5:38 a.m. - Saturday, Mar. 08, 2003
Ms Leslie... a victim of flattery
Oh that summer-gale. She really frosts my drawers! I laid sleepless as usual in bed until about one o�clock, and then decided to get up and check my mail. Finding nothing, I started just randomly clicking on some of the diaries I read. I�m not really very good at keeping up with my reading. I lose track of who has updated and who hasn�t, so I miss a lot. There are some, though, that I do click on more than others. summer-gale is one of them.
I clicked on her this morning to find that she had written about her new status as an honorary transsexual. She said some nice things about me, so I got all big-headed and went back through her other entries to find all the other nice things she said about me. That was at one. Now it�s almost four-thirty, and I�m just soaking wet in her life all over again from reading her diary. What do I mean �soaking wet�? Well, some of it refers to tears, of course. No one can read summer-gale without a good many tears. Tears of sadness sometimes, but other times, tears of joy, respect and admiration. What.. you never cried with admiration?
But when I say �soaking wet in her life�, it means something different than tears. It means that there is something in the way she writes that makes you part of her life. She writes honestly, something that�s very hard to do, and that honesty immerses the reader in her feelings.
If you read her diary from the date it started in early 2002, you�ll feel like you�re going hand in hand with her. From carefree days as an on-line-game-playing mother, grandmother and somewhat unconventional partner to a beloved but impossible ex-husband, to a scared and angry cancer patient, to a survivor who is still in the midst of surviving that cancer. And she still finds an awful lot of time to care about and love others.
I encountered her just a day or two before I left to go to Thailand for my own surgery. In spite of all the work I had done to be ready to take this huge step into sex reassignment, I was sick with nerves and fear. Fear of flying over the Pacific ocean, uncertainty over having wired the price of a new economy car directly into the bank account of a stranger half a world away; nervous about major surgery in a third world country, and even more nervous about not having it.
And in the middle of my uncertainty and fear, this summer-gale pops up saying how I don�t look like a woman and wondering how could a GUY ever be a woman, and so forth. It was a blow to my confidence I didn�t need just at that moment. But in between her words of confusion and denial, I could feel a real concern as well. She was uninformed but not ignorant. She only needed some exposure. So I wrote to her.
It was just what I needed at the time. As I tried to explain my very existence to her, I found myself in the middle of a re-affirming experience. Telling her was a way of remembering for myself. It was very calming and reassuring for me, whether she gained anything from our exchange or not. See, it really IS always all about me. Yet there was a wonderful added benefit. summer-gale was moved to actually consider the issues around sex and gender. She thought about the things I said and then she�. she got it! I was so pround of her I could have busted. That�s burst to you life-my-way.
Not long after that, summer-gale found herself facing her own life-issues. Breast cancer became a dominant concern for her. She never did let it supplant the things that were really important to her though; her family. She�s blessed with people around her who genuinely love her. That�s one of the reasons I cry when I read her. How very lucky she is.. and how deserving.
I�m still mad at her though. See, now it�s almost five. I�ve spent all this time re-reading her diary when I could have been sleeping. Today is the anniversary of Craig�s death in Vietnam. It�s a day I normally would spend in my dusty old secret grief. Now, instead, I�ll be thinking of summer-gale all day, when I�m not sleeping, I�m proud of her. I�m a little proud of myself. And what the heck, I�m proud of Andrew for making a place like DiaryLand where we learn about ourselves by learning about others.
I recommend that you don�t go there. Don�t click on the link to read summer-gale. You�ll only find your day mostly gone while you read every entry. You�ll only be in awe at how uncommon strength can come from common lives, and then you�ll realize that there are no common lives. And that uncommon strength is in us all in one way or another, but that uncommon love is rare and beautiful.
I hope she doesn�t sue me for swiping her picture from her diary.
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