In his biography, “The Naked Civil Servant,” Quentin Crisp describes the makeup he chooses to wear as his “war paint.” I first came across this intriguing piece of text during my junior year at Hofstra, when I decided that I absolutely needed to take another class with Dr. Sulcer, who was and always will be my favorite part of my undergraduate education.

The class he was teaching that year was titled “Gay and Lesbian Literature” and while I’m sure it seemed off-putting to some, to me, it would provide me not only with another semester of Dr. Sulcer’s mastery, but also what I now see as an invaluable wealth. Taking this course exposed me to an entirely different set of issues that millions of people face, and helped me to understand how I relate to other humans in general.

Back to Crisp. His notion struck a bell in my brain, so much so that I still remember the text more than ten years later. War paint. A type of armor. A form of protection. A show of ferocity. So many ways that showed me people liken their lives to a battle–one where they’re not only being attacked, but the attacks are inescapable.

Whenever I come across a tough spot, or an issue that sparks controversy, I like to ask myself a “what if?” What if it were me on the other side of that fence? What if I were a part of the minority?

What if identifying as gay was the “norm” and identifying as straight was seen as “unnatural?” What if I were born into a body I truly did not feel connected to? I covet my alone time and my most valuable possessions are my thoughts, so these kinds of questions paved the way for a LOT of interesting quiet time. And the conclusions I came to are conclusions that echo during times of “controversy.”

I typed that last word in quotations since I believe it is the wrong word to describe an issue that’s been popping up all over social media lately. In fact, I believe this “issue” shouldn’t be an issue at all.

I’m referring to the idea that people are finding a cause for alarm that individuals identifying as transgender may choose to use a public restroom that doesn’t align with their physical biology.

If I’m going to be flat-out honest, it kind of makes me insane with anger. This is why: One of the most valuable things I’ve learned is that only an individual can label himself or herself. No one can do it for you. We all have, of course — the guy you knew in college who made out with other guys…of course he was GAY, right? ALL girls are bisexual, right? Being into a BDSM lifestyle OBVIOUSLY means you were abused at some point in your life, right?

But when you think about it, that’s all wrong–really wrong. Who are we to stick a label onto someone who hasn’t decided for himself? And I don’t mean that everyone deserves a label or even that labels are a good thing–personally, I dislike them. I’m using it as a blanket term to describe ALL kinds of identities, not just one or two.

If we’re gonna go down the road of biology, let’s hop in and start driving. We all gotta pee. It’s inevitably going to happen when we’re outside of our homes. So, because we’re not wild animals ((at least not most of us)), we’re gonna find the closest facility, do what has to be done, wash hands, and cue credits. In fact, I’m willing to bet most of us spend the LEAST amount of time possible in a public restroom, because again, if we’re gonna be real, they’re pretty disgusting.

So let me ask you: As you’re doing your thing, are you ever wondering what kind of genitals the person has in the stall next to you? Has this thought ever really crossed your mind while you’re peeing?

If it scares you that much, do you think there might be a deeper problem there?

Let me describe a cartoon I’ve seen re-posted several times. In it, we see a mother and daughter at a restroom sink next to a row of stalls, gaping at the doorway. The door is swinging open and a very sketchtastic, creeptastic dude in a trench coat is entering, carrying a camera. “Relax lady,” he’s saying. “I’m transgendered.”

I’m not going to get into all of the ways I found this cartoon highly offensive. I’m going to address what I gathered as its point: Letting individuals who are transgender into any restroom they like gives perverts and pigs the opportunity to spy on women and/or children.

Let’s be clear about two things: 1. It’s likely that most people entering restrooms are going because, well, they have to go. 2. If his or her intent is to spy and/or be disgusting, a pervy or creepy person is going to enter whatever bathroom he or she chooses.

I mentioned earlier that I got my degree at Hofstra. I will tell you that I chose to never use the restrooms in the student center. The reason why? Public safety briefs. I cannot count how many public safety briefs I read explaining that non-matriculated men were discovered hiding in the women’s restroom and removed from campus.

Disgusting people do not need to use the issue of transgender to do what they’re going to do. The only way to keep them out is to assign public safety officers to every public restroom in the entire world.

On another note, if you think about it, the label on the restroom door is a suggestion–a heeded one, of course, but no one actually says women can’t use the men’s room or men can’t use the women’s room. I have been with my best friend on many an occasion when she’s headed straight into the men’s room after realizing there’s no damn way she’s waiting on the line at the women’s room. She’s never been arrested. Or fined. Or even reprimanded. There are no genital scanners at the entrance of each door, so really, who says you can’t?

I also get it that people are concerned about their children’s safety, and rightfully so. But how many parents of younger children do you know who let their kids go to the bathroom in public alone? You’ve probably seen it–a mom bringing her young son into the bathroom with her or maybe a dad waiting outside the door to the ladies’ room, nervously peeking inside. What about older kids or teenagers? Think about the last time you were in a restroom at a movie theater–chances are likely there’s been a gaggle of teenagers waiting on line in the bathroom together.

I’m not insinuating assaults in bathrooms don’t happen–they do, and it’s awful, and no one should condone that. But no one should use this as an excuse to bar women from the ladies’ room, or men from the men’s room. Because at that point, this person has decided on an identity, and no one has a right to tell them otherwise.

It’s likely these people–people–have spent quite some time on a personal battlefield, grappling with all kinds of “what ifs?” and wondering what kind of armor they might need. Can’t we just let them pee in peace?

I have a small blurb on my resume cover letter that has garnered some attention over the last few interviews. It explains how I spent two years living in a tiny town just outside Reno, Nevada, and how I find this experience to be as valuable to me as getting my Bachelor’s.

In a business sense, this means that I learned the true sense of self-discipline when it comes to work. It’s funny what happens when you realize you can open a browser in the middle of the workday and not have to worry about some hawkeye spying on you over cubicle walls.

It means that you’re still unshowered in pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon, you haven’t eaten anything other than a couple of Oreos and a lukewarm cup of coffee, and an assignment that should’ve taken you an hour has suddenly taken you all damn day.

No matter what anyone says, working from home is not always the corner office with an amazing view, the break room that never runs out of chocolate, and the personal assistant who does your laundry of the business world.

It takes a ton of self-discipline. I’ve been freelancing on and off for almost four years, and I still haven’t mastered it. And when you really start grappling with it in the beginning, it really sucks.

But learning about how to really be my own boss is not the only valuable thing I took away from my time in the desert.

I plan to write an entire post about what happened after we rode off into the sunset, and all I could do was look back. So, for now, I will say this: I was alone for more than 90 percent of my time in Nevada, and I was not prepared for what would happen when the only person I had to talk to was myself.

I’ve mentioned it before that it is not always fun taking a walk around inside my brain. Turns out, there are a number of derelict buildings and dark alleyways and wild-eyed muggers brandishing guns in there. But there’s another side of town where ideas are born a dozen times a day, where lines of dialogue show up and you’re not sure where they’re going yet, but you know they’re going to wind up in something. This part is the New York City of my brain–the lights are still going and the beats are still bumping at 4am, regardless of who’s annoyed by the noise.

In this part of my brain, there are tons of shop-laden streets with nothing but reflective glass, lined with mirrors, and tons of things written on the walls. And I spent lots of time in there.

Paired with the treatment I underwent while in the desert, these things I discovered and re-discovered sent me back home to New York as an entirely changed person. It was both refreshing and horribly scary, and it came with a multitude of effects. One of the biggest, and probably the most significant, is that the only person who is going to live my life is me. The only voice I will ever really have to listen to in my brain is my own. Reading those sentences aloud, they sound cliche and kind of insignificant. Of course those things are important. Everyone knows that. Everyone lives that way. But when you haven’t lived that way, at least not fully, and you actually realize it–it is HUGE.

If I’m going to put it in layman’s terms, it has provided me with the opportunity to give a lot less fcks.

Not in a callous way, not in a lazy way, in a better way. What does that mean? It means that I stopped talking to people who continuously made me anxious, even if these were people were going to be unavoidable. It meant now I don’t have to care if this will make you dislike me more.

It means that I don’t do things I don’t want to. I spend a lot of quiet time in my apartment. I love it here. It meant I’m not going to go to this dinner/bridal shower/holiday that I clearly do not want to go to, where I’m going to hate my existence for the entire 3-5 hours, just because someone “might” get mad if I don’t show up. No. No one ever gets mad at someone for declining an invite, and if they do, chances are likely they’re going to get over it before the next time I see them.

It means I’m going to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. It meant I’m tired for a bevy of reasons that I don’t have to explain or justify, and if I have to recharge for an hour or two in the middle of the day, it doesn’t mean I’m lazy. Hear that, brain?

It means I’m going to try to stop re-hashing and re-living every time I should have said this; I should have just done this; why did I let this go on? It meant those things are gone. Justified or not, you did them, and chances are likely that they’re not as momentous as they are to you. 

Which leads to one of the biggest: Letting these things fester in the back alleys of my brain only makes me anxious; it only makes me angry; it only makes me upset. Everyone else moves on, carrying their issues or not, and I’m the only one who will ever have to live in my own brain, so why make it all broken sidewalks, smashed windows, and crumbling doorways?

It takes work, every single day, to not go on autopilot into those shady neighborhoods. It takes a lot of awareness to head toward the lights and the music. Like self-discipline, it isn’t something I’ve mastered yet. I still grapple with it. And it still sucks. But it’s a lot better than it was. It’s not even comparable at this point.

When I sat down to write, I knew that I was going to reference Reno, and the first thing that popped into my head was the title to this post. The funny thing about Reno is that it’s located in a valley in the mountains, high above sea level. This means that you could wake up to a usually cloudless sky, but get to sit on your balcony and watch the biggest hailstones you’ve ever seen in your life rain down into the courtyard an hour later. It means that up in the mountains, people might be skiing when it’s 75 degrees. It means that you could wake up to snow flurries on a mid-July morning, but have to hide from the furiously hot sun by two in the afternoon. It is always changing. And it always takes getting used to.

Always.

And so, they’re fond of a familiar saying out there: Welcome to Reno. If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten minutes.

I did something out-of-character last week, and a funny thing happened: It started to affect the rest of my decisions. As the week turned into the weekend, I found myself contemplating my attitude ((or lack thereof)) when it comes to the idea of risk.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have trouble making decisions–any kind of decision. I’m as likely to spend the same amount of time choosing whether I’m going to eat yogurt or cereal for breakfast as I am between which television or laptop I’m going to buy. And then comes the intense questioning. Is this really the right choice? What would my mother say about it? What would my best friend pick? Have I thought about this? What about this? What if this is a mistake? What if I’m attacked by wolves–will I still be okay with the choice I made? 

It’s not always fun to be inside my brain.

But when you strip down all of the intense torture–I mean, overthinking–it comes down to a simple thing: I am uncomfortable with the idea of risk. So much to the point that I avoid it as much as possible, in any type of situation. I think it’s likely because I convince myself that possible negatives aren’t possible at all–if given the opportunity to arise, they’re pretty much guaranteed. But according to therapists and psychiatrists, this notion isn’t all that uncommon for someone who has Generalized Anxiety Disorder ((GAD)), even when it’s controlled.

Anyway, back to last week.

After five months of unemployment ((which was a blast, let me tell you)), I found myself employed with a financial services firm about half an hour away. The job was listed as a temporary proofreading job, and was slated to run from January through the end of April. Without getting into too much detail, aside from my really fantastic fellow temps/coworkers, I absolutely hated this job. The work was straight-up awful and I was not a fan of management at all.

It wasn’t for my lack of trying, or that I was bad at the job. But every day, I dreaded getting out of bed, the drive, the walk through the warehouse into the office, the never-ending inbox of work, and every single assignment I took. And I noticed that things oddly seemed to go downhill once I took this job. I got into a car accident and had trouble with my rental. I started getting migraines. I made it to the second round of interviews for a full-time position I really, really, really wanted and was really, really, really qualified for, only to be told the company was choosing another candidate. My overtime pay was unbelievably taxed. I was so tired at night, I couldn’t even jot down notes, let alone write anything at all.

Maybe the universe is telling me I should quit this job, I thought. Ha ha ha. As if I could ever do that. What the hell, universe? Don’t you know I have RENT TO PAY? My cat needs to eat! I need to eat! What about my cell phone? The student loan payments I’m so far behind on? Who cares about misery–what about all that?!

So, I stuck with it, misery and setbacks and all. And then came what I like to call my own personal creeping death: The realization. What I mean by this is the realization that I am not doing what I want to do with my life. That my work should at least fulfill me a little, even if it isn’t ideal. That I should enjoy my role, even if it’s only slightly. That I’m doing something that might make some kind of lasting impression–something that might make someone enjoy his or her life a little bit more.

That I didn’t fight my way through getting my bachelor’s just to ignore the rules of grammar and make sure the formatting is correct for something that next to no one is going to read and is going to wind up shredded in the garbage in a few months.

After a few final straws and a monumental amount of overthinking, I did it. I chose a Friday and sent my “supervisor” a message over the office chat: Please note that next Wednesday will be my last day in the office. Even I couldn’t believe it as I read over the words. But then, something awesome happened.

I felt a huge wave of relief. I actually enjoyed that weekend, instead of dreading the idea that Monday would be here before I blinked. I slept really well. In fact, on the morning of my last Wednesday in the office, I woke up early and even felt a little excited.

After playing phone tag with an HR rep from a company who’d reached out to me, I scheduled an interview with a new prospective job, and then a second interview. I felt almost none of my normal pre-interview panic, and when the publisher of the magazine asked me “On a scale of 1-10, how good do you think your writing is?” I answered, with almost no hesitation, “It’s a 10.” And later, proceeded to tell the interviewers that “I’m not intimidated by learning how to write in a new style; growth and transformation are part of a career in writing. This is what I’m good at.”

Overconfident? Maybe. But I legitimately felt those things at the time. And what did I have to lose?

Speaking with my mother later in the week, I said something that I’ve never said aloud, especially not to her. “Maybe I don’t even want to work for them. I’m not sure. All I know is that I feel much better right now, and I don’t think I want to take a job just because I’m desperate for a paycheck ever again.” Is that a realistic statement? Maybe not. Everyone needs to eat. But it felt good to come to a realization.

As I walked to my car on my last day at the office, half-listening to the NoSleep podcast, I thought about something I’d read in an interview. I want to say it was with Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but this writer had said something along the lines of, keep working, keep creating, keep writing–“the money will come.” I took this for what it meant–I might not be able to expect gazillions of dollars, but my talents will provide me with a way to support myself, and it was important not to forget that.

I woke up this morning relieved that I didn’t have to make the 50-minute drive in traffic or shiver under an active air conditioning vent all day long in a windowless office. Instead, I got up, checked my email, started the blog I’ve been thinking about for weeks, took a look at the assignment board for my freelance job, and thought about the time I would have to get back to the one thing that I was letting avoidance of risk take away from me–my own work. The writing and editing that means the most to me.

Will I have to collect unemployment? Maybe. Will freelancing get tedious? Possibly. Will I get frustrated applying for the copy editing jobs I want the most? Well, that’s already happened.

But it’s okay to make a decision–to exercise a choice when you realize that there IS one. It’s okay to give yourself a break sometimes. The money will come.