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!

My first three days in Alaska

It’s been rustic. I’ve been staying at cabins with no running water. The bathroom is an outhouse for peeing & pooping. A pot of water heated on the stove and then used to wash oneself in the shower-tent in a corner of the garden is the shower at my friends’ cabin. No shower option at the cabin here at Byers Lake. 

Rustic, wild. 

Some of this rustic, wild simplicity is familiar, it reminds me of my sailing adventures, of the simplicity & “back to basics” of life on those adventures, as a young adult — and I like that. 

A lot is new, though, unfamiliar.

The drive from my friends’ cabin outside Fairbanks to Byers Lake along Alaska highway 3 was beautiful, but in the middle of nowhere. A one- or two-lane highway winding its way through forests, forests as far as the eye can see, and mountains — the Alaska Range — in the distance. One drives through two or three small towns along the way, the major one being the one outside Denali State & National Parks, but these “towns” are nothing more than a cluster of buildings around a gas station. All of them, though, have a State Troopers building. The only town with cafes and gift shops was the one outside Denali State & National Parks. 

At one of the gas stations where I used the restroom, I overheard two guys, strangers, chatting, telling each other about their hunting exploits: one had just shot a moose the day before. 

This is a very different world from a lot of what I’ve seen before — in the U.S. or in Europe. 

I’ve never been so far North. Here, I’m at around 67 degrees North. Although the super-long days of summer and the “midnight sun” are behind us now, the days are still longer than down in Colorado. And the light is paler. The light has a delicate but somehow insistent quality to it. It’s beautiful, it looks almost magical, surreal. 

The trees I’ve seen so far have been mostly spruces and birches, the latter now turning yellow and gold as autumn approaches. It’s all green and golden, all extremely lush. It reminds me a bit of the late summers of my childhood in the Austrian Alps, except for the light. 

The mountains — the little bit I’ve been able to see that was not hidden by the thick cloud cover in these past two days — are different, too. A dark grey, brownish, blackish rock that I cannot identify, and what looks like dark green/dark grey shrubs. But most noticeably, the tree line being so low: because of the high latitude here, the tree line stops much sooner than on any of the mountains I had seen before. 

It’s been a pity, though, that I haven’t been able to see, or do, much more in the past two days because of the rain. It’s been raining almost nonstop for a day and a half here at Byers Lake, since we arrived yesterday afternoon. So instead of being out there running or hiking and exploring, I’m here, sitting in this rustic cabin, hoping we’ll have enough firewood to keep us warm through tomorrow, writing these notes. 

I’d like the rain to stop or, at least, to abate a little. I’d like to get out there and go for a walk in the woods, to enjoy the potentially beautiful autumn here. Preferably without running into a bear… 

Removing filters: an honest view and another hard lesson

Two weeks ago, after a half-marathon trail race where I wore my “Trans Pride” shorts that have hearts with the trans flag on the butt cheeks, a guy (cis-man) came up to me and said, “I like your shorts, especially the hearts with the trans flag on the butt. I was running behind you for a while and I noticed”.  

I was taken very much by surprise. Other people have commented on these running shorts of mine at races but it’s always been women (or female-presenting people) just saying, “I like your shorts”. I don’t do well with appreciative comments on my looks, especially from strangers; and since my looks have become more masculine, I have gotten used receiving fewer compliments, if any at all, and only from women (or female-presenting people). Sometimes there’ll be a very matter of fact comment on our bodies between me & my climbing/running buddies, with a brotherly camaraderie; or a compliment from one of the gay men in the chorus. But otherwise the norm is, “straight/non-queer men don’t make appreciative remarks on each other’s looks” — an unspoken but very clear homophobic social rule. So this comment by the guy at the race really surprised me. And my friends who either overheard the comment or heard about it later when I told them about it, all said that he must be queer and/or hitting on me. And I ended up believing the same — and feeling flattered also because I found him attractive. 

It eventually turned out that he wasn’t hitting on me at all. 

All my friends and I had misinterpreted. 

This discovery disappointed me in a disproportionately intense, almost devastating, way. I felt not only terribly disappointed but also disproportionately hurt and frustrated, even angry. The intensity of my emotional reaction required an explanation. So here’s the analysis of the four reasons I found for my extreme disappointment, frustration, pain, and anger: two of them are external reasons, i.e. frustration, pain and anger due to society’s biases and their influence on how I allowed myself to perceive this situation; two are internal reasons, i.e. due to my own emotional state & biases. 

External reasons: 

1) Queer people tend to “see queer everywhere”, so most of my queer friends to whom I recounted the episode automatically thought that guy must also be queer. I think many queer people tend to “see queer everywhere” because, for better or for worse, they spend most of their time in queer environments so they end up having a biased view of the world or a tendency to “wishful thinking”. I have spent (& still spend) most of my life, for better or for worse, in environments where queer people are either non-existent or invisible, so I have a more realistic sense of how it is: society, unfortunately, is overwhelmingly straight and sadly normative (and, to be honest, many queer people are sadly normative, too, with their romanticism and monogamic or hierarchical partnering and attachment to marriage). So I should have trusted, or followed, my own usual, logical assumption here, too: chances were that this guy wasn’t queer simply because there are fewer of us queer folk.

2) Society is overwhelmingly neurotypical and allosexual, and people apply the neurotypical and/or allosexual filters to everything. People just cannot take a comment or phrase at face value, they have to, or want to, see (sexual or romantic) implications in everything. I usually don’t. I’m usually literal and asexual to a fault, often missing (sexual or romantic) cues the few times they are directed towards me. So I should have done just the same with that guy’s comment at the race and taken it at face value, as a simple statement of facts: he liked my shorts (like many other people do), appreciated the trans flag (i.e. he’s probably a good ally), and explained the practical way in which he came to notice it. No more, no less. This one time, instead, I allowed the neurotypical, allosexual filter applied by people around me to bias my own interpretation. Why did I allow that?  

I allowed it for the following two, internal or personal, reasons: 

1) I wanted to interpret that guy’s comment in a neurotypical, allosexual way for once because I desperately want (a) “boyfriend(s)”. I’m in such terrible need for that type of connection — for sexual attention and sexual connection with (a) man/men — that I’m trying to “wish it into existence”, I’m seeing it even when it’s really not there. This is a very dangerous and unhealthy emotional state for me to be in.

2) Somehow, for the past decade, when it comes to some form of non-platonic attraction, I have always been drawn irresistibly — subconsciously — to unavailable people/men. I don’t know how but some part of me — my “reptilian brain”? — seems to pick up on cues that indicate the person’s unavailability (to anything non-platonic) and then I’m drawn to them non-platonically. It’s gotten to the point where, for me, the words “unavailable (to anything non-platonic)” & “(non-platonically) attractive” are (dangerous) synonyms.

This is all very frustrating, painful, and concerning to me. 

So, as I try to work through and dispel this burning disappointment, what can I learn from this experience, and what can I treasure? 

I can learn to trust myself both more and less: I can, I must trust my autistic, literal, asexual brain more, allowing myself and maybe also trying to show others to take comments at face value, to not read additional (sexual or romantic or flirtatious) meanings into everything; I can trust my life experiences that keep showing that there are few queer people and even fewer non-normative ones, proving that most people really function in the boxes they were given; but I must also trust myself less when it comes to feeling non-platonic attraction towards people, because there I am in a vulnerable, needy, and therefore very biased and dangerous position. So I’ve got to apply to myself, and follow strictly, a simple rule: if I feel any form of non-platonic attraction towards someone, I must steer clear of them.

On the other hand, I can treasure one thing from this whole experience, from that one comment that guy made to me after the race two weeks ago: for a brief instant someone connected to me in a refreshing, non-standard and simply direct way, breaking those unspoken but mighty homophobic rules that prevent most men from praising each other’s looks; for a brief instant, a man who was a stranger took the courage to say something nice to me, to an openly queer person with masculine looks. No more, no less. 

My own body letting me down

I’m feeling really depressed. The pain in my left hip & groin is worse again, 4-5/10 now. I don’t know if the pain is worse again from this morning’s run or from sitting at my desk or driving: but as much as I can reduce the sitting & driving to the minimum necessary, I cannot avoid it, so this isn’t going to get better any time soon.
I think this is a real injury: I felt I pulled something in my left groin while doing Sun Salutations last week, on Wednesday 8/27, before heading out for my solo trip to South Dakota. I probably reactivated an old injury from a decade ago. And during COVID, I had a very severe episode of hamstring tension/inflammation from all the sitting and because all I could do during the shutdown was run & hike, and that lasted for months: literally for months all I could do was walk, nothing else at all. So this doesn’t bode well.
I cannot “take it one day at a time”: I need to make a decision for myself now to not run for the rest of this week, lest I also ruin my trip to Alaska next week.
This is devastating for me. All this year I’ve been working to finally do my first full marathon, after having missed “my chance”, my wish last year, and I’m missing it again. I’ve failed again. None of my runner friends get so many injuries and setbacks as I do, so I must be doing something wrong. I feel like I’ll never go beyond the half-marathon. And even there, when I race, I’m performing much worse that the projections, whereas my friends perform just as expected.
Running is all I have. It helps me regulate, it brings me joy, it gives structure to my days, my weeks. My job is uncertain, my relational needs are often unmet in painful ways, climbing depends on others and that often backfires. Running is the only thing I could do without depending on others, without the risk of being let down by others.

But now it’s my own body letting me down.

South Dakota solo trip — Afterthoughts

I’m back from my solo trip in South Dakota, I got back yesterday late afternoon. 

I was on edge for the first two thirds of the trip because after about half an hour of driving a whining/whirring sounds started, the pitch getting higher as I sped up, which indicated that it was something rotating, like a belt slipping. I still had over 300 miles to drive, mostly through “the middle of nowhere” and on a holiday, so all I could really do was keep going and hope that everything would hold up at least until I got back into “civilization”. (It did help that I had a good friend/mentor, one of my “sailing uncles” father figures from California, with whom I could text about the mechanical issue for brainstorming and reassurance — another example of how, even when I am technically by myself on these trips, I am not utterly alone, I guess.) 

Fortunately, the noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun and didn’t return for the rest of the trip so, despite the anxiety due to the possible mechanical issue and the pain coming from my left hip-flexor injury, the trip went more smoothly and quickly than expected. And when I got home, I wasn’t even tired: all I could feel then, as now, was the joy and healing power from this trip. 

It was healing. So healing. 

And I’m so glad I went and did it.

I didn’t do “anything special” while I was there, I didn’t even go see the “sights” in the area (Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse memorial, etc.): partly, the frequent, intermittent, and sometimes abundant rain stopped me from being able to make big plans there; partly, the flaring up of an old injury in my left hip-flexor prevented me from risking strenuous hiking; but mostly, I just listened to myself, to what my body & soul needed, and what they (i.e. I) needed was rest. 

So I rested. 

I allowed myself to rest. 

I went on one very pretty hike and two runs on beautiful (& technical) trails, all in the same area, all very close to the campground where I was staying. I went for two swims in the nearby lake. I never did any physical activity for more than a few hours, less than half a day. The rest of the time I relaxed: I sat and read and colored and listened to music (& sang along), hunkering down when it rained; I lay on my big blue woolen blanket in the soft grass in the sunshine under the oak trees in the campground, reading or napping or listening to music and singing wholeheartedly, when it didn’t rain. I made myself healthy meals regularly, took hot showers, prepared my tent as well as my car every evening so I’d have a warm, dry place to sleep even if it started storming in the middle of the night. And the last two nights there, as the moon shone in the clear sky, I sat and looked up, or walked around slowly, looking at the sky. Once the campground had quieted down for the night and almost all lights were off, the sky was so clear, so full of stars and I could even glimpse the Milky Way. And on both of those last two, clear nights, I saw shooting stars: three on Saturday night and two on Sunday night. And again, I felt that thrill, that beautiful, sweet, radiant joy of a child. As if I had just received a wonderful gift from the universe. 

Those last two nights with the clear sky were particularly healing for me. On Saturday night, as I stood looking at the moon over the dark shadows of the trees in the forest surrounding the campground — a landscape so similar to the one painted by my European queer ex-lover on that mug for me, which I buried and no longer have — I felt something loosen up in me, open up in my soul, in my heart, in my chest. I felt myself make peace, wholly, for the first time fully, with that part of my past that is connected to my European queer ex-lover and thus truly open up to the future & any relationships it might bring. As silly as it sounds now, that first shooting star that surprised me on Saturday night felt like a sign. 

This trip was also important for my growth or pushing my comfort zone living in my body (& identity) as a trans person traveling to areas/States that are “not trans friendly” (to put it mildly). I was scared about going to South Dakota, driving through Wyoming, all by myself, as a trans person. But I decided that I wouldn’t let that fear stop me, stop me from exploring, enjoying, traveling, i.e. from being me. After all, when I looked like a woman, I also ran risks traveling by myself but I didn’t let that stop me: I just tried to be sensible. So I did the same here. 

It’s easier said than done, though: this “new body”, this “new identity”, my masculine looks, using men’s restrooms, etc. is all still very new and somewhat foreign to me. I still cannot fully believe that the world sees me as a man — as I moved over for some horseback-riders on a trail and one of the men thanked me, saying “Thank you, young man!”, I was still half incredulous. 

I have been using men’s bathrooms quite regularly for a couple years now but I had never showered in any of them, not even at my climbing gym where I feel quite comfortable & safe. So when it became evident that I’d have to do this trip all by myself (or cancel it), I called the campground and had an open-hearted conversation with the woman who managed it and with whom I had had several phone calls trying to fix the dates of my reservation. I asked her if they had single-stall and/or all-gender showers at their campground. When she said “No”, I explained my worries to her, i.e. that as a trans man I was afraid that if other men in the showers saw my “weird/different body” they might be violent or hostile towards me. She listened and, while admitting that she could not understand my experience because she “didn’t live in my body” (as she put it), she told me that the showers were all single, i.e. separated from each other with walls & a curtain, so I would be able to undress, wash, dry myself and dress again without anyone seeing me/my body. Knowing that, I decided to take the risk and go on this trip by myself — and I did shower there every single day in the men’s bathroom. 

Apart from the privacy of the showers, I didn’t do anything else to hide my body or my transness: I swam in the lake twice in my Speedos, I wore leggings, and I walked around bare-chested when the weather allowed it. I didn’t “flaunt” my queerness like I do here (with T-shirts, tank-tops, armbands, pins) but I didn’t even obsess to hide it. I tried to strike a balance between being careful/sensible and still being authentically myself in a place where I was definitely a “little weird” (the campground’s guests tended to be cis-het couples, families, and vets). At the end, when I checked out yesterday, I went up to the campground manager, whose husband was also a veteran. She was sitting at a table with a dozen people, adults in their forties, many of them vets, and a few children & teenagers. I could sense some hostility and/or curiosity from the manager’s husband, but she had always been very helpful and nice, I think genuinely nice, to me, so I told her what I felt. Loud enough for most of the other people sitting there to hear, I said, “I want to thank you for that conversation we had on the phone about the showers: it helped, and I’m glad I took the risk and came here for my trip. These are not easy times for people like me, so if you ever have another guest who is trans, you can tell them that at least one trans person felt safe here.” 

I said that because I truly wanted to thank her. But also because I wanted to state openly, as I was leaving and thus was “safe”, that I am trans and that things are hard for me & others like me now, especially in places like the area where that campground is. I hope as many people as possible heard what I said there yesterday. I might be the only openly trans person they’ve ever seen and they might think I’m a freak, but there’s also a chance that they might see me as just another human. Now more than ever, as so much of the world wants us to cower in fear and hide or shut up, I’m going to stand up and be me. I’m not going to do it putting myself consciously in danger in silly ways, but I am going to do it as much as I can: existence is resistance and visibility, just being out there, is the first battle — the first battle we win.