Who Am I Now

Ah, what a question.

And what a concept.

To answer it honestly, I almost have to abandon every previous point of reference. Every label, every role, every version of myself that somebody else remembers.

So if we begin at zero:

Who am I right now?

Right now, I am sitting in a cannabis grow house in Oklahoma, finishing an evening of pruning the ladies.

So today, I am a cannabis-farming apprentice. A steward of the earth. An earth warrior learning how to care for something living.

I am learning discipline through consistency... the quiet discipline of showing up again and again. I am meeting expectations and beginning to surpass them. I feel good about the work I am doing. There is something meditative about pruning the plants, observing them, caring for them, and participating in the cultivation of a plant that has carried medicine, controversy, culture, and ceremony for generations.

Right now, I am learning that not every transformation needs to be dramatic.

Sometimes becoming happens through repetition.

I am a creator.

I am a writer trying to finish the story of my life.

I am developing a documentary about that life, a children’s book, and sacred medicine music.

The spoken and written word captivate me.

There is something fascinating about the contradiction between language and silence. Silence can teach more than words ever could, and yet words become the paths we leave behind for others to walk.

I want mine to mean something.

I am a dancer.

An entertainer.

I am interested in modeling and performing in spaces where imagination, movement, fashion, sound, lighting, and production are allowed to become enormous.

I am an athlete.

A trained military veteran.

I am adaptable. Intuitive. Capable of moving between discipline and surrender, structure and flow.

I create and hold sacred spaces.

I enjoy designing experiences, opening spaces, curating environments, managing risk, building strategy, and imagining possibilities that do not exist yet.

I am futuristic in my thinking while remaining fascinated by ancient principles.

Earth.

Breath.

Fire.

Water.

Community.

Story.

Ceremony.

I try to walk somewhere through the middle of things... honoring all my relations while maintaining standards for how I want to live and how I want to be treated.

I believe in becoming.

I have faith in divine union and personal ascension.

I honor the masculine archetype of the beloved without wanting to abandon my own center in pursuit of him.

That distinction matters.

I can desire union without making another person responsible for completing me.

I can expand my own energy while allowing attraction to exist.

I am learning how to breathe intentionally. When I feel an extreme amount of energy moving through my body, I am learning not to immediately react to it.

Sometimes I can simply breathe.

Clear the mind.

Return to the body.

Wait.

Listen.

I believe in choice.

My diet is primarily plant-based, and I believe in intuitive eating.

That is what works for me.

I also believe that life is complicated, bodies are complicated, medicine is complicated, and another person’s relationship with food does not require my judgment.

I do not want to persuade or shame somebody because of what they eat.

You live your life.

I will live mine.

We can meet each other without turning every personal decision into another ideological battlefield.

Let’s leave it there.

I believe in respect.

I believe in maintaining emotional maturity while still allowing passion to move through me.

I believe in learning.

Growth.

Forgiveness.

I believe human beings are capable of relating to one another far more deeply than we usually allow.

But first we have to put some things down.

The armor.

The performance.

The defensiveness.

The stories about who somebody else is before we have actually listened to them.

Sometimes beneath all that baggage are two people who understand each other much more than either expected.

I no longer confuse spirituality with entitlement.

Spiritual entitlement is what happens when somebody invokes community, service, healing, love, or mission while treating another human being as a resource instead of a person.

It can look like disregard.

Disrespect.

Overexpectation.

Exclusion followed by expectation.

Someone can remove you from the conversation, make you feel unwanted, ignore your contribution, and then suddenly remember your gifts when those gifts become useful.

That is not reciprocity.

And eventually I had to ask myself:

If I was not worthy of your communication, inclusion, respect, or consideration, why am I suddenly worthy of being called when you need my knowledge?

Someone else's lack of planning does not automatically create an obligation for me.

Someone else's mission does not become sacred simply because they use spiritual language to describe it.

Perhaps what I once called spiritual entitlement is simpler than that.

It is ego entitlement.

And my spirit does not have to serve every mission that calls for me.

My life has been an experiment.

Living experimentally makes you different.

Most people never have to seriously sit with questions like:

What would it mean to remain physically as I was born?

What would it mean to remove my facial and body hair?

What would hormones feel like?

What would vocal coaching awaken?

What would it mean to change my body surgically?

What if I did?

What if I did not?

What if neither decision determined who I was?

My life has always carried extremes.

Some of those extremes were chosen.

Some were absolutely not.

My history includes sexual violence at different stages of my life. Those experiences shaped the way I learned about intimacy, secrecy, masculinity, vulnerability, touch, danger, desire, and belonging.

But trauma is not the entirety of my sexuality.

There have also been experiences of profound intimacy.

Euphoric experiences.

Moments of connection inside relationships where sexuality did not feel like survival or negotiation. It felt like communion.

And then there was everything in between.

For a long time, I carried shame around the simple reality that I enjoy intimacy with men.

Sometimes I imagined that truth became evidence people could use against me... that desire somehow made me less trustworthy, less serious, less spiritual, or less worthy of being understood.

But desire is not a character defect.

I spent much of my life being seen while simultaneously feeling invisible.

My life has always attracted attention, and somehow I still learned to think of myself as nobody.

Maybe part of that came from reflecting people who treated me that way.

Growing up in Utah, I had friends, but many relationships emerged through circumstance... sports teams, school groups, activities, proximity.

There was also an unspoken social boundary around me.

I could feel it.

Some boys would connect with me privately but hesitate to acknowledge me publicly because proximity to me could invite speculation about their own sexuality.

So some of my deepest bonding happened behind closed doors.

In secret.

In darkness.

I learned to seek belonging through intimacy and touch, and then found myself wounded when the same closeness people wanted privately became something they rejected publicly.

That was one of my lessons in extremes.

I was trying to come home to myself while constantly being shown that certain parts of me were supposedly only acceptable when nobody else could see them.

I learned how to perform survival beautifully.

I go deep.

Sometimes I feel miles ahead of where my physical life currently stands.

And I do not want to make my past sound entirely tragic.

But I do want to tell the truth.

There are photographs of me looking beautiful, strong, social, accomplished, magnetic.

And sometimes the person inside those photographs was fighting to survive.

I used alcohol and prescribed medications at different periods of my life while trying to manage what I did not yet understand.

I was doing the best I could with the tools I had.

And I became very talented at making struggle look good.

My motto was:

Fake it till you make it. Never let them see you cry.

But why?

Because I did not want the boys to know they had hurt me.

I did not want my girlfriends to realize that sometimes I had feelings for the men they were dating.

I did not want anyone asking questions I did not yet know how to answer.

For many people, I became:

Joey, the gay cheerleader from Northridge.

That description never completely worked for me.

Not because there is anything wrong with being gay.

But because internally, that word never fully described the way I experienced myself.

And that brings me back to gender.

Because underneath all these questions is one I have carried for a very long time.

How do I describe myself when my internal experience does not neatly correspond to the categories available to me?

There have been times when I have experienced myself as profoundly feminine... sometimes even recognizing myself internally through the archetype or experience of a heterosexual woman attracted to men.

And then I look at my physical body.

Male anatomy.

Testosterone.

Facial hair.

A masculine history.

A male social identity.

And attraction to other men.

One system looks at that equation and says:

Gay man.

Another part of me says:

That still isn't the whole story.

If my internal identity is feminine and I am attracted to men, does that make the experience feel straight to me?

If my body grows facial hair, does that automatically determine my gender?

And what about women who grow facial hair?

What about feminine men?

Masculine women?

Trans people?

Nonbinary people?

People whose gender changes over time?

People who never find a word that feels completely right?

Suddenly the supposedly simple system becomes much less simple.

And maybe that confusion is not a problem requiring immediate resolution.

Maybe curiosity can be an identity too.

I know there are physical options available to me if someday I determine that they belong in my life.

Laser hair removal.

Hormones.

Voice work.

Gender-affirming procedures.

Different presentations.

Different names.

Different embodiments.

Knowing an option exists does not mean I have to choose it today.

Right now, something in me says:

Wait.

Not no.

Not yes.

Just not now.

So I am allowing myself to witness what happens.

I want to know how much of my desire for physical transformation comes from my own deepest expression and how much comes from wanting the outside world to interpret me correctly.

Because perhaps there are parts of me that do not need translation.

Perhaps my natural expression can seduce the world precisely because it refuses to become easily categorized.

I don't need to know the final version yet.

That is the answer to the question.

Who am I now?

I am the farmer.

The veteran.

The writer.

The dancer.

The masculine.

The feminine.

The sacred and the profane.

The disciplined one and the experimental one.

The person who survived.

The person who performed survival.

The person learning that survival no longer has to be the performance.

I am someone who has lived inside many identities without needing to declare any one of them the final destination.

Maybe becoming yourself is not about discovering the perfect label.

Maybe it is about becoming safe enough within yourself to remain unfinished.

So who am I now?

I am paying attention.

I am listening.

I am becoming.

And apparently...

I'll see you on the billboards.

"I  have watched everyone around me slip into a simulation. What one am I  in?"