fakemink:

I feel like running away, but I’m just stuck in this place

F- a familiar face, need a familiar place

With a familiar b- and that familiar rain

Need a familiar kiss with some familiar face

julia wolf (now):

I was just an apparition most of my youth

Cannonball into the coffin and then wake up for school

‘Cause I knew who I was

All those nights, I knew who I was

And my premonition right, damn right

Now look at me-

can you tell that i like fakemink yet? my introduction to him was by looking at an instagram note of a certain someone that i don’t talk to anymore (i miss you, maybe in another life), but if nothing else i can thank him and instagram’s development team for introducing me to an artist that i enjoy. fakemink is overly enigmatic sometimes, sure, but like i said in my little analysis of his song london life, i understand the need for the modern artist to be a little cryptic for the sake of aura farming for an audience of angsty young adults like me.

rather than doing that more extensive analysis nonsense again, i’d rather take the time to write about the events in my life that pop up in my head when i listen to this song. i’ve said this previously, and maybe the last sentence was self-explanatory, but i’m a little weird in the sense that i will associate the songs i listen to with a particular place and time in my head. it can be as specific as associating a song with 6:31 am outside of my algebra 2 classroom in high school, or as broad as associating a song with the nighttime of the spring 2026 semester…and in this case, i associate 51 ttashpel pony ave. with that exact place and time.

the song by itself is pretty simple in terms of lyrical content, at least in the sense that it sends a pretty straightforward message to me. i really appreciate the fact that fakemink self-produced this song and made it so that the song’s instrumental was able to fit both his lyrics and the chopped up lyrics of julia wolf’s now. i feel like both speakers are talking about similar themes of exploring self-identity, feeling stuck, not realizing your potential, having an itch that you could be looking out for more. i’m going to be leaving it at just about that, because unlike the more cryptic and indirect london life that really made me go into this long tirade about what the song’s lyrics could mean, i feel like this 51 ttashpel pony ave.’s simple matter is making my brain want to explore more about how these themes of searching for an identity apply to me.

why do i even care about identity

i guess this stems because i’ve had trouble fitting in socially throughout my life, and stuff was definitely made more complicated once i entered puberty and noticed that a lot of the changes that were happening to my body contributed to this really nasty sense of dread that kept me dissociated from my body for a long time. it’s obvious in retrospect that i didn’t love myself, and it sort of caused downstream changes in my personality to where people could notice it. and they noticed just that, which i didn’t really know at the time. there’s this one interesting thought that i’ve seen thrown around where people other than you can see little habits and tendencies that you can’t notice. some of the ones that i’ve picked up on over the years are physical, like this weird grin that i do when i’m trying to hold back laughter (i laugh at like everything all the time so i don’t want to weird people out) and my difficulty holding eye contact with people. as it turns out, this little theory also applies to personality traits, and things that you subconsciously don’t pick up on yourself are also definitely noticed by other people. in my case, it was this really telling lack of self-esteem that made people kind of have this weird feeling about me, like i wasn’t really being myself and was maybe being a bit fake.

it’s definitely something that extended all the way to college, arguably up until about last year when i began my transition. obviously this sounds like a very crazy generalizing statement because it’s kind of like i’m giving it credit for everything good that’s ever happened in my life, but that’s not really how i’m trying to come across. i think it rather gave me the ability to be able to finally live for myself and to not really conform my personality to the perception of others. obviously i’m very very excited about the physical changes it has brought me, but very underrated in the discussion of the benefits of hrt are the mental changes (should i make a tier list? let me know lmao). it gave me the ability to grow. for the first time in my life, i was able to love myself, and it’s something that i hadn’t experienced before up until that point. i love myself so so much, and it’s so weird going back in time and realizing that a lot of the personality and identity problems i had growing up were because my body was undergoing changes i hated…it’s so mysterious why the universe chose me in my one life to be trans, but in many ways i could think of it as a blessing if i’m being honest.

soooo your spring 2026 semester

so yes, my spring 2026 semester. i think this was kind of a turning point in my personality, where a lot of the initial awkward hormonal changes had kind of settled and i finally found some time to think about who i wanted to be. my college is really weird because i honestly think its social scene is pretty hard to navigate. i didn’t do myself any favors by isolating myself almost completely in my first and a half there, and one day i realized that i literally did not have any friends. my second sophomore semester was a raging mess because i was undergoing this crazy identity crisis, and my first junior semester was kind of a really bland point in time where i didn’t really do anything with anyone but was definitely in a much better space mentally. i’m not going to exaggerate things and say that the first half of my junior semester was especially lonely or anything, but there were definitely moments that made me feel very isolated and alone in life, except that this time it was exacerbated by the fact that i was actually making an active attempt to socialize and to somewhat put myself out there, to little avail.

and so that start of 2026 was kind of when things started clicking a bit more. i got closer with my friend group, and i also sort of helped start a new one composed of people that i had already known (and they already knew each other!!). i started doing more meals with people instead of eating by myself. study sessions were now opportunities for socialization with my friends (and sometimes we’d even get work done, muahahaha). friday nights and weekends had a little more life in them, even if i didn’t particularly go out that much to do things. i started taking care of myself a lot better instead of relying on a survivalist mindset. there were times when we’d say “screw the work” and spontaneously go out on little adventures. it all sort of culminated, in my head, into this very beautiful scene where one snowy night we hiked up this small hill (relatively, for how outdoorsy new england folk are), and even though i was freezing my ass off with my friends, things felt so alive. we kind of just sat there at the top of the hill for a little while and really appreciated our surroundings. they were busy taking photos and aura farming and whatever else today’s youth does (ok i was too lol), but i also had this very distant sense that i wanted to cry. i didn’t because it was genuinely freezing cold, and the next few like half hour while we climbed back down and drove back to campus kind of felt like a blur in my head. things were starting to click in my head, and i wasn’t really super conscious during it.

i went back to the student center on that snowy night. normally i’m so full of anxiety when i go there because of how judgy things can feel…i don’t like it when i enter people’s point of view, even less when they’re looking at me. this time, it’s like things felt a little bit different. i don’t really know what was in the air that night, but it’s kind of like a big part of that anxiety was gone, even if it was just for a brief moment. i sat down and put my backpack down and started to write a little bit before heading to the bathroom, and i have this really weird thing where i won’t look at the bathroom mirror (it’s right in front of the stalls if you want to picture it in your head) until i’m at the point where i’m going to wash my hands, and as i lifted up my head so that i could stop staring at my hands and take a look at how i looked, i suddenly knew why things had clicked earlier, why i was so at peace with myself. i could recognize myself in the mirror. it wasn’t perfect, and to this day i really struggle with picturing myself and understanding why i feel what i feel, but it felt like i was genuinely one step closer to understanding it this time. it was so beautiful.

of course, i recognize that i didn’t fully describe that quest for identity that came up in my thoughts, but i think that the looks tying into the personality tying back into the looks sort of describes this? if it didn’t, then oh well, but definitely give fakemink’s song a try because it might just open up your eyes to all this existential dread that i just talked about :-)

Last modified on 2026-08-13