I started transitioning during the pandemic [and] a lot of my social and other developmental goals were on hold during that time as the world was in survival mode for a couple years. As a result, I’m turning 30 this year but it feels like I should be turning 27, and also it feels in some ways like I should be turning 19 while I try to figure out what it means to be becoming a woman? […] Sometimes I feel like I skipped over my early 20s by pretending to be more adult than I was just to appease the people around me, and now I have to go back and do that identity exploration. […] I was wondering what your experience with development and chronology has felt like in these past years and what thoughts or advice you might have on giving ourselves compassion and grace as we try to understand ourselves. [shortened]
I often feel shame that I’m not “adult” enough. Ugh why do I use tiger and pig oven mitts I picked up from a child’s room at an estate sale two years ago? When will I be able to afford to reupholster the living room couch, which is full of holes & stains? Why don’t I own a stunning newly-renovated Brooklyn brownstone like Suleika Jaouad and Jon Batiste, both just a few years older than me? I feel behind in my career as well—why don’t I have a book published? In my day job I’m situated toward the bottom rungs of the nonprofit world, since most of my work experience was piecemeal all those years I was playing music in my band.
It can feel infantilizing to be an artist or creative in a world that does not value what I value, let alone my work. Where I’m supposed to project assurance and stability when my art accepts and probes the unknowable. Where I don’t have enough space for personal exploration, when I expend so much of my energy just trying to meet my basic needs.
I think the artist is always anachronistic. Concerned with processing the past, with memories, and with childhood. In her new book The Light Room, Kate Zambreno speaks about this in reference to Joseph Cornell and his shadow boxes full of tiny plastic toys and ephemera from his boyhood. David Wojnarowicz too, he kept his childhood box of treasures under his bed until his death.
Other than feeling out of step with the world, I feel behind in knowing myself because many of my genuine interests weren’t embraced by my caregivers. Since my parents didn’t believe art was a feasible career, I spent most of my youth/ early adulthood prepping to enter a buttoned-up adult world I had and have no rightful place in. That is antithetical to my nature. My mom told me to buy a pantsuit and pantyhose when I was 16. My dad told me to get a linkedin when I was 17. I said writer they said lawyer. Like that quote from Celine in Before Sunrise:
I’d say to my dad, I want to be a writer, and he’d say journalist. I’d say, I want to have a refuge for stray cats, and he’d say veterinarian. I’d say I want to be an actress, and he’d say TV newscaster. It was this constant conversion of my fanciful ambitions into these practical money-making ventures.
I was a kid who wanted to write stories and dye my hair blue. I wish I knew that was ok, I wish I was able to explore those parts of myself more, so I could earlier accept my nature. So I could take accountability for my interests and vocation, and be more able to create my own definition of adulthood.
It sounds like you’ve had similar experiences, forcing yourself into an “adulthood” that was not made for you, your interests, or your gender expression. I can’t speak to queer time personally, but it’s something the writer Michelle Tea speaks about often, her inability to “grow up” properly, her shame & eventual understanding that her life will never follow a linear heteronormative path. In a widely-circulated quote from her novel Black Wave she writes:
It [was] so hard for a queer person to become an adult… They didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. They didn’t buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.
Tbh that definition of queer adulthood doesn’t sound so bad to me, but, of course, these aren’t your only options now. As for what your options are, you get to choose.
And how do you give yourself compassion and grace as you try to know what to choose, who to be? Such a fantastic question. The fact that you even asked is an act of care toward yourself, an act of understanding that you are inherently valuable and worth loving. I do hope you know that.
Some ways I give myself compassion are through journaling, through writing down negative internal monologues and cleansing my system of them, even if it’s temporary. I try to surround myself with people who make me feel special and loved. I try to engage in activities that make me happy & to say no when I don’t want to do something. And if I have to do something I don’t want to do I bring chocolate and I keep my journal nearby to touch down into self, even if it’s only for thirty seconds. I also have to credit the book Women Who Run With the Wolves for helping me begin to access my power.
The astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo, on a recent episode of Ghost of a Podcast, wrote about how most of us don’t accept our true natures until we’re in our mid-thirties, at least. We don’t accept the things about ourselves we view as shameful and embarrassing, the tone of our voice, our forgetfulness, our weight, our neediness. What would it look like if you valued your uncertainty? A word that’s thrown around a lot in therapeutic settings is “curiosity.” What would it look like if you viewed your process of deepening into womanhood with “curiosity” instead of judgement? Like a journalist, taking notes, studying your subject, yourself. This kind of sustained attention is an act of love.