Hi

I’d love to tell you all about my rats because they’re adorable but

I really want to write about work because it’s a heck of a lot less stressful now.

Long story short:

I found out three weeks ago that my job was in jeopardy. And for about a week, I felt like most of what was going on was out of my control. But part of it was in my control and I tried to focus my attention to that. My biggest issue at work was this: I am remarkable in the classroom but I had no idea how to book more programs.

I’ve changed my attitude.

\I stopped seeing meetings and phone calls required to get in places to teach as hassles and started seeing them as a means to an end. The more meetings I go to and the more phone calls I make the more programs I’ll have and the more time I get to spend doing the parts of my job that I love.

And I organized my life.

And I mean it.

I have a color coded schedule in my professional and personal life. The past two weeks have not only proven to me that I am definitely in the right line of work, but that I can be just as successful outside of work. And I don’t just mean things like remembering to take out the garbage or putting my clean laundry away.

…I know now that I can be a way better friend than I the one I am being right now. 

If given the choice, I wouldn’t really want to change much about my job. After a few weeks of uncertainty, I love my new supervisor. I love the programs I’m creating. I love the youth that I work with and the adults who work with youth. My coworkers are some of the most altruistic people I’ve ever met in my life. I feel more like I’m at home when I’m at work than I am anywhere else.

I haven’t felt this way about a place 

since I was living at ESU. 

This may be the place that I call home

But work is where I feel at home.

And once I finally feel like I’m on even ground at work, something happens and I need to make decisions about my future.

Last Thursday, I was given the opportunity to give a presentation outside of the few locations that my job description covers. I was asked to do a workshop with a high school aged group of kids who are being trained as peer health educators. And it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with youth. To give you an example, I loved this group as much as I loved being with the after school club at Stroudsburg High back in college.   

And this group meets, three miles away from where I live. 

On top of that, My coworker who is in charge of this program is leaving the agency in June. 

Not to mention, because of how well I’ve been doing lately and as well as my recent move,  my new supervisor suggested that I throw my hat into the ring and try for the position opening. 

Pros:

1. It’s much closer to where I live now.

2. I’m pretty sure it pays a little more. 

3. I would be moderating discussion groups along side teaching, doing more professional trainings, and could create more types of programming.   

Cons:

1. I would have virtually no supervision. I would be in a different office than my new supervisor, I would have to diligently plan and schedule my own time.

 But– if I keep working the way I’ve been working over the past month, and I get my job accommodations for my disability, I really think I could do it.)

2. The department head has to give HR her decision by close of business tomorrow.

But–I sent the department head an email right before I left for the day asking her if I could still apply for the job.

3. There’s another pretty big con.

But– I can’t say anything about it until next week.

 

The worst outcome possible from asking to apply for this position is that I will end up staying in the job that I currently have and that is not a bad thing at all. 

We’ll see where this goes.

This week is kind of hectic at work and with the new additions. 

But I’ll blog when I can, promise.

Hey there.

It has been a busy week to say the least. Most of what’s been going on has been positive.

All of it has been stressful. 

Can I just say that Thursday might have been one of the best days at work

that I’ve ever had. And it had very little to do with the fact that I got a free pepperoni pizza out of it which I did not eat, but offered to my roommates

so if they didn’t love me before, they certainly do now.

I wish I could tell you more about why Thursday was awesome but– just like most exciting things in my life lately–

I can’t right now.  

Here are three things I can tell you about though. 

The first:

I do not know how to be an adult. I mean, I’ve got the basics down. I can grocery shopping, I do my own laundry, I can hold down a job and I can pay my rent on time.  

But then there are things like finding healthcare providers, and buying car insurance, registering as a resident on New York State, and making sure everything that I can’t do during the week gets done in one weekend.  

It’s just a lot to do all at once. So I spent a good majority of my weekend outlining various daily routines that will provide day with more structure so I can do all of the things I need to and still leave time to do things that I enjoy like writing and volunteering.  

This way next weekend I don’t look at the clock on Sunday telling me that it’s already 8:30

and I still haven’t blogged. 

I also  spent a good chunk of my time this weekend unpacking the rest of my stuff:

For some reason I was really nervous about putting my food and dishes in the kitchen. I wasn’t worried that any of my roommate would take or use my things without permission. I was more concerned about taking up their space. But I got over it. 

And lastly the biggest distraction has been these guys:

 

Rex is in the front and Ollie is in the back. And as much as I’d love to tell you all about them,

 

I’d rather be playing with them.

This was just a post to tell you that I’m not going anywhere.

I’ll see you tomorrow. 

Hi everyone.

Let’s just say that

it was a pretty productive weekend.

Be honest now, …after a three day absence,

how many of you thought I wasn’t coming back for a while.?

Nope. Things will be different this time around. I don’t think the English language has the words to describe

how fed up I am with this cycle I’ve been living in.

But with that said,

I will not let this blog become another solitary beacon of emotional  (and even social) support for me. This vulnerable spot– not just in me– but in everyone

is too momentous for one thing or one person to hold on it’s own for very long.

So I’m not going to write everyday single day. And for the first time in a long time, the reason  I won’t be writing everyday has nothing to do with feeling too apathetic or indifferent to want to write. It’s because I have other obligations that I want– and need– to occupy my time with. There are  that are going on right now in my personal life and at work that are stressful, to say the very least. And a lot of events that I’ve recently gone through and most of what I’m currently going through

are things that I’m not comfortable sharing on here. I need more support right now in ways where this blog just won’t be useful. But the things I can’t share on here, still need to be shared. So I made it a point to meet with friends this weekend to make sure that my stressed-out-rationale is in check:

I needed to see my friends more than anything else this week, even if my GPS decided to avoid all of the bridges that I normally take on my way home from Brooklyn and by the time I realized that I was going a different way than usual I felt like it would be a waste of time to turn around and it would probably be faster if I kept following my GPS. I was wrong. It would have been faster to trace back my steps and go the way I knew how because I wound up driving through Manhattan (which was and still is, regardless of recent events, one of my biggest fears) and into New Jersey in order to get home making what normal is a forty-five minute drive into well over a two hour trek.

And when I wasn’t with my friends I was unpacking or doing adult things that I had been putting off for too long like buying stamps and looking up car insurance quotes. And I spent Saturday night hanging out with my roommates and getting to know them better (and I’d definitely say that I like them all as roommates and even see a promises of some friendships in the future.)

So basically what today’s post is trying to say is

I’m going to write whenever I can.

And I mean that.

I also was thinking…

that I might limit posting to once a week for a bit. I plan on writing more than I post because back around this time two years ago, I was working on this memoir thing

for a college course that I enrolled in and I think I’m ready to start working on it again. I distinctly remember my professor advising me to abandon what I had written for his class for a few years until I could refine it with hindsight and a new perspective. And I think that time has come. But the reason my memoir was so well received in class was partly because I had written blog posts months earlier that formed into the drafts that I handed in for review.

So if anyone from that class is reading this and would be on board to help workshop this next phase in the project,

get in touch with me.

I would greatly appreciate it because a lot of you helped to shape what I wrote the first time around.

I’ll be around later on in the week, maybe even tomorrow if I can fit it in, which is a strong possibility.

Until next time. 

Hey.

Can I just say that some times my life

feels like a dream.

Like there’s no way this is really happening to. Yesterday I was talking with Alison and I was explaining all of the reasons behind why certain parts of my job and my personal life has been unbelievably stressful lately. And she said to me, “Man, when it rains, it pours, right?”

I’ll tell you about what’s going on but not right now.

I want to wait to talk about it when the issues are resolved and I’m not nearly as emotionally invested as I am right now. And in one way or another, they will be resolved in time.

So yes, when it rains it pours but when the sun’s out it shine.

And well, I got some really promising news today. I got a text from my friend Charlie this afternoon while I was on my lunch break and he told me to check my Facebook messages because there was an opportunity that he wanted to talk to me about. So I went back to finish my lunch in my office and read over his message and apparently there is a support group forming for trans*youth in my town and they need facilitators.

I actually scared one of the volunteers who was working a few desks over from me (we were the only two in the office at the time) because as I was reading it I kept saying, “NO WAY. THIS IS. NO. PERFECT. OH MY GOD.”

And she came over to me and asked me what was going on and I summed it up as finding out that there is a perfect opportunity for me to meet new people in my town.

I love working with all types of youth but I especially love working with trans* identified youth. Because if there’s someone like me in their lives, who can relate personally to what they’re going through, who can offer support and unconditional acceptance and who can listen, there’s a better chance that they will never have to experience something similar to what I went through when I came out.

And speaking of coming out. One of my first thoughts after one of my first or second posts this week was

Yeah, I should probably come out at work.

When I got hired at my current job, I decided that I wanted to try to live stealth. (Stealth for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term is when a trans-person decides not to reveal their trans-identity to others. There’s actually a pretty interesting article on families with trans* children who have made the decision to “go stealth”.)  I thought maybe this would be the next phase of my transition, just livin’ as a cis-guy workin’ in sexual and reproductive health.

It wasn’t.

At all.

Aside from one of the human resource reps at my job who I asked for advice on what sex I should put down on my medical insurance and  the head of the department I’m in who I told when I was first developing educational programs about gender and sexuality, I hadn’t really come out to anyone yet. This decision came about a few different factors:

The first was wanting to see if I could.

I can.

And I hate it.

The second was that I wasn’t sure how my coworkers would react. After I told the head of my department that I was trans* identified. She kind of tried to discourage me from coming out.

She is from a different generation and as open minded as she is, she is pretty uninformed about trans* people and trans* identities (I’m working’ on educating and enlightening but as I’m sure most of you know, teaching someone about diversity can be a slow and tedious process). And her discouragement wasn’t based out of any malice or prejudice. It was based out of fear that someone would try to harm me, physically, mentally, emotionally, etc. She was just trying to protect me.

One of the biggest changes in my attitude recently has been that I  try my best to avoid challenging ignorance with judgement and anger. Because, for one thing trying to combat ignorance with judgement and anger is an ignorance all in it’s own. Ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge or awareness in general. The only way to change ignorance into awareness and knowledge is through education and there is no way you can educate someone with resentment and bitterness. I’ve found that it’s kindness, patience and compassion that conquer the unknown.

Maybe I would feel differently about living stealth if worked in a field where trans* issues weren’t discussed as much, but I do work in a place where trans* issue are talked about and they’re talked about often.

And here’s what I see day in and day out. I see an organization that advocates for affordable sexual and reproductive health care for all people, not just women. We provide free HIV tests and Plan B on our mobile clinics. We have educational programs for all ages on a variety of different topics from sexual health, to healthy relationships, gender and sexuality, to social media literacy workshops for parents. We’ve been getting more and more calls for “LGBT” workshops in schools than ever before. And the organization I work for would love to have a relationship with and support the trans*community. They know they should, but aren’t sure how to.

So here I am

I am a lighthouse, able to safely guide ships ashore.

And I’m afraid to turn my light on.

Do you realize that for the past six months, when the trans* community has been brought up at work, I’ve been saying THEY

instead of WE.

It was so painful for me and I decided earlier this week that enough was enough.

I spent the first twenty years of my life denying who I was and it almost killed me. 

Why would I ever want to do something like that to myself again?

I didn’t buy a megaphone and walk into my office and announce to everyone that I was assigned female at birth and identify as something other than that now.

I  started out easy, I gave the coworker I feel the closest to a link to my blog a few days ago. She’s also a writer and I told her that I had recent began writing again and that I thought she’d like it.

I’ve told a few others but I haven’t been going out of my way to say anything to anyone, I’m just waiting for leeways in through conversations.

All I can say is that it feels so good to be me again.

And I need to go shower because my water is getting shut off tomorrow morning because a leaky pipe needs to be repaired.

But I’ll leave you with this.

Until tomorrow.

Hey.

I’m buying more lightbulbs this weekend because I hate this lighting situation.

My job has been incredibly stressful the past few days.

I would go as far as to say that the next six weeks might be one of the most trying times I will ever experience in any part of my life thus far.  

 I would really prefer to not write about work at all right now.

But yesterday I said I was going to talk about January today and I’m going to stick to that. And maybe reminiscing about the good things that happened in January will help me cope with all the stress my job is currently presenting. 

There are a few more things that happened that I think you need to know about before I get into January. 

From November through the end of December, I had only been working with one youth group. It’s actually a pretty amazing program. It’s made up of two after school groups: a weekly group for middle school aged girls, and a weekly group for high school aged girls that emphasizes the importance of community, cultural awareness, and education. The program offer it’s participants homework help, group projects and has guest speakers come in,

like your’s truly, to do workshops. 

The first group I took on was the high school portion of the program. And it was a pretty messy start.

For one thing, I had never worked in a classroom setting before.

 

And no lecture I have ever given or youth activity I have ever facilitated even remotely prepared me to be a teacher. I feel pretty strongly that you’re almost born to be an educator or you’re not. Teaching isn’t something a person can learn how to do from a textbook or from observing even observing other teachers. It’s something that you need to experience in order to really comprehend and get better at. Needless to say,

It was a challenge. I wouldn’t say that I let them walk all over me but it took a lot of effort for me to keep them quiet. 

And I totally forgot that I have to do laundry.

So I’m going to go do that now. 

And now I’m in my kitchen.

Just makin’ some dinner. 

Did I tell you that there’s a dog in my house?

Why did this picture download side ways? 

Whatever I’m not changing it. (and yes, Amanda, that’s for you).

I’m not going to try to blog while I cook.

Because we all know what happens when I try to blog while I cook.

There were a few other factors as to why this group didn’t run as smoothly as I had anticipated that it would.

The biggest was that I didn’t know the curriculum as well as a probably should have when started. 

And now I probably know it better than I know the lives and loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton. And I think a big part of why I didn’t know the curriculum was because I didn’t really like it. I felt like it didn’t offer enough information about the actual effects sexually transmitted infections (STIs) can have on a person and it didn’t cover all of the different forms of birth control that are available. And the text I teach out of is pretty heterosexist but

I make a few word adjustments here and there and and preface parts that I can’t actually change, like the videos we watch.

The curriculum was originally designed for middle schoolers but it is adaptable to work well with high school aged participants and I’ve noticed that they tend to be less receptive to the films we watch and some of the activities we do, they still enjoy it but it take them a little longer to get on board.

I’m also not sure if that’s actually the case or if I just was not good at facilitating a group yet.

 And on top of  all of that, a lot of high schoolers I’ve worked with have already had at least some form of sexual health education before I came into the picture. They learn a lot but they also think they know a lot.

So my first experience teaching was not the

fantastic, awesome, entertaining and fulfilling experience I had hoped it would be. Add that to the fact that I didn’t have anyone at work to sort of guide me where I needed to go and  that I didn’t really feel like I fit in with my coworkers at first,

I was completely and utterly lost and I didn’t really like my job.

And then came January.

At the beginning of the month, one my co-worker had started  a eight day program at a charter middle school, she was about two or three lessons in when she had a sudden death in the family. She called me up in the morning and asked me if I could I cover her program scheduled for that day in the early afternoon. 

I walked in to this gorgeous charter school and set up shop in the library and waited for a group of eighth graders to come upstairs after lunch and spend the next hour learning how to put a condom on. 

And I had a blast. The kids were completely interested and engaged, they asked questions and commented on the material we covered. I ended up working with them for three days and on the last day I was there, I was writing something on the white board when I heard them coming down the hallway and I heard one of them call out to the rest, “Alright it’s Mr. Gabe again!”

I don’t bother trying to get my students to attempt pronouncing my last name. I have a very limited amount of time with them and I don’t need them constantly asking me how to correctly say my last name.

There was one kid in particular,

He was pretty shy, soft-spoken, even a little aloof and pretty tall for his age. He must have been 5’8″ or 5’9″. He worked well with the other kids but I bet if he had been given the choice he probably would have chosen to work on his own.

  

A fellow introvert. 

Everyday I was with this group he would come up to me once the lesson was over and whisper questions he had about sex to  me like “Does it hurt when a girl has sex for the first time?” And I would stick around for a few minutes and talk with him and I could see the gears turning behind his eyes until I would have no choice but to walk him part of the way to his next class just so he wouldn’t be late. 

Spending those three hours with those middle schoolers is what reminded me of why I love working with kids. 

I remembered that I was still getting the hang of my job and I still have a long way to go as an educator, 

I can still make a difference and the best way to grow is to help others grow with you.

And the morning after I worked with those kids was the first morning I woke up and wasn’t dreading going to work. 

Oh and it worked, writing made me feel a little better. 

I’ll see you tomorrow.