There is an exquisite pain for those of us who live in the liminal spaces of life. Never enough, always too much. That’s how it’s like to straddle my different identities – bisexual, half Mexican/white, switchy in my kinky interests and fluid in how I choose to express my gender (although still identifying as deeply femme). Born the year that Star Wars was released, I was the turning point of a whole generation. Stuck between Gen Xers and Millenials, us Xennials sit oddly in between two titans of generational change, the uncomfortably cynically wise bridge between.

Keeping up with the times became an essential part our identity. We had to constantly get to used to new technologies, coveting them for years at times before they became affordable. One day we had nuclear fallout drills, the next day, the Berlin Wall began to crumble. We have hit such incredible highs – watching LiveAID on tv, feeling connected to everyone world wide and weathering some tragic lows like the Challenger explosion, Waco and Columbine. We came of age in a time where coming of age stories were the gateway of geekdom whether it be Star Wars, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Neverending Story or afterschool specials. We still got to see more sex on TV than likely was ever appropriate. We have had to update our lingo from “cool” to “cowabunga dude” as often as we’ve had to keep up with the hairstyles and trends.

Of course that isn’t particular only to us because this is the march of time eternal, right? Everyone has to adapt, right?

As we transitioned from beta to VHS to DVDs to BluRays and digital, our generation was always on the leading edge of accepting new ideas, integrating new music, blowing up new trends. Adaptability was our middle name because we were always just enough and too much in the middle space, the Star Wars generation bridging the gap between heroes and narratives, always with just a little too much information. For a decent portion of our lives, we knew a lot of people solely by their usernames, caring for them like they grew up down the block from us rather than the strangers on Buffy forum that they actually were.

There is just something about being born in this in between space that has always made us feel like we have to be the master of all trades, the knower of all trends, enough to be blend in as an adult but enough of an individual to stand out. We had to learn how to ping-pong back and forth between the expectations of the generation just before and the disappointments of the generation after. We became adaptable because we were always at a pivot point, the messy transition space for the world.

An Online education in adaptability

My dad, who I am now convinced may have been autistic in some way, was a huge gadget nut. He wasn’t the first to have something, but he would wait out the trend and then invest in something reliable but still advanced enough to satisfy his craving to learn all the things. The first computer technology I really remember having access to as a kid was a Texas Instruments computer back around 1984 or so. I used to push in a cartridge and play games like Frogger or Donkey Kong for my designated hour I’d had to earn with chores.

While my dad enjoyed video games to an extent, he was more interested in word processing for his psychotherapy notes and his creative writing. When he had a thought to try his hand at programming, we upgraded to a Commodore 128 by the time I was in 3rd or 4th grade (1987?). Dad had learned enough to teach a little coding at my school where he taught us to make simple games and change the colors of the text.

Around the time that I moved into middle school in 1989, I was not only an embarrassingly big Trekkie, but we had started using the internet more – dialup that cost a LOT per minute. It was around that time that I was first becoming interested in boys AND questioning my sexuality (thinking that my attraction to girls meant I was really a boy…I got past that once I had a term, bisexuality, for what I felt).

This early version of the internet was a crash course in the lopsided art of seduction. To be a kid coming of age in the early days of the internet – no longer relegated to math nerds with IQs in the high digits, but now accessible to impressionable kids like me – we learned too quickly how to find the forbidden sexual content. There wasn’t the same kind of online safety or moderation tools that we know now. It was a bunch of people taking advantage of a new anonymity mixed with a fluid familiarity.

Awakening in the age of Dial-up

To say this was a formative time in my life would be an understatement. The summer between 6th and 7th grade I went to Medjugorje, coming back with a calling that would completely change my life. After I came back people started treating me different. Women started putting me on pedestals they wanted to knock down. Men started hitting on me in person and online, giving me attention I didn’t know I craved, but didn’t ever fully trust. Yet, that too was a valuable experience that challenged me to bridge the divide between masking and vulnerability on the most intimate levels.

Unlike the generations that came before us, who explored those first sexual awakenings with real people and books/magazines that didn’t interact back, mine started through a disembodied thrill that some disembodied someone somewhere, wanted me enough to talk sexy to me in real time. Yes, I explored with boys my own age too…but I was kind of an ugly duckling during middle school and became the butt of a lot of jokes about how non-pretty I really was. But before the days of dating profiles and catfishing with stolen photos, we had what our imaginations created even if it was entirely self-deception. But compared to the rejection I felt at school and with my real life crushes, the attention I got from the men I met online was dangerously enticing (and awfully illegal) to seventh and eighth grade me.

But it also created a sort of dual personality, forcing me to separate the Catholic from the sexual even more than it might in others. See, on the one hand I was being asked to lay hands and pray over the women in my mom’s rosary group; but on the other, I had men throwing their best manipulations at me through the ether over Quantum Link.

What kept me grounded was a sense that this lesson would serve me beyond the temporary thrill of pretending I was wantable. It quickly became very easy to predict when men were trying to get their slice of psychic avoidance by sweet talking my innocence vs. my maturity (whichever served their purposes). It didn’t take long for me to control that outcome according to how they treated me. It was in learning their patterns that I could predict their moves, keeping myself from getting caught up in their seductions. I learned how to adapt myself either to overwhelm their senses or avoid their attentions – a skill I use frequently still to this day.

Maybe in some ways it was better I was exposed that way to how easily people can fake their interest, feign their pleasure, disguise their intentions online. But also, it mattered that I got to see what they reveal when someone isn’t judging their looks. The confessions could be false, but too many proved to be true – people stuck in bad situations, grasping at the last remaining straws of connection when the world was spinning out of their control. Pen pals had always existed in some way, but instantaneous connection as we transitioned to AOL Chatrooms and increased capacity to send photos and animations gave us ways to express vulnerability, especially around queerness, that we hadn’t had access to before. The masks changed, but they also came off.

Lift the gates holding back vulnerability

My generation broke through the gates of vulnerability in ways that our parents never could. With Channel 1 bringing us the news every morning to our classrooms, we also broke through the barriers of acceptance, realizing the immensity of the world and how quickly it was now available to us from our small towns and high schools.

Being identified as a “leader” early in life opened me up to leadership events that brought together kids from all over the country, exposing me even more to different points of view and different ways of living. The experiences awakened me to other “in between” parts of my identity including my Chicana roots. Unraveling privilege and using my power to push back against people who would leave behind the Latinx kids, 60% of my classmates, became a lifelong quest to marry the Celtic/Unitarian privilege with the Mexican/Jesuit fire into the whole of me.

While I had started my political activism by advocating for LGBTQ+ people, standing up against Amendment 2 in 1992, my awakening wasn’t complete until the end of high school I finally explored the lingering promise of my bisexuality, kissing a girl for the first time (literally the night before I left for college). I arrived at Loyola in Chicago the most integrated I’d ever known myself – holding opposing truths, my Chicana queerness with my Catholic-inspired call for service. By the time I graduated in 1999, I had fully woven those two opposing sides of me together into the DNA of who I am today.

But just as I had to integrate the chasm between my spirituality and my sexuality, so too does our generation weave a path of transition from one reality to the next. It is our inherent strength to be an eternal bridge between the old and the new, no matter how deep that chasm gets.

The trials of time

Xennials turned our cassettes and CDs into mp3s and online radios all while witnessing some of humanity’s worst days before we could even (legally) drink to drown out the images, bridged the gap, impossibly. Brilliant in walking a tightrope between two opposing realities, we had to build the connections, the path for the rest of humanity.

That isn’t to say it’s easy to balance those – that it isn’t entirely a labor of love to balance analog and digital. Tragedy after tragedy, the increased access to information means we are the first to lose our heroes to the monsters they were hiding inside, the first to mourn the divides of politics that began to make the work that much harder. That patience gets worn thin, giving us that cynic’s sneaky smirk.

Likewise, it wasn’t easy for me to carry the obsequious traditions of Catholicism along with the spirit of a queertastic sex positive revolution. I forged a personality that was just rebellious enough to make a passionate plea, but accepted enough to be forgiven my transgressions by authorities. Trauma after trauma, the hero inside started to see herself as a monster and the distortions taught me to distrust my generational gift of adaptability – the work was just so big. And the costs of the pandemic robbed me of too many who held the generational wisdom that could have helped me serve with greater vigor and thoughtful action that we’ll all need in the years ahead.

I started writing this the week I had to say goodbye to two people I loved from two completely different generations: my grandma (Silent Generation) and one of my favorite friends from LiveJournal (Gen X/Xennial cusp). My grandma, known for her caring steadfast faith, died unsure of the world and where she belonged in it, unable to keep up from the dizzying changes that were happening one after another. My friend, was quite the opposite, he was so ahead of his time that the world couldn’t keep up with him fast enough – he was a font of continual memory, cool retro grooves mixed with fresh appreciation for flow of time and all the new music, art and insight it was bringing – it was just the world couldn’t keep up with how bright he burned.

As I sit here today, looking over what I still want for my life, reflecting on where I came from and the vast differences between these two important people in my life, I know more than ever that I want to be surrounded by people who continually help me update my life, to stay in this robust, adaptable liminal space so I can grow with the world instead of stubbornly gripping at the last shreds of a dying system. I want to taste every last drop of life I can in the time that I have left.

Progress that requires us to go back

The lessons of my generation, our adaptability, our willingness to integrate new truths, are part of the only reason I’m still here today. It is only in leaning into change, especially that undefined liminal space that I learned to survive. The sands of the hourglass would fall, dripping down a growing pile of accumulated time to make room for new memories. All of them are a part of me, but not all of them need to be present in the now to be remembered and honored.

The past year has brought me face to face to the stories of my ancestors. Starting my year in Albuquerque I connected with them more deeply than I ever had before by visiting Chimayo. I’ve been trying to write about it all year, but up until my grandma’s death, I didn’t feel that chapter of my life was fully written yet. Not that I mind telling a story already in progress, but it’s only when the narrative has concluded that we really know the full depth of the journey. It’s only in looking back on the life led that we recognize how meaningful it was and how the story will progress.

When my grandma finally decided to allow my ancestors to take her into their fold, I knew that this was only possible because I had returned to them earlier in the year, asking for their help and wisdom, integrating the past with the future. Returning to her mother, father, sisters, brother and husband, I know she is happier to be in a spirit space where she can help – and the fuss over her funeral I think was her stretching out those wings for the first time, fretting over details that only happened because of the increased sensitivity – bless her dear, Pisces heart. Only when she was finally at rest in the ground next to my grandpa did I feel the ancestors finally say, “Now you can write about this from a newly integrated self.”

It’s the integration that matters most in the fractured world we see today. It means being willing to grab the polarities of two opposing truths and finding the middle way that was always there – that can weave in the chords into a harmony that resonates well beyond us without losing any of the diversity that defines us. And specifically it means integrating the differences between our vulnerability and our socially imposed requirements to hide it that will make all the difference in the years to come.

Overcoming the fears of missing nostalgia

We are defined by the icons of our age – a willingness to keep showing up each day with Han Solo’s swagger and Freddie Mercury’s audacity. We live the dreams of the most famous princesses of our generation – to Leia’s powerful pursuit of liberation – both give us an unstoppable drive for justice and near inhuman tolerance for exploitation. We live in this cozy in between of giants of technological evolution, the dreams of boomers manifest in breaking free of their mold to survive the scattershot of generational trauma that came for us too. We’ve had to fix ourselves so often broken by the unsustainable systems that came before that we gained knowledge of how to fix the world too.

Our generation’s burden is to the bearers of hope. It might be sharp and even dangerous, like a shard of a stained glass window, but it is still there. We were literally built for these times. Being able to hold two differing truths to find the magnificent individuality between them, being able to manifest hope when all seems lost. We’ve felt it too often but instead of giving up, we dug in to figure it out.

Or at least I did.

To be adaptable means to welcome those who will us siphon off the nostalgic attachments that no longer serve, like the old identities and guilts that keep us small. We need people who challenge us to be brave but also temper us so we don’t burn out. It is only in the integration of the trials of time that we come to a healthy appreciation of how the lives that came before us renew themselves through us.

We live with open hearts tethered to the narratives of a better future and more connected past. We are the bridges that help the world the transition, whether from one technology to the next, one genre to the next or adorning the tree with the nostalgia worth holding onto. For we are the magicians that became the early drivers of diversity initiatives, innovators of the internet, the first adopters of social media spaces that made strangers into virtual neighbors. We have surfed the turbulent waves of trauma and lived to tell the tale. We survived all that the world threw at us and even if we have the Goonies scars to tell that neverending story of resilience.

Resilience: It’s what we do best!

I wouldn’t have a whole section of my work devoted to #RadiantResilience if I wasn’t already a believer in it. But over the years, as I shut down my heart, I found myself craving the certainty of trusting that it would never get hurt again if I opened it up. But resilience isn’t refusing to budge an inch until you have a guaranteed outcome. It means nudging yourself to be brave and try, fully knowing that you could very well land face first in the dirt…again. Resilience is about trusting ourselves, our experience, our wisdom and guidance despite all the ways the world tries to convince us it knows best.

In the end, it comes down to our willingness to hope, to trust, to believe in ourselves and our ability to adapt in a world that is constantly threatening our hope. It is only when we band together in the inevitability of progress that we can activate our generational powers to shape and mold reality into what we needed most growing up. It means supporting each other as we let go of nostalgic traditions that are founded in colonization or exclusion. It means providing a place to land when once trusted institutions crumble around us. And especially as more of us are waking up to the impact of trauma and previously undiagnosed neurodivergence in our lives, we deserve caring communities that reflect our growth and potential.

Perhaps that’s what our generation understands best – we have had to lovingly say goodbye to so much of the certainty and security that we thought that we had, that we intuitively tend to spark change wherever we go. Which is what primes us for what is coming next: humanity’s biggest shift into it’s biggest heart-space. For it is the love and connection we found in those early days, the narratives of anti-heroes who have to sacrifice it all to keep humanity going, the superhuman passionate risk we have lived with our whole lives – that the bigger-than-life challenges we are facing as a people right now make us the best leaders to charge into the fold with lights held high, sparking the heart of humanity to change.

That is what I want to build in the coming year, a foundation of hope, a spirit of adaptability, a willingness to try even if the trends out pace us. I’m seeking a few fine people to join me on this journey – not just followers or clients, but companions, chosen family and beloveds who are committed to this cause. Is that you? (If so, sign up for my newsletter so you don’t miss out on important updates.)

I think it’s only in the embracing the inevitability of change that we finally feel the freedom to grow into our best and brightest selves. And the best way to honor those who came before us is to make the most of the time we have here, inviting the perfect companions to help us light the world on fire, igniting the grooves in each of our hearts, filling the cracks with the memory of a connected, badass truth: it’s the rebels who win and the empire that loses.

Always.