my name is Julie. i am a trans woman. and tonight is the first time i’ve said those words to anyone other than myself.

i first started questioning my gender identity around my sophomore year of high school. it had never crossed my mind when i was younger; i thought i was comfortable with my identity, until very gradually becoming overwhelmed with the feeling i wasn’t. looking back in hindsight, i think i had always felt uncomfortable in my own skin to some degree, but i never knew how to put a finger on it. i slowly started to realize i’d be happier as a girl, but the more confident i became in that assertion, the more scared i became of actually expressing it. so i pushed it down. i denied it. i repressed everything and continued living as a shell of myself.

in senior year, i came out to my friends as non-binary and started using different pronouns. it felt like the right move at the time, a way to distance myself at least somewhat from an assigned identity that didn’t represent who i was, but there was still something off. the truth was that i wanted to be a girl, but i still didn’t know how to express it, and i was still hiding behind a name i hated but didn’t have the courage to change. during my last summer before heading off to college, i told myself it was finally the time to come out as trans. i was about to start from scratch, head into a new chapter of my life, meet new people; if there was ever a time to finally start living as my authentic self, this was it. and then i just never did it. i was still too scared. so i went through my freshman year of college, still going by my old name, still hiding behind a facade. it ate away at me every night, but i just couldn’t bring myself to take the one big step i needed to.

watching I Saw the TV Glow tonight, i saw myself up there on the screen in a way i never thought i’d see in a film. my exact experience with dysphoria had been perfectly, devastatingly articulated. transness and gender dysphoria are never directly mentioned in the film, but it’s unmistakably there in the text. it’s about the dangers and horrors of living behind a facade, of denying your true identity and living as a shell of yourself. it’s a film rooted in the feeling of realizing your body isn’t yours; your life isn’t yours; the memories you thought were happy and normal now feel false, like you were seeing someone else’s memories the whole time and you were just….not a real person. a spectator in your own life. it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you push all that down for too long until it eventually comes roaring back up and it’s too late to do anything about it. 

but that’s the thing: it’s not too late. it’s never too late. there is still time. this movie showed me a deeply sad, horrifying version of my life and what it would be like if i kept going the way i was. as the credits rolled, i knew what i had to do. i couldn’t hide anymore. the egg had cracked open. i came out to my friend as we walked back to our dorms afterwards. i then came out to my friends from home over text. my anxiety had me immediately feeling like i regretted it and wanted to crawl back behind my shell, but i knew deep down it was the right choice. if not now, then when? how long could i have kept going like this? it was scary, but it was also me lifting the biggest weight in the world off my chest. and this movie was the push i needed to finally take that leap.

will have more to write on rewatch, but suffice it to say that this movie means a hell of a lot to me. i am eternally grateful for this film and Jane Schoenbrun for making it. film of the year, film of the decade, film of a generation.