“Acceptance is the answer”

Acceptance is the answer is tattooed on the forearm of one of the gay men in the chorus where I sing. 

I’ve seen and heard quotes along similar lines before and often considered them trite or defeatist. But I think I’ve finally come to understand — once again, not just rationally but also, and especially, emotionally, deep down inside me — the wisdom and even the power of the idea that acceptance is the answer. 

And I think this has been the key aspect of the healing and peace I’ve found in the past months. 

I stopped wishing that some things were different — thus putting into practice, from the climbing wall to my daily life, the wise advice from Arno Ilgner’s book The Rock Warrior’s Way. 

Wishing that things were different is a huge waste of energy, and often also a great source of pain. Painful situations can teach us a lot and really open our hearts and eventually even bring us peace, if we learn to look at things (& people & relationships) as they are. That takes courage, though, and often an amount of courage that isn’t easy to find, because plenty of times it requires we actually make some big change(s). Which is precisely where the idea that acceptance is the answer is not a defeatist viewpoint. 

If I accept things as they actually are, then I can really make a choice, and that will probably bring me peace in the end. 

I have made peace with the fact — i.e. accepted at a deep, inner level — that, most likely, I won’t have a nesting/life/sexual partner again. I had that type of relationship, with deep, beautiful love, three times in my life. That’s more than many people can ever hope for, so I’m grateful. The first two times were almost two decades ago. And all three times it happened ”by accident” or, at least, that’s how it felt to me: it caught me by surprise, I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t seeking it out, and all three relationships had started as interesting or fun friendships. All three times, it was the other person who pursued me and I suddenly realized that “something more than platonic” would be nice from my viewpoint, too. But I hadn’t been expecting it or craving it. 

Theoretically, that could happen again. But realistically my situation is very different now. I’m not in college or grad school anymore and thus surrounded by many peers who might be “interested” in me, as I was for those first two relationships. I’m two decades older and at this age in life most people have “settled down” and are thus not looking for nesting/life/sexual partners. Neither my job nor my athletic endeavors nor my social activities bring me in contact with many people, so I’m not bound to meet anyone new who might be “interested” in me. But also, and maybe most importantly, I’ve come to understand and accept that I’m not interested in going to seek out those types of relationships and never really have been. That’s not how I function. I can crave intimacy and I love deeply but it needs to come organically for me, to follow or grow in a spontaneous way from an existing friendship, not come from a dating app or going to social events or bars. 

There have been a couple of moments in my life when that type of relationship came to me and I was open to accept it and I/we had a wonderful experience of love. 

I am grateful for having had those experiences, truly grateful. But I’m also truly at peace if they never happen to me again. 

Acceptance is the answer. I have truly, deeply accepted and integrated into me those experiences, those past loves, including the pain of the losses — the most recent only a couple of years ago. Those experiences, those loves, are part of me, part of what makes me who I am now. And who I am now is ready to move on through life simply with the love and comfort of the good platonic friendships that I have (& might make).

The little things we remember

[Content warnings: loss, grief, death.]

Often, it’s the small things we remember about the ones we loved and lost. The color and shape of their eyes. The sound of their laugh. The inflection of their voice as they told us they love us. 

“Ich liebe dich”, A. said suddenly, almost bluntly, matter-of-factly, for the first time to me ever, as we were sitting across the high kitchen table from each other that evening. 

“Ja, ich auch”, I replied. 

We had been arguing because of something they had done, unthinkingly, “behind my back”, that made me lose trust in them and thus feel hurt. And the pain came out as anger. I can remember the cause of the argument and my feelings, not really the details of the argument. But the inflection of our voices in their “Ich liebe dich” and my own “Ja, ich auch” is still crystal clear to me. 

I can remember so clearly, so vividly, how they looked at me and said “Ich liebe dich” again that last night we spent together, our last night of lovemaking. 

Or the sweet peck on the lips they gave me saying, “Bis morgen”, as I got ready to ride home on my motorcycle the day before I found out about my father’s death. 

Or the sunflowers, the sunflowers everywhere, since those were the months when sunflowers blossom and bloom here. And how A. talked about gathering sunflower seeds to roast them and eat them together – which we never got a chance to do. For months after A.’s departure & return to Europe, sunflowers haunted me, like a blade twisted in my wound, they reminded me of them so much. 

Or the violent summer thunderstorm and pouring rain the afternoon before they left and went back to Europe, and the hot shower we had together, for the first & last time, at their place afterwards. 

I cannot remember what we had for dinner that night. But I can remember that storm, that shower, the shifting emotions, the lovemaking. 

As I can remember the first text message from them that finally made me think that there might actually be something non-platonic in their interest towards me, as they wrote explicitly that their “bed was big enough for two”, in case I needed to sleep over when I drove them home after we went out dancing together on that night in May.

I can remember how they cupped their hands over my “new” chest on that first morning we woke up in the same bed, their bed, together.  

I can still remember how their hair felt in my fingers – so soft, so silky. 

And I can remember their eyes, their beautiful, teardrop-shaped, clear green eyes – maybe the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen – so sweet, so full of love and joy, smiling or, sometimes, welling up with tears. Their eyes, the window into their soul: a soul they shared with me, a soul that reached out to touch me, to hold me. 

That beautiful soul that touched mine. 

“Maine”

[Content warnings: loss, grief, death.]

Often, my favorite songs remind me of beloved persons or meaningful places or memorable experiences.

I’ve never been to Maine. I have no connection to Maine, nor does my European queer ex-lover. Yet, Noah Kahan’s song Maine for some reason makes me think of my European queer ex-lover. Maybe it’s the song’s longing chords and melancholic rhythm. Probably it’s also some of the song’s lyrics… 

“

Tell me, lover

Now that you made your change

Was your soul rediscovered?

Was your heart rearranged?

[…]

You don’t hate the summers

You’re just afraid of the space

[…]

A boat beside a dock in the sunlight

And nothin’ but the water and the sunrise now

[…]

I miss this place, your head and your heart

And my dad

Still tells me when they’re playin’ your songs

Laughin’ at the way that you would say

“If only, baby, there were cameras in the traffic lights

They’d make me a star

They’d make me a star”

[…]

I miss this place, your head and your heart

And my dad

Still tells me when they’re playin’ your songs

Laughin’ at the way that you would say

“If only, baby, there were cameras in the traffic lights

They’d make me a star

They’d make me a star”

[…]

Tell me, lover

Once you’ve had a change of heart

‘Cause we’re no more than the fossils

On Crescent Beach State Park, and we

Used to sing along to church bells on Sundays

And can you even hear ’em from the subway now?

And I hope that we make you proud

‘Cause this town’s just an ocean now

”

Some of the lyrics reflect how I feel about my European queer ex-lover, what I could imagine saying to them or would like to ask them: 

“

Tell me, lover

Now that you made your change

Was your soul rediscovered?

Was your heart rearranged?

[…]

You don’t hate the summers

You’re just afraid of the space

[…]

I miss this place, your head and your heart

[…]

Tell me, lover

Once you’ve had a change of heart

‘Cause we’re no more than the fossils

“

Others, instead, make me think of them as in things that they might say to me, their way of joking or teasing me: 

“

A boat beside a dock in the sunlight

And nothin’ but the water and the sunrise now

[…]

Laughin’ at the way that you would say

“If only, baby, there were cameras in the traffic lights

They’d make me a star

They’d make me a star”

[…]

”

And then, there’s one verse that probably makes me think of them because of the connection, in my own head & heart, between them and my dad, because within a few weeks in the summer of 2023 I lost both my father and my European queer ex-lover and the latter had been intimately close to me in the initial, shocking grief of my dad’s death: 

“

And my dad

Still tells me when they’re playin’ your songs

”

“MAGA’s Bulldog”

Some scary, concerning facts about the government and some terrible quotes from Vought [from the New York Times article: “The man behind Trump’s push for an all-powerful presidency”]:

“

To many legal experts, Mr. Vought’s work is a threat to the foundations of democracy. “One of the main sources of power that Congress has over the executive branch is the budget,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a law professor at Georgetown University. “If the executive branch isn’t controlled by the power of the purse, then there is very little that will control the President.”

She added: “It’s a fundamental challenge to liberty for every single person in America.”

“

“[…] he had laid out steps to achieve the long-sought conservative goal of a president with dramatically expanded authority over the executive branch, including the power to cut off spending, fire employees, control independent agencies and deregulate the economy.”

“Mr. Vought has at last begun to put his plans into action — remaking the presidency, block by block, by restoring powers weakened after the Nixon administration. His efforts are helping Mr. Trump exert authority more aggressively than any modern president, and are threatening an erosion of the longstanding checks and balances in America’s constitutional system.”

“At the heart of Mr. Vought’s plan, associates say, is the intentional engineering of a legal battle over Congress’s power to decide how government money is spent, potentially creating a new legal precedent for the president to block spending on any programs and policies he dislikes.”

“

“We have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state,” he said.

”

“Over the years, Mr. Vought has made clear how he views his targets. He has said the Education Department promotes “woke-rot” propaganda like “grooming minors for so-called gender transition.”

“

[…] That the Internal Revenue Service targets “struggling families in a craven effort to sustain the broader bureaucracy’s radical progressive agenda.” And, in a remark captured on video unearthed by ProPublica that stung many in Washington, he said he wanted federal employees to be “in trauma.”

Once the budget director has the power to starve those government agencies, Mr. Vought has said, they can wither away. “We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said on Mr. Kirk’s podcast.

”

Love catches us by surprise, again and again

[Spoiler alert: some details & a quote from the book “A man called Ove” by Fredrik Backman.]

In the beautiful book “A man called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, when Ove ends up in the hospital and one of his neighbors goes to check on him, she finds herself suddenly overwhelmed by her concern for Ove and the author, describing her emotions, writes “Love is a strange thing. It takes you by surprise. […]” 

Yes, love does take us by surprise. 

In the spring of 2023, I thought I’d just be reactivating an intellectual, queerplatonic friendship with the European queer visiting scientist that had already spent a few months at the institute where I worked the previous year. But within a few weeks of their arrival in Colorado, as we quickly reconnected despite months of silence, our friendship evolved rapidly, and surprisingly, from intellectual to deeply emotional and then also sexual to one of the greatest loves of my life. Our separation and subsequent complete loss of connection, total silence, left me devastated for months. After our painful separation two years ago, initially I needed to distance myself from them. Once I was ready to reconnect and talk to them, it was too late: they didn’t want to talk to me anymore and never, ever replied to any of my messages again. So most of my rituals to find closure and healing in 2023-2024 involved erasing my European queer ex-lover from my life, e.g by burying all the objects related to them and considering them “effectively dead” by making a “tomb” for them. They had rejected me from their life so I rejected them from mine. Almost as if I was tearing or cutting off a piece of me.

Despite the comfort I got from those rituals that I did by myself, it was only this summer, two years later, on my solo trip to South Dakota, that I truly, deeply, and wholly made peace with the circumstances of that relationship (including the painful separation). 

A couple weeks ago, I was telling a good friend about some thoughts and dreams that I had been having about my European queer ex-lover, and his surprised response was, “Oh, but I thought you had made peace with them and that relationship”. He said it as if “making peace” meant “forgetting” or “never thinking about something again” or “never talking about someone again”. 

But no, for me “making peace” is quite the opposite: for me, “making peace” means allowing that event or person or part of my life to be truly and fully accepted by me and integrated into myself. It means acknowledging to myself the importance that a person or event really had to me while also recognizing what went wrong, admitting what I wish had gone — or I/we had done — differently. 

Love for my European queer ex-lover caught me totally by surprise in the spring/summer of 2023. And in a sense it caught me again by surprise recently as I dreamed about them so vividly. 

I have made peace with what happened with them that summer of two years ago. I’ve made peace with the fact that part of it was simply the “wrong timing”, “too soon for me”, with the fact that “I wasn’t ready”. I’ve made peace with the mistakes we made, with how poorly we handled some things, particularly the separation. I have made peace with all that pain. But I have also made peace with the importance that person had in my life, with the love I felt for them and still feel for them now. I have made peace with the fact that they will always have a place in my heart, they will always be a piece of me and a piece that I don’t want to tear off. 

And I have made peace with the fact that I may still think of them and dream of them and even miss them sometimes. Because love catches us by surprise, again and again.

Healing from the blinding pain

Pain can be blinding. For me, pain often shows up or expresses itself as anger, and anger can easily blind us or make us “see red”. But pain remains blinding for me even once the anger has blown off. As long as the wounds are there, unhealed, I cannot see the full picture, I cannot see in a balanced way, I cannot see clearly. And thus I cannot see or act (or love) in a wholly balanced way.

I have more love to give now than I have had in a long time, maybe ever. An open, centered kind of love. Yet I’m giving it out in a more controlled, probably balanced, way than in a long time, maybe ever.

For roughly fifteen years, I often gave out more love than I got in return, draining myself, clinging to relationships, or doggedly trying to connect with people even when they weren’t the “right fit”. Not always — in these past two decades I have also met some of my dearest friends and maintained some of my closest & healthiest relationships — but often enough to show a pattern or tendency. A tendency or pattern due to loneliness: I’d choose be with the “wrong people” or in relationships where I was giving much more than I was receiving rather than be completely alone. Trying to chose the “lesser pain”.

This year, mainly between May & August 2025, three of my dearest friends let me down in very painful and disappointing ways. These painful events, on top of the usual, general flakiness of many acquaintances, broke something for me. Almost like the adding up of many cracks in a hard surface, until one or two final, deeper cracks shatter the rock or the shell. These painful let-downs by some close friends, though, happened alongside some concrete proofs of love and availability and presence from other close friends. I think that contrast was the real wake-up call for me. What gave me the strength, or courage, to focus on the friends who were really available & present. It also gave me the strength to address the lack of mutuality with some of those close friends who had let me down, the courage to face conflict with them, with two possible outcomes: either the loss of the friendship or the improved balance/mutuality within the relationship. 

As I’ve said before, 2025 has been a year of healing for me. Some of that healing has come from abrupt, even painful, shake-ups or wake-up calls. Some of it has come from the steady proofs and presence of loving people in my life. Some of it has come from the solo trips which have allowed me to rediscover my own strengths and to really live in the present moment, to really be present here & now. The result has been an increase in clarity and centeredness for me. And an improved balance between how much I’m wiling to give and how much I need in return. (And I don’t mean this transactionally, but within the context or from the viewpoint of healthy relationships.) 

A lot of the pain is healed and thus I can see, and love, more clearly again.

Father & Son

Yesterday I got the news that, after months of paperwork, emailing, and waiting, my change of sex request has been accepted by the City Hall of the city where I was raised in Europe. The records of that City Hall now say that, a little over four decades ago, a “male” was born with my chosen name. And I will be able to renew my European passport not only with my chosen name but also with ‘M’ (instead of ‘F’) as sex/gender-marker. 

This news is such a great relief that it’s hard to put into words and I can still hardly believe it. 

As the news slowly sank in yesterday evening, as I allowed myself to think about it and try to believe it, a thought came to my mind: “Now it’s official”, I heard my thought say, “my father’s first child was a son”. 

Last night, I dreamt of my dad. He was alive and still relatively young, maybe even just the same age as I am now, somehow. We were both in the dream’s foreground, my mother in the background. And I said to him, “Now I’m also ‘Signor L.’, now there’s two of us”. 

I’ve taken on my mother’s surname, too, so officially now I’m ‘Signor L.-S.’, which would mark the difference with my father, ‘Signor L.’. But that’s besides the point: the point here is that I am also, finally, at last, officially a “man” in my family, that my father “officially had a son”. 

My father “officially has a son” but he’ll never, never know it.

Northern Light(s)

I’m back in Colorado, back “at home”. And yet, as I was leaving Alaska on Wednesday night, I cried. 

Colorado is “home” for me, or as close as “home” can get, I guess. But in Alaska I left a piece of my heart: a big piece of my heart. 

As my plane landed in Colorado shortly after dawn yesterday morning, with my beloved mountains in sight on the horizon — those mountains that made me fall in love with this place over six years ago, those mountains where I go to explore and adventure and seek reprieve and immerse myself in Nature and connect with myself more deeply — even those gorgeous mountains paled in comparison to what I had experienced for the previous nine days in Alaska. 

As I sat on the bus driving me home from the airport, all those lanes on the freeway, traffic, construction, buildings, signs of human activity everywhere one looked, despite the mountains in the background — it all felt jarring. 

It felt familiar and like “home” but at the same time also jarring. 

On my last night at my friends’ place in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, on Tuesday night I got to see the northern lights, the aurora borealis, at last. The last gift to me from that beautiful, wild place that is “real Alaska”. 

I want to go back. Back to Alaska, to those single-lane highways that wind themselves for hundreds of miles through forests and mountains and rivers and lakes. Back to those ethereal lights — not only the aurora borealis, but also that delicate, oblique, long, almost transparent sunlight. 

My closest climbing buddy, who is also a mountaineer, went to Alaska almost a decade ago and climbed Denali. He’s told me about Alaska many, many times, he says he keeps thinking about it, wants to go back. Now I get it, I really get it. I want to go back, too, ASAP. 

It’s hard to put into words, it feels like words don’t do it justice. Like the pictures I took: as good as they can be, they simply don’t do it justice. That wilderness, that awe-inspiring wilderness that comes right up to the highway, right up to the cabin door. Nature everywhere, nature reigns. 

It’s extreme. I haven’t been there in the wintertime, when it must be really extreme, but I can imagine it. Cars there have a cable coming out of the engine compartment for the engine heater that one plugs in during the winter months. 

I probably couldn’t take it in the wintertime there, I think my mental health is too dependent on sunshine. But in the summertime time I’d go back there in a heartbeat. 

Of the nine days I spent there, a whole week was cloudy, rainy, overcast, cold, even snowing in places. It was trying. After a few days of it, I was tired and really wished for sunshine. And yet, I still found it beautiful, I still felt its refreshing, healing, liberating effects on me, I still enjoyed it and can still feel the magic of it now. 

That northern light, the northerns lights, the untamed wilderness — Alaska. So refreshing, so liberating, so healing. 

Incredible.

Alaska

It’s been wet. Rustic. Cold. Wild. 

When I was getting ready to come out here a week ago, I was thinking it would be “fast forward into fall”. And sure enough, the first day, Tuesday 09/09, that’s how it felt: like autumn. Like I had been sped up a little, with respect to Colorado, into autumn. It was chilly, temperatures in the low forties going up to the mid-fifties for the high of the day; crisp air; damp and moist; yellow and golden leaves everywhere on the deciduous trees and many on the ground already, too. 

But then, on Friday & Saturday at Denali Park, it definitely became “fast forward into winter”: temperatures dropped to just above freezing; rain became sleet, then snow; very cold wind was blowing; and overnight we got over five inches of snow. 

I wasn’t ready for winter: not physically, not mentally, and barely with the clothes & gear I had brought. 

Now it’s autumn again, outside Fairbanks. 

I just wish it would clear up. I don’t mind the low temperatures as much as the constant cloud cover, the lack of sunshine, the impossibility to see the sky — the northern lights or aurora borealis, the starry sky, the long, pale, bright nordic sunshine. 

Alaska is wild. Wild in a way that I had never experienced before. Some things remind me of the Austrian Alps or southern Germany, of the summers I spent in the former with my family of origin, of the years I spent as a young professional in the latter. It’s the cold damp wet overcast weather. And the vegetation. But other than that, Alaska is nothing like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s awesome in the original sense of the word, i.e. awe-inspiring. As we were driving from Fairbanks to Byers Lake and then partway back to Denali Park, I kept looking out the car window in awe and saying, “It’s so wild. So beautiful and wild. I’ve been out in nature a lot but I’ve never seen anything like this”.

“That’s because the wilderness comes right up to the highway”, my friend who’s spent the summer here for decades replied to me. And he’s right: that’s the point, I guess. The wilderness is everywhere, it’s right outside the front door, right up to the highway, as far as the eye can see. The highway, the roads, the cabins, the little buildings for gas stations, road-side diners or cafes, banks, State Trooper buildings — they’re all small, isolated human-made things surviving, adapting in the vast, powerful wilderness that just sits there. It’s just there: immense expanses of forest, spruce pines and birches and aspens; the red and brown bushes and shrubs of taiga and tundra; the brown and gray-black rock of the mountains, partly covered in snow; the brown and gray rivers and lakes — rivers and lakes and water everywhere. 

Water is everywhere, nature is everywhere. And within all this, here we are, small creatures adapting, surviving with our little cabins and sturdy (& mostly old) cars. 

It puts us in our place, gives us a sense of perspective, I think. 

It’s overwhelming, overpowering, humbling and at the same time liberating, refreshing. 

Water water everywhere!

I just got back from my first run in the rain in a very long time. 

When I was living in California, I went on a couple of runs in the drizzle, usually caught in it while I was already in the middle of a workout. But I hadn’t really set out to run in the rain, intentionally, in many years, maybe since my teenager or young adult years. 

Probably, I wouldn’t have done it today, either, if the friend I’m visiting here in Alaska and with whom I’m spending these couple days at Byers Lake hadn’t pushed me to do it. He knew that the training plan from my coach would have been for an easy 45-min run for me today and that I was hoping to get it done today in order to let my recovering injuries rest before the longish run planned for this weekend. But I had sort of given up on the idea because of the weather. Apparently, he hadn’t. Shortly after 2pm, as the rain seemed to abate for a moment, he asked if I wanted to go for a run-walk. I imagined we’d go for an easy little hike, given the rainy weather and very muddy trails. But he really meant to run. 

So we went for a run. 

And it felt so liberating! 

There was water everywhere: in the puddles across the path; in the mud on the trail; rain coming down, running down my cheeks; sweat under my running shirt & rain-jacket; my runny nose. But once my foot got into the first puddle, the switch was flipped and I didn’t care anymore. Wet shoes, wet feet, muddy shins, wet face, damp torso, wet thighs. It felt so liberating, so refreshing, so empowering — the realization that, so often, we truly are our own biggest obstacle. And, as such, sometimes all we need to do is step aside and let ourselves just go and do it.

I guess I’ve opened for myself — or my friend has opened for me — another door: the renewed possibility of going running despite rainy weather!