Every once in a while, I find myself accidentally in balance.

Change is in the air, lifting the wings of a paper crane as it floats over turbulence, rustling the unkempt spikes on a dragon’s back. Mesmerizing. This week, probably. For a lot of years–maybe 7 or so, I should think–the Fox and I kept up a daily correspondence about our creative output in the previous 24 hours. Then I got cranky and disillusioned with the industry and he met and fell in love with the Otter and that all got put on hold for 2 years. Then he married the Otter (I married the Otter and him, because that is something I am totally qualified to do in the state of Arizona, and he had kindly married The Man and me 3 years earlier) and I got my groove back and we have been writing each other emails again. This is very exciting.

Tomorrow I’ve been invited to participate in a panel on gender and sexuality at a near-ish college, and I’m really excited. I think this–adult sex ed–is something I want to get more involved in. I guess I’m suffering from a little chest cold (6 airplane flights in 5 weeks, not surprising) and I’m not feeling like much of a dragon, but I’m determined to put my heart into this, because it’s important to me that young adults see that the world is not 100% heteronormative and cis-gendered, that’s it’s OK to not fit into a false binary, that you can be happy and fabulous without conforming to arbitrary life expectations based on someone else’s perception of your genitals. I was lucky to attend Antioch College, so I heard these messages when I was 17, but even with the Internet, I guess a lot of kids still don’t know that they’re OK.

But if you’re reading this, and your gender and/or sexuality don’t match up with your community’s stereotypes of acceptable outcomes, know that you are OK.