Pageboy

Highlights

• As Leslie Feinberg writes in Trans Liberation, “This movement will give you more room to breathe—to be yourself. To discover on a deeper level what it means to be yourself.”
• I was reading Mother Night, a novel of moral ambiguity. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote.
• “I just want what’s best for you … I want to protect you … I don’t want you to have a hard life.” These sentiments would slide over me. What was best meant fitting neatly into our society’s expectations. Staying inside the lines. The perfect heroine’s journey preemptively and unknowingly written for me.
• Coming out in 2014 was more a necessity than a decision, but yes, it was one of the most crucial things I have ever done for myself. No matter what came after, a different kind of exposure, vulnerability, it was all worth it. All a step. I’d rather feel pain while living than hiding.
• In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.
• I smoked compulsively. Hoping to blow out all the thoughts. Or as Kurt Vonnegut puts it, “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
• “What’s the hardest part of Rollerblading?” “Telling your parents you are gay.” Is it bad I love that joke?
• “The system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange,” Sarah Schulman writes in her required read, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.
• We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from. Invisible until it is not. A thought just out of reach. Only now do I understand just how much I was consumed, the degree to which my brain was taken by a desperate, insatiable need to control. A watchtower enforcing my own personal isolation.
• I suppose my aversion to “coolness” and “popularity” related to the degree to which I was already masking myself, fully aware of it or not, and popularity is the ultimate mask. A mold too tight. I felt compressed enough.
• I felt more comfortable in environments with queer women, but inherently something in me knew that I was transgender. Something I had always known but didn’t have the words for, wouldn’t permit myself to embrace.
• It is not trans people who suffer from a sickness, but the society that fosters such hate.
• It’s exceedingly surreal to have transitioned ten years ago, find myself happier & healthier than ever, have better relationships with friends & family, be a better and more engaged citizen, and yes, even more productive … and to then see strangers pathologize that choice. My being trans almost never comes up. It’s a fact about my past that has relatively little bearing on my present, except that it made me more empathetic, more engaged in social justice. How does it hurt anyone else? What about my peace demands vitriol, violence, protections?
• “Why do I feel this way?” I’d plead. “What is this feeling that never goes away? How can I be desperately uncomfortable all the time? How can I have this life and be in such pain?”
• If a part of you is always separate, if existing in your body feels unbearable—love is an irresistible escape.
• I could barely find the words, but I did. As if they moved on their own, wriggling through and up my body, pouring out. My body knew, deep down I knew, and something had shifted. It was now or never. It was alive or not.
• This is your life. You don’t need to believe their stories. Those are their narratives. This is your career. Why are you agreeing with them? Trusting them? They aren’t the right ones. They, in fact, are wrong. You don’t believe them. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is your life.
• For the first time I was acknowledging my transness out loud, allowing this knowledge to breathe without obstruction, brief moments, sparks, not just grazing it, but holding. This understanding did not stop at my gender. Finally, I was on the verge of disentangling myself from toxic family dynamics, at last able to find the words.
• In a world where queerness all too often alienates us from blood, I am grateful to Julia, and the family I have chosen. Without them, I wouldn’t be here.
• There was time to sit, a moment to think. All that space initially amplified the discomfort. I had spent years and years figuring out all the tricks to avoid my feelings, to exit my body, numb it out. But now, something was simmering, preparing to bubble over, I could feel it.
• My brain was doing everything to get around it, for it to not be the case, it was just too fucking much to contemplate. An actor, an established career, people hate trans people … etc.
• My brain was as hot as the sand. How do people do it? How do they shut off the noise? And I don’t mean “happy,” they may not be happy, but they seem to be able to exist at least. People existed with a fluidity that I wished to possess.
• But the answer was in the silence, the answer would only come when I chose to listen.
• Fuck, I’ve made so many U-turns it seems the dizziness has affected my memory. Receiving this from Bea prompted flashbacks. Friends I had asked, friends I had told. And again and again, I pushed it down, down, and down. I moved on to the next role, the next photo shoot, the next relationship, the next airport, the next tighter sports bra.
• This was not miracle water that sprang out of nowhere. This was a long-ass journey. However, this moment was indeed that simple, as it should be—deciding to love yourself. There had been multiple forks in the road, and more than once I had taken the wrong path, or not, depends on how you look at it I guess.
• It is painful the unraveling, but it leads you to you.
• Even though I am extremely lucky, this narrative where trans people have to feel lucky for these crumbs—that we fought hard for, and still fight for—is perverse and manipulative. Here is the thing—I almost did not make it, the now I finally have I did not see, and all I knew was permanent emptiness, a mystery I would never solve. Incessant, without language, a depth of despair.
• As a trans person and a public one, the sensation is that I’m always pleading for people to believe me, which I imagine most trans people relate to.
• A year and a half later and the pronouns are still just too much for some. I am patient, we all are endlessly learning and I’ve made the same mistakes, but sometimes patience wears thin. I know these instances and remarks may seem tiny, but when your existence is constantly debated and denied, it sucks you dry.