life

On the Road Again…

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s road trip time!

When this post goes live, my partner and I should be a little over halfway to Minnesota, where we’ll spend the weekend running around like mad people getting caught up with friends and family as much as we’re able to in the space of three days.

It’s a beautiful time of year for a road trip. I imagine as you’re reading this that we’re enjoying some gorgeous fall colors as we drive through Wisconsin. The weather’s cool enough to wear all the knitted things. Really, this might be my favorite time of year.

I tend to deal with a fair amount of pre-travel anxiety, and this week is no exception. There’s always too much to get done before we leave, and never enough time to do it all. But I know the payoff is always worth it.

I get to see my nephew this weekend. I get to give him his Yoda hat (which I finished Tuesday night, a whole 30 hours before our departure), and see in person just how much bigger he’s gotten since the beginning of August. I know he’s getting to the age where stranger anxiety is a thing, so I’m nervous that he won’t like me. I want us to be buddies.

This trip marks the last time I’ll be renting a car under this name. So that’s exciting.

It’s also the last time I’ll probably make it to Minnesota this calendar year…probably the last trip for quite some time. Starting next month, we want to really cut back on our spending (particularly what we spend going out to eat), and I want to start seriously paying down my credit card debt, so I don’t really know when our next trip will be. I hope I can keep that in mind this weekend and take full advantage of the time we have in our home state.

Hopefully next week I’ll come back with some interesting stories (and maybe even a few pictures)!

Hats! (or, ‘Tis the Season to be Knitting)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I haven’t posted much about it on this blog, but I happen to be a knitter.

My partner is also a knitter (and a knitting designer). Knitting was actually how we met. It’s a really important part of our lives. My partner is a much more dedicated knitter than I am, though. As part of an effort to decrease the amount of yarn we have stashed in our apartment, he’s been tracking how many yards he knits each month, and let me tell you, those numbers are impressive (over 16,000 yards for the year, he tells me). Particularly when compared to what my numbers would be, if I kept track. (I have finished a total of six projects this year. He’s finished at least forty-two. And no, I’m not exaggerating.)

See, I have this problem where I want to knit all the things. So I cast on one thing that I’m excited about, and within days (or hours…), I get excited about something new, and cast that on…which basically means I currently have about ten projects in varying states of completion on different sets of needles scattered about the house. I also knit a lot less in the summer (because we don’t have air conditioning, and it’s hard to get my easily overheated self excited about working with wool when it’s 90°F outside). The last project I finished was a super quick project in July that I finished in under 24 hours. Before that, it was a pair of socks in April. (This problem is not really isolated to just knitting. I have attention span issues with most creative things I pick up. Some of it has to do with Bipolar cycles, but a lot of it is just the fact that I want to do ALL THE THINGS, and I don’t have time to do them all.)

I am an extraordinarily selfish knitter. I can count on one hand the number of people aside from myself that I am willing to knit for. One of those people is my seven-month-old nephew. I decided before he was born that for his first Halloween, I would knit him a Yoda hat. After he was born, someone else brought that idea to my brother and sister-in-law (whose wedding was Star Wars themed), and I promised them it would happen.

Halloween is fast-approaching, and we have a quick trip to Minnesota planned in the next couple of weeks. I decided last Thursday (which is the day of the weekly knit night at our local yarn store, which I have not been going to nearly as often as I’d like) that I needed to get cracking on this hat. So I bought the yarn, cast on at knit night, got about halfway to the crown…and realized that the hat was not only going to be big enough for my nephew (who was easily fitting into 9 month hats at 6 months), but it would be big enough for me. (Possibly for me AND my nephew at the same time.) I ripped it all back and started over.

And then I got distracted. My partner had been worked on this great hat that’s made out of sock yarn, and as I was working on the baby hat, I realized I had the perfect skein of sock yarn for a hat of my own: purple and black stripes, in a fiber blend that I felt was too nice to use for something that would go on my feet, that was part of the boatload of yarn that came into our lives after one of our knitting friends passed away last year. And I got excited about the idea of a stripy hat for myself. So I put down the baby hat, pulled out the sock yarn, and cast on.

The great part about knitting something with stripes is that it’s easy to find motivated to do “one more stripe,” and therefore finish the whole hat. Long story short, I started the hat on Saturday, and finished about 1am this morning. And it looks great:

Hat!

(I don’t have a picture of me wearing it yet, because the friend I inherited the yarn from had a cat at some point, and I am allergic to cats, and since just working on the project made me very sniffly, I decided to give it a bit of a wash before putting it on my head. It’s drying as I’m writing this; I’ll try to get another picture up later today.)

Thankfully, I have today and tomorrow off from work (hooray, Jewish holidays!), and tonight is knit night, so I’ve got plenty of time to get the Yoda hat for my nephew cranked out. And now that I’ve satisfied my selfish knitting impulse with a nearly-instant gratification project, I’ll be able to focus on the thing that has an actual deadline…right?

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Adulting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been quite the week.

I successfully filed my name change paperwork last Friday and was assigned a court date that’s now a little over seven weeks away. So now I’m working on pulling together everything I need to bring to court (and to the DMV, where I’ll be headed directly after the hearing).

Adulting is hard. And scary. I’ve done way more of it in the past week than I’ve made myself do in a while. And I’m proud of myself for doing the hard and scary things.

But then yesterday at work was just one of those days, and I ended up leaving a little early and skipping my weekly volunteer commitment because I felt like shit, choosing to hide at home where I could curl up under blankets and read and pretend the rest of the world wasn’t there.

Adulting is hard. And scary. And it’s a process that often feels a lot like two steps forward, one step back.

But still, progress is progress. I’ll get there in the end.

Forward Motion

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

‘Tis the season for Jewish holidays, which means I get a bunch of paid days off in the next month, including today and tomorrow (for Rosh Hashanah). Since I am not Jewish, this gives me some free time to attend to various personal business matters I haven’t gotten around to taking time off for, but that really need to happen.

Today, I’m going to the doctor to get labs done and check in on my hormone levels.

Tomorrow, I’m heading downtown to file the paperwork for my name change.

It doesn’t feel real yet. It probably won’t feel real until a couple of months from now, after my court date, when I’m holding my new driver’s license with my name on it.

My name. The one I chose for myself. The one that fit so effortlessly the first time I tried it on that I thought it couldn’t possibly be real.

I’m not yet Alyx in legal terms, but I’m Alyx in my dreams. And in my social life. And at work.

I have been Alyx for nearly three years now.

I am not looking forward to the fiddly bits of legally changing my name – changing over bank accounts and credit cards and utilities and dealing with social security. But I am looking forward to the day when I can hand a bartender or TSA agent or car rental agency employee my ID and not need to spend all of my energy praying they don’t look too closely at the feminine name on the card in contrast with the sideburn-sporting dude in front of them.

Tomorrow, I take the next official step in being recognized for who I am. And while the part of me that resists going outside of my comfortable bubble of routine is terrified, mostly, I am excited.

It’s time for forward motion.

Reminders of Weakness

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

On Tuesday morning, as I was making the bed, my lower back spasmed. After a panicked thirty seconds when I thought I wouldn’t be able to move at all, I slowly got out of bed, got dressed, and headed in the direction of work. I was halfway there when I realized my back was hurting worse as time went on, so I got off the bus, hopped on the next one coming in the opposite direction, and emailed my managers to tell them I would be working from home. As the day went on, I found I could sit, and I could stand and walk around, but the in-between bits of getting to and from one or the other? No way. Super painful. I ended up working from home Tuesday and Wednesday, taking lots of ibuprofen and making liberal use of a heating pad.

I have a bad back. The first time my back went out, I was twelve. Back then, I was a cheerleader (no, really, I was!), and a stubborn middle-school ego combined with a coach who didn’t have the training or common sense to realize that a twelve-year-old couldn’t possibly understand the long-term ramifications of pushing themselves past their limits…well, it was a problem. (The day my back went out was a game day. My team was furious when I told them I couldn’t be the base for any of the floor cheers. I had to call my mom to come pick me up before the game, because I was scared that they would make me do it anyway.) I did irreversible damage to my back in the three years that I was a cheerleader, and it’s haunted me ever since. My back is always tense, and almost always hurts in some way. Most of the time, I can deal with it fine, because it’s just become the backdrop of life, and I’m not super conscious of it. Every so often, though, something like Tuesday morning happens.

It’s always the stupid little things. This time around, it was making the bed. The last time this happened (almost two years ago), I had leaned down to pat my napping partner on the head, and found I couldn’t stand again. And every time it happens, I am reminded of how fragile humans are. In the space of half a second and one half-hearted arm motion, it suddenly became difficult to do the most basic things like getting out of bed, or going to the bathroom, or putting on socks.

Bodies are weird and wonderful and amazing, even if we don’t fit the ones we’re in and have to take matters into our own hands to form them into shapes we can feel comfortable wearing. And even when I’m laid out flat from a back spasm, I’m thankful for mine: without it, I wouldn’t be able to experience this amazing life I’ve found myself living.

My Life in a Monday

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s not often that a single day provides a snapshot of the kind of life I have, but this Monday sort of did just that:

  1. Monday morning, I took the last pills in my existing bottles of psych meds. I had placed a refill order last week, and knew that both my prescriptions were ready for pickup, and I knew I needed to collect them on my way home from work. Unfortunately, my pharmacy is in no way, shape, or form on the way home: in fact, I have to pass home to get there, and go twice as far in the opposite direction. I spent the entire day at work trying to talk myself into going. Finally, as I walked the half mile to the bus (which would take me to the train, which would get me within a block of the pharmacy), I realized the solution: I would allow myself a silly indulgence if I otherwise behaved like a responsible adult and picked up my meds (more on that in #2). Long story short, for the first time in many, many months, I picked up my prescriptions on time and didn’t miss a single dose of anything.
  2. The silly indulgence? While I was out running my post-work errands, I swung up to Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy of the newest Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. I had been kicking around the idea anyway, because starting the end of this month I’ll be joining a D&D game run by someone my partner met in college (who happens to be a minister and is doing this game as part of an independent study for a class he’s taking at Loyola), and we were planning to meet Monday night to work on creating a character for me to play. The more I researched the newest edition of the game online over the weekend, the more excited I got, and so I went for it. It was very helpful to have a copy of the book for each of us to look at while we rolled up my character (a dwarf sorcerer – this would probably prove to my family that I am a godless heathen) that evening, and now I’m all set for the future games I’m sure I’ll be playing. Nerdery abounds!
  3. And then Monday night happened, and I laid down to go to sleep…and waited…and waited…and waited…and my brain just wouldn’t shut down. I wasn’t even perseverating over anything in particular; the gears just wouldn’t stop turning. Thanks to the insomnia and the fact that I needed to go in to work early, I ended up running through my Tuesday on approximately 3.5 hours of sleep and two shots of espresso and crashing by 8pm.

This is my life: learning to be a (sort of) responsible adult, discovering new and exciting depths to my capacity for nerdiness (and probably disappointing my relatives in the process), and never knowing exactly what to expect from my brain. It’s an adventure, and not always grand…but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Three Things on My Mind

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

After last week’s monster post of gratitude, this week has been pretty quiet. So here’s a glimpse at what’s going on in my brain:

  1. I really, really want to get out of debt. I’ve managed to accumulate a fair bit of credit card debt in the past couple of years (due in large part to being underemployed for the first nine months we lived in Chicago, but in larger part to the fact that I like to spend money…it’s a problem). It’s been hanging over my head and I’m sick of it. So starting in October (because this month I have to worry about paying for the name change), I am going to begin aggressively paying down the balance on my credit card, with a goal of having the whole thing paid off by next October. It’s a big goal, and I’m going to have to seriously cut back on frivolous spending, but I think it’ll be worth it. I’m also going to try to start building my savings (which currently amounts to approximately $20).
  2. For the first time since college, I’m starting to think about and plan for my future. When I started college, I had this ridiculous five-year plan that involved getting both my BA and my MSW and becoming a social worker. For many reasons (including the fact that it just wasn’t a good plan for me), that all went up in flames…and I never really replaced my dreams with something new. It’s been years since I planned for much of anything more than six months out. But that’s starting to change. The future is more enticing than terrifying, and there are wonderful things on the horizon.
  3. I’ve been thinking about faith a lot lately. I was raised believing that salvation was this deeply personal, unshakable thing that had very little to do with one’s own merit or power. I personally can’t believe in a God who would send people to hell for asking questions (or worse, for dying oblivious to the existence of some “perfect” religion). I believe that grace extends to everyone, regardless of where they were on life’s journey when they reached their finish line. I may call myself “functionally agnostic”; I may not belong to a church. But that doesn’t mean I lack a spiritual life.

Gratitude

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A friend of mine nominated me on Saturday via Facebook to come up with three moments of gratitude a day for five days. Well, that was about five days ago, and I haven’t done it yet, but that seemed like a good direction for the blog this week. So Amanda, here’s my list; thanks for the inspiration.

  1. A partner who will join me on silly, spontaneous adventures. Last Thursday, I had the wild idea that we should rent a car over the weekend and drive to Cedar Falls, IA to catch Joe Stevens in concert. The conversation went something like this:

    A: We should go on a road trip and see Joe Stevens!
    E: But it’s Iowa.
    A: But concert!
    E: But IOWA.

    I acknowledged it was a pretty ridiculous idea, but I was a little sad…until I got off work and was greeted by a text to the effect of, “So, about that concert…”

  2. Friends with whom I can escape reality for a while. Saturday was Dungeons & Dragons & Knitting, which is the monthly Pathfinder game with some folks in our knitting circle (the original idea was to play D&D, but Pathfinder ended up happening instead…we just never changed the name). Four of us have an adventure in group storytelling while our partners hang out in the other room and knit and make fun of us. It’s consistently one of the highlights of every month.
  3. Open spaces. We did end up renting a car this weekend and going on a road trip into Iowa, taking a detour on our way to Cedar Falls so that I could show Ethan some of the northeast corner of the state, which is not entirely flat and very, very pretty. The farther we got from Chicago, the more I relaxed. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in Chicago. But wide open spaces do wonders for my soul.
  4. People who choose to love me because of who I am, not in spite of it. The reason I know that there is a pretty part of Iowa (the aforementioned northeast corner) is that my grandparents live there, on a farm in a valley surrounded by trees and bluffs and wildlife and gardens. I remain convinced at age 26 that their farm is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. We were close enough on Sunday that, had I so chosen, we could have stopped by for a surprise visit. But I didn’t. I love my grandparents very much. They love their grandchildren very much. But when I came out to them as Alyx in a letter two years ago, their response (also in a letter) was that they would never call me Alyx, because Alyx was “an imaginary person.” I am almost entirely certain that they don’t know that I started any sort of physical transition. I haven’t seen them in over two years, and I haven’t been on their farm in at least three, and I don’t know when (or if) either of those things will happen again, which is heart-wrenching whenever I think of it. But it also reminds me that I have a whole bunch of people in my life who not only accept that I am Alyx but actually celebrate my life with me, and that is a great comfort.
  5. Those moments of recognition by others in our communities. Visibility is such a huge thing, both for those of us who are still frequently misgendered, and those in our community who pass so well that no one believes they’re trans. There were a handful of those moments this weekend.
  6. Approachable heroes. Meeting Joe Stevens was great: he’s one of our songwriting idols, and is just a fantastic person. But even better than meeting Joe was the fact that we got to actually talk with him. By the end of the night, we were giving each other hugs goodbye. We’re now friends on Facebook. This is still blowing my mind.
  7. Adventures that lead to more adventures. When we got to Cedar Falls and started talking with Joe (and River Glen, who’s touring the Midwest with him), we mentioned we’d road tripped it from Chicago, at which point they told us they were actually going to be playing a house concert in Chicago on Monday night. Throughout the night they told us several times that we should come. We got in touch on Facebook and got the details, and despite the fact that my partner had only slept about 45 minutes and had worked a full day, and the fact that we’d returned the rental car and weren’t entire sure how we were going to get home after transit stopped running, Monday night we found ourselves in the very humid basement of a hippie couple we’d never met, sweating with strangers (and new friends, and someone we met at a karaoke bar three-and-a-half years ago), enjoying more music.
  8. Music that inspires me to create more music. I felt two things in regard to the music at both shows: first, that my songwriting is totally inadequate, and second, that I want to write more songs. There are times when I get the first feeling but not the second one; this was one of the beautiful moments where my feelings of inadequacy were outweighed by inspiration.
  9. New friends. We met some awesome people on Sunday and Monday.
  10. Thinking about the future. My partner and I have been doing a lot of talking about our future together, and it’s really wonderful not only to have a partner I want to have a future with, but to be able to think about the future at all. There was a long time when I could barely see past tomorrow. I’m learning to dream again.
  11. Air conditioning. This is a silly one, but it’s been ridiculously humid in Chicago this week. We don’t have AC at home, but I have it at the office, and I’m grateful for the times I can spend in places where everything does not feel soggy.
  12. Comfort in my skin. This isn’t a constant, but I’ve been feeling fairly centered and okay within myself this week. I was able to go to both concerts without feeling more than momentary social anxiety, and a lot of that had to do with being comfortable being myself. I spent a lot of years stuck in self-loathing, and while I’m not my biggest fan, I’ve at least reached the point where I feel a sort of benevolent indifference toward myself, which is unbelievably better for my mental health.
  13. Fresh perspective. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this one, because it’s been a largely internal thing. Mostly, there have been tiny things happening in the past few weeks that have helped me to look at the world in new (or old but forgotten) ways, and it’s been refreshing.
  14. A (mostly) calm brain. There have been a lot of storms here in the past week. My brain tends to get really uncomfortable when the weather is shifting back and forth rapidly. I’ve felt surprisingly stable in the midst of all of it.
  15. Concrete future plans. I alluded to this in last week’s post, and now that I’ve told my family, I can announce it to all of you: at the end of September I will be filing the requisite paperwork for a court date to legally change my name. By the end of the year I will legally be Alyxander James! There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express how excited I am.

Three Tiny Reasons to Smile

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

The world is still a dark and scary place, and the part of me that wants to fix everything is really struggling right now, because I feel so utterly powerless to do anything meaningful.

Despite the darkness, though, there have been some small glimmers of light this week. Here are three of them.

  1. I’ve been knitting more. Not every day, but more days that I’ve been knitting all summer. Knitting is one of those things that, particularly in the summer, I tend to forget how much I enjoy it and how relaxing it can be until I sit down to actually do it. I bought some really lovely yarn from The Verdant Gryphon at Stitches Midwest a couple of weekends ago, which helped to kick-start my knitting mojo just a little bit. It’s nice to be excited about creating things with my hands. (On a knitting-related note: knitters should go to Ravelry and check out the pattern my partner published this week!)
  2. I’m getting more excited about music again. I’ve been seriously slacking off for the past couple of months, in part because I was dealing with DepressedBrain, and while DepressedBrain is greatly helped by music, sometimes the thought of taking the instrument out of the case (or even taking it off the stand) is too overwhelming. I decided to swap out the strings on my tenor guitar and play around with a new, lower tuning, and that’s gotten me to play more this past week. I even set up a SoundCloud page for myself. It doesn’t have anything on it yet, but I’m sifting through the songs I’ve written for class and hoping to start recording some of them and throwing them online sometime in the next week or so.
  3. The third thing is going to be super vague for the moment (I’m hoping to post more next week), but in the past week I’ve nailed down some details and made some actual plans for moving forward on something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. There’s still a lot of waiting and there will need to be some challenging conversations before it happens, but it’s finally starting to feel real.

On Darkness and Inner Demons

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long, hard, scary week in the world, and it’s only half over. There have been so many awful things happening that, when I sat down to think about this week’s blog, I wasn’t really sure where to begin. But I’m going to try to address two of the big things.

First things first: on Saturday, a black teenager was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. It’s an appalling and altogether horrible situation, and is just one in a long line of similar murders in recent history. I’m still trying to educate myself on the situation (despite the overwhelming urge to bury my head in the sand), but this is the best article I’ve seen on the whole situation so far, and while I had a lot of thoughts similar to this bouncing around my head, I would never have been able to express them so powerfully. When my partner posted this article on Facebook, ze posted it with the comment that, “If you are a white person in America, you need to read this. (Everyone else in America already knows and lives it.)” which sums up the truth of it pretty damn well. Read it. If it’s a choice between reading that article or finishing this blog post, go there, now.

One of the other things that’s been blowing up all over the news this week is the death of Robin Williams, which, it’s thought, was a suicide. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this. The fact that the suicide of a rich white man has gotten more media attention than the murder of a young black man is profound evidence of a number of deeply-rooted issues in our society. And Robin Williams wasn’t a hero. He, like many comedians, sometimes went for the cheap joke at the expense of people who absolutely do not need any more of that from the world (for example, the transmisogyny-perpetuating man-in-a-dress trope of Mrs. Doubtfire). At the same time, he was undeniably talented, and undeniably troubled by inner demons the rest of the world didn’t always see. Suicide, like any loss of human life, is always a tragedy.

These two news items have served as powerful reminders that this world is a dark, scary, overwhelming place a lot of the time. And not just the world around us, but the worlds we inhabit internally. We all have our demons. Darkness seems to be everywhere these days.

I find “it gets better” tropes to be pretty useless. Sometimes, it doesn’t really get better. It definitely won’t get better on its own. Things only change when we make them change. But we don’t always have the resources available to us to make things better for ourselves.

Which is why it’s so important that we, as human beings, take care of each other.

We can take care of each other by listening to one another, whether it’s to educate ourselves about the experiences of people who are different from us, or simply being aware of when the people around us need some extra gentleness. We’re all in this together. At the end of the day, we’re all human. If we could learn to value the humanity in ourselves and to recognize it reflected in others…maybe the world wouldn’t turn out to be such a dark place after all.