Ten years ago today, I was posting “Only 19 but my mind is older” from a coffee shop in Manhattan
It’s my 29th birthday; ten years ago exactly, today, I turned 19 years old. That year was an exciting birthday for me: I traveled to New York to stay with my cousin and see America's latest obsession, Hamilton, for the first time on Broadway. Lin-Manuel Miranda was still performing in the title role. (I had been in In the Heights my senior year of high school, so I was familiar with his work. I saw Hamilton again when it toured in San Francisco, with a different cast). ”Only 19 but my mind is older” is a line Alexander Hamilton says early in the show, and I felt so clever posting it on my 19th birthday. It feels like a century ago.
March 2016. It was the last year of the Obama administration. A week later, I would get the first email to my new email address (changed my name, but still went by she/they): a summer job offer. I would be a teaching assistant for a Girls Who Code program in Washington, DC. The sponsor of the program was Lockheed Martin. I didn’t care that it was a defense contractor. I was so optimistic about the tech industry, I could've been piloting a drone and it wouldn’t have fazed me.
That year, I walked by the White House every day (when I didn’t take the subway or ride my clunky $20 Craigslist bike, that is) on my way from my Airbnb in Foggy Bottom to my job in Chinatown. I remember when Pokémon Go came out; I caught so many pokémon on that walk. I had to stop my students from playing it in class. An older guy tipped me off about a Nidoking in the park one morning. I put a Vaporeon named Hillary in the White House gym. “Pokémon Go to the polls.” It was a simpler time.
And yet, I’m a lot happier now than I was at 19. The state of the world might be in chaos (thanks, Trump, later that year, and Trump again), but I’ve transitioned, met the love of my life, and overall become more secure in my identity. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be writing about how much happier I am at 39. God, I hope so.
Despite everything, I still carry a little bit of the optimism I had at 19, when it seemed that social progress was inevitable, when every tech company was “making the world a better place,” when we were months away from having a woman president.
Only 29, but my mind is. Well, I think it's about 29, actually.