Trans-visibility day reflection
10 1/2 months on HRT
A year ago, on trans-visibility day, 2024, I was sitting in my parent’s house alone, looking at the fairly new trans social media feeds on my phone, feeling so invisible and alone. It’s not a past that I’m particularly fond of looking back on now, 10 and a half months into HRT, finally free of and independent from my parents, living a completely different, dramatically more liberated and happy, version of my life. But I suppose it’s worth taking a moment to pause and to see how far I’ve come, and how it’s all been going.
Things I’ve discovered
It’s amazing to me just how bound up I was, and in so many ways still am by trauma and by a past that I didn’t even completely understand. The ways in which I morphed and bended to other people’s expectations for who I should be, in order to survive and stay safe. I did such a good job of it that I didn’t even know what I was doing, and yet constantly I was butting up against the reality that I couldn’t escape—all the ways in which I wasn’t who I so desperately wanted to be, all the ways in which it felt like I couldn’t enjoy life as someone else, all the ways in which I so desperately hated myself—my self being the obstacle that kept me from ultimate safety.
What’s scariest to me now is how much I wanted the assimilation, destruction, annihilation of my self, the way I would have given anything to see it done. And yet it’s remarkable too, now as I’m returning more and more, month by month, to who I really am and all the aspects of myself that were buried for so long, that despite all of that there was so little in my life back before in my childhood, before disability and my life falling apart, that was really a lie. Everything was tailored, warped, carefully presented through lenses of masculinity, conformity, christianity, etc. Yet even under those conditions I brought a remarkable amount of myself to bear upon the world. I made YouTube videos, and dm’d D&D sessions, I wrote, and laughed, and led. And it’s so easy for me to despise that person. To despise the gnawing ambition and personal indifference in the me making YouTube videos with my classmates, to despise the calculating and desperate loneliness in the me organizing d&d sessions and book clubs for the people I wanted to be friends with, but ultimately I don't think I could possibly hate that self now any more than I hated her then.
I was trapped in an impossible game, just trying my damned hardest to work myself out of it. I think that counts for something. Recently I’ve reached out to(or been reached out to by) a few friends from those times, and it’s always remarkable talking to them, how fondly they remember it all, how much joy they say I brought them through the projects I worked so hard on, supposedly for purely selfish reasons. And I wonder if maybe I loved them more than I give myself credit for. I wonder if under all of those masks and cages I bore, I was not simply the endlessly caring girl I pride myself so much on today.
How it’s been going
But how has it been going? I haven’t really spoken of it yet. It’s so much harder to look back fondly on things happening now. To be gentle and understanding and illuminated with present misunderstandings and troubles. Life goes on, and as ever, she has her difficulties. It’s been so difficult trying to move through spaces of healing for all the hurt that has been bound up inside of me for so long. It’s been so difficult trying to navigate school-systems that are built around conformity and performance when your health is failing and you’re constantly falling short of the built-in expectations. And it’s also been very difficult navigating and grounding myself within the current political climate, with stories constantly on the airwaves of how bad things are, and how much worse they’re likely to get. None of that is easy, by any means, and yet, all of it so much genuinely easier to bear as myself. There is so much more joy and delight and freedom in my life to counterbalance all of the burdens I have to bear. There is so much more room to grow and to heal when I don’t constantly have to worry about being someone else. And that is so amazing and so earth-shatteringly good for me, it’s hard to express in words.
What the future holds
What the future holds I genuinely do not know, so much has changed, so much can change all in a moment. But if things were to go my way, I’m very happy where I’ve landed up here in Northern California. It’s a good community and a beautiful place, and I’ve begun to put down roots for the first time in oh, so long. So I hope to stay here for the foreseeable future. As for school I wish for the moment to continue pushing against these systems and advocating for change from within the institution if merely for the reason that there is yet more space to breathe within these hallowed walls than I would expect there to be outside of them. Our world is so sincerely fucked up, and I do not think I would do particularly well in facing it as of yet. Though I hope to one day feel more able to. It’s remarkable how much more of my world and planning has to be about survival as a disabled person, but I do not think it is particularly better for many other people as of late. Capitalism is a harsh beast, now perhaps especially so for the rise of oligarchy and the slow dissolution of so many of our other support networks. It won’t be easy to build a better world. I hope to try.