I used to be incapable of imagining my future self. Maybe some vague grey-bearded apparition that survived somehow. But lately I've started to imagine a powerful queer woman advancing into middle age and beyond, grey haired and serene in my 50s, my 60s, my 70s, my 80s... still learning, still teaching, still exploring, still doing.
When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in a downwardly mobile blue collar family, the expectation was that I would be a husband, a father, a family breadwinner who made it through college and worked some kind of respectable job in an office, maybe wearing a suit to sit in a cubicle. Doing business bullshit or whatever.
Instead, I became a transsexual computer weirdo. Isn't life fucking marvelous?