Photography by Natham Pham

Human beings and trees are not so distantly related. As we age, our mature selves come to be by growing around the parts of ourselves that already exist. Like rings in a tree trunk, we are always adding to, not moving away from. Even if we don’t like it. 

I grew up desperate to grow up. With my eyes ever-fixed on the horizon, my memories of childhood and adolescence were like photographs faced down and left to gather dust. I incessantly searched for the next milestone, obsessed over the life I thought I had to be building. If you don’t preserve memories, stargazing and self-loathing will rot anything away. My future self was who would really count, I thought. Who I was right then—he wasn’t real. 

Only recently have I begun to re-examine old memories with a softer gaze. I try not to consider my  teenagehood as lost years—I still lived them, even if my memories are sparse. I just lament being so afraid of living fully. In this search for reconnection, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of ‘queer time’. ‘Queer time,’ says Jack Halberstam, ‘[is about] the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance and child rearing’. Emerging from the AIDS crisis, queer time offered a way for the terminally ill to come to terms with time’s ‘compression and annihilation’, by finding hopeful ways to conceptualise the time they still had. Queer time, in current thinking, has come to signify the rejection of a capitalist, patriarchal progression of life. For Halberstam, it refers to ‘temporalit[ies] that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family’. I think of my younger self. I thought I was going to be married, skinny and full-time employed before thirty. I was desperate to be a different person, to attain capitalist patriarchal fulfillment. I’ve met none of my childhood goals. I haven’t even come close. Yet I wouldn’t call myself unfulfilled, not by any means. 

It’s got to do with our world, I think, how our histories are conceived. Caroline Dinshaw et. al. theorise there is a ‘scholarly imperative…to view the past as other’. It’s a basic defense mechanism: historians frame the past as distant, and we do the same with ourselves as a form of disavowal. In this, we can evade responsibilities not just to ourselves but to others. How we view our pasts is directly correlated with how history is viewed more broadly. In so-called Australia, colonialism buries its dirty history. So, is it any surprise that we internalise it in every other aspect of our lives?

We unwittingly separate ourselves from our own rich histories and go insular, taking on the 

crushing weight of

you-are-only-living-your-life-starting-from-this-moment-so-hurry-up-you’re-running-out-of-time.

And we do it over and over again.

I understand the desire to distance the current self from the former: being proud of change is  part of growing up. But cleaving apart the inherent multiplicities of the self cannot be healthy. It’s easy to sneer at our younger selves than have compassion for who we were—for a self that is still underlying. And LGBTQ people seem to be especially susceptible to this. It’s the waiting.

‘Waiting … seems to be a form of postponement until it becomes clear that nothing has been postponed and nothing will be resumed,’ says Halberstam. Waiting. I am always waiting for something. I’ve done so much fucking waiting. Lots of LGBTQ culture revolves around the idealisation of youth: an epidemic of millennial and Gen X gay men obsessed with looking young forever, adult transgender men carrying boyish aesthetics with them long after a cisgender man would have let them go. All of us are so caught up in reclaiming the youths of which we feel we were robbed that we don’t see the possibilities right in front of us.  The only way to fully embrace life is to radically change that perception of a life course, to embrace that I cannot and will not conform to a patriarchal, capitalist formation of time. I was born to exist outside of it. Jack Halberstam would suggest:

part of what has made queerness compelling … has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space… queer subcultures [producing] alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logistics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction and death.

Uncertainty is too scary. Sara Ahmed would say we’re all looking for a seat at the table that’s not been left for us, or is entirely the wrong shape. Even when we distance ourselves from ‘the family line’, we are still tending towards it. Ahmed acknowledges ‘being out of line can be uncomfortable’. But being out of line gives us a vantage point which, I think, is a shame if not used.), We watch  a straight family line that repeats itself again and again and again. Is it not a gift to be inherently outside of this framework? To be able to distance oneself from the scaffolding of a capitalist, patriarchal nuclear family if we so choose? To see the cracks in the family line growing wider and wider all the time? Gayness and so forth as not just a sexual identity but an entirely different way of life?

Cutting away our younger selves and feeding them into this great churning sky-machine is what makes the time we have feel so limited. If we can’t engage with the children, teenagers and young adults we once were with empathy, then we can’t enmesh their pasts with our present, can’t allow those years to be ours too. It’s a suffocating feeling. Each day, the sky lowers itself a little more. Gravity compresses with this new normal and I feel it first in my shoulders, then at the back of my eyes. Before I know it, I’ll be old and grey and a whole lifetime will have passed me by—and I won’t have been paying attention. There’s not enough time in the day for everything I want to do. I’ve taken to waking up early most days, even on rare mornings where I’ve got nowhere to be. I read, do some exercise, shower and make breakfast without rushing. But bubbling under the surface is resentment: resentment toward how short the days get, resentment that there aren’t  enough days in the week, resentment that I spent my teenage years so depressed I hardly did anything at all. The outer rings of my tree struggle without a solid core to keep them sturdy . It’s all an attempt to make up for lost time, isn’t it? Everything is an attempt to make up for lost time. And queer theory knows I feel that I’ve fallen behind. And in the malady lies the cure: it’s all self-love, baby.

Who are we to impose straight expectations of timeliness on ourselves? Who are we, really? Until I have the answer, I’ll keep watching the sun rise. I try not to resent it, but I do think: dearest sun, I wish you’d put more time in the day