You Look Good In Anything
I started hearing this phrase when I grew into my teens, no longer something small and cute, but a gangly thing with a pretty face. No matter how awkward the form I took, it was enough to be desired.
I heard it first on an unusually chilly day during the amihan season. I came to school wearing the black cardigan I loved. I arrived a little late, and my classmates had crowded around a girl who had recently gotten a new pair of glasses. Everyone took turns wearing the thick plastic frames, laughing after they realized they weren't prescription. The girl came up to me and put the glasses on me herself, her fingers lingering on the tips of my ears before pulling away. She took a moment to look at me and muttered, "God, you look good in anything."
It felt a little like she had cast a hex on me then.
It never feels right to be perceived as an especially attractive person without couching it under a layer of self-deprecation and jokes. I suppose I'm afraid of being seen as more arrogant than I am, because arrogance means giving people permission to bear their fangs down on you. As much as I aspire to being true to myself, avoiding pain has always taken priority over that. And how else is "sometimes my beauty has caused me a great deal of heartache as much as it has made my life easier" going to sound to anyone but the annoying little whines of some privileged whelp?
But my feelings are true, regardless of what anyone else says about them, regardless of whether you think the hurt matters when it is otherwise a blessing. I want you to understand it, though, even if it's a little irritating. I have to navigate my life now presenting myself in a way people do not want me to be, after all, and if nothing else, this change has made it clear why it hurt so much when it really shouldn't have.
I have to admit that life was a lot easier when I was everyone's favorite doll prince. I just had to act in the way they expected: brilliant in some ways, bumbling in others; mysterious when they wanted me to be, open in private and intimate moments; miserly with my smiles, but when I let someone see one, it felt like a benediction. It all sounds hyperbolic, but it's easier to act like a cartoon character than yourself, if that's what people expect from you. Part of why Dazai's No Longer Human resonated with me so deeply was the book's depiction of this act of self-caricature—what an alarming thing it was to see so clearly how ugly I was being—and how the act could eat away at a person who sees themself as nothing.
My transition felt in part like a claiming of my own humanity. I found what was missing inside me, and it wasn't even necessarily the gender aspect of it. It's hard to define; if you're trans, you probably understand it intuitively as something that completes personhood itself. Individuality, maybe, autonomy over who I am.
No matter how clearly you define who you are, though, you still have a life outside of yourself, and people will have their own definitions of who you are. Oftentimes they will try to align you with how they want to see you, like trying to bring a split-prism image of a phantasm into clear focus. Could you even take a photo of an apparition?
But I do love to strike a pose. I don't think I'm a people-pleaser, exactly; I'm too prickly to comfortably be a doormat. But I do want people to like me, and I unfortunately still have this impulse even after I've transitioned. It's difficult to bear the loneliness of being completely true to myself, and I've never been particularly brave.
"You look good in anything."
This is my mother's response whenever I ask her for advice on fashion or makeup and she doesn't have an answer for me. Sometimes she really doesn't know; sometimes it feels like she's still torn over the fact that I'm like this now. I can feel it in our conversations sometimes, in her subtle nudges, that she still misses her prince. She recognizes that transitioning hasn't really changed who I am, fundamentally—and that's probably what makes my mother so torn. The prince is still there.
Other people in my family are a lot less subtle about it, though.
"You look good in anything, but… you look better like this."
A common joke my family makes is that I dress better than any girl—is it any wonder none of them want to be my partner? I hear this way more often from the men of my family, and, well, I never expected a bunch of straight men to collude against me on the matter of aesthetics. They once put me to one side for an usapang lalaki—talking man to man, despite it being more like a tribunal—to tell me all sorts of bullshit about courtship between a man and a woman. If I hadn't already known about their own relationship troubles, I might have taken them halfway seriously, but as it stood, it was hard to take advice from someone who, for example, has kept pining for a woman who left him for another man half a decade ago.
Try as I might to be stubborn, I haven't completely disregarded what they've said. What could this mean for me? Right now it feels like my identity is in flux, and I can't tell if my attempts to explore my presentation and style are genuine or if I am simply trying to appease the people around me in a half-hearted way. I could say I'm subverting their expectations by meeting them halfway, but I rather feel like a child feeling a cheap thrill from committing a minor misdemeanor than like I am doing anything brave.
The desire to be true and the desire to please are in a deadlock that I can't seem to break. I could end it right now, just define myself through my own words and feelings—maybe I'm doing that through writing this, even if it only looks like a tentative step.