To what end?

Why is it that I write these posts, these public journal entries? It's not that they have an audience, or that I'm trying to reach anyone. I don't promote myself anywhere; this really can only be described as a diary with neither cover nor lock.

Something in Jenny Boylan's She's Not There helps me to an answer. Like the putative misguided participant in a creative writing workshop, my stories and remarks swell with angst and banal detail where they lack in charm and intrigue. Unlike the aspiring author, though, charm and intrigue -- the amusement and enlightenment of a reading audience -- are not my aims. I may someday feel like writing a memoir -- heaven knows, my family has given me enough lunatic excitement over the years to make a good read -- and at that juncture I shall commence the process of editing and selection. Until such time, however, I use this page as a means to clarity.

As so much of this course I've set is clouded and hidden, the more memory I maintain of whence I've come the better. I am, therefore, aiming to capture for myself moments of insight and of emotion. As a diarist, I'm documenting me whenever and wherever I become momentarily lucid. As a reader, I am hoping to come to a deeper and broader understanding of myself. For the present, any other uses really must remain secondary.

Aaand this still needs editing. Oh well. In due course.

Socks

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written. I’ve had my hands full with living. A newborn in the household is probably all the excuse I really need, but there’s also been the experience of, after nearly nine years with a company, being laid-off. Whee. Why didn’t I do that last one three years ago and get it over with? Oh well.

Many things have come together and begun to make sense. Many more questions have opened-up. A few things have fallen-apart entirely. I suppose this is all normal, really, for any such suite of colossal life changes, but that fails to lessen the impact. There has been no time, no energy, and too little sleep. There have been no mute crises to voice, no burning questions to articulate, so there have been no words. And so there has been no writing. Only living, getting through each day alive and awake, and talking. So much talking!

It’s marvelous to be able to speak freely to my wife, now. Challenging, too, but no less of a marvel. Closing the yawning breach from six months of silently growing apart is hard, and I had begun to wonder if for us it might be impossible. I’m glad it’s not.

But now … now I’m beginning to feel the need to capture thoughts, again. I’m beginning to unfold, and I’m finding all manner of interesting details lost within the creases.

It’s dreadfully tempting to draw-out the paper metaphor a little: I’ve always had a peculiar philological love for the word ‘palimpsest’, and so it delights me to find it so apt. Certainly in most aspects transition (for me) is a process of completing the last chapters of Part I, then beginning Part II. Yet there are numerous ways in which it feels rather as if I am rubbing-out the older, irrelevant text in order to reinscribe this dirty, worn — yet irreplaceable and thus priceless — vellum with these sacred verses, newly translated from their cryptic forms of antiquity.

Hah. I wonder how many transitioning transsexuals have come upon that particular analogy, before, and thought themselves ever so clever. Ah, well. I’ve given up striving for novelty (or so I like to claim); to comport myself with grace is my remaining hope. And if I really mean that, perhaps I should get a little less enraptured of my own florid prose, hmm? As if.

But really, wasn’t I posting to capture a few thoughts that might otherwise float off and be forgotten? Wasn’t there some fragment of an idea that needed articulation, maybe a little exposition? Oh, yes, that’s it:

I wonder if, some years hence, I’ll note the birth of my son — and the coincidental internal transformations, as I began to pare and revise my wardrobe and care so much more about my deportment — as the point at which I ceased to lose socks.

Seriously. I haven’t lost a sock in the laundry since then. It’s a little bit creepy. Do the mad, vestokleptic demons that inhabit our washing machine also suffer from severe transphobia? Have I somehow miraculously exorcised them? I don’t think so. I’m still losing my son’s socks, left and right, so there must be some other mechanism at work. Go figure.