So shortly It’s going to be my birthday — which is a bit weird for me because both my father and my grandfather died early, and I’ll now have outlived both of them. So there’s always been a part of me that just assumed I wouldn’t make it that far.

In a way, it’s a feeling kind of like the HIV+ people who expected to die during the AIDS plague years, but who unexpectedly survived — and had to relearn how to live again, to reimagine a future for themselves.

It’s definitely compounded by all the ways that pandemic broke me, some of which I’m still discovering.

Plus the realities of post-transition life as a trans woman. Believe me, thanks to my extended social transition, I went into it with far more realistic expectations than most. But I keep seeing those Facebook memories and remembering how exploring my gender was new and exciting and hopeful. And don’t get me wrong, things definitely are better, and I’m thankful for the day-to-day ordinariness of living as a woman.

But to paraphrase Inigo Montoya: Is very strange. I have been in the gender transition business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.*

*Some of this is a delayed reaction thanks to Covid, a tough and lengthy surgical recovery, and dealing with my mother’s death.** I’d been feeling this way at the beginning of 2020 — which was gonna be the year I started to learn to live again.

**She died on my birthday, and these past weeks have been the anniversary of her final days with pancreatic cancer. Which is also a reason I’m in a mood