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With every adventure that life brings us (or the adventure of life itself) there is a time when the adventure must come to end. For my summer in Bolivia, this time is imminent. I am leaving my host family and Cochabamba in less than two weeks, and in three weeks I will be sleeping in my own bed in the States.

Although I have missed San Francisco during my time in Bolivia, I haven't felt an aching or a longing for familiarity that I half expected might occur during my time abroad. I feel like I have lived really fully here. But I think today I hit a little bit of a turning point, and I am ready to come back. I am ready to return to the completely different life that I have set aside for the last 2 months.

I think this feeling of completion was influenced by a lot of factors. The first being that there are people in the States who I care about a lot who are going through very difficult times and it pains me to not be there with them in a time when they really need support.

I was going to go to my host-cousin's birthday party tonight at a fancy club in the north of the city, but I got to the club and there was a huge line out the front door of girls dressed in six inch heels, with three layers of make-up on, and big burly boyfriends hanging all over their waists and I thought about the last time I was at a club where my friend Manuela pointed out all of the guys at the club who were standing around the edges watching and waiting for the next girl they were going to hit on.... and then I though about the 30 BS cover to get in if you are a guy (less if you are a girl-- sexism?). And I looked down at myself and my clothing that doesn't really fit my body right because I can't fit my female-bodied self into clothes I feel comfortable with. And I can't get into clubs without someone at the door giving me a hard time because I look like a 12 year old boy, and once I am inside, what bathroom am I going to use because the highest percentage of hate crimes happen in male bathrooms, but I also can't really use the female one...

So, I just got out of my cab, hailed a different cab, and left.

And then I opened the letter a kid from my program had written me (he wrote everyone a goodbye letter) because he is leaving Bolivia tomorrow since his program is over. In the letter he wrote about his experiences with Christ and his christian faith and how he believes that "homosexuality is a sin" but he is a sinner, too so he won't "point his fingers at me." Give me a fucking break. Not only am I not a homosexual, and thus comments about homosexuality are not relevant to my identity, I also have gone so far out of my way to use only male pronouns to describe myself, introduced myself only as Lucas, had the support of all the USF girls in making sure that they never used female pronouns around me... Why do people have to assume that trans people are all homosexual? Not that I don't love all the homos in my life (because I DO love them), but I wish the non-queer community could figure out that gender identity and sexual orientation function independently of each other.

So, I am ready to get back to the States, start testosterone, and move closer to the point in my life where I will not have to defend my identity every day. I am also really missing those SF dive bars.