My friend and upstairs neighbor committed suicide a week ago and it feels a little like a bomb has exploded in the center of my community. Watching my friends struggle to process the news and dealing with complicated feelings all while trying to make sure that my friend’s partner is well supported has been… difficult. Amelia and I weren’t all that close of friends, especially in the last few months or so, but hir death echoed like a shockwave across the community. I feel responsible for us not having been closer friends and at the same time, I’m not sure what I could have done differently.

As a survivor of childhood sexual assault, it is a challenge for me to be around overt displays of sexual behavior. I have a feeling some of my friends consider me to be rather prudish about sex, but it’s just really complicated for me. Even when it is modeled in healthy ways, it feels unsafe or at the least deeply uncomfortable for me to be around people who are being really flirty and aggressively sexual. Amelia often made me feel triggered in this way. Watching hir relationships with people often left me feeling vulnerable in a way that made me feel unsafe. I had planned on trying to set some clear boundaries around the specific behaviors that made me feel unsafe, but I also didn’t want to cause hir more distress when ze was already so overcome by depression so this conversation was never able to happen.

Now I have regrets. I regret that this conversation was never able to happen because it makes things feel unsettled, unresolved. And now instead of mourning for the loss of a friend, it feels like I lost a friend who could have been a much closer friend if it weren’t for my hangups around sex and sexuality. I regret that I was unable to be a better support for hir when ze was still alive because I was afraid of being triggered. I regret keeping my distance as much as I did because I was trying to protect myself. And I feel deeply alone in all of this because it feels like everyone else’s relationships with Amelia were much simpler. I feel like I can’t say “I miss Amelia but our relationship was difficult at times and it’s complicated” without coming across as a giant asshole.

My therapist reassured me yesterday that I’m not a giant asshole, but somehow having someone who gets paid to listen to me tell me that doesn’t dissolve those feelings. Of course she says I’m not an asshole. It’s part of her job to help hold me together. I don’t know how to resolve my feelings around this. I feel deeply guilty and angry and oftentimes very alone. How do you get support from people who you’re afraid are going to judge you harshly, even as you feel you probably deserve it? Is it possible to have imposter syndrome when it comes to grief?

And if that weren’t enough to deal with, I’m also struggling with the guilt I have over the realization that a few years ago, I could be the cause of all of this grief in my loved ones. There was one day back in 2012 where I had a plan in place. I was ready to die and all I needed was for my partner to leave for work and leave me alone in the apartment. I had made up my mind and the only thing that kept me from dying that day was my partner seeing something in me and knowing that I needed help immediately. She didn’t go to work that day. Instead we went to the emergency room and I signed myself into a locked psychiatric unit for a month. But I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if she hadn’t realized where I was. She would have come home from work and it would have been too late. But when you’re in that mindset, when you’re ready to die, the consequences of your actions don’t register. I know that for me, I wasn’t thinking in that moment of anything except ending my pain in the only way I knew how.

So how do I move from this guilt, this anger at myself, into a place of healing and moving on? I know it has just been a week, but this feels like the longest week I’ve ever had. I feel stuck in my grief and alone with my guilt. How do I let people in without inappropriately centering the conversation on myself? It all just feels like some horrible dream from which I can’t wake up. How do I be a better support to the people I care about so that this doesn’t have to repeat itself in the future? How do I be a better person to myself? If only I had all the answers.

(Image description: A photo of my right wrist with a tattoo of a semi-colon nestled between a sinus EKG rhythm)

Depression walloped me yesterday. I had a short case of the sad and lonelies on Sunday afternoon, but getting out of the apartment for a bit and being around other people helped. Monday night I was supposed to go to chorus rehearsal but instead I sat at home medicating the anxiety that popped up late morning. So when I woke up yesterday feeling that sense of doom hanging over me, the darkness enveloping my brain, all I could find the words to say was that I felt “bad” inside.

Because that’s how it feels inside my head and body. A sense of something dark deep inside me that is growing sinisterly. Last week when I saw my psychiatrist, I mentioned that my sleep had been really off for a bit, but I had just come back home from a trip to the west coast and we both kind of chocked it up to my brain having difficulty adjusting to the time change. And I was optimistic that things would improve soon, once I got over the jet lag, I would bounce back. Except that’s not what happened.

I went through the motions yesterday. I got exercise riding my bicycle seven and a half miles to my weekly therapy appointment. I went to therapy and was honest with my therapist about how I felt. I forced myself to eat three times. I went to Tai Chi. But every single step that day was forced. Nothing came easily. My therapist reminded me that depression does this, makes everything feel impossibly hard. I feel like I’m carrying a huge weight alone, uphill, in a blizzard. I can’t see where I’m going, I’m cold and lonely and tired, and every step feels harder than the last.

Today I met with a friend to get groceries for dinner. I took the bus a few miles into the next city over from mine, walked through the aisles of the grocery store trying to find ingredients for dinner tonight and tomorrow. I bought the box of dinosaur-shaped macaroni and cheese to eat someday when my appetite returns because it was cute and hey, dinosaurs! I paid for my groceries and got back on the bus to go home with my two light-ish bags and I felt a tiny bit better. The company helped and I was being productive. Then I realized I’d forgotten to do something minor yesterday when my brain was fuzzed from depression and immediately started to catastrophize. “You are a horrible person.” “Everyone hates you anyway.” “What’s the point in trying?” my brain told me on a loop. I unwisely got on the internet and looked at the state of the world and felt powerless and angry and bad. And then I apologized to a friend for my error and corrected it so it no longer existed. My friend was very kind and told me how not a horrible person I was. My cat sat in my lap. I lay on our beanbags under my weighted blanket. And you know, things still suck, but they suck a little bit less.

And that’s the way life goes. I’m trying to practice radical acceptance that as a person with recurring severe depression, this is just a part of my life. To acknowledge that the dark times are going to come and eventually fade away and brighter days will come. And even though I may not want my life to exist this way, I don’t have total control over this and my life is still worth living. I have people who care about me. I am loved. And even if I didn’t manage to get my laundry done today, I did enough and that counts.

(Image Description: Me lying reclined on two brightly colored beanbag chairs, under a weighted blanket with polka dots on it. I’m reading a book – So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo – with my cat lying near me)

Four Year’s ago, I was sitting at a table in a locked psychiatric unit drawing non-stop, wishing desperately that tomorrow would be just any normal day and not a holiday that had driven me to suicidality. The how’s and why’s of that are a whole post of their own though. That year I would spend Christmas among twenty or thirty other patients, a handful of staff members and a “special” hospital food feast. It was glum and depressing and while the staff went above and beyond to make it as decent as they possibly could, receiving a wrapped weekly planner didn’t do much to brighten my mood. Seriously though, the staff was amazing. They even gave me a small wrapped gift to give my partner that day so I would get to give her something. The point I’m trying to drive home though is how bleak and hopeless things felt at that time in my life and how powerless I felt to confront that.

It has been a long four years filled with growth, progress and set-backs but this Christmas is starkly different. This year, for the first time in 17 years, I am traveling to celebrate Christmas with the older of my two younger sisters. I’m not sure who out of the two of us is more excited. For weeks I’ve been shipping little stocking stuffers to her house because that is a family tradition that she’s kept. We’re arriving in California slightly after 10 PM on Christmas Eve since that was significantly less money than flying out earlier in the week. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and we’ll unpack stockings that I can’t wait to fill tonight and go play DND with my sister’s friends and I’ll get to spend the day with her, rather than an hour away from home, inpatient and suicidal like I did in 2013.

There are a lot of things that I attribute this change to. A shit ton of hard trauma therapy for one. Different meds. Some repairing of family relationships. Some healing wounds. I don’t think any of just one of these things would have made all the difference without the others alongside it. I feel pretty damn grateful for my partner, my supportive friends, my mental health team.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year and as we head into 2018, I’m trying to retain a sense of hope that the challenges I’ll face in the upcoming year will be things familiar enough that I can cope to overcome them. It different enough that I still grow as a person. The state of the world feels pretty bleak and I’m easily overwhelmed if I read too many news stories, but I’m hoping things can still change if we don’t give up. Even if it sometimes feels like I gave up a long time ago. This year I’m celebrating Christmas with my sister in California. That’s pretty hard to top.

There’s a white supremacy rally happening across the river tomorrow. I’m going with a group of friends to join the counter-protest early in the morning. We’re meeting two miles away and then marching to the common. I’m having a lot of anxiety about tomorrow. I’m worried that things will get violent. I’m worried that I can’t guarantee the safety of myself and the people I love. I’m worried that I could possibly be arrested if things get out of control. But I feel even more strongly that I need to be there tomorrow. I need to show up and stand up and fight back against all of this bullshit because what will happen if people don’t? I’ve got my buddy for the protest. I’ve got a contact person who will be expecting me to call and check in at a given time and can start a search for me if need be. I’ll have the numbers of my contact person and the National Lawyers Guild written on my arm in case I need them and don’t have access to my phone.

I was heartened to read today that nearby churches are opening their doors to the counter-protestors tomorrow, some offering to stay open all night if need be. I’m heartened to see that 15,000 people have RSVP’d on Facebook to show up to the counter-protest and another 30,000 marked themselves as being “interested”. I hope they all show up tomorrow morning. I’m grateful to know that these people will have my back tomorrow if I need them to. And I hope that there won’t be violence tomorrow, but I feel like I’m as prepared as I can be if there is.

Let’s do this…

(Image Description – Myself wearing a black t-shirt which reads “White Silence = White Violence. Black Lives Matter”)

About six months ago, I started having an increase in anxiety symptoms. I have panic disorder with agoraphobia and so sometimes, I just get really anxious for reasons that I’m not aware of and, if I don’t succeed in using coping skills to deal with the anxiety, can progress into having a panic attack. So I started wanting to avoid things that I normally enjoy and was procrastinating on a lot of important tasks. About four months ago, the anxiety skyrocketed seemingly out of the blue. I couldn’t leave my house, I was dependent on prescription anxiety meds to survive the days, I basically spent entire days underneath my weighted blanket to keep my skin from crawling. And then the depression hit. It started off as a subtle shift from the extreme anxiety I was having with my mood beginning to change and then hit me like a train.

I saw my mental health providers and decided that even though it was early on in this depressive episode, I’d seek out intensive treatment with the goal of preventing it from continuing into something darker where I might become actively suicidal again. I picked a PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program) in a program designed for queer patients, meeting for five group therapy sessions per day. The people at Triangle were great. The mixture of patients was really well suited to my needs and after a few days of silently nodding and snapping my fingers when I identified with something someone said, I began to feel comfortable enough to open up to the group. And gradually, with structure and group sessions and a medication change, I started to feel better.

I’ve been at home full time for about three weeks now and while things aren’t 100% better, I feel like I’m on pretty stable footing. I started volunteering once a week with an organization that does important work that I feel makes a difference in people’s lives. Even though it’s usually just one day a week, it’s made me feel a tiny bit productive and I feel like I’ve gotten as much out of the relationship I’m forging as they might be getting from me. I haven’t really felt this way since I started with OCEMS (Ouray County EMS) in Colorado years and years ago. Life has changed and I’m adjusting to the changes in my own crotchety, skeptical manner. But I am adjusting.

Tomorrow I leave for a four day camping trip in rural Maine. I’ll be spending time with friends that I’ve known for over a decade now, many of which I haven’t seen in years. I have to admit I’m a little anxious about the trip, regardless of my excitement for it. It’ll be the first time going on a trip without Aria since I went to Philadelphia four years ago. I get anxious when riding as a passenger in a car on highways because of the speed and this trip involves several hours of highway driving. And I’m anxious about meeting new people, of which there will be many. I’m managing by reminding myself that I have the friends I know already to feel comfortable around, and that I can medicate myself in the morning before we leave to help with the car anxiety. I am really looking forward to hanging around with a bunch of friends lakeside, getting to use my tent again, bonfires, and sitting around in the sun in a pair of shorts and no shirt.

I’m packed, except for last minute things like my cell phone and my alarm is set for 6:15 tomorrow. The only thing left to do tonight is stop worrying so I can fall asleep. Hah. If only it were that easy, but you know what I mean. It’ll be a good trip and I just need to keep reminding myself of that until it happens.

Last April I was excited and nervous to announce that my partner and I were in the early stages of trying to adopt a baby. I’ve been very aware of how long ago that announcement was and how silent I’ve been on the process. Some of this has been because it was suggested to not be too vocal about the process at our adoption workshop, but more has been because of the challenges this process has brought so far. When we attended the adoption workshop back in April, things felt like they were moving along smoothly. We’d had two visits with our home study social worker, we were signing on with the agency we’d chosen to work with for placement. Everything was very positive. Of course, things didn’t continue in that way.

The original paperwork we filled out for the home study required disclosure of any prescription medication and hospitalizations. Because I am on psychotropic medication for the management of my mental illnesses, the home study agency required letters of recommendation from both my therapist and psychiatrist. Originally, the instructions for these letters was very vague in what the social worker was looking for and my first letters were rejected for not being detailed enough and for implying but not outright saying the exact phrase “I am in support of this adoption”. Our social worker offered to let my providers write a second round of letters, but there was an issue with the second letter that my therapist wrote which sent up red flags within the agency and my psychiatrist was told by the lawyer at the clinic where she works that she was not able to answer specific questions pertaining to my ability to parent or use the specific language required. After clearing up the issues with my therapist’s second letter, which had resulted from a miscommunication between her and the social worker, our social worker said she could write yet another letter but did not follow through on her offer to reach out to my therapist again to clear up any confusion. My therapist wrote a third letter with the guidance of my partner and myself and it was submitted a couple of weeks ago. I was waiting to hear back from the social worker about the last letter when we got the first major bad news.

Yesterday, we received an e-mail from the Independent Adoption Center, which we had chosen to do our placement, that they were filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy and closing all of their offices immediately. The e-mail cited the declining number of domestic adoptions happening in the country and the increase in number of families trying to adopt a child as a reason for them shutting their doors. Apparently the money they have at this point will go in a court appointed trust and after their debts have been paid, all the families that had signed on with them, more than 300 last time I looked, would be contacted to submit claims as to what they felt they were owed. It sounds like if there is money left over, there will be some process of divvying it between families, but I don’t imagine there will be much returned of the $15,000 we’ve paid them. This news was devastating. My partner lost her job three weeks ago, money has been tighter than usual, I used a chunk of my savings to pay for the final agency payments to IAC. It looks very unlikely that we will be able to sign on with another agency any time soon. After all of the initial excitement, our hopes of starting a family in the next few years were effectively ended.

Then I got a call from our social worker about the home study this morning. Unfortunately, my psychiatric history is pretty extensive and includes seven inpatient hospitalizations from 2012-2015, three of which were for a month or longer. I had to report them because leaving them off of my paperwork would have been fraud and easily discovered if the adoption agency requested copies of my medical records. Because of this, the social worker and the agency she represents felt that I had not been stable long enough for them to take the recommendations of my therapist and psychiatrist and find in our favor. Our social worker offered us two options. The first was that we could continue the home study and have a negative outcome. The second was that we could stop here, not complete the home study and wait until I had a longer period of stability, at which point we could start another home study in the future and not have this current home study impact our ability to adopt. I had been expecting this from her because she’d discussed it with my therapist a couple of months ago while waiting for the third letter. When I asked her how long of a period of stability they were looking for though, she told me five to ten years of consistent therapy and no major hospitalizations. At this point, I have been stable and out of the hospital for two years and some weeks. With this recommendation, the earliest we can hope to start another home study is three years from now and I could still be told that they want to wait closer to ten years at that point.

So that’s where we are. Our placement agency is bankrupt and I’m too crazy to pass a home study right now. It feels pretty hopeless and bleak. I keep having dreams about parenthood but the reality of that happening feels impossible. I’m trying to stay positive. Tai chi class last night helped give me a solid 90 minutes where I was completely focused on what I was doing, which helped. But still, I feel like the rug was jerked out from under me. I’m alternating between completely numb to very angry and sad.

So yeah, it’s been a week already and it’s only Wednesday.

Friday, the president signed an executive order banning people from Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran from being admitted to the country, even those with green cards and visas. On Saturday evening, I was browsing Facebook when I came across an event at Logan Airport, protesting the detention of passengers by Customs and Border Patrol. My partner and I immediately headed to the airport to join the protest. Our shuttle bus to the airport had maybe two people on it who were heading to the airport to catch flights. Everyone else was headed to the international terminal to protest. When we reached the midway point on the shuttle trip, where they switch the buses from overhead power to gas-powered engines, a supervisor came onto the bus, had a short word with the driver and then asked if there were any passengers headed to Terminal E (the international terminal). He then told us that we would have to walk from the nearest airport terminal because transportation to Terminal E had been shut down due to the protest. As he finished his short speech, he said “And I hope you have to walk through the whole airport!” At first, my partner was unsure if he was being critical of the protest, but then realized that he was saying that he hoped there was a mass of people walking throughout all the terminals carrying signs protesting the detention that was currently going on.

As we walked through Terminal C to our destination, we passed people who had arrived through the international terminal who were making the opposite trek as us. Many of them made positive comments about the protest and thanked us for joining. One guy gave me a high five. Of course, there were a couple people, able bodied white men of course, who complained bitterly of having to walk through the terminal because of the “damn protest”. When we reached Terminal E, there were probably about 400-500 people gathered there, speakers passing around a megaphone, the crowd repeating what they said so the people at the edges could hear what was going on. More and more people continued to pack in behind us. The state police were present, occasionally asking us to move back from the path from Customs and Border Patrol to the exit so that passengers could get through, but otherwise not saying much. There was a loud cheer when it was announced that a federal judge in the state had issued a stay of the president’s executive order, but quickly a reminder came through that we couldn’t stop protesting until all passengers who had been detained were released.

Elizabeth Warren was present and had made a speech before we arrived. Sometime after the announcement of the stay, Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, also made a speech. The protest continued as detained passengers were slowly reunited with their families. When the last detainee was escorted through Customs and Border Patrol by the mayor there was a tremendous energy and lots of cheering. After someone announced that there were buses waiting outside to take us back to the train station and asked us to remain peaceful as we exited the airport, my partner and I made out way outside to cram onto a very full shuttle back to the subway to take us home. Again, the bus was mostly full of protestors. I was exhausted but felt like we had made a difference for the night.

The next day, we headed to Copley Square with our neighbors to the immigration protest being held there. The subway station at Copley Square was shut down, so we walked from Park Street to get there, following a continuous stream of people headed to the protest. We got as close to Copley as we could, packing in with the other people who had gathered before us. I heard estimates put the crowd at 20,000 people that day. At first I couldn’t really anything or see what was going on, but as the crowd changed, I was able to get a spot on the stone wall where we were and then I could see above the crowd into the square. The energy was high that day, filled with people chanting and holding up homemade signs.

Since then, I have heard too many accounts of airports throughout the country refusing detainees to meet with lawyers even though federal court orders have been issued ordering them to do so. People have been detained for long periods of time, children separated from their parents for hours. A five year old boy was separated from his mother because he was deemed to be a risk to the country. An eleven month old who was still being breast-fed was separated from her mother for hours. A mother and her two young children were detained for twenty hours without being given anything to eat. And a woman who had lived in the US since 1995 and had a green card was turned away from a terminal in Iraq. She had become ill during her family’s trip. Her son says she knew, as she was being taken back to the hospital in Iraq, that she was going to die. She died a day after being refused the ability to board a plane back to her home.

I’d never been to a protest before Saturday night. I’d always been too scared to go out with everyone else. Scared of violence, of the risk of getting arrested. I don’t know what changed on Saturday to give me the courage to go to the airport, but something happened and I couldn’t stay silent any longer. It was exhilarating though. My usual phobia of crowds didn’t overwhelm me, even while packed into the airport terminal with hundreds of other people. Maybe it was the collective purpose, the fact that everyone there was there for the same reason I was, but I didn’t panic and my anxiety level stayed manageable. Even the shuttle ride back to the train station and the train home on Sunday didn’t bother me when in the past crowded transportation has caused major panic. So while I don’t know what exactly allowed me to engage in the protests this weekend, I plan on continuing to raise my voice in the following weeks and months. This upcoming weekend there are more rallies I plan on attending and I’m excited to be present.

A protester holds a sign during the protest at Copley Square as protesters gathered in opposition to President Trump’s executive order temporarily halting immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.(Jesse Costa/WBUR)

When I was nine, my parents enrolled me in a Tae Kwon Do class through a local dance studio and I fell in love with it during the first class I took. I stayed with the martial art through the end of high school, grateful for the discipline and patience that the training taught me, as well as the relationships I gained over those years. I grew close to my instructors, both of them taking active roles in my life akin to parenting, which was absent. For the first time in my life, I had the care and guidance I’d been seeking but not finding at home. After I graduated from high school, however, I stopped going. I’d come out a couple years earlier because I felt somewhat at odds with my straight peers, needing a community of people who supported me. After I transitioned, I never really looked back. I was living in rural Vermont with no transportation to classes and with the changes in my life, my priorities had shifted. Still, I missed the training, both for the physically challenging exercise it brought me and for the family I had left behind.

Over the years, I’ve thought about the hole this had left. I briefly thought about trying to find a local studio to begin training with again, though never got very far with that idea. When I’d left, I’d earned my second-degree black belt and was training 4-5 days a week. With the time having passed since then, I’d forgotten most of the physical part of the art. I could no longer remember the forms or the moves that I’d grown to know so surely I could have done them in my sleep. The idea of starting over again felt disheartening. The idea of starting over with strangers even more so.

Then I started getting treatment for CPTSD. I kept hearing, and reading, about how yoga was really good for helping to heal trauma helping to integrate and regulate mind and body, which after years of dissociation were skills I didn’t have. Unfortunately, I found the idea of yoga completely intimidating. Maybe it was just my preconceived notions of what yoga studios were like and my assumptions of the people I would meet there, but it felt like an insurmountable goal to break down. And I know there are probably many perfectly nice people in yoga classes who would welcome me with open arms if I wanted to try. I just couldn’t.

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the downtown area of my city with my partner and I noticed a local martial arts studio offering Kung Fu and Tai Chi. Tai Chi had been recommended years prior by a DMH (Department of Mental Health) caseworker as something to try. It has a lot of the same benefits for trauma that yoga does. When it was suggested, I wasn’t really in a place to even think about it. I was still pretty mobility impaired and in a lot of chronic pain on a daily basis. With walking being a challenge some days, martial arts seemed out of the question. But things have changed a lot since then. It’s been over a year since I stopped needing to use crutches to walk and both my stamina and strength have increased a lot since then. When I brought up the idea of looking into trying Tai Chi at therapy a few weeks ago, my therapist was enthusiastically in favor. Still, I was pretty noncommittal and only willing to agree to look online for more information. But the information I found was more promising than I had expected it to be. The local studio offered adult classes twice a week, and one class on Tuesday nights was structured in a way so that they could easily accommodate beginners with multiple instructors. I was cautiously optimistic when I e-mailed them, asking if myself and my partner, whose attendance I knew would bolster my confidence to try it, could come in the following week to try a free class.

And it was good. It was better than good. I was engaged all through the class. I felt challenged emotionally and physically, but not too much. I liked the instructors working that night and we weren’t the only new people there! Maybe because it was so close to the beginning of the year, there were five people trying it out that night. I left at the end of class feeling energized and excited and looking forward to returning the following week. In a lot of ways, I felt like I had after that first Tae Kwon Do class when I was nine. We went back last night and I felt more at peace in my body than I have in a long time, which is not to say that I felt comfortable, but that is probably a long work in progress. And of course it’s only been two weeks, so I’m not going to get ahead of myself here, but I left feeling actually happy and that doesn’t happen the often. For now, I am glad to have found a place that feels safe to work on myself and to learn that maybe it’s okay to trust my body again, however slowly that may go.

I’ve been sitting on this announcement for months now because I couldn’t find the right way to say it, but things are actually starting to feel real now so I’m finally ready. My partner and I are early in the process of adopting a baby. We’re actually on our way to New York City right now for a workshop through the adoption agency we’ve chosen. I’m sitting on the train watching the world stream by out the window and thinking about this path that we’re on. Things feel like they are happening both very quickly and far too slow. It’s been about six months since we started talking about having a kid and I realized that things in my life are actually really stable right now, making this a possibility. I’ve been staring longingly at all of the babies I see, and imagining what my life will be like in a couple of years when I will hopefully have a child of my own. Sleepless nights and negotiating public transportation and trips to the park. Right now though, I’m learning to be patient.

We’ve had two visits with our home study social worker so far. I’ve spent hours reading their parenting handbook, writing an in depth autobiography, and taking online classes on adoption. I’ve collected birth certificates, our marriage license, copies of our lease, a letter from the bank with our current balance, sent off fingerprints to the FBI, mailed forms for child abuse report checks, asked my therapist and psychiatrist to write letters attesting to my mental health stability, met with my primary care physician to get a form filled out that I am in good enough health to become a parent, and signed off on more paperwork than I can remember. Next week our social worker will meet with us individually, which scares the crap out of me. The thought that this one person will decide whether to sign off on us as potential parents… It’s terrifying. This workshop we’re attending this week will enable us to be listed with the agency as a waiting adoptive family after the home study is complete. Large amounts of money have changed hands. Things have suddenly become very real.

And while yes, I’m terrified, I’m also incredibly excited. It feels like each step gets us just a little closer to the end goal of having a child. I read the letter of recommendation that one of our good friends wrote for us this week and realized that this is really happening. While it may be years before we have a child, I think we will. One day in the future I will be a father and holy crap am I looking forward to that day.

When my partner was asked to speak at a conference in Barcelona months ago, she didn’t think I’d ever consider coming with her because I hate traveling, especially when it involves airplanes. But I thought about it and couldn’t think when I’d get an opportunity like this again and things in my life have been pretty stable lately, so I took a deep breath and did the unthinkable. I said let’s go! And so we bought plane tickets and booked a hotel room and I found myself making all the last minute preparations I needed to travel last week, like telling the bank not to decline my credit card for being used over seas and exchanging dollars for euros and now we’re here. And I’m so glad I came!

When I was fifteen I got an amazing, once in a lifetime opportunity to go to a field station in the Bahamas for school credit, but that was the only time aside from the few trips I’ve made into Canada that I’ve ever been out of the country before. Barcelona is full of tiny little cafes and restaurants and tapas and all of it is delicious. Our hotel is a few blocks from the Mediterranean Sea, so every night we’ve sat at a beachside restaurant drinking wine and watched the sun set. It’s been pretty incredible. Even with my very basic, rusty Spanish I’ve been able to get around okay and thankfully a lot of people here speak English for when I’ve needed help.

I’ve been exhausted because this whole trip has felt like a whirlwind of visiting places and remembering to eat and breathe and trying to sleep at night but that’s been a struggle. But I’ve felt relatively calm and at ease here, which I’m often not in places away from home. Yesterday I got lost for forty five minutes walking home from the zoo alone while my partner was at her conference and I didn’t even panic! I just kept checking google maps and figured if I really couldn’t figure things out I’d eventually be able to flag down a taxi back to my hotel and while I wound up walking a long ways farther than I otherwise might, the pride I felt when I recognized where I was at the end and realized I’d done it was awesome. Which, if you know me, is huge. I usually panic about everything, especially when there’s any deviation from the norm!

Friday morning, we walked to La Sagrada Familia, an incredible cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudí in the 1800s which is still under construction today. Stepping inside it was breath taking and the pictures I took don’t begin to do it justice. It made me miss my Nana a lot, thinking of how much she would have loved to see such beauty and peace. We followed that up today with a visit to Palau Güell, a palace he designed for the Güell family in the gothic quarter of Barcelona and the Cathedral de Barcelona. Tomorrow we have plans to go to Park Güell.  I don’t know what else we’ll get a chance to see before we have to fly back to Boston on Wednesday morning. This whole trip has just been amazing so far though. I feel like I’ve seen so much beautiful history. I’m so grateful to be here and so glad I took the leap to make this trip.

And I’m grateful to my partner for bringing me here for this experience. It wouldn’t be the same without her.