Last night I went to Stormbird in Camberwell, which is quite possibly my favourite pub in London. It was a Friday night, I arrived first, got myself a drink and sat down to wait for Glen and Katie to arrive. I hadn’t been in over a month, and am likely to go a lot less frequently in future since moving further afield.
We bought £5 pizzas from a pizza place that we love called Francescos and ate them in the pub (yes, you can do that!) with a few pints of Orbit lager, which is brewed just a 15 minute walk north under a railway arch in Walworth.
I guess it really is a summer pub. In the warmer months, the building is open from all sides, light streaming through its huge windows, with people sat outside chatting on the pavements.
Going to Stormbird brought back a few memories from the year I spent living nearby. My year spent living in the Camberwell area was my first year on hormones: it was always going to be a big one.
It was in this pub, on a dark January evening with my friend Glen, that I made my first purchase under my new name on my bank card, Miss Freya Onions, which I was so delighted with at the time. I wrote about it in Reading 2.
It was also here that I became good friends with Oliver over a series of weeknight pub trips, and where he slid a copy of Bellies to me over the table on a hot evening in July.
It was where my mother and I got pissed drunk the night before we flew to Athens.
This blog is about me moving away from Camberwell, and how I’m having to learn for myself that my life can still go on even if it now takes me 40 minutes, 2 stops on the northern line, and one on the overground, to get to Stormbird and its surrounds.
It sounds silly but in my experience, a period of personal upheaval can, quite counterintuitively, feel like it puts your life on hold. It can feel as if the usual narratives of daily life, your progression towards your own little goals, go out the window, forgotten. Or, worse, like you’ve gone backwards.
It’s like, now this thing is so different, can my life ever go on as it had? Will I still keep going in the right direction?
I’d been really getting into writing these posts over the summer. Now it’s been a month, and during that time I couldn’t even think to write one. Moving flats felt like a true upheaval, by far the hardest move I’ve ever had to do (I usually love moving).
I moved flats from Walworth to the Clapham/ Balham area- and I’ve generally had mixed feelings about it.
I love aspects of my new room: I love the window, looking out on the bright green trees, and even being able to see as far as the tops of trees in Clapham Common. I love how I’ve decorated the place; in many ways it feels like the first place I’ve ever truly made my own.
This week I put photographs on the walls.
I adore them, it’s so nice to look up to pictures of my favourite people while I work at my desk. They recall memories of some of my favourite times from the past year: the boat trip in Windsor on a sunny day in June; feeling great after getting dressed up for a fancy party at a friend’s in West London back in March, right after I’d got my first job and right when the coldness of that very cold winter was starting to thaw.
These were some amazing, incredible times- times when I really felt like my life was moving forward- like I was going somewhere- like all the incredibly difficult aspects of my early transition (updating identity documents, HRT admin, not having a job, etc etc) were starting to become things of my past- things that, one by one, I’d overcome. All the while, I was experiencing the welcome effects of estradiol. Seeing myself in the mirror.
I felt, vividly, as if I was moving forward.
Then, I move flats, and, for a few weeks, I feel as if I’ve totally stalled. Everything had shifted, it all felt out of whack.
I look in the mirror: is the HRT reversing? or have I just fucked up my makeup?
I came to miss the area I previously lived in: Walworth and Camberwell. Never have I lived anywhere that I’ve felt more connected to. That area of London is easily my favourite place in the world. It’s edgy, arty, brilliant- a total melting pot of different groups of people. Poster ads for Jockstrap’s new album plastered on bus stops. Pissed up people staggering home in the late evening. It feels like anything could happen there.
I felt immensely proud of my local area, something which I’ve never felt before.
In contrast, Clapham is the full of the worst people in the world. It’s sterile, boring, full of chain shops, and I cannot stress this enough: everyone here looks exactly the same. They queue in bakeries to buy a £4 pastry. They work in the city. They earn a lot of money. They’re saving to buy a house and will eventually leave the city and get a car to drive the family and the dog to go on walks in ‘nature’.
J.K. Rowling has one of her mansions in Clapham, which tells you about as much as you need to know about the area. White, insanely middle class, totally out of touch, rich, profoundly unenlightening. It’s a little enclave of the deaddest people fresh from universities across the country. And, now, I’m one of them. But not really by choice.
I don’t see myself staying here particularly long: I’m only here because most of my friends moved to Clapham Junction.
But my new room is nice, if hideously noisy. After spending a year in an ice-cold basement room, having any access to natural light at all feels revelatory. I’ve already spent hours standing at the window, gazing out, doing my make-up in the light, my brain illuminated with simple euphoria when I raise the curtain to a bright blue sky in the mornings.
So, I have complex feelings on my move. And, even if I adore the area I once lived in, I certainly didn’t like the room I had there.
It was dark, mouldy, untouched by the sun’s warmth or natural light. The walls were a glaring yellow.
But, looking back, I see so much of the personal progression I experienced during the year I lived there. So many great days and memories. I’ve come so far, and am a lot happier than I was before I lived there. In that year I developed a capacity to live and enjoy my life.
Where before my transition had meant a lot of hoops I had to jump through, and a lot of pain I had to suffer, now that those things were over I can reap some of the rewards. I mean, I feel like a person now. I look forward to things. I can lay on my bed reading and just feel relaxed. I can feel how I really feel. This things were unthinkable a year ago.
And writing these blogs, especially Readings 4 and 7, have been profoundly useful for me. Not only have I loved the act of writing them, but they have made my life seem clearer and more pointed than it ever has before.
As I approach my first year milestone on hormones, it’s actually difficult to imagine how much more difficult things were before. As time goes on, that past existence becomes shadowier, a shiver, unthinkable.
The process of moving flats was really difficult for me. Not only is finding a flat in London in itself unbelievably difficult and exhausting, doing it alone is even harder. In fact, moving out on my own has been the hardest part of all of this for me to take- this is the first time that I’ve lived totally on my own in a houseshare.
In reality, the living alone part is sorta fine. I mean, I’d much rather live with friends, but I just didn’t have much of a choice with the way I was kicked out my previous place.
I had a lot of help with the move. My friends made it so much easier. They helped me to believe that this is a place I can live my life, a place I can progress, where I can continue.
THE TUBE
I have to get the tube to work now. I used to get the bus. It takes the same amount of time to get to Euston, even though I live a lot further out from central.
In some ways it feels more adult to get the tube, like a thing I always knew was coming. Like I could hear it approaching in the tunnel, the rush of air starting to breathe through the platform.
But, like most other things, it’s taking me some time to adjust. I was so used to going to work on the bus that there was nothing to really bother me.
For context, the clothes I wear to work are the most femme I wear all week, and it has taken me a lot of confidence to start dressing that way. On the bus, all I had to do was get to the bus stop, then I could board the bus and switch off- no interactions with people, no one I could see could despise me for being trans.
Whereas, I’ve found that taking the tube dressing as I do requires a heck of a lot more confidence on my part. I can’t really get away with what I usually do, which is avoid all eye contact with anyone on the street to protect myself from the glares.
There are times and situations now in which I do pass, but they’re unpredictable, so my assumption is always on the negative.
I’ve found myself spending the whole journey to work on guard, avoiding eye contact, feeling their eyes stabbing at me as I look away and flick through my phone.
I’ll be wearing an outfit I’m really happy with, like: a black pencil skirt, chunky heel patent leather Mary Janes, tights, fitted white top, yellow blazer- but I’ll be stood there feeling indignant and threatened and uncomfortable. Preempting what people are thinking about me, feeling constantly like I’m on the defensive.
The issue with this is that, on defence, my confidence is totally drained. I’m not getting to feel happy with the effort I’ve put into dressing up nice for work, and, instead, feel persecuted for it. I feel sorta angry the whole journey.
I only realised that this has been happening towards the end of this week but I know I definitely need a new approach to this whole commuting thing. Where believing I was invisible felt like it worked on the bus, it’s not really an option on the tube, what with all the walking between platforms and being in confined spaces with others.
What I need to do really is just not give a fuck and be confident in myself. I mean, if I’d have seen a trans person doing the same thing before I transitioned I would’ve been like ‘wow that’s so cool, that’s so impressive, they really just don’t care do they?’
But it’s so much harder when it’s you who’s gotta have the confidence. It’s a lot easier said than done. Especially when you know that most people are, on a daily basis, being fed information actively designed to prejudice them against people like you.
Anyway, I’m gonna work on this. It took so much confidence to get where I am today in terms of how I dress, but it’s the actually feeling confident that I need to get a secure hold of. It’s the difference between blocking it all out and actual self-assurance.
This is one tunnel.
I love that Clapham Common is a green triangle on the map. My great-aunt Judith Onions used to live on the north side of the common in the 1960s, which has always leant a peculiar attraction to the area.
She was a potter and artist who studied at the Royal College of Art in the ‘60s, being in one of the first waves of women who attended. I find her very inspirational as a familial figure, even if I only have only very vague memories of her before she died in 2008. When I picked my middle name, Judith, I took it from her. That, and I can joke that I named myself after Judith Butler.
Clapham would’ve been a lot different back then, but I like to think that some things are the same. The common, for one, won’t have changed much.
One thing I’ve really loved since moving here is going on runs around the common with Katie after work. We meet at the bandstand at the centre of the park and run in a spiderweb of routes spreading out towards the edges of Clapham, Battersea and Balham. I’ve got to try out my new lilac mesh sports bra that I totally love.
As time goes on I come to realise how much everything has always been about desire. Discovering, uncovering what it is that I actually want, as much as society might have told me to hide it. Excavating it, becoming comfortable with it, then becoming proud of it even.
I was recently reading something by Rachel Pollack, a really interesting trans woman who was pretty influential in spirituality and tarot stuff:
The trance-sexual woman sacrifices her social identity as a male, her personal history, and finally the very shape of her body to a knowledge, a desire, which overpowers all rational understanding and proof.
Pollack saw transness in highly spiritual terms, as a kind of trance, a dance of desire. And more and more I come to see how everything, all of it, the shape of my life, my capacity for hope and futurity, has stood on the back of the desire I hid. That’s what progress is, embracing desire. Decorating my room how I want for the first time.
And these are all things that I couldn’t, wasn’t ready to do before.
I often find transness presented as this thing where once you come out it’s like well, look, now I’m free to causally explore all these things I couldn’t before. But my experience of it is more gradual and slow. Yes, a lot of things became more open to me when I came out, but the main thing is feeling ready and confident enough to do enjoy it and not second guess yourself.
I bought a contour, blush and highlight set last weekend and want to do better makeup.
I want to book some voice training lessons over the next few months and get started with that.
I want to start dating, I think I might start feeling ready soon.
I want to get more fairy lights for my room.
This is another tunnel.
There are bright green leaves flickering in the window from my desk. They came so close to naming Clapham South tube station Nightingale Lane that the original platform signs were laid over the top of ones that already said Nightingale Lane.
I remember how, almost a year ago now, as I approached the time when I would finally be able to start on estrogen, I thought that whatever happens this winter, whatever happens at least the hormones will be working. Like, I can go into hiding, it doesn’t matter, there will still be a corporeal progress. Even if I can’t get a job, or have to stick to my work in retail, at least I’ll be manifesting my desire in one facet that was going to take this time anyway.
Part of me wished I could hibernate, and come out the other side a girl, full of confidence and totally composed. That most certainly wasn’t the case, but what did happen was so often magical.
There are a lot of things I want to do over the next 6 months.
I keep getting reminded of the end of one of my favourite poems by Kathleen Fraser, an experimental feminist poet of the second half of the last century, which reassures me with the promise of future, and continuing, joys:
A great urge to be down-to-earth seems to show up in each generation
You can slice it as you would a flatworm for a microscopic study
or shuffle it or randomly select
well-bathed individuals and place them in an antiseptic atmosphere
and still the tiny jiggles of light persist,
as though some precedent of joy insisted on having its way—
a full tank, a sunny day, a mailbox stuffed with envelopes
30/9/23
Freya-Onions-report 
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