Published December 16, 2024

My phone has counters. “Straight days of remote status” counts up from March 13, 2020, when the job I had scattered us to the four winds as the pandemic broke wide open. Its meaning goes beyond that, though. It’s how many days in a row I’ve mostly been alone in my tiny studio apartment: 1,737 days. I’m coming up on five years. Almost 75 percent of the time I’ve been openly transgender has been spent in virtual isolation. That’s because I’m vulnerable in more than one way. The world is less safe for me all the time.

I stopped drinking alcohol in September 2020 (1,548 days) because it was interfering with overall health related to my transition. TypoBot is a thing at work that flags a typo or an error we’ve missed and lets the whole company see on Slack. I’m proud of this streak (213 days), although it’s a tad skewed because I haven’t worked since Nov. 3.

Everybody is going through something. If it makes your life better to gleefully point out a typo you’re not paid to point out, please don’t object when I don’t join in. I’ve had enough of that world for a thousand lifetimes.

A version of this post appears on LinkedIn.

♥

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