Turning 60...

Today I turn sixty.

There is something wonderfully liberating about that sentence. I don’t feel old. I feel seasoned. Less interested in proving myself and more interested in living truthfully. Less concerned with arriving somewhere and more grateful for the remarkable road that brought me here.

My life has never unfolded in a straight line. It has moved like the tide; advancing, retreating, reshaping the shoreline in ways I never could have predicted. There have been seasons of confidence and seasons of uncertainty, moments of exhilarating clarity and moments when I had to trust that the next step would appear only after I took it.

Looking back, I no longer see my life as a collection of successes and setbacks. I see a thousand turning points, each quietly asking the same question: Whom are you becoming?

Some of those questions led me into service. In the United States Coast Guard, I learned discipline, responsibility, and the quiet satisfaction of contributing to something larger than myself. Others led me into social work, where I discovered that bearing witness to another person’s struggle is both a privilege and a profound responsibility. Over the years, I have had the honor of walking alongside veterans, transgender people, families, caregivers, and countless individuals searching for hope during difficult chapters of their lives.

My own life demanded that same courage.

Coming out as a teenager in 1980 taught me what it meant to live outside the expectations of my time. Beginning my medical transition at thirty-six wasn’t simply a change in identity: it was an act of alignment, an acknowledgment that peace comes not from fitting in, but from living honestly. That journey eventually grew into decades of advocacy, education, and leadership. I had the privilege of helping shape transgender care within military medicine, writing books I once wished had existed, editing collections that preserved the wisdom of other trans men, and contributing to conversations that I hope leave the path a little clearer for those who follow.

One of the greatest gifts of this journey has been sharing it with my wife, Margaret. We met at Pacific School of Religion in 2002, long before either of us could have imagined where life would lead. For the past twenty-four years, she has been my partner through every season—encouraging me when I doubted myself, challenging me to become a better person, celebrating life’s victories, and helping me weather its disappointments. Every meaningful life is shaped by people who choose to walk beside us, and I count myself extraordinarily fortunate that Margaret chose to walk beside me. Her steadfast love has been one of the great constants in a life otherwise marked by change.

Life has also taught me that goodbyes mark every long journey. I lost my mom in 2000, far sooner than I was ready, and my dad in 2024, closing a chapter that had stretched across my entire life. Their lives shaped mine in ways I continue to discover. Some of the values I hold most deeply—the importance of perseverance, service, and finding meaning even in difficult seasons—are part of their legacy within me. Grief has a way of changing over time. It never truly disappears, but it gradually becomes less about absence and more about gratitude. I carry them with me now, not only in memory, but in the person I have become.

Those experiences also taught me something unexpected: every community has its orthodoxies, every institution has its pressures, and every human being eventually faces the same fundamental question: Will I organize my life around approval, or around integrity?

That question has become the heartbeat of my work.

Writing The Third Space wasn’t simply about publishing a book. It was my attempt to describe a way of living that I had spent decades discovering through experience. The Third Space Institute, the Third Space Well-Being Model, my podcasts, workshops, and conversations have all grown from the same conviction: that psychological freedom begins when our values, beliefs, and actions become aligned. When we stop performing the lives we think we should live and begin inhabiting the lives that are authentically ours.

Ironically, the older I’ve become, the less certain I am about many things; and the more comfortable I am with that uncertainty. I’ve traded certainty for curiosity. Ideology for discernment. Performance for congruence. I have found that wisdom rarely shouts. More often, it arrives quietly, asking us to become just a little more honest than we were yesterday.

The greatest gifts of these sixty years aren’t the awards, the titles, or the milestones, meaningful as they have been. They are the relationships that endured. The people who believed in me before I fully believed in myself. The conversations that changed my mind. The laughter that interrupted grief. The ordinary mornings that, in retrospect, turned out to be extraordinary simply because I was alive to experience them.

I’ve come to understand that flourishing is not the absence of hardship. It is the willingness to remain open to life through all of its seasons.

The ebb has taught me as much as the flow.

The losses have deepened my capacity for gratitude.

The questions have become more valuable than the answers.

Today, I don’t feel as though I have arrived. I feel as though I have finally learned how to travel.

I know who I am—not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve stopped looking to everyone else for them.

I know what matters: integrity, dignity, curiosity, meaningful work, authentic relationships, and the freedom to become more fully myself while helping others do the same.

If the first sixty years were about becoming, I hope the next chapter is about contribution. Through the Third Space Institute, my writing, workshops, and podcasts, I want to continue exploring what it means to live with dignity, congruence, and psychological freedom. Through my work with Braver Angels, I have discovered that bridge-building is not about abandoning conviction but about choosing relationship over contempt. Through the Prohuman Foundation, I have found companions committed to the radical idea that our shared humanity matters more than the labels that divide us. And through ProSocial Workers, I have joined colleagues who believe that caring for others also requires caring for ourselves and creating healthier professional cultures. Though these communities are different, they are united by a common hope: that we can become more curious, more courageous, and more capable of living together across our differences. I hope to spend whatever years I have left helping cultivate that possibility.

So today, I celebrate every tide that carried me here.

Every beginning.

Every ending.

Every unexpected turn.

Every person who walked beside me.

Every version of myself that dared to become the next one.

And with deep gratitude, I step into this new decade; not wishing to be younger, but excited to discover what is still possible.

The horizon has never looked more inviting.