trusting myself to be myself

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor

The other day I was outside traversing the pavement of my neighborhood in roller skates. It’s an activity that has supplanted my hobby of figure skating, which I developed while living roughly five minutes away from a university rink in snowy Syracuse, New York from 2021 to 2022. I was listening to music–for about a month I’ve been looping a playlist that includes a lot of Kacy Hill, Towa Bird, Orla Gartland, and Muse–and generally having a great time. Having an hour or so every day or so to be inside my head while bopping along on eight wheels is, I’ve discovered, one of my favorite current pastimes. 

My roller skates are black in color, just like my figure skates. I remember the experience of being fitted for my figure skates–sitting in the basement of a skating instructor’s home one November afternoon on the banks of Skaneateles Lake, one of New York’s Finger Lakes, and letting her show me how to correctly tie up the laces. Watching as she put my new skates in an oven to heat them up, so that I could put them back on, lace them up again, and sit unmoving as they cooled and molded to the shape of my feet. Heat molding, this is called. It was the beginning of a winter in which almost all of my positive memories happened on ice, in that quiet rink in my neighborhood. Skating became a kind of solace for me; at the time I was twenty-three and slowly, painfully coming to terms with the fact that I had made a mistake–that soon I would need to confront an inevitability, something necessary for my mental health and overall wellbeing: dropping out of the grad program I was enrolled in at the time. 

Being a beginner at something can be remarkably addictive. Initial bursts of progress in a skill leave me high on the feeling of achievement. At the time I started skating, it felt like it had been awhile since I had achieved absolutely anything in my life. But suddenly there I was alone on some random Monday evening in a huge, empty rink, successfully teaching myself how to do backwards crossovers. I remember the elation. I remember how cool I felt, even if my crossovers were initially slow and wobbly. 

I think it was around this time that I began trusting myself to be myself–for the first time ever in my life, in fact. At least in certain ways. Just slightly earlier in 2021, in the summer, I had come out as queer to my family. The experience was mildly terrifying. Then there I was, several months later, the only woman I ever saw in that rink skating around in black skates, traditionally the color of men’s skates. I was beginning to be confident about being different, beginning to trust that who I was and how I thought about the world and my ability to learn and to exist in it was valuable and right. I was throwing myself into something that I found truly fun, and at the same time I was beginning to extract myself from something that wasn’t fun, from a place that didn’t see the value I saw in myself. 

After I moved away from Syracuse in 2022, I decided that my main priority in life would be to pursue things I thought would be fun for me. And to not tolerate environments that didn’t appreciate me as the person that I am. I was viscerally aware, at the time, that the stability of my life could dissolve at any second–that I might live a long life or I might not, but it’s certain that one day I will die, so until that happens I should be chasing relentlessly after the things I only really, truly want to try and to do. And that’s still the perspective that I try to maintain.

There is no correct way to live a life. You could say that I live a queer life, I live a writer’s life, I live my own strange life. I’m trying to do many things. I’m obsessed with humanity and life and society–I want to make all three better, somehow, if I can. I spend most of my time online, immersed in communities there that support and challenge me–that are some of the most important bolsters of my life. I’m still unraveling the aggravating, irksome bonds of expectation that society has been wrapping around me since I was a child, and trying to figure out just what kind of world I live in now and what that means for my future and my present. I am trying to keep trusting myself. 

So, this summer I’ve started this newsletter–I’ve bought roller skates–I’ve returned in a few ways to the things that brought me life-altering joy in my teenage years, to fandoms that I’ve, in the past few months, contributed fan fiction and zine articles to and where I’ve found people all over the planet to connect with over one shared fixation. I’ve fallen more in love with the woman I fell in love with in late 2022–I’ve let my mind frolic despite all the tumult and angst involved in being twenty-six years old in 2024. 

And so now August is approaching its end. Summer alights on the horizon, setting so that autumn can rise. I skate on the black pavement in my black skates, slaloming to the rhythms of songs. The inexorable vulture swoops overhead (metaphorically, sure, but also literally, as I’ve discussed how common turkey vultures are near my home), its body tilting but sure, as Orla Gartland sings through my headphones: if you really want me, take me as I am.