My Angel, "Javier"

It was the handwriting that made it stand out. Sometimes when I’m at my most stressed and least functional, I let my mail pile up on my bookshelf, obscuring Dostoevsky. I know what just about every piece of mail is before I open it, most of it worthless statements explaining bills I have set to AutoPay, or the occasional credit card offer, or an AI-generated plea for me to consider that paying $100 a month for car insurance actually is much cheaper than $80 if you add everything up. And I know anything marked “highly confidential” never is, because why would something so secretive advertise itself so indiscreetly. And I know I’ll never use the Stop and Shop coupons piling up, but I keep those because that kind of paper helps de-smellify my shoes. And I’ve gotten to the point where just by looking at the font, not even the return address, I know what company has sent me mail. Too many serifs on this one - must be Chase. Feeling bold are we? That’s the IRS. 

And it’s rare that I get mail from a human. With very few exceptions, everyone I know or care about lives within a small radius around me, able to knock on my door within an hour’s time at most. Heck, when I send my Christmas cards, I just tape them to mailboxes by hand. Which made this rare instance of receiving a hand-addressed envelope all the more curious.

I shouldn’t say everyone I know… there are people I know who live very far away and have sent me hand-addressed envelopes, though it’s been years since that happened. The contents of those envelopes usually weren’t all too nice, and after years of not responding, I think they eventually got the hint. But every time I see my name and address written on an envelope by hand, if I’m not expecting it, I worry it’ll contain another little bit of emotional poison.

This one felt thin. A good sign. Maybe it’s one of those mailers that charities trick you with so that you think you’re getting something from a loved one, actually open it, and be guilted into making another donation. But that didn’t seem right either. Have you ever seen a charitable envelope that didn’t have a postage-free return envelope stuffed inside? This one was too thin for that. Plus, late September is an odd time to be getting shame letters - usually they wait for December.

I didn’t think it was from my loved ones. I hoped it wasn’t from my not-so-loved ones. Seemed too oddly-shaped to be from any corporation that had any reason to contact me. I was nervous. It couldn’t go on the pile. I opened it up.

“You are cordially invited…”

This was new.

Let’s not pretend I haven’t been to weddings before. I vaguely remember a couple I went to as a kid, though those hardly count. Those are the weddings of people who invited my parents, and I was tagging along. I’m talking about real adult weddings. Those where you get dressed up, you travel somewhere, you have alcohol aplenty, you make small talk with people you’ll never see again, you judge how this isn’t the way weddings should be done. And most importantly, you get to be there to show a friend that you’re so happy to celebrate them and their love.

If we ignore one of those points, I’ve been to a decent amount of weddings. A wedding in Charlotte, one in Des Moines, one in Tulsa, one so far in the middle of nowhere in Maryland that I couldn’t tell you its nearest metroplex. But the vast majority of these shindigs took place around the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. I got dressed up for all of them. I travelled at least an hour for each one. The ones that weren’t too churchy had alcohol, and when I wasn’t too churchy I had that alcohol. I made small talk. I had plenty of opinions about how the weddings should have been done better. 

But on that last one… caring for a dear friend… I never got that opportunity. All those weddings I went to? Plus one. Always a plus one, never a guest.

For reasons that are my fault, I never got invited to weddings of old friends from my hometown. There are extenuating circumstances that contributed to this, and maybe I’ll explain those on another day, but by the time I hit my twenties, I neglected to keep any of the friends I made in my teens. It’s the reason my own wedding at 21 didn’t have two sides - I didn’t really have anyone to sit on “my side” of the aisle, let alone my half of the bridal party.

Once we reach my twenties, though, I have such a handy scapegoat for not having friends: dysphoria. Oh, to be a woman in her twenties who doesn’t know she’s a woman in her twenties - you are at your most stupid, but in hindsight, you can blame so much of that stupidity on trying to live life without understanding a very important fundamental part of who you are. Who needs to take responsibility when you’re impaired?

If there’s anything I can unequivocally blame on dysphoria in my twenties, it was that I never earned any wedding invitations of my own. Thinking I was a man, I tried to act like a man, and I sought other men to be friends with. But even though I had an unfinished theatre degree, I don’t think I ever got that successful at pretending to be a man. At my best, it was probably as accurate as somebody trying to do an impersonation of George H. W. Bush by reading about Dana Carvey in Lorne Michaels’ biography. People can feel when you’re trying to be something you’re not. And no one wants to be friends with someone who isn’t who they are. And thus, that someone never gets close enough to get a wedding invitation.

But that was the “old me”. That was barely even “me”. Now I’m wonderful. Now I’m beautiful and magnetic and the life of the party and people like me. People want me in their lives.

And now, after all these years, I got a wedding invitation. Addressed to me.

Finally.

I R’dSVP right away, I was so excited. Not only was this the first wedding that wanted me, this was the first wedding I’d get to go to as me.

In a wide variety of ways, “I” never went to a wedding before. _______ did, on my behalf. And he wore his stupid suit, and he had his stupid short hair mussed slightly to the right, and if he had enough whisky, he’d get up when “Uptown Funk” started blaring and do his own stupid dance along with everybody else. 

But if I’m honest, _______ often was absent from those weddings too. The same nagging dysphoria that kept him from being able to make friends also kept him from being able to function at these events, and many other social events with even lower stakes. Every once in a while, he would be able to trick himself into dissociating in the right direction so that he could perform a kind of respectable sociable facade.

Those times felt really nice. Not just because he didn’t feel like as much of a freak, which was its own hell, but because he didn’t embarrass his wife. My now-ex. A longsuffering spouse, excited to be there for one of her dear friends on the biggest day of their lives. More often than not, too busy to be fully focused on the wonderful events, because she was babysitting her “husband” who can’t just be a person and exist with other people. 

If there’s any reason I will never believe TERFs, it’s that. The kind of person who should have no problem entering a room and functioning well is a relatively well-off straight white man. And the kind of person who would feel self-conscious just by existing in public is a trans woman. But look at how pathetic he was, and look at how incredible I am. I got invited to a fucking wedding, for god’s sake. The only reason I can come up with to explain why my social experience completely evolved and transformed for the better, while my social privilege crumbled into nothingness, is that I finally get to be who I really am.

No more of those stupid fucking suits. What the hell am I going to wear?

A couple of months after I got the invitation, and I started planning how to get down to DC from Boston without a REAL ID, and I started considering what I was going to wear, and I started getting excited about how different this was going to be from all those horrible memories, I hit the fifth anniversary of realizing I’m trans. It didn’t end up being the happy anniversary I hoped for five years prior.

Don’t get me wrong. The circumstances of my life, the amazing people I’ve filled my life with, and the way I’m able to live authentically around them is exactly the magic that transition promised it to be. I don’t believe in blessings anymore, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling so blessed to have the life I could only dream about for my first thirty years.

But it turns out it was a really nasty December for my dysphoria. All I could think about was the things that hadn’t changed for the better. “Transhumanism” hadn’t progressed far enough in the five years I’ve been transitioning, and I’m still stuck in this garbage bag of meat. Try as I might to follow Descartes’ teachings and embrace the vibrant life that the mind can afford, dualism still feels so far off when I have to live in a body. When I have to live in this body. When I can’t yet afford any surgery, and when HRT isn’t doing as much magic as I hope, and when I can only see my dad in a wig when I look in the mirror. I feel ugly. I feel fake. I stop wanting to be perceived.

Not a good time to get ready to go to a wedding.

Thanks to my superpower of actually being able to function, though, I finally had friends. I had people in my life who love me and support me, and their endless patience helped nurse me back to a relative level of mental health in the ensuing months. I was still struggling, and I still had a lot of anxiety around being perceived, especially in a room full of DC Socialites I didn’t know. But through therapy, support, and the welcome relief that my best friend Mai and her wonderful husband Khoa were going to be at the wedding too, I could calm a lot of my nerves. I even picked out shoes and a dress. All of which was already in my closet, but I thought they’d look nice on the day.

For all of my complaining about the changes I haven’t seen in the past five years, one of them reared its ugly head the day of the wedding. It was 3:00 on Saturday, a couple of hours before Mai, Khoa and I were to arrive at the venue, and my heels were too big. Everyone and their mother knows about the fun secondary-sex-characteristic changes that are supposed to take place during second puberty, but not enough people know that your feet might shrink. 

Mine certainly had. I bought these nude pumps in the earliest days of my transition and maybe got to wear them out once before. But four years later, I learned that they were bigger on me than they were when I wore them last. This wasn’t a welcome development. The timing was terrible. I already was managing plenty of nerves and I didn’t need part of my outfit ruined. I tried walking to Mai’s room in them… I guess they could work? I was a little wobbly, and dancing was probably out, but I thought I could make it through the evening without falling and embarrassing myself? Or embarrassing Mai and Khoa. I just had to focus. I just had to be intentional with how I stepped and try to stretch my toes every time I moved my foot and make direct lines as much as I could in what was going to be a very crowded room and I started feeling a little too warm and

Nope. The other shoes I had with me are my favorites - little greyish-tannish waterproof boots that have the slightest heel and are slim enough to make people think my feet aren’t giant. I like those shoes. I could walk in those shoes. I’d rather be wearing heels - that’s the attire people are probably expecting for the evening. And I feared I was going to be severely underdressed if I’m wearing my boots. But I triaged, and determined that the risk of my night being awful would be greater if I fell than if I was a little underdressed. And I threw on my boots, and I left my heels in my room.

As we’re ubering to the venue, I’m surprised that I seem to be the calm one. Mai and Khoa both share that they’re the slightest bit nervous about the social toll of the evening, and I laugh, wondering if they’re just trying to make me feel better. Because I do.

We enter the door, and I’m surrounded by refinement. Men all in their tuxedos, women all in their ball gowns, all looking elegant and cultured and debonair. There’s even another trans woman in the room, looking incredible in her black gown, confidently showing it off to friends.

And one of the hosts comes up to us. Greets Mai warmly with eye contact. Greets Khoa warmly with eye contact. Greets me, staring straight at my shoes.

And I’m gone.

somehow i’m at a counter now and i don’t know how i got here; and i have no peripheral vision; and i am introduced to someone who also is from texas and i can barely remember what part of texas i was from to relay to him and i seem like an idiot; and i alert the part of my face muscles that control the corners of my mouth and tell them to go up girls; and i’m worried if anyone can hear me breathing; and i haven’t said a word in what could be forty seconds or what could be half an hour; and now i’m at a table and i don’t know how i got here; and this is the worst thing that could have happened; and i just stare at a spot behind the bar and i don’t understand why my arm hurts so much and i realize i’ve been gripping it hard; and i’m still fucking _______ and nothing has changed and all the things i thought were good about transitioning are bullshit and who am i kidding and OH GOD I AM GOING TO EMBARRASS MAI AND KHOA

they’re worried about me they can see how paralyzed i am they’re not gonna want to be friends with me just fucking pull yourself together you can fake this you can fake this you can fake this just smile and be a person you can fake this you can fake this you can

Mai, wonderful Mai, looks me in the eye and assures me. “If you need to go, I will go with you. We can get dinner together. Food poisoning is always an easy excuse.”

“no no i am going to stay if you go i won’t go; just have a fun night,” I blurt out.

there’s no way there’s no fucking way i am going to be the same social yoke i was all those years ago; no one is going to babysit me no one is going to be embarrassed by me being a nothing by their side; my arm hurts even more; somehow i have a drink; they are going to enjoy their time at what is supposed to be a fun night and i am not going to get in the way

I’m glad I explained enough of my nerves to the two of them beforehand, because they gave me the biggest act of kindness that could seem to an outsider like an act of cruelty - they walked away. They let me be on my own. The worst way I could have felt in that moment was as a burden, and as long as they were standing by me freaking out and spiraling, I would continue to feel like one.

They gave me a chance to be visited by my angel.

He snuck past my current lack of peripheral vision and landed straight in front of me, offering his fist across the table. “I love to talk to new people, my name is…” something. It started with an R or an S or a T or one of those generic masculine letters that strange men always start with, but I don’t remember what his real name was. 

He was probably 5-15 years older than me, about as tall as me, with the kind of orange tan that will be able to cover a bible with ten more years of sun. Every sentence he dropped felt like one he didn’t understand until he already said it, as if he was following poorly transcribed cue cards behind my right shoulder. He had enough hair to seem like he took medicine, and lacked enough hair to seem like he lived life. His blue suit was just light enough that no one would call it navy. It felt like he never looked directly at my eye, but always my left cheek.

And as I realized he was greeting me by asking me for a fist bump, I went in for one and shared my own name. I don’t think I finished spitting out “Olivia” before he asked me if I knew any jokes.

There are plenty of jokes I can think of right now, writing this. Some are from the schoolyard. Some are funny stories of my own life. Some are drafts from the summer I was gonna do standup. But at the time, in my dissociated state, the only joke that came to mind was a terribly off-color joke I once heard Martin Short tell about Karen Carpenter. And there’s no way that was coming out of my mouth that night. 

I told him I couldn’t think of any, but that didn’t stop him. He seemed almost glad he didn’t have to wait for me to take my turn, and immediately asked me, “What costume does Batman wear for Halloween?”

I can’t remember what the punchline was. But I bet it was the dumbest thing I ever heard.

I don’t know how he segued after that, and he likely didn’t have any transition at all, but he started trying to guess where I was from. He didn’t know the bride or groom but his wife did, and he was from Michigan but he was really from Florida and he thinks he can guess where I am really from. As if I couldn’t tell he was from Florida. And I started answering yes-or-no questions about what state I was born in. God, was he bad at asking those questions. All of them were very directly “Are you from this state? What about this one?” with the sole exception of one strange “Does your home state have the confederate flag in its flag?” Which of course, since 2020, would never have “yes” as the answer.

As soon as he heard “Texas” (which I practically had to spell out for him), he shifted again, telling me about how he heard about the new candidate running for Senate there. Which, in DC was a risk for him to bring up, talking so explicitly in mixed company about your preferred political leanings. But if there’s one social advantage to my visible identity, it’s that everyone already knows what side I vote for. And, for the first time in what was either seven minutes or ninety, I let out a full, coherent thought: “They had hope about Beto, and look how that turned out.”

Sometime between the initial fist bump and the weird segue into Texas politics, my arm stopped hurting. And somewhere inside of myself, my soul finally sighed.

My angel didn’t stay very long after that tangent, but I realized I didn’t remember his name. I asked him for it again and he told me “Javier”. Obviously I had just narrowly recovered from a dissociative episode, but I would have remembered if I already heard the name “Javier” that night. He must have noticed my head cock sideways and added, with a grin or at least a bad impression of one, “I just feel like a Javier tonight.”

And he flew into the crowd.

I won’t say I was at my best after that - it was still scary to see that I was still capable of falling apart like I had. There is shame I thought I left behind with _______. And it’s sobering to be reminded that I still have old problems that haven’t been solved by transition.

Something strange happened in a completely unrelated event a couple weeks prior - someone referred to my pretransition self by the right pronouns. And by that, I mean “she”. As you saw above, I’m not usually in the habit of doing that. It helps the myth I build for myself: in the before times, I wasn’t even the same person - it was an evil man who was piloting me while I lay dormant, and he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. But now that I have been reborn, he has been banished to the darkness, and I will conquer the world with my ebullient power.

Only I still don’t know what the fuck I am doing. And I can’t bifurcate my life so easily into “the terrible me I hate” and “the wonderful me I love.” Because I was still there, just lost and confused. And if I hate who I used to be, when I still act like it, I start hating me again.

And I can say this much - even with the turbulence, after my angel visited to make me think about anything but myself, it was nice. Not the most present I’ve ever been, but I really did have a nice time. I was charming at moments. I wasn’t embarrassing to my dear friends. People seemed to enjoy talking to me. The room was too crowded to notice my shoes anymore. And, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed a wedding.

I was afraid that I had been “It’s a Wonderful Life”’d and had witnessed a genuine celestial occurrence, but there was at least one piece of evidence that he was corporeal. About an hour later, when I wandered upstairs, someone else laughed about how there was some weird guy named Javier, and nobody knew who he was. Thankful that I hadn’t lost my mind, I smiled and told the group that it wasn’t his real name, and his wife knew the bride, and they lived in Michigan. Someone pieced together that he must have been married to a cousin, which I thought would have been impossible to do while surrounding the holy of holies or sharing the gospel with shepherds.