Fall came around again last week, as it does every year. I am usually sad to see summer go, especially in Seattle where summers are glorious days full of sunshine and fall means a return of the darkness and drizzly rains that envelop us here for much of the year.
This year, though, I am ready for fall. So very ready. I had a summer that was full of powerful growth, deep healing, significant challenges, wrenching grief, hot rage, fierce self-care, and radical love from my community and my chosen family. This whole year has been transformational for me as I have explored my word for the year (“storytelling”) and all the ways that going ever more deeply into my own wholeness has allowed me to connect in authentic, vulneraable ways with others.
In coming out more publicly as gender non-conforming, and especially coming out to my family of origin, I have dealt with the deep pain of loss. Telling the truth about my life has fractured some important relationships in ways that I don’t yet know how to repair.
I have come to a place where an absolutely non-negotiable part of being in relationships, for me, is that I get to show up in my wholeness. I refuse to hide parts of me that make people uncomfortable. I will not make myself smaller for anyone. I have fought for the right to take up space in the world–for myself, and for others who have been denied that right–and I am unwilling to give that away because my bigness is intimidating. Sometimes that means I lose people whom I’ve been connected to for much or all of my life, or for a brief time but who meant a lot to me. Sometimes, self-care looks like setting clear boundaries, like not engaging in relationships that don’t allow me to be whole, like not picking up the phone. Sometimes, that means that relationships can’t continue, or can’t continue in their present form.
Sometimes existing in my radical wholeness is a lonely proposition. But, even in moments of feeling isolated, I feel so much better existing as myself than I ever did pretending to be someone I could never be.
I have been doing a lot of reclaiming of the idea of isolation versus solitude. I can be alone without being lonely. Being with myself, truly and deeply present with myself, has taken me to some of the richest places I could have imagined. And now, I’ve noticed that I’m not trying as hard to fill the empty spaces in my life with just anything. I think of Warsan Shire and her reflection, “My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.” After my solo retreat to the coast last month, I feel the same.
And then I shift back into being in community with amazing people who see me and celebrate my authenticity. I see them and celebrate them as well. This year, of any year of my life, has been full of growing some of the most amazing connections with people. I have engaged in the deep, loving, challenging work of being in relationships with clear communication, boundaries, consent, accountability, and fierce love. I am flooded with gratitude for these people with whom I am co-creating the world I want to live in.
This summer was a huge one for me, both personally and within my community. I don’t yet have the words to speak to all that happened, or possibly the desire to share what I’ve been doing in my inner world. I’ve gone to some hard places and searched for whatever good I could find there to bring back with me. I’ve grieved, and grieved hard. I’ve raged at the violence and the unkindness that exists in the world and that has been and continues to be perpetrated against me and against people I love and against my community and other communities. I lost a queer friend to suicide. I had another that was viciously assaulted. Institutional oppression–in the form of racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, classism, and so many more–continue to harm so many folks, and working to change the status quo is exhausting. Yet I don’t see any alternatives but to help co-create the world.
The last few lines of this song have been running through my head for weeks:
Maybe it’s all right
Maybe we won’t fight any more
Maybe love is waiting at the end of every road
I don’t know
I don’t know
But maybe
Maybe it’s all right–Patty Griffin, “Mother of God”
I don’t know about every road; I haven’t walked all of them. But I know this road that I’m on is going home. And I know that love will be there, if for no other reason than that I am bringing it with me.