the first night at ter apel

I guess I need to write this right now-right now. I'm not sure why, but I have been writing an awful lot. And the tone and urgency resembles the frenzied, have to get this all out, it feels really important big words emphatic statements moral righteousness and fury, this stuff I wrote in my late twenties, the early days at Uber, and also in seminary (obviously I took to homiletics immediately). I can guess at why this feeling is back in my writing, and I'll save you the religious allegory but I think that should probably explain well enough.

So here we are. It's dark. My phone is at 10%. I don't have an adapter for the outlets here and I might be able to charge it but I'm not sure. Noah, ever perfect, is curled right up as close to me as he can and I can feel his tiny body breathing against mine. I've been awake three days or so. I fed him right before bed and I had my second meal of the day, a carton of apple juice, as well. Both our tummies are churning and making the sounds of living things, living. It's keeping me awake.

But what's really keeping me awake is this journey. I came out kind of a long time ago now, and I knew only one thing about that process: I was unprepared, I could not know anything about it other than a new person would exist on the other side and the person I thought I was would essentially cease to exist. This was entirely accurate. The same was true with going to seminary. I knew that was going to change me in a very deep and personal way, and I might not even like it, I might regret it, but I knew I had to, and I was familiar with the bargain, and I said to myself, if I believe I am called to seminary, that's a big deal, I should nurture that in myself, and do it. Also accurate. I left Uber, I went to seminary and emerged a different person. I withhold judgement on this new still forming person but yes, it happened again.

I feel California in my bones. So deeply. I tell people my heart is 2/3 brine by volume. I grew up in the Pacific. I need California in a way I struggle to describe because it is so deep and elemental and romantic and passionate and good and true it just stops meaning anything because it means everything. And I left, man, I left California. The room I'm sleeping in, or rather not sleeping in, is a generous gift of the Dutch that I am so grateful for because it is what I need right now and I will tell you it is indescribably gross. It is just a fact. I think I showered Monday morning. I'm filthy, truly. I've had the dog attached to my body, basically 24/7 since Tuesday morning. And this guy joins me in airport and airplane and train station restrooms, plays in whatever he finds to roll his little body around in, and then he sits in my lap or pressed against my skin on my chest. That filthy. I unquestionably have public bathroom grossness indirectly transferred via dog hair on my chest.

It feels a little like the dirtiness you feel at a festival or out in the Mojave when you're up late doing drugs and listening to music and staring at the sky. But that feels decadent. You choose the filth. The Mojave is spectacular, why not rub it all over your body? There's nothing romantic about the filth tonight. I don't have a good way to clean myself, nor my clothes. I have zero toiletries. None. This filth feels a little fraught. I'm not embarrassed, obviously, but I didn't really choose it, I am not enjoying it, I'm a little worried I will get some kind of skin thing and that's not going to be good, but it is, and I can't change it.

Why go on for an entire paragraph about the comparative difference of two very filthy situations? This condition of just having to give myself up, again, and say okay, this is bigger than me. I'm doing this, I have to, and the price of admission is myself: I get to come out the other end of this, which I see as necessary, but I have almost no control over that, and I can't be prepared because I can't possibly know what will happen in this process. So here we are in the dark.

And I'm just noticing. The Dutch have been, honestly, I think everyone I know would think of what I've been given today and say, you're grateful for that? That's hospitality? They have been friendly, ish, never really mean although they do seem to think the enormous trans woman and tiny dog is hilarious, and they're not wrong. But I showed up in their country with everything I own in the world attached to my body, the entirety of my net worth something like €360 (a gift, even) and $100 (I sold something I used to own). So yeah, bread and butter and a dirty room with paper sheets and a carton of apple juice, yes. I am absolutely grateful, I asked for help, and they're doing just that. They don't owe me a thing. At all. And I'm safe. With my dog. I have a roof over my head. I will eat again in the morning. That's pretty agreeable in my mind, let's start with just calories and refine upwards from there.

But, listen. Between the puppy breathing and the growling tummies and the people talking in the hallway. Right there. That is the sound of not being afraid. I'm a little afraid, but in a way I'm familiar with. I don't know what comes next. I know I can handle it because I can handle anything, I genuinely believe that. And it's going to change me, and I'm okay with that, and I don't know what I'll be in six months or two years or what will matter to me and even really what my life will look like, kind of at all. That's a little scary. But I've been here, and I'm okay with that process.

I am not afraid someone is going to threaten to kill me while screaming slurs at me outside this door. I am not afraid I will be arrested and killed in a men's jail for peeing in a public restroom. I am not afraid that one group of people is using me as a pawn in a greater ideological war against another group of people, neither of which actually care about me, and which has an immense cost in bodies. I can't describe the feeling of that stuff not being on my shoulders. It's been there now for a long time, longer than this year, but I was thinking it was that. I was wrong. It's been there. It's been heavy. I didn't realize I was wearing this suit of scorn and shame and slurs and how fucking heavy it was. It was just there. And there was no way to take it off. And every year, it got heavier and somehow sadder, even though I've been improving my own relationship with that stuff dramatically for the last ten years.

I am so filthy, and I'm destitute and probably definitionally homeless but sheltered and I'm excited about a carton of apple juice and buttered bread and my dog pressed against me and a roof over my head and a door I can lock and, oh here come the deep breaths, okay, here's the truth I've been dancing around, and a government that says to me, hey, are you okay? Hey, you asked for help and said you're scared. Let's talk about that. They're taking notes. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid, at all. And here's where it just comes out of me in sobs. I just. Why? Why? Why is safety revelatory? Why did I not know how much stuff I was carrying on my body, for so long, that I didn't even know it was there until I did something radical and scary and chose to leave my entire life behind?

Why is this writing, the writing that scares me a little, but is an old friend, back? Where did it go? Why does it seem to burst out of me when I need it, even though I secretly kind of sneer at it when I'm comfortable in my life?

So here we are. As low as you can get, mostly. Absolutely filthy, questionable but manageable circumstances. Future completely unknowable. And I'm furiously trying to write this all down before my phone dies and I'm crying in the dark because.

I'm not afraid anymore, and I had no fucking idea how afraid I was. And that feels so important.