Heights and Deep Water
On fear, authenticity, and the cost of living a life that is not your own — a reflection on twenty years of military service and what it took to finally tell the truth.
I am afraid of two things.
Heights. And deep water.
I know — naval aviator, afraid of heights. It sounds like a punchline. I have landed on aircraft carriers in the dead of night, pulled g’s over the Persian Gulf, flown approaches in weather that had no business being flyable. None of that ever bothered me. But standing at the edge of a roof? Looking over a railing into open air below? That specific, irrational, visceral fear never left.
The deep water thing is older. I grew up in the South. Swimming lessons were not always a given, and somewhere along the way I developed a healthy respect for water you cannot see the bottom of. Not a phobia — I have been on ships and carriers and never lost sleep over it. But something in the deep, dark water unsettled me in a way that I could never fully explain.
For a long time, I thought those were the two things I was afraid of.
I was wrong.
The Fear I Did Not Name
The fear I carried for most of my adult life was not about heights or water. It was about being known.
I knew from an early age that I was transgender. I also knew, with complete clarity, that admitting this would cost me everything I had built — my career, my community, my sense of who I was in the world. So I did not admit it. I became very, very good at being the person everyone expected me to be.
The military version of this is called compartmentalization. You learn it as a professional skill — separate the mission from the noise, focus on the task in front of you, don’t let personal concerns bleed into operational judgment. I applied it to myself with precision. I built a wall around the part of me that was true, and I performed the rest.
I was good at it. Twenty-plus years of service. Naval aviator. Thousands of flight hours. I loved the work — genuinely, not as a performance. Flying is extraordinary. The community of people who do it is extraordinary. The mission mattered to me. None of that was a lie.
But I was living two lives simultaneously, and the effort of maintaining that division was enormous. Fear is exhausting. Not the acute kind — the low-grade, constant kind. The kind that never fully releases because the threat is always present. The threat, in this case, was the truth.
The Pier in Pensacola
There is a pier in Pensacola that I remember specifically.
It was during flight training. I was standing at the end of it late at night, looking out at the water — which, if you know Pensacola Bay, is dark and deep and not particularly inviting. I was not in a good place. I had not told anyone what I was carrying. I did not have language for it that felt safe to use.
What I remember from that moment is not despair, exactly. It is something more like clarity. A recognition that the life I was building was structurally wrong. Not the career — the career was right. The work was right. The people were right. But the foundation was built on a version of me that was not real, and foundations like that eventually fail.
I did not know then what I was going to do about it. I just knew something had to change.
It took years. More years than I would like to admit.
Coming Out in the Military
I came out as transgender in 2018. The timing was not coincidental — the Obama-era policy lifting the ban on transgender service was still nominally in effect, though litigation and political pressure were already working to reverse it.
I did it through proper channels. I informed my chain of command. I worked with Navy medical. I followed the process that existed at the time. And then I waited to see what the institution would do.
What followed was a two-year fight for my flight status — not because my flying was in question, but because the medical and administrative processes for transgender service members had not been fully worked out, and I was in the middle of figuring them out in real time. I had to fight for something that should have been a routine administrative update: the right to keep doing the job I had been doing successfully for over a decade.
I got my flight status back. I was the first openly transgender naval aviator to do so.
The process was not graceful. There were moments when I was not sure it would work out. But what I found, consistently, was that the people around me — colleagues, supervisors, fellow aviators — responded to authenticity with respect. Not universally. Not without friction. But more often than not, telling the truth made things better, not worse.
That was the lesson I had not expected.
What Fear Actually Costs
I spent decades afraid that being known would cost me everything. The career. The respect. The community. The sense of purpose.
What I learned was that hiding cost more.
The energy that goes into maintenance — maintaining a version of yourself that is not true, managing what information reaches which people, constantly calculating what is safe to say — that energy does not disappear. It does not go toward something neutral. It goes away from everything else. Away from the work. Away from the relationships. Away from the possibility of being actually, genuinely known by the people you are spending your life with.
I was a good officer. I could have been a better one if I had not been doing that accounting in parallel for twenty years.
This is not a regret — I made the decisions that were available to me at the time, with the information and resources I had. But it is an honest accounting of what fear costs over a long horizon. It is not free. It is very expensive. And the bill comes due whether or not you ever intended to pay it.
On Moral Courage
People often describe what I did as brave. I understand why they say it, and I receive it graciously, but I want to be precise about what the courage actually was.
It was not the disclosure itself. The disclosure was frightening, but it was finite — a moment, a conversation, a letter. What it preceded was not finite.
The courage was the decision to stop optimizing for safety and start optimizing for truth. Those are different things. Safety means maintaining the conditions under which nothing bad can happen to you. Truth means being willing to let bad things happen in the service of something more important.
I have seen this pattern in people across very different contexts — not just in the military, not just in LGBTQ+ experience. Anyone who has told a hard truth in a room where it was unwelcome understands the mechanics. Anyone who has refused to go along with something wrong, in a culture where going along is the default, understands the cost. The specific content varies. The structure is the same.
What makes it possible is not the absence of fear. Fear does not go away. What makes it possible is deciding that the fear is acceptable — that whatever is on the other side of the truth is worth the risk of what the truth might cost you.
That decision is individual. Nobody can make it for you. But I do not think it is made in isolation, either. I have watched people find that decision by watching someone else make it first. Moral courage, it turns out, is somewhat contagious.
Heights and Deep Water, Revisited
I am still afraid of heights. Still a little uneasy about dark water.
I have made peace with both of those fears as facts about myself rather than failures. The heights thing is not going away. Neither is the water thing. And I have done enough in and around both of them to know that the fears do not stop me — they are just part of the experience.
The larger fear — the one that ran for two decades underneath everything else — that one is gone.
Not because I conquered it or defeated it. Because I stopped feeding it. I told the truth, took the consequences, found that the consequences were survivable, and continued.
That is available to more people than use it. The fear is real. The cost of the truth is real. But so is the cost of silence, and that cost accumulates over a longer timeline than most people calculate for.
I spent twenty years afraid of being known. I have spent the years since being genuinely known — by colleagues, by peers, by the community I am part of — and it turns out that is not something to be afraid of at all.
It is what I was missing.