I wanted to share a blog post about my transage experiences I wrote not so long ago. Someone who read it took issue with a particular part of it:
Despite what my weirdly specific age updates look like – 32, then 37, 38, etc – I do not actually feel a precise difference between one number and another, and I calculated them by adding 1 each year when I did not feel anything extraordinary, and some round number, 10 or 5, each year that felt like a sudden boost.
I want to know how transage folks who use precise numbers for their age were able to pick a number that fits.
Well, I didn’t pick mine, which probably has something to do with it. My main age is 47, this is sort of how I feel by default, and I just sort of know it’s right. It hit me, this exact number, after giving it to a character who I realized I was subconsciously representing myself through: He was me. Now, my other age, 32, has to do with the internal timeline we experience as a system, and if I remember my childhood with these memories, it happens through being 32 usually, like a proxy. As for 53 it’s just because my Grandpa talked about his life at 53 and it hit me, that number fit as well. None of these would feel right if they were changed by a year, 48 is not my age, nor is 31, and certainly not 54. I just know it, I feel it like any other part of my identity, plain and simple to my own mind.
Are your ages permanent? As in, you’re not getting older and not getting younger?
Yes, they’re permanent. In the sense that I don’t ‘grow’ older, but sometimes I have a mental shift to being moreso 32 (still 47 just less so) or similar. My body is almost 18 (2 days, oh boy) but I am in no way 18, nor will I ever be, mentally/internally at least. I couldn’t comprehend anything in the realm of trying to imagine myself as younger. Maybe older in the sense of an infinite existence as a deity, but in this body and this physical brain, I feel 47, with a dash of 32 and 53.