come with me
I said to myself
I have something
to show you
and without asking what
I followed
Photos by Mercia Moseley
Like many of us I grew up absorbing a stream of stories about how to be, who to want, what to look like, and what success is.
For a lot of my life I didn't challenge many of those messages, because challenging them meant risking a sense of belonging.
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When I was 30, I had a realization I couldn't un-realize. ​As much as I loved my husband, the marriage I had wanted and built in my 20s was not, in fact, for me. Not because of him, but because I am queer in ways I was only beginning to understand... in who I'm attracted to, but also in how I want to live.
I also discovered during this time that womanhood is not for me.
Nor is the whole concept of gender if I’m honest, or traditional ideas of what relationships look like, or the notion that there's one right way to do, well, anything. The more I looked at these stories I’d been living without question, the more they crumbled. Even as I knew it needed to happen, it was heartbreaking to watch the future I'd constructed dissolve.
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Eventually I just stood in a pile of rubble, wondering "what the hell is left? What is actually me here?” I couldn't even figure out what I liked, which was kind of alarming. Who doesn’t know what they like?! So I just started picking up pieces one at a time, seeing if they fit anywhere on me.
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One day when I was flying down a hill on my bike in the sun, I thought, “Oh, I like this. This one is me.”
A piece fit. And then another.
Photo by Basil Levesque
It was messy, non-linear, and often very ungraceful. I started playing with the term “trans”, feeling called by it and also like I wasn’t “trans enough” to claim it.
But then I did, and it fit so comfortingly. I thought maybe I’d try taking testosterone, only realizing how much I wanted it when I got denied the first time. I somewhat impulsively paid a $500 deposit for a breast reduction before realizing I wanted them gone altogether. Embarrassing. I also made questionable relationship choices, trauma dumped on friends I'd known for two weeks, and cried at the boxing gym. Like, regularly.
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After several years of transitioning in place, I gave myself the gift of moving across the country so I could see what it was like to be around people who had only ever known me as “Max (they/them)”. It was surreal at first, like my brain kept waiting for someone to trip over a different name or need a minute to adjust. When that didn't happen something in me started to settle that I didn't even know had been unsettled.
In truth I've been riding waves of performing and being myself my whole life, often without knowing which was which.
The noticing didn't arrive one day and fix everything. My sense of "This is not for me" and "This! This is for me" has just gotten stronger, and I've gotten better at listening over time.
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Ten years ago I felt unmoored as I painstakingly deconstructed what I’d once held as truth. I was trying to get to the other side of it, to some place where I was “done” and I could finally be a finished product.
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I will not do the hero’s journey ending of “Now I’ve done all my unlearning, I know myself completely, and everything is perfect!” because that’s not how this works. There is no done, no other side.
I just feel less like I need to arrive.
Photo by Dylan Robinson
I grew up on an island in the Pacific Northwest, wandering barefoot to my friends’ houses and building fairy houses in the woods. I studied photography and rhetoric in college, and often still miss the smell of darkroom chemicals. My childhood was full of music and singing in various forms, and that love has carried into my adulthood.
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I've also backpacked over 4,000 miles, which is either pretty cool, totally unhinged, or both depending on who you ask.
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People often describe me as warm, playful, and sometimes sparkly. I'll take all three.
Folks also tell me I bring out their weirdness, which I take as the highest compliment.
Positioning myself
Like many of us, I live in a mix of privilege and marginalization that shapes how I see the world and where my blind spots are. These include being white-bodied, trans, queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent, polyamorous, middle class, a US citizen, midsize, elder millennial, and currently living on unceded Suquamish and Tulalip land.​
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I am committed to disrupting systems of cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and extractive capitalism in myself and the work I do. I believe being an ally, accomplice, and co-conspirator is a matter of action, not title. It is a practice of continually learning, un-learning, and dismantling these destructive systems we live in.
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I'm an ICF-certified coach, a certified ontological coach through Accomplishment Coaching, and currently in an advanced IFS coach training program. I'm also a trained experiential facilitator, and spent years in learning and development at a global tech company, designing learning experiences and coaching leaders at all levels.
Want to see if this is for you?
I offer a free 30-minute call where we can explore what's going on for you, you can get a feel for how I work, and we can see if it's a good fit