I can’t believe I’m 40. It feels weird. I didn’t feel this weird about turning 30, 20 or even 10.
Well, I officially turned 40 earlier this year and celebrated with my work colleagues, but I felt weird about it in retrospect. (It’s going to be a pain in the ass asking people NOT to observe the official day.)
Since 2010, I’ve celebrated my independence day instead, and I will continue to do so. Why?
On 10 October 2006, I ran away from my severely abusive, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, far-right, authoritarian, evangelical Republican parents and established my own life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
At 20, I was an inveterate dork inordinately delighted by artificial intelligence and Richard Dawkins. I was a militant atheist, mostly in reaction to my strict evangelical adolescence. I drew wobbly pictures of green alien space cats and wrote a sprawling science-fiction novel, Intelligent Artifice, about 2026-era news staples like sentient AI, tablet computers and trans kids. My playlists were heavy on 1980s pop: Thomas Dolby and Madonna in particular. I spent my days griping about my family’s bullshit on the long-lamented Livejournal (and to my therapist). I was a college dropout who couldn’t work because none of the easily available jobs were accessible. I’d picked up a habit of using Commonwealth spelling from all the Australians I used to talk to. I was trying to accept myself as neurodivergent after dealing with so much shitty ableism from my family and my school experiences.
At the time, I was living in Abilene, Texas, not far from the Air Force base where my father was stationed. The situation at home was dire. Dad ruled his household with an iron fist. When I was pressured into coming out by my family in May 2006, my parents lost their shit and thought it was the devil. I had only one offline friend; the rest of my social universe was online.
And of that online friend circle, an idealistic cadre of ragtag youth-rights activists was determined to get me out of there. The first week of October, I got the good news: they’d scraped away the resources to get me a ticket out of Texas. I remember posting on LJ: “I’m leaving in a week!” I had to keep shtum for the next week so that my parents wouldn’t figure out that I was leaving. There was so much that I had to orchestrate to hatch my plan: coordinate with my friends over MSN and AIM chats, schedule a taxi, call people using a phone card so my parents wouldn’t see the calls appearing on their long-distance plan.
Finally, the morning of 10 October arrived. I left before dawn with $100 to my name, a handful of outfits, a falling-apart Compaq laptop with tape where keys should have been, and god knows how many books.
When I landed in San Francisco, an employee stopped me, saying that my mom wanted to talk to me—she’d reported me missing. I told him I didn’t want to talk to her, but I felt bad and decided to respond to her anyway. And that was the last time I spoke to her directly, other than a brief period when I messaged her when I wasn’t all there a few years ago.
A lot has happened since 2006. I’ve faced a recession, the modern-day plague, the decline of liberal democracy worldwide—and those are just the shared experiences. I’ve slept outdoors and been dashed with sprinklers. I’ve lived with a colourful cast of characters, including two Satanists, a millionaire’s son, folks of all permutations of queer, and countless cats. I moved across the country in 2012. I’ve undergone altered states that have caused my epistemic foundations to shake. I went back to school and got my bachelor’s at 27, and then my master’s at 31 (and have the student debt to show for it). I’ve talked on White House and MIT panels. I’ve had a few existential crises to boot.
At 40, I’m still a dork with weird obsessions. My playlists still groan with 80s pop. I still use Commonwealth spelling when I’m writing for myself. But I don’t have heroes any more unless I actually know them. I grew disenchanted with Richard Dawkins after he showed himself to be a gutter bigot. AI will never become sentient, or at least I hope it doesn’t. I have a lot less internalised racism and ableism. I don’t socialise as much online as I used to, mostly because people have migrated to platforms like Discord, which I hate with a passion. My social anxiety is exponentially worse than it was when I was 20 and was a lot less chary of putting myself out there. I take way better care of my tech. I get self-conscious about my use of em-dashes and other punctuational niceties, for fear that people will think a large language model was somehow involved. (Though I’m not self-conscious enough to change how I write. If you think I’m using ChatGPT, that’s your problem.) I don’t write fiction very much any more, if at all.
TL;DR: I’m 40 now; I’ve seen a lot of shit; happy independence day to me.