I walked this meandering path in the early morning mist in the Grand Tetons. I did not know where the path went. I followed it because with each step it became more beautiful. Alas, I had to turn around because I had run out of time.

You never finish answering a call because the demands of the call are many, unrelenting, and ever changing.  And eventually, you run out of time. Joseph Campbell talked about following your bliss, but I’d like to ask him to explain just a bit more about what exactly bliss means. As it relates to work, I’ve always said it means moving in the direction of your gifts. But in life in general, it seems a call can be far more difficult to discern.

When I decided to transition, it was after seventeen years of therapy and two bouts of moderate depression. (As I’ve written before, moderate depression is like moderate turbulence on an airplane. It is a lot worse than it sounds.) Some who transition say either they transitioned or they would have died. I am not sure that is true for me. I certainly have friends and family who believe that is true for me. I believe I might have stayed alive, but at great cost.

As I have written often, including in my memoir, my call to transition came during a television show. It was the final season of Lost and there came a point during that season in which Jack, the protagonist of the show, realized he had been called by the God figure (Jacob) to die. (If you are a Lost fan, it is the episode in which he saw his childhood home in the lighthouse mirror.) I knew I had been called, and cried until dawn. Most of the time a call is not received as an, “Oh Joy!” moment. It is received as an, “Oh Shit!” moment.

That call came early in 2010. Almost fifteen years later, my call keeps shifting, like the early morning light. When I first transitioned, few knew what it meant to be transgender and gender dysphoria was not even a diagnosis in the DSM. Today, thanks to the far right and Donald Trump, transgender people in America are under siege in ways I never could have imagined ten years ago. When my first TED Talk took off in 2017, outside of the evangelical world most of what I received was good will – worldwide. Not so today. I have lost at least three high-paying university or corporate speaking gigs this year because the powers that be said, “No transgender speakers on my watch!”

I am fortunate to live in a very accepting town in which I serve as an elected official (Mayor Pro Tem and Board of Trustee member,) one of fewer than 50 elected transgender officials in the United States.

Outside of Colorado, and particularly when I am in neighboring states, or when I am in the south, if people find out I am transgender I do not feel safe. Unless my speaking gig requires it, I never out myself in those states. I do not feel called to be an activist for the transgender community. I do not avoid speaking out on trans issues, but I feel far more called to speak on gender equity.

Sometimes I find a calling emerges by trusting the flow of my life. My counseling practice has picked up again, primarily with two groups, CEOs and other c-suite individuals, and with those exiting evangelicalism with all of the accompanying complexities of religious trauma. My practice is growing in both areas. The other realm that has arrived by complete surprise has been coaching speakers. I currently have a dozen speaker coaching clients, most of whom have come because of my work at TEDxMileHigh or my TED Talks. (If you are interesting in counseling or coaching with me, reach out to me at paula@rltpathways.com)

Each of these areas of endeavor lines up with the oft-quoted phrase from Frederick Buechner that where you are called is “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”

There is a deep gladness in counseling leaders who know the loneliness of leadership every CEO experiences. With a quarter of a century of experience as a CEO, I come to that work with lived wisdom and painfully earned knowledge.

Working with people who have experienced toxic faith is gratifying because of my extensive knowledge in the area, and again, because of my own personal experience. Enough time has passed with both that I have few issues with counter-transference, the problem that occurs when a counselor does not have enough distance between their own painful issues and a current client’s similar issues. (It is also a reason I do not counsel transgender people – too much counter-transference.)

I have also been called to an ever-changing understanding of what it means to be transgender. I now use language I rarely used when I first transitioned. I feel I come from the borderlands between genders, or the liminal space between genders. I do not experience life as a cisgender woman, but there are so many ways in which a cisgender male experience felt so very wrong. The best explanation I currently have is that I am far more comfortable living as a female than I was living as a male. For those who have over a decade of lived transgender experience, that is something I hear often.

I have a lot of questions and concerns about the meteoric rise in the number of young people who identify as transgender. What was consistently a diagnosis of about one half of one percent of the population is now often up to five percent. Unfortunately, that is also accompanied by a large increase in the numbers of those detransitioning. I’m carefully following the studies being conducted of this phenomenon in Europe. It is too much of a politically charged issue here in the United States for truly objective studies to be completed and published. There are extreme reactions from the right and the left.

I received an extremely positive response when I shared these concerns with a large group of therapists, pediatricians, and psychiatrists at UCLA. I received the opposite response when I shared them with a mainline Protestant church in the same region. That’ll leave you scratching your head.

I shall be discerning the call of my life for as long as I breathe. One of my mentors said when he was approaching 97, “I am called to the final conversion, to leaving my ego behind and following my soul to the other side.” He had spent his life as a Christian leader. Both of my long-term mentors were Christian leaders, one Catholic and one from my former denomination. Both had passed on before I transitioned. Both would have been supportive of my transition, of that I am sure.

Discerning a call is a learned skill. Sometimes it arrives via a still small voice, and sometimes via a hard virtual smack up the side of the head. Either way one is grateful, because at least for the moment, you know where to step next.

And so it goes.

 

The call toward authenticity is sacred and holy and for the greater good.

Those words grace the dedication page of my memoir. They are also the last words I wrote for my 2017 TED Talk that has had over 7 million views. I chose the words carefully. No one is authentic. We are called toward authenticity and it is quite a journey. We are always in pursuit of it. We never arrive. All manner of distractions get in the way.

I try to live wholeheartedly, but I have tended to struggle with dysthymia (low grade depression) throughout my life, which can make wholehearted living difficult. I always strive toward authenticity, regardless of my mood. The desire for authenticity has brought me to this place in the year of our Lord 2024. I do not pretend to know where that call will take me next. It has not been made clear. It rarely is. You catch a glimpse of something in the mist and move in that direction. That’s all you can hope for.

Self-knowledge is holy, and the search for it is sacred. Throughout my life I have sought self-knowledge through various means, conventional and unconventional. Traditional depth therapy, with Jungian and Freudian flavors; writing, whether it be the journal I kept for 18 months after going through a difficult time, or these posts, or my memoir, or any of the other books I have authored.

Music has always been a part of the search. For someone who makes a living with words, it is ironic that I pay little attention to the words of songs. With a few exceptions, like Handel’s Messiah, or Hy Zarat’s Unchained Melody, or most of Billy Joel’s ballads, I don’t pay much attention to the words. For me it is all about the melody and especially the harmonies. I believe the most compelling argument for the Trinity is the existence of three-part harmony. God dwells there, in all of God’s parts.

Whether it is what Maslow called “peak experience” or the church fathers called “mystical experience,” we are all called beneath the ego and its incessant demands for power and safety. We are called to the realm of the soul where the deepest self-knowledge lies and we are most alive. We usually have to get there through a side door. The ego guards the front and back doors. You have to sneak past the ego to get to the soul.

For children, the soul comes forth through play. When I was a kid I loved building blocks and could play with them for hours. I would build castles and forts and then I would tear them down. Tearing my creations down was a part of the play. It prepared me for all the tearing down that accompanies even the most ordinary life.

For some a calling is birthed through a recurring dream. For others, it is a conversation you randomly hear on an airplane that feels as if it was meant for you. I still remember the time in the 80s when I was on a flight from Pittsburgh to Syracuse and the woman behind me, a pastor, said to her seatmate, “God is nothing if not subtle.”

Sometimes the soul comes forth through song lyrics I cannot get out of my head. As I already said, I don’t remember the words to songs, so when a phrase or snippet of a lyric comes to mind, I pay attention.

One of the most effective ways for the soul to speak to my consciousness is through the poems I have memorized. I haven’t quoted David Wagoner’s poem Lost in a couple of years. Lately I cannot get it out of my mind. I think I know the reason, though I am still pondering.

Sometimes instructions arise from the silence of meditation. Initially you take them as interruptions, and then you blessedly realize they are actually instructions. At least that is what people tell me. I have never been able to sustain any kind of meditation. I once took a doctoral course on the spiritual disciplines and told the two professors teaching the course that I was spectacularly bad at them. They assured me I was not. At the end of the week one of the professors, a very kind-hearted soul, said, “Maybe this isn’t the path for you.”

Sometimes a movie or television show awakens me to what the spirit is trying to say. As I wrote in my memoir, the television show LOST was hugely important in my life. Halfway through the final season there was an episode in which the protagonist realizes he has been called by God to die. I wept uncontrollably because I knew I had been called to transition genders. I think often about that night.

Throughout my adult life I have asked two questions. “What is right for me?” and “Where am I willing to be led.” They are the right questions. The problem is that I sometimes refuse to listen. I like to move fast, acting as if speed itself is holy. Speed is not holy. It is just speed. If I take the time to listen, the spirit emerges.

I am not artistically inclined, but I remember the cold winter day in Akron, Ohio when I noticed that a big chunk of ice had formed beneath a dripping outdoor faucet. I got a hammer and chisel and started shaping the block of ice. I sat there for hours carefully chipping away sections of the block. I had no idea what I was making until I saw what appeared to be a nose emerge. Following that clue, I sculpted two eyes, lips, and a square jaw. When I finished, the block of ice looked a little like Frankenstein, but I was proud as a 12-year-old can be. I had found a face in a block of ice.

Sometimes a call emerges when you chisel away at the detritus. If a face was in a block of ice then maybe a call might be embedded in the frozen sea that develops within me. I must find a hammer and chisel so I can get to work.

I’ve given a lot of speeches over the years, and on hundreds of occasions I have quoted Frederick Buechner’s words from his book Wishful Thinking: “God calls you to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” On scores of occasions people have thanked me for giving them that framework to understanding calling.

If you answer the kind of call Buechner identified, you will also be answering the call toward authenticity, and that is sacred and holy and for the greater good.