*** EXCITING NEWS *** Just heard from my publisher TODAY that Paralian has finished printing and a few copies are on their way to me!!! In about 2 weeks I’ll hold the real-life copy of my very first book in my hands. What a fabulous adventure!
Here I am, drawing an island while working on the island. One of my many passions in turquoise paradise was guiding boats. On our way to wherever we were heading that day, I would draw each dive site briefing on a little chalk board while the fellow ocean enthusiasts I was guiding would watch my drawing progress with sparkling eyes and eager anticipation…
Happiness in a puff of chalk and a splash of water.
However, life on the island wasn’t all pirouetting dolphins, sunshine and margaritas. Even in the most magnificent of places, life can be tough when you are confined to a tiny pile of sand with a whole bunch of individuals, all of them (including you) experiencing bouts of island fever on a regular basis…
I wouldn’t want to miss any of it. It is so worth it (at least for me) to go out there, take risks, leave materialistic values and a safe existence behind. It’s invaluable to meet a whole bunch of people from all over the world and all kinds of backgrounds; to live and work with them, laugh with them, be annoyed by them, and experience cultures from the inside (not just as a visiting tourist in two-week-wonderland).
Throwing myself into all kinds of challenging life and work experiences abroad was one of the best things I ever did. I can’t even count how many times I was ready to rip my hair out or hijack a plane to get the hell out of there… but, I always persevered and never regretted it.
When I wrote my book, my four years as a diving instructor and hyperbaric chamber operator in the Maldives spanned four chapters. The life lessons I took away from these adventures were infinite. On the other hand, the very secure, comfortable job I held in Switzerland before heading out into the unknown barely added up to half a chapter in ‘Paralian’.
So I wonder about the wisdom of amassing materialistic wealth and security. I’d rather let go and explore the world together with my soul mate with wide-eyed curiosity and an open mind.
… this one a bit cheesy I know 😉 but true nonetheless 😀 Here some more words of wisdom by yours truly, “hot off the tweet” from my publisher:
How I loved this job! Coaching performers, keeping them safe during the show, being a stage hand and stage manager underwater in one of the most visionary projects of all time. The best times were when I could prepare performers for their aquatic environment. I loved seeing them work during our training sessions. Their focus, dedication and support for each other were second to none.
My four years of being part of the “The House of Dancing Water” show family in Macau were life lived to the fullest. All in. Nothing held back. Steep learning curves. It was heaven and hell, Jekyll and Hyde, utter happiness and despair. I looked into the abyss and at the same time was mesmerised by the beauty, passion, and creativity all around me. Blood and tears, utter commitment, corporate politics, friendship, integrity, growth, dreams coming true (sometimes shattered), an abundance of hugs and kisses, standing ovations, and the overall emotional intensity of an earthquake magnitude 8 on the Richter Scale.
For as long as I can remember I’ve devoured books of almost all genres. I still easily read three a week, taking every chance I get to immerse myself in someone else’s thoughts and imagination.
Recently, through writing my own first book ‘Paralian’ I’ve redoubled my efforts and have even caught myself reading whilst walking home from the bus stop. If it’s a good read, something resounding deeply within, I seem to be incapable to set those precious pages aside – and be it just for a few minutes. Even more so, I love those days when I can do nothing else but wiggle into the large cushions of our comfy couch, book in hand, Nacho and Pushka, our fluffy fur balls, purring on either side of me.
One writer who has managed to charm me more than most is Matt Haig. I love his fine sense of humour, his compassion, and sensitive celebration of life. In all he has been through I recognise a kindred spirit. Living through tremendous pain and struggle heightens our sense of how magical and meaningful our brief, meaningless existence really is. Storytelling in all forms and shapes, listening to others’ and sharing our own, being an essential part of this magic…
“I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest…”
(From Matt Haig’s new book ‘Reasons To Stay Alive’)
How beautiful, and how profoundly true. Thinking ahead to the months and years to come, I dream my books will add to the magic. ‘Paralian’ is a beginning. I hope it carries the inner strength to, at some point in time, be a treasure map for someone out there as well…
Have you seen “The Danish Girl”? Go see it!
I loved the sensitivity, the subtleness, the clarity, the not-so-in-your-face way of it. Never have I seen a transgender person portrayed with more love, sensitivity, and acceptance. “The Danish Girl” makes you really FEEL what it is like to be trapped in the wrong body. There was nothing extreme, nothing overly colourful, no over-obvious wow-effects, no capitalizing on the exoticness of it all… and yet, the movie gripped me through its profound humanity and through allowing me to understand the crushing extent of loneliness, lost-ness, and pain Lily was going through.
It was truly truly amazing! Beautiful.
I see myself so much in that movie. And I love how Lily was accepted as who she is by her closest friends. Just as I have always been accepted as who I am by those closest to me. Lily’s friends were there for her and treasured her the way she was. But like I did, Lily needed to find a way to live life out in the open, to be perceived on a daily basis as who she really was, and to get rid of a body that wasn’t hers. After her second operation, at the brink of death, she said with the most beautiful, heartfelt smile what I had felt too after my second operation: “Now I am finally, truly myself.” You could see it was worth it, even if it might mean she had to die that very instant.
With tears of happiness in my eyes, I remembered how terrified I had been of dying while still stranded in the wrong body. Nothing had felt more horrifying than to end up being buried in a body not my own. To be remembered with a tombstone, saying, “Miss Stefanie Klenk, beloved daughter of…”. I had hoped all along I would make it to the other side, so I could at least die happily in the knowledge of being buried as who I really was, always had been: “Mr. Liam Klenk, beloved son and husband of…”.
I think, most profoundly, “The Danish Girl” shows just how important it is to transgender individuals to be able to live life like everyone else. Lily’s happiness to be able to get a simple job as a perfume sales lady with a group of other women was heartbreaking.
See, the truth is, even though people like to think of us as exotic creatures, the majority of us aren’t colourful butterflies. We are just people who have been dealt a very screwed up deck of cards. And there are so many of us out there. We are everywhere, and always have been. Always will be.
I hope I’ll find a way to become a strong advocate and fighter for transgender people on a global scale. But when I do, I want to be there for others in the admirably sensitive way in which the movie “The Danish Girl” presents itself. Subtle, yet very powerful, clear, and very very personal.
I am glad we live now, in a world where people like Lily and I are not being locked up, subjected to radiation “treatments”, electroshock “treatments”, or killed anymore – at least most of the time that is, depending on where you live. Many trans people still can’t afford to come out in great style or even begin steps to become whole, because in the countries or areas they live in they’d be shot or beaten to death in an instant.
But still, we now live in a world where many people who had the good fortune of being born in the right body are at least beginning to understand a tiny little bit that being a trans man or woman means just the same as being a man or woman like everyone else out there. It’s this INCLUSIVENESS I want to highlight most of all. Not any kind of exclusiveness.
Plus, I want to help make clear to any of my contemporaries who are afraid, just how important it is to be yourself. How important it is to never let yourself be defined by only one element of your existence. You’re the sum of your experiences. You’re the soul within. Never let anyone tell you different or tell you who you are supposed to be. You know best who you are!
Have you ever read “The Hours” or seen the movie? It’s one of my all-time favorites, making me cry — with sadness as much as happiness — every time.
One scene in particular always stays with me:
In a very intimate moment towards the end of the movie, Clarissa says to her daughter, ”I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.”
As I look out the window of our little eagle’s nest overlooking the beautiful city of Zurich I breathe in deeply. My wife is working today. We had a cozy, slow breakfast together. She just left a few minutes ago and I already miss her with every fiber of my being.
Pushka, our fluffy Persian, is looking out of the open window, her eyes sparkling, seeing snow for the very first time.
Our other cat, Nacho, is sitting on his cat tree, every so often pawing the window pane, trying to catch a stray flake through the glass.
And on the table behind me, the final typeset of my book is waiting for me. The next three days will be busy… reading through 450 pages once more to check if all final corrections I made a few weeks ago have been implemented. I’m looking forward to finding that last hidden typo…
It keeps snowing. I’ll start soon. Just a few more minutes of gazing out the window…
Clarissa was right. It is the moment. Right now.
And here right away another press release from LiterallyPR (thanks so much Helen, Sam and Diana) this time focussing more on the transgender/LGBT side of things…
Press Release
LGBT History Month: Not Just Transgender
London, United Kingdom, Thursday 14thJanuary 2016: Liam Klenk’s powerful, distinctive memoir Paralian: Not Just Transgender takes a holistic approach to recounting his tumultuous life that includes his identity as a transgender man, a child of adoption, scuba diver in the world’s biggest aquatic show and an international traveller. This LGBT month (February 2016) he is ready to celebrate the greater inclusion of transgender people in society whilst questioning how much we are ready to see transgender people as individuals.
![[image]](http://collateral.prmax.co.uk/collateral/92331.jpg "66753-3.jpg")
Paralian: Not Just Transgender covers in depth his journey from being born a girl to becoming a man in his early 20s, the process by which, when he was a young adult, he found out he had been adopted at five months old, his journey around the world working for performance groups in and out of the water, and ultimately how…
View original post 604 more words
Every twenty days or so I need to help my body along with a little testosterone. The needle is a good 4 cm long and also not the thinnest kind. Rather a McDonalds straw as opposed to a thin reed if you know what I mean. It needs to be that big because the large amount of hormonal fluid to be injected into my muscles is gelatinous and quite immovable. Supposedly, the more relaxed my muscles are at the moment of injection, the less it’ll hurt.
So every three weeks I sit there, syringe in hand, moving my leg this way and that, willing my thigh muscles to relax. I can’t help but wonder “What if I hit bone?” or “What if I accidentally inject the fluid into a vein instead of muscle tissue?”
In the end, pushing all dramatic scenarios out of my mind, I put on music, talk to my wife, to the cats, or to myself, and think of relaxed hours in a turquoise-blue sea. Still, just looking at the gigantic contraption continues to make my muscles tense in anticipation.
But it has to be done, so relaxed or not, I jam the needle in as deep as it’ll go, and accept the pain.
It’s part of what needs to happen so I can live my life as who I really am. It’s definitely worth it.
Liam Klenk 