Nearly There
Queer Time and the Myth of Missing Milestones
My life doesn’t move in a straight line. It’s cyclical, recursive, returning always to the same question:
I thought that question meant I was behind. On the outside, I repeatedly failed to arrive at something other people accessed: academic success, athletic recognition, artistic breakthrough, emotional regulation. But I’m starting to understand something different.
Milestones are not neutral. They are structures that assume certain conditions already exist: family support, emotional stability, financial access, institutional permission, gendered safety. When those conditions are uneven, milestones defer into loops.
For a long time, I experienced that as personal failure.
I was a strong runner. I had a body built for power and speed. I wanted to play football. I wanted to push my physicality further to see where it could go. But access and support didn’t align with my desire. I was also academically driven. While I was capable of deep focus, I didn’t always have the emotional tools to sustain the kind of consistency school systems rewarded. At home, responsibility moved in other directions. I became the caretaker toward my siblings, my parents, my household just holding things together that were already under strain. The open secret of the eldest daughter still called a son.
So the future I was supposed to be moving toward kept splitting.
Instead of becoming a single trajectory, my life became fragments.
Fragments don’t resolve. They repeat.
I think my perfectionism entered there. It was great ambition paired with a deep form of compensation. If I could be great, maybe I could be accepted. Even if I couldn’t guarantee my arrival, I could at least control the precision of my attempt. In every unstable environment, I learned how to stabilize my output.
But that kind of stability is exhausting because it never completes itself. It just loops.
In my music, I hear that loop clearly. My repetition doesn’t resolve; it returns to the same question without answer. I used to think resolution was the goal of songwriting. Now I think I’m more interested in life’s structure. I ask myself often what does life sound like when arrival is deferred?
In my last article “Don’t be a Deepfake: The Lonely Future of Intimacy,” I talk about the concept of totipotence. It’s the idea that a single cell can become anything, but only under certain conditions for a limited window of time. After that, it specializes. It commits. It loses access to other possible futures.
I think about that a lot.
I don’t really believe I missed my window; I just think some lives are forced to specialize without the conditions that usually guide that specialization. What gets left behind is not potential, but unprocessed possibility.
Art, for me, becomes a place where that possibility can keep changing shape.
In that sense, I don’t think I am making up for lost time. I think I am finally working with time that was never really structured around me.
That changes the emotional tone of everything.
My question is no longer why am I not there yet? It’s more what does “there” even mean when my path isn’t continuous?
And maybe that’s why the loop persists. I am less stuck and more still inside the process of translating fragmentation into form.
Maybe the point is not to answer it.
Maybe the point is to learn how to hear it differently each time.
Happy Millennial Pride.