How to Fall in Love with Yourself in 15,988 Days
MY FATHER LOVED me something fierce.
He loved me so hard that when he squeezed me in public, I felt my ribs move. I often struggled to catch my breath, squirming while he laughed, and we’ve all seen kids do this, haven’t we? Try to break free from a parent’s jokingly captive embrace, the adult laughing, the kid squealing, everyone equally in on the play?—or maybe we haven’t all seen that. Maybe I haven’t, even; maybe it’s something I imagined or projected onto other people or a television screen.
“Get your hands off that child,” my mother would say to him, only during the day, when she saw it, but still enough times that if he’d had to put a quarter in the bank each one, my retirement account would be full. Sometimes, even when I was an adult, when he pulled me onto his lap with his arms around my waist when I was home from college or sat next to me in a restaurant with one arm around my neck, both lips against my face, she said instead: “Leave that baby alone.”
It was because of how much he loved me, he told everyone, his affection. Her objection cast, then, as jealousy.
My boyfriends and husbands loved me, some of them more fiercely than others—or at least as I understood things in this boring old story: My daddy wasn’t right, and some relationships I later chose were, at their best and most euphemistic, suboptimal.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
This week, I found an unlikely holiday hero in the form of Jack Black. While Thanksgiving isn’t nearly as hard for me as Christmas, these winter months span the time that I was as an adolescent incest-pregnant, so they’re all a little terrible. When I woke up on Monday, I knew I needed to do nothing but lie around and watch movies. And though I argued with myself briefly (I should be working! I could at least clean first!), I surrendered to my own needs pretty quick.
I get quicker at it all the time.
Imagine my delight when, a half an hour into the brand-new Dear Santa, Jack Black’s character—which is Satan—says to a child:
“Why would I touch you?”
Then, the punchline: “I’m the devil, not a trusted relative.”
He laughs. I laughed, after the shock wore off that someone on TV finally said something so honest. Then, In this season where I miss and revile the encompassing, literally suffocating love of my father in near-equal measure, I cheered wildly at the screen.
EIGHT MONTHS AGO, I was in bed by myself when I suddenly thought: I’m so in love with you.
I smiled, immediately.
I wasn’t thinking about anybody else, and I’d never thought that before. I’d thought it about—and said it to—lots of other people, sure. But not about me.
I’d recently managed, after fifteen fucking years of therapy, to start telling myself I love you—and even that was definitely more practice than perfect. Six years before that, I’d given a Viking funeral to my self-hatred in a long and agonizing ayahuasca ceremony, then tussled with my belief that god hated me in an even longer, even more agonizing ayahuasca ceremony after that. But the road between self-hate and self-love is a hard, fucky game of Chutes and Ladders.
And when you have no idea what Love (, Actually) feels like? When the people you most wanted, or still want, to love you, in the way that feels right to you, never, ever will? Those are slides that dump you back at start over and over again.
The night that I thought to myself, I’m so in love with you, I Googled how many days I’d been alive. Because while I’d sometimes successfully loved myself before, I’d never felt in love with myself—felt that same swoon that I’ve felt for others for myself. It was important to note. It was important to know.
Fifteen thousand nine-hundred eight-eight days. That number felt lower than I’d expected: felt like, Is that it? But I expect that’s from spending those days wondering how I could possibly do another.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
“HE JUST NEEDS to be seen,” Bobby Cannavale says to Rose Byrne about their son in Ezra, which is not a brand-new movie but is newly streaming on one of the seemingly 4,000 streaming services I subscribe to precisely for days I need to do nothing but lie around watching movies. “And heard and…and appreciated for what he has to offer.”
“Yes,” she responds, “but he also needs to be able to give us a hug without screaming.”
“He doesn’t,” I said to the screen.
“He doesn’t!”
There are many scenes leading up to this one where Ezra’s parents try to touch him in a way they already know he doesn’t like, and he yells at them. It’s a problem that supposedly needs to be fixed because he has autism. Or, they could just stop touching him in a way that he has already many, many times expressed he does not like to be touched.
I had this argument with my second husband, as well as with my first live-in boyfriend after I divorced and started transitioning. I have never been diagnosed with autism, but I do not like to be touched without permission. I find it jarring. The boyfriend was woker than the husband—queer and trans and California-bred—but we still fought about it all the time. He couldn’t feel like he was expressing his love without consistently putting hands on me. And he—also a sex-abuse survivor—couldn’t feel like I loved him, unless I was consistently putting hands inside him.
The people who are in my life now, they’re attuned enough to feel the way my system jolts, if only internally, when they reflexively lay a friendly hand on my leg to punctuate a point of whatever story they’re telling.
“I’m sorry,” they say immediately, interrupting their train of thought to look into my eyes. Or, “Is that okay?”
Because they’ve asked or apologized even after the fact, I say, “It’s okay.”
Every day of high school before I could drive, my father woke up earlier than necessary to take me to school. He didn’t need to be at work until much later, he reminded me regularly; he didn’t need to be at work until or unless he chose. We rode along listening to NPR, the smell of his coffee as thick as on the Christmas morning he raped me after I told him I was a boy, just out of toddlerhood. In the uniform skirt of my Catholic high school, my thighs were bare, the backs of them against his Cadillac leather seats, the top of my left thigh under his palm, which rested or rubbed me, sometimes patting me or lightly squeezing, the whole way, and I still managed to be in the National Honors Society.
Texas has put a bathroom bounty on trans people. Get this one a hot shower.
RV propane is $3.49/gallon, and it’s officially cold outside.
TIp 🤍THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, I got out of bed at 6 p.m. and started drinking.
Not in a sad way—although I was definitely sad. Since the election, I’ve felt my parts in deep mourning. I’ve been sleeping vampire hours, up all night while most of my time zone sleeps, watching the sun come up with dismay: Another day.
While I don’t necessarily feel like being unalive, I don’t feel like living a day, either. And so, I don’t. I put on a sleep mask, and I call the day a night.
I love living in the night.
Wednesday morning before I’d fallen asleep, my ancestors, transcestors, guardians, and guides had talked to me, as they often do near dawn. And this time, they’d said: Have tequila for breakfast.
Dishes were piled up in my sink. The Spirits encouraged me to ask a friend to come do them, too, and that, I could not. I spent a long time trying to picture it, me just lying here in the squish while someone not only saw my dishes but did them. I am the longtime self-appointed dish-doer in my blood family—and subsequently in my various chosen cohabitation families. Something in my soul has informed me that I need more help, and I understood that asking someone else to do my dishes would be an important step.
But as much as I let my friends see, I couldn’t yet bear to let any of them witness that, after a lifetime of doing other people’s, I don’t always have the energy to do my own chores.
Gabriel Mac
Drinking tequila as soon as I woke up, though—that struck me as bananas but easier to do. I still resisted it; I still thought, No, I’m not going to do that and argued with myself about it, argued that it wasn’t right, that it meant I had a problem, that it would make me unlovable—Jesus, imagine my asking someone to come over and do my dishes while I drank tequila for breakfast! I fretted about it right up until I reached into the refrigerator and grabbed the bottle along with some mixers for a sparkling cocktail: a grapefruit I cut and squeezed fresh into the glass, a little sweet vermouth, some glugs of lime soda water. A couple of dashes of orange bitters. All over a big, sexy cube of cocktail ice.
Someday I’ll love myself enough to feel confident that exactly who I am, wherever I’m at, won’t repulse anyone around me. Or, more important, won’t at all repulse me.
Lots of people breakfast-drink, I reminded myself many times as I started on mine, holding the condensing glass and sitting down to work on a puzzle. I toasted the framed picture of my dear murdered/departed bestie, Rice, like I always do before I take an alcoholic sip. She was a huge fan of booze in general and of morning Irish coffees in specific. And a few years after she and I solidified our friendship in grad school, I went on to marry a Frenchman. I remember showing up to meet his whole family, crammed around a tiny apartment-kitchen table in Alsace at nine in the morning one snowy Saturday. They were stunned—like, audible-gasp shook—when I told them it was too early for me to drink.
Gabriel Mac
Listen. I can make all the justifications in the world for getting drunk at whatever time and not hurting anybody—unlike a heavy-drinking father, ex-boyfriend, ex-husband—and for getting drunk in a non-harmful way that brought me a lot of Joy, Actually, once I stopped judging myself for it. More important, I theoretically could stop judging myself even if I were the only person in the world doing any non-abusive thing I do, as far outside Normie existence as I increasingly get in this majestically queer and trans and wild and free body.
There’ve been many moments in the eight months since I fell in love with myself that I’ve felt—and said—it again. There’ve been moments where I suddenly felt so beautiful, as both a being and an aesthetic. As a theory, even: an evolution in the worlds of both my own soul and the cis-het hegemony’s.
As I put together a puzzle on the pretty wood table in the non-normative house I live in last night, listening to a genre of music that can only be described as “pretty-gay electro-pop” and drinking a pretty-gay drink (let’s be honest, straight dudes are mostly not—to their own detriment!—squeezing fresh grapefruits into tequila with sweet vermouth, lime Bubly, and orange bitters), I was suddenly struck by my own specialness. By how much I did. By how much I’ve lived in the number of days I’ve been alive. It burst something open in my chest. Not a sense of freakishness, but the spectacular freakiness of it all.
You could argue—and you bet your ass I have—that I should have been able to get there without tequila. That I should be able to feel that way every stone-sober second, despite the global apathy to child sex abuse and the incredible widespread enthusiasm for trans extermination.
But I wasn’t.
And that’s just exactly who I am, wherever I’m at.
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