A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
- Langston Hughes
Have you ever been lost in a daydream? Seriously, absorbed, transported, and blissfully happy in your own little world? Remember when you were younger, when you took all the cushions, and chairs to make a castle. Or, perhaps, you were pretending to be a hero, with the red shirt tied around your neck, as a parent helped you fly.
Nothing else mattered, you were who you believed yourself to be.
You could build a castle, you could fly.
You were unstoppable.
You were living your dreams.
But what if that was suddenly ripped away, the fort crashes, the cape doesn’t fit. What happens when a dream becomes a nightmare. Transitioning later in life it is as if your cape is ripped away, and your hurtling to Earth, your castle is being torn down and the bricks fly and fall catastrophically around you. You doubt yourself, you condemn yourself for believing a fairy tale.
You casually say to yourself humans can not fly and the castles will never endure. Superman doesn’t fly, and Camelot never stood tall. How could you have been so foolish? It’s time to put the dream away.
For many of us within the transgender community this is similar to how much of our lives have been. When we were younger there may have been giggles to our silly notions and questions of “Mom, when will I be a pretty girl?”, or “Why can’t I paint my nails?”, yet we held on to those dreams because we knew what they were. These were not just the questions posed to amuse parents, these were questions of our very identity that we phrased in our young minds. These were the dreams we were trying to speak into existence. These were the dreams we begged we were able to live.
Some days we could get lost planning for what it would be like, or what we hoped it could be like when suddenly those realities crashed in around us. Perhaps our dream was deferred by a parent that punished us for these ways of acting. Men don’t play with Barbies, men don’t care about fashion. Women don’t use tools. Or worse, it could have been met with physical or sexual abuse where our identity was used by another to prey upon us. More so, it could have been a faith background pushing us to hate ourselves and living with the scars of thoughts of suicide.
Yet those of us within the trans* community have always known ourselves, we have know who we are, and we have it held tightly. Yet we learn the world isn’t always accepting, and for many of us we have had to spend years going in and out of a dream. We are crushed because of faith, society, laws, family, and friends. We think we may have found a group we can be open and honest with but then they make “gay” an adjective for weird, they laugh at another transgender joke on a television show, or in a movie. They compare these people to Mrs. Doubtfire, and wonder how someone could be so “fucked” up.
Our dream it seems never gets to materialize. Each time we hold on to it, we see it pushed further away, deferred. Like Langston Hughes we wonder will this dream just fester, or explode? And what will that do to us, will we experience the same thing?
For many of us in the transgender community the idea of a dream deferred is so close to us. We have known long before we verbalized to another person who we are, and what we are. Yet day in and day out we have had to contend with a world, and with people that would rather see our cape removed, and our life crash rather than accept us as we are. Even worse when we get to affirm ourselves others will come out to combat our truth now spoken. They will tell us what we have dreamed, what we have known, and what we are isn’t real, it’s a phase, a result of abuse, or bad parenting.
But they are wrong.
What happens to our dreams deferred?
We get to live them.
Yes, the modern political and national climate is tough, we face dogged persecution every single day for how we present, and the people we love. But that does not mean the hateful, the ignorant, the misinformed, and the bigoted get to defer our dreams. You and I have held onto these dreams for years, or even decades. Now is the time to live it to the fullest. The more bold we become, the more bravery we will find that we had all along. In the process of building our castle, or flying with PRIDE we will show the world that dreams come true. More so, we will show them that the truth really does set you free.
Don’t let your dream spoil, don’t lose it.
Dreams were not meant to sag, they were meant to make us soar.
Hold on to it, and find the power within yourself to speak that dream into reality.
Maybe I’m still naive, but I believe our stories and our dreams will change the world.
