How “Pose” (and Magic Mushrooms) Saved (and Destroyed) my Life

by Jude Hope Harris

October 21, 2017 was an “A-stunt” day. I was in the far suburbs of Indianapolis filming Too Stupid to Die, a show like Jackass starring a backyard stunt crew doing high-stakes pratfalls for laughs. We had divided stunts into increasing levels of danger (and increasing levels of presumed comic value).

“C-stunts” were the omnipresent rat traps, electric shock devices, and crotch punches that were impossible to contain or supervise. “B-stunts” required advanced safety approval and a medic, but only risked minor injury: a swim with a baby alligator in a kiddie pool, for instance. A-stunts required a full stunt team, ambulances and medical evacuation teams as well as on-site safety personnel.

The production team took over a local junkyard. The set belonged to the tanned, muscular pyrotechnics guys and stunt riggers weaving between the skeletons of picked over cars to do their work: last checks on the ramps, detonators and vehicles critical to the day’s mayhem. There were firetrucks, police on standby in case we needed an escort to the emergency room, and a small crowd of locals on folding chairs huddled by the junkyard office to watch the circus unfold.

While we had a showrunner, director and full crew, the show was to some extent, my baby. Helping ringleader (and star) Zach Holmes and his friends to make Too Stupid to Die was a dumb dream, but it was a dream come true nonetheless. I’d become close to the cast in the months we’d spent preparing and filming. They affectionately called me “stunt dad.” I’d gotten to know their families. I loved them. And there were two vehicle stunts that day that scared me for them. Most days, we’d ask what if questions about the things that could go wrong and usually the worst-case scenario was awful, but survivable (a broken rib, pepper spray in the eyes, frostbite on a tongue). But, that day, there were some very unlikely, but very scary potential outcomes.

I paced the junkyard, clawing at my beard and feeling the familiar Brillo-pad roughness beneath my fingernails. I checked in with the cast, their families and the production team. Zach would be jumping a motorcycle off of a ramp and with his heavy frame the physics of a fall were never in his favor. Meggan, the sole woman in the cast, was going to be driving a car through an exploding RV. It was a, technically, an “easy” stunt and quite safe except for the gruesome worst case in which she’d get trapped in the RV when the gas bombs were detonated, and suffocate from burned lungs.

Meggan’s father asked me “Would you let your kids do this?” I don’t remember what I told him. I think I was honest and said that I would never.

Twice that day, I wandered away from set, found a private spot hidden behind piles of wrecked cars, free of oil-slicked mud and broken glass and knelt to cross myself and pray that my friends would make it safely through the day. The first prayer was answered. Meggan launched her muscle car through the RV so fast that she overshot the crash zone and slammed into a school bus the stunt team had parked as a backstop. The car and her helmet were wrecked. She was ok.

As I was walking back from my second prayer, Amy, my wife at the time, called me. Half the Picture, the documentary she directed (and we’d produced together) had been accepted into the SXSW Film Festival. It was the culmination of thousands of hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars of our money, and Amy’s passion. I celebrated on the phone with her, walked back to set and watched Zach mount a miniature motorcycle and launch it, semi-successfully, through a wall of fire before landing in a tumbling crash. Everyone looked for the thumb’s up and when it came, there was a wave of cheers and high-fives as the fire crew put out the remaining flames.

I drove back to the hotel as the sun set over soy fields and billboards for Amish shops, telling my two sons about all the cool stuff their dad had been up to. The day was as close to perfection as I had experienced in a long time, complete with the prestige of film festival validation, and the adventure of crashing cars and blowing things up. It was everything I’d hoped for in my life and career.

It didn’t seem at all strange to me that the morning had started, as most of my mornings started on the road: in a war with my body. I got up an hour earlier than I needed to and exercised my arms and core until I couldn’t move. I ate a toxic mix of sausage and pineapple from the hotel buffet for breakfast, carb-free and too hard to digest to eat much of. And after I brushed my teeth I took a long look at myself in the bathroom mirror and sent myself into the day with my standard affirmation: “You fat fuck.”

This was normal as I reached my 40s. My inner monologue was loud, angry, self-loathing in the extreme, and increasingly, not so inner as I’d often find myself saying these words out loud. I could not figure out why I felt so sad.

Life was good for my little family. Amy and I were raising two brilliant, sensitive kids. The small elementary school they attended on the west side of LA was the hub of a community of engaged parents, and an idyllic suburban social life. We’d managed to buy a house, and while it was in need of renovations and maintenance we couldn’t afford, everyone within its walls was healthy, nourished and safe.

I knew all of this, but I could not feel it. I was temperamental, score-keeping, full of gallows humor. The moments of feeling present were few and far between. Moments of happiness were ever more rare. I felt the disconnect most with my children, and worried that someday someone would be explaining me to them the way my parents had been explained to me: “He loves you, but he has a hard time showing it.” I was miserable. I longed to be a better person, a better father.

Therapy had not helped. My near constant sadness and anger was attributed to childhood trauma and the high pressure work environment of entertainment. It made sense as an explanation, but didn’t make me feel any better. Religion was the same. I had converted to Catholicism in my late 30s and felt a close connection to my faith, but assumed my prayers for happiness were going unanswered because God had bigger problems to solve.

I had been overweight and felt unhealthy, and threw myself into long distance running. I dropped 50 pounds. Being thinner didn’t make me happy either. I was worried that inescapable sadness was just the human condition, but it didn’t seem like other people felt this way.

So, in 2018 when Amy planned the annual 4th of July trip to visit her parents in Western New York, I asked to be excused. I told her that I would use the time to catch up on work and enough rest to curb the burnout. Secretly, inspired by stories from friends and online of life-changing personal revelations being brought about by psychedelics, my plan was to try magic mushrooms for the first time and figure out my life.

My plan took shape at a rooftop office party at the small studio I worked for, beneath tea lights and the saturated colors of a California sunset. My friend Chevis (a Texan, like me and my assistant at the time) was dangerously candid by day and hilariously unfiltered after a drink. She was buying mushrooms for a camping trip with her friends. I asked her to buy another bag for me.

Chevis and various online forums set out the plan for an ideal trip: the dosage, arriving with the right intention, finding a supportive natural environment, and having a companion along the way to keep me safe. But by the time I had reached the appointed Friday, the plan had been abandoned. I was home, alone. I had attempted, but failed, to engineer a work-free day. I juiced some lemons from my backyard, added some sugar, water, and double the recommended dose of psilocybin and gulped down the mixture, estimating that it would be forty-five minutes or so before the trip began.

My heavy workload had conditioned me to make use of every minute, so I decided to take this time to catch up on my weekend viewing. Earlier that week I’d had lunch with Silas Howard, a friend and director who was the Co-Executive Producer of Pose which had recently started airing on FX. Silas and I were working on a horror movie together, and at lunch he’d given me a hard time for not having watched his show. His episode, the fifth of the season, was airing that weekend. So, waiting for the shrooms to come on, I decided to start watching Pose.

For the unfamiliar, Pose is a fictional series originated by Steven Canals and set in the historic 1980s New York Ballroom scene, where people primarily from Black and Latinx LGBTQ communities came together to form houses based on chosen family. At home, house “mothers” and “fathers” would look after their “children,”providing a safe place to live, pooling resources, and teaching them the ways of gay and trans life. At the balls, the members of these houses were stars, competing in themed dance, beauty and fashion categories. Winning houses took home trophies and money, but more importantly — made themselves into legends.

The mainstream world met houses like Xtravaganza, LaBeija, Ninja in the 1990 film Paris is Burning, and their legacies live on today in a global ball culture and on screen in FX’s Pose and HBO Max’s Legendary. Pose was groundbreaking as the first major series to put trans women and femmes of color in lead roles and has made mainstream stars of Dominique Jackson, Angelica Ross, Indya Moore and MJ Rodriguez. I knew that context as I started to watch, but nothing prepared me for what I actually saw.

The Pose pilot began with the show’s signature audacity. As Elektra Abundance, Dominique Jackson was introduced as an acid-tongued diva, masterminding a museum heist to steal costumes for a “royalty” themed category at that weekend’s ball. As members of the House of Abundance wandered the museum, Ryan Murphy framed his shots to show the audience that when the women stopped to admire the priceless treasures, they were actually looking into mirrors. And when they entered the ball in their “prince and princess realness” with all the Hollywood glamour Murphy gives to his iconic female characters, I was stunned. I had seen trans people diminished onscreen by many things in many ways. I had never seen them given a spotlight this bright.

The trip feathered in slowly around twenty minutes after the Pose began. At first it was a feeling of deep empathy. As Blanca Evangelista, MJ Rodriguez was one of the most endearing characters I’d ever seen on screen, vulnerable but strong, optimistic, determined, and radiating love for herself and the people around her. I felt a connection to her I could not understand. She had grace and stoicism in the face of hardship, believed in herself even when her mother and the world questioned her worth and her realness, and fought for her children as hard as she pushed them to fulfill their potential.

I said out loud: “That’s the kind of parent I want to be.”

Of course I was nothing like Blanca. Our lives were separated by race, class, time, location, community, and life experience. She was a mother, I was a father. And of course, she was transgender and I wasn’t.

Inspired by the sense of connection, I tested that last idea in my mind.

I wasn’t trans, was I?

I definitely wasn’t… Despite the ugliness I felt as a child, even though I could look back now and see how beautiful I was, with almost transparent blonde hair, bright eyes and a smile that always looked a few years more innocent than my actual age. Despite the isolation I felt as adolescence segregated the boys from the girls and I was left out of some of my happiest friendships. Despite the joy of sitting next to my grandmother at her makeup mirror as she “put on her face,” sampling perfumes and learning about makeup as we got ready for our summer trips to Houston’s gem and jewelry shows. Despite my 5th grade obsession with Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”…

Maybe other little boys didn’t wish on birthday cakes, dandelions and magical-looking rocks to be girls. Maybe other men didn’t feel so sorry for the women that had to love them despite how repulsive they were. Maybe other men didn’t find time with men so draining and insincere. Maybe that one time I modeled a dress for a fashion student in art school and felt seen and beautiful meant something. Maybe I should have paid attention to the joy I felt when a painter friend depicted me in eyeshadow and lip gloss in her series objectifying and softening men. Maybe there was a reason that as an entertainment executive trans scripts and shows and talent always skipped to the top of my to do list. Maybe these things and a thousand more meant something.

The feeling was so intense and so sudden that I thought “this is a terrible high! no one warned me that shrooms make you feel like you’re trans!” I didn’t know what a bad trip was like, but I was sure this was some kind of a bad trip. But this “bad” trip felt blissful, like I’d put down a heavy burden and come home. The trip deepened. I kept watching.

When I went to sleep that night, I hoped that I could hold fast to the inspiration and empathy I’d gained that night, but that maybe instead of waking up trans, I could wake up vegan, or passionately into yoga or some other empathetic, less disruptive change.

I would never be the same again.

In 1992, when the second Lollapalooza came to Houston, a Texas hippie stranger gave me a sheet of acid which I promptly gave to someone cooler than me. I’d been scared off by the urban legend of “the orange man”: the tale of the guy who’d taken too much acid in the 1960s and who still, in 1992, was fully convinced that he was an orange.

My mother is an Episcopalian Neiman Marcus shopper and ballet enthusiast. She favors JK Rowling’s high brow “intellectual” transphobia to the populist conspiracy-of-perverts transphobia that has captured the imagination of the far right. She knows my story and is convinced that I am the trans version of the orange man. It’s been almost four years since we’ve had a meaningful conversation, but she’ll surface occasionally to invite me back home to Texas where she’s found an inpatient facility willing to institutionalize me and attempt to rehabilitate me from this years-long bad trip. She’s told me that she agrees that I was stressed and angry, but that the drugs somehow inspired me to take the “easy way” out of facing my problems.

For a long time I wished that her twisted logic was true. I initially embraced the orange man theory. If psychedelics got me into being trans, I was sure that they could get me out. It was the logic of a 1960s sitcom in which amnesia is started and stopped by a hard knock on the head. I drank my way through the week that followed. I had a plan to rejoin the ranks of straight men.

When the next weekend came, I rushed home and attempted to recreate the time, lighting, and mood of the previous trip. I prepared another large batch of magic mushrooms, waited for them to come on, and watched Predator. I didn’t have cable as a kid, but would spend long days at my best friend’s house at the end of the block watching R-rated movies on HBO. I loved the fantasy masculinity of 80s action movies: the mumbling, muscle-covered men baptizing themselves in dripping sweat, dust and mud, bright-covered stage blood and a hurricane of bullets and pain from terrorists, communists, or monsters. I’d never fought in a war, but being big, good at pain and hard to understand had carried me for most of my adulthood.

As the psilocybin turned the jungles of Predator into a swirling paisley nightmare, I smiled and kept my eyes on Arnold. I was grateful for the lessons of Pose, but this was a movie for a body like mine.

It was just so boring.

Watching a body builder pretending to be a soldier did connect with me, but not in the way I’d hoped. I thought about how few actual tough guys I knew, the real soldiers, cowboys and criminals I’d met on film sets over the years. They weren’t like this. I saw for the first time what I’d missed as a kid — and even as a man. This “masculinity” was drag. Arnold was just a scared little kid acting tough and playing soldier. Like all the “tough” guys making the world less fun for the people around them. He was me. I turned off Predator, opened Netflix and watched Glow. When the night was over, I was neither a commando nor a wrestler.

When I could be alone with my revelation, it was a gift. I felt lighter. Being alive took less effort. Decades of discomfort melted away. My shoulders relaxed. I didn’t need the verbalized self-hatred in the bathroom mirror anymore. If only there was a way to be trans in only my private moments, to keep it secret. Being trans felt so perfect when I was alone. I loved the energy it let me carry into work, into being a parent, into every interaction.

I was afraid of what would happen to my life as soon as I told anyone about this private joy. I had become a sponge for the stories of the trans community on Reddit and Instagram and they didn’t make me feel optimistic. From my vantage in the closet, it seemed that the rich (usually white) women came out and transitioned into a cycle of rejection, depression and professional and public humiliation. The poor women, largely women of color went through all these, but with more unwelcome sex work, more violence, more poverty.

I felt dangerous, maybe a little poisonous. The potential damage my secret might cause only made it harder to carry alone. But to tell anyone was to start the predictable slow-motion tragedy: losing my marriage, being ostracized from family, and making myself a spectacle in my career and daily life. And for what? Happiness? With so much on my shoulders, happiness felt like an indulgence.

Coming out felt irresponsible and greedy. Wouldn’t my kids prefer a sad dad in an unbroken family to a happy, divorced trans mom? Wasn’t it better to carry my own strangeness and spare them from bullying? What would this do to Amy? Her family? My family? I just couldn’t imagine being that selfish.

There was no denying that the world had changed for me. I saw men and felt: I am not them. I saw women and felt: I want to be them, but I am not them either. I saw trans people and thought: I think I am them but what if I’m just having a crisis? This was the early indication that I had traded generalized self loathing for the special hell of gender dysphoria. This is the awful Catch-22 of trans existence in a world that hates trans people: as I am, I am unacceptable to myself, as I want to be, I will be unacceptable to the world.

A couple weeks later I mumbled a confusing confession to Amy. I don’t think either of us ever fully understood what I said, but it probably sounded like I was bisexual, maybe a cross-dresser. She was upset and confused until a week later when I clarified for both of us: “If I could make a wish and wake up tomorrow as a cis woman, I’d do it.” The words were very scary to say. Feeling how true they were when spoken to another person was even more terrifying. Amy cried again, harder now because now she knew what she was crying about. I was too scared to put words to it then, but I watched her, almost instantly, fall out of love with me.

I tried to be practical. Non-binary identities were starting to become part of the language of the straight world, which is where I learned about them. They were having a moment, and while the LGBTQ and mainstream press were both treating them as the avante garde of queerness, I didn’t view being non-binary as a radical choice so much as a practical one. I was certain that I’d never been seen as a woman. I’d been a competitive swimmer for much of childhood and had broad shoulders, a hairline that had been receding since I turned sixteen, and a barrel chest. My voice was a low, gruff mumble. I was sure I’d never “pass” and be perceived as female by most of cis/straight society.

Maybe it was better to claim my own gender, and find a private, quietly trans way of existing that would let me be happy without destroying the life I’d worked so hard to create. I submerged myself into writing and interviews from Alok Venon, Jacob Tobia, and Jeffrey Marsh.

And maybe, just maybe, I could harness my stubborn masculine traits. Amy’s favorite movie was the Todd Haynes glam-rock infused Velvet Goldmine. One night I proposed a plan to her for my non-binary identity. This wasn’t going to be like Transparent. I wouldn’t transition. I’d just know. And, sure, I’d be a little more feminine. There would be nail polish, but no dresses. Kindness, but not breasts. “Bracelets.” I swore to her, trying hard to get both of us to believe it. “It’s just going to be bracelets!”

This was the start of what I called my Criss Angel phase: bracelet stacks, skinny jeans, and black nail polish. If anyone suspected anything, it was that I was moonlighting as a club promoter.

A few months passed. Amy traveled frequently to promote her documentary. I kept working, with weeks of single parenting when Amy was on the road. My dysphoria had matured into a monster. In the noise of the work day it would whisper in every quiet moment: You are not a man. And then, when I took a few deep breaths to process this truth: You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke.

This loop was omnipresent and left me anxious and destabilized. I found a therapist and told her that my life would not permit me to be trans. We spent weeks as she explained away my theories that this might be a hormonal imbalance, or echoes of trauma, or Munchausen’s disease. When Amy was in town, I’d cope with long runs: 8–10 miles before work, sometimes a half marathon at five in the morning.

At night, in bed, the voice of dysphoria was more dangerous. Then it whispered: You are not a man. You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke. And then, as the tremors of a panic attack began: Or, you could leave. “Leave” was my euphemism for the one thing I knew would bring me peace.

There were many days when I wanted it more than I didn’t. I’d read my kids extra bedtime stories, hug them a little longer, and remind myself that I owed them survival. On other days, I convinced myself that they would be better off without the burden of a parent like me.

It wasn’t long before I couldn’t outrun the fear anymore. Under the pressure of my growing inbox, my list of meetings to cancel and projects I could not focus on, I asked for a leave of absence. Amy was heading to Rome for a screening and it would take all my energy to get the kids to school in the morning. Even then, I was dropping them off three minutes late, running down the hall to their classrooms, and depositing them with no lunch, or the wrong lunch, unbrushed hair, and clothes we should have disposed of. I was a regular at the principal’s office, returning later with lunch or homework, or a binder full of Pokémon cards.

Back at home, I’d dump the clean laundry from the Ikea couch on the floor and set the alarm on my phone with enough time to pick the kids up on time. I’d lie down and let the panic consume me. Dysphoria whispered: You are not a man. You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke. I started to shiver. And then I’d cry, inconsolable, like a child. The cries would build to sobs, the shivers crescendoed into full body shakes. I counted down the days until Amy returned from her travels. I planned a suicide that I hoped would keep anyone from finding my body.

Some time near my lowest point, two of the cast members from Too Stupid to Die came to the house for lunch: Zach and Chad, whose tattooed face, dramatic gauge piercings and split tongue concealed a deeply kind sweetness. They surveyed the piles: of mail, of clean and dirty co-mingled laundry, of dishes in the sink, of printed out scripts, of homework and toys.

“Dude,” Chad said, “this looks like the scene in the movie where the dad lost his job.” We all laughed, and I came out to them as trans. “That’s rad.” Chad said, “What are your pronouns?”

Chad, Zach and I talked about stunts. Zach showed me their latest amateur efforts on his phone. We fantasized about a second season of the show and everything we’d do better if we got one. As they left, they gave me big hugs. Zach threw a big, scar-and-tattoo covered arm around me “I love you, bro.”

Somewhere in these gray days I drove to an LGBTQ supportive doctor in a gleaming mall on the westside. I walked past an Anthropologie and an Apple store on my way to the waiting room. The office was next to Din Tai Fung and I wished I had the appetite for dumplings. I tried as hard as I could to be invisible when I checked in. I was taken to a clean examination room where I waited for the doctor. He was young and kind and I hoped that he would read my chart and lead the conversation, but he read it, looked at me and made me say the words aloud. “Tell me why you’re here.”

“I’m transgender and I want to try taking hormones…” I felt the shake of an anxiety attack hovering and tried to keep it away. “I read on Reddit that you can take a micro dose and that the changes might not be… dramatic?” I talked the doctor through what I hoped could be the medical equivalent of my Criss Angel phase.

The doctor explained back what I already knew: he couldn’t promise that anything would, or would not happen. I might get the invisible, “non-binary” transition I wanted — and hold onto the comfort, privilege and familiarity of passing as cis. As much as I feared it, I knew I’d likely physically transition, finding myself with growing breasts and a shrinking libido, shedding pounds of muscle, and watching the subtle shifts as the fat redistributed in my body. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to face those changes.

The doctor ordered bloodwork and sent me home with an informed consent form, a long document acknowledging all the risks and changes I was signing up for. This is the document that frightens cis people with its risk that giving people the autonomy to make a decision about their bodies might come with deep regret over irreversible changes. What if it’s just a phase, after all?

By the time I read the paper in my hands, I’d read a dozen variations online. I’d read the very few stories of detransition and regret. I’d read the many stories of mental, emotional, and physical surprises which all shared a similar pattern: I expected one thing from transition, I actually got an entirely different thing, but who cares, I am finally happy.

Who was I to be happy, though? I assumed no one was happy, and still thought my kids would be better off with a dead cis dad than a live trans mom. I returned home for what I thought would be my last few days with them. Among the stacks of unwashed dishes, the take-out bags that wouldn’t fit in the over-full trash can, and the piles of laundry, we spent the mornings and evenings in a shaggy, laugh-filled sleepover mentality. When they were in school or sleeping, I was back on the couch riding the waves of shivering, sobbing, hyperventilating, and falling asleep in a horrible loop.

The morning Amy came home, I was in the throws of my worst attack yet. I had called my best friend, Lee, who patiently interrupted his work on his small farm to talk me through breathing, one inhalation and exhalation at a time.

When I heard Amy’s key in the door, I hung up the phone and told her that I was going to medically transition — her welcome home from two weeks on the road.

I drove my signed informed consent forms to the doctor’s office, got my final instructions for estrogen, and testosterone blockers, and was on my way to the pharmacy. I would take my first dose, take a nap, and then start the process of purchasing two 9mm Sig Sauer pistols at my local gun store.

At home, with Amy looking on, appropriately harried and overwhelmed, I took one large spironolactone pill and allowed a small sweet teal estrogen pill dissolve under my tongue. I crawled in bed and gave my mind over to dysphoria: You are not a man. You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke. I took comfort in knowing that I wouldn’t be haunted much longer. I set my alarm for school pickup and fell asleep in the bright California sun streaming through the windows.

It wasn’t my phone that woke me up. After weeks of being bound to the bed or the couch, I just felt rested. I looked at the fat bright yellow lemons hanging heavy in the dense green leaves of the tree outside my bedroom window. The sky was a deep, cloudless blue. A hummingbird flitted through the technicolor scene, framed by the blue and white Ikea curtains.

I’d been embarrassed by those curtains, which had traveled from our first apartment to our second to our first home. They’d seemed cheap and dorm-room-y to me, a brightly patterned reminder of the endless list of things that needed to be updated, fixed, or replaced. But now, they were cute, a reminder of the early days — the dreams of marriage, kids, our own place. I forgave the cracks in the paint in the ceiling, the cobweb wafting from the lamp, the piles of unread books on the bedside table.

And then it came to me: Is this what normal people feel like all the time? I tried to remember the last time I felt so calm, so at home in my own body, and I couldn’t think of a single moment since childhood. I went for a walk, taking in the sound of the trees, the leaf blowers, the highway. I spent too much time basking in the feeling of the sun, the warm fall air, and the reprieve from dysphoria and had to postpone my gun shopping plans. Tonight, we’d celebrate Amy being home, our little family being back together.

Dysphoria would eventually overwhelm the microdose of hormones, and I would increase my dosage to defeat it, over a year, creeping up to a “full” transitional dose. My body began to change in all the ways I’d been afraid of, but the only uncomfortable thing about the changes was worrying about what cis people might think. All the bad things I thought might happen, did. My mother, who I’d once been close to, disowned me telling me that she couldn’t have a relationship with me as a trans woman. Amy and I spent painful hours in couple’s therapy crying over my “gender journey” before saying out loud with increasing frequency and conviction the obvious truth that our marriage was over. Acquaintances and colleagues asked about my genitals and my plans for them. Strangers laughed at me and went out of their way to misgender me.

I steadily crossed off milestones: sheepishly asking a salesperson at Sephora for a concealer to cover my 5 o’clock shadow. Deciding that a Tuesday was the right day to put on the pencil skirt I’d rescued from Amy’s discards, and go to work — for the first time — as myself. Attending a workout class for trans people and explaining that no, I wasn’t a very successfully transitioned trans man, I was a very larval trans woman in a body that didn’t make much sense with my soul. My first trip to the women’s bathroom, my first email with pronouns in the signature, my first Starbucks cup with my new name, my first date as me. Standing outside of trans ness, these things had seemed so strange, so distant. Within, they were full of joy, small and large.

Was it as selfish as I feared?

During quarantine, I adopted the habit of taking a long walk with one of my kids on alternating days. It was my solution to asking them to tell me about their days at the dinner table and hearing some variation of “I don’t know, it was just a normal day, I guess.” Usually after the first mile, whatever was weighing on them would come out and we’d spend the next hour talking about whatever it was, taking funny, poignant detours along the way.

On one of these walks, my 11 year old asked me what the hardest parts of my childhood were. I told him there was a lot to pick from: all the moves to new places with no friends, the brutal conformity of suburban Texas, my parents’ explosive divorce.

I asked him the same question.

“Well,” he said, apologetic, “It was when I was little and I’d do something wrong and you would get mad at me and it felt like there was nothing I could do to make you happy.”

I told him I was sorry, that I loved him and his brother more than anyone on earth and that it broke my heart to know that I’d been the hardest part of his childhood.

He shrugged. “It’s okay. That was David. It’s all okay now that Jude’s here.” He reached out, took my hand in his and we kept walking.