Nearly Everything: A Retrospective

This is a retrospective for my recent article “I Was There 3: What If We Imagined A World Without Scripts?” I’ll be honest, I have no idea how long this will be, or what its contents will be, this is my first time writing a retrospective. If it goes well, there will be more. This is being started 48 hours after I finish the article.

The first thing I noticed after writing IWT3 is that I’m not the same since writing it. I can tell that there has been a shift within myself. The ending is where much of this feeling comes from. It was completely unintentional to not actually vocalize the question at the start, but it worked out really well in the end. I’m able to reclaim agency and move on with my life from what has happened recently. I’m able to move on from the initial blast radius of the trauma. My life has been overhauled 3 different times now, first by the realization that I’m not cis, then again by the lockdowns, and finally getting kicked out of college. An article connecting those 3 could happen if people were interested. I got kicked out of college and hit with life changing disability within 6 months of each other, what am I really supposed to do with myself?

Getting trauma is traumatic of course, but so is living with unrealized trauma. Realizing and processing the trauma is its own trauma. All from a single incident of trauma, you get a bunch more stuff you gotta work through. IWT 3 was traumatic just because of how much ground I covered. This article springs from that, I’m able to process the fact that I just put myself out there like that and talk about some other stuff related to the article. The trauma of getting kicked out of college was especially hard to process by the design of the process that inflicted it, I was kept in the dark at every step of the process. I had about 10 hours to get off campus, hardly enough time to tell my entire friend group about what’s going on and say goodbye before leaving. It especially sucked as time went on and information slowly trickled in on what had led up to it. The realizations afterward only made it more traumatic as they revealed the true intentions and reasoning behind the events.

Time for a bit of insight into my writing process. In total, the article took 43 days from creation to completion. I spent a lot of those days just thinking and a bit of it writing another article. Including this one, I’m working on 3 different articles, 2 of them being new territory for me when it comes to writing. More articles gives me more chances for inspiration to randomly strike and have an idea to write down. I never shoot down an idea just because I'm already working on something. By being able to go back and write about traumatic stuff, I’m able to circle back to comprehend and articulate what has happened. I may not be able to right the wrong, but I can at least process the trauma and reclaim some of what the trauma cost me.

College was supposed to be this great adventure I went off on where I'd come home in 4 years with 1-2 degrees, a job connection in some industry so I can work, and a crown of laurels. Instead, I came home 2 years in with hardly anything good to show for it. I got a ton of trauma, some good life experiences, a few college credits, several thousand in student loans, and a half-dozen symptoms of severe mental illnesses that I now gotta be on medication for the rest of my life for. I watched it again on October 28th, after completing my recent article. It’s where I first heard of the webcomic I referenced earlier, What Happens Next. I quickly fell in love with and subsequently devoured the webcomic, checking semi-frequently for updates. I totally recommend anyone take a look. If you’re interested, here’s a link. The main character, Milo, is unfortunately relatable to me because I don’t quite feel like the world has space for me anymore. I got caught up in a lie that college was the answer, with no acceptable alternative. I was questioning if college was the answer for years beforehand and now here I am. I was proven right in the worst possible way.

“What If We Imagined A World Without Scripts” would be nothing without the fantastic video essay by Lily Alexandre, “Transition Regret and The Fascism of Endings”, linked here. I first watched it on August 27th and it really helped me conceptualize what I was feeling at the time. Leading up to it, I had wanted to watch it cause I was going to be transitioning soon and wanted to be prepared for any of the bad parts that may come with it. I kept putting it off until I finally worked up the bravery to watch it. “What If We Imagined A World Without Scripts” is my equivalent to “Transition Regret and The Fascism of Endings” in that it mirrors the format of a trio of examples being used to construct a larger narrative, with a chunk at the beginning and end to tie it all together. The title of this article comes from a quote in that video essay where Lily Alexandre says "What happens next, if I'm lucky, is nearly everything”, referring to what happens after she finishes transitioning. I will finish this article up with a poem I wrote about the exact fears that I faced in watching the aforementioned video essay.

A day comes

A day comes when it will all be over

The struggle will be over

The pain and suffering will all come to fruition

The last cent is spent

The last pill taken

The last surgery done

And I will just live

I wake up not to a horrorshow, but just

Me

I wake up and I don’t have to do anything

A reminder on my phone tells me that my next injection is in 3 days

And that is it

I live

I wake up

I eat

I work

I sleep

All of it will be worth it

All of it will be in the past

I have become so wrapped up in this journey that I worry

That I have lost the forest for the trees

That I have focused so much on the journey that I have lost sight of the destination

I say that it is not just about the destination, it’s about the journey

But have I made too much of it about the journey and not the destination?