Category Archives: personal

Content warning: suicide

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I met a woman once, who was constantly in and out of prison and jail. She was smart, and kind, but also knew that she didn’t know how to exist in the world the way society wanted her to. She didn’t like being in prison or jail, but she knew that was where she would keep ending up. She had brought suit in Indiana to ask to be allowed to die. She was a drain on the system, she wasn’t happy, and there was no way out that she could see. The judge didn’t allow her to die with dignity.

I’m a big fan of Death With Dignity. I think there are all sorts of times that it makes sense for a person to opt out of living intentionally. I don’t think deep depression is one of those times, but there are other circumstances. We all die eventually, and I sure would like to be of sound mind and body when I decide when my time will be.

This attitude has helped a few of my friends when they’ve been in dark times. I’ve been told more than once that someone I love has wanted to die, always with the expectation that I would demand they not! That I would cast shame. I’ve sat with them quietly, and then talked to them about getting their affairs in order. Please don’t leave a mess for those of us mourning you to deal with. This has been enough to snap 2 or 3 people out that depth of depression and into a reality — they’re not making things easier for the people around them, it isn’t consequence free, there is work involved in doing it responsibly.

One of my dearest friends has been actively suicidal for about a month now. He’s spent a bit of time in a hospital after an attempt, but since returning home has returned to unhealthy coping mechanisms that feed into his doom spiral. I get something like a hundred texts a day ranging broadly between coherence and disassociation. I do my best to ground him in reality while also laying my own boundaries on how much I’m willing to engage with his spiral and wanting to respect his wishes if he truly does want to die. He lives far away and tends to keep people at arm’s length, so trying to rally his community around him has been complex and piecemeal. I’ve been trying to get him to be ok with me flying out. I’m not ok with him being around my kid in his current state, so having him here would be hard. He refuses to get his affairs in order, his attendance to therapy is spotty, and he’s unwilling to stay somewhere else long enough to do their Death with Dignity program in a way that only has people dealing with his body who know what they’re getting themselves into. There have been a number of close calls.

A month is a long time. I bet it’s been even longer for him.

There was this post on Twitter, the day George Floyd’s killer was convicted, where someone said something to the effect of “strange day to be a prison abolitionist.” I felt it that day, and I sure do feel it now. I think my friend should have the right to decide if he’s done living. He has both very silly, but also some legitimate reasons to be done with life. But also, I’m going to miss him so much. He’s been one of my favorite people for over 10 years. Selfishly, I want another up-all-night session talking about really tiny things, and adventures, and music, and how precarious humanity is. But maybe I don’t get that with him anymore. But I do get to sit (distantly) with my friend who is suffering, and tell him I respect whatever path he choses, and that I’ll love him regardless. But also I hate it.

May Joy : Pedal Bike!

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I sold my last car in 2008. While I’ve had motorcycles since then, it’s been important to me to be car free. Reed and I are deeply aligned on that, and have structured the entirety of our lives around this.

I got into bicycles in 2016 when Reed, Tilde, and Rubin built me up a city bike. This was before Reed and I had met, mind you. I loved that bike. I didn’t understand why I’d ever want anything more than 7 speeds. Now bikes are by far my preferred mode of transit, including biking the 50 miles into the office some mornings when I’m going in.

A spreadsheet of bicycles with columns for years starting in 2016 and rows for each bicycle I've owned. Each bike also gets a rating and a status.

I love bicycles. And my life is built around that love at this point. So we were reasonably anxious about how Locke would feel about bicycles. He was in an infant car seat in the front of our Load 75 before his due date. We also had both the Yepp Mini for the front of the bike (way more fun) and the Yepp Maxi for the back of the bike (when he got too big for the Mini and for when we have a full cargo load in the Load 75). We have to ride to preschool even when it’s raining or the traffic is bad. There are lots of opportunities for him to decide that bikes aren’t for him. And we have friends who love bikes whose kiddos just never really got into it.

Baby Locke in a purple polka dot helmet sits in a seat affixed to Reed's handlebars. The seat is between the handlebars and Reed's seat. The bike is a titanium Merlin with swept back handlebars, chubby tires, and a Brookes saddle.

He was pretty into his balance bike from the get-go. Balance bikes are the new way that kids learn to ride bikes — it’s a bike without pedals, and so they learn to balance while running with the bike between their legs. He got to be pretty quick on it! We even put a little basket on it, for him to collect bottle caps and rocks into. But as he outgrew it, he adamantly told us he wasn’t ready for pedals yet.

Locke very excitedly riding a balance bike with a purple basket on it. Locke wears a purple helmet and puffy jacket. His stuffed dog Crate comes along in the basket.

So Reed got a FollowMe tandem and had Locke practice pedaling while Reed took him to and from places. Locke was SUPER into this “train bike” and wanted to take it everywhere. And then, one morning, I asked him if he wanted to ride his pedal bike to preschool. The train bike isn’t set up on my bike(s), so he’d have to do it on his own. I would help! He would totally crash! But he knows how to crash, and he has his helmet.

And so we tried it. And he did great! Lots of gumption — every time he crashed, he insisted on getting back on and trying again. Preschool is about a half mile away, and it now takes us about 10 minutes to get there. I even have a little Strava account for him! And every time he stops because he wants a break, or he gets distracted, or he crashes, we look back at where we started and how far we’ve come, and he gets this deeply pleased smile on his face and says “yeah.”

Locke rides his pedal bike for a whole 17 seconds without stopping!

I love getting to share this joy with Locke, and I love watching him become confident and independent as he skills up on his bike. This is so much fun!

Riding my own coat tails

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Pregnancy was hard on me for gender and pregnancy reasons. Then Locke came 2 months early, and then Reed suffered from something like Postpartum Depression for 18 months. Life was really hard for a long time. But I did the hard therapy work and thought I was past all of it. Locke was consistently sleeping through the night and so was I. But I wasn’t coming out of the brain fog. I worried it was because of substance love affairs I’ve had in the past. Every doctor I talked to told me that wouldn’t have lasting, increasing effects. Was it because I had long covid? The timeline of symptoms starting didn’t match up. But work and home were both being impacted to significant degrees (once the subject was finally broached), and things seemed to be getting worse.

It took a long time for any of this to even come up. I’ve been performing at a high enough level in nearly all parts of my life that most people don’t monitor what I’m doing, and if I do mess up they usually think I have deep thinking behind it at most, and that it’s a small glitch if it is a mistake. But my new manager at work was paying enough attention to notice, and when I brought it up with Reed he was eventually (after being super supportive) like “just so you have all the data.. it’s not just at work.” He had been concerned about early onset dementia, I was being so forgetful and unobservant!

During all that time, I was mostly masking by having good practices in place that were documented and that I could follow even in my reduced state. I have excellent people in my life who were willing and able to support me even through a hard time because I had invested in our relationships when I did have capacity. And so while it took awhile for all this to come to light, and months to diagnose what was happening, I was able to maintain good practices in the meantime. I’ve been riding Past Willow’s coat tails to recover enough for Future Willow to be well again. Thanks, Past Willow!

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Time is the only thing we don’t get more of

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I’m obsessed with time. I think it’s the only thing we don’t get more of, our most precious resource. It’s the currency of caring. I live my life by my calendar to the point friends have had interventions with me. I had gcal pins made both to celebrate this love and also to subtly flag for polyamory. One of my favorite books is Latitude, about the race between astronomers and horologists to help people sail the sea. So at some point, I realized I wanted to get a tattoo about time.

This is part of a series on my Santa Perpetua tattoos. You can read the rest in the tattoo category on this blog.

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Testosterone

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I’m agender, which means I don’t really care a whole lot about gender. But that also means I don’t particularly like getting bucketed with women based on body shape, clothing, voice, or other things related to presentation.

Although my body got back into a shape I was more comfortable with, another thing I really wanted was to have a less femme voice. While some folks tell me I have a nice alto voice, it still sounds too femme in my head to align with my gender identity. Testosterone thickens the vocal cords, so will often drop your voice. I want that! But it ends up testosterone does a BUNCH of stuff. So it’s been a journey. Here’s mine so far.

Disclaimer: hormones have a different effect of different people, and my experience is not to say what I think the standard experience is for men and/or trans folk. I just found it FASCINATING to have such a different experience, and want to explore it here.

Not great

Mood

I have been far more impatient, and prone to anger. So much so, that the first time I went on testosterone in 2022, I had to go back off of it in early 2023 because I simply couldn’t afford the tumult of a second puberty while navigating Locke’s infancy and also my return to work. Going back on testosterone has been steadier the second time — I knew what to anticipate and be self aware about, and I think the injectable actually helped me out here. I’m still less patient than I used to be, but I don’t think this is necessarily always a bad thing — more on that in the “Mixed” section below.

This has given me even more respect and compassion for the testosterone-laden humans in my life who are compassionate, collaborative, and considered. I see what a challenge hormones can make this approach, which I still think of as table stakes.

Hair

My head hair, already thin, began thinning even more. I started growing (very pale, very scraggly) facial hair. I’m not into either of these things, so I went on Finasteride, a drug that limits how testosterone impacts the skin. It’s caused my hair to stop falling out so quickly, and I have no idea if it’s actually stopping facial hair growth. I may need to start shaving instead of just plucking soon, which is not my favorite idea.

Sex drive

My sex drive, already persistently higher than most anyone I’ve ever dated, has gotten egregious. I don’t know how teenage boys get anything at all done. I’m having inappropriate crushes. I am still treating everyone with respect, and am grateful to the decades of managing this already to help manage this new volume.

Mixed bag

How I take up space

Because of both my abusive relationship and also Gunner persuading me to take up less space, the way I inhabit group situations has changed. I’m less certain of myself, less assertive about things I do know. I over compensate by seeing assertive when I’m less certain of things. It’s a mess that I talk with a therapist regularly about. But now I’m feeling more confident in myself again, like what I have to contribute matters, not just uplifting other voices. I don’t know if this is the testosterone itself or the gender confirmation, but either way, it’s generally been good.

However, I lack grace around this and am starting to trample other people more, especially given the miscalibration of when to be assertive and when to be more humble. More work to be done here, for sure.

Amazing

Voice

My main goal of my voice dropping has finally started to happen, about a year back on T and 6 months on an injectable. I went to pick up Locke from preschool the other day and one of our parent friends was there at the same time and asked if I was sick. “NO! My voice is finally dropping!” I was so excited I squeaked. But it’s been SUCH gender euphoria. Hooray. I’ll never be super base-y, but I won’t be so far on the femme side of things. Hopefully I get a bit more here, but even if this is it, it’ll be enough.

Strength

This has been an unexpected boon. If I was deconditioned, I would need to start with a 10 mile bike ride, and then add 10 miles each week. Now I can hop on the bike for 30 miles with hills or 50 without, and add 15-20 a week afterwards. I’m already benching more than I did before I stopped lifting for a year. It’s BANANAS and it feels SO GOOD to be strong. I like being muscley.

Perimenopause

Because I have ovaries, I was going to go through perimenopause and menopause at some point. Technically, I now have because it’s been so long since I’ve menstruated, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t also have to go through associated hormone changes. Because I didn’t want to deal with the discomforts of those hormone changes, I would have had to go on HRT at some point anyway, and I certainly wasn’t going to double down on femme ones.

In short

Hell yeah, I love being on T, I hope it doesn’t get taken away by this administration.

Bonus Joy : Little Free Library!

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I love stories. I love that someone distilled “enough” of an idea into a concrete, knowable object that can be indefinitely shared. I love the documentation, the legacy. I love that others will build on that object in their own ways.

I love libraries. I love a collection of knowledge, well sorted and cared for, to share with others for free. I love how meta a card catalog is, I love information science, I love the smell of so many books in one place.

And I love Little Free Libraries. I love a small curation of “here are books we loved and want to pass on to others” in an accessible way smattered through a neighborhood. They make my little robot heart sing.

So for our anniversary in November 2023, Reed got me a LFL kit. I got SO excited! I immediately made a list of books to stock it with and got as many as possible from Marcus Books in Oakland. Would they all fit? They did not, I had to trim down the list. I matched the neutral tone to the house and the accent color to some flowers in our front yard. Jenbot even made a book plate design for it so I could include why I thought each book was worth reading.

And then it mostly sat for over a year. I would make headway on it every once in awhile (thanks in large part to the same stand up group we’ve had going on and off for like 10-15 years), but I’m not particularly handy with physical things and so it sort of became an albatross sitting in my office. Something that could bring me joy but I just couldn’t get over the finish line.

But I’ve been taking a short term leave from work to figure out some brain fog things, and I made it through my backlog of easier tasks. Reed and I suddenly had an entire afternoon off together with Locke in preschool. After starting to wax some bike chains, we turned our attention to the LFL and managed to finish it up! We borrowed a post hole digger from a neighbor and put it in the ground in our front garden. And the local lab/golden mix Mango came by to say hi while we were doing it!

Willow grins broadly in front of the empty little free library. Their purple shirt matches the purple accent on the library. The library has a tilted roof and one shelf, and is placed in the front yard that has a recently greening Japanese Maple and lots of native plans, along with a bench.
Exceedingly proud we finally got it in the ground

Some books have already been picked up! Reed and I have been having a long conversation about my desire to keep the LFL stocked with the same set of books no matter how many times they get picked up — I want to send a consistent message, he wants to provide variety to the neighborhood as it’ll be a lot of the same people walking by regularly. We’ve settled on about half the books being consistent and the other half being ones we’re going through in the house + neighbors leaving books.

Another angle of the library, this time with books on the shelves. You can see the steps going up to the Idlewild yard and some flowers through a gate int eh background.

March Joy : Goats!

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Uncle Tilde took us on an adventure to Goatlandia in the North Bay to feed some baby goats and meet some older goats. So cute! So soft! So invested in being high up! And their wagging tails while they drank milk! Oh my goodness.

Reed in a green jacket and pink hat has a goat under one arm while another puts its front legs on Reed's leg to smell his hand. The back legs are on a hay bale that Willow sits on, petting another goat. Locke watches on from the fence.
Image by Uncle Tilde

Goatlandia is a goat and other animal rescue. We met some ducks, an alpaca, and many many goats. We even scared up a wild hare! The tour guide was delightful — invested in animal well being without being preachy about veganism. The baby goats get fed about 5 times a day at their current ages. While many of the kids (lol) will get adopted out, the adult goats we met are there as their forever home.

Image from Reed

It was so nice to just be out in a rural area with animals. The requests were simple and easy to fill with our trusty guide. I felt like I was in my body.

Then we all went for delicious bread at Wildflour. I’ve only been there once before – on the Freestone Bread Run 200k I failed out of a few years ago. It’s worth going out of your way a fair amount for, and we were in the neighborhood! Each thing we got there was amazing.

Tilde wearing a THICCC hat gets chewed on by a baby goat.
Selfie from Uncle Tilde, trusty adventure-inducer and driver

While Tilde’s car charged on the way home, we spent about an hour playing with LEGOs and exploring toys at Fundemonium. Locke fell asleep on the car ride home and we all got some quiet time to recover from an intense and fun day.

February Joy : A Day with Family

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Reed and my family haven’t been getting on particularly well, so for the family meetup in NYC in February, Locke and I went on our own. This is both stressful and not — Locke is a champ at traveling at this point, but also my family and I have been in a non-child groove of hanging out for 25 years and introducing a 3 year old into the mix has proven difficult. My family really likes winging things and having epic meals together, neither of which work particularly well for a kid who wants to play with LEGOs and has a strict sleep schedule. So I was nervous.

The first two days were a mess. Folks wanted to wander around Manhattan (Locke wants to play in the snow while everyone else wants to walk somewhere; Locke wants to touch everything in stores or gets tremendously bored and destructive while folks are shopping) and have late lunches (beginning right after he should be down for his nap). We did get to go see the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image! We were jet lagged. No one else knows his routine and I had to be along for the ride even when folks did want to help. A (mostly) bad scene. Because of that and other stressors in my life, I actually cried to my mom and brother at the end of the second night, telling them I wasn’t sure I could do a trip like this again. We are not a crying family.

A build-your-own muppet with many eyes, a green nose, grey hair, and purple shirt.

Apparently everyone had a meeting after we left to put Locke down to sleep, and rallied. The following days accounted for Locke needing to sleep at certain points, doing adventures that were kid compatible, and people taking Locke for adventures without my needing to be there. I felt loved and supported by my family.

So on our last night together, we put Locke down for his sleep and he fell asleep quickly. I then went to play cards and drink cider with my family nearby, without feeling any anger about how the day had gone. And that was nice.

January Joy : our cats North and Holiday

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I set out to write one blog post a month about something that brought me joy. This one is a few days late, but that’s ok, I’m not perfect.

After Reed and I had been living together for awhile, with the intention of feeling each other out before marriage (his idea) and kid(s) (my idea), I proposed we get cats. Reed wanted to think about it and research. Months passed. I said, no maybe you don’t understand, we are now getting cats. He acquiesced.

We spent all day at the animal shelter meeting pair bonded kitties. It was important to me to get a set of cats so they could keep each other company and be happier. Also, they have a harder time finding homes. I fell in love with a few, Reed didn’t really click with any. As the shelter was closing down, the staff said it was clear we weren’t done looking and recommended we go to a nearby Pet Food Express that hosted some shelter cats, as they were open for another hour or two. So we went. No pair bonded kitties. But Reed immediately noticed and fawned over a little white cat (not a kitten, but not fully a cat yet either) with heterochromia. Reed scooped the cat up. The cat purred a whole lot. Reed held him like a baby. He purred even more. I tried to pet him. He bit me. Reed pleaded with me to take home a single cat that didn’t like me. The staff were so excited to find him a home that they waived all fees. And that’s how we got North.

A white cat with one blue eye and one golden eye sits on a lap next to a pile of his hair.
North – smart, trainable, lots of shedding.

North proved to be highly trainable, and Reed is also excellent at training animals. He would come to where you tapped. He would do high fives. But we couldn’t get him to stop biting. Finally, one day, I suggested that he was unhappy and lonely and needed a friend. Also, I wanted a cat (Reed was by far North’s favorite. He would tolerate me when Reed wasn’t around, but I wasn’t getting the kitty cuddles I craved). Reed was willing to try, so back to the shelter we went. There were some cats that were pretty ok, but none that we were both clicking with.

Now here is a major difference between Reed and me. Reed has HUGE amplitudes of emotion. He gets SO excited about things, and he is SO disappointed if something doesn’t go according to plan. And after he feels things, he moves on. And I have lower amplitude of deep emotions that don’t get very big but still exist. In this circumstance, that meant that any cat I was lukewarm on was about as much as I was going to get into it, and Reed either LOVED the cat and would end up with two cats at home, or HATED the cat and didn’t want to take it home. When I noticed this mismatch and its consequences, we sat down in the lobby and discussed, and ended up taking home a small sickly kitten. Reed named him Doc Holiday for his dark brown coat.

A handsome dark grey cat with green eyes.
Holiday – alluring, either dumb or cryptid, so loud

We tried to keep them separated, but North immediately wanted to play (gently) with the little cat. He immediately stopped biting humans (he used to run into a room, jump to your hand to bite it, and then run back out. Now we see he was probably trying to get us to play with him). Holiday dealt with a series of health issues, some of which transferred to North. But we got through it, and they became good buddies. Holiday was a nervous wreck for the first 3ish years we had him, and then finally grew to trust a predictable food source and a solid play and care routine. Like, he used to get so anxious he’d form crystals in his bladder, get blockages, and have to go to the emergency vet. But he’s very charismatic in a long play kind of way.

Holiday sleeps on my bed, and North cuddles Reed in the mornings and evenings, and both cats love it when Reed and I share a bed. They’ve both turned into lap cats and begrudgingly share a lap when Reed and I are not both sitting down. They both come to say hi to visitors now, although they’re not the most gregarious with new folks. We play with them or take them outside (supervised!) 15 minutes before feeding them in puzzle balls every morning and evening, and it seems to work really well for their dispositions and health. We treat them with respect and care, and as more than ornamental fish in our house. And they meet us in kind with affection and play.

They both bring me so much joy, and I’m so grateful we get to help them have happy lives. I love that they have specific ways they like to get pet. I love that they suit us so well, and that we’re able to provide them happy lives.

2024 in review

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This will be my tenth(!!) year in a row doing these, so you can also read about the years since 2015 if so desired. They are inspired by Tilde, who has taught me that it can be a Good Thing to remember what the last year has been like. Many of the headers in this post are based on my goals for 2024.

The word for this year was abundance. I struggled to bring this take to everything I do — I feel an immense amount of guilt around my privilege these days, and so while I still try to come at things from an abundance mindset, and bring abundance to others, I struggled to apply this across the board.

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