By Skylar Lyralen Kaye, et al, fae/they
Author, “Bachelorx, a Nonbinary Memoir”
The cool water of the Atlantic covers the tops of my Hoka sandals first, then my calves as I push forward and place one knee down on the paddle board and then the other. It’s that moment, the one when the push and the lift occur simultaneously, that my heart lifts toward freedom and I might as well be swimming into the sky.
Liftoff.
Once an older closeted guy said to me, “Most people in their sixties don’t paddle board for four hours a day out in the ocean trying to get to every island.”
I asked, “Why not?”
Perhaps you need to be plural, holding all the multiple consciousnesses of yourself at all ages, able to allow your inner teenagers and kids to keep you adventurous. Perhaps you have to have had as big a change as coming out as nonbinary in middle age. Perhaps you need to have written a book about all of it. Or perhaps you just need to be curious. Because getting older doesn’t have to be a slowing down.
Growth can continue.
Early in my life I struggled to get ahead of the trauma that had contributed to my plurality. I also struggled with dysphoria and a complete lack of language to name why I felt so different — not masc, not femme, not just tomboy, but another gender altogether. I taught Creative Writing for some of these years, mostly to women much older than I was, and I saw them still vitally, politically engaged in their lives, and I thought: that is going to be me.
But why come out as nonbinary? Why come out as a plural person? This isn’t about a bucket list. It’s a refusal to give up on your own queer, proud, plural life. The path is simple, if emotionally challenging: lean into the truth of who you are inside. And then bring all of who you are. Every plural self. Every trans nonbinary truth. Because that is revolution.
I get misgendered daily. I’m asked stigma questions about what it’s like to lose time to another part of yourself — which I don’t do. Middle-aged women I date push me to be more femme or more butch to make themselves comfortable. Some screw up my pronouns repeatedly. And many people go awkwardly silent around my plurality.
Not easy.
But I am packed with knowledge about consent, collaboration, inner respect, loyalty, truth-telling, experiences of kindness and connection…all the things I received from my inner people and so many queer and other allies once I left the endless oppression of my younger years.
People keep expecting aging to be about slowing down and getting wise. Well, I wouldn’t run with the bulls again, or rock climb without a belay. But I paddle board hard trips and haven’t given up on surfing. For me aging leans toward kindness, bravery, staying adventurous, and letting the young in me play as they always have.
I want to be alive until the moment I’m not.
The reward is when I meet a woman or nonbinary or trans person or ally who gets me and says some kind of yes. Yes, I find you attractive. Or just: yes, let’s know each other, I’m in for all of who you are. Trans euphoria is in the yes I say to all my very queer selves — not a cisgender personality in here. Because later in life, I don’t only know who I am. I know how to hold and soothe all of who I am.
At least much more of the time.
I create more fully because I have less physical tension in my body than I did twenty-five years ago, and less pain and injury with it. I don’t get sick as often.
I think of it like this: I’ve been working with my inner people for over thirty-five years. After three years we flipped from crisis to a mix of struggle and landing that lasted over a decade, and in my fifties, we all moved into wholeness — a sense of being on each other’s side, of being embodied, fully queer in the sacred sense of body and gender.
The thirty-five years of my healing and coming out included the search for a safe place to land in myself, to create with consent and collaboration with others, learning how, bringing more, grieving, hurting, making art, movement practice, hurting, healing, working through conflict, speaking truth to power, making comedy, grieving again…the years accrue toward better.
I woke up one day in my fifties and my therapist asked, “You do realize you’re healed, right?”
“Oh, is that what this is?” I answered.
I began to understand then that it’s not what we carry, but how we queerly carry it. How wholeness has taken root in living all my outlier identities right out loud. How I claim our sensitivity and the deep pain that comes in response to ugliness, injustice, transphobia, ableism — sometimes with a typical mature composure, and sometimes with an earned, fully embodied emotional reality from my teenagers (including swearing) that many adults are rarely allowed, except onstage.
I get pissed off and raise my voice. I get hurt and cry. I get triggered. I hate current political realities. I want to rescue every trans child. I titrate. I choose to help, and I still hold a space for myself.
Here, in Portugal.
Sometimes, when I’m paddle boarding, I lift the black bar of the paddle over my head and look at the clouds and sun and let out a yelp of pure joy. Sometimes I whisper to the schools of fish swimming alongside me, warning them off the boats and piers and lines. Sometimes I get caught in a swell and have to paddle like mad not to be dashed on the rock shelf bared beneath my board.
But I return. To this queer body. To my own voices on the page. To the wild beat of the ocean, and to its stillness. That’s how I make sense of life. I return, to all of me — and we can all do this, whatever age we are when we finally find all the truth of who we are.
Peace is the practice of returning to ourselves, and to this queer, ecstatic, embattled family. So worth it, especially in those moments when the push forward and the physical lift take us into rising up and pride.
Liftoff. At every possible age.
Bachelorx tells the story of everything Skye et al learned when they left a 35 year marriage to go on the apps and date.
