Living My Best Life — They Tell Me
Pondering a transition cliché
People sometimes congratulate me for "living my best life."
This is not my best life! Running A Non-Profit out of a laptop, at a seaside cabana in Bali, while my lover sunbathes nude nearby — THAT’S my best life. Giving a TED talk — THAT’S my best life. Getting a Netflix deal on my someday novel. Nesting with the love of my life.
My transition allowed me to finally start living authentically. And I'm deeply proud of myself for taking the very very scary first steps, for not giving up, for still being here. But I'm not done. I'm so far from done.
Then again, life is what happens when you're making other plans. So I also accept the "little glories" — the poetry of the mundane. Getting drunk on cheap wine with my roomies while talking about all the things. The simple pleasure of my bedroom looking like MY bedroom. A rose. An unexpected kiss from a pretty woman. A man holding my hand, looking into my eyes, telling me I'm beautiful.
Most of all, lately I'm noticing how my memories of "the old me" has become so far removed from my sense of self. There once was a man. I barely remember him.
There's something sad in barely being three, four years old. I have no history, I have no family other than my chosen one cobbled from good friends. I never went to school (the boy went to an all-boys high school... but that seems irrelevant). I never married (the man stood in a tuxedo once, filling a role. But that hardly matters).
I am a middle-aged woman, but also a fresh-eyed young adult, and also a chaotically hormonal teenager, and also a tiny toddler, trying to make sense of this shiny, wondrous, terrifying thing called life.
I don’t really know whether I’m living my BEST life. What I do know, with excruciating, vivid, heartbreaking certainty, is that I’m living.
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