license to live, 39

On Saturday I was talking to another trans woman, at least a few years younger than me. She mentioned that the night before she’d been out late, “trying to keep up with the kids” and “do things she missed out on the first time around.” 

I turn 40 in a few months. It’s weighing pretty heavily on me. Some part of me still desperately wants to be 23, going out dancing and talking late into the night, being visible to others, fumbling toward love, learning, having more time and more chances to do it better. I don’t know how to let go of the things I haven’t had.  

The other day my new-ish therapist asked me if I think I’m depressed because I’m so fixated on my loneliness or if I’m so fixated on my loneliness because I’m depressed. I said that I believed that all the years I’ve spent with very little closeness and companionship and intimacy and touch in my life have changed the way my brain functions. But saying that, I realized that some ugly part of me feels like I’m owed something in return for this. 

After therapy, I went to a meditation group that I’ve started attending recently. The focus this week was on forgiveness. The person leading the teachings that night spoke about Ricky Jackson, a man who was exonerated in 2014 after spending 39 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and was able afterward to forgive the man whose false testimony had resulted in his conviction. 

39 years. That’s as long as I’ve been alive. I am amazed by this man’s ability to forgive. I don’t know how to let go of my anger and bitterness over the experiences I haven’t been able to have, but I know that I’m the only one who suffers for my inability to let go of them.

Today this came in the mail. After lots of little hangups and setbacks, I finally have a license with my name and gender on it. 

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And I want to abandon the bitterness that weighs me down but I don’t want to stop wanting the things I want. I want to feel like it’s not at all too late for me to meet someone great who cracks me open in the way that so few people do and who wants to be with me and who might someday be up for hanging out with me in arcades in Japan, even if I’m in my 40s instead of my 20s.