Trust Yourself

Every heart vibrates to that iron string

I have a strong fondness for the Transcendentalists. Namely, I can’t get enough of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be familiar with them or Transcendentalism to read this post. Living in Northern New England, it’s hard not to wax poetic when I think about the proximity and touch of culture that has been intertwined with their own contemporaries, and how they were influenced by their own environment.

There is a beautiful, inherent contradiction among the Transcendentalists which is I feel is representative of the way they wrestled with the tension between their internal reality and the external struggles and expectations placed upon them by society. As a trans woman, I can’t help but feel an affinity with this struggle. However, the apparent contradiction itself is not between the internal and the external, but I believe in the way that they attempt to rectify the individual and the collective.

When I read an essay, a book, or a poem, or even watch one of the many films of Little Women (I’m fond of Greta Gerwig’s), I see the mirror of a particular question I consider daily in my own life and especially in my political perspective. There is a question about the responsibility we hold to ourselves as well as to others, and at what point do these responsibilities converge and where do they diverge. The golden rule comes to mind.

The Transcendentalists believed in a sort of rugged individualism that attempted to avoid burdening others with their own struggle while a responsibility toward collectivism, giving everything of themselves to others, at least as much as they could stand it. We’ll put aside for now the fact that when Thoreau went to to live the ‘rugged’ life alone at Walden that he was provided the land and that his mother cooked and brought him lunch everyday. What a lovely contradiction.

One of the things I treasure most about the Transcendentalists is their openness about their own contradictions and struggles. They boldly made mistakes, such as a lambasted commune they attempted which was ridiculed by the low-key Transcendentalist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was also a founding member. I hesitate to say ‘failed’ as Hawthorne would describe it, because I believe there is beauty in what they had while they had it, and for a time, they lived their ideals the best they could. Nothing lasts forever and for a time, the beauty of their project existed in that time and place and no one can take that away.

They spoke boldly about what they believed and they often boldly changed their minds without shame for what they had said in the past, admitting their change of heart.

Walt Whitman, another Transcendentalist, in Leaves of Grass wrote,

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Emerson, who I reference in the title to this post, is famous for his quote,

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,”

and he goes on to clarify,

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ —Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

I’m going to insert a trans-centric thought here for a moment. I have noticed a trend among many cisgender people, especially family members, often parents of trans kids. I think there is a concern among this group that their child or loved one may change their mind later, and what if they were wrong? What if they were never actually trans at all and it was just a phase?

First, I want to make it clear that the data shows it’s almost never a phase, and it’s important to know that if your loved one tells you they are trans, believe them and please, by all means, support them.

Even if you can’t shake the idea of it being a phase, aside from the fact that number of people who eventually detransition is an incredibly tiny fraction, and among those, they typically don’t detransition because they are not trans, but because they are forced by external reasons (forced by family, laws, medical complications, they discover their own gender fluidity, etc.), even among those who do detransition, many of them are still happy to have had the experience as they have learned so much more about themselves and have gone through a beautiful process few people ever get to experience and come out the other end of it with a fuller sense of self and empathy for others and their experiences in life.

So again, what if it was a phase and what if they were wrong? Is it so bad, then, to be wrong? Again, is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Have they not gained so much through their experiences? Should life really be lived in fear for the sake of consistency? What integrity is there to deny one’s self and exploration for the sake of consistency?

Breaking this back out from this trans bubble, I want you to consider in your life the times when you wish you’d been bolder. I want you to consider the times that you were wrong– dead wrong– but in the same embrace I want you to hold thoughts of the things you learned, and the things you often gained as a result of your mistakes.

Who of us hasn’t taken the wrong turn in opposition to a friend’s protest that you should have taken the other turn? And what did you find? An adventure? A newfound respect for your friend’s navigational capacity and humility for your own? And did you not eventually learn the correct directions?

If this is what can be gained when one is bold and wrong, what more can you gain when you are correct and faithful to your own convictions? What have you gained in the past when you spoke or acted boldly and bravely? Have you ever wished you stood up for yourself or others and instead stayed silent? Do you ever feel like a piece of you died when you stayed quiet or were not faithful to your convictions? I will claim now that a piece of you did, in fact, die when this happened, but you have the opportunity in each new moment to live anew when you breathe life into living in the freedom and conviction of who you are.

With this in mind, you may understand, in part, why I chose the word ‘radical’ in the name of this newsletter. Many of us know that radical changes need to occur in this world and in our own lives. We see the writing on the wall. Live boldly. Live radically. Be free to be who you are. Be free to say what you think and believe. Be free to feel what you feel. Be angry, be joyous. Stoicism is overrated.

If you’ve got the time for it, I recommend Emerson’s essay to expand on this so much further and more eloquently than I have, which you can find online here. It’s in the public domain, so you already own it, as do we all, so there’s no need to pay for it. I read this periodically, and it always gives me confidence to live freely as myself, damn the consequences, damn what tomorrow might bring. Because the consequences of denying myself are to die each day, again and again. Today is here, so don’t let the integrity of now die for the sake of an illusion of consistency and what you believe tomorrow might bring.

So live.