Transfiguration revisited

Bottoming out at 1,410 feet and ten inches below sea level, the Jordan River valley is literally the lowest elevation on the face of planet Earth. It was there that Jesus was baptized, a feast we celebrated last month, and a voice came from heaven, saying, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'

The precise identity of the Mount of the Transfiguration is not identified in the gospel accounts; scholars have variously identified it as Mount Tabor or Mount Hermon, which are not among the world's tallest peaks, but either is plenty tall that when God again speaks and says, 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!' it certainly communicates range and contrast: God's word extends from the depths to the heights.

This is a strange story! Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

If we think it's strange, imagine how strange it must have been to Peter and John and James! This teacher they've been following around has seemed special. He taught with confidence. He even performed miracles. But as far as they could tell, he was still definitely in "special teacher" territory, not something more unusual than that. And then, they go up a mountain with Jesus, and they see… this. And what are they supposed to do with it? They're overwhelmed, and Peter, God bless him, stammers out his incoherent response to what they saw, only to be met with nothing less than the voice of God themself, proclaiming about Jesus 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!'

But perhaps most disturbing, now that they know that they're in the presence of God's own son, is the subject of the conversation they overheard between Moses, bringer of the Law, and Elijah, greatest of the prophets: they were talking about Jesus's departure which was to be "accomplished" in Jerusalem.

Oh great, think Peter and John and James. We are finally in the presence of God, and what's he talking about? Leaving. The Messiah's job description might be muddled in many regards in terms of what people expect, but one thing is clear: he shall reign forever and ever. Whatever else the Messiah is or isn't, Jesus's followers expect that he will not be taken away. Not be betrayed into human hands and die. That can't be how the glory that was revealed on the mountain top ends up. God forbid!

This conflict of exceptions about what a Messiah is supposed to be and do lies at the heart of the clashing worldviews of God and Empire. What is glory? What is power? What is peace? The peace of God which passes all understanding doesn't look like the peace we come to expect when taught by the powers and principalities of this world.

And yet, at the end of today's Gospel, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, where these things are all going to play out. And that's where we stand today: at the beginning of a long march toward an ending the disciples are dreading and hoping is impossible. Messiahs are supposed to win. Messiahs are supposed to reign in glory. Messiahs who are transfigured in glory like Peter and John and James saw Jesus just can't suffer and die. 

It's a long walk. They have plenty of time to think about it. And that's where we find ourselves in this story: at the start of a long march.

The calendar even tells us that we are at the beginning of a 31 day March, but somehow today on the calendar seems to point to so many other days also. Today's story of the transfiguration points toward Palm Sunday, when Jesus's march that begins today ends when he arrives in Jerusalem. It points Good Friday and Easter. Every year, we hear the transfiguration story the Sunday before Lent begins, because this story marks the point in the Gospel where Jesus's ministry shifts gears from teaching and healing, and he sets his face for his journey toward Jerusalem, where he knows he will die. Despite this yearly reading of the Transfiguration story on Sunday, this is NOT the date the church has set aside as the Feast of the Transfiguration. 

The theological influences that most shaped my life so far have established August 6 as something of the moral axis about which the modern world revolves. That day is the feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus's transformation in dazzling light into a glorious preview of the splendor of the Reign of God. The day set apart to honor the particular Gospel we heard today. But 80 years ago on that day, in dazzling brightness accompanied by a towering mushroom cloud that reached up to the heights of the heavens, the city of Hiroshima was transfigured to oblivion in a radiant display of the apex of humankind's death-dealing powers.

So because of the accidents of the calendar this gospel has become inexorably intertwined with the contrast between Imperial Peace and Christian Peace. The Reign of God, that for which we pray for each time we pray the Lord's Prayer, always stands in contrast to the reign of the powers and principalities of this world. When we call Jesus King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Prince of Peace, we use titles that Caesar had claimed for himself. When the Angels proclaimed to the shepherds outside Bethlehem that they carried good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people, they drew on the formula used to announce the ascension of a new Roman Emperor. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey and the people waved branches and threw their coats on the ground to make a path for him, shouting "Hosanna to the King of Kings," the whole scene was a subversion of a Roman military procession that would have likely happened before passover each year.

The Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, stands in direct contrast to and subversion of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace carried out through the establishment of widespread fear across the known world of Rome's ability to dish out death to any who dare to defy them. The Roman peace through strength and fear is the polar opposite of the peace of God which passes all understanding and operates not through the fear of death but through the life-giving power of self-sacrificial love. Jesus is precisely the anti-Caesar (which is very much to say that Caesar, and his imperial successors today, are the anti-Christ).

When Christians make the sign of the cross to mark our lives as belonging to God, we subvert the greatest weapon in Caesar's arsenal of terror, a dreaded instrument of torture unto death the mere threat of which could cower peoples into line with the Roman dictates. When we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim that love is stronger than death, that hope is stronger than fear, and that the worst the powers and principalities of this world can do to us cannot break us nor destroy us, because Christ has beaten down death by victory, and death's sting is gone.

From the days of Moses, God has called heaven and earth to witness that humankind has been offered life and death, blessings and curses, and invited us to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. Do we seek to thrive by increasing our grasp on the mechanisms that can deal out death to those we would seek to control (the essence of idolatry), or do we seek to thrive by emptying ourself and submitting to a life of humble service and even to death -- death on a cross! -- for the wellbeing of all God's creation, even those who would call us enemies? Do we seek what Caesar calls "peace" through power over others, or do we seek the true peace of Christ through love and service? Does peace come from our capacity to nurture life, or from our capacity to dole out death?

From the theological perspective that shaped me, the feast of the Transfiguration is where these two worldviews collide: from the moment of the Transfiguration onward, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the death on the cross that he knew was the destination ordained by the life of liberation he led, knowing that the powers and principalities of this world would not consent to coexist with his ministry that set the prisoner free and proclaimed good news to the poor. This feast marked Jesus' pivot from the gathering phase of his ministry to the final showdown with the forces of death, a showdown that could only lead to the resurrection, but could also only lead there through immense suffering. This feast marked Jesus embrace of the vulnerability that would lead to his ultimate triumph.

But also on that feast day, August 6, 1945 we marked a milestone in humankind's ability to kill one another, to transfigure our world into an uninhabitable hellscape of fire and brimstone beyond Dante's imagination with the added feature of deadly radiation bringing painful later death upon those who survived the first wave death or even visiting its devastation upon the children of survivors, themselves warped by the deadly impact of the bomb's radiation.

If Moses set before us the choice between life and death, the nuclear arms race marked humankind's fullest embrace of the capacity to kill -- to overkill with an arsenal whose lethal capacity numbers beyond the population of the world, with the ability to kill each person on the planet multiple times over and still have more bombs in reserve.

Given that the wages of sin are death, the embrace of nuclear arms is most firmly the fruit of the most capital of sins, the capacity to kill not a just single person, as Cain first did, bringing murder into the human story and God's curse upon himself, but the capacity to kill all of humankind and render the earth uninhabitable.

Thus, I was shaped to believe that as sin is equated to dealing in death, nuclear war is the ultimate sin and the chiefest moral problem of our age.

What people in the generations that have come after me have known almost instinctively but it took me much longer to figure out is that humankind's capacity to make choices that could render our world uninhabitable does not stop with the atom bomb. Climate change is the new atom bomb. Humanity's collective ability to kill off so much of life on earth no longer relies on someone deciding to pull the trigger, to launch the missiles, to fail to reach the conclusion that when it comes to nuclear confrontation, the only winning move is not to play. Every day that goes by without dramatic action to rein in greenhouse gasses is taking a step toward the equivalent of a nuclear missile launch that will someday (but we do not know when) become irreversible.

I hadn't seen it. I hadn't seen how the moral urgency behind preventing nuclear war is the precursor to the same moral urgency behind preventing catastrophic climate change. And as individuals, we feel powerless in both struggles, able to shape neither national policy about nuclear weapons nor global policies that shape the emissions that could be destroying our livable world. But in each case, God calls us to faithful resistance to the powers and principalities of death. In both cases, God calls us, as we make the Transfiguration present here and now through our storytelling, we who take and eat the Body of Christ in Eucharist are transformed into glowing agents of God's love and light, to resist the forces of death and denial that would deny our collective human descendants the chance to live in the glory for which God created us.

God has set before us life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that we and our descendants may live.

Amen.

Love your enemies: Inaugural sermon at St. Peters

Today's Gospel is simultaneously most difficult and most central to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. How can you tell if a place is heavenly? A place is heavenly to the extent that its inhabitants love their enemies, do good toward those who hate them, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who mistreat them. If that is how people act, then where such people dwell is heavenly. If that is not how people act, then we have not yet gotten to the point where "[t]he kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord."

Today's gospel starts with the central, defining message of what it means to follow Jesus, to dwell in the reign of God, to "be saved": 

Love your enemies. 

Love your enemies. 

Love your enemies. 

Now how in hell are we supposed to do that? 

Now I say that partly for shock value, but also I say that because it's literally the challenge. A world not driven by a love of enemies is, in fact, hellish. And our redemption is nothing more and nothing less that learning, practicing, living, being transformed, in such a hellish world, into people who do love their enemies. The world’s redemption, the apocatastasis or restoration of all things for which God longs – it is the same transformation of all dwellers in the world.

Our salvation and the salvation of the world is precisely living out an answer to the question "how *in hell* are we supposed to love our enemies?" 

And to answer that question, we need to define love. 

We can quote scripture, we can read theologians, we can open the dictionary, and all those things have shaped my understanding of what love is, but the definition I'm going to give you today is experiential. After 48 years as a human being, experiencing love as a child and a friend and a part of the church and communities and raising kids and caring for pets and holding people's hands while they die and being in and out of a marriage and teaching and leading parishes and being in relationship with parents and siblings and family and friends, and being in the presence of God in prayer and word and sacrament and in the world, this is what I've come up with. My working definition of love is that to love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. 

Love is giving the dog a bath in tomato juice after the skunk sprayed them when you were about to leave for church on Palm Sunday, it's holding someone's hand as they cry, it's changing a diaper in the middle of the night, it's singing to someone as they fall asleep and holding their hand as it turns cold and the beeping of the hospital heart monitor says they've left this world and gone on to whatever is beyond. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. 

If love is about warm fuzzy feelings, we likely can't summon that for our enemies. But Jesus doesn't tell us we have to like our enemies. We don't have to enjoy spending time with them, or smile when we see them. But if love is not feeling but action rooted in a genuine desire for someone's good, we just might be able to do that, even for those who have mistreated us and who continue to curse us. 

The current Vice President of the United States recently ventured into the realm of moral theology and claimed there's "a very Christian concept" that "You love your family and *then* you love your neighbor, and *then* you love your community, and *then* you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then *after that*, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world." When challenged by actual theologians, he doubled down and referred to the concept of the `ordo amoris`, which Augustine of Hippo and later Thomas Aquinas both discussed: the "order of love." The Vice President asserted that a person has a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away, and therefore, by analogy, the rest of his moral hierarchy also holds. And I would argue that he's not wrong that one does indeed have a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away. But not because of the sort of hierarchy of obligations he suggests. 

Dorothy Day wrote that "The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the _deserving_ and the _undeserving poor_." I would extend that further: the Gospel takes away our right to discriminate at all between those deserving and undeserving of our love. There is, in fact, a hierarchy of *urgency* in terms of the actions of our love, but it is not about to whom we owe care and service based on relationship nor past service they have rendered to us, nor what we hope to expect from them in the future,, nor tribe or any sort. Our obligation to desire someone's well-being is universal, but our obligation to have that desire direct our particular actions is focused not on bonds of kin or tribe or webs of past or future obligation, but on whom we are uniquely positioned to help. 

That aid that we are uniquely positioned to be able to offer is the aid that we are most obligated to undertake. We have a special obligation to feed our children not because we are related to them but because they are uniquely dependent on us. We have an obligation to provide consolation and support to our friends and partners because the life history we share enables us to understand and care for them in ways others cannot. The loving service that can only be given by us is the loving service we have the most particular obligation to undertake. This is how self care fits into this hierarchy: if there is love that we can show ourselves that others cannot do for us, we have a special obligation to act in pursuit of that love. 

We are called to desire what is good for everyone. Love is more than just desiring good for someone; it is acting, on the desire for good for a specific person in a particular place at a particular time. Vaguely wanting good for people is the baseline, but love-in-action is when that desire for people's good translates into specific decisions about how we act. 

Then today's Gospel reminds us that this prioritization of action might be differentiated by our ability to make an impact but Jesus calls us to **not** let how much we _like_ someone enter into the hierarchy of priorities. We may not let the ill that someone has done to us in the past, or even the ill that they are doing to us in the present change their place in the hierarchy of action. If we are well positioned to act for someone's true well being, we are obligated to act on it, regardless of how much we like that person, how they have treated us in the past or treat us in the present, regardless of any expectation that they will help us in the future. 

We often do have a greater obligation to act for the wellbeing of those whose lives are closely linked with ours. And sometimes those whose lives are closely linked with ours are, in fact, the ones who have done the most evil to us. The story of Joseph and his brothers that we heard the conclusion to as our first reading certainly illustrates that. 

But I need to make clear what love of enemies is **not**. Loving our enemies does **not** mean embracing their agenda. We are called to love persons. We are called to desire what is good for a person, and to act on that desire. But if their agenda is evil, loving them doesn't mean promoting their agenda. In fact, it might mean opposing it. If someone has power, and is using that power to hurt people, it may well be the case that removing that person from power is promoting what is good for them. Loving our enemies might well mean opposing them, working to frustrate their plans, working against what they might *think* their interests are. But it cannot mean wishing for them to suffer or hoping for their eternal doom. We cannot give up a genuine care for what is truly good for them, and we can never will their suffering as an end. 

We are called to oppose evil, but not to oppose the people who do evil. We must desire good even for evildoers. And this is good because far too often, we **are** evildoers. It's easy to sort the world into good guys and bad guys but each of us do evil. When we persevere in resisting evil, we live out our baptismal covenant. If we condemn evildoers, we condemn ourselves. Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (sole-jha-NEET-sin) wrote that "[t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either--but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts." When we love our enemies, we act in the hope that they, and we, and all people will turn away from evil and do good. We act confident that through God, _all_ creation is redeemable. No one and nothing exists beyond God's power to save. 

When I was a child, every night I would pray for the repose of the souls of Judas Iscariot and Adolf Hitler. I certainly wasn't condoning their actions. I picked them because they were the two most evil people I could then imagine. I prayed for them in part because I believed that if they could eventually be redeemed and enter the reign of God, we all would be likely to do the same. I prayed that in the end, hell be empty. To love our enemies must at a minimum mean to never give up the hope of their redemption, to write no one off as unforgivable, irredeemable, outside God's love, or ours. 

Which brings us back to the psalmist. 

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; 

do not be jealous of those who do wrong. 

For they shall soon wither like the grass, 

and like the green grass fade away. 

I need to start with a disclaimer here. It's not so much that I practice what I preach but that I preach what I need to practice. I am spending a lot of time this month fretting myself because of evildoers. The evil being done right now by people in positions of power to hurt the vulnerable and to wield power with explicit cruelness is causing me to do a whole lot of fretting. I'm certainly not jealous of the harm they are doing, but I am jealous of the power they hold and the ability to change things that they seem to currently enjoy but are choosing to use to inflict suffering. I find myself going back to the well that is the psalms again and again to draw deep nourishment in trying times. Morning after morning, night after night, the psalmist has been offering the words I need to hear to sustain me through these trying times. It is not because I am good at this, but precisely because I am not that I keep coming back to this prayer:  Do not fret yourself because of evildoers.

But if we love our enemies, this takes on another layer of meaning: "do not fret yourself because of evildoers" means yes, do not worry that they will remain in power forever, but also, if we love them, do not fret that they are beyond redemption. To pray that wicked soon wither like the grass does not have to mean we fail to love them. To pray that the wicked soon wither like the grass does not mean we pray for their suffering or their destruction. We must indeed pray for their redemption. It is good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people to proclaim that God casts down the mighty from the throne and sends the rich away empty. When we are mighty ones on the throne, when we are rich ones who hoard what others need to survive -- accusations that cling to me all too closely -- it is a blessing indeed to be separated from our ability to do harm. It is the first step on our road to redemption to pull us away from the evil we do. Do not fret yourself because of evildoers -- do not fret that they are condemned to remain as evildoers forever. Do not fret that their hearts will forever be hardened. Their power will fade, their ability to do evil will wither like the grass. God is already at work in accomplishing their salvation, just as God is at work in accomplishing ours. 

Prayer is good, and stories are powerful. 

Love does not end with prayers and stories;

love is action rooted in those stories and prayers. 

We can pray that God will cast the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, but can we participate in God's action? Do we have opportunities to resist the evil in the world? The spiritual forces that Jesus's followers have turned to across the centuries to strengthen us in resisting evil have been prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I will talk more about those as we approach Lent, but there is a particular fasting opportunity we could join in this week to resist the evil at play right now. 

This coming Friday, February 28, is a day that various organizers have called for as an economic blackout. A day to fast from spending money, at all if possible, or only on those most urgent emergency needs if necessary. The followers of Jesus's way have long observed Fridays as a day to refrain from various forms of consumption to mark that it was on a Friday that the powers and principalities of the empire of this world put Jesus to death to try to assert their claim to relevance. It is meet and right that we prayerfully consider this invitation to fast from consumer spending this Friday so that our prayers that the world might change might turn to action in bringing to birth a gentler, more loving, more humane world fit for God's creatures. 

Amen.

Why priests?

 My theology of Eucharistic priesthood:

The assembled church is a royal priesthood.

It is God who consecrates.

It is the assembled church who asks God to consecrate.

So what, then, is the role of the person in Holy Orders?

The priest has no super powers. The priest does not consecrate nor does the priest enable the people’s prayers to be heard from God like some sort of holy amplifier. The priest does not add anything to the Eucharist. Indeed, that is precisely the point. The priest’s role in Holy Eucharist is not additive but subtractive. The person in Holy Orders is important not because of what they do, but because of what they do not do. The person in Holy Orders follows the order of the church. The person in Holy Orders does not do those things which the Church has discerned that it does not do. The priest is not an amplifier, but rather a piece of safety equipment. Prayer is powerful, and the priest helps prevent the congregation from doing that which the church has discerned is not pleasing to God. It is not the case that the prayers of the faithful are not powerful enough, but need a priest to amplify them or offer them on the congregation’s behalf. The priest is needed because the prayers of the faithful are indeed very powerful, but directed toward the wrong ends, they can lead us into sin. The role of the priest is to keep us from worshipping wealth, power, ambition, easy comfort, tribalism. The role of the priest is to help direct the prayers of the church toward that which the church has discerned is good and to forestall heresy and idolatry. 

The end of learning [The book banners are right about something]

It’s a universal right for 

each forsaken human being 

to hear stories about people 

thriving in all different ways

coming from all start conditions

of biology, class, gender,

culture, ethnic groups, geogra-

phy, the list goes on for days

and we can’t predict which stories 

will connect to which small humans

but connection to a tale of 

thriving we need to impart, 

because remedying hopelessness 

is both complex and simple: 

everybody needs a vision 

they can hold inside their heart.

For a swan and ugly duckling 

aren’t the same thing – you might think so – 

but the consciousness a swan has 

but the duckling lacks is key

ugly ducklings live out stories 

they can’t find a way to thrive in

but that changes when they learn of 

swans and think “that could be me”

But if we allow one parent 

to prevent their kid from hearing

stories that might give that kid hope 

we are party to abuse.

Queer folx never had a chance to 

thrive as straight; that’s not an option, 

we can move from doomed to thriving 

when new scripts are introduced.

In the story of creation 

God gave Adam the decision

out of all created beings 

just what preference he would voice.

For the Holy One presented

him with tapeworms, goats, and llamas 

as potential life companions

And God left it Adam’s choice.

And the Earthling formed in Eden

chose the woman as his life mate

but to focus on the details

of that one’s mans choice seems strange

For existence precedes essence

and we all must build a meaning

for each life’s a different pattern

that each person must arrange.

So yes it is exposure

to queer stories that transform us 

but it’s  only the right stories 

for each person that will do.

When we’re hopeless undead zombies 

plodding through life without vision 

the right image might ignite a 

spark of  hope in me or you.

My heart goes out to the queer kids 

‘cause I wish I’d found that vision

long before the years it took me 

but this need goes far beyond.

Everybody needs a vision 

of just what a life of purpose 

could be shaped like in their context.

And to that we must respond.

The right stories for each person

can unlock the hope within us.

If we try to live the wrong ones

there’s a lot that can destroy.

Our creator longs for us to

find the fullness of our being

Called to life and life abundant

Called to love and hope and joy.

Gracious living will look different

as each separate person finds it

but the object of our learning

is to find a way to thrive

When we latch on to the stories

that at long last are the right fit

we’ll unlock our maker’s purpose

for us, finally alive

Stories do change us

This might be one of my #1 public policy issues: As a human right, every single kid needs to be exposed to a wide range of diverse examples of people who thrive in all sorts of different ways. People of all different geographies and neurologies and physical shapes and abilities and ethnicities and gender identities and sexualities and careers and partnered statuses and a whole bunch of other ways humans are different. We don't know who will connect with what examples, but seeing a giant range of ways to thrive and helping kids imagine that just because of where you start, there are lots of "where you can go"s is absolutely life-saving. If we allow any parent on the planet to opt their kid out of exposure to stories about diverse models of thriving, we are complicit in child abuse.

I'd argue the book banners who want to prevent this are partially correct: stories DO make someone queer. But the alternative isn’t “straight”; it’s hopeless or perhaps dead. Make the book banners say it out loud: to deny queer kids stories about queer thriving is to say they would rather said kids be hopeless or dead than thriving as queer people.

Cis kids need to learn about trans people too, but wow, I *really* needed more examples of trans people much much earlier in my life.

We queer folx never had a chance of succeeding at being straight, but in an urgent way, exposure to stories and roles DOES change who we are. It changes us from dysfunctional, hopeless people doomed to fail in an attempt to conform to a hegemonic norm we can never successfully fit into people with hope because there are other models of success that are actually congruent with our core identites.

Self awareness *does* create an existential difference between a ugly ducklings and swans. Just because I wasn't successful at being straight, I wasn't queer yet. I was just hopeless. Exposure to another archetype of success changes people -- changed me -- from a hopeless doomed failure of a straight person into a queer person with hope. Stories changed me from a hopeless doomed miserable cis person to a trans person with hope (I mean I'm still terrified and far from thriving as a trans person, but having other stories to hope for makes living possible).

National Coming Out Day

 It's national coming out day.

I feel like I've done nothing but coming out this year. Other people can come out or reaffirm their coming out today. It's an ongoing process; I'm not done coming out, and I'll have more to say about it. But not right now. Happy coming out day to all who celebrate; for now, I'm tired and I've done far too much "coming out" and today I'm just going to think about what to fix for dinner for me and my amazing kid.

But I will say this to anyone who thinks it might be safe to come out but you're scared to do it: yes, it's terrifying. Yes, there are things and people and contexts you'll lose, and it will be heart-wrenching. But to be yourself and not hide who you are is one of the most amazing things ever. 

And I think the answer might be grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Change and hope

 There’s a disturbing big number of questions that start with “I never used to want to __; I wonder why I’m starting to feel differently now” for which the answer is “oh, that was a response to gender dysphoria.” I guess the good news about the past is wow, I developed a lot of coping mechanisms and the good news about the present is being able to begin to imagine possibilities beyond them…

I've always understood myself as an introvert. But as I'm rediscovering myself, I'm realizing that gender dysphoria led me to just be uncomfortable in a lot of social settings because I felt like I was present as the *wrong person,* and as I'm trying to grow into my more authentic self, I'm surprised how much more comfortable I am in social settings. But also I have some sort of audio processing bug in my brain, so too many people talking at once does cause my brain to shut down.