Time for an Encore, Part II

Originally posted on paulastonewilliams.com on September 12, 2023

This week, part two of “Time for an Encore.”

During this period of taking stock and the first letting go, I asked a second question, “What do I really want?” The limelight and I are friends. Being seen and appreciated has always been more important than being well-compensated. I grew up in a world in which it was considered a sin to be ambitious or to seek an audience. Those were signs of the sin of pride.  A favorite phrase of my family, common in Appalachia, was, “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was all right to do well singing a solo at your elementary school concert. It was not alright to bask in the applause. My mother saw it as her job to make sure I did not get too big for my britches. She excelled at the task. But I loved an audience. I loved discovering I could hold the attention of a group of people just by singing a song or telling a story. And I always wanted to do it in such a way that someone felt better than when they started their day.

In my forties I identified a life phrase that guided my work. It was an unusual phrase I suppose – to lessen spiritual suffering. As I developed my pastoral counseling practice, the phrase continued to guide me and I chose to specialize in healing spiritual trauma. Making people happy is elusive. Lessening unnecessary suffering is more attainable, at least most of the time. It is never easy, but it is worthy.

Which brought me to the third question, “What should I do?” I needed to do the second letting go, this time not age related, but leaving the past behind to live authentically into an uncertain future. (You never attain authenticity. You can only live authentically.) I knew I had to come out as transgender and within seven days lost every one of my jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

That experience is captured in my first two TEDTalks. It is more completely chronicled in my memoir, As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

Life in the Liminal Space

When I came out, I was still not certain I was going to transition. After losing all of my jobs and most of my friends, I tried one more time, for three months, to live as Paul. It was not sustainable, and oh, there is so much in that sentence.

I returned to my chameleon-like life transitioning back and forth. It is a blur, remembered through a glass darkly. On one side was the elation of letting go and moving in the direction of authenticity. On the other side was the pain of discontinuity that signaled a life lost, never to return. I was a transgender woman on a desert island with no accessible past and a supremely uncertain future.

I am now ten years post-transition, and in retrospect I can see that I exited this difficult transitional space incrementally. The first phase took three years. The second, another four, and the third phase, a very difficult two years.

During those last two years I learned the importance of identifying what was and was not within my control. As a white male, I had far more control than I have as a woman. I had to accept reality and acknowledge what had happened and where it deposited me. I had to live my life as it was, in the present moment. It did not help to blame others. It did help to take inventory of the events and their causes and accept them. I had little choice but to live my life as it was, in the present moment. That was when I frequented David Wagoner’s Poem, Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here, you must treat it as a powerful stranger

Must ask its permission to know it and be known

Listen, the forest breathes; it whispers “I have made this place around you

If you leave, you may return again saying, Here

No two trees are the same to Raven; no two branches are the same to Wren

If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost

What do you do when you’re lost in the forest? Stand still

The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you

Those last two years may have been the two hardest years of my life. I had to take stock yet again. I discovered taking stock and letting go are essential skills to develop on the road less traveled by.

During that time I had to come to grips with what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls existential guilt. It is the recognition that some personality traits have been with me for as long as I can remember and are likely to remain with me for as long as I live. They are not positive traits. I call them my abiding shadows. And the best I can hope for is to be able to identify them, all of them, and lock them in the basement, knowing damn well that they will find their way out. When that happens, my task is to catch them before they’ve done much damage and lock them in the basement again. There is no joy in this, only the abiding desire to unleash a bit less suffering into the world.

Toward the end of that two year period, I kept returning to two stanzas from William Butler Yeats’s poem, Vacillation.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled. 

Next week, Part 3.