I have mentioned before that I am quite conscious of the fact that regarding a few of the subjects that I have dealt with in this essay series, that not all of them immediately read as obvious for why I would consider these subjects informative in explaining or touching upon my experience in being trans and queer. I have also mentioned my own self-awareness to the fact that not everything that I read as queer or trans even in an allegorical vein will work for certain people. But I can only speak from my experience and hopefully my cases make sense.
The queering of certain subjects be it in from fictional characters in films, literature, and television or the queering of artists whose themes are subject to such (re)interpretation in a queer lens currently does feel simultaneously liberally overdone in some cases and also not considered enough in certain subjects and artists. Sometimes declaring an artist or a work as queer can cause a response to the effect of, ‘Your idea of queer is just what you like and think is cool’. But for me that is not really the frustrating part, because I am not cool. No, it is not about queerness as coolness, even as outsiders as rebels as icons can lead to those connections that get tied back to queerness. My frustrations come from more of the fact there does exist a type of gender essentialism that makes it seem so unbelievable and unimaginable that characters- or broadly, the works themselves- cannot be read in a queer lens (or dare I say, a trans lens). It is a rather childish (blue for him, pink for her) but reflects pretty widespread rigidity and binaries that men/women/people of color/white/queer/trans can only like or respond or relate to one certain thing.
Some of that has festered from critics, viewers, and readers have well-intentioned and sincere critiques about the landscapes of art as far as diversity, or lack thereof, whether as voices that are behind the works or character types that emerge as not just popular but important. The rise of the ‘difficult men’ that accompanied not just the white male anti-heroes (cue reader who just remarked, ‘But The Wire!’, under their breath) and their white male creators is a great example of the pushback and critique of why those characters, those shows, those guys, are considered the benchmarks when in a changing world and time period there seemed like only one type of character was having an impact in the culture and also in the industry. I would say it is not so much that the characters of Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Don Draper and their creators are the guilty party in why there seemed to be breaking point for a lot of people. Rather, it was the knock-offs and impersonators who got their foot in the door with networks and at network meetings because they sold their show as a legacy of those others and those specific characters. Many of those shows were greenlit and produced over shows that perhaps could have rendered a more different, diverse perspective. Instead the television landscape got oversaturated and there were antidotes in the rise of other networks and streaming services. That era has closed in a way, from the difference in viewing habits to the variety of shows out there, but I got no quarrel with those ‘difficult men’ shows or characters as people seem to expect that I should or would.
I often read on social media from well-meaning people who identify themselves as allies to causes that I do care about and often they seem to think that to stick up for me and my visibility is to demean work, particularly works that fit the above ‘difficult men’ descriptor on a surface level. ‘Another TV show with a white male anti-hero!’ is a frequent comment that is to be heard and read in a voice of exasperation and frustration for this struggle in a homogenous television landscape on social media, usually accompanied by an eye-roll gif. I do not doubt their sincerity. But I think there are occasions when those people are just looking at the surface. Perhaps this is borne out of me constantly having to search and connect to things beyond the surface level because I often do not see images or characters that match my experience as directly as others. This has nothing to do so much with being a deeper thinker or observer or anything like that, as though I can read code and crack a different visual language by reading things as trans and queer. It is more that I have for years grappled with the fact, that you simply cannot know a person’s experience and their specific internalizations or how their identity may or may not match their current presentation to the world. I have complained about the lack of visibility and lack of classic role models whose experiences directly relate to my own as far as being trans but there are characters out there whose experiences that I have definitely read in relation to my own experiences who are not trans. Again, they fall closer to the realm of transallegorical. For me, Don Draper is probably the best example of that. What makes Don Draper work in that aspect for me is, despite the fact he was introduced as a man with ‘secrets’ and a ‘past’ from the very start of the show’s inception, that I was often surprised in how I was starting to connect more with his character right as many viewers seemed at a loss with a man, who was increasingly appearing to be an empty vessel to a lot of people.
Don Draper probably does leave you the impression that I am only stating he is relatable because his iconography is cool (cigarette smoking, square jaw, old-fashioned drinks, skinny ties, the wealth, womanizing, an insane amount of privilege in getting away with so much because he was a great ad man) and could still be seen as, even with everything people know of what happened to him, aspirational. Don Draper has been my avatar on social media more than once. I often reference him with a jpeg or gif in reaction to things, to the point people who do follow me on social media do associate me with the character. I do indeed humor and indulge in this quite often. It was my favorite show, after all. Jon Hamm is a handsome man who indeed does make the character look great, yes, this is undeniable, but my connection to the character is not that shallow. He is a mess and so am I. But I do not enjoy being a mess. He was probably one of the first times that I realized what a disassociating person looks like to other people. Usually when I connect or relate to a character it is rarely a good reflection of myself. Seeing your worst instincts, cases of stubbornness, repeated behaviors, and flaws through the prism of a character, even a handsome one, can be eye-opening. Don Draper made me realize more than a few things about myself and they are not easily fixable or even something that can be concretely fixed. I really do pick the best trans icons!
The story of Don Draper being a Madison Avenue ad man for fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper in the 1960s with a ‘past’ and a ‘secret’ has in a way always lent itself to a type of critical queering by viewers, even if Don from the first episode of juggling his interests and time with three different women could not possibly be mistaken for queer in sexuality. Many characters of fiction from that era, even if they were not homosexuals, did harbor ‘secrets’ and ‘shames’ from their past that rendered them outsiders in post-WWII era worlds of conformity and homogeneity all as they kept the appearance of conforming to society while trying their best not to be found out. Such characters were embraced in the queer community in literature in allegory and interpretation as outsiders as queerness. You can do that with Don. Even as a retroactive reinterpretation of Don’s behavior and character history could be subject to queerness a la Mark Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies works to a degree. On a show like Mad Men, there was the allegory while also presenting the real in queerness, which the show slowly presented as two co-existing, shared experiences of the outsiders.
Mad Men’s whole history with their queer characters or lack thereof had on occasion brought out mixed reaction. People wanted more and people wanted the best for Sal Romano, the art director at Sterling Cooper who from his first scene in the series you, as a viewer knew he was gay, but not so much his colleagues in 1960. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was indebted to telling the truth about the period when he did cast a light on the homosexual experience but as per guidance from former BBDO Media Executive and closeted gay man of that time period, Bob Levinson, a lot on Sal was more on how (little) gay life could be expressed in that particular world and what really could be done with an actual queer story within the show’s universe. Sal was repressed; he knows what he wants, but he has to still be in a room with people who made snide homophobic comments and can flagrantly flirt and be forward with the opposite sex in ways he cannot. To be found out as gay in that office meant you and the person who ratted you out were both in trouble. Closet case client Lee Garner Jr. propositioning Sal leads to Sal’s dismissal because he rejected Garner’s advances to save the job that he would lose. Sal’s dismissal is met with mutterings of, ’… you people…’ and then we last see him outside a gay bar calling his wife that he won’t be home tonight. Possibly the darkest and saddest character ending on the show. But as the show goes on, the characters become louder as the era became louder and ancillary characters be it partygoers, clients, and agents could be read clearly as gay and are recognized as gay by the same characters who could not read Sal or anybody as gay earlier in the show. Then in Season 6, Bob Benson is introduced. He appears and pops up with two cups of coffees around Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce with one cup to give out to anybody he wishes to impress. He is a suck-up but his charm works. Then it starts to become a question of what is behind there. Who is this Bob Benson? Bob is shrouded in mystery. We do find out that he has a past, his alliterative name is likely not real, and he lied about virtually every credential that he espoused to anybody who would listen. Sound familiar? It is, familiar, except that there is also the fact that he is attracted to Pete Campbell. In a season where Don Draper is going through the motions of his own internalized ‘inferno’ and the world is going through the collective breakdown of 1968, we are introduced to a twin version of Don’s own personal story, the show acknowledging that a queer reading and queer interpretation of Don’s story could easily exist.
But let’s get back to Don (and Dick).
The entire first season of Mad Men is built around being introduced to this man who is juggling women, juggling work life, maintaining the status quo at his job because that is what is expected of him, keeping certain rules and boundaries at work, but having no boundaries in his personal life, and being a mystery and stranger to everyone around him while being among the best in his field. So the mystery, aura, and mystique of his character at work and in real life get unveiled in flashbacks, people from his past showing up looking for him, and sudden questions while he’s out for drinks of where exactly where his bumpkin drawl comes from. There were theories for who exactly was ‘the real Don Draper’, theories from him being Jewish or him having a different name or something in his background that was shameful enough to cover up. It turned out to be that Don Draper was an assumed name that a young U.S. Army Private named Dick Whitman took because the real Lieut. Don Draper died in horrible fire mishap in a Korean War battle that involved gasoline and an unlucky cigarette lighter. The real Don Draper so immolated from the fire burns on his body and face that rendered him unrecognizable that Dick Whitman saw the opportunity to switch dog tags. It was the opportunity for a new lease on life, leave his past behind, transform, and, most importantly, escape.
But it is not that easy.
Don from there on out is carrying guilt of taking another’s man life and having a major secret and past that he cannot afford anybody to know about. The whole narrative of having a secret, a past, and being seen as living a double-life is such a well-worn trans narrative. But those trans characters were/are often the villains who get exposed for ‘fooling’ people, Don is the protagonist. Nonetheless, he is extremely protective over his life story being revealed and often was the source for a lot of dramatic conflict about him. In Season 1, Don does get ‘outed’. His past is used against him, a potential fireable if legally consequential case of being tried for desertion by the government, by Draper’s associate Pete Campbell. The co-partner of Sterling Cooper, Bert Cooper, dismissed this outing with a, ‘Who cares?’ When Campbell insists on an explanation for why a potential liability and possible criminal would be shrugged off, Bert Cooper states, in front of Don witnessing his future at the company unfold before his very eyes, ‘The Japanese have a saying. ‘A man is whatever room he is in.’ And right now, Donald Draper is in this room!’ Don passes because he is there just to be creative and make clients happy. It is when his internalizations come to the fore, best documented in a Hershey Chocolate Bar pitch where Don reveals his unseemly origins of living in a whore house and in poverty as a child to a client that causes the problems. Don never says he is Dick Whitman during that breakdown but for everybody in that room he is not Don Draper anymore, his closest associates are dumbstruck in disbelief, trying to figure out if he actually was telling the truth given they never really queried about his personal life. Don assure them it was. As a result, Don is given a leave of absence from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.
I always think about that moment with the Hershey pitch in Season 6’s ‘In Care Of’ as a ‘coming out’ scene. What makes it relatable to me as a coming out scene is that, as a somebody who has felt compelled to come out more to one person, is it is all in your mind, internalized, and you bring it out and whether it is really not at a great time to do it or not. But what is a good time to reveal that about yourself, really? I came out to my mother in the parking lot of a goddamn Chipotle. Not the right time in the slightest, but I had been for months working up the courage for a moment to do it and instead it just happened there in a car as I broke down. You are trying to give yourself a moment of clarity and re-introducing yourself to people who believe that they got a good read on you, have a certain set of expectations of you, and then you reveal this about yourself and you become a stranger to them.
There were viewers who truly saw Don Draper as a mask for the real Dick Whitman and to a certain degree, Don Draper himself was always shielding Dick Whitman from the rest of the world. But as the show went on, the reconciliation of Don’s double-life was a primary goal of the show. Don was losing people who knew about his past (his half-brother, Adam and Anna Draper, the woman her mercifully let him keep her dead husband’s identity) and while his marriage with Betty was falling apart and heading for divorce without this revelation, Betty finding out about Don’s past became the clincher that she needed to end that marriage with a man who had become more of a stranger for her. In Season 4’s ‘The Suitcase’, Don breaks down in front of his protege Peggy Olson when he finds out about Anna Draper’s death from cancer, believing that she was the only person left who really knew him. Peggy assures him that is not true (she does this with again him on the phone in the series finale ‘Person to Person’, where he indirectly reveals to her his major secret and past, worrying her and confusing her at the same time- perhaps not even something they would ever talk about ever again). When he has to go through a security clearance to get client North American Aviation in Season 4’s ‘Hands and Knees’, he is rattled and has a panic attack in front of his associate and then girlfriend, Dr. Faye Miller. He confesses to her his identity and past in his apartment. Again, this never seems to be at the right time, but when you feel you are being cornered by certain external forces (tangible and intangible) and have to explain certain anxieties and behaviors, it can pour out. Faye is shocked but accepts this confession of information. Still, Don, with a lot on his name riding on survival professionally at SCDP, runs on instinct, beginning to merge his work life and personal life together now that he is divorced. He does not build anything more with Faye, instead falling in love in a May-December romance with his secretary Megan, who he does reveal his identity to her off-screen. But in this new chapter for Don, his worst tendencies are revealed and undercut a lot of what could have been a new lease on life.
Much of Don Draper early on in the series can be defined in two bits of advice that he gives, one to Peggy Olson, ‘This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened,’ when he visited her in a sanitarium to get her back to work after a traumatic, unexpected childbirth. The other was to clients, ‘If you don’t like what is being said, change the conversation.’ This is nice-sounding, sage words of advice that Don feels is appropriate for other people’s situations because they do remark on his experience. Some viewers even believed those things. Perhaps because it came from Don, who is the perfect ad man. However, the whole mindset of moving forward and forgetting about the past is something the show confronts Don with as being wrong. Peggy can never forget what happened to her and it informed her character. She learned, she grew, not without scars but she acknowledges them as existing than ignoring it. When Don gives similar advice to Stephanie Horton in the finale ‘Person to Person’ in her shame and turmoil involving her various bad choices, she calls him out. She tells him he has a really bad life philosophy. The latter half of Mad Men is about reconciliation with Don Draper and Dick Whitman being one. But with those two characters are one, we see a severe abandonment complex and a character who, for years, distanced and disassociated himself from his past and surroundings because of trauma, shame, and self-loathing. I do not have Don’s history of stolen identity, being sexually assaulted by a prostitute, born out of wedlock to a prostitute, or serving the military out of desperation to leave my impoverished environs (I love a good soap opera, though). But I was also a disassociating person who had faced traumas of a different kind. To escape was to remove myself from a situation or setting, and as I got older, I too would take to the road or the nearest faraway place for refuge. I have lost count of the number of days that I would just leave work early and go to some place, be in solitude, surrounded by strangers, and how I thought that was the possible thing for me to do. Or just drive around. Don drives too. I am starting to notice a lot of subjects for this essay series also drive around in the cars. A lot. For many reasons, but primarily to escape the conformist, status quo of life, although, often it is of wandering than with any particular destination or goals. That can only take you so far.
Mad Men as a show did portray, in ways that perhaps certain viewers couldn’t catch, that while Don could be eloquent in what he would say, and we are not talking about ad pitches and ad presentations but life advice here, that he himself was not always the best practitioner of his own advice. I would say the second-half of the show’s history for Don’s character is about the uncomfortable aspects of going from disassociation to re-association. Don has new people who know him but he spoils a lot of that. He gets selfish, jealous, and spiteful, mainly because he feels in putting himself out there and not exactly getting exactly what he sought (be it from his marriage to Megan or his work relationship with Peggy) that it is because something is wrong with him. For Megan to have left the ad agency to pursue her dreams in acting, when Don had idealized Megan in the image of a wife and colleague, it betrayed him. For Peggy to leave him for another agency after their history, and him no longer feeling like a necessary guide for her in the ad world, was also a betrayal. The two remaining people who he felt comfortable leaving the door open for, to him, have left. He starts to not feel in control and his way to regain control is to assert himself both at work, undercutting Ted Chaough and Peggy Olson after their agency merges with Don’s agency, and in his personal life, such as cheating on Megan with a neighbor. We do see in the flashbacks, that at the time were critically pummeled by viewers and critics, that Don is still holding on to the past. That past is traumatic, speaking to his toxic views on power and sex, the damaged and scarred levels of self-worth and self-esteem he has of himself. It never feels introspective. He is stewing in self-loathing that he had felt from the time he was a child trying to survive. When you feel a rejection to anybody you have opened yourself up to, it can put you in a deep, psychological, emotional tailspin, particularly when it is indeed an effort to really push yourself out there in seeking to be your best self to those people. Your instincts are to retreat. Don’s retreat is to heavily drink, womanize, and become hyper-competitive at work, stuff that he built reputations for (some of which he had not quite enjoy knowing he had a reputation on). Those bad choices Don makes are to medicate, to forget about his troubles but it only compounds on problems that relate back to the psychological toll on his past. He has aversely effected his life at both work and home, until it crashes down on him. Peggy calls him a ‘monster’ for his behavior toward her and Ted and his daughter Sally witnesses his philandering. Don lives within an identity that he hates but feels is his truth. Yet, he is ashamed by both actions that nearly, irrevocably wrecked two relationships that he cherished. He wants to be redeemed, but it requires a breakdown. It did require that Season 6 coda of ‘coming out’ and revealing himself. ‘This is where I grew up,’ he tells his children, showing where he lived in Pennsylvania. It is unclear how much he reveals about himself to his children after that shot, his daughter Sally looks back on him with an expression that appears to be wanting to ask him several questions. She perhaps cannot reconcile this, for now, but Don is beginning to. It has to start from there. People view the trans experience as a before and after. For those of us who come out and transition, we have to reconcile, sometimes accept, that we are of one person, that our experiences and past, regardless of how unhappy our pasts were, inform who we are and what we become.
Still, this revelation of the self is just a first step. Not everybody is receptive to your self-discovery. There is still untold damage in what you have caused in leading up to that clarity that came along the way and not all can be forgiven as easily as you wish it would. Don’s actions and withholdings of himself to other people over the course of the series, simultaneously work against him. He finds himself in the last season discovering that his past actions have colored the views of many people and he finds his autonomy taken from him, just as he regained a reasonable work life and job status once more, with McCann Erickson taking over Sterling Cooper & Partners. The perceptions that people have looking back at Don are revealed to him at one point, and it surprises him (fired creative John Mathis angrily yells at Don that he [Don] can get away with anything because of his looks, not so much because he is a great creative). A lot of Don’s goals with work and in life was a kind of independence and building something of his own, and then he finds himself in a room full of dozens of other Don Drapers in the creative field. He looks out a conference room window to see a plane fly by and leaves with the intentions on leaving advertising altogether.
Also toward the end of that season, it slowly becomes apparent that Don’s exact worst fears are confirmed when he confided with Peggy in the Season 7 episode, ‘The Strategy’, the idea that he never did anything and that he would be all alone. His work begins to feel erased, he feels displaced in finding himself in a new environment that feels closer to a cottage industry, and he questions his importance, feeling foolish that he worked so hard to return after his original dismissal. But it is the fact he suddenly feels alone that cuts deeper. Don has done pseudo-sabbaticals before but he also had a place to come back to with work. He thought he would at least have his family to be around after his travels. He then gets news that his ex-wife Betty has cancer, he is not even in the discussion for custody of Sally and her two brothers, Bobby and Gene. He calls her to confront her, but she notes that his relationship with the children, that has always been at a distance, will remain the way it was, and that it is best that he is not given the responsibilities that he had never previously showed inclinations on having as she saw it. Betty is right. Don knows she is right but his heart breaks, nonetheless. On that trip he had previously tried to check in on a waitress named Diana, whom he met back in New York, trying to find her, because even for him, ‘she looked so lost’. He finds out that Diana’s trauma in losing a child caused her to behave in ways that broke up her marriage and leave her living child behind. He notices that the child is not crestfallen about her mother and the ex-husband has remarried, moved along with his life, and is pretty spiteful about Diana. Diana is gone and nobody misses her. It is positively Dickensian. Don feels like he saw his ghosts and hauntings of the future ahead of him. He could be gone and nobody would notice. This is not true, but once you are given those various blows personally and professionally over that amount of time, doubt begins to cause a complete fog on your psyche. I have felt that sensation before.
In re-associating from years of disassociating, I often feel like because of my past behavior and actions, originally done for self-protection, that I missed several opportunities. That I acted and got clarity too late. You feel like a stranger to people you have been around and you are more comfortable in being yourself among strangers. Still, you are isolated from your alienation and you are not sure if you can ever quite relate to people without bringing your own emotional baggage along. You make the decisions to show a part of yourself to certain people and hope for the best it does not overwhelm them. Then it starts to become clear how you are not really thought of in the way you want to be seen by these people, in the same way you are not seen or really thought of by people in your previous presentation. You thought it would be different if you tried and be more assertive and be your best self, or at least what you thought was your best self. Didn’t work. The work and effort you put yourself through, starts to make you question if you wasted your time. Don has had those moments. With Rachel Menken, he wanted to run away with her and she called him ridiculous and some ‘silly affair’, not a serious relationship. She still lingered in his mind for years after and it will forever be a mystery to him if he was that way for her. But she died married and with children, with a life. Don is alone. That should be enough of an answer.
Don always had a fatalistic streak in feeling damned for what he had done and where he came from. But he never really faced the fact that his actions could lead to him being potentially disposable in other people’s lives. At certain points I had felt this way. The feeling that you were perhaps not doing enough or being forthcoming enough with the right people that led to you feeling of no consequence. It was nobody’s fault this happened but yours- you disassociated. You could be gone and you would be a stranger or passing memory to a very small circle of people, but not somebody of importance no matter your efforts. I never liked indulging in this headspace. It is my biggest fear. But at times, I felt like I was living in it and wondering what exactly am I good at doing if my efforts felt so unsuccessful and to a certain degree delusional. It was not even that long ago that I felt this way. I always fear about going back into this headspace, worried in what could befall me for doing so- because I do not want it to ever happen again. The last time was it was because I felt disposable and temporanious, feeling nobody really knew me. I am not going to say what or who originally helped pull me out because the gesture itself was random. It was not quite Helen Slater’s all-knowing Sheila at Esalen with seeing a despondent Don Draper and inviting him to join the group circle, but in looking back, that was my version of it in being in a similarly alienated, defeated headspace but then being seen.
The key to Don Draper in that group circle is that he is receptive to another person’s experience. This ‘eureka!’ moment of complete empathy that Don expresses for Leonard, who breaks down after giving stating how invisible he feels, may feel like an anticlimax for people. ‘So Don displayed basic human decency to a stranger that one time and it changed his whole life course? I don’t buy it…’ It was not that Don lacked humanity, he always was giving words of advice. The issue was he never could really place himself in the mind and headspace of other people, this was especially obvious through the whole series from Peggy Olson to Lane Pryce to Diana the waitress, often referring to his own experiences that were not as cut and dry as he at the time ever believed them to be. Leonard’s story does tie in to Don’s in certain anecdotes, but this is not about twinning their experiences, this is about Don seeing a man distraught and broken needing to be reminded that he has somebody to reach out to and being there. It is a major breakthrough. To re-associate does have to mean that while introspection is good and necessary, that there are other perspectives out there that are being shared and you do need to make an effort to listen as to understand. You are surrounded by other perspectives, it does not matter if you live with them, work with them, or are strangers.
I find the finale and conclusion of Mad Men, with the Coca-Cola ad, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’, that the show credits Don with creating, to be incredibly bittersweet. Don is incredibly stubborn, a man who does repeat his nefarious behavior, and who does close himself off. It is perhaps a leap of faith to people that this man changed and I think the requirement of believing that Don made this ad did cause people to think the show was being slyly cynical with its ending, that it was suddenly about co-option of the counter-culture all along or something. The ad itself was out of step with some many personal, subjective ads that Don made before. A Don ad was the image of an isolated figure often alone about their own singular need. This was an ad of multi-ethnic, unisex grouping of people singing in harmony about love and connecting to one product. That ad is pretty antithetical to the Don we had previous known, admittedly. The ad definitely does reflect a change but we have no idea how Don’s relationships will be with people upon his return. What is his future? How does he relate to people? In a way, the Esalen trip and the ad are Don letting go and doing a serenity prayer. Don perhaps now knows what he can and cannot change. He can return back to McCann Erickson with the best ad that he ever but he also knows that his relationships are complicated and may require his full attention in unknotting. He can explain himself, but he also has to be an attentive, engaged listener. Still, that his mark as a character ends with his work, something that he will be remembered for, while his personal life is an open question. That is tragic, but then again, his whole life story was tragic.
Still, there was something relieving about it.
There is a feeling ellipsis in Don’s story than your normal, average case of closure with a television finale, almost capturing that life continues for him and nothing is quite concretely defined, instead, always ongoing and evolving. It can take a lot out of a person to build and mend their past and present, to stop disassociating and instead to re-associate. It is being open about yourself and also open to taking in those around you. Don is still learning this, Leonard was a start. I do relate to Don Draper but also accept that such a comparison is fraught with facing, and some of these moments never even occurred concurrent to when I was watching the series, the knottier aspects of myself. I am still learning this and I accept that as far as me re-associating is still ongoing and evolving process and that I am still figuring out what I can and cannot control. There is still a lot of unknotting to do.
Originally published in 2017 on TinyLetter.
Daffy Duck in Hollywood 