I don't know how it's possible for life to keep getting both harder and better, I just know that it is possible.
I don't mind, particularly. I'm a stubborn old bird, and as long as the quantity of the better keeps rising in proportion to the harder, I can maintain my equilibrium. 2024 was a bit over the top on this score, though.
For the prior few years I had been cocooning. It's a luxury I had available to me by virtue of the fact that I had already sleepwalked into a situation where I was living in near-total social isolation. So when I packed up and moved a thousand kilometres to a city where I knew nobody, with no particularly well-developed plan for what I was going to do with my life, I can't imagine anybody thought it odd. Well, no more odd than anything else about me.
Cocooning is a luxury few trans people get to enjoy. I am always struck by the way people can sort themselves out while still keeping their work, social, and family lives going at full tilt. It's rather like disassembling and reassembling a car to a completely different design while you're inside it and hurtling along a motorway. I am in awe of that degree of bravery.
Still, I couldn't stay cocooned forever. For one thing, it seemed shamefully dishonest. For another, I simply couldn't bear to keep up the performance. If the dam's eventually going to burst no matter what you do, it's prudent to prepare and ensure it happens in a controlled way at a time of your choosing.
According to my copy of the Big Book O' Transgender Ideology, among we transgenderists this is called "social transition". Even with the advantage of being able to do it as a series of small, manageable "Ta-Da!" moments, I don't think I've done a particularly good job of it. And although I started in early 2024, I've still quite a way to go. And I've had it easier than anybody I know.
Anybody who claims that transition is so seductively easy that hordes of impressionable youth are doing it on a whim can get bent. Anecdotally (frequently the only source of useful data we have on trans issues) the opposite seems far more common. I've heard of (or from) plenty of people who have resigned themselves to living out the rest of their lives under a shroud of self-loathing, with the constant pain of inauthenticity, rather than risk losing everything they have. Every story is heartbreaking.
Another thing that's difficult is ADHD. For a long, long time I'd known enough about it to think the symptoms sounded very familiar, but I either didn't think there was anything much that could be done about it (not at my time of life, anyway), or didn't care about myself enough to consider it worth investigating. However, I recently heard somebody say something to the effect of "if I'd known one pill a day could make such a difference, I would have sought help ages ago". This was an appealing proposition.
Consequently, as of last April, I've been in a position to report that the pills do indeed help immeasurably. There's quite an industry of cranks with podcasts and YouTube channels who claim it's entirely possible to manage ADHD without drugs, and I don't doubt them. It's also entirely possible to save on transport costs by swimming the English Channel. However I'm more inclined to go along with the metaphor of the drugs being like eyeglasses: why go through life uselessly squinting if you don't have to?
On the other hand, to extend the metaphor, if being terribly short-sighted has prevented you from riding a bicycle, getting a pair of glasses does not automatically mean you can now ride a bicycle. You still have to learn how to ride a bicycle. Over the course of my adult life I've occasionally earnestly tried to accomplish things, but have for the most part (consciously or otherwise) masked my ADHD by affecting a lofty disdain for vulgar achievement. So while I can now in principle do things I couldn't before, I really don't know how to in practice. I was never in a position to learn, so I have to catch up really very fast.
Now that you know who you are
What do you want to be?— The Beatles
I left my cocoon unchanged, in most respects of practical concern to anybody but myself, from the person I was when I went in. Granted, this is not the way cocoons usually work, but it's my cocoon and I'll use it how I please. I'm less unhealthy, immature, and dysfunctional, and a good deal happier, but the old cultural and intellectual fixations are still firmly fixed. I've all the same bees in my bonnet, plus a few more acquired recently, and ideally I'd like to train them to fly in formation, on a Reithian mission to "inform, educate, and entertain" people. That woolly ambition, and an improbable series of events I won't go into now, is how I've ended up doing postgraduate study.
These last six months have been an immense privilege, an exhausting challenge, and an emotional rollercoaster. In the first instance, while I can unquestionably do the work, working productively at the required rate is a skill, art, or knack that eludes me. I know of people working in this field who can saw off brilliance by the yard, and I know for a fact that they are mortal creatures of flesh and blood like myself. (Some of them have been teaching me on this course; how cool is that?!) At a greatly reduced level of brilliance, this should not be such a problem for me.
A jarring side-effect of all of the above is something I'm calling "reintegration", after the phenomenon of that name in the brilliant TV series Severance. Spoiler alert: if you've not yet seen series one, go watch it now; you've been missing out. The premise of the show is that the main characters live dual lives, with each life unaware of what's going on in the other. One of the characters has escaped from this predicament and "reintegrated". He's now able to access the memories from both lives, with the result that he experiences distressing and disorienting flashbacks that intrude on his present experience.
The downside of cocooning for about five years is that I'm experiencing something like this. Working away now on topics that have fascinated me for years or decades, I'm haunted by negative emotions or attitudes from the past.
There have been times when I've left my desk, glanced in the mirror, and been surprised not to see a fat, hairy, dead-eyed wreck in a stained and tattered t-shirt. It is of course ultimately a relief to see the usual dotty old lady instead, but realising I've spent an hour or more back in that awful mindset is vertiginously nauseating. The sense of suddenly having lost oneself is nightmarish.
I'm sure this will dissipate as the work acquires more recent and positive associations, but still it's something I wasn't expecting. They certainly don't warn you about it in the transgender ideology classes.
I could witter on, but in broad strokes, that was my personal 2025: ups and downs, but I muddle along quite amiably.
Globally, I could never have anticipated many of the horrors of 2024. As little as a few years ago, the idea that my government, and the governments of other wealthy nominal democracies, would support the open genocide of millions of people was inconceivable. I had no idea that fascism would get so far, so fast. This wasn't the catastrophe I was expecting to come along first. I fear for all of us.
Stay safe. Stay strong. And frustrate those bastards at every opportunity by being wilfully, obnoxiously happy and kind. That's my Project 2025. You're welcome to join.