The Farm

Hey,

I've been carrying a lot of anxiety and existential dread lately, and I've had trouble naming it. I’m under a lot of stress with work, I’m worried about money, I’m worried about surgery in January, I’m worried about COVID and whether my friends will be ok. But this feeling was… something else.

It wasn't until therapy tonight that I realized it was the election.

I haven't been able to name it because I've been pointedly not looking at it. It feels like The Nothing. A sucking void. An event horizon that I can't see past. I have big work things and (socially distanced) holidays and fun stuff at home with L coming up, and none of that feels real because it's all on the other side of Tuesday. Any time I think about it I just feel overwhelmed and scared, and I have too much to do to give in to The Nothing, and so I've been pretending it's this distant thing in the far-off future that I could afford to leave for Future Bridget to deal with.

I can't do that anymore, because it's in five days. And I literally don't know what my life is going to look like this time next week.

The only thing I've been able to latch on to is a possible new job opportunity, and that feels like a dangerous thing to hitch my wagon to because I have no idea what my chances look like. But right now it’s the only thing I can see past the event horizon, so I’m hanging on to it for dear life. And hey, maybe it’ll work out. Right?

I've really struggled with, like. Wanting things? Having hope? Because historically nothing ever works out for me and then at some point I just stopped getting my hopes up. But the past two years have been an ongoing exercise in things working out better than I thought I would. My life is orders of magnitude better now than it was two years ago, and that's despite all the fascism and plague.

After so many years of being afraid to want things in life for fear of never getting them, I’ve had to repeatedly face the possibility that maybe, just maybe, things will work out. It’s frightening, in a way that I’m not quite accustomed to yet.

L and I have talked about the future a lot since I (officially) moved in a year ago, and a recurring theme is The Farm. The specifics change, but it all amounts to getting a house with at least some bit of acreage around it, enough that we could grow some of our own food and, most importantly, have enough space so that anyone in our extended friend circles and chosen family who needed a place to stay could have one. We want to make a safe haven for people who need it-- not least of whom is ourselves.

We've both been struggling a lot lately and we've coped, in part, by talking more about The Farm. (And watching homesteading videos on YouTube.) It's a thing we've held on to when things get bad. It's a thing that feels scary to hope for, not least because it's A. basically what I've wanted my whole adult life and B. closer to actually happening than I ever thought possible. I never dreamed this might actually happen. But there was a time when having a home or stable work or being a girl or finding someone like L felt basically impossible and, well. Here we are.

What if it works out.

So, this is the thing we've been telling each other when things feel overwhelming and scary. Feel free to swap out proper nouns and adapt for your needs.

"One day, he'll be gone. Either deposed or dead or hiding in another country. His power will be broken and the work of cleaning up will begin in earnest. Our family will be as safe and as happy as can be expected. We'll be married. And we'll make it to The Farm. And no matter what— we’re all going to take care of each other. Because we have to."

Whatever your Farm happens to be, please know it's out there waiting for you, and that you'll make it there someday. And no matter what happens— we’re all going to take care of each other.

Because we have to.

Listen to Wonders on Spotify. S. J. Tucker · Song · 2013.

Take care,

Bridget

Keeping Vigil

Hey,

What I’m writing here is a reflection of my experiences with gender and transition, as well as mental illness and trauma. None of this should be construed as representative of The Trans Experience or the experiences of all people living with mental illness or PTSD.

In addition to reflections on transition, this piece also deals with a wide range of experiences on mental illness, including a mention of suicidal ideation. If this is a sensitive topic for you, please proceed with caution. First and foremost, take care of yourself.

This piece makes a reference to “The Mower” by Phillip Larkin. While the poem has always had a particular emotional resonance with me, I cannot and will not overlook the fact that Larkin himself was an unapologetic racist and misogynist. Any analysis or review of his work cannot proceed without taking that into account.

Throughout this piece I reference my younger, pre-transition self by my deadname (the name I was given at birth, which I have since changed) and with he/him pronouns. This does not give you permission to do the same. If you are referring to me, at any point in my life, you should refer to me as Bridget and with she/her pronouns.

When I was younger and I found myself mired in a deep pit of depression, I always thought about my own death. Not necessarily about killing myself— although suicidal ideation was definitely a recurring phenomenon— or what might happen to me afterward. It was almost always about how other people would react.

In this fog, I kept coming back to the same place.

No one would come to my funeral. 

No one would mourn.

No one will remember.

***

Yesterday morning around 10:00 am I logged on to a Zoom video call, and was joined shortly thereafter by The Hon. Judge Paul Karkula of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. Judge Karkula said “Good morning, Ms. Gordon,” before reviewing all the paperwork I had submitted months ago. After a few tense moments of shuffling papers, he said that everything seemed to be in order and that he’d sign the form granting my request. He wished me “good luck” and then left the video call.

That was that. All the paperwork, all the money spent, all the waiting and then more waiting, just for a three-minute video call to get a piece of paper saying that my legal name is now Bridget Madeline Gordon.

My partner was sitting next to me, just out of frame of my phone camera. When the call ended she stood up and held me for a good five minutes. 

Is there a word for that thing where you let out a breath you had been holding for too long but you’re also crying? Just curious.

All this to say: I was elated. I was relieved. I was happy. I was gratified to find that something I had been working toward, something that took time and work and money and support from my community, actually paid off.

I was also grieving for the boy I tried so hard to be for so long, who had just been declared legally dead.

***

One of the things that being trans means to me is the intentionality of my lived experience. 

I didn’t grow up knowing how to be a girl. No one showed me how. No one ever thought to. I had to figure it all out later. I had help, but I still had to ask for it, and there was a time when I was so out of my depth that I didn’t even know what questions I should be asking. Cis people at least have scripts, even if they’re largely bullshit. All I had was a small mountain of built-up dysphoria and a curiously large collection of body glitter.

When we talk about transition we talk about it in terms of benchmarks that are easily observable by outsiders; a change in pronouns, hormone replacement therapy, legal name changes, gender confirmation surgeries. All that comprises maybe 20% of what transition actually entails. Most of the work of my transition was turned inward, and revolved around a central question: what kind of woman do I want to be? 

And as difficult and confusing as transition can be sometimes, I never let myself forget that I chose this. I didn’t choose to be a girl that happened to be assigned male at birth, but I did choose to acknowledge that fact, and I chose to make changes to better reflect who I really was, often at great personal cost. 

I also don’t let myself forget that I didn’t just choose to live as a girl. I chose to live as this particular girl. I chose to be Bridget.

And that, I think, is part of what’s behind my feelings of grief right now. 

Because James was an okay guy, all things considered. He was dorky. He was clever, on his good days. He tried to be there for his friends, even when he didn’t know what that actually looked like. He wanted to do work that mattered. He wanted to be the kind of person others counted on. He wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be able to trust that that love wouldn’t up and disappear one day. He wanted to be the hero of somebody’s story, since he didn’t feel like he could be his own. On his bad days, he just wanted to know what he did wrong, and why he never seemed to be enough. Never, ever enough.

Sometimes I think about a version of me from an alternate timeline. This version of me was assigned female at birth and named Bridget, and at some point along the way realized he’s actually a trans guy and that the name James suited him better. He found a way to make that work. He was the lovable, chubby dork that I wished I could be, that I spent more than 30 years trying to be. I think about this version of me that could’ve chosen to be him, that would’ve loved being him.

James was a good guy. I wish somebody could have been him, and that he could still be out and about in the world. But he wasn’t me, and I couldn’t pretend anymore.

At 10:11am on July 16th, 2020, James was declared legally dead. 

Everyone who knew him is so preoccupied with being happy for me and my big step forward that there’s nobody there to mourn or remember him. Except me.

***

I told all this to my therapist last night, hours after the hearing concluded.

“What would you say to him now, if you could?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can you elaborate on that?”

I couldn’t. I choked on my own words. We talked around it until the session was over. Then I started sobbing.

***

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same

***

I’ve been keeping vigil since last night. 

Tomorrow, I’m going to celebrate being, finally, legally, Bridget. I’m going to put some fresh holes in my ear, then come home, eat pizza with the love of my life, and then spend time with my friends. (Via Zoom, obviously. We’re still in a pandemic.) 

Today, I’m going to bury the dead.

***

I’m sorry, James. 

I’m sorry I didn’t love being you. Someone could have, and should have, and I’m sorry it wasn’t me.

I’m sorry you didn’t feel safe for much of your life. I’m sorry you had to come out of a family where your vulnerabilities were punished or exploited. I’m sorry for every person who made you hide in the bathroom for hours at a time so that no one would see you cry. 

I’m sorry you were ever made to feel like you were never enough.

I’m sorry that made you never trust anyone when they told you they loved you. I’m sorry you didn’t let yourself start to believe those people until it was almost too late.

I’m sorry we couldn’t figure out an escape plan together. I’m sorry you never got to be the hero of your own story.

I’m sorry you couldn’t see yourself the way others saw you.

I’m sorry you won’t have a funeral, but I promise you that someone will mourn you. 

I promise you that I’ll always remember.

***

Take care,

Bridget

Here We Are In The Future

cw: transphobia, sexual violence, COVID-19

Hey,

Every so often, but in particular around big milestones or anniversaries, I try to check in with myself around my transition and how I’m feeling about things. Among the questions I ask myself:

Would you go back, if you could?

This month was… a lot.

My birthday was at the beginning of March. It was my 37th since being alive but my first as Bridget. My birthday this year felt… freeing, in a way I’m not used to with my birthday. It’s hard to explain.

That birthday came at the end of my first week at the new job. So, of course, I was buzzing by the time the weekend rolled around.

The difficult stuff came soon after.

The following week, while coming home from work, I survived an attempted sexual assault. I won’t go into details, except to say that I managed to get away, and I was thankfully not physically hurt. But it shook me, and I’m still struggling to process it.

In the coming days, awareness of the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak started reaching critical mass. By that weekend, people were starting to voluntarily quarantine at home. A week later, it became a government order.

At work, my new-hire training wrapped up a week and a half ahead of schedule. They needed me to be able to do my job un-observed and without hand-holding immediately. While I was glad to be useful, being in a patient-facing role at a primary care clinic in the middle of a public health crisis while everyone is scared and angry has been hell.

I’ve had to carry a lot this month, and I’m not doing it nearly as well as I’ve let on.

I’m writing this on March 29th. It’s the one-year anniversary of one of the biggest days of my life. In a single evening, in the span of four hours, I made my change of name and pronouns “official” and also confessed my feelings to my now-partner.

In many ways they’re bound up together by more than just proximity. It took me a long time to get to where I needed to be— for transition, for figuring out who I was. And for a while I wasn’t sure I would ever make it. (I’ve said it before, but: I never even thought I’d live this long.) But I made it, and she was the first person I saw on the other side. That has to mean something.

A year ago we had to have that mutual confessional over Facebook messenger, and even after everything that happened and was happening, all I wanted in the world was to be in the same space with her. This year we laid in bed and cuddled and watched Steven Universe.

I spent a long time trying to figure out if I was really trans. Like, if I could just solve this puzzle then everything would work itself out. And that cost me years of my life.

At some point the question stopped being “am I a girl” or “am I something that is not a boy.” The question became, “what kind of life do I want for myself?” Once that clarified, things became simpler, if not exactly easier.

It turned out the life I wanted for myself included being a girl, but it was more than that. I wanted to have the kind of life where I wasn’t afraid to tell my friends that I loved them. I wanted to have the kind of life where I didn’t beat myself up for crying at the movies. I wanted to have the kind of life where I was present and honest. I wanted to have the kind of life where I stopped being afraid of everything.

So really, “would I go back” is two questions. The answer to both is No, but the inflections are different. If I’m asking, “would I go back to being a guy,” it’s a No with an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh. Ugh. Must we?

If I’m asking, “would I go back to being James,” the No is much more immediate and visceral. I can’t imagine going back to that now.

I don’t really believe in Happily Ever After. I think there’s always more to do and more bad days to get through. This past month highlighted that.

But the good days now feel better than I ever could’ve imagined. And the bad days feel more survivable. It’s the only reason I’m able to look at everything happening now, everything that’s already happened, and believe that maybe I can get through it.

And the first step is going to work tomorrow.

Listen to Happily Ever After (feat. Zach Callison, Deedee Magno Hall, Estelle, Michaela Dietz, Tom Scharpling, Uzo Aduba, Jennifer Paz & Shelby Rabara) on Spotify. Steven Universe · Song · 2019.

Take care,

Bridget

Staying Afraid

Hey,

My working life has been rough.

I spent the better part of a decade, starting at age 17, working retail customer service. I struggled in those jobs; for a variety of reasons, only a few of which were within my ability to control. I went to college— at age 24— in part because I knew there was no future for me in retail, and that if I wanted to, you know, eat and stuff, I needed a new plan.

So I went to art school in my mid-20s, hoping that it would set me up, at the very least, for some white color job that I wouldn’t completely hate. The 2008 financial crisis hit near the beginning of my second year in school, so those modest dreams evaporated quickly.

But I also learned in my time there that a few problems I dealt with in retail were following me into my new career in… digital media? Academia? I couldn’t tell you for sure.

What I can tell you is that I was strongly advised— some might say bullied— into changing majors halfway through undergrad because too many of my colleagues refused to work with me on group projects. (I was a Game Design major, and making video games is really hard to do by yourself.) I was passed over for a web developer position at the school newspaper for “culture fit” reasons. (I found out later it was because of my weight.) The teachers who made a point to mentor students in my department conspicuously declined to work with me in that capacity. I graduated with no real career prospects besides an offer for a graduate program, for reasons that were largely unrelated to the quality of my work.

I took that offer for a spot in an MFA program. I lasted less than a year. As it turns out, being so deep in depression that you can’t get out of bed for several months can have a detrimental affect on your work.

I left grad school. Soon after that I was homeless. I couldn’t work even if I wanted to.

When I finally got a regular place to stay— I would’t exactly call it a home, but it was off the streets— I tried to get back to work. And I soon discovered that I was functionally unemployable.

I got into freelance writing mostly for that reason. I was broke, and recently homeless, and I needed money. Nobody wanted to give me a job. So I went and made my own.

I didn’t plan on getting into sports journalism— I just sort of fell into it. I sent out feelers and pitches, and soccer writing pitches were the first ones to yield actual money and opportunities, and eventually that just became my job. That fact always fed into my impostor syndrome; I knew people who were busting their ass to get even a sliver of the success that I garnered largely by accident.

Even so, the past few years were tough. I would pitch outlets I knew I could deliver good work for and never got responses. I’ve been laid off twice. I applied for a staff position at a major outlet that would’ve paid me an actual living wage to do this work; I got really far into the application process before they finally just stopped responding to my emails.

Finally, things hit the fan within the past couple of months. At Christmas, I had three stable writing gigs. One month later, I was down to one. One gig I left voluntarily, with my departure announced many months in advance. The other was a lay-off at a publication that is in the process of shutting down.

I spent six years trying to make a career in soccer writing work, and I haven’t yet. At times it still feels like I haven’t really broken in. Meanwhile, all I have to show for my work right now are poverty wages and an informal blacklist kept by people who won’t entertain pitches from, uh, people like me.

I’ve spent most of my adult life feeling like I was too broken for adult life. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a way to survive capitalism, because I was always going to be a bad culture fit everywhere I went. All of my old insecurities came flooding back, and I had to find a way to power through it; not just for my own sake, but because I’m currently trying to build a life with a woman I love, and I literally could not afford to let this derail that.

I try very hard to be aware of my personal limitations and how they bump up against a world that has been largely hostile toward me, even before I came out as trans. I keep those limitations in mind not to weigh myself down, but to be able to name the problems I have to work around. Yet, try as I might, I can’t always help that awareness translating into creeping despair. It’s too tempting to look at the difficult road and decide that it’s actually just impassable.

Overcoming that despair is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in the past year and change. But I have to do it. Not least because it pays off sometimes.

It’s certainly paying off now. A couple weeks ago I was offered a position at a local LGBTQ community health clinic, and I accepted. My first day is tomorrow.

(Incidentally: my first full week at the new job will end on my 37th birthday.)

This is my first actual, fill-out-a-W4-form kind of job in almost 11 years. It’s also my first since I started transitioning— which means I now have to try to navigate the working world as a woman.

I’m scared that I’m going to screw this up. I’m scared that I’ve been out of the mainstream labor force for so long that I won’t know what to do or how to act. I’m scared that everything people used to say about me behind my back is actually true and it’s going to start happening at this new job as well. I’m scared that I’m going to try my best and that it will never, ever be enough. I’m scared this will blow up in my face and then I won’t know what to do next.

I’m scared. Well and truly scared.

And I’m going to try and do it anyway.

Listen to The Real Me on Spotify. Radio Stars · Song · 2013.

Take care,

Bridget

Painting The Walls

Hey,

A while back— not long before I came out publicly as nonbinary— there was a webcomic floating around on social media that hit me like a ton of bricks.

[Source for the original post here, link to the artist’s portfolio site here.]

When I was younger there were things I wanted to do to look the way I wanted to look but I never actually did them. I never got piercings. I didn’t get a tattoo until I was 28, and it’s unfinished, and I got it mostly because a former friend was apprenticing and needed practice. I stuck with the same basic uniform for years— jeans, black t-shirt— because trying to find outfits I liked was too daunting. I purposefully made myself look frumpy and unkempt. Even tending to my hair, the one part of my body that I actually liked and was proud of, felt like more hassle than it was worth.

A potent combination of depression & anxiety, executive dysfunction, and gender dysphoria made it feel like none of that was ever worth the effort. I was always going to be ugly and gross, and tattoos and cute outfits and nice hair would never change that, so why bother.

My body felt like a cheap, shitty rental. There was no point in making it look nice. And it’s not like I was going to be here for long anyway.

Coming out as trans was life-changing (and life-saving) for a number of reasons, and one was that, at long last, my body finally started to feel like a home.

I started to rethink how I dressed— not just to present as my correct gender, but to expand my idea of what kind of clothes I could wear and look good in. It’s such an obvious thing, but wearing colors other than black felt radical and liberating in a way I’m almost embarrassed to admit.

I stopped feeling bad about dyeing my hair and also felt comfortable enough in my femininity to try out a hair style other than “long.” I recognized that taking care of my hair, and making it stand out, wasn’t a half-measure or a coping mechanism. My hair is a source of power and confidence for me, and once I recognized that, I felt better about investing in it.

And I finally started to feel like I could start painting the walls and doing a bit of remodeling.

All this to say: I put a hole in my face last weekend.

Getting my septum pierced is something I’ve been wanting to do for years, and never did. Because why bother, right?

It’s not a transition milestone, but it feels like one. My body doesn’t feel like a cheap rental anymore. It feels like home.

Listen to White Cedar on Spotify. The Mountain Goats · Song · 2012.

Take care,

Bridget