
> Sound of silver, talk to me<br/>
> Makes you want to feel like a teenager<br/>
> Until you remember the feelings of<br/>
> A real-life emotional teenager<br/>
> Then you think again <br/> <br/>
> *— LCD Soundsystem,* [Sound of Silver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kmTQj8x0N8)

Yesterday I celebrated 3 years since I stepped through the mirror and started my life over as Erin. In so many regards I’m pleased with where transition has taken me: I feel my emotions so much more clearly, I’m plagued less by dissociation and depersonalization and their accompanying cataracts over my memory, my body has transformed in ways that I never thought possible. I live as a woman and recognize myself as a woman (albeit a strange one, with a mysterious past!).

And yet.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything, but this year at my egg crack date I find myself sitting with impatience as I wait for the return of my adulthood. My life right now feels like the longest summer ever after high school graduation: a directionless holding pattern. Puberty still slowly burns through my body and brain, while new expectations of executive function are placed on me. All of my friends are in town but we all know life is going to take us in different directions. I really need a summer job, but I’ve been looking for months and nobody wants to hire recent graduates (especially when many employers don’t think they will stick around). I’m still working through the teenage passion of trying on new identities, so my wardrobe is a mess and I feel cringe most of the time. I want to start building something that’s going to last, lay the foundation of an adult life, but the college applications haven’t come back yet and I’m still stuck in my parents’ house.

I think this feeling is coming from a few different places. The most obvious one is the literal experience of second puberty—I don’t think there’s much to discuss other than I have another 2 years to go on that front. Another source is systemic oppression: it’s hard to feel capable when the State is weaponizing its bureaucracy against you, throwing up roadblocks at every turn, feeding into uncertainty. Power doesn’t want to contend with adequately resourced adults if it doesn’t have to, and so it makes things like employment, education, healthcare, housing and identification more and more difficult for trans people to possess. I feel lucky to have close to 4/5 of those checked off for the time being (hire me!). But lacking these things, and/or lacking assuredness in retaining these things, severely constrains my and my peers’ ability to move through the world and start making long term plans. I want to build more of a life—find a new home, restart my career, invest in some long term projects—but without being able to know what is attainable, what is a mirage, and what soon will be snatched from me, it’s hard for me to direct my energy.

Part of the experience of adulthood is a feeling of moving through time in step with the world and with the people around you. Transition smashes that feeling to bits. Many writers have outlined how trans lives often fail to adhere to mainstream temporalities because we experience a loss of cisheteronormative milestones. Our train jumps off the standard track of education -> relationships -> marriage -> parenthood -> retirement, and we keep on steaming ahead into the wilderness for parts unknown. Some people look for new milestones: get on hormones -> come out -> start voice training -> get a few surgeries -> maybe fit in some self acceptance work when the surgeries don’t solve everything. The question always comes back around: now what? I’ll admit that I still hear the siren call of the knife sometimes, but I know that another consult and wait and recovery is not what I need to move forward. To make meaning out of a life not structured by the norm can be exciting and promising, but it can also be deeply frustrating in its unresolvedness.

Paired closely with time is finesse, and the ease that it brings to one’s circumstances. Nothing is easy about gender expression when you’ve transed your gender. I was talking with a trans friend the other day who shared with me a feeling of intense gender envy that washed over her on a recent trip when she met an exceptionally put-together art curator who was about her age. For those of you not familiar with gender envy, it’s a sort of fantasizing about stepping into someone’s gender expression. Eggs and closeted gay people can sometimes confuse the feeling for attraction, when what they’re feeling is not so much a desire for the other person as for their aesthetic: outfit yes, but also mannerisms, the way they move through the world, often a perceived sense of effortlessness in a setting. It’s been three years of hard work to paper mache together a new understanding of myself, so when I meet someone similar in age who demonstrates 20 adult years of finesse, 20 years I’ll never get—the mix of longing and grief can be devastating. My challenge here is to not count that time in the eggshell or closet as a waste, to find the value that it brought me. Pining for an ease one will never have is a distraction from accepting the inherent cringe of transition into your heart, and the only way to build finesse is, unfortunately, to fuck around and find out.

The common thread that runs through all of these struggles—material instability, lack of a roadmap, the effort of showing up in the world—is a much higher level of complexity that trans people have to navigate in our lives. We have to pick our battles carefully, often without clear indicators of the likelihood of success. When I first came out, I was quick to judge some of the women around me for what I perceived as “slacking off” on fronts of transition. These days, I know better: we’re all doing the best we can to prioritize our limited energies in life, investing so much more of ourselves into just facing the demands of the world while so many cis people move forward without having to contend with the same obstacles. “Keeping up appearances” isn't an option for us, and acquiescing to that fact is the only way we can survive at all.

Not too long ago, I was out on a walk with two friends who had begun their transitions five and twelve years ago. I told them about my struggles with this feeling of perpetual adolescence, and asked if they felt like it went away for them. They both smiled, and the “elder” of the two chuckled. “yeeeah—it went away for a while, but then it came back,” he said. Not the answer I wanted to hear, but maybe it was the one I needed. Here's to three years—I'm gonna keep looking for that summer job, and managing the tasks at hand as best as I can.

World's Oldest Teenager

<p>In my continued drive towards inscrutability, I've assembled some of my recent thoughts about absurdism, gender and shame into an interactive website. I wanted to make something that feels like how my thought processes have been working on these topics, like shuffling a deck of cards to make new associations. Check it out here:</p>
<h2 style="text-align: center">
  <a href="/post-media/epe-baby/index.html" target="_blank">~~EPE, Baby~~</a>
</h2>

EPE, Baby

Human Kibble

EPE, Baby

EPE, Baby

World's Oldest Teenager

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