How To Transition Without Turning Into Your Father

after naively entering your thirties in the mistaken belief that you were just one of those rare queer adults without father issues

Towards the end of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Mathilda meditates joyfully on her impending death and subsequent “mental reunion” with her late father:

I smiled with quiet joy; and in my thoughts, which through long habit would for ever connect themselves into one train, as if I shaped them into words, I thus addressed the scene before me:

“I salute thee, b…