Around the age of 30, I was the furthest from myself I'd ever been.
It wasn't as though my life was a disaster. Yeah, I was underpaid, working too much, and enduring some pretty severe workplace abuse. But I still had a pretty sweet job working on some high profile projects as part of a boutique software development shop, a girlfriend, and a series of increasingly nice NYC apartments. I was extremely overworked and tired at the time because on top of the standard 60 hour work weeks, I was also finishing up college classes. But all in all, it didn't look that bad from the outside.
It might be a surprise to folks who know me now, but I wasn't really playing a lot of games at the time. Maybe I'd occasionally play something on my computer or phone, but I don't think I owned any consoles at the time. I definitely had gotten turned off by the seventh generation's endless grimdark dudebro games, but I also just felt like maybe it was time to move on.
I definitely wasn't thinking about digital preservation at all back then either. Like, I knew what the Internet Archive was and used the Wayback Machine, but I wasn't thinking that I'd ever work there. The last cool thing I did as part of my extremely online 20s (where I came as close to a hikikomori as possible while still being able to hold down a job) was play a small role as curator and influencer of the early vaporwave scene, eventually running a pretty popular Turntable.fm room where Vektroid and the early Fortune 500 folks would hang out. (To give an idea of the timeline, Floral Shoppe actually came out at towards the tail end of my involvement in the scene, which was a few years before it really broke out and became a meme.)
It probably won't be a surprise to folks who know me now that inside I was absolutely fucking miserable. I couldn't comprehend the crippling anxiety that lived inside me or the ways that putting on a business casual dress shirt and khakis made me feel like I was preparing for my own funeral. I couldn't understand why I would get constantly yelled at by my bosses (who owned the company) basically just for being a faggot.
If I'm gonna be real with y'all, I don't really know how it started. I was trying to fill time on a really long subway commute at one point, and I think my bosses recommended some shitty podcasts to me (The Nerdist was in there, to give you an idea). I eventually found myself wondering if there were any good podcasts about older games, and immediately stumbled on Retronauts, which appealed to me because I had been a Jeremy Parish fan since his early ToastyFrog/GIA days.1
As my outside life became bleaker — the job got steadily worse, the girlfriend left me, etc. —I started to burn out pretty spectacularly. I holed up and started getting pretty obsessively into retro games and ephemera like game magazines. I got into Japanese microcomputers and multimedia CD-ROMs and PC Engine kusoge. I probably read every single article on HG101, many twice. I downloaded full MAME ROM sets and Laserdisc game rips from private torrent websites with obnoxiously pedantic rules.
It was around this time that I first encountered Chrontendo. If you've made it this far, you probably already know this, but Chrontendo is a chronogaming video series covering every Famicom, Famicom Disk System, and NES game in chronological release order. I found myself drawn in by this obsessive level of detail on the life of a platform on a game-by-game basis. It made it so clear how much these games were in conversation with each other. Trends rise and fall. Mario clones give way to Zelda clones give way to Dragon Quest clones. Weird pop culture fads come and go. Developers slowly improve, inching from subpar arcade ports to Mega Man II and Blaster Master over the course of years.
I became obsessed! This! This was what I wanted! It started my mind racing on how the timeline of video games in the 80s looked laid out with three big regional microcomputer scenes, a thriving arcade scene around the world, and massively successful consoles all intermixed.
Believe it or not, I was pretty "retired" from online at the time. I didn't have a Twitter or Tumblr or anything. I mostly did increasingly left-wing shitposts on Facebook until I got tired of some dipshit from high school who stayed in our hometown yelling at me. But I wanted to follow updates on Chrontendo on Twitter, so I created an account and slowly found myself getting deeply immersed in the online retro gaming community.
It was through Chrontendo that I learned of the Retro Pals and their PlayStation Year One project, which drew me in because I was becoming especially interested in game history around the early and mid 90s and the big changes that came about with CD-ROMs and 3D graphics. Then I started getting into the Retro Pals streams and that opened up meeting a lot of other folks with similar interests.
It was somewhere around this time that my Twitter feed was starting to have less middle-aged white guys with beards and glasses and more queer folks and especially trans women. Then even some of the middle-aged white guys with beards and glasses turned out to be girls, too. I had already had a trans co-worker by this point, so I didn't think much of it at first.2 But over time, I started to feel as though I fit in better with the trans femmes than the cis guys.
By this time, I wouldn't necessarily have self-described as nonbinary, but I began to just give up on gender. I was basically "lazy cis" for about two years. This actually began to improve my mood dramatically. I was still always a little bit depressed, but I managed to get myself into a freelancing situation where I worked around half the time, made enough to keep a studio apartment and a basic lifestyle going, then spent the rest of the time experimenting with art projects, coding for fun, and figuring out the next steps in my life.
This would probably be around the point when I first met some of the folks who are still moots on various platforms to this day. It's pretty much where I think of my life as truly beginning, around 2018 or so. Like, shit still kinda sucked that year, tbh, but I could take a breather, which I needed badly because I had a ton of shit to work through.
None of these things were my big egg crack moment, which came much later.3 But if I hadn't discovered Chrontendo, I might have never signed back up for Twitter or met the people that I did. For a long time, being into video games and computers was a thing that I clung to as a distinctly masculine trait. Being a kind of soft, emotionally sensitive straight boy into nerd shit is certainly a valid kind of guy you can be (what's up, cishet guy friends!), and it was, tbh, the least worst kind of guy for me to pretend to be. But when I figured out that trans lesbians were a surprisingly common thing and that a lot of them were into weird video games and computers, I saw, for the first time, the kind of girl I could be, and I learned the difference between an awkward fit that'll hafta do and one that's a perfect match.
There are other ways that I could have found my way to my transness, but they could have happened much later or under much worse circumstances. It was the long journey back to myself that not only led to me transitioning, but discovering my life's work as well. I'm certain that I wouldn't have ended up working at Archive or doing the preservation and history work that I do if I hadn't started to see the light in the darkness when I first discovered that there might be other girls like me during a time before I even knew I was a girl.4
I'm still working through a lot of shit with early transition and still getting my life back together, but I'm so happy to have found myself. All I needed to do was look for it in the right places.