#tw dad

Younger MePhone4: No, please don't! I have a family to feed!

Steve Cobs:

Steve Cobs: What? 

I'm currently playing the game Season - A Letter to the Future. It's about recording all the sensations and memories of now for future generations. But it's also about transition periods. The characters in the game all know the world is going to change, but they do not know how. The main character spends much time pondering what this will mean for her and the world she knows.

As a transgender person and a human, I think about transitions a lot. There are events that wholly and suddenly mark new seasons in our life; and then there are those that are slow, gradual.

Recently, for the second time in my life, I was part of a roadtrip across the country. Washington to Ohio. We were visiting my grandfather in the hospital. We made plans to drive out there when he could still speak. When we got there he hadn't reacted to any stimuli in two days. Hadn't been awake. Hadn't eaten in a week.

It had felt so sudden, and yet… I remember. Almost a full year before that, he and my grandmother came to visit my sister's highschool graduation. He spoke of his recent surgies. He choked on a piece of chicken and we almost called the ER. I can't help but think that my grandfather's passing was not so sudden. That I was simply not present for it until the very end.

When I think of transition periods, I think of my father. On the way back home to Washington from Ohio (the third time I'd made that trip) we passed through Chicago to see the Korean side of my family. They had just moved into a new apartment that was maybe 200 feet away from their old one. Practically just across the street. They asked my father to bless the new home. He is not that kind of pastor. But still, he prayed. He spoke on transitional periods and how they can be difficult. How family and community are important for such times. And I thought, "How ironic is that?"

How ironic is it that you would say this when you would not be there for my transition! That he would look me in the eye and tell me I was wrong. That I would have to wait until college and even then, do it by myself. That it would not be spoken of in his house.

Now, I wish I had taken more time to be present for my own transition. I am almost at two years of HRT, and yet, it passes in a blur. Two years of transition, so sudden. Again, I was simply not present until the very end. And I can't help but think it's because my father was so unwilling to be part of it. That it made me wish to just be at the end. As if being at the end of the transition period would restore that family and community.

But of course, it didn't. I've had to remake my family and it has been wonderful. They make me want to present. To memorize the now and appreciate it before the next transition.

There is a tiktok comment thread I think about a lot. Profound words in unlikely places are all the more profound, I think.

It goes: harashsidhu - this will gonna take 3 years

ashmanathletic - creator The time will pass anyways

take your hands from my history and release me

father

take your words from my past and release me

mother, father

let me go let me be free let me live

mother-

father-

release me

your love should not be a prison and my life should not be a jail cell

release me

i saw a pic of Madara Uchiha and my brain was like "that's our dad now"