Don’t get me wrong–I couldn’t be any happier to be writing a book and have a book deal. But I also have fantasies and dreams of the things I will be able to do when I am done:

1. Find a random travel deal online for an upcoming weekend and fly away on a whim.
2. Snowboard, hike, camp, or do any outdoor activity that requires a full day, or even better, two days.
3. Start my day with yoga for a week.
4. Write an essay, fiction, or something not about gender.
5. Read in bed until the morning becomes the afternoon.
6. Go dancing on a Wednesday night, or even a Saturday night.
7. Enjoy the leisurely life of allowing my second job, also known as my “real” job, to be my only job.
8. Take or teach a class–it’s a toss-up.
9. Keep a journal.
10. Consider 8am “getting up early” instead of “sleeping-in.”

My To-Do List:

Exhale as deeply as you inhale.

Drink four glasses of water for every coffee or beer.

Make eye-contact with strangers and smile (except in the Castro after dark).

Ride high on the joys of others.

Call or see at least one friend you haven’t spoken to in six months.

Write.

Accept all offerings of fruits and vegetables.

Lie in the sun.

Forgive me for combining holidays here–but it’s only at Valentine’s Day that I’m able to reflect with the type of retrospective so common at the turn of the New Year. I’ve always been slow, thoughtful, deliberate, late. Though taking the two holidays  together makes more sense in context. For 2009 was the year of love, or almost love, or not really love at all, or self-love perhaps. It was the first year of my life as Nick, and the first year my gender and body were no longer impassable obstacles to my becoming involved physically and emotionally with others. It’s no surprise that I spent the year in relationships, four of them to be exact, though “relationships” is a term I’m using in its broadest sense to include engagement with another in a serial (and for me) monogamous (though unintentional) fashion.

I met the first girl at the start of 2009, literally, midnight-ish on New Years. Re-met would be a more appropriate term since she used to hang out at my house years ago, flirt with my back in the day when I’d run away scared of anyone who wanted my clothes off. When I re-met this girl and she saw my room, she shook her head in disappointment. All I had was one map of the world. For the three years I’d lived there, it was the only thing that made me feel comfortable, a map with its millions of escape routes. I didn’t have a home. Home was something I couldn’t create inside my body and it was something I couldn’t create in my surroundings.

Shortly after we started hanging out, I asked this girl to make a decoration suggestion. “Curtains for your bay windows and a comfortable reading chair,” she replied. The chair is where I’m sitting as I write this, my windows framed by my handsome blue and gold curtains.

I didn’t get to ask the second person for room advice. We never spent an entire night together. But he showed me boundaries, the beauty of the queerest of bodies, helped landscape my internal home. The third suggested a duvet cover for my bed, and how her of her to have the perfect one, to give it to me and make a home for me to rest. The fourth picked out a plant, bringing life into my home.

I’m still feeling the fourth, enough to know it’s time to regroup, time to be alone inside this home I’ve created, time to watch the leaves on my new plant, the hair on my new body grow. I’m feeling her enough to know that today would be a special challenge, and oh, how I love challenges.

I had decided Rusty would be my Valentine long ago, looked forward to yoga today for all that I knew it would be and all that I didn’t. There’s something about his tone, part pleading, wisdom and command, the way he says, “Don’t miss this moment,” so that even if my legs are trembling, and I’m so uncomfortable I want to call it pain, I cannot help but think, “Do not miss this moment,” and that when I’m so beat I can’t see through the sweat in my eyes and he says, “I want this to be the most challenging part of your day. I want this to be the most challenging part of your week,” I know that I can hold sadness, loneliness, loss, and even more, that I don’t want to miss the moment.

The hardest part was towards the end, a two-minute meditation, stillness. Rusty challenged us here too, offered us a couple mantras and goaded us to try them. “I dare you,” he said. “For two minutes, I dare you to repeat to yourself: I am worthy of love. I am worthy of love.” I certainly believe it and I certainly tried, but let’s just say my mind wandered a little. How easy it is to give love to others, and how easy it is to receive love, but  how very very hard it is for me to sit with my own love.

He ended class with words he’s said a lot since he opened his new studio though the meanings are infinite. “Welcome home,” he said

“Welcome home,” I said to myself.

I was at the Press Club last night. It’s one of those places that’s cool in concept–you can drink wine from a handful of Northern California wineries, and awful in reality, attracting the yuppie, FiDi (Financial District) crowd for what I took to be a singles mixer for twenty and thirty something “socially conscious” people. There must have been almost 200 capital “S” straight people in the place, all dripping in boring brown and black, and I did that thing I don’t like to do–dismissed everyone immediately as unworthy of my attention. I was only there because I needed to get out of the house, to be surrounded by noise, and the event served that purpose.

So, there’s this girl standing near me, stuck alone because her companion is flirting away with some guy. She barely attempts the basic social pleasantries, not that I encourage them, before she says, “I hope you don’t mind if I ask. But how old are you?”

“Thirty-one,” I say.

She is truly floored, goes on and on about how remarkable this is, how I look no older than…

“Thirteen?” I say.

“No. Seventeen,” she says. “You look no older than seventeen.” She can’t stop talking about how shocking all this is, how amazingly youthful I look, and though I find it amusing when small children announce with complete certainty that I’m not an adult, not “full grown,” I have no patience for this woman. She keeps repeating how lucky I am to look so young, and all I can think of is this one word: transgender. I am transgender, I want to say. It explains everything. I was born female and I have the hormones of an adolescent male inside of me. And, although I do personally consider myself “lucky,” there is nothing lucky about the challenges most trans people face.

But I’m sure she doesn’t know what the one clarifying word means, or could mean–the fact that I’m “transgender” is so far from her consciousness, so far from the galaxy of her possibilities that she’s more likely to believe in magic, a fountain of youth, than to even consider anything resembling my actual experience. I want to hate her for her ignorance, but then I’d have to hate everyone in the room, hate most everyone really.

It’s just one word. Trans. Like man or woman. So, fine, it’s more complicated, way more complicated, and yes, there’s plenty of transfolk who’d rather just stick with one of the common two genders. But not me. I want to have cultural currency. I want to be recognized. I want the red misspelling underline on “transgender” in this blog post to go away.

“Yep,” I say in a voice so disengaged I barely recognize it as my own. “I guess I look more like seventeen.”

We were in one of my favorite neighborhood bars, a mixed-crowd gay bar, late on Saturday night. Heated in conversation, gossip actually, my friend, a woman, followed me into the men’s room. We were standing in front of the door to the stall, leaving both the trough and urinal open and available, when a dude entered. He literally tried to push his way through us while telling us not so kindly to get out of his way.

My friend started to argue, yelling at him to calm down as she took a step to the side, forced out of the way. I did the opposite, shut my mouth and stepped directly in front of him, prompted by I don’t know what, the confidence that comes from having a new tree-trunk neck or an extra few inches of thickness around my chest.

I stood my ground, until he turned, then I used the stall. When I returned to the bar, my friend was still fuming, prattling on about the asshole. I had nothing to say. I was a jumble of emotions, at the axis of so much conflict, angry at the boy for his bullying and frustrated with the girl for following me in, stripping me of everything I fought for daily.

I’d made a territorial move. I was protecting my right to be in the men’s room, and especially my right to the stall. I was protecting my right to be transgender, my hard-earned identity. Had my friend not been there talking to me, I knew the altercation wouldn’t have happened. But had she not been physically present, her body sort of in the way, I also knew something that scared me, that is still scaring me, that I hadn’t ever thought myself capable of until that moment. I would’ve punched him, of that I’m sure, and I would’ve done it before I’d even had the chance to stop myself.