Gender Jumper

From late 2016 through the end of graduate school, I was low-key fixated on grief. I had lost my grandfather, two very important relationships, and enough of my sense of self that I committed to being reborn. Sometimes it's just easier to start from scratch than to sort through so much. But even then, I think there was a part of Free (that is, the person I was before, his name was Free) that tried to endure. And although my family is doing better than we have any right to 21 months into the global pandemic and the ongoing frisson of capitalism making its (last?) stand, I'm having a really hard time seeing any future that isn't still hindered by the flotsam of Free's dreams, expectations, and idealistic trust. All year I've been wrestling with whether to sit still where it's safe or dart forward into risk, and to my detriment I have had this conversation mostly internally. Moreover, because I have spent about two years utterly unable to see the future -- I mean, not like I'm psychic, but I am used to having some "sense" of what is possible, where to direct my energy -- I have also walled off the past. What is happening now is about the present, therefore I should live in the present -- right?

But I'm not. I'm still building intentions around the future Free saw for himself and his (my) family. Many times this year, I was tempted to give up on taking the pandemic this seriously and just make a go of that future anyway. But something would hold me back, and sure enough a new variant wave would appear shortly thereafter. Guess I'm not completely out of touch with the future, after all -- maybe it's me, my perception/read. So before I start a deeper thinky on where I need to direct my focus in 2022, I think I need to do what I never did when I had my heart set on it: I need to write out the intention, the plan, the expectation. I'm not sure I will be able to exorcise the whole thing unless I actually see it lain out before me.

( Flashback to March 1, 2020... )