The things which touch me deeply are often the most difficult to write about; it’s difficult sometimes to disambiguate the stories I tell myself from the reality (i’m just as bad an eyewitness to my own life as anyone else is), examining things enough to write about them is sometimes scary, and sometimes words don’t feel like they can carry the weight of the importance.

Halloween is an anniversary for me; this year is a ten-year anniversary of the halloween which changed my life.

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It’s hard to remember the person I was in the late 1990s; hard to feel what that person felt, hard to put myself in his worldview … and hard to disambiguate from who I am now. I’d come back from six months of travelling in 1998 to find that my friends’ lives had gone on without me, and to suspect that our friendship was a hollow, empty, fake shell – that I didn’t matter to them even though they mattered to me. This left me feeling empty and lonely, wandering through the world without much of anything to lean on. (Family? My mother was dead, I’d never met my father, and I had no contact with my mother’s family. Family didn’t exist, in my world). The few friendships which were strong, my need and dependance on them was so strong, my terror of losing them so powerful, that it threatened to break the friendship … and I was aware enough to live in terror of just that, a nasty self-reinforcing bitter cascade of fear.

It didn’t help that I had a secret.

It was a secret which had been poking out around the edges; I’d basically admitted it to myself and had told one or two people, including my brother and a woman whom I had told after spending a night in bed with her (still, I think, one of the strangest nights of my life), and her wife (whom I was actually closer to). But most of my friends didn’t know the secret; I couldn’t tell them; I might lose them.

A silly fear, in retrospect. But nothing cripples the soul more than fear does; every time you give into it, every time you don’t do something you want to do because of it, it becomes stronger, until it warps you, bends it to your will, diminishes you.

I went to a show at the Santa Cruz Civic, the weekend before Halloween. (I don’t remember the date or day of the week; I suspect it must have been Saturday, but it’s gone). I went with a friend of mine (whom I actually sort of had a crush on, something I don’t think I’ve ever told him) and his girlfriend (who later became his wife). I don’t remember who was playing.

He asked if I wanted some e.

I’d never done it; I said yes.

Have you ever taken e? It was the most amazing feeling I’ve ever had. (Given a regular supply, I would have become a hopeless addict). On the dance floor that night, listening to who knows what, I had the most amazing feeling of peace and calm, of accepting everything, of sheer love for the people around me and for myself and for the beauty of the world. It was as strong and as powerful as anything I’ve felt in meditation; it echoes through me, to some degree, to this day. (I’m sure that what I feel when I’m a floor now, sober, is in some way an echo of that; a pathway forged through my brain and through my soul on that night. (This is helped enormously, of course, when I’m around people who are themselves on e. ). The sheer joy, and love, of the experience is, in my experienced, unmatched.

Some people say that there’s a letdown after; that the high can be replaced by a bleak depression which lasts for a few days. It didn’t happen to me. I hit a point late that night where I was exhausted but too wired to sleep, and that sorta sucked; but it passed, and I slept, and I woke up the next morning, and the peace and happiness and acceptance lingered.

It lasted for almost two weeks. (The happy afterglow buzz from a concert today typically lasts 3-4 days; maybe i’m just unusually susceptible to such).

The second week of that was an election day. As was my habit up until last year, I took the day off, and worked in a polling place. One of the board members was gay; it was the longest time I’d spent with an openly gay man. And … we never said anything about it, because I was still too fucking timid to do such a thing, but he knew my secret.

I was still high; the world was still imbued with the special magic afterglow of my halloween weekend trip. By the end of the day, I was used to the fact that he knew; I accepted it … and could not go back to people not knowing. Which meant, of course, I had to tell my friends.

I don’t know if, absent the e, and the afterglow, I would have had the courage to do that; it was scary, even then, but I had no choice. I *had* to.

I was a coward: I did it via email.

This is the thing, I think, that I like least about the person I was then: for all that I love people now, I was terrified of them then, terrified of their judgment, terrified of conflict with them, and I’d allowed that fear to consume me and leave me with a weak, tattered will and vulnerable soul. (There are still echoes of this that I encounter from time to time; sometimes the only way I can get over my fear of a given social situation is to remind myself of just what the wages of fear can be; and sometimes that reminder fails … but never for terribly long).

Most of my friends already knew. we’d never spoken, never discussed it … but they knew, all the same.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine holding a secret so close that the fear of letting it out almost breaks you, only to find that it was no secret at all, and that it had never mattered? Can you imagine the relief? And, at the same time, the bewildered mumbling about how you could have been so stupid?

I stand here, across the vantage point of a decade, and I cannot imagine that moment, even though I lived through it; I can merely shake my head in wonder. I had judged my friends well, in choosing them; and yet I had judged them not well at all, in hiding from them. It’s a contradiction I cannot unravel.

****

The change was not complete; it took years to settle in. I never came out to most of my coworkers at Borland; by then, I’d moved from the relatively safe and comfortable tribe of tech support engineers into an engineering department where I always, to the day I left, felt like an outsider, alone and incompetent, barely able to do my job and not really worthy of it. I reached out, a bit, to an employee who was changing her sex; but when she left the company, I lost touch, and while I wonder sometimes what happened to her, I cannot even remember her name. Even as recently as my first year of law school, I wasn’t obviously out to everyone; it’s only in the last couple of years, with a strong community around me, that i’ve really internalized the feeling that I just don’t give a shit what judgment people will pass on me as a result of my sexuality. change is constant; the journey is never completed.

I don’t much like the person I was in my early twenties; it is hard for me not to look back in harsh judgment. I wonder, sometimes, if it’s like that for all adults; I wonder if in my mid-forties I’ll look back on my mid-thirties with the same harsh judgment. I suspect not, but how can I know? I do know that I am happier, and freer, and more able to love, and less afraid of the world, than I was then; and I can look back at two weeks ten years ago, bracketed on one end by trying the best drug in the world and on the other end by choosing to walk into my greatest fear because I had realized I had no other choice, as the pivot, the moment in which the world changed. And I am grateful for that pivot: more grateful than I can say for the friend who led me there, more amazed than I can say that it took me so long to walk through that fear, and … in this instant, in the afterglow of a concert and focused on the reflection I see in the mirror of ages past, more blown away by the beauty of the world and the joy of living in it, than I can possibly express.

I love you.

Whoever you are, reading this.