Your Life Story Isn't Your Life. It's Your Story.

"Your life story isn't your life. It's your story."

I'm feeling that quote acutely as I sort through thirty-five years of pictures, handwritten correspondence (letters! notes from abroad! the best postcards!), awards, published and unpublished writing and other random keepsakes. The small, finished room in our basement is full of this shit.

While I have an occasional flash of joy a la "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," I'm keeping more than I want to keep. I'm keeping it out of a vague sense of obligation to my mother or unborn child (not sure which).

I'm keeping letters from my college friends because the humans themselves bring me joy, and I'm not inspired in this moment to reread every letter I've ever received from them. Does that mean I'll never want to do so?

I'm keeping the box of pictures from my mother because, while I've been completely happy cutting my own photo collection in half, I've run out of steam. I can't hold another 300-500 pictures in my hand, one by one, and decide what to do with them.

This weekend, Sonia and I went to Connecticut to visit one of her friends from law school. On her fridge was a magnet: "Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself."

The friend is gorgeous -- tall and African American with perfect skin and amazing, long dreadlocks. She's from Virginia and told us the story of her husband walking into law offices where she was working and looking her up and down, clearly curious about her but clearly not going to do anything about it. Against policy if not the law, she searched in his file for his email address and sent him a message asking him out. They were married a few years later.

When I praised her bravery, she said, "Girl, I had to find my husband," and shrugged it off.

I don't know too much about this couple, but I liked that quote on their fridge. In the course of a weekend, we went to a winery, a cider mill, a casino and a corn maze. We made small talk easily and avoided politics and anything too personal. There was a sense of confidence in both of them, a sense of plunging headlong into the future together.

There are things I kept because I'm creating myself.

Because I kept the letters from a youth counselor named Mark, I'll remember lying on the floor of an elevator with him in a hotel near the Mall of America. I was sixteen, he was twenty. We didn't kiss. He wasn't my first taste of the illicit.

Because I kept the laugh-out-loud "communication contract" written by my ex boyfriend Dan, I'll remember how funny he was, how I probably would have chosen him if I was able to choose a man.

Because I kept a book constructed by Ari and written in a few months into our relationship, I'll remember the intensity of my first relationship with a woman, how it came upon me like a revelation.

There are things I didn't keep, too. But they're not a part of my story.

Recently, I sat in on a session about trauma's effect on the brain in young children. In all children, the neural pathways that are encouraged (i.e., "If I cry, I am comforted.") are the pathways that become set. Other potential pathways are pruned away. This pruning continues through our lives.

There were maybe a dozen letters from unrecognizable names. These completely forgotten intimacies -- both friends and lovers -- had been completely pruned from memory. Yet I'd been present with them all once, maybe more than once. Regardless, they were in Friday's trash.

It's both empowering and tragic, the relentlessness of time. The reality of so many people -- and each moment -- intersecting with your life so briefly. The constant need to create one's life, and the fact that each moment passes into the abyss if we don't seize upon it.

The Ocean Has Taken Her

What a book to read in the weeks I've been staring down death for the first time. Molly's casket was open, my first experience of one. It was bizarre.

I kept looking around, afraid of offending someone, and wanting to whisper, "It doesn't look anything like her." I didn't dare. Did I think the mortician was hanging around, might be insulted?

The body didn't look anything like the human I remembered seeing just over a year ago. Yes, the disease had ravaged her: made her thin, allowed sores to pop up around her mouth. But I'd known Molly on acne-plagued, hungover days without makeup. I'd known her to fluctuate between skinny and a little bit chunky. The changes were more than cosmetic. Molly simply wasn't there.

Which begs the question: where did Molly go?

I struggled with questions like this as a young person -- middle school, high school. I had the Catholics' answers to wrestle with then. By the end of college, I'd adopted a wholistic spirituality inspired by books like The Celestine Prophecy and The Secret, with a little Kerouac thrown in. I trusted my own subjectivity and the power of my mind and my life force to drive compassion, integrity and decision-making. They haven't let me down.

My questioning today feels less like a struggle and more like a point of curiosity, something I wouldn't hesitate to bring up at a dinner party. You know, the nature of mortality. Let's talk about it.

Enter The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In this lovely, scary tale reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time, a seven-year-old boy discovers truths that remain hidden to the adults around him. He also befriends a girl named Lettie Hempstock.

Lettie looks like she's eleven, but she and her mother and grandmother are older than the world. They get our main character twisted up in other dimensions. A window to another world becomes embedded in his heart, quite literally and quite dangerously.

Lettie ultimately has to sacrifice herself to save the little boy, but the exact nature of that sacrifice remains blurry. Lettie's mother wades with her limp body into the backyard pond. The body floats. We hear about what happens next from the seven-year-old boy.

The great wave came, and the world rumbled, and I looked up as it reached us: it was taller than trees, than houses, than mind or eyes could hold, or heart could follow.  

Only when it reached Lettie Hempstock's floating body did the enormous wave crash down. I expected to be soaked, or worse, to be swept away by the angry ocean water, and I raised my arm to cover my face.  

There was no splash of breakers, no deafening crash, and when I lowered my arm I could see nothing but the still black water of a pond in the night, and there was nothing on the surface of the pond but a smattering of lily pads and the thoughtful, incomplete reflection of the moon.

If only all sendoffs from this world came complete with erratic, otherworldly weather. In fact, as Molly's brother spoke at her "celebration of life" last Saturday, it started to downpour. As he was wrapping up, a clap of thunder shook the Irish center.

"That's Molly telling me, 'that's enough sad talk,'" her brother said.

She's in the weather. She's in the ether. But where is Molly really?

Lettie's mother has an explantation for what happens in the end, to a girl whose spirit is as old as time itself.

"Lettie's hurt. Very badly hurt. The ocean has taken her. Honestly, I don't know if it will ever give her back. But we can hope, can't we?"

It's So Good to Be Alive

These are the flowers Sonia and I got one another for Valentine's Day. Most of them are still going strong.

Last Friday, I lost a friend. Molly was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a child, and lived her life on borrowed time. She was diagnosed in the 80's, when it was rare for people to live past their teen years. She made it to 35.

Cystic fibrosis affects the lungs and digestive system. It's a hereditary condition in which the body produces heavy mucus and eventually shuts down multiple organs.

We lived together for three years, in a three-bedroom house in Center City with two different roommates. The first roommate was standoffish; the second became a friend.

Molly loved the Steelers, and she loved to drink. She was gorgeous and vibrant and blonde. She mastered the art of the flowy shirt to hide her CF-bloated belly. She was welcoming of my partners and curious about my queer identity. It seemed to me as though she simply hadn't known many gay people, especially women. Molly also loved men.

It was the early days of my nonprofit job. I went about three years without a day off, besides the common holidays. I remember one of the first weeks I took off, for a trip to Florida with my partner to see friends. It wasn't even a whole week.

Molly said, "You work so much. You deserve some time off."

At the time, I remember thinking I had her fooled. I didn't really deserve it.

I didn't have a clear picture then of how lazy many people are in their jobs. Instead of competing against humans, I was competing against my own best ideal of what I could do. I fell short every time.

Her words stayed with me. They brought tears to my eyes, even as I denied them. Over the years, they have rung in my ears whenever I'm being too hard on a friend, partner or coworker. I give myself permission to be generous in the way that Molly was to me. Even though I didn't think I deserved it, it felt nice to have someone else believe in both my hard work and inherent worth.

Just as we'd settled on what felt like a comfortable, drama-free household, our ancient landlady showed up one morning. She hadn't seen the neighborhood in 10 years, but that didn't stop her from using her own key to enter our home as Molly and I ate breakfast. She couldn't believe how the neighborhood had changed.

Within a month, we received notice that she would be selling the house. We needed to find a new home. Our roommate moved in with her boyfriend. Molly stayed with family for a brief time, then with the boyfriend who became her fiancé. I moved to West Philadelphia and made new friends.

Since Molly died, I've found myself reaching for Sonia more often, more desperately. The way I feel reminds me of the Stephen Dunn poem, I Came Home Wanting to Touch Everyone. Even in her death, Molly brings me an appreciation of each breath.

It's so good to be alive, to be able to work and love. No qualifications.

Parker (Part 1): New Frontier

When I first met Parker, we were 19-year-old undergraduates at the University of Westminster in London. 9/11 had just happened.

A few days before, I'd been sitting in a London hotel room with my mother the night of September 11, 2001, and I came out for the first time -- as agnostic. Through her careful protests, I shared my ideas about how the universe might work, based largely on James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy.

Then I put my mother on a plane back to the States. I was on my own for the first time.

Parker and I met in a drab college common room on the ground floor of a narrow building in the heart of the Victoria neighborhood in central London. A hundred undergraduates were crowded in for orientation, the anxiety and excitement palpable. We all sat in uncomfortable chairs in a circle around the edge of the room, international students and first year Brits. Our lives were just beginning.

I remember looking around the circle of faces, deciding whom to befriend. In my newly empowered state, with mixed results reinventing myself in my first two years of college, I was determined to do this study abroad thing right. I chose Parker, a gorgeous boy with the cheekbones of a god, and a young woman with a tie-dyed shirt and a pierced labret.

The three of us processed the aftermath of 9/11, ate mushrooms for the first time, head-banged in grungy basement bars and danced all night in cavernous clubs. We also ate meals together, watched movies and wondered about the world. By the end of my four months in London, they were my closest friends.

My senior year of college, Parker asked me with some reverence for a phone date. I was sure he was going to tell me that he was in love with me, which meant he was probably going to come out to me (that was usually how it worked).

Instead, he told me that he was exploring BDSM, that it was a part of him. He could share magazines to help me understand, if I wanted. It seemed important to him that I understand.

This was a new frontier, but I didn't flinch. It was like my friends from high school who came out as gay or admitted to abortions despite our years of Catholic education: I knew their hearts and knew all of the pieces of their decision-making. I could not find fault with them; instead, I needed to expand my perspective.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago. I shared my blog with Parker and he had some things to share with me, too: he'd taken up acting in porn in Berlin and working as an escort. I suspected he was queer or bisexual, too, so I asked if I could interview him.

Parker went to school for architecture and pursued careers in art writing and video game design before embracing a life of sex work within the past year. The new frontier for me here was not the fact of the sex work -- I've known anecdotally that there are plenty of people doing sex work who choose it and enjoy it.

The new frontier was that I hadn't loved anyone in the industry. I hadn't had the chance to see how the work fulfilled them in a way similar to how I feel fulfilled in my own work. I hadn't explored big questions like love, ambition and satisfaction with someone who is both a fantastic critical thinker and has found peace and presence in sex work.

I haven't let Parker speak in this first post, but you'll meet him and read his careful analysis and irreverent skepticism in the few that are coming.

It felt important first, to say: I love him, and I'm unsure if we can ever be truly fair to a subject we love. I'll do my best.

Jenny (Part 3): On Becoming Honest

Jenny and I had beers on her front porch Sunday afternoon, and I realized how much time you have to spend with a person to get a decent interview, to make sure you've covered all your bases and captured at least a little bit of the nuance of their experience. 

She was on fire for Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (review here). 

Traister argues that even for most straight women, relationships with women are more fulfilling in every way. "So I just felt so lucky," Jenny said, "that I'm also sexually attracted to women, too, because I can get so much more from those relationships -- physically, mentally and emotionally -- than I could with a man."

"I'm generally happier when I'm in a relationship," she'd said the week before. "When I'm happy, it's because my life feels full. It feels like the things I'm doing are honest projections of me, and what I want, and what I want to give to the world."

As a teen, Jenny remembers meeting gay women and feeling an inexplicable admiration for them, an awe for their bravery. She remembers being impressed when any woman -- gay or straight -- was able to present themselves as strong and down-to-earth, in opposition to a culture that wanted them to preen and pluck and perform. 

After she came out, she realized that this admiration came because she knew deep down that she wasn't being brave in the same way.

Now, she knows who she is but still finds LGBTQ labels -- lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer -- spectacularly insufficient.

"Meeting someone new, I say 'gay' because I'm dating a woman, so I feel pretty gay," Jenny said. "I do identify as queer, but I don't say that when I am first meeting people, because they're like, 'well, what is that? What does that mean?' If they don't say that, they're thinking it, and that's almost worse."

Queer, for Jenny, carries with it an acknowledgement of the men and the F-to-M trans people she's crushed on and dated. As she puts it, "It's a little more than just lesbian." Queer also gives her the freedom to embody her own version of the strong and down-to-earth women she's admired. 

Jenny is petite, with a tough and determined walk. I most often see her in straight-legged pants, button-down shirts and dangling earrings. She explained her thinking behind her look. 

"I don't like to portray a whole lot of feminine qualities. I've been cutting my hair shorter and shorter. I have a very strong aversion to portraying myself as super-feminine. I don't want to be masculine, just somewhere in between. The last time I dressed really feminine was Halloween. That felt really right to, only on Halloween, put on a dress."

Five or six years after Jenny first started to settle into her own identity and feel comfortable in her own skin, she met her current partner. They've been together for a little over a year now, and the five year plan involves a child. Jenny hopes it involves her current partner. But marriage? Not necessary.

"I'm not sure that marriage is super-important to me. It's a huge waste of money. I'll have to spend money on having a baby. But yeah, I think in five years I want a kid. Just one. Then I'll get another one in seven years," we laughed.

There was something in our laughter that hoped it would be that easy for her to become a mother.

At least some of the confidence and excitement around this vision -- of a child and family, in a few short years -- comes from her current girlfriend.

My relationship has made me feel more fulfilled. Sometimes, I'm overwhelmed by that feeling of being fulfilled, but I feel that I could be with her for a long time and never get bored. She makes me feel confident in myself. I can bounce ideas. She's a question-asker who challenges me without making me feel stupid. 

I feel better matched in my relationship than I ever have, in terms of us being able to talk about anything. She's the first person I've dated who I can see a really long-term future with. In the past, I have been terrified of settling for something that's not right for me, or getting stuck in something, but that has nothing to do with being gay.

Maybe there's a key in there to gay happiness, or to what Jenny called "grown-up happy": learning to separate the trials and dramas of life, the hang-ups and heartbreaks, from our sexuality. Or at very least, to not blame our sexuality -- or bigots' response to it -- for the challenges we face.

Few people lead truly charmed lives. Gay or straight, everyone has their inner and outer demons to face. We're all just working towards being, in Jenny's words, honest projections of ourselves and what we want to give to the world.

Jenny (Part 1): Grown-up Happy

Monday night, in a walk through West Philadelphia, Jenny called herself "grown-up happy." It's not the giddy happiness of our first relationships or the inspired happiness of a newly discovered art form. There are fewer firsts, but greater calm. Occasional satisfaction.

Jenny and I met on OKCupid in our mid-twenties. We were both new to any kind of gay community and ready to get out there. I'd already suffered my first major heartbreak with a woman but would date men again; Jenny had just broken up with her boyfriend of two years because she was gay. 

Romance was never in the cards. We both needed a like-minded friend more than we needed anything else. We hung out weekly in those early years, and the friendship blossomed into one of my closest adult friendships. Before Sonia and I moved in together, Jenny and I lived together for a year. 

She agreed to be my first blog interview. After seven years, I still had plenty to learn.

Last Friday, I arrived at Jenny's third-floor apartment and we settled at her circular, dinette table -- the one I'd left behind when I moved out. She prepared a peanut butter treat for her white pit bull mix, Snow, so the dog would leave us in peace.

We'd shared dozens of meals over the same table but this felt different, more formal. We started with religion, family and community.

Religion played a peripheral role in Jenny's experience of being a gay person in the world. Although her mother's family was secularly Jewish and her father's family Christian, Jenny said, "both parents explained it: people who believe in God are silly, and God doesn't exist."

Easy enough. Or not.

Even being religion-adjacent can be tough for LGBT people. The atheists have an easier time with it, but even atheist parents are still parents. 

Jenny explained, "My mom, who grew up atheist, her uncle came out as gay back in the 70s. She and her parents had already gone through this. But she was very adamant that she know -- 'you can't be bi, you can't be questioning' -- she needed to know, 'because I need to know what your future is going to look like.' Besides that, she was very accepting."

The Christianity on the other side of the family was a little tougher to navigate. 

My dad didn't really believe me for a while. He wanted me to go to therapy. He wouldn't let me tell his family, and that's where the religion part plays in. He thought his dad would view it as this moral dilemma -- either disown your granddaughter or accept something that you completely disagree with and hate. So he basically said, "Don't tell him until you're going to marry a woman." In his mind he was thinking [my grandfather would] be dead before that would happen. 

When I finally did tell [that side of the family], I was in my first long-term relationship with a woman and I wanted to bring her to my cousin's wedding. I told my cousin, and asked her what my grandfather would think. She [disagreed with my dad], and she was right. 

My grandfather took a few days to respond to my email and said, "this isn't what I would have wanted for you, but I still love you and accept you." Even now, if I'm single, he'll ask me if I'm going to date a man. I'm glad he'll say things like that rather than just not talk about it at all. 

I certainly felt this huge weight lifted once I was able to come out to that side of the family...I was watching my cousins get married and have babies, and to their knowledge I hadn't dated anyone in years. That was so weird and dishonest, so once that didn't have to be the case, I felt so much better.

Whatever chosen family and communities we can build up around ourselves as gay people, there is no denying the import of the love and acceptance of our family of origin.

Despite her religion-adjacent traumas with religion in her extended family, Jenny explored her own spirituality in different ways throughout her life.

"When I was a teenager, I started going to synagogue with my best friend. I connected a lot to her family's ritual around Judaism, and the community that they had around Judaism, and how it brought so much warmth to their lives." 

What if these were our standards for religious communities: warmth, inclusivity, richness and support? 

Jenny's personal spirituality matured when, in her mid- to late-twenties, she worked in hospice as a music therapist. Despite her resilient personality, I remember sitting across from her those years -- usually on someone's porch with beer or wine in-hand -- and noticing a new weight and intention in her approach to daily life. 

It's not easy to be around death all the time, even if the dying are older folks who led long and relatively healthy lives. Not all of Jenny's clients were that lucky, though. There were too many rough days without a supportive supervisor or administration. She had to find the answers for herself. 

"What I realized then was that music was my larger-than-self form of expression and form of connecting," she said. "I was very attached to music since I was five, so maybe there was always a part of me that was using music [to connect to spirituality] without even realizing it." 

I learned a few things through this first interview, and I'm so grateful I could run this experiment with one of my dearest friends. I learned that transcribing an interview takes a hell of a lot of time, and that I need to ask interviewees to trust me, rather than offer to let them read the post ahead of time. There's an urgency to blogging that will keep me engaged, and I lost it for a moment this week. 

Strangely, this interview with Jenny felt more like our first intimate conversations than it did our more recent, more comfortable friendship. The stakes were higher: to listen carefully, guide the conversation in a worthwhile direction and be true to her words. I'm grateful she's a key part of my community. 

Jenny's also been thinking a little bit about her communities lately, those she shares with her girlfriend and those they navigate separately.

"Moving to West Philly in the past year or two," she said, "I've developed a really strong queer community. I go to a party with some of these people, and the minority of people are straight couples. When I was first coming out, this was the kind of community I craved. It took years for me to find it, and now it feels so normal and so good. It helps me to interact more openly and honestly in my other communities."

From our first times dipping our toe into the pool, nodding across the bar and whispering to one another, "do you think she's gay?", to our now mostly-LGBTQ friend groups, Jenny and I ran toward queer adulthood arm-in-arm. I couldn't have asked for more thoughtful or kind partner in crime.

Perhaps because of that, there's a lot more interview to share. Stay tuned for Part 2. 

The Most Satisfying Thing(s) about Delaying Children

One of the most satisfying things about delaying children is the pleasure of adult friendship. Whether it's traveling with old friends to visit new cities or catching a play on a Thursday with a new friend from around the corner, I thoroughly enjoy and appreciate grown-up company and conversation.

Kids are cute (and just maybe getting increasingly cuter), but I do not envy my young friends and family members who have babies and toddlers right now. I believe them when they say they are experiencing some of the highest highs and lowest lows of their lives, but I'm also quietly noting how sleep deprivation can contribute to emotional roller coasters. 

Friday night, Sonia and I made tacos with chicken in adobo sauce and cabbage salad. Then I drank the better part of a bottle of red wine while we watched a few episodes of Homeland. Short of her reminder that I wouldn't want to be groggy for my Saturday (a good one, although I don't always like to hear it), it was a perfect evening. 

We're lucky enough to have evenings like that fairly often. When we talk about it to a couple with two children, however, their mouths hang open in envy. 

Ok, so one of the most satisfying things about delaying children is the appreciation of time spent with your partner. The other is adult friendship. 

Tonight (Saturday), Sonia's staying home while I go to an art opening and poetry event with my newest friend, a professor of creative writing at a local college. She's a thirty-something writer like me, at once confident in the ways she's spent her years so far and a little nervous that she's wasted some time. 

Can I blame this one on the patriarchy? What better way to cut women off at the knees than leading us to question, while at the height of our productivity, energy and power, whether we should be having children instead?

About a year ago, the professor invited me to sit on a panel at her college. The audience were undergraduate writing majors, and the topic was life after graduation. Two of the four panelists were MFA professors encouraging young writers to saddle themselves with another two years' of graduate school debt to "pursue their art." 

I couldn't in good conscience stand for that. I told them to travel or get any job they could, get some experience in this thing called life, start paying off loans, and see if they had the discipline to write every day. I think the professor liked my attitude, and we went out for our first beer shortly thereafter. 

Two of my twenty-something coworkers recently decided, in my general proximity, that no one makes new friends after college. While that's not true, it certainly gets harder. In recent years, I met one of my closest friends through OKCupid, two others because they lived in the apartment above me. One by being overconfident and a little bit bitchy on an otherwise-male panel. 

As a young person growing up in a rural area, I was a poet. I dreamed. I gazed up at the stars and marveled, imagining my future and its possibilities. Even then, those possibilities included culture, travel, theater, community, close friends, lovers and a commitment to remember what it felt like being a child. 

As I've written before, childhood didn't suit me. It was awkward and monotonous and quiet. I wrestled with vague demons and kept to myself. I promised myself that when I got out, I'd travel to all of the cities, read all of the books, see all of the theater and connect with all of the friends I could. 

So far, so good.