I’m not sleeping well. I wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back asleep because I start ruminating — or my ruminations make the whole night restless.
A lot of the rumination comes from practical issues making me anxious right now: politics, my own financial instability, looming work deadlines. But the deeper reason for my ruminations and sleepless nights is unhappiness.
I am unhappy with my life.
It’s a different feeling from what I’ve often written about when mentioning my relational needs not getting met. This is a deeper, more existential unhappiness. This has to do with my life as I’m living it, what I’ve built up to here, how I’m living it daily, and what, if anything, I’m going towards in my future. This feeling is more similar to the one I had a dozen years ago in Barcelona, a year or two before making the biggest change in my life and moving to California. I had similar feelings 4-5 years ago, which led to my move from California to Colorado, but those were also skewed by the intense emotions and complications of the pandemic. The crisis I’m feeling now seems more similar to the one I underwent in Barcelona over a decade ago because it seems to stem from a deep unhappiness despite an overall “okay” (albeit uncertain) life. From the outside, one could think that, apart from the political hell we’re all in and apart from my own financial insecurities & professional instability (that I share with many other people), I’m doing “okay”. One could even venture to think that I have “all I could want”. But I really don’t. Far from it.
The main reasons for my move to Colorado, apart from the weather, were that I wanted to climb outdoors a lot, trail run more, and find community to share these activities. And during my first two years here, in fact, I got this. That’s when I met most of the cis-men who then became my close buddies. For my first two years here in Colorado, I was climbing outdoors two or three times a week and running on trails — real trails, not the flat open spaces or neighborhood gravel path — at least a couple times a week. I was going out scrambling, meeting new people, making new, lasting friendships, pushing my limits, exploring, adventuring. And all this while still being at the very beginning, and then in the midst, of my “medical transition”, i.e. starting GAHT and getting gender-affirming top-surgery. That means that, despite it being a time of my life with huge upheaval and deep, even difficult changes, I was still able to get out there, make deep connections, have fun “bro-time” and, most importantly, live authentically as my adventurous self. The time I was spending out on the trails, up in the mountains, up on the wall with my buddies, all that male bonding, was wonderful as it nourished both my needs for adventure and the affirmation of my masculinity.
In the past couple years, ironically as I’ve come more into my authentic self, I have been living less and less in the way I’d really want to. What’s going on?
Part of it has practical reasons. A thumb injury requiring surgery in the spring of 2024 and then a severely sprained ankle in August of the same year, kept me first from climbing and then also from running or hiking for months on end, which limited my activities and also made it harder to have bro-time with my buddies. My having moved several times within the same general region here but changing towns has also been a disruptive factor, making it logistically harder to meet up with some of my friends. But I also feel like there had been a fire burning in me, fueling me, during my first two years here, giving me all that energy to get out, explore, while also moving, settling into a new place, getting gender-affirming care, doing name-change paperwork, etc. And now I feel exhausted, chronically fatigued, like I have nothing left in me to fuel me even through a normal day.
And then, there’s the other side: my buddies’ side.
My Italian climbing buddy I lost because he went back to Italy.
My French climbing buddy I lost because he moved to California.
My older running friend I lost because he’s depressed and doesn’t feel like talking to me (or, apparently, anyone else).
My younger running friend I lost because we both moved away from the town where we were living when we met so it’s logistically difficult for us to meet up now, especially given he has a wife & daughter to whom he’s very committed, which limits his availability a lot.
With my two closest climbing buddies things have changed a lot, to the extent that from a practical viewpoint I’ve lost them, too, because they are both shifting out of their “young, adventurous phase” and going down the normative path of getting married, having children, buying a house, and getting steady office jobs with a tight schedule that doesn’t allow for as much “weekly adventuring”.
And with my oldest climbing buddy things have been complicated for a while, first because he & I both were kept from climbing at different times due to our respective injuries, and now because of his physical/sexual attraction towards me (& ensuing drama).
That’s all of the buddies I had. All the close male friendships I had built in my first 2-3 years here in Colorado which had brought me so much joy and validation, through our bro-time together, both from the viewpoint of gender and from the viewpoint of being “adventure buddies”. I was living the life I wanted, had dreamed of, and felt really aligned to myself, both gender-wise and adventure-wise.
Now, I have no buddies left with whom I can hang out regularly or go explore. My old buddies I’ve lost due to “life circumstances”. The new people I’m meeting, like the lovely people on my climbing team, are nice but we don’t “click” in the same way. My buddies and I were “platonic soulmates”, there was something in our natures, in our approach to life, in our experiences, that made us “click” instinctively and connect deeply, immediately. With these new climbing folks it’s not the same. And it’s not a question of time: that kind of connection you can feel instinctively, immediately. I’m not finding it anymore, and don’t know where, or how, to find it again.
And I miss it terribly. It undermines my identity as a boy as well as my identity as an explorer, adventurer.
I want to live my life like I was doing when I had just moved out here to Colorado. I want to be out in nature, climbing, hitting the trails, more often and with the “right people for me”.
But where do I find those “right people”?
And how do I get my energy back? What if I never get over this chronic fatigue that has been crippling me for the past year and a half?
The Little Prince and the Fox 