Staying Afraid

Hey,

My working life has been rough.

I spent the better part of a decade, starting at age 17, working retail customer service. I struggled in those jobs; for a variety of reasons, only a few of which were within my ability to control. I went to college— at age 24— in part because I knew there was no future for me in retail, and that if I wanted to, you know, eat and stuff, I needed a new plan.

So I went to art school in my mid-20s, hoping that it would set me up, at the very least, for some white color job that I wouldn’t completely hate. The 2008 financial crisis hit near the beginning of my second year in school, so those modest dreams evaporated quickly.

But I also learned in my time there that a few problems I dealt with in retail were following me into my new career in… digital media? Academia? I couldn’t tell you for sure.

What I can tell you is that I was strongly advised— some might say bullied— into changing majors halfway through undergrad because too many of my colleagues refused to work with me on group projects. (I was a Game Design major, and making video games is really hard to do by yourself.) I was passed over for a web developer position at the school newspaper for “culture fit” reasons. (I found out later it was because of my weight.) The teachers who made a point to mentor students in my department conspicuously declined to work with me in that capacity. I graduated with no real career prospects besides an offer for a graduate program, for reasons that were largely unrelated to the quality of my work.

I took that offer for a spot in an MFA program. I lasted less than a year. As it turns out, being so deep in depression that you can’t get out of bed for several months can have a detrimental affect on your work.

I left grad school. Soon after that I was homeless. I couldn’t work even if I wanted to.

When I finally got a regular place to stay— I would’t exactly call it a home, but it was off the streets— I tried to get back to work. And I soon discovered that I was functionally unemployable.

I got into freelance writing mostly for that reason. I was broke, and recently homeless, and I needed money. Nobody wanted to give me a job. So I went and made my own.

I didn’t plan on getting into sports journalism— I just sort of fell into it. I sent out feelers and pitches, and soccer writing pitches were the first ones to yield actual money and opportunities, and eventually that just became my job. That fact always fed into my impostor syndrome; I knew people who were busting their ass to get even a sliver of the success that I garnered largely by accident.

Even so, the past few years were tough. I would pitch outlets I knew I could deliver good work for and never got responses. I’ve been laid off twice. I applied for a staff position at a major outlet that would’ve paid me an actual living wage to do this work; I got really far into the application process before they finally just stopped responding to my emails.

Finally, things hit the fan within the past couple of months. At Christmas, I had three stable writing gigs. One month later, I was down to one. One gig I left voluntarily, with my departure announced many months in advance. The other was a lay-off at a publication that is in the process of shutting down.

I spent six years trying to make a career in soccer writing work, and I haven’t yet. At times it still feels like I haven’t really broken in. Meanwhile, all I have to show for my work right now are poverty wages and an informal blacklist kept by people who won’t entertain pitches from, uh, people like me.

I’ve spent most of my adult life feeling like I was too broken for adult life. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a way to survive capitalism, because I was always going to be a bad culture fit everywhere I went. All of my old insecurities came flooding back, and I had to find a way to power through it; not just for my own sake, but because I’m currently trying to build a life with a woman I love, and I literally could not afford to let this derail that.

I try very hard to be aware of my personal limitations and how they bump up against a world that has been largely hostile toward me, even before I came out as trans. I keep those limitations in mind not to weigh myself down, but to be able to name the problems I have to work around. Yet, try as I might, I can’t always help that awareness translating into creeping despair. It’s too tempting to look at the difficult road and decide that it’s actually just impassable.

Overcoming that despair is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in the past year and change. But I have to do it. Not least because it pays off sometimes.

It’s certainly paying off now. A couple weeks ago I was offered a position at a local LGBTQ community health clinic, and I accepted. My first day is tomorrow.

(Incidentally: my first full week at the new job will end on my 37th birthday.)

This is my first actual, fill-out-a-W4-form kind of job in almost 11 years. It’s also my first since I started transitioning— which means I now have to try to navigate the working world as a woman.

I’m scared that I’m going to screw this up. I’m scared that I’ve been out of the mainstream labor force for so long that I won’t know what to do or how to act. I’m scared that everything people used to say about me behind my back is actually true and it’s going to start happening at this new job as well. I’m scared that I’m going to try my best and that it will never, ever be enough. I’m scared this will blow up in my face and then I won’t know what to do next.

I’m scared. Well and truly scared.

And I’m going to try and do it anyway.

Listen to The Real Me on Spotify. Radio Stars · Song · 2013.

Take care,

Bridget

Painting The Walls

Hey,

A while back— not long before I came out publicly as nonbinary— there was a webcomic floating around on social media that hit me like a ton of bricks.

[Source for the original post here, link to the artist’s portfolio site here.]

When I was younger there were things I wanted to do to look the way I wanted to look but I never actually did them. I never got piercings. I didn’t get a tattoo until I was 28, and it’s unfinished, and I got it mostly because a former friend was apprenticing and needed practice. I stuck with the same basic uniform for years— jeans, black t-shirt— because trying to find outfits I liked was too daunting. I purposefully made myself look frumpy and unkempt. Even tending to my hair, the one part of my body that I actually liked and was proud of, felt like more hassle than it was worth.

A potent combination of depression & anxiety, executive dysfunction, and gender dysphoria made it feel like none of that was ever worth the effort. I was always going to be ugly and gross, and tattoos and cute outfits and nice hair would never change that, so why bother.

My body felt like a cheap, shitty rental. There was no point in making it look nice. And it’s not like I was going to be here for long anyway.

Coming out as trans was life-changing (and life-saving) for a number of reasons, and one was that, at long last, my body finally started to feel like a home.

I started to rethink how I dressed— not just to present as my correct gender, but to expand my idea of what kind of clothes I could wear and look good in. It’s such an obvious thing, but wearing colors other than black felt radical and liberating in a way I’m almost embarrassed to admit.

I stopped feeling bad about dyeing my hair and also felt comfortable enough in my femininity to try out a hair style other than “long.” I recognized that taking care of my hair, and making it stand out, wasn’t a half-measure or a coping mechanism. My hair is a source of power and confidence for me, and once I recognized that, I felt better about investing in it.

And I finally started to feel like I could start painting the walls and doing a bit of remodeling.

All this to say: I put a hole in my face last weekend.

Getting my septum pierced is something I’ve been wanting to do for years, and never did. Because why bother, right?

It’s not a transition milestone, but it feels like one. My body doesn’t feel like a cheap rental anymore. It feels like home.

Listen to White Cedar on Spotify. The Mountain Goats · Song · 2012.

Take care,

Bridget

Planting Year

Hey,

It’s not a tradition as such, but there’s a pattern I often fall into around the same time every year. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and sometimes stretching into mid-January, I get back into video games. I don’t play much during the rest of the year— certainly not as much as I did when I was younger— but there’s something about late December and early January where it’s all I want to do. I usually chalk it up to fatigue and wanting a brief vacation from my brain; after the rollercoaster that was 2019, that familiar tired feeling returned in a big way. I haven’t been able to indulge last year due to my Xbox 360 kicking the bucket, but my new living situation comes with an enticing fringe benefit— access to a PS4.

And so, in the couple of weeks after Christmas (which included a whole week in which I had the house all to myself), I’ve revisited Skyrim.

I first played it a few years ago (on my now-nearly-dead 360) but I didn’t quite get the full experience. I blew through the main quest, thinking I would get to all the side quests after I finished the story, and then just never went exploring. I moved on to other things, and then my console died, and that was that.

This time around I’m only grudgingly following the main quest. I’ve spent most of my time on my current game doing side quests— including a lot of wandering around the map, stumbling across dungeons and clearing them out, racking up treasure and XP— but also focusing on personal projects. I built up my Smithing skill mostly for the sake of having an area of expertise other than swinging an axe and killing monsters. I did some errands just to ingratiate myself with a local Jarl enough to buy some land, and then proceeded to build a house on it. I approached an NPC that my character had built a working relationship with and asked her to marry me. We now live in that house I built, two queer sword ladies with some adopted children and a cow. There’s always fresh baked bread in that house.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy the developers had intended to enable with this game, but here we are.

Eventually I’ll have to finish the main story. And I will. But for now I’m content to build up skills and have smaller adventures and settle into this new home.

***

A lot of my emotional energy in 2019 was taken up by two big things— transition, and a new relationship. At my friend’s New Years’ Eve party, I started thinking about what 2020 will look like. I realized I don’t really have any other big things coming up this year.

Which is to say, I don’t have any big professional or personal happenings that will be, for lack of a better term, complete stories onto themselves. Not like falling in love was. Not like telling everyone I’m a girl was.

What I do have coming up this year is the start of several big things which won’t really bloom for another few years.

I feel like 2020, to borrow from a gardener friend of mine, is going to be a planting year.

So in the interests of transparency and accountability, here is what I’m going to be working on this year:

• Get at least part of the way there on my legal name change. (There are complications, which I won’t get into here, that make this project difficult. But I want this, so I’m settling in for the long haul.)

• Build up a freelance writing beat outside of soccer.

• Write more fiction, including a good start on my big fiction project (which I won’t talk about just yet).

• Look for, and hopefully land, a day job. This is a big one for me; I love writing and I’m grateful I’ve been able to pay some bills with it, but I’m coming to realize that no one is presently willing to pay me a living wage to write about soccer, and that might never change. With some anticipated big changes in my personal life coming in the next few years, I need to be able to count on a stable paycheck in order to make those things possible. Also, frankly, I’ve been in survival mode for my entire adult life, and I’m done with that. I’m ready to thrive, you know?

• I don’t have a particularly good track record with relationships, and more than once I found myself in the position of not knowing what to do or where to go once the New Relationship Energy wears off. That’s a pattern I don’t care to repeat. The rush of new love carried me through 2019, and now I feel like it’s time to put that energy to work. So, a big priority for me is putting more personal resources and bandwidth into the relationship with an eye toward building something to last.

• And while relationships require two (or more) people to put in the work, some of that is going to entail work I do on myself this year. Right before Christmas, I was diagnosed with PTSD. While I’m grateful to have the diagnosis, because it opens up resources that might not have been available without it, seeing it on my chart hit me like a ton of bricks. A big part of the work of 2020 is addressing my trauma, coming to terms with it, and beginning the long and slow process of healing from it.

Most of this won’t pay off in 2020. It’s all prepping the soil for 2021, and 2025, and 2030, and beyond. After going through much of my life feeling incapable of planning for the future, of believing that Not Dying was the best I could hope for in a given year, this feels like wholly unfamiliar territory. It’s frightening. It’s nourishing. It’s going to mean a lot of work.

Listen to Skyrim Tavern Song - Dragonborn on Spotify. Jeff Winner · Song · 2015.

Take care,

Bridget

The Longest Night

Hey,

My deepest, darkest secret is that I really love this time of year.

The reasons why I love this season have changed over the years. When I was a kid it was about falling asleep under the Christmas tree and hoping Santa remembered where I lived. When I embraced my Pagan faith, Christmas transposed to Yule, and I mostly carried on as before. But I didn’t quite have the appreciation for the Solstice that I do know. I think that’s because I was thought of Yule as a translation for Christmas; in my latter years I realized that it’s actually closer to Advent. A time of waiting for what’s next.

One year ago today I started hormone replacement therapy.

The funny thing is that it wasn’t even supposed to happen that quickly. I knew I wanted to start it after I moved into my new place— in fact I moved out in large part because I wanted to start HRT and I didn’t feel safe doing so where I had been living— but it was something I had in mind for the new year. Maybe before my birthday. Maybe before spring. But a few days after I hosted my first Yule party last year (and my first time hosting any kind of social gather since moving out) I had a doctor’s appointment for something unrelated and I left with a prescription for estradiol and spironolactone.

I took my first dose the next morning. Three days after that Yule party in which I made an unspoken oath to myself during the symbel to get the ball rolling on transition. Less than three weeks after I moved in to that new place. I didn’t plan on it happening that quickly, but when my doctor asked me if I was ready to go ahead, I didn’t hesitate.

And I’m glad I did, if for no other reason than for the symbolic resonance. 

I have three transition anniversaries now. The other two are in Spring; March 7th is the day I told everyone that I wasn’t actually a guy, and March 29th is the day I told everyone my name is Bridget. Spring feels like a good time for putting words to things. But I know now that the work begins well before the naming. You can’t name something that isn’t there, and every something is born from the dark.

And so, having this trans anniversary fall right around Yule feels good and right. The Solstice is the time of deepest darkness and the signal of the return of the light. Whoever you were before is dead. The world you knew before is gone. Something new is coming, but it’s not here yet. The waiting is part of it. But it’s not an empty promise; we are given a sign that what we hope for will come. That’s Yule. That’s Christmas. That’s taking your first dose of estrogen and rushing to look in the mirror and seeing no visible changes.

That all feels so much more literal this year. There’s a feeling common among trans folks, where your memories start feel like they belonged to someone else. The gap between who you were and who you are starts to feel so wide that you start wondering how you ever got here. I look at what my face looked like less than a year ago and it somehow looks like me and someone else entirely, all at the same time. The days were getting longer but you couldn’t tell back then, because they were only getting longer a few seconds at a time.

It’s so easy to get discouraged on HRT because you keep looking at the same face every day and it feels like nothing’s happening. Then one day you look up and it’s summer. It’s you.

Every year your world dies, and every year a new one emerges around you. Right now is the deep breath before the next thing. You won’t notice the changes from one day to the next, but then you’ll look up and see that it’s still light out. 

Take that breath. Love who you were, and let them die. Spring is coming.

Listen to Air on Spotify. Erin McKeown · Song · 2005.

Take care,

Bridget

It's Just Hair

Hey,

One of the more horrifying things for me about the Luna Younger story is a particular detail of the abuse— and I have zero qualms referring to it as abuse— she suffers from her father. When the 7-year-old trans girl is forced to leave her mom as per the custody agreement in place, her father makes a point forcibly shaving her head to make her look more masculine.

As I mentioned on Twitter back in October, that detail about her hair hit home.

When I was little I had zero say in what I could do with my hair. My mom cut my hair every month, an uneven and unflattering bowl cut that she did in the kitchen using fabric scissors. Once a year she would “splurge” and send me to a SuperCuts, telling the stylist to give me the same haircut she gives me at home.

When I was about 12 I stopped submitting to those cuts and started growing my hair out. I didn’t know I was trans back then— my very early questions about gender wouldn’t really bubble to the surface until sophomore year of high school, when I got myself sent home for wearing a skirt to class— but I knew I didn’t want be seen as a typical boy. My mom wasn’t happy, and she made that clear every single day that I lived under her roof. I had an uncle who would “joke” about holding me down and cutting my hair off to make me look “normal” again. For years, whenever he saw me, he would make a scissor-cutting gesture with his index and middle fingers and say “snip snip!” in a taunting sing-song voice. Said uncle had long hair himself, but that was beside the point. It was never about looks for him (or my mom). It was about power.

(This is the same uncle who, earlier this year, outed me as trans to my mom without my consent, apparently for no other reason than because he could.)

I kept my hair long well through adulthood. Partly due to repressed dysphoria and partly due to comorbid depression and poor self esteem, I never really knew what to do with my hair beyond that. All I knew was that having it long was non-negotiable. Starting in my teens and carrying on well into my 20s, I tied it back into a ponytail, because it was the only thing I can think of to do that didn’t require either a lot of work, posing questions I didn’t want answered, or giving up the ghost and cutting it.

But as an overweight masc-presenting person with long hair tied back into a ponytail who had stereotypically geeky interests, I inadvertently sent signals to others about what kind of person I was that didn’t quite match my internal reality. At some point I gave up on the ponytail. Late in my 20s, I started dyeing my hair whenever I could sweet-talk a friend into helping me with it. It was closer to what I was looking for, but there were still some missing pieces.

Earlier in the decade, queer femmes sporting undercuts had A Moment. It was one of those looks that inspired an all-too-familiar feeling for me: “gosh, I wish I could pull that off.” But there was no way. Even after I came out as nonbinary, I still read mostly as masculine. Even with long hair, even with occasional lip gloss. (The beard I had back then tended to override everything else.) I worried that being a mostly masc-presenting person with an undercut would, uh, send the wrong message. And I wasn’t totally sure to what extent I could claim femininity; I was still working through some complicated feelings, all of which were tinged by a deep-seated worry that I was appropriating trans identity and queerness.

I was also still stuck on this idea that hair length was the only means I had to signal to other people that I wasn’t, strictly speaking, a guy. Even in very recent years, when I started going to a salon once or twice a year to get my hair dyed. I never asked for it to be cut or styled; at most, I’d ask for a trim at the edges to get rid of split ends, and even then, I was terrified at the idea of losing too much length.

After I realized I was a trans woman, and started being open and public about that, I started feeling like I had more options available to me. Like maybe I could experiment a bit and see what being a girl actually meant to me. That was what was running through my head when I saw a photo of a queer femme sporting an asymmetrical bob with an undercut on the side.

My usual script started to play out. “Oh, I wish I could pull off something like that.”

But then:

“Well. Why can’t I?”

Long story short: I got my hair did yesterday.

This is the first time I’ve had it cut above my shoulders in at least a decade. It’s the first time I’ve had any part of my head shaved ever.

Past me likely would’ve been horrified at what I’ve done. And indeed, when my stylist first took her razor to the side of my head— the undercut was the very first thing she did during my visit— I had a moment of extreme terror.

But the thing is, it passed.

I really like this look. Besides the color— which my stylist did an amazing job of— I like how genderfucky it makes me look. I like the wavy layers. I like how it frames my face. I like that it gives me some versatility in terms of how I style it at home.

But mostly, I feel a sense of relief. I’ve spent so many years feeling like I had to keep my hair extremely long, because that was all I had to work with. Now I don’t feel like I have as much to prove. That feeling of freedom means everything to me right now.

And anyway: if I end up not liking it, it’s just hair. It will grow back.

Listen to True Trans Soul Rebel on Spotify. Against Me! · Song · 2014.

Take care,

Bridget