Where are you now?

I finished (!) the first draft (!!) of The Last Alchemist (!!!) at the end of last week, and because writing “THE END” after chapter 33 on a YA manuscript I’ve been dreaming into reality for all of 2024 was only the start of my weekend plans, I chased that with a surgical edit of the manuscript for my previous novel, Enneaka. I added four new (important) pages, and a revision of the (endlessly complicated, to my eye) final chapters. That, friends, was a fun weekend.

I’ll be on to next steps on both of those soon(ish), but for right now, I’ve got a yearning to wander around the screenwriting universe for the rest of the year, ideally finishing the scriptment (or more!) for my spec feature, Safecrackers, before Christmas. Just to get some version of it on the page. Then it’s a race to revise, revise, revise till the Blacklist deadline next summer.

Crazy fuckin’ year, huh?

A month or so back, I ran into someone I don’t see very often, someone who was generally aware that I’d left my prior job (thanks, LinkedIn!), but hadn’t heard any news since about where I’d landed. So he asked: “Where are you now?”

A brief aside: I’ve set myself a minor mental project to be more patient with small talk, because — good lord — we’re all just trying our best out here, and there needs to be ways into a conversation, and sometimes one of them is the faux principle that we all position ourselves around what workplace we trudge to every Monday at 9am. It’s up there with “wow, this weather!” and “what shows have you been watching?” in terms of overall topics of discussion, but it serves a convivial purpose. I get that.

But that phrasing…. “where are you now.” Woof! The implied positionality! The charting and the maps! The need, for me, to break authentically from the question’s in-built assumptions, and provide a real answer!

Here goes:

1. I’m adjusting to freefall, work (and life)wise.

I wrote a bit about this a few weeks ago, so I won’t re-litigate it, except to acknowledge that some of this is scary as fuck.

Not, like, bombs-being-dropped-on-me scary. But — to return (for the third time in an issue of this newsletter!) to the premise of poorly-defined problems — my brain is very definitely not used to not having no real containers or (immediate) success metrics for the work I am trying to do. The result, I would imagine, is like that thing that astronauts report, regarding the experience of zero-G: it feels like I’m falling, all the time.

So, I’m trying to build some bench strength there, and that strength is definitely building. I told my coach the other day that I think I hit the terminal freakout point about a month ago. Since then, I have been feeling overall more comfortable with the discomfort — to coin a paradoxical phrase — than I had been. So that’s good.

I will say: because I’m picking up some contracts now and therefore having to re-learn the skill of structuring out a “work day” that produces some measurable results, both for myself and for my clients… I forgot how frenetic all of that shit is. How fundamentally ennervating office work has become. Like, the anxiety is built into the design.

It’s one of the deepest, strongest beliefs that has kept me from wanting to retreat to the (somewhat) psychological safety of a 9-5 job: modern workplaces are, I think, profoundly toxic to human health and happiness. This isn’t anyone’s fault, per se (except, like, Late Capitalism’s); it’s just, like I said, built into the design, and it becomes kind of blatant when you’re even marginally outside it enough to be able to see all the pieces zinging around.

The basic contract between the provision of labour and its remuneration, at least at the intelligence worker level (and, who are we kidding, probably everywhere else; although I haven’t had any real experience in the other realms since I was in my twenties), is just broken. It has probably been eroded by degrees over the past three or four decades, but it’s sure as fuck fucked now. And it seems like every overall positive improvement to modern office work gets rolled back two years later by a management class that simply, fundamentally, cannot tell the difference between their actual objectives as a business, and the way they want their office to feel.

But I digress.

2. I’m working through how to present myself to the world as a bigender person.

The other freefall, of course, is my continued “bigender odyssey,” which (as noted previously) maybe is not something I should have undertaken simultaneously with a whole-ass career pivot; but then, lol, it’s not like I had a choice.

Still: this new sense of myself, with its day-to-day sensing, is its own kind of near-permanent instability. I doubt that’s permanent, but it’s certainly a fresh set of nerves I’m working with now. So I feel, overall, less moored than I’d like… which would actually suck, if it weren’t for the proportional measure of outright joy that the whole thing has also brought me.

I seem to have solidified a few basic elements of how I think of myself, and my online persona as well, which should mean that what I called the “chaotic online codeswitching” of a few months ago is over, when I might have been changing the styling of my name between replies on a single email thread, which must have looked nuts.

But something larger for me to take away for 2025 is the simple crudity of trying to be my authentic self while wearing what is, ultimately, a very cis-presenting middle-aged man-body, which I am working on, but probably also not in the ways you might think.

Part of it goes back to a bit of advice a nonbinary friend gave me when this was all starting out, which was basically — to paraphrase — as folk with beards (and with neither of us planning to remove them), the world is just kind of always gonna push us in a certain direction, genderwise, because that’s part of what it (“it” being, here, The Patriarchy) is here to do.

I saw this TikTok by a trans creator that I follow and adore, and they explained it better than I can:

That bit about not being taken seriously in my claims to a non-binary identity when I still “look” like a man… yup, that hits. Masucline people as incapable of escaping the gender binary… let’s think more about that, everyone.

Not that anyone’s currently railroading me in any real direction right now, of course. But boy, it sure seems to make some folks’ life easier to see a dude when they see me, which makes me simultaneously want to cut all my hair off and wear a prom dress to the premiere of Wicked this weekend, and also… not do that, out of spite, cuz fuck them? I don’t know, reader. It’s a lot of conflicting emotions, each of which leads down its own potentially viable path. So… a selection process, I guess. A figuring-things-out-as-I-go, Indiana Jones-style.

tl;dr maybe I need boobs. Maybe I would be doing pretty much all of this better with a slight change to my overall physique, which is a nice set of ta-tas.

Instagram, at least, would be happy about it; that algorithm has been obsessively femme-ing me since the moment I changed my pronouns. It even knows my (current) titties are (relatively) small!:

But back to the joyfulness, because again, overall, that shit 👆🏼feels wonderful and more than makes up for any queasy feelings of who-am-I-what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-am-I-doing-this-right, that shake out during the odd moments. (And also: who cares? Monopoly money!)

Which brings me to:

3. I live in a good universe

My meditation instructor frequently brings up a fundamental question we all must ask ourselves as a guideline for how we live our lives: do we believe that we live in a fundamentally good, or fundamentally hostile, universe?

This question, I think, is personal to every single being who answers it. And I don’t interpret it as a question that we’re meant to constantly re-evaluate every day of our lives based on incoming evidence (of which, at least in our sector of the universe lately, the news has been overall pretty shitty), because that would probably erode its value.

I take the question as more of a starting premise, one which guides your responses to everything that follows. If one’s starting premise to every single day is that the universe is, for lack of a better way of embodying it, “out to get you,” that belief creates a certain perception of life that informs everything afterwards. Everything one thinks and does.

If, on the other hand, one believes that being here in whatever we call reality is overall a net-positive experience, one that supports and rewards the meaningful things in life (whatever they might be, to the person answering the question); well, that’s a whole different way of feeling about being alive.

(I recognize that there is a third, “anal-retentive atheist” answer, which is the smug “the universe doesn’t care one way or the other!”, which is to miss the point of the thought experiment so fundamentally that, wow, as an atheist, I feel sorry for that person.)

Anyway. I already gave you my answer to this question in the header to this post, but I’ll answer it again. To me, pretty much the whole way along, I have fundamentally felt that I live in a good universe. Nothing that has happened in all my live-long life has made a real dent in dissuading me on that point. This whole thing has been, as they say, a good-news story.

Or, as I scribbled in my “draft 2.5” revision notes for Enneaka before I dove in on the weekend,

"This is a narrative of joy."

Closing with the links and recs as usual

• Sure, I’m an easy mark for this sort of thing, but this podcast about the gender panic around trans women in sports, and what it really means, was incredible. (Culture Study Podcast)
• As folks finally bail on Xitter and find their way over to either Bluesky and/or Threads, I cannot help but get in my feels a little about what, precisely, motivated the flop now, that wasn’t profoundly evident two years ago, when Musk made his “welcome to transphobic, Nazi hell!” rebranding of the old social media site so plain. Well anyway. Here’s this. (¡Hola Papi!)
• And now, the most “my parents” article of all time. (Altered Carbon)
• It’s not even my top film of the year but I’ll tell ya what: Anora is the film I cannot wait to see again, and have been thinking about every day since. You should go see that! (At a theatre near you)
• While we’re out here giving you things to watch, the second (and final) season of Arcane: League of Legends is killing the game to such a degree that it is making the first season look pale… and the first season was one of the best animated anythings I’ve ever seen. Final three episodes drop tomorrow, and if this feels like too burdensome of a thing for you right now, the total is 18 episodes. You have the time. (Netflix)
• Five years since The Rise of Skywalker?? It’s nearly here. I commemorated with a re-review of the Poe Dameron X-Wing fighter. (Giant Green Space Hand)