Hello dear ones,
First I just wanna say welcome to everyone who has recently subscribed! So happy to have you here. And thank you to the folks who signed up for a paid subscription. It’s my dream to end this year with 250 paid subscribers.
Currently there are 6081 of you subscribed and 103 of those are paid subscriptions, which equals 0.017% of subscribers. It’s really important to me to keep this writing accessible and not put up a paywall. Please consider contributing $5/month or $45/year, which equals $3.75/month.
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With love and gratitude,
Margeaux
I’ve entered a new era in my healing journey, that I’m calling my Dress-Like-the-Boys-You-Wanted-to-Date-in-High-School era. One reason for this is that over the last six months, I’ve been in a process of re-establishing my gender identity and presentation. No longer am I feeling called to the mix of black and floral dresses in my closet. I still identify as a femme (or, as Heidi Cho put in on a t-shirt that I still wish was being made, a low femme weirdo. Try as I might, searching the depths of my phone, this photo below is the only evidence that remains of this shirt).
These days I’m feeling more like a boy-femme or femme-boy. All I want to wear are pants and shorts. I’ve given up struggling to get skinny jeans on and off of my body. Instead, I’ve fallen in love with Big Bud Press’s work pants — which, I can’t help but notice, remind me of the baggy phat pants and modrobes that I used to wear as a goth metal kid who went to raves in the early 2000s (oh how I wish I had photographic evidence to show you).
At first, I was totally horrified when wide legged pants started to make their way back into fashion because there is little about early 2000s fashion that I believe is redeemable. And yet, what I’ve found is that every time I put on a pair of baggy pants, my body experiences some serious gender euphoria. But it’s more than gender euphoria for me. My desire to look like the boys I dated (or wanted to date) in high school is about healing a wound.
Throughout my teen years (and into my early twenties), I slept with boys who were too ashamed to be seen in public with me. Boys who wore baggy jeans and plaid shirts, band tees and that infamous 90s silver ball chain necklace. These boys treated me poorly. Never called when they said they would. They’d hang out with me in secret and we’d have sex, but the next day at school they pretended that I didn’t exist.
Or, if they did say yes to dating me, they’d make fun of me with their friends when I was still within earshot. There were a few good ones, boys who wanted to hold my hand, who told me how beautiful they thought I was. But I’d end those relationships within a matter of weeks. I wasn’t used to anything that wasn’t cold and withholding. My desire orbiting around the absence of the very things I so desired.
Over the past two years, I’ve been having recurring dreams about the boys I hung out with. I wrote about some of these in an earlier CARESCAPES: “Haunted Dreamscapes.” These more recent dreams are different. Instead of the main characters being those who sexually abused me, I am dreaming about the boys I wanted to date but never did. In these dreams, I’m 38 (my current age) and so are the boys, but they look exactly as they did in high school. They look at me and tell me that I’m so hot, that they want me. Their desire is explicit. They do not make fun of me. I’m the one with power now.
Sometimes I end up ignoring them. I can hear them talking about me — only positive things now — and I just walk right by them. Don’t give them the time of day. In other dreams, I kiss the boy and it is everything I wanted it to be, though I know that this can’t last. That I will return back to LA and they will continue to live their life in the suburbans near where we grew up. But the conclusion doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m giving myself the missing experience that I yearned for.
Upon waking, I find myself so amused with these dreams. For outside of my dreamscape, I have no desire for cis men, and am the happiest I’ve ever been with my T4T partnership — except for the fact that I can’t stop crying whenever we try to have sex. My body is trying to process so many years of trauma linked to sex and intimacy and desire. My wounds are open and bleeding and I’m trying to dress them, tend to them, as gently as I can.
I believe that these dreams are part of this healing process and so too is my desire to dress like these boys. I buy the silver ball chain necklace and I go to a photo booth to take my portrait. I have a vision. I want to capture the inner teen boy within me. The next day, reminiscent of all of my high school journals, I take these photos and I turn them into collages in my new journal, adorned by all of the messages I wish I’d heard growing up.
Being the boys I wanted to date in high school is one part gender euphoria project and one part healing my teenage trauma wounds. While I might be dressing like these boys, I am treating myself with the love, care, and dignity that I always deserved. When I dress like these boys, I feel in my body that I am a babe and that these boys really missed out. With my baggy pants, plaid shirt, loose t-shirt, and necklace, I am rewriting the past and creating a present in which teen me is seen and celebrated for all of their magic.
Culture Diary
A shorter culture diary this week because I’m in the last few weeks of school and have been spending a lot more time writing than I have reading, watching, and listening.
In project listen to the music I loved as a teen, I’ve been re-aquainting myself with Placebo’s 1998 album Without You I’m Nothing and wow is it so so good.
I just started Maryann Aita’s memoir in essays Little Astronaut, which I’m only about 30 pages into, but her recounting of her sister’s struggle with anorexia has been powerful and heartbreaking.
My partner and I just started Under the Bridge because we love Lily Gladstone and wow was it wild to realize that the events of the show happened in Canada AND as we were watching I realized that the reason the events sounded familiar to me were because I performed a monologue for drama class from The Shape of a Girl, a play based on the death of Reena Virk. Mind blown!
I’ve been closely following what is happening at Columbia University as students in SJP (Students for Justice for Palestine) set up an encampment to protest the university’s investment in Israel and call for divestment.
Oooh Big Bud Press really reminds me of 'Lucy & Yak' in the UK!
Thanks for the music inspo/reminder... i've been having a bounce around to Placebo & doing domestic tasks :-)
I never understood why I was so attracted to Brian Molko when I was young... its only taken 20 years to figure that out.
And just generally thank you for being so inspiring and affirming...
I always wanted to wear the short denim skirt & leggings combo that so many of the femmes I "fancied" (UK version of crushing on)... so now I have and I enjoy it so much, as well as full length summer skirts... I looooove them.
Love this so much 🖤🙏🏻