I spent a good portion of this past week cleaning out a lot of old emails. My oldest extant email address is my full birth name at Gmail, dating from around 2007. I have two others (a professional one, also tied to my birth name, and my first name @ famiconsumer dot com) that I use almost as often plus several others for specific purposes (e.g. social media bot signups). I have a lot of various accounts registered across the three main emails along with a lot of history that's accumulated in the past 15+ years. I wanted to sift through and save whatever I still needed while consolidating down to, ideally, one primary email address.
This began, ostensibly, as a chore to make my life easier. But it quickly became an excavation of my past selves. Going back through my ancient emails and chat logs, I found all the old version of me that I tried on: the sensitive platonic friend to a series of female best friends, the empath hipster with impeccable taste, the Silicon Alley Web 2.0 tech guru.
There are things that I did in those roles that I'm proud of, memories I will always cherish, people who I still care about deeply, but I was never really there. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was just pressing my nose up against the glass, observing my life from a distance. I thought everyone else, too, just faked feelings, faked a sense of self; the problem was that I was just too fundamentally damaged to manage the faking. Then when I became too exhausted to keep up the faking, that just hit as more failure.
I take the good memories with me. I hold them in my heart. The rest goes straight to the trash bin.
I keep on coming back to reflecting on the past versions of me. I don't really mourn them or even the time I wasted being them. Lots of people have past versions of themselves long dead and buried, not just trans folks.
But what I see in all of those things is a subconscious attempt at striking a bargain with myself, finding a compromise that'll work this time, followed by an eventual abandonment when the inchoate dysphoria that swirled within started to overwhelm me. I had internalized all my trans feelings that made my teenage years so confusing as defects, and I had to dig back through all those layers of fake personas to get back to revisiting those feelings and reclaiming them as essential parts of my being.
The promise of the future is a promise of a stable version of myself, one anchored by my true core. It comes with its share of anxieties and challenges, but they feel manageable for once. I can inhabit myself now, where once I felt so distant.