About once a week I run with a neighbor who’s also a friend now and himself a runner (who runs almost every single day). Among other things, we share the passion for running and the need for it. Now we’re preparing for the same race, training sort of in parallel, and today we’ll be going for the weekly long run together. And yesterday he told me he had a very stressful day and said “I’m looking forward to running away from it all for a while tomorrow”. I know that he meant that “running away” figuratively as well as literally.
Last night I had dinner & a lovely evening with one of my close non-binary friends, catching up after not having seen each other in over a month and also celebrating my eighth “anniversary of liberation”, i.e. the eight-year anniversary of my move from Europe to California. They will also be celebrating with me next weekend, the “double anniversary” of my move from California to Colorado & of my gender-affirming top-surgery. They too have gone through some important moves and big shifts or life changes. And as we talked about these moves, they asked me, “Have these moves or changes for you been a ‘moving away from’ or a ‘moving towards’ something?”.
I had never thought of my big moves or life changes that way and I found it an interesting question, for which I had to pause to find an adequate, truthful answer. As I reflected and then answered my friend, I realized (& said) that for me it’s always been both together, both a ‘moving away from’ AND a ‘moving towards’ for all of my big changes. It’s been that way for me professionally, the times I’ve made important career shifts; it’s been that way for me geographically, moving away from places where I no longer felt at home but also moving to a new place where I really longed to live; it’s been that way for me on the personal level, too.
I hadn’t thought of it this way until my friend’s question last night, but now I see it clearly. Even my gender journey has been that way: I struggled with the sex assigned at birth to me & female socialization my entire life, always moving towards some form of masculinity. But it wasn’t until I had a form of masculinity that was really clear and available and desirable to me, through HRT & gender-affirming top-surgery, that I truly moved away fully from my “assigned femininity” and towards my version of masculinity — this masculinity that I’m stepping into more and more confidently.
And that liminal place or state when I already know how uncomfortable or unhappy I feel in my current situation but don’t know, yet, where I want to go, in what direction or towards what I want to move — that’s the hard place. And that’s where I feel I am now professionally, feeling unsatisfied and/or inadequate in my current job but still unclear about where I want, or can, go with my career from here. And also in intimate relationships, feeling unfulfilled/unhappy in my prolonged “singleness” but still not ready to enter into romantically intimate relationships both for lack of “available people” and for my own relational shortcomings.
The Little Prince and the Fox 