Crying on my birthday

Crying on my birthday

I’m making myself sob.

Today is my 29th birthday. It’s also the five-year anniversary of starting Hormone Replacement Therapy, undoubtedly the single most decisive action I’ve ever taken in my entire life. Five years ago today, I steered myself onto a path that was many years in the making, and yet one whose trajectory still bewilders me. It’s hard to believe I’m really here.

Right now I’m creating a playlist for myself on the fly, selecting songs that have proven, in some form or fashion, instrumental in becoming the person I am today. It’s a strange feeling, to know that every single song I turn to is so freighted with significance, that I am somehow deliberately able to put on any number of tracks that fast bring a tear to my eye. Five years ago, this almost certainly wouldn’t be possible. My emotions were elusive, and my ability to feel them even more so. While I could readily narrate within my brain what I was “feeling,” those scare quotes around my heart were ever-present. Even in the most impassioned of moments, it was rare that I’d meaningfully encounter the genuine heft of what I was experiencing, precisely what you would hope and expect of your innermost feelings. That absence, more than any other aspect of transitioning, is what ultimately prodded me to take a leap into the unknown. That trust in myself, in my ability to still be there on the other side, is a belief that feels almost magical five years on.

I put on “Annie” by Neon Indian, chuckle to myself as I picture teenage me standing astride Alan Palomo at a show, both eyes closed, four thumbs up between the two of us, and hear my name conjured in an image of a woman haunting the night, me at my most feral. I go to Ezra Furman’s “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” a song where she sings about “considering ditching Ezra/and going by Esme,” and remember riding a Brown Line train over the Chicago River, a new name emerging from the one my parents had gifted me, and the loving nicknames I’d been bestowed in college. Another Ezra song, “Body Was Made,” where she sings about a “recurrent desire never totally tamed,” is the one I remember from a day in May 2018 when I read the list of changes brought on by HRT, deciding I had “a need to become something totally new/a mysterious process that don’t involve you.” of Montreal’s “An Eluardian Instance” reminds me of going to Twist and Shout Records in Denver for my mom and I’s birthday 15 years ago, and my first encounter with the kind of kaleidoscopic queerness that only made itself real in my own life many years later.

More presently, I put on the live recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Mary’s Place” from August 11 this year. It’s a song that I didn’t know before this year, but with multiple chances to see Bruce with Elise, first with their family in Dublin, then twice more at Wrigley Field just three months ago, it’s one that’s become integral to my life. On that night in August, I thought ahead to where I’d be a few months into the future, with Elise and our closest friends and family, getting married at Pilsen Community Books, one of my favorite places in the world. The song conjures the scene perfectly: “Familiar faces around me/laughter fills the air/your loving grace surrounds me/everybody is here.”

Last weekend, as Elise and I traded our vows in front of those who had traveled to Chicago to celebrate us coming together, I traveled back to that performance in my mind. While the show two nights before had been incredible, showing me that I’d properly done my homework well enough to sing along to many more songs, I’d felt off through the first half of the second show. We’d been gifted floor seats from Elise’s dad, close enough to the stage that I snuck my way into a pic of the Boss and the crowd. We got in line at 1:30 that afternoon; by the time Bruce came on stage more than six hours later, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Bruce played songs that weren’t on the setlist two nights before, covers that I didn’t know, yet seemingly everyone around me cherished, and I felt out of place, uncertain I could even get through the end of the show.

Then, as the opening notes of “Mary’s Place” kicked in, a dam broke within me. Every doubt I’d felt, every stress about my body breaking down on the hardened plastic flooring, melted away in an instant, as the magic of Bruce’s words and sounds enveloped me. I wrapped my arms around Elise, so grateful we were together in that moment, amazed just to be there with them, knowing how far we’d traveled to get there. To know that the song would then burrow through time to the moment we’d be with our loved ones just a few months later, and now again in this moment as I write these words, feels unreal to me. I’m not sure that I can attest to the reality of time travel in any meaningful sense – still, all the same, I am in each and every moment with all of these songs as I play them again right now, present to my heart’s ability to make these jumps across time and space.

I was born on my mom’s 25th birthday. Four years ago, on the first anniversary of starting HRT and on my own 25th birthday, I traveled by myself to New Orleans, trying to take stock of the whirlwind of a year of a second puberty that had just transpired. It seemed impossible to imagine my mom being ready to bring me into the world at that same moment in her own life; all the same, to know that I was there a quarter-century later, following in her footsteps in my own way, felt so surreal to me.

Four years further in, a full half-decade into this absurd journey, and things feel only marginally less impossible to imagine. Still, in this moment I feel a deep and abiding peace within myself. No matter where life goes from here, no matter how dark and ominous the wider world feels at each turn today, I am grateful for the time that’s been gifted me, and all of the loving companionship that has made this passage possible. Thanks for joining me.

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Bonus round: "I'm not crying, you're crying," a playlist

  • Neon Indian, "Annie"
  • Ezra Furman, "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend"
  • of Montreal, "An Eluardian Instance"
  • Ezra Furman, "Body Was Made"
  • Pansy, "Woman of Ur Dreams
  • Bruce Springsteen, "Mary's Place" (especially a good live version)
  • Penguin Cafe Orchestra, "Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter"
  • Angel Olsen, "Chance"
  • Cocteau Twins, "Alonysius"