual plane, not just over philosophy and theology and the analysis of our crazy world, but in the experience of living of our lives. And I’m not talking about the shallow little stories that we share on Twitter (“Heading for the store now, #$%&! parking lot is jammed...”) or over a drink after work (“Long day, my feet are killing me...”) or in our thousand-and-one daily Facebook posts (“Cutest pic ever of my toddler, and did you catch American Idol last night...”). Not that such stuff doesn’t have its place - and rightly so - in true friendships as well as casual acquaintance! But those things are just not the keys to that deep wellspring of connection that the soul can so desperately crave when it is lonely, and so long to celebrate when it feels touched with hope.

When I had just started this online journal, a friend pointed me toward another UU transman’s blog which I hungrily proceeded to read - two years’ worth in one night! Until then I’d had no contact with any other real, live, breathing person on this same path. I laughed and cried (it’s a really good thing I never bought into that old hooey about how men don’t cry) and kept reading, and felt immeasurably warmed and, yes, befriended, in a way, by those words and the person they revealed.

And during our recent Water Communion, when I invited our congregation to offer our own deeper stories to each other, a male visitor stood up and outed himself as a transman, in support of me and my journey. He “passes” extremely well, and it’s likely that no one would have guessed, as he stood there with his lovely wife and daughters, that theirs had previously been a Lesbian marriage. But he wanted to give me the gift of his story, and the hope that it contains.

The hope that not all tunnels cave in. That some of them lead to sunlight. Especially when followed in the truth of one’s heart, in deep authenticity, in great faith.

And recently, a very dear gay-but-cisgendered friend of mine, who generally avoids long-winded “reading assignments” like the plague, and from whom I have felt a bit separated of late, in taking this crazy path that I’ve suspected did not really make sense to him... well, this friend told me that he had read my blog. That it had been eye-opening. And thanked me warmly for writing it.

Miracles do happen. And miracles are needed in this world!

And so I continue to write, and offer my thoughts and my stories to you, whoever you are. Because we need each other. For challenge, for growth, for support. For filling the dark times with hope of sunlight. For being human together, heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul.

You are not alone. And neither am I.