Diary

A friend's sixtieth birthday party today.
We started talking about the gap between the fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays...
...and all of a sudden that kin of positioning process that happens in birthdays, when you think of where you were then, and where you are now,
that process that never really happened at my sixtieth because what with the play opening and all, there was no real space for it
suddenly kicked in and I found myself thinking back to my fiftieth.
Me still living as a man, finding it more and more difficult.
Writing to all my friends, telling them i was "polygendered".
Which for me, then, was an enormous step.
And Susie still alive, and the girls still at home.
It feels like a different world.
Somewhere far far more distant than a mere ten years.

I never mentioned all this to my friend: somehow it seemed all too big a thing to put into words.
But we agreed what a good thing it is to feel you have changed and moved.
How dull and sad thing is stasis.

Labels: birthdays