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Like many of my attempts to gain greater self-conception, this is late and disappointingly unfinished. But the point of this blog is to give my thoughts a space to exist, so I’ll do my best.

I have been on HRT for fifteen months, minus about a week, at time of writing. I don’t feel any different, and as far as I can tell I don’t look very different, either. I’ve been out to most people I know for that amount of time or longer, and while they respect me and treat me well, our interactions are largely similar. Very little changes, what ought to be a chance to create a self I can live with is instead sputtering, without the velocity to escape the inertia of existing day to day. I think there are reasons why: not being out to my family (the people I spend the most time around); and never having enough stability of a job, my own space, a social life, or the fortitude to grasp opportunities when they arise. For as obvious as these limitations are, what they add up to is a pervasive feeling that I will never grow up, into someone who actually gets to be who she wants to be. Often, she forgets that doing this is the point, and worth fighting for.

As a friend from high school once said to me: “we get it, you have depression”. And, well, probably yeah. But I don’t want to be defined by a a lack of clarity and purpose. I just want to find out what those are to me.

Of my many attempts to do this, a recent one was a trip to NYC Pride with a straight friend. I didn’t know of anyone else available, and I was laughably underdressed for the occasion, but nevertheless we went, me lugging a backpack full of clothes and camera gear, him with his seemingly dozens of pockets stuffed with anything you could imagine.

I wanted the moment to feel special. Like I wanted my first time trying a dress to feel special. Like I wanted my first time taking estrogen to feel special. Like so many things that have mostly met me with banality.

The first time I tried on a dress, in my pandemic-era dorm, I dissociated into the mirror and shared my misery with a close friend. The first time I tried estrogen, I played a song that I thought would be meaningful to me, timing the placement of the blue pill at the chorus. There was no perfect moment, the pill dissolved and then I went to a meeting about my thesis, where I was still myself, incoherently talking about how I wanted to write about hauntology in city planning. When I went to Pride, I took my favorite camera and a roll of rare slide film that I was desperate to enjoy, a roll of Fujichrome 64T, perfect for the bright sun of a New York summer day.

The lab processed it improperly. All my slides came out bright teal. There is still detail contained, behind a haze, inaccessible unless the color is stripped and rendered in grainy black and white. When trans people talk about coming out and beginning to transition, especially with HRT, they talk about a feeling of being able to see the world in color, like a new dimension has opened for them to be free within. I see transition timelines of people who have been on HRT for half the time as me with a glow in their eyes and a near completely different look. I know in my mind that this is behind the veil of social media, or ways that these statements could be qualified. I also know that I want them for myself.

Maybe none of the slides were worth anything anyway. Maybe my photography is carried by the film and the camera and luck. I have no real approach to photography as such, I simply want to compose an image that feels good. In some ways that’s all it needs to be, but I wish it was more. I wish it had a depth and pathos and a feeling of distinctness, that the image means something about who I am. Instead, they mostly mean that I just like photography.

As dumb of a reference as this might be, I often think back to a point made on Chapo Trap House. I am not going to get into a discussion about leftist podcasts here, or anywhere. Mostly the podcast is background noise. I do like their side projects (like Fighting in the age of Loneliness), and especially Matt Christman’s history work (I own a copy of No Pasaran!). The thing that sticks with me came from Felix. I believe it was about the right-wing project in America, but honestly I can’t recall the context. He said, “you’re still you at the end of the world”, that no matter how much you ascribe your shortcomings to society, and want to burn away the external limitations that feel oppressive, you still have to contend with the self. I think about that a lot. I think about what it means to be myself at the end of the world. What it mostly means is being something barely given shape, and unsure how to find one.

I have to qualify what I’ve written so far, in a way. I have had good things since coming out and transitioning. I did feel a little more at ease with people around me. I returned to rugby. I got a job and wrote my thesis. I had a great relationship (my first), for which I will always be immensely grateful that I got to spend it with a wonderful person who I care deeply about, and who I would never blame for any of this. So why can’t I keep moving forward?

Just before I moved out of Texas, a classmate reached out to me and said that she had a box of unused clothes, and that I was welcome to see if any of them fit. As we sorted through sweaters and pants and whatever else, we had a similar conversation. I used the word inertia again to describe how it often feels to exist. The clothes that I took back home with me the next day have largely sat in a box under my bed, waiting for the time when I realize how to be myself. I hope I do eventually.