Paula Stone Williams's Blog, page 8

Time for an Encore – Part 3

The awakening to my abiding shadows took place, in fair measure, because the world now receives me as a woman. People do not give the benefit of the doubt to women that they give to men. And who are the worst offenders? Other women. That’s right, it turns out women can be pretty cruel to one another, quick to judge, constantly comparing you to themselves and others. Often they are wrong. I mean, like, really wrong.

It has always been painful to have people point out flaws I know to be true. It is painful because they tend to be the same flaws I’ve been dealing with my entire adult life. And my recognition, awareness, and ownership of them does not provide much relief, other than the relief that goes along with embracing the truth.

It is quite another experience to be accused of actions that are not based in any kind of reality. Often it is the other person projecting onto me their own way of operating. Sometimes it is transference, when a person redirects their feelings about another person onto me. That happens a lot with therapists and pastors. You end up the recipient of pain that should be directed at the person with whom they are really angry. Instead, it’s easier to transfer that anger onto you.

Sometimes the origin is a mystery to me; I just know I am being accused of behavior or motives that are not remotely true. “Did that happen often as a guy?” you ask. No, it did not. And learning to handle the gossip, innuendo, and judgment has been one of the most difficult parts of being a woman. I see why a lot of women prefer friendships with men to friendships with women. They are less complicated.

The redemptive part of the judgment is the awakening to my legitimate abiding shadows, the ones not confronted when I was Paul. I’m reminded of Rilke’s concept of life’s necessary defeats in his poem, The Man Watching, which ends with these words, “Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

Such criticism, both justified and unjustified shook my self-confidence. No wonder women are always apologizing for themselves. They are constantly being told they are doing it all wrong.

Reengaging With an Encore Life

A couple of years after the Humpty Dumpty experience of having a great fall, I finally emerged from the dark night of the soul, or the dark cave of the hero’s journey, or whatever analogy you want to use that mirrors the pain of waking from a bad dream only to realize it is not a dream at all, but a cold, stark reality. Slowly I found my footing again, and I was ready to reengage the world, one day at a time .

Three years after my transition I did a TEDTalk that has had to date, almost 7 million views. That talk was quickly followed by two others that have had another three million views. Those talks ushered me into the world of TED and the largest TEDx in North America, TEDxMileHigh. I became a Speaker’s Ambassador for TED, a great honor, and a Memorization and Delivery Coach for TEDxMileHigh, another wonderful honor.

That first TEDTalk gave me fifteen minutes of fame, and an international platform for speaking to corporations, conferences, and universities on gender inequity, the subject of my talk. It also gave me a contract with Simon & Schuster for my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

We all have abilities, gifts, and pinnacle gifts. An ability is something you are good at but do not particularly enjoy. For me, that is doing the finances for RLT Pathways, the company Cathy and I own. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it. A gift is something you are good at that you enjoy so much you lose track of time when you are doing it. Writing, counseling, leading – those are gifts I am blessed to enjoy.  A pinnacle gift is something at which you are so good that people say, “That is your sweet spot. It is where you excel.” Your pinnacle gift is what you do that is most affirmed by others. For me, it is public speaking. Whether doing a keynote for a corporation, a sermon for a church, emceeing a TEDxMileHigh event, or a television interview, I am blessed to hear people say, “This – this is your sweet spot.”

As Paul, my speaking was all related to ministry. As Paula, it has expanded to corporate, university, and conference speaking, not to mention my good fortune with TED.

When searching for an encore life, your new career or offerings to the world will always be within the realm of your gifts or pinnacle gifts. And often it will arrive unexpectedly. Through my speaking for TED and TEDxMileHigh, I have discovered I truly love coaching other speakers. I emcee events for TEDxMileHigh and it is an honor getting the crowd ready for each speaker. But I love coaching those speakers even more. That is the highest honor, helping people with incredible ideas, big enough to be chosen for a TEDTalk, and helping those people present their ideas in the most compelling way possible.

That, I discovered, was a new gift, born out of my decades of public speaking. A new gift emerging at the time most people are retiring. Who knew? The truth is that it can be true for anyone, if you give yourself permission to be open to new opportunities, and allow your soul to soar.

After my transition I also continued my counseling practice, and found it naturally moving in a direction I did not anticipate, working with people in C-suite positions at corporations. I am as comfortable working with men as I am working with women. I understand the experiences of both genders because I have the unique experience of having lived in both genders.

That is another element of creating an encore – finding gifts that are uniquely yours, and offering those gifts to the world.

Part 4 to come.

Time for an Encore, Part II

This week, part two of “Time for an Encore.”

During this period of taking stock and the first letting go, I asked a second question, “What do I really want?” The limelight and I are friends. Being seen and appreciated has always been more important than being well-compensated. I grew up in a world in which it was considered a sin to be ambitious or to seek an audience. Those were signs of the sin of pride.  A favorite phrase of my family, common in Appalachia, was, “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was all right to do well singing a solo at your elementary school concert. It was not alright to bask in the applause. My mother saw it as her job to make sure I did not get too big for my britches. She excelled at the task. But I loved an audience. I loved discovering I could hold the attention of a group of people just by singing a song or telling a story. And I always wanted to do it in such a way that someone felt better than when they started their day.

In my forties I identified a life phrase that guided my work. It was an unusual phrase I suppose – to lessen spiritual suffering. As I developed my pastoral counseling practice, the phrase continued to guide me and I chose to specialize in healing spiritual trauma. Making people happy is elusive. Lessening unnecessary suffering is more attainable, at least most of the time. It is never easy, but it is worthy.

Which brought me to the third question, “What should I do?” I needed to do the second letting go, this time not age related, but leaving the past behind to live authentically into an uncertain future. (You never attain authenticity. You can only live authentically.) I knew I had to come out as transgender and within seven days lost every one of my jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

That experience is captured in my first two TEDTalks. It is more completely chronicled in my memoir, As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

Life in the Liminal Space

When I came out, I was still not certain I was going to transition. After losing all of my jobs and most of my friends, I tried one more time, for three months, to live as Paul. It was not sustainable, and oh, there is so much in that sentence.

I returned to my chameleon-like life transitioning back and forth. It is a blur, remembered through a glass darkly. On one side was the elation of letting go and moving in the direction of authenticity. On the other side was the pain of discontinuity that signaled a life lost, never to return. I was a transgender woman on a desert island with no accessible past and a supremely uncertain future.

I am now ten years post-transition, and in retrospect I can see that I exited this difficult transitional space incrementally. The first phase took three years. The second, another four, and the third phase, a very difficult two years.

During those last two years I learned the importance of identifying what was and was not within my control. As a white male, I had far more control than I have as a woman. I had to accept reality and acknowledge what had happened and where it deposited me. I had to live my life as it was, in the present moment. It did not help to blame others. It did help to take inventory of the events and their causes and accept them. I had little choice but to live my life as it was, in the present moment. That was when I frequented David Wagoner’s Poem, Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here, you must treat it as a powerful stranger

Must ask its permission to know it and be known

Listen, the forest breathes; it whispers “I have made this place around you

If you leave, you may return again saying, Here

No two trees are the same to Raven; no two branches are the same to Wren

If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost

What do you do when you’re lost in the forest? Stand still

The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you

Those last two years may have been the two hardest years of my life. I had to take stock yet again. I discovered taking stock and letting go are essential skills to develop on the road less traveled by.

During that time I had to come to grips with what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls existential guilt. It is the recognition that some personality traits have been with me for as long as I can remember and are likely to remain with me for as long as I live. They are not positive traits. I call them my abiding shadows. And the best I can hope for is to be able to identify them, all of them, and lock them in the basement, knowing damn well that they will find their way out. When that happens, my task is to catch them before they’ve done much damage and lock them in the basement again. There is no joy in this, only the abiding desire to unleash a bit less suffering into the world.

Toward the end of that two year period, I kept returning to two stanzas from William Butler Yeats’s poem, Vacillation.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.  

Next week, Part 3.

Time for an Encore, Part Two

This week, part two of “Time for an Encore.”

During this period of taking stock and the first letting go, I asked a second question, “What do I really want?” The limelight and I are friends. Being seen and appreciated has always been more important than being well-compensated. I grew up in a world in which it was considered a sin to be ambitious or to seek an audience. Those were signs of the sin of pride.  A favorite phrase of my family, common in Appalachia, was, “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was all right to do well singing a solo at your elementary school concert. It was not alright to bask in the applause. My mother saw it as her job to make sure I did not get too big for my britches. She excelled at the task. But I loved an audience. I loved discovering I could hold the attention of a group of people just by singing a song or telling a story. And I always wanted to do it in such a way that someone felt better than when they started their day.

In my forties I identified a life phrase that guided my work. It was an unusual phrase I suppose – to lessen spiritual suffering. As I developed my pastoral counseling practice, the phrase continued to guide me and I chose to specialize in healing spiritual trauma. Making people happy is elusive. Lessening unnecessary suffering is more attainable, at least most of the time. It is never easy, but it is worthy.

Which brought me to the third question, “What should I do?” I needed to do the second letting go, this time not age related, but leaving the past behind to live authentically into an uncertain future. (You never attain authenticity. You can only live authentically.) I knew I had to come out as transgender and within seven days lost every one of my jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

That experience is captured in my first two TEDTalks. It is more completely chronicled in my memoir, As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

Life in the Liminal Space

When I came out, I was still not certain I was going to transition. After losing all of my jobs and most of my friends, I tried one more time, for three months, to live as Paul. It was not sustainable, and oh, there is so much in that sentence.

I returned to my chameleon-like life transitioning back and forth. It is a blur, remembered through a glass darkly. On one side was the elation of letting go and moving in the direction of authenticity. On the other side was the pain of discontinuity that signaled a life lost, never to return. I was a transgender woman on a desert island with no accessible past and a supremely uncertain future.

I am now ten years post-transition, and in retrospect I can see that I exited this difficult transitional space incrementally. The first phase took three years. The second, another four, and the third phase, a very difficult two years.

During those last two years I learned the importance of identifying what was and was not within my control. As a white male, I had far more control than I have as a woman. I had to accept reality and acknowledge what had happened and where it deposited me. I had to live my life as it was, in the present moment. It did not help to blame others. It did help to take inventory of the events and their causes and accept them. I had little choice but to live my life as it was, in the present moment. That was when I frequented David Wagoner’s Poem, Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here, you must treat it as a powerful stranger

Must ask its permission to know it and be known

Listen, the forest breathes; it whispers “I have made this place around you

If you leave, you may return again saying, Here

No two trees are the same to Raven; no two branches are the same to Wren

If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost

What do you do when you’re lost in the forest? Stand still

The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you

Those last two years may have been the two hardest years of my life. I had to take stock yet again. I discovered taking stock and letting go are essential skills to develop on the road less traveled by.

During that time I had to come to grips with what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls existential guilt. It is the recognition that some personality traits have been with me for as long as I can remember and are likely to remain with me for as long as I live. They are not positive traits. I call them my abiding shadows. And the best I can hope for is to be able to identify them, all of them, and lock them in the basement, knowing damn well that they will find their way out. When that happens, my task is to catch them before they’ve done much damage and lock them in the basement again. There is no joy in this, only the abiding desire to unleash a bit less suffering into the world.

Toward the end of that two year period, I kept returning to two stanzas from William Butler Yeats’s poem, Vacillation.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.  

Next week, Part 3.

Time for an Encore

Carl Jung said, “You cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.”

I was the CEO of a tiny non-profit that grew from a budget of 200k to 4m. I was CEO or Chair for 25 of the 35 years I worked there. When I began I wanted what the young want – affirmation, status, and income that would give my family a comfortable life.

The organization expanded from Long Island to working across the nation, as well as beginning a few ventures overseas. But in my industry, it was rare for someone to stay in the CEO position beyond their mid-60s. In my mid-50s, I knew it was time to prepare for a new chapter. I went back to seminary and ten days after I turned 61, received my Doctor of Ministry degree in Pastor Care. Six months earlier I had stepped down as CEO and became non-executive chair. That was my first letting go.

I have always been a Renaissance person, and in addition to my leadership of the non-profit, I also worked as the editor-at-large of a magazine, and on the teaching team of a couple of megachurches. I was a national leader and knew well over a thousand people by name.

My second letting go was radical, the kind of letting go that happens after you’ve come to the stark realization that your ladder to the heavens has been leaning against the wrong wall.

I announced to the world that I was transgender. A year later I transitioned genders. I lost all of my jobs within 24 hours, and my pension. I even had to fight to get back hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been designated for my own salary. Those thousands of people I knew? In the ten years since my transition, I’ve had substantive conversations with exactly six of them.

One life ended – completely, which is unusual. Most of us go through multiple transitions during our lives, but there is a certain continuity on which we can depend. Friendships remain. Family is still intact. We may stay in the same industry. There is an unbroken line to our lives.

 In my case, there was almost no continuity, no unbroken line. I lost every one of my jobs. My marriage ended (though we remain close) and pretty much my entire work world abandoned me. If there was to be an encore life, it would have to begin from scratch. What do you do when you are 62 and have to start a new life from scratch?

I had known for some time that my theology was moving left of what was acceptable in my denomination. I thought I could bring about change from within. Whatever change did occur was incremental, and dictated by the whims of financial expediency. It was not enough. A non-profit cannot survive without donations. After transitioning, going back into the evangelical world was impossible, and I did not want to move into any area that might satisfy my ego but not my soul.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis said the soul is interested in two things – power and safety. After you’ve lost everything, the last thing you are concerned about is power and safety. They are out of reach, and you painfully know it. Your ego has been defeated, which is a good thing, and you no longer focus on power and safety. The desires of the ego seem remote.

When forced into a major defeat that brings disruption and discontinuity, one’s ego finally fades and one’s soul emerges. It is not because your better angels take over. It is because it takes defeat of the ego to free the soul. Your ego has always wanted the retirement benefits. Your soul has always been here for the ride.

As I said, as a young person I wanted pretty much what everyone else wants, affirmation, status, and to provide for my family. My background and culture established the goals. The main question was, “How do I achieve those goals?”

As I approached my sixties, the question was no longer how. The question was why? Why did I arrive here and more importantly, for what purpose? I asked three questions:

Who am I?What do I really want?What should I do?

The first was powerfully difficult to accept and even more difficult to act upon. I knew from the time I was three or four I was transgender, but it was not until I was watching LOST, my favorite television show of all time, that I thought of the three questions related to my identity. Who am I at my core? Who is the visible me? Who is the best me?

My core self is incorporated in a line in my first TEDTalk. It is also the dedication line of my memoir, As a Woman. The line is,  “The call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good.” My core self was Paula. Which meant my visible self needed to be Paula. Which meant my best self could only be born out of Paula. My life, as I knew it, was over.

And as for this week’s post, I’ll leave you there. I’ll pick this up next week.

And so it goes…

Ah, the Good Old Days

One more post about flying. Unlike last week, this post is not about the differences between flying as Paul and Paula. Today, I want to talk about the differences between flying in the 70s and in the 20s. And yes, the differences are a lot greater than the differences between a YS-11 and an Airbus 321Neo. Is anyone else still alive who knows what a YS-11 is, or what US airlines flew it? Well other than the one pictured here, I mean.

Things I remember: They used to serve a hot breakfast to all 74 people aboard an Allegheny BAC 1-11 on the flight between LaGuardia and Buffalo. It was pancakes with butter and real maple syrup, a cheese and bacon omelet, and fruit, all included in the price of the ticket, for everyone on the plane. This on what was, on one particular January day in 1976, a 58-minute flight. I was in the first row and the flight attendants were talking about what an accomplishment it was to pull that off in 58 minutes. They were excited, not sad or angry with management for doing that to them.

Not long after that I was flying on the same airline on a one-stop from Buffalo to Detroit to Cincinnati. You stopped in Detroit, but didn’t get off. Some folks got off, but they were the ones going to Detroit. Most folks were going on to Cincinnati. The flight had been delayed in Buffalo on account of a mechanical problem. Not a bad delay mind you, just a half hour. (It didn’t take a long time to write up repairs back then.) But the shift manager came over to the gate agent and said, I’ll sign off on free drinks for everyone. So, on our way to DTW, there were free drinks for everyone. Well, if you were over 21, which I was by about four years. I didn’t drink, but still, it was a marvelous gesture.

Last week, when we waited almost two hours for a mechanic to fill out the logbook on the repair he’d made (I wrote about that last week,) we didn’t get free drinks, or even water and a granola bar. And I was in first class. After we finally got to SFO the captain said, “Sorry about the delay in Dallas.” Apparently, that was the extent of the airline’s concern.

Here’s another thing folks did back in the day. They looked out the window of the airplane. On my flight from DFW to SFO last week, there were five rows of first class with 20 people. I was on the aisle in the first row – 1D, my usual seat. No one had their windows open – from pushback to landing – not one person. Everyone had their eyes on their phone or tablet. Every single one. Even I was reading a book on my phone, though I would rather have been looking out the window. The Rockies are beautiful to fly over, and it was a perfectly clear day, or so I heard later from the folks back home, because I couldn’t tell, window shades being closed and all.

If you’re flying over the Ohio or Missouri rivers, you can see how they turn back on themselves 180 degrees time and again. The Army Core of Engineers straightened out the Missouri and ruined the Mississippi for 100 miles with silt from the Missouri. Turns out there’s a reason rivers turn back on themselves 180 degrees. It’d be best to trust their flow. It is fascinating to see when and where a river makes its detours. It’s not concerned about hurrying the trip. It knows where it’s going, and knows it’ll eventually get there. I’m sure you can google during your flight where rivers are going. Or you can look out the window, you know, the one that’s closed.

Things I never saw on an airplane in the 70s or 80s: someone taking their shoes off; people getting into a fight because the person in front of them reclined their seat; people yelling at a flight attendant; flight attendants talking loudly in the galley; flight attendants slamming overhead bins shut (there is actually a way to quietly close them. Just fly an Asian carrier and you’ll see.) And now I’m sounding like Tom Hanks in the movie Otto.

Back before Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines, it wasn’t unusual to be on a flight with seven or eight other people. It was wonderful, with lots of space and personalized attention. Airlines made a profit. Airline executives weren’t hell bent on not leaving a dollar on the table. Gate agents could give you an upgrade just because they felt like it.

I had a friend who was the station manager for USAir at Long Island Islip airport. She quit her job when America West took over and told her she couldn’t give upgrades anymore. She said, “If I can’t reward our best customers, then why am I here?” She was old school. So was her successor, who retired not long ago. I’d known both of them for decades – salt of the earth kinds of people.

Some things are better than they were thirty years ago. My Apple MacBook Air with its M2 chip and 1080p camera is state of the art, though there is still a special place in my heart for my first Mac PowerBook. That thing was a tank. We took it on outdoor television shoots at 17 below zero and it still fired up.

Well, I’m done complaining like an old man. “But you’re a woman,” you say. Yeah, that’s true, but I still have a Y chromosome.

And so it goes.

The State of Gender Inequity

When I transitioned genders I found it difficult to compare my new experience of life with my old experience. I had traveled life as a white man, better educated than most, financially secure. I ran a non-profit, preached for large churches, was the editor-at-large of a magazine, the host and head writer of a television program.

When I came out as Paula, all that was gone, most of it within 24 hours. My new life looks nothing like my previous life, so trying to compare the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Still a nourishing life, but wildly dissimilar to the one I led before.

Which made flying a wonderful laboratory. I had been Executive Platinum with American Airlines as Paul and I’m still EP as Paula. Unlike the church and all of my jobs, American handled my transition with nothing more than a shrug and a request for a legal name change. Now I could compare apples with apples, life in seat 1D as Paul and life in 1D as Paula.

What I discovered was sobering. Apparently, Paul was brilliant, knowledgeable, a customer to be pampered. Paula was not. Surely by some fluke Paula accidentally earned Executive Platinum status one year, but it was an anomaly not worthy of anyone’s attention. Yes, it really was that bad.

I talked about it in my first TED Talk, and still do in most speeches on gender equity. I always have a raft of new stories, fresh from a recent trip. Coming through DFW (my least favorite airport in my least favorite state) in June, a 12-year-old gate agent with an attitude said, “Ma’am, why are you standing there?” I looked around to see who he was addressing and when I realized it was me I answered, “Um, I’m waiting to board.” He said, “Well, you can’t stand there.”

Now my hackles were up. “And why can’t I stand here at the Zones 1-4 line when I am, in fact, in Zone 1, sitting in 1D, and the sign behind you says we are boarding in five minutes?” He said, “Because I may need that space.” I said, “And I definitely need the space in the overhead above 1D, because there is nowhere else to place my bags, hence my desire to board as soon as Zone 1 is called.”

Mr. Twelve-Year-Old said, “Why are you concerned about that?” Now, agitation registering, I replied, “Because FA’s put their bags above 1D in this type of 321 because there is no closet up front. So, they use my space to stash their bags. Unless I want to fight against the crowd when it is time to leave the plane, struggling back several rows to get to my bag, I need to board at the beginning, which I am, in fact, waiting to do.”

Then I added, “I have 2.6 million actual in the air miles with your company. I have been flying in 1D since before you were born, and in the 40 years since your frequent flyer program was started, this is the first time I have ever been told to move from the boarding lane because you ‘might need the space.'” He said, “Ma’am, are you going to move or do I have to call someone.” Not wanting to get arrested and all, I stepped aside. The man standing behind me, waiting to board, moved up to take my space.  In exactly the same spot I had stood, he did not get so much as a glance from Mr. Twelve-Year-Old gate agent.

How would all that have played out had I still been Paul. It would have gone like this. Mr. Twelve-Year-Old gate agent would have looked up at me, then looked back down at his computer screen and continued his work. That is how it would have played out. He never would have started the altercation. I know because as Paul I was never asked to move aside, not once, ever.

These micro-aggressions happen about every third or fourth trip, on average. Most aren’t that egregious. Most of the time, like most women, I just let it go, because you only have so much energy. And worse, I am getting used to it, so I barely notice the micro-aggressions anymore.

I thought about writing the CEO of American. The last time I wrote about a problem, their Director of DEI called me, which was pretty cool. But that problem was transgender specific, and American is far more responsive to LGBTQ+ issues than they are to “run of the mill” gender inequity issues. Treating a trans person badly might give them bad press. Treating a woman badly is just life in a patriarchal world.

I’m on a flight to SFO as I write this post, and we’ve been waiting for almost two hours for maintenance to complete the write-up of the repairs they made so it can be recorded in the logbook. Two hours to write up a repair in the logbooks! That is the state of flying today. I did leave my seat at 1D and ask the A flight attendant if the crew might time out. It’s late in the day. Blessedly, she recognized I knew what I was talking about. Motioning to the cockpit she said, “Those guys have about an hour to spare. The FA’s have more.”

She is a seasoned flight attendant who started with USAir 35 years ago. We talked about how wonderful Edwin Colodny was as chair of USAir back in the day. Then we talked about the utter mystery of what takes so long when mechanics write-up their repairs after they’ve finished. Do they take a nap first? If you’re an airplane mechanic, please enlighten me.

The captain heard us talking and stepped out of the cockpit and said, “You’d think someone might follow them back to their desks to see what they are actually doing. It’s a mystery to us all. Both captain and flight attendant treated me exactly as they might have treated Paul. It was refreshing.

We got to SFO about 90 minutes late. I checked in at the hotel and yet again, had a check-in agent who did not mention my Titanium Elite status with Marriott. They mentioned it to Paul all the time, thanking me for my loyalty to Marriott. Apparently, Paula’s loyalty doesn’t matter.

Apples to apples, here’s what I know. Life is a lot easier for men than it is for women. And nobody, male, female, or non-binary, seems to understand the murky underworld of airliner logbook repair notes.

And so it goes.

That’s Rather Remarkable, and Sad

I met with a church member last week who spoke about being traumatized by a church in the state in which she previously lived. The more she talked, the more I knew which church she was talking about. It is one of the respected larger congregations from my former denomination. The lead pastor, a sweet guy, was once president of our national convention. Though it has been a long time, it is a church at which I have spoken.

It is not the first time I’ve had someone at Envision Community Church tell me about being wounded by a church with which I used to be affiliated. In fact, the chair of our board attended one when she was in high school. Lots of people move to Colorado from lots of places, so I am not surprised at the breadth of states in which these churches exist: Arizona/Washington/Texas/California/Indiana Kentucky/Ohio/Pennsylvania/New Hampshire/Florida/Illinois/Colorado. I am probably missing one or two states. Three states have multiple churches on the list. They are Colorado, which given where my church is located, is to be expected, plus Indiana and Kentucky.

Our little church has only been in existence for five years, yet already I have had individuals talk with me about their wounding experience at churches affiliated with my former denomination in twelve different states. That is rather remarkable, and sad.

Most are megachurches. None of the people at my church knew of my former affiliation with the denomination. Over coffee or dinner they simply told me how hurt they were when they found out their church did not accept LGBTQ+ people. Sometimes it was in a very public way, spoken by the pastor from the pulpit. Other times the church would not be forthcoming about their stance on LGBTQ+ people, even when the person asked directly. A few times LGBTQ+ issues were not the cause of the harm. It was teaching the substitutionary atonement, specifically that a blood sacrifice is necessary to appease an angry God.

I loved my former denomination. Best I can figure, I am the fifth generation of my family to have been a part of it. Among church historians it is referred to as the Stone/Campbell movement, and I had connections on both sides of it. My mother was a Stone from Bourbon County, Kentucky. And yes, it appears Barton W. Stone is on my family tree. My father’s mother was baptized in Brush Run Creek, where Alexander and Thomas Campbell established a church in what is now northern West Virginia.

My denomination has no headquarters or church hierarchy, though pretty much everybody knows who the fifty or so most influential leaders are. Most would have included me on that list. I served as Vice-President of the national convention, and on its executive committee for a number of years. For those who know the Stone/Campbell movement, I was a part of the middle branch of the movement, the Independent Christian Churches, not the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, or the Disciples of Christ, a more liberal denomination.

Should I be surprised when these folks tell me their stories? Truthfully, no. After all, I knew well over one thousand people by name within the denomination. Post transition, I’ve heard from about 20 of them, and spoken more than once with just six. I am only in regular contact with two. The great majority discarded me faster than you can say “excommunicated.”

Yet still, I am surprised. My love for these churches runs deep. The pastor mentioned by the woman with whom I met last week is someone I have always respected. He has an irenic spirit and is a person of character. Yet he left my church member traumatized (her words, not mine.) And no, he is not one of the 20 people who have reached out to me since my transition.

I, too, once believed that gay relationships were wrong and the substitutionary atonement was true, though I was never comfortable with either doctrine. I read an article challenging the substitutionary atonement in the mid-80s, and kept it in a prominent place in my filing cabinet. I struggled with where I stood on that doctrine until after my transition. I had changed my position on LGBTQ+ issues in the late 80s. I did not go public, other than within my book club of Roman Catholic friends in New York. I thought that was okay at the time. It was not.

I am sure that I, too, traumatized people unknowingly, by not speaking out in support of queer people, or in support of what most call universal salvation, the notion that God loves everyone just as we are, no changes demanded to get into heaven.

One of the most difficult things about being transgender is the discontinuity between my life as Paul and my life as Paula. It is exacerbated by the fact that my ostracization from my denomination was total and unequivocal. The truth is that it would have been just as complete had I only changed my theology, not my gender. I imagine more than six people would have had conversations with me, but based on what has happened to others, my theological shift alone would have still brought about the loss of my denomination.

I think of how different it would have been had I been a part of the Disciples of Christ, the more liberal side of the Stone/Campbell movement. It would have been marvelous to have continuity in my religious community, to have folks who could say, “Do you remember when we changed the magazine from a weekly to a monthly?” or “The first time we met was at that CIY conference in the late 70s. Remember that?” But alas, any possibility of continuity within my denomination is gone.

Integrating the two halves of my life has proven to be quite difficult. My former church world certainly has done nothing to help. And it sure does hurt when time and again church members tell me of their wounding by a church in the denomination I once loved. It’s all hard, really hard.

And so it goes.

Some Say…

I watched Oppenheimer last week and found it to be a very good movie. Over the years I’ve read a lot about the Manhattan Project. I grew up when the possibility of nuclear war seemed imminent. I remember only too well hiding under my desk in atomic bomb drills at my elementary school. We were all terrified of atomic war in the 1950s and early 60s, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis.

A couple of days after seeing Oppenheimer, I went with Cathy to see Barbie because, well, why not? I was not prepared for how good it was. I cried, like, a lot. I cried during America Ferrera’s monologue about the life of women. I’ve only been Paula for ten years, but I have already experienced a lot of what she described. But that wasn’t the only reason I cried.

Ten years into my life as Paula, I have come to feel comfortable in my own skin, though not always in the world I inhabit. I do not claim a cisgender experience. I do not see the world in 28-day cycles. I see it as linear. I do not have ovaries or a uterus. I have lots of estrogen and no testosterone, both of which feel right, and I also love that the world receives me as a woman. That is important to me, and it is true 99.9 percent of the time, which is very much  a blessing. But I have no illusions. I come from the borderlands between genders, from the liminal space between male and female.

I do not describe myself as non-binary because I am not. I am a transgender woman. Still, I do not feel like I belong in Barbie Land, though I give a big nod to the producers for including a transwoman as one of the Barbies. I also do not belong in the short-lived Kendom, inspired by Ken’s brief trip into the world of the patriarchy. I do not belong in either fantasy land.

Increasingly, I also do not feel like I belong in America. Given what happened to Anheuser Busch after their support of Dylan Mulvaney, I feel vulnerable. Corporate speaking engagements have dried up alarmingly quickly. Companies are afraid of having a transgender speaker. With 78 anti-trans bills signed into law this year, there are now 20 states in which it can be dangerous for me to travel. All of that was also on my mind as I cried through Barbie.

I also cried because of what Cathy and my daughters, daughter-in-law and granddaughters have gone through, living in a patriarchal system in which they do not even realize how heavy their handcuffs are. I know how heavy they are. I lived for six decades without them.

I watched both films while I am also watching Dickinson, the AppleTV+ show about the life of Emily Dickinson. The show ran for three seasons and thirty episodes between 2019 and 2021. In my opinion, it is a superb show, especially after the first few episodes. It takes a while to get accustomed to the somewhat jarring juxtaposition between 19th century New England and the show’s contemporary music score, as well as more than handful of current cultural colloquialisms. But give it time, it works.

There is a point in season two in which Sue, Emily’s sister-in-law, and according to many scholars, her life-long romantic interest, says to Emily, “You don’t want fame. You crave meaning. You crave beauty. You crave love.” That was when I cried hard in Dickinson.

Good storytelling brings tears, and laughter, and all manner of emotions. I cried all the way through Ted Lasso. I imagine you did too. Given how much the show runners were affected by James Hollis’s The Middle Passage, no surprise there.

People sometimes say, “You live life with too much drama.” My response is that maybe they don’t live with enough drama. Life, this short pause between two great mysteries, is complex, awful, wonderful, and profoundly difficult. I accept all the feelings that file in through the front door, bringing their bags with them, sometimes for an extended stay. They tell me I am alive, and making the most of my time on earth.

Life is peaks and valleys and long periods on the open plains. Sometimes bright sunshine, sometimes shadows and storms. Periods of elation followed by pensiveness, followed by the worst, boredom. I need to be busy. So did my father, and his father before him. So do Jonathan and Jana. Jael is more like Cathy, enjoying times of quiet solitude.

I want my work to be meaningful. If you believe the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, you also believe in the importance of good work.

Oppenheimer’s legacy is complicated. Was his work good? Given the line he spoke to Einstein in the last scene of the movie, it is obvious he asked the same question.

Emily Dickinson was virtually unknown during her life. Most of her poems were not published until well after her death. Her legacy was her poems, and they endure. All things being equal, I’d rather leave a legacy of poems than a legacy that, in the wrong hands, could spell the end of the species.

How will people see the journey of a transgender pastor a century from now? Will anyone care? Will the fight for LGBTQ+ rights be seen as laudable, or will the conservative side have won, or will the controversy surrounding it be so far in the past that no one pays any attention? Who knows?

I do not care about a legacy. I care about living as authentically as I am able, given my flaws and such. I hope my children and grandchildren remember me fondly, when their lives slow down enough to allow them to remember the past at all.

I’ve only memorized two poems from Emily Dickinson. I memorized the first about a quarter of a century ago:

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

Challenge or Attack?

While I was at the Wild Goose Festival two weeks ago I talked with several speakers and authors about hate mail. We all get it and respond in ways consistent with who we are. One of the authors I know answers every negative correspondence with a short pithy quote appropriate to the comment. That takes a lot of work. Another publishes what the person says, along with their name. That’s an approach, I reckon. None of the people I was with at the Goose respond that way. They mostly respond as I do.

The second I can tell I am being attacked, I stop reading. Life is too short to respond to people who have already drawn their conclusions, truth be damned. Ninety-nine percent of the evil in the world is done by people who are 100 percent convinced they are right.

If I am challenged, but not attacked, I will respond, though not until I have taken the time necessary to seriously consider the challenge. Often, there is at least a kernel of truth in what they are saying. Though it is painful to acknowledge that kernel, I know of no other way to grow. M. Scott Peck said the path to wisdom is through the brambles and thickets of stringent self-examination and openness to challenge from the outside.

Remaining open to challenge is good. To allow yourself to be attacked is fruitless. My experience is that those doing the attacking are not the people doing the work of stringent self-examination, or open to challenge from the outside. From their perspective the problem is always the actions of others, never their own. There is no value in reading the words of those who always see the problem as “out there.”

It is worthwhile to be open to challenge. The hero of all great myths is the person willing to go where others will not go, which sometimes means facing the parts of themselves they do not want to face. It is a willingness to spend three days and three nights in a dark place. For Jonah, it was the belly of a whale. For Gilgamesh, it was a cave. For Jesus, it was a borrowed grave. Of course the ancients understood the symbolism. There is no moon for three nights every month, and those are the darkest times.

Fighting the mother of Grendel In his own dark place at the bottom of a cold and forbidding lake, Beowulf had to come to grips with the fact that his hubris had caused the death of the king’s best friend. When he killed Grendel, Beowulf confidently told the king he had solved his problem. In reality, Grendel was not the problem. The mother of Grendel was the problem. As David Whyte says, our problem is not the thing we fear. It is that which gave birth to the thing we fear. In Beowulf’s case,  the mother of Grendel was his own hubris. Beowulf had to fight her for three days and three nights  in the dark, cold, forbidding waters of her lair. He rose from those waters wiser, though exhausted.

Jonah had to learn that saying no to the call of God never works out so well. When you reject the call of God, you do so at your own peril. It took three days and three nights in the belly of a fish to know he was called to Nineveh, like it or not.

Every ancient myth includes a time in which the hero must face themselves in the mirror. They must own their abiding shadows, those parts of themselves that have always been a problem and will always be a problem. Only after they have completed that work is the hero able to move on.

Once you have faced your own abiding flaws, you can be okay when others name them, though it is always painful. Having them named means that once again, they have escaped from the basement and done their damage. You must get to work putting them back in the basement, where they can do as little damage as possible. Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer comes to mind. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

There are six words I will not speak – “I am too old to change.” If you are too old to change, you are too old. When I hear people speak those words, I wonder when they gave up? When were they so wounded they could not recover? When did they abandon the belief that getting out of bed in the morning includes facing your entire self in the mirror, not just the parts you like.

Being open to challenge creates wisdom. Being attacked does not. It only generates despair. When you are challenged, turn inward and discern the truth that might exist within the challenge. When you are attacked, build a wall. Protect yourself. Create boundaries. None of us can withstand an onslaught of terrible words, particularly when they have been designed to wound us as deeply as possible.

I will continue to be open to being challenged. On the other hand, I will not subject myself to attack.

And so it goes.

Challenge, or Attack?

While I was at the Wild Goose Festival two weeks ago I talked with several speakers and authors about hate mail. We all get it and respond in ways consistent with who we are. One of the authors I know answers every negative correspondence with a short pithy quote appropriate to the comment. That takes a lot of work. Another publishes what the person says, along with their name. That’s an approach, I reckon. None of the people I was with at the Goose respond that way. They mostly respond as I do.

The second I can tell I am being attacked, I stop reading. Life is too short to respond to people who have already drawn their conclusions, truth be damned. Ninety-nine percent of the evil done in the world is done by people who are 100 percent convinced they are right.

If I am challenged, but not attacked, I will respond, though not until I have taken the time necessary to seriously consider the challenge. Often, there is at least a kernel of truth in what they are saying. Though it is painful to acknowledge that kernel, I know of no other way to grow. M. Scott Peck said the path to wisdom is always through the brambles and thickets of stringent self-examination and openness to challenge from the outside.

Remaining open to challenge is good. To allow yourself to be attacked is fruitless. My experience is that those doing the attacking are not the people doing the work of stringent self-examination, or open to challenge from the outside. From their perspective the problem is always the actions of others, never their own. There is no value in reading the words of those who always see the problem as “out there.”

It is worthwhile to be open to challenge. The hero of all great myths is the person willing to go where others will not go. It is a willingness to spend three days and three nights in a dark place. For Jonah, it was the belly of a whale. For Gilgamesh, it was a cave. For Jesus, it was a borrowed grave. Of course the ancients understood the symbolism. There is no moon for three nights every month, and those are the darkest times.

Fighting the mother of Grendel In his own dark place at the bottom of a cold and forbidding lake, Beowulf had to come to grips with the fact that his hubris had caused the death of the king’s best friend. When he killed Grendel, Beowulf confidently told the king he had solved his problem. In reality, Grendel was not the problem. The mother of Grendel was the problem. As David Whyte says, our problem is not the thing we fear. It is that which gave birth to the thing we fear. In Beowulf’s case,  the mother of Grendel was his own hubris. Beowulf had to fight her for three days and three nights  in the dark, cold, forbidding waters of her lair. He rose from those waters wiser, though exhausted.

Jonah had to learn that saying no to the call of God never works out so well. When you reject the call of God, you do so at your own peril. It took three days and three nights in the belly of a fish to know he was called to Nineveh, like it or not.

Every ancient myth includes a time in which the hero must face themselves in the mirror. They must own their abiding shadows, those parts of themselves that have always been a problem and will always be a problem. Only after they have completed that work is the hero able to move on.

Once you have faced your own abiding flaws, you can be okay when others name them, though it is always painful. Others naming them means that once again, they have escaped from the basement and done their damage. You must get to work putting them back in the basement, where they can do as little damage as possible. It is Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

There are six words I wil not speak – “I am too old to change.” If you are too old to change, you are too old. You may as well be dead. When I hear people speak those words, I wonder when they gave up? When were they so wounded that they could not recover? When did they abandon the belief that getting out of bed in the morning includes facing your entire self in the mirror, not just the parts you like to see.

Being open to challenge creates wisdom. Being attacked does not. It only generates despair. When you are challenged, turn inward and discern the truth that might exist within the challenge. When you are attacked, build a wall. Protect yourself. Create boundaries. None of us can withstand an onslaught of terrible words, particularly when they have been designed to wound us as deeply as possible.

I will continue to be open to being challenged. On the other hand, I will not subject myself to attack.

And so it goes.