How do we make sure the people we love know we love them?

And other questions I've been asking myself.

The rain is here. Climate change has offered up a new routine for the end of summer and beginning of autumn — September and October are simply not cold months anymore, not even chilly, really — but eventually (at least for now), the rain rolls in.

In the past month Parker and I pulled our thick winter comforter down off the tallest shelf in our closet and switched it out with our summer blanket. I spent hours in the garden tidying up the beds, pulling the summer flowers I didn’t want to go to seed, getting daffodil and crocus bulbs into the ground, weeding and mulching and planning for our fall and winter planting. The tomatoes are finished — the large green ones pulled off the vines and ripening dutifully on our kitchen windowsill, the tiny red and orange gems split open outside, no longer tasty, setting seeds for volunteer plants to sprout next spring. When I wake in the morning now it’s cold, and we spend our days at home with our toes pushed into slippers, our bodies tucked under wool blankets, our fingers curled around seemingly endless cups of tea. My jackets are down from the attic. As my aunt used to say before my uncle divorced her and she cut ties with the rest of our family, rendering her simply a woman I used to know: The big wheel turns.

Life functions the same way the year does, by which I mean cyclicly. There were times when I don’t think I noticed life cycles so astutely, but as I grow and age it’s so clear to me how tied to rhythms we all are, even if we often attempt to circumvent them. I’ve been thinking, also, what it means to age, and what I want the cycles of my life to look like.

It’s undeniable that since meeting Parker, getting married, buying a house, and settling into our neighborhood community, my life has become more legible to many people I love — and also perhaps less legible to many other people I love. I joke that getting engaged is the most legible thing I’ve ever done for my family, but the thing that makes it funny is it’s truth, right? When I was 19, riled up from queer theory classes and falling in love with a dyke for the first time, a dear friend — a gay boy who had grown up in a town similar to my own, upper middle class and normative — scoffed at my new big ideas and told me, “You may have a radical heart, but you’re going to lead a pretty typical life.” When, at 25, I blew up my life in New York to travel and get to know myself outside the context of a relationship and a desk job and a city that serves as a character in the lives of many of the people who inhabit it, he apologized to me for what he’d said years ago in his East Village apartment over a pot of turkey chili made exclusively with ingredients from the Trader Joe’s in Union Square. I was following my heart after all; I was living a radical life.

Now, at 35, just a month shy of another birthday, I am formally returning his apology. My heart is still radical — I hope, I try — but my life is fairly typical after all. I have a wife, a mortgage, a 40-hour-a-week job, health insurance! I could rattle off the quirky things, too: I have 3 chickens, I have plans for a rain garden, I have more friends who are self-employed artists than I do friends who are bankers, I have access to dungeons and orgies should I wish to attend them… but really, all those facts just make me a typical queer 30-something in Portland. I’m not special. I’m just an aging Pacific Northwest dyke.

What does it mean, to age? To change? To grow up? To settle? Can “settle” be a positive verb, not a passive or outright negative one?

A few weeks ago, one of my best friends visited Portland. She currently lives in Minneapolis and I see her much less often than I’d like, so it was a treat to have her in my home for a few days, then in other friends’ homes for a few more. We both took a day off work while she was here and decided to go hiking; I drove us to a large waterfall, still plentiful in this part of the country, and we joined many tourists on the switchbacks that took us up and up into the forest. I love her brain, the way it works; we have known each other for more than 10 years, and I feel that not only does she recognize the paths in my particular nervous system, but that she actually is responsible for creating some of them. It’s comforting, to feel as though she and I have not only a shared language but a shared framework for the way we see the world. It allows us to use shorthand with each other, and it allows us — this is how I feel at least, and I hope she does too — to suggest new ideas that may feel too vulnerable or silly to share with anyone else. We can try our thinking on together.

Something I’ve been pondering for months now — maybe almost a year, maybe even longer? — is the difference between a big life versus a small life. What does this sentiment mean, and what kind of life am I striving for? Reading a post in Jami Attenberg’s newsletter, The 52 Project, titled “Big Life,” calcified the thoughts. Jami writes:

“What does it even mean to live a big life to you? Does it mean to be public-facing? Does it mean to be in a leadership position? Does it mean to have a lot of lovers? Does it mean to have a dramatic existence? Does it mean to be spiritually focused? Does it mean to be rich? To be well-traveled? To run for office in order to change policies? To be someone who saves lives? To be loudmouthed? To be the funniest person in the room? What does it mean?”

On our hike, I shared this context with my friend, confessing that I think I used to have a big life but now my life is much smaller, confessing further that it’s unclear to me if I miss having a big life or if having a small life actually brings me more joy. I often want two things at once, usually things that are diametrically opposed — my damn Gemini moon. My friend, ever thoughtful and wise, asked a version of Jami’s question, though she hadn’t read the newsletter I was referencing. “What does a big life mean to you? What about a small life?”

I wrote about my life on the internet for almost twenty years. Originally I had a paragraph here detailing what that looked like, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, when I shared a lot and received a lot of feedback from that writing, my life felt big. And also, my friend pointed out as we hiked and unpacked this topic — I had a lot of capacity for connection when I was younger, a lot of space for that bigness. In my twenties I was hungry for the vastness of life; I’ve always been social, always been extroverted, and I took for granted that it would always feel good to meet new people and make new connections. It’s not that it doesn’t feel good anymore, not exactly… I think I’m just more tired. Or maybe I need more time for myself now, so the finite hours I have to dedicate to relationship building are fewer. Or I’m invested in relationships with people I can see, and hug, and sit in a room with even in complete silence and feel safe… so the relationships I was cultivating online feel harder to fit in.

A small life, to me, is focused on the people around me. My wife, our dog, our chickens, my neighbors, my close friends. To say this brings me joy is an understatement — but there are parts of a “bigger” life that I do miss. The idea that we can have anything we want, but we can’t have everything we want, flits through my mind. Does it come from a random personal finance podcast or an article The Atlantic ran on feminism in 2009? I don’t remember. What do I want? Part of my work is to figure that out, obviously, but part of my work is also to accept that I can’t have it all. When I invest in my closest relationships with everything I have, I lose the hours I used to have to idly chat with acquaintances on Instagram. I don’t say that lightly; I loved the evenings I spent in grad school, when I lived alone and was often quite lonely, flirting and commiserating and simply goofing around with many of the little gay people who lived in my phone. Since getting off social media, I’ll often think to myself, I wonder how so-and-so is doing? and I really wonder. But without the tenuous connections of the algorithm to keep them in my life, I no longer know. Meanwhile, I can walk down the street and check on my neighbors right now if I want to. And I do want to.

Most writers who have been writing for a long time can recognize their own obsessions. I used to joke that any Vanessa Friedman essay included Portland, friendship as North Star, some amount of glitter, and a fisting scene. But the truth is I know my obsession well, and it is more than the fun glittery sexy parts of being a dyke. The question I am trying to answer in everything I ever write: What do we owe each other?

More broadly, I think this starts at the very seed of an idea: Who is “we”? I’m scared that forfeiting a big life means more than just losing casual Instagram connections; I’m scared it means abandoning the collective, or letting go of my ideals. If I make my life small am I accepting the nuclear family as God, giving up on my radical 19-year-old heart that said marriage was bullshit because the whole pie is rotten? Since I gave up what was truthfully a fairly public life (in the queer world, which is very specific and not at all the same as a public life in the world at large, but which was meaningful and also overwhelming in the small sphere I exist in nonetheless) for more privacy, I have felt mostly relief… but it’s paired with a sense of loss.

I’m not sure where to go from here, especially as we enter a particularly bleak time in our country. My best friend who was visiting flew home a few days before the election. Parker and I went to bed on the earlier side on election night, employing what Maris Kreizman coined “defensive sleeping.” I woke up at 4am to a text from my mom, asking if I was okay, and that’s how I found out about Trump’s second presidency. I didn’t text anyone. I didn’t wake up my wife. It’s not that I assumed anyone was okay, rather that I could guess that they weren’t. A text from me early in the morning of November 6 wasn’t going to be the difference of my loved ones being okay or not; my actions in the days and years to come might be.

When I first started wondering what we owe each other, it was 2014 and I was going through a terrible friend breakup. I was in my twenties; Obama was president; I posted on social media all the time; “Instagram stories” weren’t yet a thing. Ten years ago the world was a different place. Now when I wonder about what we owe each other, it’s much deeper. I’m not just thinking about how we move through dyke drama (though I’m not not thinking about how we move through dyke drama — I’m still human!), but rather how we make sure the people we love know we love them.

What do you think?