How a Water Bottle Helped Me See Myself

And learn that people pleasing pleases no one

I remember that day as the Day of the Water Bottle. That day, I began to realize how profoundly I misunderstood myself.

It was the first summer of the pandemic. My girlfriend, Kelsi [not her real name], and I decided to go for a Sunday afternoon walk on the old rail-to-trail path north of the city. We’d been dating since January and celebrated my one-year “manniversary” on testosterone the same week the pandemic officially hit the US.

Now late July, we’d grown used to the social distancing. I spent the weekdays at home with my teenage son and slept at Kelsi’s on the weekends. Our little pod of three.

That hot Sunday afternoon, I stood in her front room sweating, my hands in my shorts’ pockets, while she walked through the dining room and into her kitchen at the opposite end of the house.

She called out, “What kind of water bottle do you want?”

“Whichever. Just grab one,” I said. I liked that I was a go-with-the-flow guy. Prided myself that I could get along with anyone, even people others found difficult. A real diplomat.

“Will!” she called. I detected exasperation in her voice, so I walked the length of the house to talk with her. “Will! You can’t just say any water bottle. There are big ones and bigger ones. There’s one with the wide mouth and the one with the straw. The one with the handle so your hand doesn’t get cold.” With each description, she brandished a different bottle from her collection on an exposed shelf.

“Would you mind if I picked a pink one for you?” She paused for effect. Many of our discussions centered on gender, masculinity, on what it means for me to be a man. What it means for her to date a man after only dating women for 20 years. I was her first trans boyfriend. She was my first girlfriend. I had been a wife in a straight marriage for 20 years. The divorce had been finalized only months before.

“Or do you want the navy blue?” she said and raised her eyebrows. Her right foot jutted out to the side. Probably tapping her toe in impatience.

“Damn, girl!” I blinked at her.

“Welcome to my anxiety brain! Nothing is simple in there.” She held up two bottles and nodded toward her shelf with a dozen more. “Help me out here.”

“I—just—that one,” I said, pointing to the one in her right hand. She handed it over. I recall little about the bottle—just that it existed and that I held it in my hand the whole walk and grasped her point about the utility of handles.

On the 30-minute drive in my red Camry, I felt her tension but didn’t understand it. We chatted about this and that, I suppose. Probably negotiating COVID-19 protocols for the days leading up to our road trip to visit her friends in New York and Massachusetts. I had suggested we stop in New Haven, Connecticut, because we’d be so close, anyway, and I had lived there for five years.

“But what will we do there? What’s the plan? Because COVID. Things are closed,” she said.

“To, to see it. To show you my old haunts, walk around campus,” I said. I didn’t feel like that needed an explanation. It was my one ask for the trip, which was otherwise centered around her and her people. “I have a couple friends still there. Can’t we just…wing it?” In the passenger seat, her body was rotated toward me, one knee cocked up, but she shifted to face forward, both feet on the floor.

Later, a mile or so up the trail, listening to her talk, she planted her feet. I walked several paces along the sun-dappled packed dirt before I noticed, stopped, and turned to face her. I realized I had been in my own world. I had a therapist once tell me, “Get out of your head, Will,” but I had no clue what he meant.

Kelsi’s face was contorted in emotional pain; she was saying something about our relationship. “If you don’t want to be with me—” She swiped her bent fingers in front of her throat, that gesture of death, finality. My brain was struggling to catch up. Through a fog, I felt like I was a mile back at the trailhead, not seven feet away. What is going on? Why is she so mad?

I scoffed. I wish I hadn’t scoffed, but I scoffed. “Kelsi,” I said as I walked toward her and offered my hand. “Of course I want to be with you.”

I don’t remember much more on the trail. At some point, we turned around to retrace our steps down the shady trail and to my car. I remember it was dusk when we approached the trailhead. I remember commenting that I’d never seen a fox in the wild. Then a fox emerged from the brambles, slinked across a patch of open grass with its body low to the ground, then disappeared into a grove of trees.

The ride home was a blur. Did we talk? Did we not? I remember confusion.

Back at her house, back in her kitchen, she grabbed my shoulders and looked down into my eyes. She was four inches taller than me, but in this memory, she’s taller.

“What do you want, Will? What. Do. You. Want?” she said, each word a clipped command.

How did we get here? How did we get to a conversation about our relationship? How did I get this oblivious?

She said, “That’s why I pushed you about the water bottle.” I searched her face for clues.

Did testosterone make me stupid? Is this what it’s like to be a man?

She said, “That’s why I keep asking you in bed what you want. I know you have preferences.” Her brows were tense, her arms mock-shaking me, gripping tight.

“You get to have wants, Will! You get to have needs!”

Her words smacked me and cleared up the fog.

I teared up. My lower lip quaked.

“No. No,” I said. I shook my head. “I grew up the middle child in a Mormon family of seven children with a depressed mom and absent dad, with gender dysphoria I could not yet name,” I said. She knew all this already; like any queer couple, we’d swapped trauma stories like Pokemon cards within the first month of dating.

I said, “That little boy? That boy doesn’t have wants. He doesn’t have needs.” I sobbed and stepped back. “He doesn’t get to have needs. He goes with the flow.” I looked at my feet and back up. “He takes care of everybody else.”

Her face softened. She knew this already. Saying it out loud was for me.

“Will,” she said, “you need to figure out what you want. With us.”

I searched her eyes, her face. “I—I want—.”

A voice inside me said, I want out.

But that can’t be right. We’re good together. Aren’t we? I don’t want to break up. It’ll break her heart. I can’t leave her right before her road trip. I can’t leave her to drive alone. I’m supposed to meet her friends. They think I’m the one.

But I’m not the one.

I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Go home. Figure it out. Take a few days. Then let me know.”

I wish I could say I broke it off that day or even the next. I wish I could say I didn’t drag her along for 10 more days trying to avoid hurting her. But long-engrained patterns don’t dissipate when exposed to air. I’m still learning to listen after a lifetime of silencing my Jiminy Cricket.

A couple of years later, before I got remarried, I reached out and apologized to Kelsi. When I run into her in public now, I crumple into myself. Maybe she’s forgiven me, but I haven’t forgiven myself.

I never did thank her for insisting on that water bottle.