This may come out as more beyond than my normal ones, but fuck.
So I've seen I Saw The TV Glow twice. I've read a bunch about it and I listen to the soundtrack a lot. I know a lot of people feel very seen by its uncanny horror in a way that is both positive and negative. I can't help but continue to inflict it upon myself.
I knew I was a girl from a very early age. I finally began to become myself at what is still a fairly early age for a lot of people. So seeing it is very visceral to me, it's very much like a horrific alternative. My psychosis also resonates from its themes. So it feels very much a dark, horrific timeline for me, as even though I knew I would sooner die than become a man, the thought of being helplessly locked into it is intensely terrifying to me. To be seen, heard, and known by all, even my self, as just a man is one of the scariest things I can picture.
But I feel like I relate a different level to it. And it's a lot to do with time.
So one of the ways we used to measure time was with a sundial, which is what informed the decision to form the "modern" round clock face. I think this is horrifying. The fact that time has a face. I am left to envision the ever passing of time as a molten hot mask that melts itself onto my own face, the heat adhering it to my skin. The longer I wait to be able to pry it back off, the more difficult it will become to separate it from my own face, until, I fear, it will become inseparable. Maybe that's its' own depressing allegory for transitioning.
I know many people feel similarly to me. That we're locked in a perpetual adolescence. I'm 30, and I still feel as if I'm a teenager, or a child. I still love to be small and cute and be held, and I am always longing for the arms of a larger figure to embrace me to feel warm and accepted and safe and loved. I'm an adult, I have an adult body, and theoretically, an "adult mind" whatever the fuck that means. A mind that's been shaped by 30 years of experience. What doesn't help is how I put my "self" to sleep for nearly a decade to try to survive an existence that was draining me. Yet, even if I lived in that myself, I don't think it would be any different.
I feel so much like I'm still 13. I still place so much value in my silly hobbies and interests that are just things like gaming and anime and soft plushies and cute clothes. I still meow at random. I still giggle like a child, especially when I don't know how to process the emotions that I thought I could fully understand, with my self-proclaimed emotional intelligence. I've mostly had just part-time jobs, but even those I have so much difficulty holding down until I inevitably feel like I'm suffocating again and want to die and would rather die than stay there because I can't stand it I can't stand it I can't stand it. "I'm just a creative type" I tell myself as if that means anything. It's just an excuse to say that I"m not like other girls, as if it makes me better than others just because I'm not capable of functioning like a real person. Like a "correct" member of this society.
One of the largest tragedies that I feel in my life is my inability to bear children, my selfish desire that I cannot fulfill, that science has been too slow and fairly uninterested in pursuing. Especially now. I will soon be too old to do so even if it were possible for me to do so at all. Days pass like seconds sometimes, and I can't always tell one day from the previous or the next. Time is divine, and my attempts to understand it are like an ant struggling to study string theory.
I wish clocks were all digital now, or maybe if they had only ever been hourglasses or a thin strip that snaps back on a new hour. Giving time a face has left me feeling like I'm staring into the eyes of an unforgiving God that can't even perceive me because it's so much infinitely larger than me that even the fact that I'm trying to perceive it now just makes me feel smaller and smaller, the same way a journey needs a halfway point, and that halfway point needs a halfway point and that halfway point needs a halfway point.
My eternal adolescence feels like a traffic jam that will not move. I know that there must be something that I need to do to act to get things moving, and that's terrifying because I feel like I either don't know what it is, or I do know but I'm too stupid to realize that I already know, you know? Even with how early I feel I broke free of the horrific confines of my perceived gender from my weird, misinformed body that only fit the boundary of male and female, I still feel a dreadful sadness of how I could not be my me from the start, and what I missed out on for not having it. Will I feel that dysphoric sadness even if I find purpose? That despair from not having found and pursued it from earlier on? Will I gain a new agony? Time continuing to run down and run me down makes me feel like I'm still so trapped.
I am infinitely fortunate right now to be in a situation where I don't have to work and can just write, and can even still just do what I want to do. But is it an extension of this infinite adolescence as I continue to age? I'm terrified of what will happen when it is time for me to return to working. It's horrific to me, and that's such a childish thing I think. But I just recall how suffocating it felt when I worked full time. How I felt consistently watched and monitored to ensure that I was behaving and performing correct tasks and doing them correctly as if I were back in school. And how thoroughly bound I felt. Even though I didn't have a strict dress code, knowing that i could be violating it, how i should be watching how my mentally ill ass acts and talks. How bound my existence was by my employer. I began to hear the stairs talk. They beckoned me to die. To be able to escape into a happier world by leaping into the center from the top, it would transport me to a world of anime where I could transform, and Miku would be there too. So fucking stupid, right? It was what the stairs were telling me. I wanted to badly to die. I feel like it will be that again. I can't work, I'm too much of a stupid dumb baby child. Maybe die? I'm 30, I'm not a child, I'm just useless worthless lazy, but I can't face that again. So maybe die.
Time is a divine essence that we can only work within. We can be more "efficient". We can create digital spaces that do not contain their own form of time. But they will wear away through time. Time keeps running at its own pace. It is inescapable, and only affected by things that already relate to itself like speed. Speed is already affected by time and it can affect time. Like heat and states of matter.
I Saw The TV Glow made me re-analyze my relationship to Sailor Moon. It's always been in my life, and always has been important to me. I've always loved magical girl shows, I love Cardcaptor Sakura, Shamanic Princess, Utena, Creamy Mami, and more, but Sailor Moon has always been different. Its transformative. It transformed me. It gave me hope, it brought me to life. I am always fixated, even though I feel like such a child. It's importance on me might be part of what locks me into my childishness, but I'm nothing without it. Even watching at 30, more than a quarter of a century past when I first watched it, it's still so impactful, it means so much to me. The fact that a children's show made me become alive is so stupid, isn't it?
Sorry, I just had to write all of this out.
