I woke up to Rachel putting a mug of coffee on my bedside table before she left for work. I didn’t drink it because I have been trying to do a 30-minute workout most mornings this week. Once I had flailed around to a YouTube video, I reheated the coffee and had breakfast.

I saw two counselling clients, then got ready to go out. I tested the car tire that likely has a leak with a machine Rachel’s boss loaned us, and via text, we agreed it was a good thing we had scheduled a car tune up on Monday. I drove to Costco feeling grateful that Rachel learned to drive this past year; it is a huge weight off my shoulders to not be solely responsible for it or the only one capable of driving it.

I’ve been trying to eat meat only on social occasions since visiting an animal sanctuary last month, so I wandered Costco looking for food items I’ve ignored in the past by defaulting to meat-based products. When I got home, Rachel was already back from work. She tried to help me unpack the Costco things, but I asked to do it myself because honestly, I do organizing better than she does.

I listened to a podcast interviewing Derek Webb while playing games on my phone, and realized that my personality has not changed in 20 years. In 2005, his album “Mockingbird” was one of my favorites thanks to his scathing indictments of hypocritical Christians (“Peace by way of war is like purity by way of fornication / It’s like telling someone murder is wrong / And then showing them by way of execution”). He is apparently still writing prophetic songs, and when he went to the Dove awards with his queer musical friends, he didn’t want anyone who knew him from his Caedmon’s Call days to confuse who he was deliberately allying himself with. So he, a cisgender hetersexual man, wore a dress.

I was full of feelings about this man and his music, so I pulled up the album I used to sing while acting as secretary for my church during the summer in high school and sang along. After a few minutes, Rachel asked what I was singing, and I shouted all of the above and more at her. When I’m in that kind of happy emotional space, I mostly want to cuddle, so I tried to sit on her. She said no, which was sad, but then she got up, walked to the couch, laid down, and held up her hands so that I could fully lay on top of her.

I was making her listen to one of the songs (“Rich Young Ruler”) when the woman who gives our cat his Solensia injection rang the building to be let up to our aparement. Rory hated it, of course, and it took two tries. Worse than usual, but this is why we pay someone else to deal with this. When it was just me and Rachel trying to do it, once it took us FOURTEEN tries, and let me tell you, two humans and one cat were extremely anxious and distressed by the end of it.

After she left, Rachel and I ate dinner at the table. Not because we were table people today, but because we’re between tv shows and didn’t have anything especially interesting to watch. Then she went to her computer to play games while I laid on the couch and scrolled TikTok. Then I realized how happy I am, and how simple the day has been, and I decided to write about it.

Vancouver celebrates Pride during the first long weekend in August, and I thought this year would be a disappointment because some things were changing, and boy do I hate change. Rachel tried to tell me about the wonders of “wait and see if something good happens” which SEEMED fake but actually turned out to be very true.

On Friday, we met up with a couple friends at a pub near our apartment. It was awkward at first, because they were friends from different areas of our lives. We had invited all of our (straight presenting) East Van friends to join us for a pub crawl, but most weren’t joining until later. Then we went down Davie Street to the Gay Village, and I was simultaneously overwhelmed by all the hugs from gay men who loved me because I married Rachel (they’re from her softball league) and overwhelmed by the fact that there was absolutely no space. Which is when our friends showed up! In pure chaos! The waiter wouldn’t even serve our table because there were so many of us crowded around it.

A couple years ago, our East Van friends went out drinking and wound up spending two hours going around the table with everyone saying a meaningful compliment about every other person. This Pride, I wanted to recreate the moment, so I got my half of the table to do it again. I’m very affectionate and very bossy when I’ve been drinking, and if someone veered into a tangential story, I would firmly redirect them to getting back to their compliment. This happened so much that one person complimented me on being “structured” and used my handling of this social event as evidence. I’m both embarrassed and flattered? Story of my life. But it was wonderful, and put me in such a good mood for literally…all the way until now.

Amy, Jayse, and Nick came back to our house until midnight, which is like, such a big deal for me nowadays. After being social for eight hours straight on Friday, Rachel and I took Saturday easy. Except for the Vancouver Rise game! This year Vancouver has a professional women’s soccer team, and we have season tickets. I had grand plans to become friends with the people with season tickets next to us, but mostly we go, “Oh, that was close!” at each other and then leave to buy things at the food trucks.

On Sunday, we hosted our traditional Pride brunch. This was one of the things that I was fearful of, because usually we cram over twenty people into our one-bedroom apartment before descending upon the parade en masse. But the parade moved locations, and several of our friends moved away over this year. Quality over quantity, Tricia!! We had eight people at the brunch, and it was wonderful! We ate, talked, and played card games.

New experiences continued – with the parade too far away to watch, we hit up the vendors in Nelson Park instead. Rachel, Nick, Sean and me spent the rest of the day together, and honestly, I could not have asked for a better foursome. We got all the free things we possibly could at vendors, played the mini golf course set up in the middle of the street, and then went to Sean’s apartment for a costume change.

The boys had found an event called Rainbow Rodeo for us to go to that afternoon, so Rachel and I wore cowboy attire. Nick had cow costumes saved from a drag performance, so he and Sean went as our cattle, and Rachel had an enormously fun time trying to lasso them.

We got to Rainbow Rodeo, which we assumed would be full of gay men (as most queer events in Vancouver are) and where I figured we would part ways with Nick and Sean. But oh, how the tables have turned! It was a queer lady party! So much flannel, denim, and body hair. Hilarious to me that that morning, I had asked Rachel if I should shave because I feared being judged by gay men. I intentionally rejected the patriarchy and didn’t shave, and then we wound up with a bunch of women as hairy as I was! My people.

When we could line dance no more, we called it a night. A long walk back to the West End led us to McDonald’s, a park to go swinging, and then to Dan’s house for a couple quick games. We blearily stared at each other at 9:30pm and realized we had to call it a night for real. Laying in bed when we got home, I asked Rachel what her favorite part of the weekend had been. “Everything… just everything!”

Same, babe.

When I went into the office a while ago, my coworker said that, upon hearing that Andrea Gibson had passed, she immediately thought of me. I was embarrassed to tell her that I did not actually know who Andrea Gibson was. Whoops. After doing some research, when I got home, I’m flattered she thought of me. Andrea was a poet, and their words that I’ve seen circulating the most are short and terribly poignant.

“In the end I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”

I have not been able to get these words out of my head. They’re so evocative: love as expanding and contracting, love as gain and loss… and the desire to experience it all.

A client of mine is going through an unexpected break up, and he doesn’t want to feel sad anymore. Valid! But we also talked about what it would mean if he didn’t feel sad, and what going through life cut off from emotions would mean.

I think of the various lives I’ve lived, the people I’ve loved and said goodbye to. Even now, I feel torn between my friends who live downtown within walking distance and the friends in East Van who are a 30 minute drive away. I cannot be everywhere with everybody. There are losses every day because by being HERE, I am not THERE.

But what a joy to miss people. What a joy to grieve. I would not, for one second, make my life smaller in order to erase the pain of losing people, communities, cities. I would not erase Woodland, or Athens, or Dallas. My heart is crossed by stretch marks, and I hope there are more before the end.

Did I learn to ask deeply personal questions when I became a counsellor, or did I become a counsellor so that I could ask deeply personal questions? Yes!

Most of the time, I am so proud of this habit of mine. I will ask people about their experience with menopause (it looms and I want to know!), what it’s going to take for them to leave their not-good relationship, or what their experience of shame was like growing up. Most of the time I find that people like it! “You’re the first person who’s asked me that,” is something I hear not infrequently. And, like, with awe, not annoyance. Rachel said she learned more about her friends three months after introducing me to them than she had learned in the years they’d hung out before I arrived.

BUT IT’S NOT ALWAYS GOOD.

Once a friend of mine told me to stop asking about whether she and her husband wanted kids, because they’d been trying and miscarrying and my questions caused her to spiral for days. DULY NOTED. Which, in case others (like me) need this tidbit: people in their 30s generally know whether they want kids or not. If they don’t have them, they either chose that or they are dealing with not getting what they want. I still give myself a pass to ask people one time (because I want to knoooooow) but I no longer repeat myself.

Sometimes my invasive questions are more harmful to me than to others. A while ago I met my brother’s new girlfriend. They were self-admittedly “disgusting” and oozing adoration at each other. So I asked, “So have you said ‘I love you’ yet?” Some part of me must have known this was inappropriate because I waited until Rachel was in the bathroom. Roy looked at me for a moment and then said, “No, because we’ve only been dating for a month.” I laughed over-loud and turned the situation into a personal anecdote while mentally screaming at myself.

When Rachel and I drove back to Roy’s apartment (alone), I waited 15 minutes into the drive before saying, “I did something bad.” Rachel laughed at me, and phew, resolved! NOT SO. Later that night, I was getting ready for bed in Roy’s bathroom and I heard Roy and Rachel talking about me. Talking about… oh no. I flew out of the bathroom like a bat out of hell, shrieking in embarrassment. They laughed at me (which is one of my love languages, when people I love bond over laughing at me, so that’s fine) while I moaned about my shame.

Roy put me in my place, “You had been telling all these stories about being my little sister, and that’s not really how I think of you. But in that moment, wow. That was a real Little Sister move.”

Anyway, believe it or not, but the point of this is to say: ask people personal questions! It leads to interesting conversations!

One of my clients said something poignant about coming out as queer that has stuck with me ever since. “I don’t want to tell my family that I’m queer, not just because I’m afraid it will make them love me less, but because it might make me love them less.”

This immediately rang as true to my experience, but it’s something I was never told about or warned about, something I couldn’t conceptualize or understand at the time. Now, I think I get it.

After I came out to my parents, I asked my mom to tell other people about the fact that I was dating a woman. In a lot of ways, that is maybe unfair! But for two people in particular, it felt entirely necessary. My grandma and grandpa are two of my favorite people in the entire world. I look up to them, and they have always loved and supported me. I did not think they would abandon or hate me for being queer, but I had a huge fear that if I had to be the one to tell them, I would overanalyze any facial expressions or comments they made. I didn’t want to live with the knowledge of their first reactions. And it turned out to be a wonderful idea. I have no idea how that conversation between my mom and her parents went, and I don’t want to know. Instead, I know that Grandma called me to tell me she loves me, and Grandpa logged onto Facebook to do the same. I got to experience their second reactions.

Would I have loved them less if I’d seen disgust pass across their faces? Maybe. In the sense that love and fear are intertwined, and my particular brand of anxiety isn’t great at letting those moments float away. It might not have diminished my love for them, but it certainly would have colored it.

This idea also makes me think about all the Christian people from my past, and how I interpreted their social media silence as rejection. For some, I think my interpretation was correct. But last year, I experienced something that made me wonder if I were also part of the problem. Rachel came home to Peoria with me, and while we were visiting, my family-away-from-family, the Monahans, hosted a games party. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and normal, and I thought my heart would explode at having another opportunity to tease each over games, share book recommendations, and extend the party to watch just one more YouTube video. This happened four years after I came out. Had it been possible all along??

I don’t know if they needed time to process my queerness (goodness knows I did), and I don’t know if that easy socializing was available the whole time. But I do know that I avoided seeing friends when I visited my hometown because I was afraid of rejection. I diminished my love for them, and it cost me. Self-protection is complicated. What helps us can also harm us, and that’s why boundaries are meant to be flexible.

So what does it mean, that a fear of coming out can be based not only on fearing the loss of other people’s love, but on fearing the loss of your love for others? I’m not exactly sure, since this is a reality I’m only starting to piece together. But a start might be to try to protect your love for others where you can, but not so much that you close yourself off to the possibility of love entirely.

This morning Rachel and I had a Skype conversation with her family, and we’re in that life stage when a lot of catching up involves describing various people’s ailments and end of life. I found myself thinking of Mary Oliver’s poem, When Death Comes, the end of which just so happened to be in my TimeHop today.

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When Death Comes

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

-Mary Oliver

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My default setting is homebody, but with all this in mind, I decided to go along with Rachel to our friend’s apartment to watch them get ready for a charity drag performance this weekend. We ate brunch, and then I filmed and cheered them on as they practiced a delightfully absurd rendition of Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need a Hero.”

I don’t mind being a homebody, and I think a life lived in books and pajama bottoms is just as valid as any other. But sometimes I need a reminder that getting out and being with people has a charm of its own. Participating in this world, not just visiting it, means saying yes. Yes to silliness, yes to friends, and afterwards, yes to reading in bed surrounded by cats.