Min-Maxing

Hey,

I used to joke that Charisma was my dump stat. Not for any particular character I would play in a roleplaying game; for me, specifically.

There was something about geek culture in the 2000s and early 2010s— or at least the parts of it I was around— where cracking wise about your complete lack of personality and charm was read as funny and relatable. The “joke” was that you put all your character creation points into Intelligence (and, if you were really into video games, Dexterity), thus explaining why you were The Smartest Guy In The Room and also couldn’t get a date to save his life.

And, I mean, there is a lot wrong with this idea, and it gave rise to some truly heinous shit. But, if I’m being generous here, I think there is sometimes a real need to try and explain why you might have trouble making meaningful connections with other human beings. This is especially true if you don’t have access to mental health resources— which a lot of folks don’t.

So, I have a lot of sympathy for the Charisma Is My Dump Stat crowd, because I also spent a long time wondering why I had so much trouble relating to others and having few plausible explanations.

But recently I realized that my jokes about my own lack of social skills weren’t just problematic— they were incorrect. My problem wasn’t a lack of charisma. It was photo-negative charisma.

There was a Tumblr post floating around for a while about someone who couldn’t help but be noticed by others, and how no one could really explain how or why that was. I rediscovered it the other day and it just… clicked, for me. I suddenly remembered all those times when adults asked me to quiet down, even though I hadn’t made a sound. I remembered all the times when I would get on a bus and almost everyone would conspicuously look up at me. I remembered the time a manager at a former job told me that I effect the mood on the floor in a way no one else there could. (He told me this as a way to impress the importance of making sure I’m always smiling and to never look like something is bothering me.)

So, part of my thinking that I had no social skills was that I felt like I couldn’t make an impression on others. I was wrong. I definitely made an impression. But when people would notice me, they saw a void. They would look my way because they sensed something, and then they would see a small, mobile black hole.

I figured that part out years ago, but I came to the wrong conclusions again. I thought that my, er, void-ness was because something was fundamentally, metaphysically wrong with me. That there was nothing I could ever do about it. That I was more than broken— I exposed a flaw in Creation itself, and it made people uncomfortable in a way they couldn’t even put into words.

I was wrong, obviously, but I didn’t realize how wrong I was until I finally found enough of myself to be Bridget.

People still notice me now, they’re still “drawn” to me, but the reactions are very different. Before, I walked around as something so dark, so dense, that light couldn’t escape my surface. This year, I’ve had people tell me I shimmer. I’ve been told I’m warm now, and bright, and full. And I hear this a lot from people who knew me “before” and who see the difference in me now. Before, I was compressed, shrunk, and now I fill out the space around me. Before, there was no air around me, and now there’s a breeze. Before, there was a storm, and now there’s only a rainbow.

I connect with other people a lot better now, and it comes much, much easier.

So, I was wrong about having no charisma or social skills. My problem was that I didn’t know what to do with it, and that lack of clarity caused problems. Because I didn’t know who I was, and for a long time I pointedly did not want to be noticed. When people notice you, they’re really asking a question, and if you don’t have an answer they’ll make up their own.

It feels good to have an answer now.

Listen to Tried So Hard on Spotify. Black City Lights · Song · 2013.

Take care,

Bridget

A Gift, Freely Given

Hey,

There is a gap— sometimes impossible to bridge— between wanting something and asking for something.

I really love reading Grace Lavery’s newsletter. Her insights on trans-ness, mixed with the kind of arcane silliness that only English Majors are capable of, have been at turns challenging and comforting.

Earlier this year she wrote about Pride Month and the discomfort that can emerge from it. There’s a line that stuck out at me when I re-read it last week:

… I can’t take pride in a gift I was given. I didn’t ask to stay alive; I didn’t ask to meet [then-boyfriend, now-husband] Danny [Ortberg-Lavery]; I didn’t ask to be trans. I asked to transition, I suppose, but I did so in such a fucking grump that it seems churlish to demand credit for it after the fact.

Not to get too Tumblr-esque here, but: #relatable.

I wrote a while back about how I got close to dying in 2015, and my surviving that led to the start of my transition. I knew I wanted to stay alive, and I did, but I’ve realized in recent days that I didn’t, strictly speaking, ask to live.

There’s a lot about the life I have now that I didn’t ask for. Like Grace, I didn’t ask to be trans; I made the decision to transition, but it was very much a response to something that was already there. I didn’t ask to meet Laura and fall in love. I didn’t ask to have so many friends stay with me through the dark years and through transition.

These were all gifts, freely given.

At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, every day that I’m alive and out in the sun as Bridget feels like a gift. I can’t help but think of that this week, seeing as tomorrow is Transgender Day Of Remembrance. I have a lot of privilege that shields me from the kind of violence and vulnerability that Black and Brown trans people grapple with every day; even so, every time I leave the house, I can’t help but wonder if this is the day when my name gets added to the list that’s read aloud on November 20th. There’s only so much I can do about that, and I still have a life to live.

Earlier today, I received two extremely generous material gifts.

Last night, Laura and I had to make a quick stop at Torrid to return something. While we were there I, in a move that was most definitely not planned, passed another big transition milestone: I wore a dress for the first time.

I looked good. I felt good. And then my heart broke when I saw the price tag. We put it back on the rack and then left to go get dinner.

This morning I sent those pics to a friend of mine; they gushed, then I gushed, then we both gushed. And then they sent me money to get the dress. I spent the next hour or so trying to reassure them that they didn’t need to do this, that I’d just wait until a big clearance sale after Christmas, but they weren’t having it. After a while I knew I wasn’t going to win the argument. I took the money and bought the dress.

Soon after, Laura bought tickets for the two of us to see Hamilton in a couple of weeks. Because, as she put it, I can’t have a dress like that and not show it off.

The thing about gifts is I never feel like I deserve them. I don’t deserve the dress. I don’t deserve to go see Hamilton. I go to therapy in part to try and heal from the long-standing perception that I don’t deserve to be loved. And there are days when I struggle to believe that I deserve to be alive— especially when so many of my Black and Brown siblings aren’t.

But also: I didn’t ask for either gift. I wanted these things, but I never would’ve asked for them, in similar-but-not-quite-the-same ways that I never would’ve asked to be alive or to be a girl or to have fallen in love. Wanting and asking aren’t the same.

These are all gifts, freely given. Nothing I do will ever make me worthy of any of this. But that’s not the point of a gift, is it?

Listen to Manifestra on Spotify. Erin McKeown · Song · 2013.

Take care,

Bridget

Tragedy of an Accidental Thirst Trap

[cw: transphobia, dysphoria]

Hey,

I went out with my girlfriend last night to see The Craft. It was one of those special screenings that comes with food and/or adult beverages that the theater organizes sometimes. (I had this amazing old fashioned made with mezcal, agave, and mole bitters. It was smoky and intense and unlike anything I’ve had before. I followed up with a nice lager to go with the all-you-can-eat pizza they trotted out before showtime.) All in all, it was a lovely way to spend an evening.

She did a sort of casual cosplay of Neve Campbell’s character from the movie, complete with a new purse that doubled as a prop. I didn’t go in quite so hard, opting instead for a floofy black skirt I got from a queer clothing swap, my new-ish pair of Docs, and a vaguely gothy makeup job.

I posted a selfie on Instagram.

I also posted it in a private Facebook group I’m in where trans people post selfies, with the caption “it me, your hot goth gf.” I didn’t see the first comment posted until I woke up this morning and was: struck.

There’s a lot about transition that I knew about before I started, just from talking to trans friends and poking around on the internet. I expected it. I psyched myself up for it. But there have definitely been a few things specific to my transition that I didn’t expect. One of the big ones: being considered attractive by other people.

Honestly, the fact that anyone would consider me attractive is sort of novel. It’s definitely not something I thought was possible pre-transition. Indeed, one of the ways my latent dysphoria manifested was by trying to make myself as unattractive as possible, either by neglect and inattention or through active sabotage. I had convinced myself that anyone being physically attracted to me was impossible, but also that if it WERE possible, I should definitely put a stop to it. I hated my body, and I didn’t want to be alone in that hate.

I’m less than a year into HRT, but it’s already done a number on my face. I’m also noticing small changes in the distribution of fat around my body; I’m becoming, slowly and almost imperceptibly, curvier. I wanted all of this— albeit at a faster pace than what I’m getting— but I still get caught by surprise by how I look. And, more to the point, how I look to other people.

Earlier in the day, I had what was maybe my worst bout of dysphoria since I started transitioning. It started last week when I tweeted about Luna Younger after someone prominent in a soccer fan community I’m part of went on an extended rant about her (replete with deadnaming and misgendering and accusing her mom of child abuse for affirming Luna’s identity). Former friend, his buddies, and a small segment of MAGA Twitter then spent the next several days camped out in my Mentions, alternately accusing me of enabling child abuse and telling me I’m delusional and that calling myself a woman doesn’t actually make me one.

All that was a slow burn that led into Monday morning, when a friend of my girlfriend’s made an unintentionally transphobic joke on one of our silly relationship posts. I tried to brush it off but I… couldn’t. I spent most of the morning and afternoon wanting to curl up into a ball and go to sleep until January. I hated myself and I hated my body, and I felt like nothing I ever did would be good enough. That being AMAB was this curse that I would never, ever escape from.

Going out in public was, naturally, the last thing I wanted to do. But my girlfriend and I had been looking forward to this for over a month. I wanted to go. But I knew going would’ve required more than just sucking it up and getting through it. I needed to actively make myself feel better about myself. In the moment, that meant gothy makeup and a spaghetti strap top to show off my tits. And selfies.

And it felt good. I liked the feeling of (mostly) nailing a look. I liked that my girlfriend felt like she could show me off in public. I liked noticing a couple people at the movie— almost all femme-presenting with varying degrees of queer coding— were checking me out. And, yes, I liked receiving positive comments on my selfies— including one from a stranger who couldn’t contain their thirst. This is a new feeling for me, and one that probably wouldn’t have been possible pre-transition. It’s weird. It’s novel. And I’m not too proud to admit that I am absolutely digging it.

I realize that depending on external validation is a losing game. But transition has forced me to be honest with myself. So, yes, sometimes knowing I’m desired by other people is exactly what I need.

But actually getting that validation is still something I’m getting used to.

Listen to Never Quite Free on Spotify. The Mountain Goats · Song · 2011.

Take care,

Bridget

Motivated Reasoning

Hey,

It's a strange thing realizing that you've spent more than half your life, stretching back to middle school, as the subject of at least one moral panic instigated by the Evangelical Far Right.

I started getting into contemporary paganism when I was 13. This was the mid-90s. Witches were having a big cultural moment. Llewellyn books were selling well. And then the Christian Right got a bug up their asses about Wicca. Things weren't as bad as, like, the Satanic Panic in the 80s, but it was still weird and uncomfortable. George W. Bush, as a candidate, went on national television and denounced Wicca as "not a real religion." It was a trip.

A few years later I came out as queer. That was right around the time Matthew Shepard died. The Westboro Baptist Church was spending a lot of time and money going to funerals of murdered gay kids to laugh at their families for having raised a degenerate. This was a few years before Lawrence v Texas, so there was a brief period of time— which happened to overlap with my first puberty, in a turn of profound irony— where I could've been charged with a crime for getting laid. (If I were alive a few decades earlier, Idaho could’ve put me in prison for the rest of my life.)

Even so, this was the 90s and early 00s. I hoped that this weirdly tense atmosphere was a result of petty culture war bullshit. And that eventually everyone would either find something better to do with their lives or, you know, die. How young and naive of me.

Now I'm out as trans and the federal government is moving to establish legal precedent saying that people like me don't, strictly speaking, exist.

It's just so weird spending such a huge chunk of my life being an object of derision and disgust by people I've never met. (I'm not sure meeting them would help, necessarily, but you know what I mean.)

Weirder still— the reasoning has changed over the course of my life. These people started out hating me for one thing, then switched to another thing, and now there’s this whole entire thing about me wanting to have a job and use a public restroom. The absolute gall of me, right?

It’s almost like these people decided to hate me first and then came up with reasons later.

And the worst thing is: I really don’t want to think about these people. I want to just let them say whatever they want about me, over there, while I go about living my life.

But I can’t just go about my day because people with power are actively working to make that impossible.

So this is the thing I struggle with— figuring out a way to live my life while being aware of how tenuous things are. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy fighting people I don’t know just so I can exist. I realize I have to, because bigots will never let up and I only have so much time on this planet.

If there’s any bright side to always having a target on my back, it’s that this part of the map to liberation has already been drawn. These people have made it so that my being alive is, itself, an act of defiance. Might as well make the most of it.

Listen to Transgender Dysphoria Blues on Spotify. Against Me! · Song · 2014.

Take care,

Bridget

But I'm Not Afraid Anymore

[cw: depression, anxierty, suicidal ideation (no immediate threat), dieting]

Hey,

The thing is, when you hate yourself, everyone around you can tell.

I didn’t really learn that until I was much older. I knew I hated myself, and also didn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to hang out with me on the regular. But obviously they didn’t want to be around me, so I’m clearly justified in hating myself.

You can spend a lot of time thinking about something without ever quite understanding the thing. You stare at the dots long enough and you forget that they’re meant to be connected.

Anyway. For a long time, I hated myself, and I really didn’t want to be alive anymore.

And then a few years ago I almost got my wish.

My gallbladder was finally on the verge of crapping out and I had to spend a week and a half in the hospital, first to have it taken out and then recover from it being taken out.

This all happened at the tail end of a really dark time in my life. I had failed out of grad school because my mental illness had become so debilitating that I couldn’t get out of bed. Soon after, I was told to leave the intentional community I was a part of. I spent the next year and change being functionally homeless, then a couple months being literally homeless, before finally calling my parents (who I had been No Contact with for several years because… let’s just say I had valid reasons). I had shelter, but it came at a great personal cost.

All the while, something that had been gnawing at the back of my mind since at least 2009 was getting louder and more difficult to ignore.

So I was still functionally homeless, staying with emotionally abusive parents, scraping together content mill jobs for any bit of money I could get, and weighed down with the inscrutable feeling that I should be living a different life.

And then my gallbladder exploded.

For years, I had been pretty sure that I would’ve been okay with being dead. I didn’t want to kill myself, per se, but if I happened to die by sickness or misadventure, I would’ve went without a fight. And when my bluff was called, I balked.

After I came home, I had to have a conversation with myself that I had been dreading for years. I had to ask myself, directly, if I wanted to be alive. In that moment, I felt like I had to answer honestly. And if the answer was Yes, I knew I would have to reorder my entire life around making that answer true and meaningful.

Once I felt well enough to be social again, I went and hung out with a friend for their birthday. I ran into another friend who I hadn’t seen in years. In that interim, she had started transitioning.

Reconnecting with her did two things.

First, I found a word for the thing that had been gnawing at me for years.

And second, it showed me that someone could do that thing and be happy.

I started telling people a few weeks later. I went out with friends for New Years Eve later that year wearing makeup and asking people to use they/them pronouns. The following spring, the day after my 33rd birthday, I came out publicly as genderqueer. A few years later I started HRT. Soon after that, I changed my name to Bridget.

Transition is a gift. Not every trans person necessarily feels that way, but it absolutely is for me. It wasn’t just about being able to live as my actual gender. Transition had a series of knock-on affects driven by this newfound sense of… for lack of a better phrase, giving a shit. All of a sudden, I actually cared about my body and what happened to it. I started eating better and walking more. I connected with a therapist to confront some of my emotional hurt. I started caring about how I looked, how I smelled, in a way I never did before. And I stopped walling myself off from the people who cared about me.

Now, for maybe the first time ever, I have a life worth living.

The other thing is, when you start to love yourself, people around you can also tell.

Last week my girlfriend and I went out to dinner. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I threw myself together quick as I could— black polka dot skirt, geeky t-shirt, denim jacket, a quick dab of eyeshadow— and hopped in the car. It was a warm night, one of the last ones before fall began in earnest, and we had the windows down. I connected my phone to her car radio and pulled up Spotify.

The first song came up. The wind was whistling around us, carrying the scent of four-hour-old rain and a promise of something after. She grabbed my hand as the song hit the first verse.

All I could think was, “This is it. This is why I stayed alive.”

Listen to Heaven Is A Place On Earth on Spotify. Belinda Carlisle · Song · 1987.

Take care,

Bridget