When I moved to Fresno in 2004 for the features job at the Bee, I saw it as a fresh start, a way to make something of myself 3,000 miles away from nearly everyone I knew my whole life. But there were still ways to be depressed. I was a stranger in a strange land, and even if you live anywhere outside the Valley, Fresno is a totally different planet. (As the foreman of a jury I sat on pointedly said to me over lunch, after I’d been out there four years, “You really haven’t been out here long enough to know the lay of the land, have you?”) It took about a year before everyone in the Tower District, where I hung out, realized I wasn’t an alien and started befriending me. The features editor who hired me didn’t listen to one single idea I had in the 4 1/2 years I worked under her. I had a long-distance relationship that came to an end. And worst of all, the years of not taking care of myself blew up into a case of full-blown sleep apnea that damn near killed me. I was able to get it under control just in time for … my little gender epiphany at the start of 2008.
And just as the night of my epiphany cut through the Gordian knot of all the years of hiding and suppressing myself, that initial estradiol shot slashed through the heart of my generally dark mood. That’s pretty much what I left behind for the greater part after that day. Well, since my life has never been that cut-and-dried, it didn’t mean I didn’t experience black moods after that.
When I was first laid off, it was a bit of a jolt, and I felt a little bit unmoored. But I figured that, with a stellar résumé and years of experience, I’d have no problem getting a job, either at a newspaper, website or doing PR work. But this was the spring of 2009, in the jaws of the Depression. (Don’t tell me it was a “Great Recession”; at one point that summer, all seven cities in the Valley had official unemployment figures of over 20%.) Suddenly, 47 was the new 65. No one wanted to hire someone with my skill level; my god, they’d have to pay me like a fucking human being! Hundreds of résumés sent without even a “You suck” in response. Suddenly, my severance didn’t look so huge; I had to downsize from the great house I was renting into a room in a house on the other side of town, which presented its own set of drama. (Another time.) Suddenly, it was the Twin Towers of Anxiety I was navigating: transition and unemployment. And while part of me grew more confident, especially during the second adolescence I wished I had the first time around, I was out of work three months, then six, then one year, then two, and the unemployment ran out, and then six more months. And I encountered weirdness with my family for 14 months after I came out to them over the phone that September.
There were only two instances where I really did think of taking a long walk into a short ocean. One was late in 2010; still unemployed, and then things came to a head with my parents that November, a week and a half before Thanksgiving, and if things went sideways with them, I had every intent of driving out to my favorite beach on the coast and walking in Christmas morning. But we straightened everything out by the middle of that week, and when I came home for the holidays three weeks later, that first tower of anxiety toppled for good.
But the second tower loomed much larger. Jump to the following Good Friday, 2011, with my unemployment having run out that week. I had just found out the day before that the magazine copy editor job I had gone out to interview for in Santa Barbara (on my dime) wasn’t happening because the editor-in-chief put in his notice. But a Sony Records executive emailed that afternoon after I applied for a website job with the company, and said he wanted to meet up with me, so I rented a car to drive to L.A. Friday morning. About 40 minutes down the 99 freeway on a four-hour drive, he called me; he was flying back to New York, and could we do this on the phone next week? Son of a bitch then rescheduled me for phoners three times the next three weeks and bailed out three times. I was six weeks shy of 50, the job I wanted (and would’ve been hired for) had vanished, and now I was being dicked with over another job, just because. So, change of plans: I changed clothes and took my rental out to the coast and looked over said beach that cloudy late afternoon and said I’d be back late the night before my birthday, because after two years of this shit, I was not gonna be 50 and unemployed and useless, and I wasn’t gonna live on the street. Forever 49 had a nice ring to it.
Thankfully, I have some good friends on both coasts, and they convinced me, after much talking, that it was worth sticking around. And I had an all-timer 50th birthday party with a lot of great friends at my hangout bar (capped by the surprise of my life; my bestie flew in from New Haven totally unexpectedly).
But yeah, all the mojo I was building through what had been a successful transition was erased by the beatdown of unemployment. When I did get rehired at the Bee that September, it was for a part-time, on-call copy editor on the news desk, at less pay per hour than when I was left, and with no benefits. And when I was dumped again nine months later, another budget cut, I moved my whole life across the country and moved in with the folks for what I thought would be three months at most. I was re-energized.
Ha-ha. I won’t bore you with details, but it took a year to find a job when I came home, and that was a part-time contract job that disappeared in another budget cut two months in – right in time for Mom to go in the hospital for nine weeks and rehab for seven. Life since I’ve come home 7 1/2 years ago has been a rollercoaster of hirings, unhirings and my parents’ illnesses. And there was that lifelong dream of being a five-time champ on Jeopardy!, which ended five games short, and in a spectacular, epic, last-minute flameout. (But I did make it to the show, I made a world of new friends, and I was only the fourth person from my dysphoric tribe to make it to the show. I represented on national TV. And as I said at the time, if someone in my situation watches the show and they say, “Hey, I can do this,” then it was worth it. And, early this March, my favorite band, The Fleshtones, rolled out a song called “Alex Trebek” on which they name-checked me. That’s something one can’t buy.)
The only certainty in all of this has been uncertainty. But I can tell you that the black moods that used to consume entire seasons of my life have shrunk to hours, maybe a day or two at most. There’s at least some general sense of calm most days. My ups and downs have flattened some these past 10 years. With what I’ve been through, that’s a good thing. A damn good thing. I mean, I’m still here.
Tags: estradiol valerate, Fran Fried, Franorama World, gender identity, gender transition, hormones
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