Laying Down Roots

On transness, home, chickens, community, and learning to imagine a future

Hello and thank you for reading, I’m Nyle Biondi, a transgender therapist and parent, based in Colorado whose clinical work focuses on trauma, chronic pain, attachment and nervous system healing.

I started this newsletter a little over a year ago in response to the administrations immediate attacks on transgender people. The intention was to offer perspective, hope, and tips on reducing stress and nervous system regulation. And while those themes are still very much present in my writing, I’ve noticed myself moving toward something more personal, expansive, and human over time.

Lately, I’ve become less interested in offering “tips” for how to survive difficult systems and more interested in writing honestly about what it means to build a life inside of them. About identity, community, parenting, embodiment, attachment, grief, joy, healing, home, and the small ecosystems we create around ourselves in order to remain human.

So this piece, and likely many that follow, lives more in that space.

Thank you for being here, whether you’ve been reading for months or just found me recently. I’m glad you’re here.

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This week’s rain on the Front Range has brought a needed pause, and with it, space for writing. The past several months have been very full. My therapy practice has grown significantly, and outside of work and parenting, I’ve spent most of my free time working in my yard.

Recently I realized that this is the first time in my life I’ve ever really laid down roots, both literally and otherwise.

We moved a lot when I was a kid, and I continued the pattern well into adulthood. When I got divorced and bought this house five years ago, I counted that I had lived in at least thirty-three places by age forty-one. Before moving to Colorado, I had never stayed anywhere longer than a year, as an adult.

When my daughter’s mother and I separated, we agreed that me staying close to her house geographically would make the transition easier for our daughter. The house I ended up buying is exactly one mile from her mom’s home. The moment it came on the market, I knew it was ours. It isn’t large or impressive. One bathroom. No basement. No garage. Smallish yard. But it works for us.

At first, though, I didn’t entirely allow myself to settle into it emotionally.

Part of that was practical. Divorce is expensive. Single parenthood is expensive. During that first year, there were moments where I caught myself imagining where I might go if I weren’t tied here. Part of me wondered whether my daughter’s mom and I might someday decide to leave Colorado altogether and move somewhere cheaper, somewhere where building community and stability might feel easier for all of us. Holding onto those possibilities kept me from fully settling in here.

And part of it ran deeper.

Many trans people struggle to imagine a future for themselves. Not just because the world can feel unstable or hostile, but because when something feels impossible for long enough, you eventually stop allowing yourself to want it. Sometimes we don’t just stop planning for the future, we stop imagining one altogether.

So when I first moved into this house, I approached it cautiously. I made it warm and colorful for my daughter. I planted a couple of raised beds. We added a peach tree and raspberries. I replaced part of the lawn with native plants through the county’s water-wise program. But emotionally, I think I was still tending the place like someone passing through. Planting things I liked, yes, but also things that felt safe. Things the neighbors wouldn’t mind. Things a future owner might appreciate someday.

Then, slowly, something began to change.

Last year, I started out slowly as I still worried I may feel forced to leave the country, but started taking more risks with the yard and becoming more intentional about what I actually wanted to create. I started a seating area before I injured myself two summers ago, that, after being frozen in time for nearly a year, got completed last summer. I started learning how to convert my sprinkler system to drip irrigation so I could plant more drought-tolerant medicinal and native plants. It turns out irrigation systems aren’t nearly as mysterious or expensive as they seem if you’re willing to learn as you go.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I stopped thinking so much about resale value and started thinking about ecosystems. Last year, I joked that our backyard had a sort of mad-scientist-meets-aspiring-hippie-permaculturist-meets-ambitious-ten-year-old-with-a-shovel vibe to it. That remains true this year, though I’m beginning to see the shape of something more cohesive emerging underneath it all.

Late last winter, I mentioned to my neighbor that my daughter and I were hoping to get chickens sometime this summer. We’d been talking about it for months. She started texting me photos of abandoned coops she spotted around the neighborhood, suggesting I see whether the owners might be willing to sell them. Then one day she surprised me: a text with a link to a coop that was on sale online. She wanted to buy it for my daughter and me, if I would let her.

I sat with the offer longer than I probably needed to.

Accepting it made me uncomfortable in a way that had very little to do with her and everything to do with old stories about self-sufficiency, shame, and deservingness. Part of me felt that if I hadn’t already bought a coop myself, then accepting help somehow meant I had failed.

But after five years of living next to her, I also knew this wasn’t charity in the way my shame wanted to frame it. It was simply kindness. A neighbor who cares about us offering a gift.

So I accepted. I told her she’d get free eggs for life. Negotiations are ongoing, as the chickens are not yet laying. (chicken photos at the bottom, if you’re interested)

That coop quickly launched a chain reaction of projects: predator-proofing the run, hauling wood chips, planting garden beds, assembling infrastructure, learning as we go. The kind of sprawling, interconnected project where every completed task uncovers at least three more.

And honestly, I love it.

Because for the first time in my life, I’m not just decorating something temporary.

I recently moved the raspberries we’d planted over the past few summers to another part of the yard to make room for dwarf fruit trees and serviceberries. I’m expanding the medicinal garden. We’ve started making salves from some of the herbs we grow and selling them on Etsy. The chickens scratch through the yard while squirrels and wild birds move through the trees and raised beds. Landscaping, yes, but also participating in and creating small ecosystems that include neighbors, animals, plants, and community alongside us.

It’s surprised me how deeply connected imagining a future is to allowing yourself to root into a place.

We often frame attachment primarily as risking loss. And it is that, inevitably. But it is also allowing ourselves to choose something. To invest in it. To create it. Avoiding attachment may protect us from grief, but it also keeps us from fully inhabiting our own lives while we’re here.

Now, for the first time, I find myself imagining not just next year’s garden projects, but years further out. A privacy fence. Mature fruit trees. Bigger harvests to share with friends and neighbors. My daughter getting older here. And who knows, maybe even a pay-what-you-can urban farm stand someday, if we’re able to grow enough.

I am no longer building this yard for some hypothetical future owner.

I am building it for us. We are building it for us. A super cool thing about my daughter being ten now is that she can and wants to help, in meaningful ways.

And honestly, there is something profoundly grounding about this. Not metaphorically. Literally. There is something healing about planting roots into the earth while simultaneously allowing yourself to believe you may remain long enough to watch them grow.

I think many of us, and especially those of us who have spent years surviving, become cautious with our longing. Careful about attachment. Afraid to imagine permanence, safety, or abundance because we know how painful it is when those things disappear.

But maybe part of healing is allowing ourselves to imagine better futures again anyway.

And then, slowly, imperfectly, beginning to build them. Weeds and all.

In solidarity,

Nyle

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I’ll be honest: I’ve considered turning off paid subscriptions because I’m no longer confident I can maintain the volume of newsletters I was putting out last year. At this point, I’m aiming for roughly two newsletters a month and trying to let this evolve into something more sustainable.

That said, paid subscriptions genuinely do help motivate me to keep writing and sharing these pieces. So if this work resonates with you and you’d like to support it, becoming or remaining a paid subscriber truly helps.

And if you’d rather contribute directly to our little urban homestead experiment: chickens, fruit trees, medicinal gardens, and all, you can also support us via Venmo.

Mostly, though, thank you. Thank you to everyone who has read, shared, encouraged, subscribed, or simply continued showing up here with me over the months.

The new raspberry patch, chickens huddled up on a dreary morning, chickens enjoying their free-range life