In Defense of the Awkward Phase
Being a clueless, dorky baby queer was the only way for me to come out at all.
Every photo that I’ve taken of myself in the past two years makes me cringe. I cannot stop taking them. I’m nearly two years into my transition, just reaching the end (middle? Late middle? Don’t say beginning) of my awkward baby queer years, and it’s become a ritual: Monitoring my face in the phone screen, waiting for myself to arrive.
I have anniversaries now. When my phone (rudely) decides to show me a “memory” from a year ago, it no longer shows me a photo of a woman with my bone structure; it shows my face. Being assaulted with my own bad selfies — the accidental Hitler hair, the patterned button-ups that look like I’ve been Queer-Eyed by a clown college, the stilted “casual” poses like, wow, I’m surprised to see you there, camera that I am holding directly in front of my own face — has come to represent the entire coming-out process. Which is to say: I have only been able to transition to the extent that I have been able to embrace looking like a total dork.
For most of my life, social success meant hiding. No matter how confident I seemed in my public persona, I buried huge parts of my personality because I was afraid people might not like them. I got good at it; so good, in fact, that I was able to…
