On the Arc of Progress
Change has a habit of dragging its feet, and most days it’s impossible to tell if we’re inching toward something better or just stuck on repeat in some cosmic loop we can’t shake. “Progress” is a mess, and it rarely manages to feel like progress for everyone all at once.
I’m transgender, so I know what it’s like to feel out of sync with the world around me. For a while, it seemed like we were moving toward something better—that maybe people were starting to understand. But lately, it feels like that momentum has sputtered out, or even reversed.
It's easy to take that as society telling me I don’t belong. The thing is, the more I look around, the more I see that a lot of people—especially young men who feel ignored or adrift—are wrestling with their own sense of being pushed to the edges.
They’re out there, watching the world twist itself into new shapes that don’t seem to have any space for them, like a party they weren’t invited to but can still hear through the walls. It doesn’t matter how many parties they got to throw first. What matters is how they feel now and how they vote based on that feeling. That’s what we have to solve.
They hear the conversations about identity and belonging, but it sounds like it’s in a language meant for someone else. When you’re already drifting without an anchor, it’s easy for that isolation to curdle into resentment, into voting or lashing out in ways that feel like they’re flipping the whole table. Underneath it all, it’s the same desperate hunt we’re all on—for a scrap of security, a sliver of meaning, some kind of proof that we’re not invisible.
Identity and tribalism are so front and center now that it feels like we’re all barricaded in our own bunkers, more busy guarding our turf than actually trying to see each other. But I think a lot of folks, no matter where they come from or who they are, are just plain exhausted by all this dividing and labeling. When we’re crammed into these boxes, it’s suffocating, and it makes it way too easy to see everyone else as enemies instead of just people, carrying their own mess of fears, dreams, and values.
I still want a world where I can exist without fear or judgment hanging over my shoulder, but I know real progress means sharing some sense of understanding in all directions. I can’t expect anyone to fully get my experience if I’m not willing to at least look at theirs, even when it rubs me the wrong way. In the end, we’re all just scrambling through a world that feels like it’s on the verge of something ugly, clutching at anything that feels familiar, that feels safe—even if it’s just an illusion of solid ground.
I’m trying to zoom out, to picture something bigger—a society where, somehow, everyone gets a sliver of space to feel like they belong. Maybe we’re not all marching in the same direction, and maybe we never will, but I want to believe there’s room for a mess of different roads to wind through this place. That there’s a future where we at least try to listen, even if we’re destined to misunderstand each other half the time.
