scarierhandles

[scarierhandles]

A letter of sorts to my 16 year old self.

It’s November 2017. I’m listening to The Wombats’ new song on repeat, yelling about it to my girlfriend and annoying my dad, and Alex Turner and Alexa Chung were spotted making out after fireworks in East London. The whole thing is reminding me of you. I remember you being just as obsessed with The Wombats as I have been this year. I remember you hating Alexa Chung for some stupid reason. I remember you being as happy as you tended to be at this time 10 years ago.

10 whole fucking years. Everything has changed. Not much has changed.

10 years ago you lost your virginity, gained a relationship (albeit a long distance one). You finished your GCSEs, you started your A-levels. You were finally figuring out your place in the world. You stopped being so fucking suicidal all the time because you were in love and doing well at school for the first time in a couple of years. Everything seemed to be coming up Charlie.

Or Charlotte as most people called you back then. Potato potahto. Whatever. It was a good year for you, for the most part. I don’t think you got on well with your family at the time but what 16 year old does? You racked up some enormous fucking phone bills, but then, what 16 year old doesn’t? You hated your hometown, but isn’t that a perfectly normal 16 year old thing to hate?

(You’d started realising you were having huge problems with your assigned gender but you kept that pretty close to your chest, and that’s not quite a normal 16 year old thing to happen.)

So where’s the brilliant student, the teetotaller, the burgeoning lesbian, the shy-apart-from-in-class Oxbridge prospect at now?

Pretty much vanished. Apart from your taste in music. That’s still roughly the same.

In some vague chronological order, here’s how your life ends up going. Your girlfriend dumps you and it’s horrible, genuinely awful. You get suicidal again. You see The Wombats eight more times during sixth form and you somehow meet Murph and Tord but not Dan. You pass your Oxford exam but fail the interview. You get nearly straight As. You try the whole university thing twice; it doesn’t suit you. You start drinking: spirits at first, you order rum and cokes because it’s Jarvis Cocker approved but then you get a taste for wine, even draught cider but never beer. You start fancying attainable men - not rock stars - eventually, and sleeping with them, and enjoying it. You get seriously into comedy and start doing stand-up. You have your first bereavement which triggers off a chain of events that leads to you getting diagnosed with something like bipolar. You learn to play pool, learn to knit, fail to get to grips with the bass guitar. You cause drama. You dabble in drugs. You have a few not particularly serious suicide attempts, and you have a psychotic break and stay in a mental hospital for just under a month. Your parents break up yet again, for good this time. You lose old friends and you make new ones, all throughout this period. You fall in and out of love with various bands: Los Campesinos! is the big one, you will have only just heard of them, but there are others. Sometimes you like chart pop songs and you frequently say the word ‘banger’ unironically. You start going to more club nights and fewer gigs but you do see Belle and Sebastian play ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ in full on consecutive nights; they play ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’ on the last night and you cry a bit. You come out as a transgender man.

I’m forgetting things, but that’s a very long paragraph.

The world becomes an even scarier place than even you, who lived through 9/11, 7/7, and the early years of the War on Terror, could imagine. There’s some douchebag who has barely entered your personal radar yet who becomes president and the world feels perpetually on the brink of nuclear warfare most days, the Tories get into office and set into motion a chain of events that lead to the UK voting to leave the European Union, and literal Nazis are more and more emboldened. Almost all of us have actual computers in our pockets. It’s not as fun as you’d think. Everyone I know is stressed out: overworked, underpaid, trying to make it somehow and struggling with it.

But me, me personally: I’m happy. Okay: I’m not happy right now, writing this, I’m reflective and a bit tired. But most minutes of the day I’m happy. Even better - but you learn that this is better than happiness over time - I’m content. That’s a cliche and more intelligent people than me have said this before. I’m loved by so many more people than you ever imagined possible. That’s like the corniest thing in the world to say but it’s true. The niggling voice in the back of my head telling me to kill myself hasn’t gone away but perhaps it’s the quietest it’s been for a few years. People call me ‘Charlie’ and never ‘Charlotte’, and ‘he’ and ‘him’ now and it feels right. I have a long-distance girlfriend again and it’s going extremely well (we met because of The Wombats, who I saw three times in the space of a week this year - oh, by the way, I met Dan and he’s literally the nicest person, so there’s that). I have a best friend who I’ve known for six years (a frankly ridiculous boy called Sam, who’s made me laugh more times than you can even count) and a whole roster of incredible, talented, kind-hearted people who I know have my back.

2017 is pretty great, in all. See you in 2027.