After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

I know they were all out because it was, or certainly felt like, the first weekend of spring. They were everywhere in the Castro and Mission, and all over Dolores Park. Every street and corner, every bar and cafe. I’m sure they were always there. The dykes and lesbians that is. I’d just never seen them so clearly before, never noticed them from the outside.

Some trans guys talk about feeling or becoming “invisible” once they transition, mostly surrounding the  loss of lesbian community and the loss of blatant queerness. I’ve been waiting for this to strike me now that the physical differences between me and women have widened.

I sat in front of Harvest on Market St, eating sweet potato soup and thinking about this late yesterday, just watching all the dykes go by. I saw ponytails and dreadlocks and short styley hair, basketball jerseys and soccer shorts and softball uniforms. I saw women who certainly didn’t need and most likely didn’t want boobs as large as they had, and super boyish looking women who were probably pretty stoked about this. I felt like I was watching my entire twenties walk by. I didn’t feel invisible. I felt old. When I got up to leave, I caught my reflection in the glass. It surprised me a little, the young man staring back at me. How goddamn handsome you are, I thought. Then the loneliness hit. For the loss of what once was.

“I just tell people they’re shark bites,” he said.

My first response, a testament to either my ridiculousness or literalness, was that my chest scars are too symmetrical to be shark bites. Or, maybe it was a testament to how ignorant (and I mean that in a mostly friendly way) I believe most people are about trans folk. But headed to Guatemala on a yoga retreat at the end of next week, I realized I may want to have a story or two in my back pocket, whether it’s about precancerous tissue removed from chest, or my passport.

Because I didn’t want to start the long arduous process of changing my name/gender, especially when I’m not sure I ever want to change my gender (mostly for health insurance fears but also because M and F as designations are beyond meaningless to me), I’ll be traveling under a passport with an “F” and the name “Nina.” My picture is pre-testosterone, but it looks enough like me now that I figure most people won’t notice my name or gender. However, I am having some awkward moment worst case scenarios like having to acknowledge that the F is a mistake and that Nina is a boy’s name in Russian–both almost as believable as the shark bite thing.

Then there’s the retreat itself, which I imagine will consist of a handful of people from San Francisco, as well as people who work there, and of course, all of the people who fall into the “unforseen” circumstances category. I am expecting/hoping I feel safe enough to be trans without any explanation for my scars, and walk around in just shorts, because, well, I’ve waited fifteen fucking years to be comfortable in a bathing suit.

As far as my testosterone, I’m on a ten-day shot cycle and my trip is about ten days. When I booked the trip, I looked at a calendar and realized that if, leading up to my departure, I pushed off a few of my shot cycles by one day, then I could line up my trip and a cycle perfectly. It wasn’t entirely necessary; I could bring my vial, a syringe and needles, but I’d prefer not to. I’d prefer not to deal with any of these things, I guess, but these things are my life as I know it.

There was a time, about a few years, when I spent most of my mental energy trying to reconcile what seemed to be a whole lot of no-win choices. Breasts or scars. My happiness or the happiness of others. Traveling as a woman or never traveling again as a trans person. I wondered how much I’d have to give up for what in the end felt less like decisions and more like instinctual mandates.

So, here I am, about to go on first trip abroad as a transboy. And the truth is, I haven’t been too worried about it. Sometimes I forget that for being so neurotic and anxious, traveling calms me down. I’m good at planning, managing situations. I fixed this trip as sort of a training wheels, a place to test how comfortable I feel with my “F” passport and how safe I feel alone for a couple days at the beginning and end of the retreat. Part of my decision to go on a destination specific trip as opposed to a backpacking  trip, even stay someplace “resorty”–something I’ve never done before–was so that I could settle into being myself around the same people, build them into a comfort zone.

And I’d be an idiot to think traveling as a trans person is any more dangerous than half the shit I pulled traveling alone as a woman. I’m also crazy if I think being trans is going be the hardest part of my trip. Because it’s entirely clear to me that the yoga is what is going to kill me.

This weekend I interviewed a trans artist friend of mine. We spoke about his music, dance, writing, as well as my writing, about our identities, trans experience, activism, being “out” in the public eye, and the intersection of it all. Before we met, I’d found myself oddly interested in a fact about him and his work for a reason I couldn’t explain. He’d recorded a song, “Little Girl,” that for the first time in music history had a transman sing alongside his former voice.

I understood that the song was groundbreaking, but when I heard him speak so emotionally about how personally definitive this song was, it got my thinking about something that was already on my mind a lot, the working title of my manuscript in-progress (or the “book” or “memoir,” as I also call it, though those words are really too far ahead of where I am).

My manuscript is tentatively titled, “Nina Here Nor There,” a phrase I don’t say aloud very often though I type and read the phrase all the time, consider its unspokenness between me and new friends who discover my blog and now know my former name. So, it felt a bit weird when I actually said the title during the interview, as if I were breaking the seal on something I could potentially see for the rest of my life. Some of my trepidation comes from that, the title of my first book is simply, in and of itself, a huge deal, but there’s also the concern over making my birth name so visible.

I recently read S. Bear Bergman’s collection of essays, “The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You“–most of them about being a former dyke, queer, Jewish, tranny with faggy tendencies. Let’s just say I had a love/hate relationship with the book, as can only be the case when faced with a writer and person so similar and yet so so so so different from me. (I also had complete respect and admiration for hir and hir work.) Bear, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, is very open in hir essay, “What’s in a Name?” about stating hir birth name. Ze makes it clear that certainly family members, airline personnel, and other people with special privileges, can refer to hir birth name.

Reading the essay as a trans person, I completely understood the underlying message, or at least my interpretation of it: There’s a time and a place for given, birth or legal names. This doesn’t make them real names (that’s Bear’s main point) or names to be used at the discretion of others (that’s my point). After Bear published the book, ze pointed out on hir blog that the media included hir given name in reviews–as if it would be remiss to forget this “fact” the “real” truth. I wondered how these reviewers had missed the whole point of that crucial essay.

Ever since then, I’d been profoundly afraid of what the media, the greater public, will do with my former name on my book, how they will abuse it. Until recently, I’d been saying one of my reasons for wanting “Nina” on the cover of my book was to commemorate it, memorialize it, give it a sort of gravestone. In my book, the characters refer to the narrator as “Nina” a handful of times, and each time I write those moments, I hold this name close to my heart.

The reality is, I see “Nina” more often than others probably realize, almost daily. It’s on mail, my taxes, my driver’s license, passport and any piece of important paperwork. I hear it at the doctor, dentist, library, and occasionally the gym. It’s on the bottom, my signage, of very old strings of emails at work, and on all my travel bookings. The super cute woman who cleans our house (and whom I have a crush on) says, “Hello, Nina” when she calls once a month. It took me six months to figure out why I couldn’t tell her my new name. I love the way she says “Nina.” It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful to tell her the truth and have it disappear from her mouth.

Sometimes, I miss “Nina.” Not as my name, but as the name that was once mine. Sometimes, when I meet new people, when I get over my fear that they’re not  seeing me in a way resonates with how I see myself–the trauma of a many years being seen as a woman–I want to pull them aside, whisper in their ear, “For thirty years of my life, my name was Nina. Thirty years of my life. That was me. How I was known. Nina.” Sometimes, when I’m with trans folk and we don’t have to protect ourselves so fiercely, we drop our guards and remind each other, again and again, to mourn.

This weekend, when my trans friend spoke about the combination of his voices on one track, he captured the fear he felt on the cusp of potentially losing his voice (or whatever the uncertain results would be to his vocal chords), the fear of losing everything, of letting it all go. Another thing he said, one of the many that I’m sure I’ll be thinking on for days, was how trans stories are really human stories, striking at something that’s often hard to see in the shock-and-awe factor of gender transition–the universality of the trans experience, of the way people change. My book, while also being an alternative transgender narrative, is, in more general terms, a story about a person finding the courage to let go of who she was.

Hearing my friend speak of his definitive song made me think, at least for the time being, it would be cathartic, empowering, triumphant to have both my names on the cover of my book. How often do any of us get to hold who we once we were and who we are in one place, or have such a defining way to mark the journey, both the fear and the reward. For him, it was through music, his voice. For me, a writer, it is through my words.

Nina. Nick.

There’s a lifetime between those words. Or at least a book.