Life without a trellis
On dismantling old beliefs, The Other Significant Others, and imagining the world as it could be
Second Rodeo is a newsletter about reinvention: dispatches from traveling full-time, rethinking old ideas, and imagining a more expansive way of living. Glad you’re here. ❤️
Last week, Longreads published my essay “Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt.”
It’s the story of how my spouse’s transgender identity required us both to confront the restrictive gender expectations we’d learned growing up as evangelicals in the Deep South. It’s about how we reclaimed our identities and discovered a more expansive understanding of womanhood and ourselves.
The specifics of that experience might be unique, but I don’t think the feeling is. We’ve all felt the pressure to contort ourselves into these compulsory identities. We sense the emotional and spiritual cost of shrinking ourselves to fit.
“Both marriage and religion had required exile from ourselves, a systematic suppression of our true identities. It was an adaptation that felt necessary for survival. But as I watched D explore, interrogate, and reinvent womanhood, changing the rules before my eyes, I wondered if I had been wrong."
This Longreads essay is a different type of writing than I usually share here on Substack, but there’s a direct throughline between the two: “Creation of Woman” is about dismantling old structures and beliefs. Second Rodeo is about envisioning what comes next.
I call Second Rodeo “a newsletter about reinvention” because, for the past couple of years, I’ve used this as a space to imagine new possibilities for my life. It began with this idea: Could I throw out those old blueprints and build something new in their place? Even if it didn’t look like anything I’d seen before?
So I started experimenting. I gave up my permanent address to live with strangers. I sold my belongings and shed old baggage. I prioritized friendship and community over romance. I drove across the U.S. and started writing a book. I stopped drinking. I got stronger. I embraced being a beginner. I redefined what home means to me.
In doing so, I realized how small those old ideas had been keeping my life.
Now, divorced by 30, childfree-by-choice, happily single and leaseless, I find myself in a very different position than many of my peers. The milestones that most people my age are mapping against no longer feel relevant to me.
Others are settling down, I’m living out of a carry-on. People are buying their forever homes, I’m in a different city every two months. Friends are finding their life partners, I’m deleting dating apps and dancing with bookstore clerks. Around me, people are beginning to zip up their personal circles; I’m re-opening mine.
I love the shape my life is taking these days. It feels more expansive and more me than any previous iterations. But operating outside of those default structures, I often feel like I’m in uncharted territory. There isn’t a clear map for where I’m going. As a result, I’ve become obsessed with finding examples of people who have rejected default paths of their own and found something more expansive.
I recently picked up Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Cohen shares stories of people who have built lives outside of dominant relationship structures (nuclear family, marriage, and two-parent households1), orienting them around friendship instead.
For the people in Cohen’s book, there often isn’t a clear precedent or even language for the kind of lives they want. They have to define it for themselves. Cohen writes:
“There is freedom in the unfamiliar when the kind of relationship you have exists outside of well-worn categories.”
There is freedom in the unfamiliar when the kind of life you want exists outside of well-worn categories, too. The freedom is this: When normative societal structures fail us, we get to build something new.
One of the people in Cohen’s book describes it like this:
“Ivy plants will always follow whatever trellis you give them. But if they don’t have a trellis, they look for light. […] Because there was no trellis, we got to create a relationship and a life that is uniquely beautiful for us.”
There are many different ways to live well. But I’d argue that the default, one-size-fits-all model is not working for most of us. I love this book — and ones like it — for expanding our sense of what’s possible.
Cohen describes the people in her book as “emissaries from the world as it could be.”
My life has been changed by encounters with these emissaries over the years: My spouse was one. Conversations with friends and strangers that opened my mind. Books from thinkers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde,
, , , , , and countless others on how to challenge conventional models — both internal and external — and live differently.I’m still untangling my own identity and desires from those old frameworks. I hope this essay, this newsletter, and this space help continue the conversation about the options that are open to us all.
Without a trellis, I still don’t have a clear roadmap for where I’m going. But I’m growing toward the light. •
Here’s an excerpt of my essay, originally published in Longreads. You can read the rest here.
Creation of Woman
We were in a hotel hot tub in Texas when D mentioned marriage for the first time. I was 19, in a red bikini, steam from the water making my skin flush pink. At first, I said no.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become. No one single future captured me, but the breathtaking collective possibility of them all. Yet, over the years, the possibilities had seemed to narrow: a thousand small reprimands snuffing them out.
Marriage was a small box, within a series of increasingly smaller boxes that I’d been pressed into over the years—by every boyfriend, youth group, church service, and unspoken expectation of womanhood. But I accepted the shrinking, the need to make myself smaller to fit the life I was offered. The other futures I could imagine began to feel blurry and uncharted. Marriage, like religion, promised certainty. When I eventually said yes, it was the relief of acquiescence. It felt so easy to become the kind of woman I was supposed to be.
Religion had locked me into a competition of womanhood, the ring on my finger the final prize. On our wedding invitations, which I designed, there was a banner at the top with Adam’s words from Genesis, the moment he first met Eve: “At last!”
As Cohen notes, “Challenging these social norms is not new, nor are platonic partners the only dissidents. People who are feminists, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromantic, celibate, or who live communally have been questioning these ideas for decades, if not centuries.”
I divorced at 30 and just quit my job to travel! I’ve found a lot of community here on Substack.
Loved your beautiful Longreads piece. I think people expect divorce to be so hateful. They often look for an easy explanation. Of course it’s devastatingly painful but it can also be beautiful to separate in peace and appreciation for each other.
We had two couple friends go through a similar experience during the pandemic- one stayed together and the other divorced. I sent them your story and one person pulled this quote as incredibly resonant:
“He never hid it from me. That surprises people. They ask, “Did you have any idea?” They imagine me walking in on him gazing into a full-length mirror, dressed in my clothes. They imagine the screaming, weeping, gnashing of teeth. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as he found the words, he laid them at my feet.”
Beautifully written.