The Little Prince and the Fox

Lately I’ve been reading, almost devouring, the book “A man called Ove” by Fredrik Backman. 

In the past few days I read a couple passaged that really touched me deeply, that resonated profoundly with some emotions that have been resurfacing more intensely for me recently. 

‘”She’s the only teacher I ever had who didn’t think I was thick as a plank,” he mumbles, almost choking on his emotion. […]

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men that they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.’

[…]

[…]

‘Maybe their [common] sorrow over […] should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it, there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.’ 

I guess I can be proud of myself: despite one partial and one nearly total meltdown, I managed to get myself safely to my friend’s house and then all the way back home riding my motorcycle for half an hour each way on the freeway. 

It started as a hard day already this morning. I dragged myself out of bed past 9:30 AM and struggled with feelings of being tired and overwhelmed and also concerned about the swelling on my ankle from the wasp sting I got yesterday evening. So I skipped the swim workout I had planned and just did chores and slowly got myself ready to go to my French climbing buddy’s housewarming party. 

On my way to his place, I stopped at the grocery store to get drinks and asked a shop assistant for help finding something. He didn’t know where the item was so he asked a colleague if she “could please help this lady”. Immediately, I snapped, “This person — help this person, not lady”. He was very taken aback and tried to apologize, but I ignored him and stormed off in the direction that had been indicated to me by his colleague. That was my first, partial meltdown of today. I know I was rude and that he probably meant no harm by calling me “this lady”, but I just cannot take it anymore — or, at least, couldn’t take it today. I understand that people are brought up with a binary view and taught to say “lady”, “m’am”, “miss”, or “sir” to be polite and show respect. But I’m just so fed up with having to be the one who is understanding about society’s binary view and misgendering. I’m fed up with being misgendered so often just because I have (small) tits and I’m fed up with always having to ask to be called something different from “miss” or “m’am”. It’s upsetting to us non-binary/trans people and once in a while it’s okay for cis-persons to have to bear the weight of their misgendering. 

At that point, I realized I wasn’t in the best of moods to socialize today and I strongly considered to just go home and spend the afternoon by myself. The weather also looked a little stormy so I was undecided about riding my motorcycle all the way and back. But I definitely didn’t want to drive my car, it felt like such a waste, and I felt itchy to ride, and my French climbing buddy said the weather was nice at his place, so I decided to go. 

I enjoyed my motorcycle ride there but still felt grumpy when I got to my friend’s place. After changing out of my riding gear, I joined the party in the backyard and felt completely overwhelmed by the crowd and loudness — music playing and over twenty people, mostly in beach-wear, chatting loudly and playing with water guns and water balloons. Moreover, they were all strangers to me except for my friend and his girlfriend. I felt like a fish out of water, with all my social anxiety bubbling up. 

My buddy came to my rescue and then a couple other people introduced themselves, helping me out of my social anxiety moment, and I fell into a pleasant conversation with a nice guy (and his girlfriend joining on and off). Then, California came up and we exchanged opinions about it, and found to have similar impressions of it. I said something about it and he replied that, interestingly, all the women he had talked to had said something similar and all the men the opposite. That really rubbed me the wrong way. And I think it was the last straw for today. When we finished the conversation as food was being served, I told him that I use “they” pronouns & identify as non-binary, not as a woman. He was very nice about it and got the reference to his previous comment about men vs. women, but still I had no desire to make more efforts to socialize at that point. 

I took a break inside the house and even went for a short walk around the block to try and get myself into a “good sociable mood” but just couldn’t do it. So I decided I would eat something and then head back home (my body needed some food before the ride). I got myself something to eat and discretely sat in a corner of the backyard where I could go unnoticed. My French climbing buddy, whom I had told I was having a tough day, saw me and asked if he could join me, and then asked how I was doing. At that point I broke down in tears — meltdown. I realized that being seen as a woman was unbearably upsetting for me. I just couldn’t put up with it — it made me feel naked in a horrible way, almost traumatizing. 

On the one hand, since the pandemic, I simply struggle with crowds of people, even outdoors sometimes. On the other hand, I realized that I’ve gotten unused to be at settings/events that don’t explicitly include either climbers or trans/queer/non-binary persons (or scientists, at my job): those are the spaces that feel safe and comfortable, manageable and known to me now. I cannot handle anything else for the time being. 

As my friend walked me inside and sat on the couch with me, asking me how I’ve been doing and catching up a little since we haven’t seen each other in over a month, I felt his affection towards me and my gratitude towards him. But I also realized that I’ve been through so much lately: the emotions from my trip to California in July are still raw; my recent move, all the changes of the past months and the changes I’m still going through and expecting for the upcoming months — it’s A LOT. And today all this along with a crowd of strangers playing loud music and beach games was simply too much. 

I needed to get myself home safely, possibly before the storm rolled in. 

So I donned my riding gear again and headed out. Sorry to not have met my friend’s housemates, especially the gay guy and his queer friends. But I’ll hopefully meet them sometime soon when I go over for dinner in a smaller group. 

For today, that was enough — and my French climbing buddy, who’s also a motorcycle rider, understood my mental/emotional state this time as well. 

So I got on my bike and rode home. Keeping my mind focused on the road and feeling the wind, the speed, and the tricky edge on which my brain was balancing itself precariously today. 

This evening I watered the garden of my owners’ house again: this is the big responsibility I have here while they’re away this summer. 

I’ve never been very good at taking care of plants but I’m really loving tending to their garden. I love the smells that come up and out of the soil, out of the leaves and flowers the moment the water hits them. I love the immediate gratification one gets from this activity. I love the connection I feel to nature and everything around me —  including the bunnies running around all over the place. 

In general, one of the things I’m enjoying the most staying in this place temporarily for the summer is the close contact with nature, being surrounded by it so easily. Even if it entails contending with rodents nesting outside, wasps stinging me while I’m watering the garden, and constantly having to watch out for mountain lions and bears on my trail runs, I love this closeness to nature, this feeling of being part of it — albeit a very vulnerable part — immersed in it. It makes life feel so much more real somehow. I just love sitting outside at night to read my book with a headlamp, listening to the loud crickets (who are now in mating season and jumping around all over the place during the daytime!), looking up at the sky and seeing a shooting star now and then. 

Today, I also watered my own garden, the garden of my soul. 

It wasn’t a super productive day of work in terms of my scientific job. But I did lots of small things that are extremely important to me. 

I tended to friendships. I reached out to counselors to inquire about starting psychotherapy to help me get unstuck from my inability around romantic/intimate relationships. I had a visit with my primary care provider to finalize the steps to wean me off the meds for anxiety/depression which I no longer need. I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist to be properly evaluated for ADHD & autism at the end of the month. I followed up with my endocrinologist re. HRT & thyroiditis. I took my motorcycle to get serviced so now I can ride it safely. I ordered an extra safety device to add to my rock-climbing gear to give me & my partners/buddies more peace of mind on our outings. I started taking concrete steps towards my next non-scientific project. I ate plenty of food despite not exercising, as one should on the “rest day” to build strength, without feeling too guilty about it. 

I took care of myself and of important things & persons around me, close to me. 

And it feels good: watering the garden really feels good! 

I’ve always liked activities that entail speed and/or danger or risk. 

Only recently, though, have I realized how much the fact of being able, or not, to do risky things is a very accurate thermometer of my mental state, even of my mental health. 

In June I was still too tired and mentally fatigued to be able to do anything other than easy climbs on top-rope. Now I’m back out there, leading many of my climbs and pushing the grades on hard routes. And feeling calm and focused when I do. 

Like I feel calm and focused when I speed in my car or down a steep ski slope. 

But maybe my motorcycle is the most accurate thermometer of all for my mental state. 

After being sick with the very first round of COVID in the spring of 2020 and having to go through a long and tough and slow recovery, I went for over a year without riding my motorcycle. I just couldn’t get myself to ride. And when I finally did get back on my motorcycle in the late spring or early summer of 2021, it was a huge effort. I hadn’t simply lost practice: that came back very quickly, almost immediately. I struggled mentally: I felt fear that I had never felt before and had to really struggle to keep it under control; I had a hard time focusing, and overall didn’t enjoy it as much as I used to. I still liked it but it also felt like a huge effort and like a part of me had disappeared. 

Now I know that I was struggling with depression and/or anxiety then, for which I ended up taking medication and eventually even leave from work for six months at the beginning of 2022. 

My mental health came back, almost imperceptibly at first, but then more and more steadily. 

I’ve been feeling really well, really healthy and whole, really like myself again even mentally and emotionally for a couple months now. And now that I’m finally well, finally my healthy self again, now I can understand, see, feel how unwell I was before. Really unwell. 

I’m enjoying my motorcycle rides like in my pre-COVID times again, and it feels so wonderful! 

I don’t know which is the cause and which the effect: do risky, dangerous, fast activities make me feel well because of the chemical high they induce and then not getting enough of them (like during my long COVID illness & slow recovery) causes some chemical and/or neurological imbalance in my brain that entails “mental illness”? Or do I need to be mentally healthy (even at the physiological, chemical and/or neurological levels) in order to be able to have the courage and focus to do risky things? 

My ability to focus and perform often increases with pressure. At school, at work, in a storm out in a sailboat, rock-climbing, motorcycle riding, going fast — the need for focus, the speed, the risk all calm my mind. On the other hand, being able to do these things, or not, is a clear symptom of how well my mind is doing… 

While I’m extremely grateful to have my mental health back, I’m also curious to know what exactly is going on in my brain, why it functions this way, especially as I discover more and more people who function is a similar way…

“You can close your eyes 

to what you do not want to see

But you cannot close your heart 

to what you do not want to feel”

Is it going to be sufficient for me to focus fiercely on my new job and stay in the realm of the “safe spaces” of platonic/buddy-like relationships, or is it time for another round of psychotherapy? Any maybe aimed specifically at my inability around romantic/intimate relationships? And in particular with someone who has specific knowledge of, and experience with, the queer community?

The constant trickle of rejections I’ve been experiencing, even if maybe manageable, is accumulating, the effects are adding up and undermining my confidence or emotional health, like Ovid’s water drop that hollows out the stone (“Gutta cavat lapidem”). 

I feel I’m stuck in a vicious cycle of misleading attractions and often unexpected rejections that are creating an unhealthy pattern for me and causing me recurrent pain. And I’m starting to really worry about this vicious circle, because it’s unhealthy for me, it causes pain, and I cannot seem to break it on my own. Moreover, I feel there are many cultural aspects and social biases that are making the situation worse, or harder, for me. At the end of the day, I’m still perceived as a woman who goes for younger men. And unfortunately this still is stigmatized more than other situations/relationships with age differences: homosexual relationships with big age differences are almost taken for granted; heterosexual relationships in which the man is older might be frowned upon or laughed off but are still considered “natural” or “somehow okay” or “unavoidable”; but no other situation seems to me to be so stigmatized as the “cougar”, the “predatory woman who goes for younger men”. And although I don’t look my age at all, although my friends who are a decade younger often think I’m their same age, although I have the attitude and body and energy of someone much younger, I still do have the experience of my age — and that inevitably comes out once I get closer to people. And it makes me uncomfortable. Somehow, I feel the weight of it. 

People have jokingly said to me, “You like ‘em young!?!”, or soothingly or encouragingly said that I’m “rewriting the rules”. 

I’m okay with rewriting the rules and won’t adapt or surrender to the stereotypes or molds society imposes on us — whether it’s conforming to age, gender, sexual orientation, relationship style, or any other “box”. But I need more support while doing it. I’m feeling the burden of my instinctive attraction to younger men. And I’m also feeling very concerned about how my being non-binary and coming out more and more as trans-masculine and even presenting more masculine might affect romantic/intimate relationships and complicate the scenario even more for me. 

I guess it’s time for me to seek professional help to carry this burden or to loosen it and lose it — to unravel this knot and be free, or at least lighter.

A dear friend of mine recently commented, when I was telling her about some of my recent crushes, “You have a type”; and then, a short while later, “It’s another one of these available-unavailable guys”… And to a great extent she was right. Saying that I “have a type” I fall for is quite accurate and also kind, gentle. At this point, I think one could duly say to me that I “have a pattern”, and probably even an unhealthy pattern, rather than just a “type”. 

Yes, I’ve been going for available-unavailable/mostly-unavailable guys for several years now and seem to keep going for them. 

But it’s not only that. There’s a “type” in the sense that they tend to be guys whose potential I see and with whom I can feel, and sometimes get, a taste (often extremely intense but also unreliable) of close camaraderie and connection and glimpses of shared purpose. Which finally get frustrated and aborted, though, for what could be, or seems to be, lack of willingness or readiness on their part (in this sense I go for “intrinsically unavailable” guys). 

This pattern of going for guys whose “potential” I see and with whom I feel intense connection and camaraderie and sometimes even shared purpose is — I finally see it — an attempt on my part to recreate a type of relationship I had two decades ago, with my sailing buddy who was also my first committed relationship and first really big love. 

For several years now, I’ve been trying to recreate that type of relationship, that type of bond, more or less consciously. And it’s not working. 

The three times I fell most deeply in love was when I felt I saw the potential in that guy. And in one way or another, all three of those relationships ended or didn’t even start because of the guy “not rising up fully to his potential”. Now I realize that’s such an unhealthy, biased, presumptuous, and almost mean way of seeing things on my part. What if all of those guys and all of the rest of guys of the same “type” for whom I’ve been getting crushes lately simply don’t like me as mush as I thought they did or are seeking something different from what I have/want? What if I’m really not that likable or lovable? 

Or what if this deeply-rooted longing of mine is blinding me or making me see things that aren’t really there? 

Where does this ancient longing of mine come from, and how do I assuage it in a healthy way, stopping all these multiple (big or small) heart-breaks that I keep getting?   

I’m getting closer and closer to being my whole, authentic self and better able to express it & myself unabashed; yet I seem to be getting further and further away from a healthy romantic relationship or unable to find persons who really like me as much as I like them (or as much as I think they like me). 

Why do I do this? What’s wrong with me?

I have the date for my masculinizing top-surgery: January 26th, 2023!

I was hoping it could be sooner, a month or two earlier, but on the other hand I quite like the symbolism of this particular date: in fact, I arrived in Colorado last January 26th, 2022. So somehow next January 26th feels like a good date to start another new phase of my life with a new aspect of empowerment and authenticity, leaving something behind while also starting something new for which I yearn…

In the past six months here in Colorado, I have instinctively gravitated towards two communities: rock climbers, on one hand, and non-binary/trans persons, on the other. Moreover, I have in particular been connecting with cisgender male climbers, who are often in a steady, monogamous romantic relationship, on one hand, and AFAB non-binary/trans-masculine persons who are either uninterested in dating or already dating someone else, on the other. And when I go climbing outdoors, I usually go in a group of at least three, more often 4-6, people, instead of just two of us. I am also having plenty of one-on-one time with new friends here, both with my non-binary friends and with climbing buddies; but I’ve noticed that when I’m spending one-on-one time alone with a specific climbing partner, we’re usually doing something different than an outdoor pairwise climbing session (e.g a hike or a free solo). 

Yesterday, for the first time in an extremely long time, I did an outdoor pairwise climbing session with a new climbing buddy whom I had met in a group climbing session last week. As almost all of my climbing partners here, he’s an adventurous, fun, kind, open-minded, cis-man in a steady, monogamous romantic relationship, several years younger than myself. And I’m being very open about my non-binary/trans-masculine identity. So the connection is really on the level of adventure buddies, camaraderie, with that combination of trust and recklessness, play and responsibility, that are common among climbers. 

We had a great climbing session as well as very nice conversations and then a fun, spontaneous dip into the creek in our underwear after climbing in the hot sun all day. Really a great day as buddies. 

I enjoyed the whole experience yesterday as I also really enjoyed the dip in the creek and snack and conversations with a non-binary friend on Saturday afternoon. I’m clearly aware that my connecting to cis-men climbers as buddies, on one side, or with AFAB non-binary/trans-masculine persons as platonic friends, on the other, fulfills my needs now, including the full exploration and open expression of two of the most important parts of my own identity. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to make these connections and in general I feel very happy and fulfilled with them. But there’s also a little melancholy after the pairwise outdoor climbing session from yesterday — maybe intensified by the phone conversation I had on Saturday night with my non-binary climbing friend from California with whom there had been some deeper, more intimate connection last winter and spring. 

The melancholy stems from a longing for deeper connection and shared purpose: something I had the fortune to experience first hand, very intensely and for a long time, in my late teens & throughout my twenties with my sailing buddy; and something I thought I might have again with two climbers in California. 

With both of those climbers in California, separately and in different moments, I rationally understood that I couldn’t get that profound connection or shared purpose that I long for, that reminded me of what I had with my sailing buddy. That rational realization was sufficient to keep me moving on towards my own dreams and life goals in a safe and/or healthy way. But there’s still some pain or sense of loss deep down inside me somewhere of which I am reminded in situations like yesterday’s. 

It’s OK. But it’s also a clear reminder, and even an explanation, of why I’m connecting to certain people only in certain ways now: not only because those particular types of person resonate with important parts of my own identity, but also because they feel safe. Safe because they understand me and accept and like me just as I am. But also, and maybe most importantly for me now, safe because we are a priori setting some very definite boundaries, even without speaking them aloud, to not get too close, because there’s no romantic or sexual interest on other side. 

So I feel safe from harm, safe from another heart-break that I really don’t want to have to deal with now.