Discerning a Call

I walked this meandering path in the early morning mist in the Grand Tetons. I did not know where the path went. I followed it because with each step it became more beautiful. Alas, I had to turn around because I had run out of time.

You never finish answering a call because the demands of the call are many, unrelenting, and ever changing.  And eventually, you run out of time. Joseph Campbell talked about following your bliss, but I’d like to ask him to explain just a bit more about what exactly bliss means. As it relates to work, I’ve always said it means moving in the direction of your gifts. But in life in general, it seems a call can be far more difficult to discern.

When I decided to transition, it was after seventeen years of therapy and two bouts of moderate depression. (As I’ve written before, moderate depression is like moderate turbulence on an airplane. It is a lot worse than it sounds.) Some who transition say either they transitioned or they would have died. I am not sure that is true for me. I certainly have friends and family who believe that is true for me. I believe I might have stayed alive, but at great cost.

As I have written often, including in my memoir, my call to transition came during a television show. It was the final season of Lost and there came a point during that season in which Jack, the protagonist of the show, realized he had been called by the God figure (Jacob) to die. (If you are a Lost fan, it is the episode in which he saw his childhood home in the lighthouse mirror.) I knew I had been called, and cried until dawn. Most of the time a call is not received as an, “Oh Joy!” moment. It is received as an, “Oh Shit!” moment.

That call came early in 2010. Almost fifteen years later, my call keeps shifting, like the early morning light. When I first transitioned, few knew what it meant to be transgender and gender dysphoria was not even a diagnosis in the DSM. Today, thanks to the far right and Donald Trump, transgender people in America are under siege in ways I never could have imagined ten years ago. When my first TED Talk took off in 2017, outside of the evangelical world most of what I received was good will – worldwide. Not so today. I have lost at least three high-paying university or corporate speaking gigs this year because the powers that be said, “No transgender speakers on my watch!”

I am fortunate to live in a very accepting town in which I serve as an elected official (Mayor Pro Tem and Board of Trustee member,) one of fewer than 50 elected transgender officials in the United States.

Outside of Colorado, and particularly when I am in neighboring states, or when I am in the south, if people find out I am transgender I do not feel safe. Unless my speaking gig requires it, I never out myself in those states. I do not feel called to be an activist for the transgender community. I do not avoid speaking out on trans issues, but I feel far more called to speak on gender equity.

Sometimes I find a calling emerges by trusting the flow of my life. My counseling practice has picked up again, primarily with two groups, CEOs and other c-suite individuals, and with those exiting evangelicalism with all of the accompanying complexities of religious trauma. My practice is growing in both areas. The other realm that has arrived by complete surprise has been coaching speakers. I currently have a dozen speaker coaching clients, most of whom have come because of my work at TEDxMileHigh or my TED Talks. (If you are interesting in counseling or coaching with me, reach out to me at paula@rltpathways.com)

Each of these areas of endeavor lines up with the oft-quoted phrase from Frederick Buechner that where you are called is “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”

There is a deep gladness in counseling leaders who know the loneliness of leadership every CEO experiences. With a quarter of a century of experience as a CEO, I come to that work with lived wisdom and painfully earned knowledge.

Working with people who have experienced toxic faith is gratifying because of my extensive knowledge in the area, and again, because of my own personal experience. Enough time has passed with both that I have few issues with counter-transference, the problem that occurs when a counselor does not have enough distance between their own painful issues and a current client’s similar issues. (It is also a reason I do not counsel transgender people – too much counter-transference.)

I have also been called to an ever-changing understanding of what it means to be transgender. I now use language I rarely used when I first transitioned. I feel I come from the borderlands between genders, or the liminal space between genders. I do not experience life as a cisgender woman, but there are so many ways in which a cisgender male experience felt so very wrong. The best explanation I currently have is that I am far more comfortable living as a female than I was living as a male. For those who have over a decade of lived transgender experience, that is something I hear often.

I have a lot of questions and concerns about the meteoric rise in the number of young people who identify as transgender. What was consistently a diagnosis of about one half of one percent of the population is now often up to five percent. Unfortunately, that is also accompanied by a large increase in the numbers of those detransitioning. I’m carefully following the studies being conducted of this phenomenon in Europe. It is too much of a politically charged issue here in the United States for truly objective studies to be completed and published. There are extreme reactions from the right and the left.

I received an extremely positive response when I shared these concerns with a large group of therapists, pediatricians, and psychiatrists at UCLA. I received the opposite response when I shared them with a mainline Protestant church in the same region. That’ll leave you scratching your head.

I shall be discerning the call of my life for as long as I breathe. One of my mentors said when he was approaching 97, “I am called to the final conversion, to leaving my ego behind and following my soul to the other side.” He had spent his life as a Christian leader. Both of my long-term mentors were Christian leaders, one Catholic and one from my former denomination. Both had passed on before I transitioned. Both would have been supportive of my transition, of that I am sure.

Discerning a call is a learned skill. Sometimes it arrives via a still small voice, and sometimes via a hard virtual smack up the side of the head. Either way one is grateful, because at least for the moment, you know where to step next.

And so it goes.