Tarot night is once a month, even now that the first little group that started trading readings has spread across the world. It isn’t quite the intimacy of the first kitchen table, but most months find us calling in while doing dishes, cooking dinner, living our lives in the most mundane of ways while we take turns pulling out our decks. We’re so familiar with each other, and with the specifics of how our lives and our emotional landscapes have changed over the years, that very few topics are off the table. Despite being separated by so many miles, we all yelp with glee when Micaela gets the Six of Wands reversed in a relationship reading again, and we hold the space carefully when Tam sees the Tower at the end of their road. From a space built on learning, it’s become about camaraderie and community, support of every kind that we can give.
Which is why, when my friend looks at me and asks, “Were you talking to someone about gender, yesterday?” I answer honestly.
“Yes,” I say. It’s a simple reply and, in that way, a little dishonest. We hadn’t exactly talked – I had called, and had heard the wrong pronouns when people handed the phone to each other. I had reminded them again, a decade in, of who I am. They made some wordless acknowledgement. We moved on.
“Okay,” my friend says. “Listen, I don’t know what’s up, but Hermes says to get them out of your life. Can I- is it okay if I go on?” At my nod, they continue. “I mean, I think he’d use a lot stronger language if it was that kind of deck, but they just – they don’t believe you. They’re waiting for you to change your mind, and worrying about them is keeping you from actually exploring who you are. I think, maybe, because you’re worried you’ll give them ammunition? Convince them that they’re right?” They look at me, awkward and anxious, worried in the way that only another trans person can really access. “How are you doing?”
It’s a complicated question. The folks on my screen, sourced from my friends and friends of my friends over the years, are all somewhere under the queer umbrella. This isn’t the first hurt of this kind that we’ve held for each other, and we all know how much it can hurt, how feeling invisible can seem like choking, like the only option is to shrink down into the box you’re expected to fit.
“I’m fine,” I say, tasting the lie. “I just… It’s been a decade. I’ve never been happier. I figured they’d figure it out.”
“Sometimes people don’t change,” my friend says. “But you can be so much more, if you stop worrying about them.”
A figure in shadows looks over a candlelit tarot spread [cansecotarot, Pixabay]
I have never considered myself either a woman or a man. From the first days of my exploration, I was very clear that my identity was something else, a trickster-slick and shifting thing that slipped past both words and into uncharted lands. It was, by definition, dangerous. I knew this inherently, and had it reaffirmed when my presentation started to change and my partner and I got looks in a restaurant or threats on the bus. The world was scary enough, in those days, and like many people I quickly shifted my goals from being in the world as my fullest self to finding something tolerable, something that seemed safe enough for me to keep going.
For me, that meant finding something like invisibility. I didn’t want people to see me as a man or a woman – but maybe, if I was careful, I could pretend at something strangers would find innocuous, something binary enough that they’d keep their questions to themselves. If all of gender is, in some way, performance – well then, I’d perform something boring enough to keep my anonymity. “Nothing to see here,” I’d say in the way I dressed, the way I walked, the cut of my hair. “Just a simple country kid on their way to work. Move along, citizen.”
The fact that, for the most part, this was manageable is down to pure luck – genetic, economic, systemic. If a white kid of a certain stature wears the right button down and tilts their head just so, if their shoulders look like this and they watch their intonation – well then, what’s there to question? I’ve had jobs, kept company, and lived in places that made it easy for me to blend into crowds and avoid most circumstances where folks might feel entitled to ask prying questions. I have done all of this on purpose, like a constant program running in the back of my head, eating up RAM and threatening to crash the system if I ever run into so much as a hint that it might not be working as intended.
Monthly column about the particulars of my spiritual life aside, I’m a private person. Being myself should, I’m told, be a project of self-discovery and growth. Instead I’ve pruned and clipped and molded myself into something good enough, something I can live with uninterrogated. Calling it exhausting is an understatement: it’s deafening, a project so expansive that it keeps me from hearing the small voice that knows who it is that I really am. I had almost forgotten that voice existed. What could there be, in the world, besides “good enough”?
A bonsai tree [LUCA_Finardi, Pixabay]
Clever readers will already be asking, “Good enough for who?” I’m pleased to say that this question wins you an all-expenses-paid approving slap on the back from Loki, who has been asking the same question for, in his own words, “an Aesir-damned decade.”
The answer is, of course, that there is no way I can perform some hypothetical version of myself that accounts for every hypothetical stranger in the world. What’s more, I shouldn’t try. It misses the point of existing, of the expansive and messy reality of being human. My understanding is that the project of living is an ongoing process of growth, until we are as unique and unmappable as any root system, any ecosystem.
I’ve known this, intellectually, from the start. I am still struggling to internalize it. It feels impossibly risky, like starting to experiment again would put everything at stake. This feeling lives alongside the certain knowledge that my friends, my partners, and even my boss would support me as I moved more into myself. It lives with the knowledge that there is something better out there, some version of me that would carry a truth and a sweetness to their existence, if I’m brave enough to find them.
Even with all of that, one of the things that has pushed me forward, has demanded my honesty and my introspection, has cajoled me through the panic and soothed the nights where I have felt most hopeless, has been my spiritual life. The kid I was ten years ago is a different person than who I am now, and I have grown in many other ways, but this shows up in readings, becomes the topic of meditations, changes how I interact with rituals. The gods keep drawing my attention back here, reminding me that this project is still pending.
What’s more, they remind me that it isn’t work – it’s joy. The spirits I love are all people who are neither-nor, who move between in ways that often feel dangerous. Loki is Aesir and Jotnar, man and woman, outcast and deeply beloved by his followers. Hermes is of the sky and the earth, able to travel between Olympus and Hades, fleet-footed and laughing as he brings back messages and gifts from both. Dionysos is ever-arriving, never at home, giver of terrible and necessary gifts. They remind me that being unmistakably other is not just manageable, not just holy in the way that being a martyr is holy – it is a gift, a blessing, a reason to be loved. They remind me that I am loved for myself.
March 31st is International Transgender Day of Visibility. Unlike its sister holiday in October, Transgender Day of Visibility is about celebrating the community that is alive now, vibrant and creative and ever-expansive. As it’s gotten closer, I’ve thought about my rumpled button-down shirts, my messy hair, all of the signs in my life that I’m living in a way I don’t particularly care about. I’ve thought about my trans siblings across the world who are so much less safe, and who show up as their truest selves on the street and on the bus. I have thought about all of the people who love me, and I have started to wonder how I would like to be seen.
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