the Null Future

about sneaky dysphoria, bread, free apps on your phone, and grey hair

the universe is mostly empty space - Popular Mechanics

Sometime around my early teen years I began to have a sense of the future. I could feel it the way you can smell bread baking in the oven. You don’t need to see it to understand that it exists, that it will be hot and delicious, that you will cut off a thick slice and butter it and enjoy its consumption. Oddly though, it wasn’t the presence of the future I could sense but rather the lack of it.

When I closed my eyes and used my mind to gaze forward – one year, ten years, a dozen – there was only nothingness.

At first these moments opened up panic in my chest; my breathing restricted, my brain a swirl of what-could-this-danger-be while I tried to strategize my way out of it. Of course there will be a tomorrow. Of course I’ll be alive and just fine. Of course I’m just freaking out for no reason.

If I calmed myself sufficiently, I’d fall asleep (or finish class, or do whatever the next thing was), and without fail tomorrow would show up.

But with age this growing sense of unease only increased.

At times I would sit with the terror of it and stare headlong into the nothingness that was tomorrow or next month or next year. It was a gaping chasm of black. Was anyone alive out there? But maybe that wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t.

I should clear this up – I was never specifically suicidal as a kid or young adult. It actually took me years to get in touch with the real concept of ending my own life, and so I can say with certainty, this was not it. The lack of a future with me in it wasn’t something I was wishing for or trying to engineer, it simply was (or wasn’t, technically), and I couldn’t understand how I could sense it (or NOT sense it, really), and I absolutely had no idea what to do about it.

You know I didn’t confess this to anyone. What would you have said anyway? “Oh, you. Always worrying. The sun will rise, life will go on, you’ll be just fine.” I mean, that’s what the voice in my head tried to say, too. It was the reasonable position to take, even if I never bought it.

You don’t really know if tomorrow is coming.

But this wasn’t about an apocalypse or a comet smashing into the planet. It wasn’t about anyone else. This was all me.

I had no future.

It’s important for me to pair this with another fear I carry with me (still). Okay, yes, I’m still afraid of clowns, but that’s not the one I mean. It’s the mother thing. You’ll turn into your mother, says that haunting little voice. You sound like her. You complain the same way she does. She’s over the top too, you know. And the worst of them all, you’re starting to look like your mother now, too.

That one? Yeah, that one could gnaw me right down to my bones with loathing and disgust and shame, and I often warned the people closest to me (but, like, obviously not my mother) never to joke about it because of my sensitivity to the topic. I just didn’t tell them that the physical aspects of that nightmare were worse than anything.

And even divulging such vulnerability to the people I loved, I never considered telling them about the lack of a future. It felt silly. Who does this? Who sits around and worries about the fact that they can’t see or feel their own future?

But good god almighty I did, and I did it so often you’d think I’d have driven myself insane. Sometimes I would face a string of sleepless nights in abject horror that this is it, I’m really not going to make it past tonight.

And then morning would show up, and I’d feel like a fool, and (worse) I’d also feel ripped off like my sense of that absent future was a misalignment somewhere in my body or my brain, that it was wrong and not tuned into reality, but that would be like telling me that my sense of smell wasn’t working and no, that isn’t freshly baked bread coming out of the oven when I KNEW IT WAS.

Until.

One day (ridiculously NOT long ago) I installed a free app on my phone. Free? Yes, I’m a cheapskate. Frugal, maybe. Tightwad? Seems harsh, but… yeah, fair. I was hoping to use it to see what I’d look like with facial hair.

Gimme a break, plenty of transguys do this. I’m hardly the first.

Free apps for beard filters aren’t very good. I could do better (ahem… *could* meaning gosh of course I haven’t really) with a printout and some crayons. But I tried all the colors and styles and whatever options it offered (plus all the ads), until I stumbled on a different option I hadn’t considered. It was an age filter. I could see myself as an old person.

Wait, let me say that a different way.

I could see myself as an old man.

And I did. The beard lightened to grey, my hairline receded a bit. It added some wrinkles and a dose of sagging, and it was safe to assume that I was staring headlong at 60-something me. Maybe older. I sat with that picture for a long time, just watching it, thinking, waiting for something perhaps. It was a slow realization, an epiphany (which is a stretch after the life-altering epiphany of coming out to myself as transgender).

I had a future. And in that future I was an old man.

I no longer have to face an uncertain tomorrow filled with terror and loathing at becoming an old woman. That doesn’t have to happen. That one simple realization was such a relief that my body figured out how to breathe like it hadn’t done since childhood. An invisible weight I’d been shouldering for decades vanished. Small things that might ordinarily be bothersome (like going bald or finding white or grey hairs) changed to joyous sights on a lifelong road trip that no longer has a painful destination. Maybe the destination itself is a myth. The journey, however, is illuminated in the light of curiosity and wonder. I want that journey. I want the future with that old man in it.

There are still moments in my life where the future seems murky and uncertain. We all have those feelings. But that future of mine isn’t blank or null or absent. It exists, and so do I.

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There are many misconceptions about what it means to transition as a transgender person, the largest of which are the benefits of social transitioning and having access to gender affirming healthcare. Both of those are a factor in the essay above. To see ourselves wholly, as the people we are, trans folks need to be recognized by others. This is often as simple as hearing the correct pronouns and names we have expressed for ourselves (social transition), which is best supported by the people in our lives who already know us. But to look in the mirror and see someone familiar and real staring back, many of us need to access gender affirming healthcare. This helps us see ourselves, and it helps the anonymous world around us see and gender us correctly, too. There are many harmful pieces of legislation in the United States and around the world making social transitioning and gender affirming healthcare illegal, inaccessible, or overly complex for those who don’t have the privilege or ability to jump through the hoops designed to make things harder. You can help make this easier by…

• Voting for political candidates who support the LGBTQIA2S+ community

• Calling or writing to your state representatives when queer legislation (for or against) is being considered in your state

• Donating to non-profit organizations like the Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project

• Subscribing to newsletters like Erin in the Morning, Amplify Respect: Non-Binary Community, navel gazing, and That Anna Marie Newsletter.

• Sharing this newsletter with others

• Supporting the trans and queer folks in your community by educating yourself without asking them to educate you (bonus, you’re already here making that happen!)

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Your trans friend,

Robin