Chapter 2: All We Could Be

When I was in middle or high school, a handsome dancer whose name I have forgotten, but is a few years older than me with spiky gelled up hair exuding boyish charms that I see at my weekly Thursday evening dance classes, rushed on stage during the school assembly. He grabbed the microphone from the principal and in front of the entire school, he proclaimed, “Summer, you’re the love of my life. I know we rarely spoke to each other during our dance classes but I have always noticed you and I believe we’re meant to be. Come with me and let’s elope somewhere where it’s just us.” The spotlight then swung to me. I slowly rose out of my chair while everyone looked. He rushed down the steps from the podium, took my hand and we ran out of the school hall hopping on the first flight going somewhere far far away.

I hope you didn’t laugh when I shared this very specific and dramatic fantasy I often escaped into.

As a teenager, I lived a lot in my head and many of my fantasies revolved around being “picked” and “saved” by a handsome man. Existing as a closeted trans girl without positive role models or a supportive environment to explore my gender identity, I looked to the dominant cultural conversations for clues and cues on who and what I should or could be. It was clear to me back then that being chosen by an eligible bachelor was portrayed as the highest honor a woman could achieve.

Growing up in Hong Kong during the late 2000s and 2010s, there are certain characteristics that are constantly used to describe girls you’d want to marry. The top two adjectives that come to mind are 矜持 and 氣質.

矜持 = a girl who is reserved and shows self control

氣質 = a girl who has the aura of someone that is poised and classy

And the worst fate to befall a woman?

剩女 = leftover women who are over 27 years old and still not married.

If you add on the intersection of being raised on Puritanical Christian values that promotes preservation of chastity until marriage and prioritizing men as the “head of the family”, it makes sense why the number one item on my prayer list back then is to be “picked” by a handsome and successful man who validates my womanhood.

At no point in my middle or high school years did I actually believe I would have a boyfriend. I was bullied way too often for being feminine and I was deeply closeted. I wasn’t even out to myself and friends until the last two years of school, so the closest I could get to having a boyfriend that would validate me as Summer was through my fantasies. My imagination was all I got and obviously, having a crush on a boy I only see once a week that doesn’t even know me was not going to cut it.

That’s when I turned my attention to boys that were closer to home and more “available” to me.

I developed a list of rotating crushes of boys in my school I could project my fantasies on. Derrick, John, Matt, Matthew, Dylan, James, Patrick, Ashley, Jerry, Nic, Ben, Cal, Rob, Ken etc… but of those only one was consistent and his name was D.

I can still remember exactly when and where my crush began. He sat in front of me during second period English class and like Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls, the moment he turned around and introduced himself, the rest was history.

D was funny, self assured, popular and beyond being cute, he was also a star basketball player in our school’s team. When he practiced, a gaggle of girls from the grade below would come watch him and try to talk to him the first chance they got. I know because I would be observing at the balcony above the gym where my locker was situated.

Practising 矜持, I did my best to hold back from being overly keen and waited for D to approach me. It took over two years for D and I to become good friends and I would talk the ears off any of my girl friends who would listen to me pine over how handsome and great he is. But looking back, what really separated D from the other boys I had a crush on was that he was nice to me.

He was the only person to ever invite me to play basketball during lunch break I was horrible and only did it once. He would invite me to after school hang outs. I recently found the movie ticket of us going to see Up in the air in my old journals, where I traced over the printed writing in blue ink because I didn’t want the proof of being invited to fade.

It was a big deal when we sat next to each other before school began and he would introduce new songs to me from his iPod like Jon McLaughlin’s So Close, while we shared his earbuds and I would inch my hands closer to his and linger there until he moved it away. I was over the moon for a whole week, when D decided I was too scrawny and needed to “fatten” up and so he came up with a plan that I need to eat whatever he eats. When I was so full that I could not take another bite, he would jokingly “feed me” by saying “ahhhhhhh” while moving the spoon to my mouth and I ate that up. It didn’t matter to me that the other basketball players were there and looked a bit shocked and disgusted. It was my moment and I was going to savour it.

Even writing this, my inner teenage girl still feels the giddiness of retelling stories about a boy she liked while my older cynical self is trying to not vomit and roll her eyes.

In my healing journey, I thought a lot about the role fantasies played while I was living under trauma. In hindsight, D was just being a friendly human being. I over analyzed his every act because for a closeted trans girl, his kindness was a reprieve from the heaviness of my life. I have yet to learn how to distinguish between compatibility and basic human decency. And I think it goes to show how small my world was that basic human decency was all it took to earn my unwavering admiration.

Looking at myself through the lens of being Summer for over a decade now, what I see is how vulnerable and at risk I was back then. As an adult meeting other trans women, I see what a big difference it makes if you come from a supportive environment. Knowing that you have a safety net to return to allows you to navigate the world with more confidence and presence, even with the transphobia that exists in our society. And for me, feeling unloved, unseen and wanting to be saved by a man makes me a target for predatory men. My desire to be validated as Summer could have easily led to disastrous results where I would easily be taken advantage of. It’s pure luck that that did not happen and I can now see how the intensity of my limerence was triggered by my unmet need to safely explore my womanhood and the fantasy coping mechanism was developed to help calm those needs down. I grieve for the younger version of myself as I had no guidance or tools to access the woman that was in me and all I saw was a rigid and limited definition of what makes a woman.

I think it’s easy to shame myself for mistaking the fantasy of eventually being chosen by a man as proof of my womanhood and inherent worthiness, but I think that survival strategy was actually an act of self preservation that allowed me to power through those lonely confusing years. My fantasies were protecting me from the reality that I was in a transphobic environment with no one I felt safe with who could mentor and guide me. I needed fantasies to make my reality more palatable.

Through the healing work I’ve done, I can now look at myself and my teen fantasies through a kinder lens. Because in addition to limerence being a survival mechanism, hormones and major brain developments also rule the teenage experience. Your teen years represent exploration of an arena that previously wasn’t available to you. It’s a “whole new world” of becoming and individuating. It’s being excited and unsure about the possibilities of where life can take you and I felt cheated out of that because in order to be safe, I had to stay small and hidden. A lot of my life now revolves around giving myself permission to explore and enjoy life without shame, guilt or fear of making a mistake and being punished because I can trust the wise inner adult that has my best interest.

I met up with D in person again while making this album. We caught up over coffee and tea while he shared about his work and life with his girlfriend. He was flattered when I shared how he inspired this song and we talked about what happened during our high school years more to come in the next chapter. But I was surprised to realize that we actually didn’t have a lot in common. Our conversation ran dry within an hour and it was clear that my teenage fantasies of all we could be were just fantasies. My limerence phase served their purpose of keeping me alive during my teen years and dipping myself back into real life means I have more agency to choose now because I can see clearly now. I’d like to think that this means I finally have the capacity to build life with someone in real life instead of living vicariously through fantasies. I think that’s healing in action.

Please click here for Chapter 1: Part of Me or Chapter 3: Your Eyes Tell Me