The Final Goodbye Letter

(that I almost wrote)

To Whom It May Concern,

In the mountains of central New Mexico, right on the edge of spring, I walked between towering pine trees that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. I didn’t plan on being gone long– I’d left my husband back at our campsite as he napped in his hammock beneath a sliver of dying sunlight – but the deeper into the woods I went, the more conscious I became of just how alone I was. It was still too early in the season for tourists, and I hadn’t seen another hiker or dog walker since I left the main artery of the trail, choosing instead to follow a vein that zigged and zagged deep into the canopy. Even the birds were quiet as I crunched dried pine beneath my boots, losing myself in the rhythm of my steps. I stopped and turned in place– every viewpoint looked exactly the same. Nothing distinguished one heading from another. The noise from the road had vanished, the air was completely still, and the silence pushed against me like a current from all directions. It was like being suspended in clear gelatin, like pressing a seashell to your ear only to hear the sound of your own heart. I stopped, sat in the dirt in the center of the path, and closed my eyes.

Ten years ago, I’d experienced something similar when I chose to scuba dive off the coast of Catalina Island. I was cleared to dive down to 60 feet, but a strong tide and a mixup in pre-dive planning found me and my dive buddy at 80 feet below the surface, the compasses tethered to our BCDs reading conflicting directions. If I looked toward what I thought might be shore, I saw only a limitless expanse of empty blue. If I looked toward what I thought was the sea floor, or the surface, or the open ocean, the view was identical. Only the bubbles escaping from my regulator oriented me in space to tell me which way was up.

Back in the forest, I began to talk to myself.

I pressed my palms to the warm earth of the forest floor, and I said everything that was on my mind. I don’t know how long I was there, but I could feel the static in my legs getting louder as I let everything out. I talked about my parents, my work, my friends, my fears, my needs. After a while, I realized that this was the most I’d talked in a long time without thinking about an audience. I was existing and feeling and talking entirely by myself. No one was listening. I was alone. The relief was overwhelming. When I felt like I had nothing left to say, I stood up.

“Fuck,” I said aloud to no one. “I have got to get off my phone.”

I have been writing some version of this letter in my head every day since then.

This is because, when I first started understanding myself as trans, the internet was a lifeline. The loneliness of my position – teaching in a public high school in one of the most conservative counties on the west coast – was overwhelming and profound. I started making videos about my life as a way to find even one single other person who understood what I was experiencing. I wanted to find people like me, and to build a life where I could see a future for myself. Numbers grew faster than I could understand. 2,000 followers became 10,000, became 50,000, became 400,000. For a while, I looked up stadiums with seating comparable to the number of people who knew my name. Then it was cities. More people were watching me than there were in Oceanside, then Huntington Beach, then Anaheim. At some point I stopped checking.

There are moments where I believe a connection to the digital world saved my life.

When I had to leave my life as a teacher, when Fox News stuck my face on the front page to score easy points in a culture war no one in my community signed up for, it was strangers thousands of miles away who kept me tethered to the earth when all I wanted to do was dissolve into my bed for the rest of my life.

A life without this view was, in my opinion, a life not worth living

When my husband and I had to flee our home and thought for sure we had nowhere to go, hundreds of people we’d never met sent us what they could, or offered to open up their homes for us, to keep us from running out of options.

But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a cost.

Most days, I feel like I’m not doing – and can never do – enough. The problems feel too big, the community too split, the struggle never-ending. My body’s systems feel hijacked by demands to say more, post more, engage more. There are punishments built into algorithms meant to smother those of us who take moments up for air. If you don’t stay engaged, don’t keep those apps open, don’t continue to create, you find yourself vanished from feeds and steadfastly on the outside of the conversation. Those of us who “make” for these platforms aren’t immune to the same pernicious tricks that keep all of us addicted to screens that, for the most part, take from our lives much more than they will ever give. It’s an icky feeling.

And it bleeds into the outside as well.

Parasocial relationships – ones where one party knows a lot more about the other than in reverse – are an especially strange minefield. I’ve never had a solid handle on how to navigate them, and the idea of living a life where they only become more common for me makes me a bit nauseous. How do you build emotional intimacy and trust with someone who is always laps ahead of you? Who has built a version of you in their mind before you ever meet them?

Me and Xilo, pictured here being sweet, charming, intelligent, and perfect

My husband Xilo and I have spent the last year traveling around the country, learning about the many ways to exist as a trans person in the United States, while at the same time searching for a place to finally settle. In November, we parked in New Mexico and decided not to keep moving. For those who live here, it’s not a surprising conclusion. There’s something indescribable about this place, and we knew that if we could make it work permanently, we wanted to try. But almost immediately, there were hiccups. For the sake of my husband’s privacy, I’ll stay vague, but our “lower case ‘f’ fame” became a problem for him when he started working as a therapist for a practice where not everyone was especially forthcoming with him about their parasocial relationship with us. He left after only a few months.

And while he’s working now within a practice much more aligned with his values, the idea of returning to the digital world scares the shit out of me. What if the work that has been a lifeline for me for half a decade derails something he’s spent his entire life building?

It’s been just over a month since I stood up from my place on the forest floor and told myself I was done, that my time on the internet had reached its limit, that I was logging off for good. This is also about how long I’ve been dodging emails from my publisher, who has a very realistic concern: if I’m not on the internet, how the fuck is anyone supposed to know I’ve written a book?

Here it is, Sam. They know now. My second book, the TLAA workbook, is available for pre-order now wherever books are sold.

Because I did write a book. Actually, I wrote two books. Books that I think are pretty important (and also good). And I want people to read them. It’s a classic “have your cake and blah blah blah” moment. It’s one that I’ve spent more than a month mulling over as I’ve written a hundred different versions of this letter in my head.

And this morning, it’s a question I brought to my friends at work.

Because I have a job now. A beautiful, profound, incredibly unserious job. I work at a book store. Every morning, I wake up, drive ten minutes across the Rio Grande, and I spend my entire day talking to people about books. I unbox books, I shelve books, I help people find books, and I chat with some of the coolest people in the city about the next Romantasy Book Club or the T. Kingfisher author talk or the merits of audiobooks versus paperbacks. And (most of) the people who come in have absolutely no idea who I am. It’s awesome.

A typical day at the office

But I know it’s only half of myself.

I’m still so young, and I have more I want to say. I’ve been a writer since I could grip a pencil, and I’m already mapping and outlining the books I’m ready to write next. I’m still getting into spirited arguments at book clubs and running my mouth in mixed company. I still care about my community and want to give everything I can to help them. I still have a platform, and it feels misaligned with my values to watch it collect dust. It’s been years since my presence on social media paid any of our bills, but I want to find a way to find my way back to a community I care about.

How do I square that?

So today, after we finished stacking chairs following a Buddhist meditation seminar that had just wrapped up in our children’s section, I asked my friends what they thought – Should I stay or should I go?

“Can’t you just… find a little more balance with it?” they asked me. “You don’t have to be all-or-nothing with it, do you?”

Classic. Black or white thinking had struck again. It was worth a try. Four weeks ago, the thought of writing or producing another single thing for a digital audience was enough to send me back to bed. But here we are, more than 1600 words into something I’ve been trying to write for weeks, and my stomach hasn’t done a backflip once.

So what do I think this might look like for me? What does “balance” mean after so many years sharing my life with this many people?

This is where I think I’ve landed:

1. I can always disappear again. Vanishing is a human right.

2. I will not chase an algorithm that doesn’t care if I live or die.

3. I will not adhere to a posting schedule or keep engagement goals.

4. The parts of my life belong to me, and I don’t owe them to anyone.

5. I listen first to the people who share their lives with me in the physical world.

6. When I feel like scrolling, I can pick up a book.

7. Or take a walk

8. Seriously. You live in New Mexico now. Just go outside.

9. Knowing more doesn’t always make me any safer.

10. I will value nuance and authenticity over brevity and clicks.

311 days of sun a year

So, ultimately, I’m not sure when you’ll hear from me again. I’m feeling it out and letting myself live somewhere between “all” and “nothing,” and it might take me a while to feel it all the way out. Even now, I can hear some of the words faltering as I attempt to type them, the images just barely coming together. There are points I wanted to make, thoughts I wanted to follow further, but I’m trying to find compassion for the space in the middle– the space that understands how messy letters like this will always be. I’m working without an outline and without optimizing my message for an audience. In some ways, it feels much more vulnerable than it did before.

So thank you for sticking around, for staying here with me as I wander through the pine trees and try to figure out which way is up. And if not– if you stopped somewhere near the beginning and found your attention pulled in another direction– I’m perfectly happy talking to myself in the woods alone. I’ve always been in pretty good company.

Love,

Flint