Thanks. I am sorry. - I just do. - I just do. If not, okay. I don’t know. Two more things.

I disliked doing so. But I think we

can? It all fucking sucks. Is there a word for it? All read and considered. Thank you for doing that. I just felt and feel sad. I
just feel deeply sorry. I realize that it wasn't. Why the week I came out? Why the week I came out? That I made her life worse.
Very “Clayton” of you! But live & learn, and so on. Maybe that's not a problem? I know this could be painful. Fuck, I forgot the
second thing. I’m sorry, is this obnoxious? My guess is that it might not be. I think sometimes people do this. I'd rather not
talk on the phone. Good luck with everything, Margot. What a heartwarming thing to read. Does that sound reasonable to you? So of
course I’m hung up on this. Of course your opinion holds water. I was really confused and terrified. You’re still very important
to me. I know this is a lot to throw at you. Yes, it is all obviously very painful. I really cherished that, and still do. Why do
I feel compelled to know this? Why do I feel compelled to know this? I’m not sure how to end this letter. I care about you and
hope you're happy. It wasn’t just you and C and Lindsay. We’re both shooting from the hip here. Let me know what you think it
could be OK! I almost threw up when I saw you'd replied. It was 80% of the people who mattered to me. That went horribly, as you
probably guessed. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good friend to you. I don’t mind if you think that’s unfair. like one or two chances to
answer the phone? I say this not to absolve myself of anything. Oh yeah: so like you said it's all contingent. I understand what
you mean about hypotheticals. Okay, next question: “Why this exact timing? (I think you’ve had that experience yourself. I
really appreciate what you've written so far. Even if it might be useful to this conversation. Again, this whole thing means so,
so much to me. This all by way of explanation not justification. Re: "skin to crawl into" god this skeeved me out. "A sort of
envious or sympathic excitement" - ha! I’ll also try to be clear to the extent I can be. And of course lemme know if anything
else comes up. I am going to clarify some aspects of my experience. Hey Margot, sorry for the somewhat delayed response. You
should look up “autogynephilia” on Wikipedia. We should have had a conversation, at the very least. Ideally, they would have held
more weight, as I said. I really wish I could have just been honest back then. That it would have been better if she’d never met
me. Even if, say, her account was incomplete or inaccurate. I know that I always needed you more than you needed me. It means a
lot to me that you’ve been willing to talk. Partially, it comes down to trust and bone-deep feeling. So I called you once or
twice, then left you a voicemail. And anyway, there’s the timing matter I mentioned above. Although yes, maybe this was helpful
for you in moving on. I'm aware of that imbalance even now, reading your letter. You don’t know how much it means for me to hear
from you. At the time I felt like I was in such a huge fucking pinch. To an extent, I’m able to imagine how bad that must feel. I
hear and understand your desires about contact between us. - otherwise I'll type something up over the next week or so. Not that
I wanna cram a lot of communication into that time. I hope you're doing well and holding hands with someone too. Yes, I know that
your ‘relationship’ was sexual at times. I agree with your assessment of where we are on the same page. I will never feel
anything about you more than I feel thankful. Maybe you think I was unfair in the way I ended our friendship? Maybe it means
something for you to hear that, maybe it doesn't. That night I felt totally supported by you, and totally accepted. I would not
be surprised if the above strikes you as ahistorical. Would you be open to setting aside a time to speak on the phone? (I think
this is a feature of excommunicating someone, not a bug. Looking back now, it seems possible that you really felt that way. I
never listened to your voicemail (vertigo), but I got your text. You know, like pervy villains in movies like Silence of the
Lambs. (Demonization = being labeled “Bad Person”, minus negotiation. Also, I regret ending your friendship with Crawford on her
behalf. In reality, on a deeper level, the above point was likely reversed. It all still feels quite heartbreaking, and maybe
always will for me.), stared back at me in that blank way when I asked her to believe me. But honestly, I was always sort of in
love with you, plain and simple. Anyway, wanting to hurt someone is not a prerequisite for being hurtful. I want you to know that
I have never felt an ounce of anger towards you. I’d built like 5 viable reconstructions of what could have transpired., but to
me those seemed indicative of the imbalance you're talking about. Dishonesty is not one of my major vices so I didn't see any of
it coming. I’m sorry for carrying on about her when I denied the intention to do so. Maybe also as a response to emotional
exhaustion, but I understand that too. Anyway, I just wanted to try to explain the "things" I was referring to then.” The second
two ‘this’s’ refer to the question of the timing, right? But it would have saved me a lot of obsessing if I’d only known a “why”.
It’s an outdated and trans- negative theory about why trans women are trans. I think we can also agree that I should have ended
our friendship differently. It's always sorta sickening to look back on how closetedness manifests itself. I always longed to be
able to talk about certain imbalances in our relationship. If that 90% bears out, then I know it’s crass to belabor this and I
apologize. I am open to emailing a couple more times, or having a conversation on the phone. Especially when it comes to
something as profound as my relationship to my gender. Did you know that this was the second time in my life I had become a huge
pariah? Especially when it comes to something as profound as my relationship to my gender. Honestly, Margot, I’ve always assumed
the timing was painful but circumstantial. I don’t want or hope to fully understand what happened between you and Crawford. I’ve
been doing psychoanalysis (which I’m sure you have plenty of opinions on! I think we are on the same page about the time frame
and end goal of this exchange. I just think it could help me move on to hear you say what those “things” were. If only that
empathy-exercise had yielded more fruit in my life outside the bedroom! But I would be surprised if this possibility had not
crossed your mind at some point.) Also, the literal repression of past events often happen, in a total or partial way.” The bold
phrases are ones where I’m not totally sure what the ‘this’ refers. I’ve wasted enough time ruminating about all that already and
am no longer doing so. Discussing the specifics of what she told me doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. I also remember
feeling, maybe ridiculously, a sort of envious or sympathic excitement. Just so you know, even at the time I never wanted to
contact you on Crawford’s behalf. The fact that you weren’t sure if you were in love with Crawford or wanted to be her? Okay,
thanks for your letter (really) and sorry if I forgot to address something from it. Initially, after shit went down, I saw our
friendship as being fundamentally manipulative. At the time I was too focused on the “in love” to attach much importance to the
“be. The fractal comment was probably a well-intentioned cop-out on the part of my sub-conscious. Personally I don’t think it’s
unfair, but I don’t want to attempt to explain why here. “I understand that you have reasons for things; however, those reasons
do not matter to me. I didn't manage to convey all that and years have passed without such an explanation i guess. Anyway, I'm
not trying to justify or asking for another apology here, just trying to explain. I know we’re deep in some bullshit with all of
this, so I’m sorry for the sentimentality. Basically says that we transition so that we can possess the type of body we are
attracted to. Okay I know I haven't addressed everything you've said, but I'm going to end this letter here. I’m sure my
contacting you on behalf of both of us intensified the feeling of being expelled. I really do still feel like you know me, and
I'll hold that with me even as we part ways again. It’s been almost three years and this is still something I spend 50% of my
time on in analysis. I still occasionally wake up at 3 in the morning with some new aspect of it suddenly haunting me. I like to
think this wouldn’t have been the case if I hadn’t had the attachment issues I had. I know that the ways we relate to what
happened between us will continue to shift over the years. If you ever feel any need to reach out to me again, please know that I
will always be open to it. Okay, I’m going to try my best to address (or explicitly not address) everything in your email. Sadder
because I got a small taste of what it would have felt like to work through these problems. Please ignore the horribly pedantic
and analytical tone of this entire email, if humanly possible. I know you’re not someone who misses people, and that ideas
impress upon you more than people do. I hope you feel understood, too - I know I’m being self-involved in the first half of this
email. Of course, you haven’t really suggested I owe anything to you; you’ve just asked the questions. I totally understand if
for you it would be painful in a nonproductive way, or otherwise unnecessary. I think the constraint of not talking about
Crawford is sort of a direct obstacle to me sharing this. I think our dynamic is such that if we ever speak again, it will have
to be because you initiated it. Anyway you’re still very important to me and I’ve long wished I could share some of this with
you. And that I always looked up to you, and always felt a couple steps behind you on the wisdom staircase. I believe this can be
productive only to the extent that it never feels like a chore for either of us. So it makes me feel happy to know that you’ve
probably got only trustworthy people in your life now. If I recall correctly, that night we also for the first time directly
spoke about my attachment issues. Also, while it's on my mind, I'm sorry if it was out of place for me to give you updates about
my life. And I can only imagine that it’s unnerving and confusing to be the object of such an impossible urge. I’m sorry for
saying things that made you think I saw you as transphobic, or motivated by transphobia. There were flickering moments when
honesty about this felt within my reach, but I was always too scared. My assumption is that everyone else from back then is not
interested in sorting through anything with me. But I am trying to live without fear of honesty, and this feels like too
important a detail to leave out. Please let me know if you have any questions at all, or if I’ve said anything hurtful or
unaccountable. I know it wasn't, but when trust shatters and you're in a state of panic, extreme ideas easily take shape. Though
Crawf and I did stop speaking for an extended period of time, I never held her culpable in any way. But then I thought about how
this is the last chance we have to talk, and I just really wanna be over this. So yeah, I have deep worries that the trauma I
experienced from this demonization will always stick with me. It's also a lot clearer to me now that you and Crawford stopped
being friends with me for different reasons. My feelings re: my gender were very wrapped up in the unhealthy dynamics I brought
to the table with y’all. I hear everything you've said, and the "things" you've elaborated on had been in my Reconstruction
Version 1. I think that the phrase “I was abused” is treated as the end of a conversation, not the beginning of one. Hopefully,
the above is a common denominator that we can-and have already, albeit less explicity-agreed upon. I’m just trying lay out
clearly what I understand about your experience; sorry for weirdly paraphrasing you. I’m not trying mount an argument here; I’m
trying to be clear af because this conversation is ending soon. I hope in the voicemail I managed not to sound hateful or bitter,
but I bet I sounded bitter at the very least. My fondest memories of our friendship are not of you driving me to storage lockers
obviously, just to clarify! I think that would be overwhelming for me, and emailing is already difficult for me, as it probably
is for you. The strange thing is that our time in Germany together seemed to me to signal a new level of health between us. I
still think often about your particular response to me coming out, when I told you in your room that one night. This “hot take”
is not to minimize the pain you or C experienced as a result of seeing things like that text. I agree that we should try to end
this conversation first week of September, though don't feel rushed to respond. It feels like any common ground regarding what
happened has already been traversed-or maybe I’m just exhausted. You probably felt a lot more miserable and scared than me, after
you drove in from Houston and got that voicemail. Also sorry I didn’t realize this until after I’d indicated to you that I was
willing to not go down this road. I think: you view my fundamental reason for ending our friendship to be legitimate, or at least
legitimate enough. I won't elaborate on the other reasons I feel a call would be productive because they're just the standard
reasons. I really appreciate you being open to this being spread out over a longer period than you'd originally had in mind. Our
estrangement was fundamentally entangled with her, so I hope you can forgive me for overstepping that boundary. Of course I have
no idea what your relationship is with any of them; this is just something I thought I’d mention. I hope the things I’ve asked of
you & subjected you to in search of resolution haven’t been too painful for you. It means a lot to me that you acknowledge the
timing aspect of this (re: coming out to Bill and Sue and my brothers). That reality was not something I could accept, so I chose
to enact that reality’s reversal, but in a grotesque way. Hearing from you has been tremendously healing for me and I really want
to return the favor to the extent that I can. Obviously, there’s a lot that’s gone undiscussed in this exchange, and that we’ll
probably never get discussed. Though I'm on good terms with Crawford she doesn't know I emailed you and I doubt she'd like to be
in contact with you. The desire to express my goodwill, as well as some of my regrets, is what motivated me to email you in the
first place. I’m not sure what I think you have to gain by hearing any of this, and I don’t think I have an agenda in telling
you. Thank you for delving into some of the uglier parts of this when you might not have had the intention to do so initially.
Also, I’ve done some calendar reconstruction and would you tell me what the “on my birthday” thing is referencing? So in that
regard perhaps I’ve gotten more self-reflection out of this ordeal than I might have if you had been clearer. She wouldn't like
the idea of us talking about her very much, so that is probably not a direction in which this should go. Nothing fills me with
compersion quite like the knowledge that you and Jordan have a very special friendship, for example. So, maybe not all of this
letter came from the well-meaning place that I intended to write from, but I hope some of it did. Never mind that they mattered
to me through such an unsustainable, possessive, and obsessive framework - they just mattered. I do, however, ask that you let me
know if you know for a fact that anyone is explicitly open to any sort of reconciliation. On a final note, if we do discuss
anything further, I want to express my intent to continue being completely honest with you. Again, re: what I said to Adele or
anyone else, I really don’t remember much of anything from the six weeks following Oct 26. I can’t answer that question
adequately, and I can’t say for sure there wasn’t an element of transphobia in the decision.) I’m expressing this pain to you
without faulting you for anything; I found all of your reasons compelling and understandable. Being “excommunicated” from my
community made it feel impossible for me to entertain firm convictions about what had happened. But I completely understand your
reasons for withholding, and see them as rooted in maturity and a lot of thinking on the subject. It is all stored in my head, I
guess, (and body) but I just can’t access it, which is scary cus I know it’s still affecting me. Honestly, by in large, that’s a
conversation that I can’t or am not willing to have, partly for the reasons you’ve suggested. Learning about your ‘relationship’
with Crawford made me feel like you were an irreedemably deceptive and untrustworthy friend. I’ve accepted the loss of our
friendship, but at the same time once you’ve know someone this well, you sort of always know them. Now it seems to me like it
wasn't just your attachment style that created that dynamic, but also a false arrogance I had in college. I'm traveling this
weekend and intend to get out all my final thoughts on a flight tomorrow - so just wanted to give you a heads up. It must be
tiring to be asked for these kinds of clarifications - I know guilt-induced memory holes are a foreign concept to you :~). I'm
glad you've trudged through all of this and I feel I can "work with" what you've given me, of course in spite of the holes in it.
Parental support being contingent upon not transitioning / going to conversion therapy, as well as apparently some bad suicidal
stuff. C, Lindsay, Adele, etc were (and in a fucked up residual way still are) the main authorities on (/gatekeepers of)
Womanhood in my life. Yes, a scrutiny that had been warranted all along, and that I had only evaded through systematic dishonesty
(towards others and myself). That you thought it possible that it wouldn’t mean anything to me to hear of any good will you have
towards me in spite of everything. Okay, next item: “Maybe it’s not your responsibility to answer this question [referencing the
question ‘Why this exact timing’]. Please, please don’t take my search for clarity to mean I don’t understand the toxicity &
deception behind certain behavior patterns. I understand what you mean about actions in a conflict coming off to the other as
being more rooted in power than in pain/fear/self- care. A different thing related to closeted transness happened back in high
school, although it was both more bizarre, and more straightforward. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for you to ask for details
re the ‘expulsion’ but I also don’t think I owe those details to you. I'm not sure yet about the exact way we'll close this out,
but I want to set the intention that we'll part ways again no later than Sept 1. You’d crossed the boundaries that made it feel
impossible to be friends with you, at a time when I'd wanted to be an understanding friend. I don’t think wanting to know how
your emotional suffering aligns with “reality” is an approach to healing that warrants justification. I don’t think wanting to
know how your emotional suffering aligns with “reality” is an approach to healing that warrants justification. I might be open to
continue talking about this with you, but only if you think doing so would be productive, as well as respectful towards her. I’m
sorry, but I have to weigh the pain those details might ameliorate for you against how wrong it feels to discuss her experience
with you. I’ve written a few unsent letters to you over the years but always believed that you would reach out to me if you ever
wanted to hear from me. It's helpful for me to know that the above-mentioned hole does not constitute a hole in my understanding
of why you felt the need to cut me out. And in light of my family’s reaction it was easy for me to feel like the entire world was
anti-trans (which, spoiler alert, it pretty much is). I’m just trying to somehow express how I’m feeling with regards to “I still
have some difficulties viewing myself as deserving of girlhood. bunch of dumb but developing thoughts on polyamory, jealousy,
etc" God I'm realizing that our whole convo has been more about me than about you. Which brings me to how this has all affected
me - I have dreaded admitting this to you, but this entire thing has been extremely difficult for me. But I can tell you that so
many things were wrong with me back then that it was not obvious to me exactly which ones were behind our estrangement. Not
saying I won't respond if you message me after we reach that point---but I want to let you know how I'm hoping this conversation
will resolve. I hope it's OK that below, I process what happened without always keeping an accurate account of which emotion
different decisions were rooted in. Not only because it would be an awful lot to expect of her in this case, but also because
that’s a perfect recipe for making yourself miserable. Putting my motivations (which were not transphobic) aside, the facts are
that I was one of your best friends (and the reverse) and I gave you, what? Of course, the person I was in 2014 was not someone
capable of engaging with criticism - so I don’t blame anyone for deciding not to engage with me. All of you knew that I was
driving home to tell my parents something that had a decent probability of ending up in my estrangement from my own family. It's
not as if you killed anyone, but your dishonesty (with respect to your feelings for Crawford), in its strangeness, felt so
incomprehensible to me. Those words do not ask to be explained, even though it’s not clear to me (except in extreme situations)
how explanation could seem to undermine them. then asked you to move out my apartment and never contact me again during what I'm
sure was one of the most isolating and difficult periods of your life. Everything above this sentence = feelings and thoughts
that (I think) one of us had communicated and the other has understood and acknowledged as valid. I realize that confessing this
sort of secret repressed love for you is the most Borderline Personality Disorder thing I could possibly be doing right now. But
we are all complicated and growing people, each with so many people who love us and care about us, so I hope you can join me in
taking comfort in that. They came up through proxy subjects from time to time, like once when we were high and wading in the
swimming pool of some apartment complex in West Campus. Thus, it’s possible for person to ‘put the pieces together’ over a brief
period of time and realize they’re caught in a bad/dysfunctional situation. I’m not saying that you viewed her in so simplistic
away, but the wanting to be someone else is in my opinion always unhealthy, if at times understandable. Honestly I can't bring
myself to apologize for the way I ended our friendship though i definitely could have done so less hysterically and more
compassionately. Maybe me asking you to "rat them out" in this particular way is just me wanting to know how much this fear of
not "deserving girlhood" comes from within myself. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see your understanding of me,
who you trusted, so quickly unravel; to have your trust in me evaporate overnight. Say you'd fixated on someone different then C,
then maybe everything would be different and we would still be friends and we'd have a more honest friendship now. I wasn't
immediately clear on what you were looking for in this exchange (not that you were being unclear or anything) so was projecting a
bit in my assumptions. Not to say that you were concretely transphobic; just that yes "the" trans exp was something none of us
had thought about at all, and I've always understood that. I just want you to know that I suspect that the allegations of
transphobia that Adele relayed to you probably had little to do with you and more to do with others. Even then I felt guilty
toward you and I feel guilty now, and because I felt guilty any contact with you or prolonged engagement with your feelings felt
dangerous. I recognize and partially understand how your transness was a mitigating factor in your ‘relationship’ with Crawford
and in your deceptive behavior towards me. Side note 2: Nothing undoes anything, nothing changes the fact that I was a snake to
y’all, and I wish I could write a (sorry ) at the end of every sentence here. And certainly not to burden you with any guilt at
all; this would have happened no matter what, probably, and I understand that I really hurt and confused everybody. I don’t want
to answer “What things” because the idea of discussing Crawford’s experience of your ‘relationship’ in this context feels
viscerally awful. A couple of ideas I just wanna put out there without necessarily attaching them to anything in specific: First,
you gotta know that I was transphobic back then, too. Not in an attempt to “set the record straight”, but just to provide some
understanding where it has perhaps been painfully lacking for you these past three years. It felt like all I had for a bit, but I
pretty quickly moved out of that into what I believe was a more sober assessment of the role my transition had in all of this.
You’ll probably remember that when you came out to me, I was pretty ignorant about what being trans even meant (I mean that not
as an excuse but as an explanation). But it felt like my first profound attempt to get my ethical life in order (transitioning
really felt/feels like that more than anything) was met with total rejection. I’ve realized that the reason I always wrote so
illegibly in my journals was probably that the things I had been writing were not things I could allow myself to read. It also
means a lot to me to read that you view the experience of having me in your life as having helped you become a better person,
because I feel the same about you. But everyone cut me out of their life through you, which led to me thinking that multiple
motivations and decisions were more uniform than they actually might have been. It feels shady to be opening up to you about my
feelings concerning this because they’re based on my perceptions at a time when I felt extremely unmoored and besieged. I have no
idea exactly how the revelations about my relationship with her affected your relationship with her, other than that it must have
been painful for both of you. On to you and me: It really surprised me that you assumed that I might have resented you (and the
way you ended things) more than you expected me to just have missed you. But at the time I felt like I'd been leveraged and made
complicit in emotional abuse toward one of the people I most cared about, by one of the people I most cared about. I remember
vaguely that the harshness of that text was meant to compensate for the tone of the voicemail, in which I didn't manage to sound
as decisive as I’d hoped to. And feeling truly (and deservedly) friendless (except for Tanya, who, being somehow immune to my Bad
Patterns, has been by my side this whole time) was A Lot to deal with. Re: transphobia: I recognized that in my beleaguered
state, I absolutely glossed over my own responsibility in favor of claiming a conveniently packaged type of victimhood. Maybe you
see my continued failure to understand just what those “things” were as evidence that my moral obliviousness and cognitive
dissonance are still in full swing. The last thing I want to do is to entertain any dynamic of you being a liaison between me and
the people I’ve hurt, or to hurt someone again in an attempt to feel better. I think that this particular grotesque reversal was
a single instance of a wider such trend in my life: “I can’t be a girl, so I’m gonna be the worst guy I can be”. I wished I'd
managed to convey that I wasn’t acting out of a desire to judge or hurt you, so much as out of a sense of hurt, emotional fear,
and reasonable self-interest. A lot of my relationships now may be very nice and healthy, but they always lack the other person's
understanding of the continuity between the me of now and the me of then. My only two meaningful college friendships felt ruined,
and the reprocessing of our friendship for some reason made me feel like an absurdly delusionally self-involved person. I know
it's about to be the second week of September, but I've been sorta swamped w/ work stuff lately (and anyway, working up the
emotional clarity to respond takes a while). all this on the weekend that you were driving home to come out to your parents,
which was likely to have upsetting and potently disastrous emotional repercussions in your life. I do think the dynamic of your
relationship was-uni-directionally-abusive, though I have no way of knowing how intentional or conscious these abusive patterns
were on your part. It’s just that you were the person I longed to be able to tell these things to immediately after they
happened, so I hope you can forgive me for allowing myself to do that now. Although I don’t remember what we said, the fact that
you and I tested the waters on the very taboo that ended up being our undoing has always made this loss even sadder for me. But
the past feels a little less heartbreaking because you value the ways our friendship wasn’t a sham, and deeply understand me when
it comes to the ways that I was a bad friend. On a side note, I feel squeamish about having told you some of this because I
really have no way of knowing if C was actually being problematic about the prospect of me transitioning. I was reminded of this
when I got to the point in your letter when you for some reason condensed all the evidence of me having been a good friend into a
handful of car-related favors. Looking back on my secret writings throughout college, it seems unbelievable to me that I could be
writing what I wrote and yet still be in the dark about myself and what I longed for. Most of my sexual experiences from back
then were only bearable to me because during them, I would concentrate as hard as I could on imagining what it was like to be the
girl I was with. I of course have worries about the ways this stuff will stick with you, as well as similar worries about my
only-amorphous understanding of the ways this stuff still affects C & Lindsay. Of course ya that fear is 50% projection, which
brings me to my next point that I am still transphobic sometimes and being trans means a whole lot of realizing the ways that you
still are. (I also have no recollection of when in the timeline or to whom I’d sent that text, or the emails you mentioned, so I
apologize for not integrating them into my account more compellingly. I’d intended to bow out of this gracefully, because I am so
grateful for everything you’ve given, and I don’t think you’re as “into” this as I am, which I don’t take personally. Of course
this is a concrete manifestation of much bigger things - questions about what it means to be a woman, or to “deserve” to be a
woman, and what role my past plays in such questions. When I came out to her she seemed to express skepticism towards me, urged
me to “be careful” before taking hormones, warned me that I did not understand the societal pressures girls face(! At the time,
the awful timing of this revelation and the mitigating circumstances didn’t hold much weight against the anger, hurt, confusion-
and also, strangely, fear-that I was experiencing.) So although I’m still working through what else my motivations are here, I
feel the need to tell you about the parts of my experience that seem to complicate (but not contradict) the narrative. but it
makes me feel self involved and I also just want you to know that when I ruminate on all of this, a lot of it is about how you
must have felt and how your life must have changed as a result. Adele and other people told me afterwards that you'd said I
kicked you out of my apartment because I was transphobic; I can't really know if this is an accurate representation of what you
told them. I’ll have to see how you feel about this email, but I think that we’re understanding each other - but of course, it
hurts to be in a situation where understanding yields only partial resolution. So, (1) out respect for her feelings and (2)
because I’m not her and I don’t want to/ probably couldn’t paraphrase her experience, I feel I can’t get into the vague ‘things’
you mention. I understand that you must have had the feeling of being ‘talked about’ but, just so you know, I always shied away
from discussing the end of our friendship with people not immediately involved. Because the way I treated them pretty firmly
established that I was not someone you could “sort through anything with,” and it’s not right for me to ask that anyone trust
that that’s changed. Of course you were deeply hurt by the revelations about my relationship with her, and rightfully so - but
you’ve thought about everything over subsequent years and has this ever crossed your mind? Of course you were deeply hurt by the
revelations about my relationship with her, and rightfully so - but you’ve thought about everything over subsequent years and has
this ever crossed your mind? Look, I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but the woman who you traumatized because you
secretly wanted to be her is probably the last person you should look to legitimize your womanhood. That maybe, if this had
happened later on, after we’d all grown some and learned how to untangle knots rather than cut them out, things could have been
different (I know, the poison of hypotheticals). Okay, what I meant by "things" is what seemed like a very conscious dishonesty
around patterns of behaviors that other people (so, most importantly for me, Crawford) experienced as serial emotion abuse. I
appreciate your desire to know what Crawford told me, why she told me what she told me while you were transitioning, and how I
formerly thought/felt and now think/feel about the ‘things’ I learned. I know that you had a tenuous relationship with the fact
that you’d gone to UT; that this betrayal of trust happened with the two people who’d made your experience at UT redeemable is so
deeply shitty. I hope you can recognize that I was using the only language available to me at the time, and that the feelings
behind those words have grown/are growing into something a lot bigger and freer and less glib. If you agree with paragraph two,
then hopefully you agree that I shouldn’t feel *obligated* to give the details of her experience (as communicated to me) in order
to justify my decision to not be friends. When I came out to Crawford, and she realized that this was really happening, her
response consisted of a specific handful of what truly felt to me like skeptical, gatekeepy, and trans-wary words and actions. I
don’t know if the fact that I was unable to admit this to myself until after I accepted that I was a girl had more to do with
internalized homophobia, or my inability to love others before I loved myself. I’m realizing now that because we never
explicitly covered it, I’m only 90% sure that the fact of mine and C’s sexual history was public knowledge in the discussions
y’all had before cutting me out? You say you felt leveraged in my abuse of her - I take this to mean that she felt trapped in a
fraught relationship with me because of the specter of me spilling the beans about the times she and I hooked up? This exorcism
not only came when I was at the moment in my life when I most needed to be told “it is OK to become yourself,” “you can be a
girl,” and so on, but potentially because I was at that moment. Something a fraction of the size of this seems in retrospect to
have been happening with me re: Sam; I’m not sure if y’all ever talked about the night that he and I got pulled over drunk
driving in Richmond.” which they are, and maybe that person is you-but that’s how I felt and, independent of any regrets, that
feeling of expectation and concern is part of what makes me feel sad but hopeful when I think of you.” Having these be the last
words you hear from the person whose moral judgment you trust more than anyone else’s - it makes you question everything about
yourself in search of just what those “things” are. Aside from intimate strangers, I don't see what else we could be besides
friends, so my hope is that this exchange will end at some point soon in a way that feels satisfactory and emotionally healthy
for both of us. At the time, when adele told me that I felt a sense of relief because it felt like such clear proof of your being
a liar, which I needed, because I was feeling really confused about how to make sense of your behavior. I still have some
difficulties viewing myself as deserving of girlhood because I’d been rapidly compelled to see myself as the masculine demon
exorcised from the only community through which I’d understood myself. I agree with the "fractal" assessment, but I also think
that this particular medium (email) naturally pressures us into playing fractal ping- pong in a way that a dynamic & verbally
nuanced phone conversation would not. I won’t get into it (already treated you to too much ~psychosexual odyssey~) but just
wanted to mention it because I find it productive to remind myself that life traumas are so daunting because they repeat &
compound. Which is overall a good thing; it just feels important for me to tell you how much the process has hurt, and that
nowadays I find it difficult to trust people when they tell me they like me/think that I’m a good person. I have sort of a busy
week and want to be able to process this some more before I respond again, in a way that both lets me figure out what exactly I'm
looking for, as well as avoids engaging with the fractals you speak of. I think that the reverse of this theory is more accurate
- that a lot of us, pre-transition, sexualize that which we secretly long to be, because sexualizing female bodies is the only
way we’ve taught to know those bodies. I doubt any of the three of us could agree about the extent to which what happened is
‘your fault,’ but the pain and distress she experienced as result of her friendship with you was real and very considerable, as
you know. I hope you can trust that I base the above bullet points on a lot of soul- searching, and reflection, and a desire to
heal, rather than on a continued desire to “up the stakes” or poeticize when it comes to you and Crawford. It didn’t surprise me
that when you elaborated on what those “things” were, you just employed a 12- word synonym for “things” that still leaves vague
which of my actions in specific they experienced as emotional abuse. The only thing I have to say about your decision not to say
what those "things" are is that it feels unfair (not "is unfair") for Former Best Friend to profess agreement that X constituted
unilateral abuse without saying what X was. I have never felt anger towards Crawford of my own accord for the way she reacted in
our conversations immediately after I came out, but several people I’m close with now have occasionally tried to coach me into
being angry with her. It sucks that the knowledge that things were as confusing for you is any consolation to me; but I’m still
recovering from the ways that social expulsion leads the expelled to ascribe strength, simplicity, and certainty to the
expelling. You matter to me so much, Clayton, and I’m sorry that it feels difficult for me to find healing without springing on
you the aspects of my experience that I might’ve felt inclined to put off had this conversation been more open-ended. But that
being said, it is painful for me to admit this to you because my continued preoccupation with hurting & losing you and C and
everyone else seems to indicate that I am still struggling to shed that “torturous attachment pattern”. In other words, my
contacting you to end our friendship made you feel ‘demonized,’ made you feel like a bad person (maybe bad in a specifically male
way) at a time when you sense of self and self-esteem was probably at its most precarious. I understand that it’s different for
you, that the mistakes you made and the painful way people responded to them-these responses including mistakes on my part-feel
negatively and intimately connected with your gender and your sense of self. My computer's broken and my iPhone touch screen is
breaking, but since I'm already replying to your letter in my head, I want to at least begin to reply now bc I'm leaving town
soon and won't have regular access to a phone for the next week or so. I will just say: I think we can agree that when a person
is in a relationship that is abusive or codependent or in some way dysfunctional, that person can be aware of individual negative
events while being blind to the gestalt-image of the dysfunction. Trying to understand a person's experience of an event like
this is like burrowing into fractals, and what's the point since it seems (at least to me) like we share a more general emotional
understanding of how our friendship ended, and what that meant. I might be wrong, but I have the sense you already understand my
answers to the question ‘Why this exact timing’-that you’re really asking why the people who were already aware of your patterns
of behavior (Crawf, Lindsay) chose to cut you off then. And I’ve always assumed that any squeamishness or antagonism that
Crawford expressed to you re your being trans emerged not from any real prejudices but from the discomfort I’m sure she felt
about being conceptualized, partly, as a skin to crawl into. Because what a wonderful and terrifying thing to have felt unhappy
and wrong inside for so long, and to then turn a corner and set out in the direction of feeling right inside and becoming happy-I
can see someone reading this and saying, “cis feelings!” I ended our friendship the week you came out because that’s when I
learned about the ‘things,’ meaning that’s when I got an account of your ‘relationship’ with Crawford that made clear that, at
the very least, you’d been a bad friend to me. I guess I can be a little clearer and say that the only potential past emotion on
all of their parts that still vexes me is "we are grossed out by Mar wanting to gain access to an identity that we think his/her
patterns of behavior disqualify him/her from". That information, as a sort of “nuclear option”, was something that I feared just
as much as she did; and for this reason I, too, probably would have felt more comfortable letting our relationship organically
fade had we never hooked up in the first place.” I remember when you came out I felt a sadness thinking about all of the pain in
your life that had been positioned so many miles from the ‘expressible’ (as the expression of it must have felt nearly
impossible, for various reasons, before you came out). “Someone’s secondhand account (which I assume was colored by hostility
towards me) of how this was on my mind was to you nothing more than proof that I was full of shit”-I could guess but I don’t
understand what ‘this was on my mind’ is referring to.) and here is my best understanding of what was going on (not that I expect
any explanation of my deep-seated motivations to “undo” anything): I experienced my obsession with Crawford as “in love with”,
and my obsession with you as “wanting to be like”. You’ve been more charitable to me than I think anyone else I know (including
me) would’ve been in your situation, and although reopening these wounds really hurts, I feel like in a couple months I’ll feel
better about everything - and I really hope you do too. Despite my unconcern and considerable ignorance about transgender people
when you came out to me, it always made sense to me that you’re a woman, and it’s been easy to make that mental adjustment
despite having seen only one photo of you in the past three years. Re “you made the decision not to interrogate how the trans
thing fit into all of this”: At the time, I did decide not to fully consider your transness as a factor influencing your
behavior, although this was hardly a thought-out decision because I was fucking furious. Also re: the others: there are some
holes in what you and I can talk about when it comes to our relationship, because there are some things between us that I don’t
think I can really address without splitting hairs about people who I assume would prefer I not talk about them. There are some
things (factual details, normative assessments) about which I don’t think we’ll ever be able to reach an understading, or even
really communicate-that is to say: there are some things about which I don’t want to attempt to reach an understand or
communicate. I’m also able to appreciate, incompletely, how painful it was for you to be cut off by two of your closest friends
while you were transitioning and how that experience might have long-term negative effects on your happiness and on your
confidence/security in your gender identity.For the past few years I've pretty much avoided you on social media but the other day
on Facebook I came across your profile and saw a photo of you, which made me sad because I have some idea of how hurtful you can
be to people, but you don't look like you'd want to hurt anyone at all. In part, in that voicemail, I think I tried to make an
appeal to your understanding of my situation, and to convey that, even if I wanted the best for you, it didn't feel possible to
be friends with you anymore, given the sort of ongoing three-year violation of trust id learned about. I’m mentioning this in
response to your fractals comment, meaning: while most of our agreement about what happened comes from a place of good-faith
reflection, an indeterminate amount of my agreement with the narrative rose out of my rapid exclusion from any claims towards the
Truth. I will try to do so humanely; without at all denying responsibility for my actions; with the understanding that you can
limit your engagement as much as you see fit; and with my assurance that no matter what, I see her as an super good person (hence
my complicated feelings about all of this). But I wanted to be sure because if the 10% case is true, it would deeply disturb my
understanding of what happened, and we’d both probably need to reprocess a lot, and I’d feel like shit for you having to find out
this way, etc BUT I won’t carry on about that unless it’s a real thing.) She and I had addressed our sexual history in the months
leading up to that October, and in a way that I understood to constitute a real move towards resolution - I guess I only bring
all of this up as an overwrought segue into a fundamental question I hope you can answer: Why this exact timing? But I just want
to say that because things happened the way they did, I don't feel like we can be friends, even though I feel I understand and
appreciate the explanations you gave for who you were in college, and for your feelings and behavior toward C, and for your
feelings and behavior toward me. My suspicion is that since my relationship with her was always much more fraught than mine with
you, the ways that I describe it are likely influenced for the worse - leading those who know me well to assume that some
acceptance of anger towards her would constitute a step in the direction of healing. For example, maybe you think that my
decision to stop being friends with you was, in itself, more or less, understandable but you also think there’s a double-standard
vis-a-vis my behavior towards Crawford (That seemed to be a subtext in your email, but maybe I’m projecting on to it, I don’t
know)? Given the level of emotional intimacy in our relationship-the things I felt comfortable talking with you about, the degree
to which I trusted you-the discovery of all the feelings and actions you'd kept from me re your obsession/love for/identification
with Crawford made our entire friendship to me feel false. "or be her," etc > I want you to know how maudlin I was being when I
said things like that Re: the many things we'll never talk about: Feeling disappointed in retrospect that we never got to talk
about our feelings about who can be attracted to whom and what that means for the "sanctity" of each relationship. After I read
some emails and texts you'd sent, talked to someone to whom you said "I don't know if I want to have Crawford or be her," and had
a series of really upsetting and confusing conversations about you with people I trusted, the idea of seeing or communicating
with you in anyway was, like, vertigo-inducing. but depending on what happened, you made the decision not to interrogate how the
trans thing fit into all of this - even to the extent that hearing someone’s secondhand account (which I assume was colored by
hostility towards me) of how this was on my mind was to you nothing more than proof that I was full of shit. I deeply felt that
in the six months leading up to me coming out, I was learning to have some boundaries with her, to understand how to adjust to
her approach to conflict management, and to accept that my strange and misplaced fantasy of sustained romance with her was rooted
in “something else” (cf “or be her”). Please don’t read my self-assessment’s involvement with you as a sign of continued
dependency; I can tell you that I’m doing a good job forming an internal basis for my self-worth (hard not to when visibly
trans), and also that I think it’s an act of strength & trust to see yourself through others when they matter to you. I’m gonna
stop carrying on about sappy stuff now, but I guess one last maudlin thing I have to say is this: Please just know that I’ll
always be carrying this with me, and wishing you happiness and trust; and that a lot of people are getting spared a lot of
bullshit because you helped me learn who I was, and who I can let myself be. I really hope you're doing well, writing things you
like, staying healthy, finding things to laugh at, holding hands with someone, etc I guess to close, it makes me feel very good
to know that you have such an accurate understanding of how all my rotten impulses in the past are turning into Good Things now
that they are free to be good. I've never had romantic feelings for you but I loved you as a friend and still care about you
deeply, and that---as well as the fact that I was absorbing Crawford's pain/distress, and felt responsible for helping her
negotiate it---are probably part of the reason I cut you off completely in a way that seems, in retrospect, peremptory and
unfair. While I didn’t doubt that your coming out to me was very legitimate and pivotal thing, I’d done essentially no thinking
about ‘the’ transgender experience in general (as if there were one), so I wasn’t well equipped to fully understand your
transness as a factor in some of your other behaviors, which doesn’t mean I couldn’t have done so. I feel deeply uncomfortable
about discussing this with you, since I doubt Crawford wants to me to discuss her at all, and anyway I don’t claim to have any
credibility with you when it comes to analyzing anyone but myself - so I’ll keep it brief, and also acknowledge that two people’s
experiences of a situation can be incompatible and yet still valid. A better and more truthful way to express what I was
experiencing emotionally when I typed the fractal comment is: Even if there’s a substance of facts and assessments that we
haven’t discussed and won’t fully agree on-the discussion of which might dredge up old legitimate feelings of distrust, hurt, and
anger-I still want the best for you, as you do for me. Obviously I can't fully understand your specific experience of attachment,
influenced as it was by your being trans, but I've thought a lot about this over the years and I see how your being in denial
would lead you toward a sort of cynical or angry performance of masculine sexuality; would unsettle your confidence in the sanity
and moral legitimacy of Life; and so on. That, coupled with the simple fact that this estrangement supposedly just happened to
coincide with my coming out, led me to assume not that the estrangement was a direct response to me coming out, but that probably
me coming out constituted an occasion for people to examine my life and behavior patterns (esp when it came to sexuality/
attraction) with a new level of scrutiny. Maybe it’s not your responsibility to answer this question, but depending on what
happened, you made the decision not to interrogate how the trans thing fit into all of this - even to the extent that hearing
someone’s secondhand account (which I assume was colored by hostility towards me) of how this was on my mind was to you nothing
more than proof that I was full of shit. The whole idea of writing you this letter is possibly stupid; I wrote it to say that,
though some bitterness and defensiveness inevitably creep in when I play through my version of what went down, three years later
(tho I don't want to be in regular contact or be friends, and who says you do I care about you and want good things for you and I
almost don't have a vindictive bone in my body about us. Also, it’s taken some distance for me to think back on how a lot of the
dynamics in our group of friends weren’t the most conducive to honesty (yes of course I contributed to this) - most of my current
friends seem to have had similar experiences in their college years before everyone learned that not communicating about the
difficult things that creep into relationships ends up fucking everyone over. That disrespectful/gross text you quoted was, in
context, actually a slight step in the direction of me understanding myself from where I’d been in the years before: reaching a
place where I could include the “or be her”; a place where I could start to admit that my problematic ways of dealing with my
attraction to girls indicated really that I wanted to be one, and resented everyone who got to be one. Side note 1: I recognize
that the relief I’d feel from establishing my status as “having been wronged in this particular way” is hypocritical, and a
symptom of the same 2010s exoneration-through- victimhood moral economy that I think was prerequisite to everything that happened
(sorry I’m so full of shit here, hard not to “““theorize””” when trying to reason through a basically limbic mess). It doesn’t
bother me that you steered the conversation toward the hidden dynamic between you and Crawford: What I learned about that dynamic
informed my decision to stop being friends with you; and that decision was understandably painful to you; it was part of an
‘expulsion’ that took place in the middle of your transition and so, also, very understandably, has taken on significances in
your life that I never intended. Regardless of what happened between you and Crawford, regardless of whether your ‘relationship’
was an abusive one, your behavior in our friendship vis-a-vis your ‘relationship’ with Crawford (concealing your feelings for her
from me, concealing sexual encounters, assiduously cultivating your friendship with me though you had an active romantic interest
in her) was, I think, justification enough for ending our friendship. Regarding the impact that all of this has had on your life,
besides narrating my effort to understand it, I hesitate to say much but (1) I don’t think it will be possible for you to get
some of the answers you’re looking for, so hopefully you’ll find a way not to need them and (2) Though my opinion holds no water
here, it seems to me that one is a woman if one is a woman; that there’s no such thing as deserving to be one. Maybe I’m only
prying you about the gender thing because I’ve been clinging to the possibility that the seed of a more authentic “me” had to
become dislodged from that whole situation before it could “““sprout”””, for more essential reasons beyond just me being a piece
of shit (like, there is an appeal behind something like “I could not have healthily transitioned in that community anyway so to
hell with the past”). Probably a clumsy way of wording that "I've thought a lot about this and although I deeply understand why
my "attraction" to C (and subsequent deception about it / other problems entangled with it) caused you so much fear and anxiety
and hurt, I don't think that on a fundamental level that attraction undermined my friendship with you, and I think that the
taboo-ness of that attraction was a negative factor in making my reaction to it worse. I still feel that many parts of our
friendship constituted real eye contact between us: talking about death late at night at La Tazza Fresca; moving your mattress
into my room the night TJ had that psychotic episode; driving all night through the South; waiting for the Triple- A man when you
locked your keys in your Volvo at that mansion; walking together, talking, both looking at our feet; speaking more and more like
each other as the semesters blew by. Anyway, what I remember happening is: C and I had a conversation about you, a conversation
where I was trying to parse out Crawford’s attitude towards you, because it perplexed me; my questions led her to almost
accidentally reveal some stuff about your friendship that unsettled me, which led to more prying from me, which led to more
reluctant answers, etc Still-I don’t want to tell you that the timing of the ‘expulsion’ was circumstantial for anyone besides
myself, because I can’t say that with certainty, and understand that the claim may be one you’re unwilling to accept. There was
one reality, which existed when we were in a room together, in which your were a good friend to me---for example, on my birthday
during your last semester of college when you drove me to that storage place off mopac, or when you drove me to different storage
places on different semesters, like every fucking semester, or when you lent me your car on a moment's notice, or when you helped
me clean my rug when I slept through my toilet overflowing at pearl st, etc---and how unnerving to realize that that situation
didn't necessarily obtain when I wasn't around, even a few minutes before I walked in the door, even on my birthday (and that's a
card I have never pulled in my life until just now)! I realize that you were a good friend to me in at least as many ways as you
were bad friend, and the good and bad ways don't cancel each other out (and that I wasn't always such a great friend) And I just
wanted to let you know that I've always liked you as a person, and that l hope your life is good, and that my experience of
knowing you has made me a better person in a strange way, and that I think that your basically a good person, even though youve
made what I consider to be some very real mistakes, and that I hope the person you are now feels less dependent on others and
more at ease with herself---and I hope that, really for your sake (at the risk of sounding condescending), you've learned to
better manage the really torturuous (for all involved) attachment pattern you seemed to be prone toward.