Turned Out

On Rilke, change & gender healing

For many, adolescence is lowkey traumatic.

You enter, or seem to enter, the world of adult sexuality. Ideality, or perhaps repression, is harder to take seriously because you begin to learn up-close how violated and compromised the people around you are.

When I was in middle school, I learned something about a family member that marked me forever. The accidental discovery of gay pornography on the internet of the nineties, a world of Netscape and AOL chat rooms, XXX image galleries, among other things, showed me a version of myself, and what I responded to, that I had no way of reconciling with, let alone having ever predicted. Then someone I knew closely died in a motorcycle accident suddenly. Her name was Ashley.

My parents seemed to be understanding. But life went on. No matter what happened, things went on. My belief in a spiritual world, one accessed through church or prayer slowly vanished. All that seemed left was music and poetry. Well, and porn. Quite a lot of my childhood devotions were held onto too, born from the entertainment industry. But one day I didn’t want to collect action figures anymore. I forgot my toys.

I was no longer who I was.

By senior year of high school, I adopted an attitude that was fundamentally cynical, in a quietly brooding, wounded way, that I kept to myself, mostly. Wanting to be liked but a sensitive weirdo. But my grim would leak out.